For her part, Evelyn thought Se?ora Leroy was so tall and blond she must have been a Hollywood actress. She had to look up at her as if she were a tree. Cheryl had muscular arms and calves, eyes as blue as the sky above Evelyn’s Guatemalan village, and a yellow ponytail that bounced with a life of its own. She was tanned an orange color Evelyn had never seen before and spoke with a faltering voice like her grandmother Concepcion, although she was not old enough to be short of breath. She seemed very skittish, a foal ready to bolt off.
Her new employer introduced her to the rest of the domestic staff. These were the cook and her daughter, who did the cleaning, the two of them working from nine to five on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. She also mentioned Ivan, whom Evelyn would meet another day as he was not part of the household but did jobs for them. She explained that her husband, Mr. Leroy, had only minimal contact with the staff. She showed her up to the third floor in an elevator, convincing Evelyn that she had ended up with millionaires. The elevator was a birdcage made of wrought iron in a floral design, wide enough to fit a wheelchair. Frankie’s room was the one the Sicilian great-grandmother had occupied half a century earlier. It was spacious, with a sloping roof and a skylight as well as a window shaded by the top of a maple tree in the garden. Aged about eight or nine, Frankie was as blond as his mother and as pale as a consumptive. He was strapped by the waist to a wheelchair in front of the TV. His mother explained that the straps were to stop him from falling out or hurting himself if he had a convulsion. He needed constant supervision as he had a tendency to choke, and if that happened someone had to shake him and hit him on the back to help him recover his breathing. He wore diapers and had to be fed but never caused trouble and was a little angel who immediately made himself cherished. He suffered from diabetes, but this was carefully controlled; Se?ora Leroy herself checked his blood sugar levels and administered the insulin. She explained all this to Evelyn in a hurry before she ran off to her gym.
Confused and tired, Evelyn sat beside the wheelchair. She took one of the boy’s hands, trying to straighten his clawlike fingers, and told him without a stammer in Spanglish that they were going to be good friends. Frankie responded with grunts and spasmodic flaps of his arms that she took to be a welcome. This was the start of a relationship of peace and war that was to become all-important for both of them.
IN THE FIFTEEN YEARS they had been together, Cheryl Leroy had grown resigned to her husband’s brutal authority. She stayed with him because she had become accustomed to being unhappy, because she depended on him financially, and because of her sick son. She had also admitted to her psychiatrist that she put up with him since she was addicted to comfort—how could she give up her spiritual growth workshops, her reading group, and the Pilates classes that kept her in shape, although not as much as she would have liked. She hated it when she compared herself to successful, independent women as well as the ones who paraded around naked in the gym. She never took all her clothes off in the changing room and was expert at wielding her towel going into or out of the shower or sauna so as not to show the welts on her body. However she looked at it, her life was a failure. It pained her to take stock of her shortcomings and limitations. She had not lived up to her youthful ambitions and now, as the signs of aging became more pronounced, she often found herself in tears.
She felt very much alone, and the only person she had was her beloved Frankie. Her mother had died eleven years earlier, and her father, with whom she had always gotten on badly, had remarried. They lived in Texas and had never invited Cheryl to go and visit them, or made any attempt to come to see her in Brooklyn. Nor did they ask about their grandson with cerebral palsy. Cheryl had only seen her father’s wife in the photos they sent her each Christmas, in which they both appeared wearing Santa Claus hats, her father smiling smugly and his wife looking dazed.
Despite her efforts, everything seemed to be slipping away from Cheryl: not just her body but her future. Before reaching forty she had viewed old age as a distant enemy; at forty-five, she felt it lurking in wait for her, an obstinate, implacable foe. She had once dreamed of a professional career, had hopes of rescuing her marriage, and was proud of her physique and beauty. Now all this was in the past. She was a broken, defeated woman. For several years she had been taking drugs to treat depression, anxiety, and insomnia. Her psychiatrist, the only man who had not made her suffer and listened to her, had prescribed a wide variety of palliatives over the years. She had obeyed him like a well-brought-up little girl, just as she had meekly obeyed her father, the transitory boyfriends of her youth, and her husband.
Cheryl was so afraid of her spouse that she tensed whenever she heard his car entering the garage or his footsteps inside the house. It was impossible to predict Frank Leroy’s mood, because it changed from one moment to the next for no obvious reason. She prayed for him to be distracted or busy, or only to have dropped in to change clothes and go out again. She always counted the days to his next trip and had confessed to her psychiatrist that she longed to be a widow. He had listened without showing the least surprise, having heard the same from other patients with fewer motives than Cheryl Leroy to wish their spouse dead. He had come to the conclusion that it was a normal female sentiment. His waiting room was filled with repressed, furious women.