Chapter 45
I was still drunk when Tom woke me the next morning.
Dark outside, the house frigid. As Tom loaded the bags into the car, I wandered to the bathroom in a haze, unnerved that I couldn’t remember driving home or what I’d done when I arrived.
Tom called that he was about to carry the kids out, and I hurried ahead of him in my underwear, making a nest with several pillows so they would be comfortable and fall back asleep.
After that, I dressed hurriedly. My ankle was stiff and swollen; I noticed a cut on the bottom of one foot as I pulled on my shoe.
When I came back to the landing, Tom had already settled Ida into the car and had Henry in his arms. I passed him into the cold darkness, Tom locking the door behind us.
For a minute, we sat with the engine idling and the heat on, Tom checking all the mirrors, looking over the maps and printed directions, being the competent husband.
“You okay?” he asked, putting the car into gear.
“I’m just a bit tired.”
He shook his head, emitting a short laugh as we began up the driveway and away.
It was strange to reach the Cuesta and turn away from town.
At the point where the road flattened out, running beside the botanical garden and then the very last of the grandiose houses and finally nothing but scrub grass, I began to see the shadowy figures of men moving along the side of the road.
Some carried small brown sacks. Some smoked, or else it was their breath streaming.
“Who are they, Dad?” Ida asked. I’d thought she was asleep.
“Men going to work.”
I would have had more to say about it, but Ida never asked such questions of me.
Tom was the last authority for all of us, including myself—although, in this case, it seemed to me the answer was far more complex and intersected our own lives, for I had begun to think about the men who would soon be riding in the back of a pickup truck to the field across from Louise’s.
And then—maybe I’d dreamed it—for a few moments, I recalled the field at night; I was running wildly, hearing animal sounds around me, moans of pleasure.
To push the memory aside, I said, “Maybe they’re going to build the houses you and Bill designed. ”
“Yeah, maybe.” He looked at me questioningly. But I didn’t share more of my thoughts or my recollections, unsure in both cases what meaning to attach to them. Instead, I rested my aching head into my hands, and for a time dozed.
The sun was just rising as we reached the first tollbooth outside Guanajuato.
Henry had awakened. I’d gotten a movie playing on the cheap DVD players we’d bought at Office Depot for the drive from Minneapolis, he and Ida listening on headphones.
I counted out the money from Tom’s wallet.
When he handed me the receipt, I tossed it down at my feet.
The task helped me sober up. Every forty-five minutes or so, we came to another toll.
I kept the little pile of receipts in the pocket of the door, his wallet wedged beneath my thigh, while through drooping lids, I watched the landscape change.
We drove past rows of agave, with their beautiful bluish tint; through deep tunnels cut into massive outcroppings of rock.
We came upon pleated mossy-looking mountains that looked like topiaries of reposing wrinkled giants.
As we neared them, Tom said, “Who would have said that the earth, with its ancient skin, would change so much?”
“Ancient skin, that’s such a perfect description.”
“Too bad it’s not mine.”
“Who said it?”
“Can’t you guess?”
Somehow it stung me, his rhetorical tone, the fact I had no idea.
“It’s Pablo Neruda,” Tom announced, and after a brief silence began to recite it in a loud, slow voice, “ ‘In the course of a day we shall meet one another… ’ ”
He gave the whole poem that way, line after line, while I petulantly noted to myself his bombastic tone of voice, the staleness of his breath.
I had propped my feet up on the dashboard, leaning against the window away from him.
I stayed that way even after my hip grew numb.
I felt terrible. My head was throbbing, the muscles around my eyes like twine pulled too tight.
When we passed into a second, longer tunnel, in the darkness, the images of the field swam back.
I was running, ears full of the filthy noises; my shoe had come off; I felt a jabbing pain in my heel.
Then, driving wildly, in our bedroom searching into the top dresser drawer and removing Tom’s wallet.
When we passed into the sunlight, suddenly the Navarro lithograph As Apes Do was vividly before me, filling my computer screen.
Then my hand holding Tom’s credit card; the exhilaration as my fingers struck the keys, the terrible cresting joy, like the moment of losing control in an argument.
“Are you going to tell me what happened last night?”
I stared at him in terror. I could feel a cold bead of sweat wending its way down between my breasts. “Tom, I really don’t feel well.”
“Listen, forget it. It happens.”
“What does?” I said quickly.
“You really don’t remember?” He glanced into the rearview mirror, making sure the kids weren’t listening. “You were completely out of it. I don’t know what the hell you and Louise drank, but you weren’t well.” He hesitated. “You didn’t quite make it.”
“What do you mean?”
“To the toilet. I had to mop it up with a towel.”
“Jesus fucking Christ.” I could feel myself about to lose control. My head was pounding.
“Sweetheart, it’s okay.” He patted my leg. “It’s done, I cleaned it up really well.”
“Right, I get it, you cleaned up after me, just please stop talking about it.”
In the long claustrophobic silence, the full scope of what I’d kept from Tom presented itself: a skein of petty lies and omissions stretching clear back to the day I met her.
He’d taken the job, he’d worked all this time in order to give me the gift of this year, and in return, I’d taken myself away from him little by little, betraying him.
And yet I had not been able to keep the accusation from my voice, as if by bringing up the disgraceful thing I’d done, he had failed in his duty to protect me.
I shifted in my seat, perversely annoyed at Tom’s proximity, his obliviousness, which I myself had created.
I unclasped my seat belt, glorying in a vision of myself thrown clear through the windshield, imagining in minute detail the sound and feel of my body shattering on the road.
Around one o’clock, the kids, who had watched another full movie, began to complain about being hungry. At a roadside stand buzzing with flies, we bought bags of homemade potato chips and tortas de jamón and fruit sodas.
I stared vacantly at the scrubby field, the memories flooding back. I was looking at the Navarro of the two monkeys on the bed; then stumbling down the stairs, taking Tom’s wallet from his dresser drawer, removing his bank card.
“Sally?”
“I think I’ve done something terrible.” A convoy of trucks was passing, their air brakes whining into the din, the kids asking at once what was wrong, why was I just staring that way, Ida laughing that I looked stupid.
“What’s that?”
I searched into his face, my heart fluttering wildly.
He pointed to his ears. “The traffic is so loud, I couldn’t hear. What did you say?”
“No, nothing. Just, I’m sorry, Tom. For everything.”
He smiled consolingly—hadn’t he told me it was nothing?
He caressed my leg again, saying with a raised voice intended for the children that it was time to get going, everyone should try to pee before getting back into the car.
Henry refused to use the bathroom, which had no door and only a hole in the floor.
Ida said pointedly she would, why not, glaring at him as she went.
Then we all piled back into the dusty car.
Tom resumed driving. Hours more passed, the view beyond the window remaining uniform as though we were moving to stand still.
At last, near four o’clock, we began the long steep descent into jungle.
The road narrowed to a single twisting lane.
The jungle spilled onto the asphalt, covering the tiny shoulder in vines.
For forty minutes, we were trapped behind a truck heaving diesel.
Dead dogs swelled in the roadside ditch, and even a dead horse, its legs like sawed-off saplings, its head mostly gone.
All the windows were down, the air soupy, not yet smelling of the sea.
I turned, looking back at my children. Ida was bent over Henry, who had fallen asleep again.
They seemed alarmingly vulnerable, with the window gaped open above their limp bodies and tangles of green closing in on them.
I reached back, caressing Ida’s little head, smoothing the delicate wisps of hair.
When I touched Henry’s leg, damp with sweat, he awoke with a start.
“I need to pee,” he moaned.
Tom looked at me. “It’s not safe,” he said. “There’s no shoulder.”
“I can’t hold it!”
“What should we do?” I asked, and Tom said to give him an empty soda bottle into which he could pee.
“I can’t!” Henry protested, hearing.
“Sweetheart, there’s nothing else to do,” I said. I had turned back to face him, holding the empty bottle steady. “It’s okay,” I said. I smiled at him coaxingly. A few seconds later, I felt the warmth meet my fingers, filling the bottle. “Good, Henry. Almost done?”
“A little more.”
Feeling a swell of nausea, I lifted my eyes to the endless regress of green out the back window. “I don’t feel well,” I said to Tom in an urgent whisper.
“Face forward and close your eyes.”
The hot bottle sloshed under my hands, releasing the smell of urine in waves.
When I closed my eyes, the patterns of the jungle flashed and flickered sickeningly against the red of my eyelids.
It’s blood, I thought; that’s what makes it red.
“I’m going to be sick.” I lowered the window, tossing the bottle spraying piss.
“It’s only a few more minutes,” Tom said.
But the last fifteen kilometers took three-quarters of an hour, winding behind a gas truck and, after we’d stopped in a tamped-down bit of jungle for me to vomit, a rusted pickup piled impossibly high with oranges.
At every turn, one or two flew off and exploded, benign grenades.
The air grew bloated, full of new smells, citrine and musky, rank.
I braced my arm against the door, my head lolling to one side.
“What’s wrong with Mommy,” Ida said.
“She’s just a little carsick,” Tom answered her.
I had to vomit again. Only bile was left.
I retched into a crumpled bit of napkin, not even bothering to lean out the window.
As I arched forward, convulsing, through the damp thinness of my tee shirt, I felt Tom’s hand rest against my back.
I was humbled. Wordlessly, my back returned his gesture, softening beneath the slow pulse of his fingertips.
“Better?” he said.
“Yes, thanks, Tom.”
A few minutes later, he put the turn signal on, calling out that we were there.
Cheering from Henry and Ida. To my surprise, I really did feel a bit better.
When we heard the first distant crash of waves, Tom looked at me just long enough for something mundane and ardently wished for to pass from his eyes to mine.
And then we laughed, like old friends reunited. In that single moment, one reality washed away another as outside, by coincidence, the low sun broke through the heavy curtain of leaves, and everything changed color.