Still, not everything about coming home to Vegas was easy. Just this morning, she had woken to that old sense of something not right. Coral kept her eyes closed, but the pressure was there: an emptiness so vast it had presence, pushing against her like a force, daring her to wobble, lean, tumble in, tumble back. If she didn’t open her eyes, she might fall back asleep, the pressure might go away: it might not be there waiting when she woke again.
This was a Vegas feeling, as old as she was, a feeling that stretched as far back as her own memory. How many mornings had she felt it? This dread or sadness or longing or fear—she was never sure quite what. When she was small, perhaps five or six, she had asked her mama: “Who is it that sits on my bed in the morning?”
“Who sits on your bed?”
“On my chest. When I wake up, and I can’t breathe.”
“You can’t breathe?”
“I can’t breathe. And then I try really hard, I think about how I want to get up, and she goes away.”
“She?”
“The person, sitting on my chest.”
“Do you know what she looks like?”
“No.”
“I sometimes come in the morning and look at you. I might even give you a kiss. Do you think that’s what happens?”
“No. It’s not you, Mama. I would know if it was you.”
“Hmmm. Well, I think it’s a dream, Coral. I think you’re not quite awake. It might be a nightmare that you have.”
“It feels like I’m awake.”
“Yes. I’m sorry. It must be scary.”
“It hurts.”
“It hurts?”
“Yes.”
Years of practice had taught her to get up as quickly as possible. The impulse to lie still, to fall back asleep, could ruin a morning. She sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bed. The sun slanted through the slats in the windows, striping the pale carpet with bands of light and shadow. Long ago, she had shared this bedroom with Ada, and they had made up a rhythm to step on these stripes of light. Coral placed her feet carefully along them now and stepped the rhythm again, remembering her sister’s raspy voice and the way she would suddenly pinch Coral at the waist to try to make her lose her footing.
Their twin beds were still covered with the same blue-and-yellow blankets. Some of Ada’s dolls were lined up on top of the chest of drawers, and the teddy bear that their older sister Althea had won at the Clark County Fair still sat, slumped and dusty, in the corner. When Coral reached the door, she leaned down and touched the bear’s nose. Then she turned to look back at the room. It was almost time to leave her childhood home. She’d never live here again—and that was good—but still, it ached a bit.
That was another thing about living in Vegas. Houses were cheap. She’d already saved up enough for a down payment. She never could have bought a house in California, but here, even with 10 percent interest, it didn’t make sense to rent. The realtor suggested she wait to buy until the first houses were built in the northwest, next year, but Coral didn’t think she would like a master-planned community or a neighborhood filled with the thousands suddenly arriving each month from Ohio and New York and places farther away. Vegas had always been a boomtown, but things were changing much faster now. At her interview, the principal had said that Steve Wynn’s new casino would need to make a million dollars a day just to stay open; that a hundred thousand people would live in Summerlin alone; that eighty-nine new schools were going to be built.
When she drove across town, Coral could see that the vast vistas of her childhood—rock and hill and sky—were already disappearing, replaced with rows and rows of red stucco roofs, the sky above blue and streaked with the puffy white plumes of commercial jets or the slowly twining ribbons left by F-15s flying in formation. When she was growing up, the streets had simply ended in desert. And there was a certain odor—dusty; maybe it was creosote or another plant—but Coral almost never smelled that now. Sometimes, if she were way out by the dam, there would be a whiff. When she was a child, the neighborhood would flood—though there might not have been any rain in the valley, just in the mountains—and everyone would put on swimsuits, moms and teens and toddlers, and race outside to splash in water that seemed bewildering, almost mystical, though it was crowded with bits of trash left in the desert and the dead bodies of pocket mice and shrews. Once, there had even been a gray rabbit, soaked to half its size, with its ears absurdly long by comparison.
Memories like these could make her feel unsteady again.
What would Augusta say if she knew what Coral was thinking, here in her childhood room? If she knew what really brought Coral stumbling downstairs for a coffee, for a sniff of the way her mother smelled, for the sound of the voice that made the world shrink back to its proper size and made Coral feel safe just by saying hello? Did Augusta know that her daughter still woke up with a heartsick feeling, that her thoughts turned so often to what her mama had told her a dozen years earlier? Did Augusta guess that her youngest child didn’t feel quite solid at the center?
The other day, a first grader raised his hand and asked not if he could go to the bathroom or if they were going to sing about alligators, but what color was she: black or white? Coral started to laugh, and to tell him that she was the color of a milkshake, or a malt ball, but just in time, she caught the expression on the face of a little girl at the back, her hair in tightly-braided rows, and so Coral answered directly, “I’m black.”
And the little girl smiled, carefully looking down at her desk as she did so. This feeling, too, Coral remembered.
14
It was summer in Chicago before Jimbo asked about the letters.
“Rita, did you write these?”
“What?”
He stood there in a striped silk bathrobe; a giant with a packet of letters in his hand. She could see bits of pink stationery, words in blue ink handwriting, a couple of airmail envelopes. She had never seen any letters. She went blank, and then, in a flash, realized what they must be. Her face must have shown her shock.
“You didn’t sign them, either?”
The magnitude of her uncle’s betrayal loomed. That’s how it was done. That’s how it was usually done. Manila pen pals. Poor women who wrote letters to rich men, in the States, in Russia, other places. They wrote letters back and forth, and the women always knew what was coming; they wanted out, the letters were their chance.
But Honorata had never written a letter.
Honorata had never been one of those women.
Is this what her uncle did? Was this the job that made him travel to Manila? Did he find the women, find the men for them to write to, negotiate the deals?
He had planned it all. He had written letters for her.
Except her uncle didn’t even know how to write. He would have had to pay someone to write those letters. Did the same woman write all the letters, for all the girls?
How long had he been planning for her trip to Chicago?
Honorata knew enough about Jimbo to know that her uncle would not have let him slip through his fingers. Big fish. Her uncle liked big fish.