I think about how my son called himself “Hammerin’ Marshall” after he hit a home run to win the opening game in Jaycee Park when he was thirteen years old. I swear he actually grew taller thinking about that hit, and a few years later, I remember the suddenly deep sound of his voice when he asked his dad whether he was also worried about Hammerin’ Hank Aaron, whether Del thought maybe something was going to happen to Hank that winter, when he was one long ball shy of Babe Ruth’s home run record. I couldn’t even look at Del when he answered Marshall, couldn’t bear all the memories our son’s enthusiasm brought up. There were so many people who didn’t want a black man to surpass Babe Ruth—he got death threats—and so many people who did. Hank Aaron had grown up in Mobile, and, of course, every time that fact was mentioned on the nightly news, I thought of Eddie.
I think about the first years running El Capitan. I think about Del. I think about Cora. I think about my mother and my father. How someone once vivid, vibrant, present in this world, can suddenly and absolutely be absent from it. Sometimes I think the joke is about to be revealed, that Del or my father will suddenly come around the corner, and how we will laugh and cheer and feel as if we will explode with joy in discovering that of course the impossible was impossible: that the people we loved have not disappeared completely and forever, lasting only in my memory, which is nearer and nearer to not lasting at all.
What if we could just see each other now and then? A quick hug, one dinner, a sunny day? What about that? It would be enough, wouldn’t it? If we all got to shimmer in, here and there, and feel the cold rush of sea wave against bare ankle, the whisper-soft skin of our grandmothers, hear the low rumble of my poppa reading a bedtime story, or an eight-year-old Marshall singing “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” under a tree? It doesn’t seem too much to ask of a universe so vast, that the absolute be a little less absolute, a little more bearable, a little more as it really feels: that the people I love are still present, are still real, are still near me.
“It’s time for dinner. I’ve cooked a piece of salmon.” I’d forgotten Helen.
We’ll have dinner, and then she’ll go home. Jessy will be here tomorrow. There’s no one with me at night. Everyone worries about this except me. I might fall, I might do something I don’t mean to do, it isn’t perfectly safe. But I hope Marshall doesn’t hire someone to be with me at night. I’ll miss that little bit of privacy, even if I mostly sleep through it.
“It’s only a paper moon, sailing over a cardboard sea . . .”
“Take a bite now, while it’s warm.”
“But it wouldn’t be make believe if you believed in me.”
I pick up my fork and tap it on the table to the rhythm of the song. I am feeling good, and I mean to eat, but this is what the fork does.
27
Engracia should not have opened the door.
Ms. Navarro and the man stared at each other for a long moment. Then he said, “How could you? How could you keep my daughter from me?” and his voice squeaked, as if he were a child, a tiny, high voice in a huge man’s body. Ms. Navarro did not answer. She turned quickly, but before she could move, the man rushed forward and grabbed her; he held Ms. Navarro between his arms and refused to move.
“Call the police!” she said to Engracia.
Engracia stepped toward them, and the man wrapped his arm tighter around Honorata, lifting her tiny body a few inches off the ground. “Stop!” he barked. “Nobody is calling the police.”
Engracia saw his great arm wrapped around Ms. Navarro’s thin neck. It seemed that he could snap it as easily as she snapped a sheet onto a bed. She froze, unsure what to do, and then he gestured, using Ms. Navarro’s body as a sort of pointer, and Engracia stumbled into the study next to the entrance, the only room downstairs with a door.
Behind her, the man half carried, half dragged Ms. Navarro into the study. Her face was curiously slack. She neither struggled nor screamed.
“I have a gun,” he said. “I don’t want to use it. I don’t even want to get it out. But I will.”
And he moved his jacket aside, so that Engracia could see it, resting there against his soft, heaving belly.
“I want to talk. I want to talk with Rita. And you’ll have to stay here and listen.”
Engracia nodded her head, her eyes glued to Ms. Navarro’s face, which remained oddly calm, removed.
Then he turned back to Honorata. “I’m going to let you go. Don’t scream. Don’t run. We’re going to talk.”
Sweat poured down the man’s neck and into his shirt collar. He was panting, looking around, trying to figure out what to do.
He released Ms. Navarro, and she stumbled to the nearest chair, sunk into it, looking like a child more than the intimidating woman she had seemed an hour earlier.
“My name’s Jimbo,” the man said to Engracia.
“Engracia.”
“What? What’s your name?”
“Engracia.”
“Sit down there. Just be quiet. I don’t want to hurt you. I’m not going to hurt anyone.”
Engracia tried to take a breath, but her lungs were constricted; she could not seem to inhale. Which was strange, because she didn’t care if she lived or died, and she had already had the thought that perhaps this strange man—this sweating fat man, too old to be breaking into someone’s house, with his gun, and his belly, and the hair limp on his head—was the answer she had prayed for.
Still, the body resists destruction. She knew that.
Her heart pounded, and she tried again to breathe, but her chest did not fill. The room looked to her as if someone had blown red smoke into it.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ms. Navarro said. “You’re going to go to jail.”
The man stared at her but said nothing. Engracia expected him to erupt, she expected to see fury in his eyes, but instead, she saw pain. He looked as if he might cry.
“You won’t get away with this. I know you’ve been looking for me. I’ve been here all along, all these years. And you never found me? You can’t even find someone easy to find.”
The man looked confused. Ms. Navarro kept speaking.
“Why are you here now? Why did you come now? All these years. I thought you had stopped looking.”
“I never looked for you.”
And again, Engracia saw that he was not angry, that the violence with which he had grabbed Ms. Navarro, ushered them into this room, was somehow not there. The terror of those few seconds was still present, though. Even her skin was alive with it.
“You never looked?”
“I never looked.”
“Why are you here now?”
And at this, the man let out something between a wail and a cry. And he threw his hands to his head, and his whole body shuddered. When he lifted his arms to his face, Engracia saw the gun again, a black handle, the glint of metal. The gun gleamed there, waiting. He spoke.
“How could you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Malaya. Malaya.”
The name came out the second time like a wail. Engracia could see that the man was losing control.
Ms. Navarro did not react to her daughter’s name. But she spoke anyway.
“What are you talking about? What Malaya?”
Engracia watched silently, trying to understand the game these two were playing, remembering what the man had said already, that Ms. Navarro had kept his daughter from him.
The man grabbed Ms. Navarro’s arm. His fat white fingers dug into her skin, and she called out, but he did not release her. He held her arm, and looked at her, staring into her eyes, and Ms. Navarro shook all over and turned her eyes away first.
Malaya was his child.