Ms. Navarro shifted in her seat, and, very gently, she put her hand on Engracia’s back. Engracia accepted this because she knew Ms. Navarro wanted to help, and she knew she was sorry about Diego, but also, she did not like it. Because even now, nothing anyone did ever helped. And also, Ms. Navarro hid her daughter from her papa.
“I turned on the wrong road, the one before the Red Rock, and we drive a long way, looking for another sign. And Diego is very quiet. He says, ‘Mama I am sick. My head hurts.’ And then he throws up. In the car.”
“?‘Diego,’ I say. ‘You should tell me you’re sick. It’s the car. It’s too hot.’ But Diego is not listening to me. His eyes don’t look at me, they are not looking at anything, but there are tears. I see tears in his eyes.”
Engracia saw that the man was no longer looking at her. He was holding his head in his hands, staring at the floor.
“I know he is sick, and I don’t know where I am, so I try to call an ambulance. I stop the car, and I get out my phone, and the call doesn’t work. I say, ‘Diego, Diego, wake up. What’s the matter?’?”
But Diego did not reply. He leaned his head on the window, with the mess from the getting sick still in his lap, and he did not answer, and he did not look at her.
“So I start the car, and I turn around, and I drive very fast. There is no one on that road. It’s not going to Red Rock. And I keep dialing and dialing, and my phone does not work.”
Diego threw up again. Engracia tried to hold him, tried to pull his head under her arm while driving with the left hand, and pushing on the buttons on the phone with her chin. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t hold him and drive and phone. Diego was limp now, so she put his head in her lap, and she drove the fastest she had ever driven. Finally, there was the road she needed. She stopped. And the phone worked. And someone must have seen how desperate she looked, right through the window, because a car stopped and then another, and everyone tried to help.
Was it better to drive him to the hospital? To wait for the ambulance? In the end, she left her car on the side of the road, and a man in a Mercedes drove her and Diego very fast toward town, and when he saw the fire engine, sirens blaring, coming toward them, he pulled over. One paramedic worked on Diego and tried to rouse him, and another paramedic asked her questions. Before they put them both in the ambulance, the first paramedic said, “Where did he get this bruise? Here, behind his ear?”
And that was when Engracia knew that he must have fallen, that he must have taken the skateboard, that he must have gone outside when she was sleeping. And, of course, he would not have told her that he fell, because he would not have wanted her to know that he had disobeyed.
“He died in the hospital. Two days later. When they asked me if they could turn off the machine.”
Engracia could not say more than this. She could not keep speaking, even if these idiotic people, who had their daughter, did not understand. She had tried. She and Diego had tried. If this is what Dios wanted, she had tried.
There were tears on Ms. Navarro’s face now. She stretched her arm all the way around Engracia’s back, and when she squeezed, Engracia could feel how her body had changed. Her breathing was ragged, but her body was no longer rigidly on alert. Instead, it was soft, heavy, pressing into Engracia.
“I didn’t know. I’m so sorry.”
Engracia relaxed into Honorata’s arms. She was a mother too. Engracia knew that the other woman had spent seventeen years afraid of just the thing that had happened to her.
A horrible sound erupted from the man.
He was crying. He was crying, and he was trying not to, and his face was hidden, and his big, fat body shook. Engracia thought that he cried like a child, without any ability to hold himself back. He snorted, and his nose ran, and he could not catch his breath, and his body twisted and shook. She was grateful for how deeply he suffered. He suffered for her, for Diego, and, somehow, this helped.
Just then, the doorbell rang.
At first, nobody moved. It rang again, and there was a loud knocking.
Engracia looked out the window and saw a man crouched on the wall and another across the street. They were wearing helmets and military gear, though surely they were the police. They were watching her in the window, and they were looking toward the front door—toward whoever was ringing the bell.
Jimbo looked up.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry, Honorata.”
And then he looked at Engracia. “I am so sorry.”
Engracia saw in his eyes that he had given up, and she thought that he might shoot himself now, but that he would not shoot her and he would not shoot Ms. Navarro. They looked at each other, the man’s face swollen with his tears, and red, like the glow of that light on the stucco.
“I’m sorry about your son.”
Engracia looked at Ms. Navarro, who was watching them, her face stricken, no longer angry.
Engracia leaned over to the man. He had been sitting on the floor, and she was on the couch, so when she leaned over, and he put his arms around her, they met in a kind of crouch near the floor. He put both his arms around her, and as he bent his head near her face, she said, “The gun. Give me the gun.” He didn’t reply. She didn’t know if he had heard; if he understood. Engracia wondered if there was a gun trained on the two of them now, someone out there waiting for some distance between her and the man, someone trying to understand what was going on in here.
“The gun.”
She said it with urgency, because there wasn’t much time. The person at the door was knocking loudly now, and he was yelling something, though she wasn’t sure what.
Jimbo gripped her shoulders tightly. Engracia slowly moved her hand forward, toward his soft body, toward the gun stuck in his waistband. The man said nothing. And then she had the gun in her hand, and before she separated from the man’s embrace, she dropped it in the deep pocket of her cotton pants.
“Open up! Police!”
Engracia and the man separated, and they looked at Honorata, who was looking out the door of the study, toward the hall.
Almost at once, they all stood. Engracia waited for the shot, the bullet that would come through the window.
“This is the police. Open the door!”
Honorata moved out of the room, toward the door. There was no shot, and so Engracia and the man followed. She didn’t look at Jimbo, she didn’t say anything; she could feel the gun against her leg, pulling the band of her slacks lower.
Honorata opened the door, and the policeman said, “Ma’am, is everyone all right in here? We’ve been calling you. We had a call earlier. What’s going on?”
And Honorata said, “Everyone’s fine. But I want this man to leave my home. I want him to go.”
“Has he hurt you? Is there a gun?”
Jimbo and Engracia stood behind Honorata, the three of them all staring at the police officer. Except for his size, Jimbo looked the least frightening of all. An old man, older than he had been two hours before, with his eyes still swollen, and the sweat beaded in his hair and beneath his ear and along the collar of his shirt.
“I’m ready to go,” he said.