“I’ll shoot.”
“Run, Engracia, run!”
She couldn’t see him, didn’t know if he had the gun out. She had her phone; she could hear something on the other end of the line. English. She couldn’t think of any word in English. Taco. Did he have the gun out? Was she going to die? “Gun. Man,” she said, and closed the phone. She wanted to die, but she didn’t want to be shot. She stopped and turned. He did not have the gun out.
“Why didn’t you run? I told you to run!” Ms. Navarro’s face was red with anger.
Engracia looked at the big man. He seemed stunned, just as she felt.
“Did you call someone?” he demanded. “Is that your phone?”
Engracia did not answer. Honorata shrieked, “You’re going to die! You’re going to jail! We’re all going to die! What about Malaya then?”
The man turned pale, and Engracia wondered if he was well. Perhaps he would faint. He would collapse right there. He looked right at Engracia, right into her eyes, and with his big, fat, fleshy hand, he motioned for her to return to the study. She couldn’t think. Her mind was flooded with what was happening, with how she might have been shot, with how she might have made it out the door—would he have shot Ms. Navarro?—with how she still might be shot, with how she wouldn’t have to live. Her heart was pounding, she couldn’t think. He motioned again with his head, and Engracia walked back into the study.
As she did, a memory so vivid came over her that for a moment she forgot there was a man, there was Ms. Navarro, there was a gun. She was in a field with her mother, standing between two neat rows of beans. She had let go of her mother’s skirt, and walked along picking bugs off the leaves and smashing them between her chubby fingers exactly as she had been taught. She was much slower than Mama, in the row just next to her, so when her mother reached the end, she doubled back and walked toward the child, picking off bugs as she went. Each time they met, her mother made the sign of the cross on her forehead and said “Que Dios te bendiga.” Engracia heard her mother blessing her, as clearly as if she were in the room then. And so she knew she would die, because her mother had come to say this blessing again.
She looked around. The man still didn’t have the gun out, but he told Honorata to sit down—that they were all going to sit down. Nobody seemed to know what to do, but Honorata sat, and the man did, and finally Engracia. The three of them looked at one another.
28
He said he had never looked for her. He thought she was in Manila or home in her village. Was that possible? That he’d never looked?
For years, Honorata had trembled anytime she was on the Strip. She had avoided the El Capitan and Caesars Palace. If the newspaper ran a story with a picture of either hotel, if there was mention of the woman who had helped her—June Dibb—she squinted her eyes and tried to make out everyone in the photo; every shadowy person in the background. Was Jimbo there? She didn’t think there was any way the Dibbs could know she was in Las Vegas. The worst part of coming here, of leaving the sad apartment in Los Angeles, had been the risk that somehow Jimbo would find out.
So why had she done it? Why, in that first rush of courage that swept in with Malaya’s birth, had she chosen the one place where Jimbo might also be? She was never going to play Megabucks again. She wasn’t interested in gambling. But all alone in that hospital, sending a message to her mother about her daughter’s birth, it had seemed to her that Las Vegas was the only place where something good had happened. Even before she had won the money, everyone in Vegas had been kind, everyone in the El Capitan had looked at her as if she were a person. She understood that they cared about her because Jimbo gambled a lot of money, but she felt it had been more than this. They had looked at her, and they had been able to guess who she was—what was happening to her—but they had not disdained her. They were kind.
That’s why she decided to move to Las Vegas.
She had never seen any of those people again. She had never once seen anyone she met in those strange days at the El Capitan. Jimbo had not found her—she had changed Malaya’s name, just in case—even though she had always believed he would.
He said he had never come back to Vegas.
He had never been here.
That was why she had never seen him.
And now he was sitting in her house—bigger and older and redder—with a gun jammed in his waistband and a fold of fat flopping over it, smearing sweat on the metal, and she was afraid and she was repulsed, and it didn’t seem possible that he was Malaya’s father. Though of course he was.
An image of Malaya—slim and taut and golden—wearing nothing but a T-shirt and boy shorts formed in her mind. Those boy shorts had astonished Honorata. They’d bought them together, and Honorata had been relieved when Malaya had not even asked to buy the tiny, lacy bits of underwear displayed on the main tables. Instead, she wanted cotton underwear that looked quite modest to her mother, so they had bought them in several colors. But the next Saturday, Malaya had wandered downstairs from her room wearing nothing but those underwear and that cropped shirt, and the boy shorts had been anything but modest.
Malaya was a freshman that year, and Honorata wondered how she had known what those shorts would do for her slim little figure. She saw too, for the first time, the body Malaya would have, how pretty she would be, how that little bit of Jimbo would fill out the curves of her slight bone structure. It was simultaneously pleasing and terrifying. She loved her daughter. She loved her beauty. She was not ready to think of Malaya in this way.
Also, seeing Malaya in those boy shorts had brought back her own adolescence. The wild desire she had felt for Kidlat even before she hit puberty, long before she had the words for what she was feeling. How old had they been? Maybe eleven. Two lean, narrow bodies, hardly different from each other, though one was a girl and one was a boy, and even then, being around Kidlat had set her skin to tingling, her heart to skipping.