Chapter 19
The next morning, there was a note from Tom on the bedside table: Meeting Bill this afternoon.
Won’t be home for comida. Love, me. The house was quiet, Ida no longer in bed next to me.
María was mopping the living room floor.
Seeing me come up the stairs, she stopped and went to fix my coffee.
I carried my computer onto the balcony and opened my email, surprised at finding a note from Louise—I didn’t even remember giving her my address.
She asked if I’d meet her later that morning.
Also, could I send her a copy of the story about the two girls in Mexico?
I read that sentence several times, unsettled at my lie, the viral way it continued blossoming without my consent.
I typed hurriedly that it was still too rough to share, but I would send it when it was more polished; held down the delete button, watching my response disappear until there was nothing.
I replaced the renewed blankness with a promise that I would come to her house at eleven.
She’d attached a file, and after hitting send, I opened it, my screen suddenly filled with my own face staring back at me.
It was one of the pictures she’d taken that first day at the hot springs.
She’d sent only one, although she must have taken forty or more.
I guessed it was taken in the moment right before I covered my eyes, after she said I seemed like someone to whom nothing bad had ever happened.
In the photo, I stared at the camera, not smiling.
Face and shoulders naked but for the thick straps of the navy suit.
My lips were slightly parted, one wet-dark strand of hair dropping near to my right eye.
It was jarring to see myself without the usual filter of self-critique and presentation of looking in the mirror.
I thought, I’m beautiful like that? Not the pretty, careless beauty I consciously projected walking along the Cuesta in my strappy sandals, holding my children’s hands or Tom’s.
It was intense, even a little brooding, the look of someone who has things to say but might not share them.
In my eyes, I read hunger. But also—harder to recognize, because as long as I could remember I’d endeavored to banish it in myself—hopefulness.
It was what I’d seen in Henry’s face when Louise asked would he like to taste an egg from the shell.
It wasn’t much longer before the children, who’d been playing beneath me in the courtyard, began to argue and cry.
Ida had hit Henry; Henry was ruining everything.
I blamed myself, I’d been absorbed in my own thoughts, they were bored, they were hungry.
I closed the laptop, steeling myself for a morning, like countless others with young children, spent arbitrating, redirecting, playing boring games sitting on the floor hunched into uncomfortable positions.
But it never came to pass: María took care of everything.
She gave them a task involving a stack of old bricks and cut sprigs of bougainvillea.
“Sí, está bien. Las flores están muy bonitas,” she encouraged them as they pushed the flowers that would soon be wilted into the cracks of the brick tower they’d erected.
A little later, when they wanted something to eat, they went to her.
They watched her mop move back and forth over the stone floor, sitting on the sofa with their legs tucked beneath them.
She spoke to them in Spanish as she worked, and they listened with wide-eyed expressions as though drugged.
In this way, I spent the morning undisturbed, writing in the notebook Louise had given me, trying to re-create the story I’d told Hector.
At the party, I had been elated, transported as in a dream, where all the constraints, the choices you’ve made—work, husband, children—lift like starting gates and you are galloping with all of it still ahead of you, free.
Here, even with Henry and Ida occupied, the urgent, simple sentences never arrived.
Instead, they were labored, pretentious.
After an hour, I ripped the pages out and threw them into the trash.
At eleven, I loaded the kids into the car and drove to Louise’s.