Chapter 45
Chapter Forty-Five
brUNO
The Sangre de Cristo Mountains are behind us by the time the highway drops into the valley where the town of Cerro Miel sits.
It’s barely even a town, nothing but a few blocks of commercial strip, a water tower, a chain pharmacy, and a shabby little school.
The kind of town that has everything a town needs and nothing else.
The air feels dry and it smells like sage and diesel.
I haven’t said much since Albuquerque. Kelsey, to her credit, has been filling the silence cheerfully, carefully. She read me a Wikipedia entry about the Jornada del Muerto desert, gave me her opinions on gas station burritos versus restaurant burritos, and created a retro bubblegum pop playlist.
I’ve been watching the road.
I made the call myself from Sadie’s office. It was a bad connection. My mother was silent for a long time when I said who I was. For a moment, I thought she’d hung up. And then, in a voice different than when she said hello—lower, quieter, more serious—she simply said, “Yes. Okay.”
The phone call was three minutes, maybe four.
We’re to meet her at her house.
We pass the gas station on the way there.
I remember it like it was yesterday, just a small white building with two pumps.
There are new signs on the exterior of the building advertising soda and lottery, but the windows are the same, including the one I peered through on that school trip twenty-one years ago.
Midmorning on a Thursday. One car at the pumps.
“Is that it?” Kelsey asks.
“Yeah.”
She doesn’t say anything else. She reaches over and puts her hand on my leg.
Our GPS leads us to a small white stucco house with a gravel yard and a porch.
I turn off the engine and we sit there. A clay pot on the step overflows with something orange and sprawling. The clay pot matches the roof tiles.
“You okay?” Kelsey asks.
“Fine.”
She waits. As usual.
“I’ll go knock,” I say.
“You still want me to come with?”
“I would.”
The woman who opens the door is smaller than I remember, though I suppose I’m taller now. Her blonde hair has gone mostly silver, and it’s short, cut close to her face. Her eyes are the same shade as mine, the unusual gray that Russell got and Adrian didn’t.
“Bruno,” she says.
I don’t trust my voice. I nod once.
She steps back from the door, holding it open.
“I’m Kelsey. Thank you so much for agreeing to this.”
“Of course,” Loretta says, and then she says it again, more emphatically. “Of course.”
Beside me, Kelsey takes my hand.
The house is lived in. She keeps her books in low stacks on bookshelves rather than displaying them spine out.
There is a blanket over the back of the couch with an Apache design, and a braided rug covers the cheap tile floor.
Small clay figurines are lined up on the long windowsill, like she’s been collecting them for years, or maybe making them. I know nothing about this woman.
“Sit, please.” She disappears and comes back with a tray that she probably put together while she was waiting. There’s a plate of cookies and a teapot with three mugs. She sets it down on the table.
“There’s a selection of tea bags in this basket.” She hands it first to Kelsey. Some of it’s herbal tea. “I know I can’t drink anything caffeinated after lunch.” She tries for a smile.
Kelsey smiles back. “I’m the same!” She takes a tea bag. “Your place is so cute. It’s so peaceful. So different than New York.” She asks about the figurines, and it turns out that Loretta did indeed make them.
She pours the water in all of our mugs. “I wasn’t sure you’d come,” she says.
“I wasn’t sure either.”
“I’m glad you did.” She wraps her hands around her cup. I used to hold those hands. Those hands used to hold me.
I had a speech prepared—something that established I wasn’t here to be managed, that I wanted the truth, no matter what. I can’t remember it, though. “I want to hear your side. I want to know why.”
A lie. I don’t want to hear any of it. I don’t want to be here. I look over at Kelsey. I’ll hear her out and get back to Albuquerque by nightfall, that’s what I’m focusing on.
Loretta—I won’t ever think of her as my mother—sets down her cup and folds her hands on the table.
“I didn’t know your father well when I agreed to marry him.
I was young, I was poor, and I was dazzled by the name, the estate, all of it.
He didn’t seem cruel at first. He wasn’t cruel to me until I got pregnant with you.
Then came the names, the cutting remarks.
I told myself it was stress. But it didn’t stop. ”
A pause. That much is believable, I suppose.
“Once Russell came, and there were three little boys, everything would set him off. Any tears. Even the smallest of quarrels between you and Adrian. Any expression of joy or feeling...even your laughter set him on edge. You could feel the whole house change when he came in the door. Whatever lightness just gone. He believed the world should run exactly to his specifications, and if he could just get it tight enough, quiet enough, orderly enough, then everything would be all right.” She looks at the table.
“I tried to compensate. We spent a lot of time in the local park when school wasn’t in session.
I would pack food and we’d stay there so the three of you could play and be yourselves. ”
I look away, remembering the park. That feeling of being bandits, hiding from the law.
“But I could see what he was doing to you. Especially you, Bruno. You were a joyful boy, but you were shutting down.”
There’s a noise in my ears. It feels like static. He believed the world should run exactly to his specifications, and if he could just get it tight enough, quiet enough, orderly enough, then everything would be all right.
“Adrian had constant stomach pains. Russell would cry all the time, which made things worse. And you were turning into a serious old man. You were seven. That’s the year the physical violence started.
It was small things at first. Holding my arm tightly enough that it would bruise, that sort of thing.
But he graduated to worse things, and once he started turning it on you boys, I was frightened for your safety.
I had to face that he was abusive, and abusers always escalate. It’s like a law of physics.”
The refrigerator hums somewhere in the kitchen. It’s a wonder I can hear it over the racing of my blood.
“I don’t remember that.”
“Good,” she says. “I went to see a lawyer at that point. I had no money, but I knew you’d be better off poor with me than rich with him around. The lawyer I hired went straight to your grandparents.”
“That’s so illegal,” Kelsey says.
“It didn’t matter. They owned that town.
The police, the judges. They told me if I went to a lawyer again or even whispered the word divorce, they’d have me jailed on whatever charge they liked, and pack you boys away to military boarding school.
” She takes a deep breath. “They guaranteed I would never see you boys again.”
A beat of silence.
On the windowsill, among the row of clay figures, there’s a small bird. Someone has pressed a thumb into its breast, leaving a hollow. I can feel Kelsey watching me, but I can’t look at her. I just study that bird. She wanted to get us away, so why did she leave us?
“I felt trapped. And your father was always around, quieter and scarier all the time, enforcing his impossible order.” She turns her cup slowly on the table.
“But I kept coming back to what they said about the military school. That they’d send you to that military school if I was out of the picture.
I knew which one they meant—your cousin had gone there.
He’d come home for Christmas and a short summer break, and he’d seemed excited about the horses there.
He lived at that school three hundred and fifty-five days a year.
” She looks up, meets my eyes. “It came to me that you boys would be better off being sent there. You’d only see your father for ten days out of the year.
I realized that going to that school could protect you from him better than I ever could. ”
“So you made the call,” Kelsey says.
Loretta searches my face. “For me to stay meant you boys being trapped with that monster, raised by that monster. The only way to get you away from him was the military school. And to do that, I had to disappear. I had to trade never seeing you again in order to get you away from an increasingly dangerous man.”
I can’t look at her. I can’t look at Kelsey, either. Everything feels crazy and confusing in my head.
“Should I have stayed and fought? Would it have been better for you to have a mother in jail, convicted of a crime, than a dead mother? I don’t know.
I made the decision that I did.” She reaches over and picks up the clay bird from the windowsill, turns it slowly in her hands, the hollow facing up. “I’ve rethought it ten thousand times.”
“So you burned your life down,” Kelsey says. “To get them out.”
“And myself in the process,” Loretta says.
“Why let us think you were dead?” My voice sounds surprisingly level. “Why not reach out and let us know you were alive?”
“I wanted to, but while you were young, I was afraid it might be too upsetting. You were getting over the loss of your mother. How would you handle it?” She looks at her hands.
“As you got older, I kept asking myself whether reaching out was for you or for me. It was always for me. Wanting to hear your voices. I didn’t think that was a good enough reason to turn your lives upside down.
And your father, well, you know how he is. He’d go after me, somehow.”
I nod.
She looks up. Meets my eyes. “But you figured it out.”
“By chance.” I tell her about the bus ride. Seeing her through the window.
She presses her fingers to her mouth. “I can only imagine the pain and confusion.”
I don’t want to talk about that. I don’t know how to do any of this. I set my mug on the table and look over at Kelsey.
“You can’t know how I missed you boys,” Loretta says. “I followed everything. There is nothing you could tell me about your lives that I don’t already know. But I wasn’t there. I don’t expect you to understand.”
“He’s a monster,” Kelsey says. “You did the only thing you could.”
The gratitude that moves across my mother’s face twists something in me.
She goes to the windowsill then and lifts something from a small blue glass tray half hidden behind the clay figures. A stone. She brings it over and sets it on the table between us.
It’s an agate. Gray, with a faint translucency where the light catches it.
“I planned my death out right down to the minute. That morning you and I were upstairs. You had this little car track, a toy your father had smashed once before, but you loved it, so I got a new one, and we’d made a game of keeping it in the upstairs closet, and you’d play with it in secret up there.
I sat with you and you played and played with it, just letting the little car slide down the ramp.
I knew it might be the last time I’d be near you, and I tried to hug you, but you just wanted to do the car.
” Something shifts in her face. “And then you stopped and reached into your pocket and gave that stone to me. You said—” Her voice catches, just slightly.
“You told me not to be sad. You saw my heart breaking. You always were so observant.”
The afternoon light falls across the grain of the table, catches the agate’s edge.
“I almost couldn’t go through with it. I loved you so much—all three of you boys.”
“I loved you, too.” I say it without looking at her. I’m looking at the stone, unsure what to do with the emotions flowing through me. Everything I knew has been turned on its head. There’s a silence at that table that feels like it goes on for a year.
Kelsey leans forward. “He’s going to need some time with all of this.”
“I know,” Loretta says.
I stand. Loretta puts her hand on my arm, briefly, and I let her.
“I’ll be in touch,” I say. “I’m going to tell Russell and Adrian. They’ll want to reach out.”
Some mixture of relief and grief shows in her face as she nods.
Kelsey hugs her. “It was so nice to meet you.”
They’re saying something else, but I’m not listening.
I’m seven years old, checking the house before my father comes home, making sure the shoes are lined up.
I’m running a yacht with rules about silence and the perpendicularity of furniture. The crew members frightened to make the smallest sound. Frightened, even, to reveal their name.
The gravel sounds loud on the way back to the car. I get in and shut my door.
“Bruno.” She can barely contain it. “You have a mother.”
I look back at the house.
“She loves you,” Kelsey says. “She loves you so much she made the worst decision of her life trying to protect you.” She tugs my arm. “Bruno.”
“I know.”
She studies my face. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I’m glad we came,” I say.
Whatever she reads in my face, she gives me the space. I pull out onto the dirt road.
“You have a mother,” she says.
I do have a mother. I’m reeling inside with emotions I can’t begin to name; it’s all way too big to process. But also, my mind keeps going back to what she said about my father.
The silence. The order. How he quashed joy.
That’s how it started, and that was bad enough, but then it got more severe and turned into violence.
He and I are so alike.
I can’t stop thinking about it.
I mustn’t stop thinking about it.