Chapter 52
The drive the next day was uneventful. The children watched a string of DVDs.
They slept. In the long spans of silence, I revisited the conversation with Tom about remaining in Mexico.
To my surprise, I found myself questioning if I truly wanted to.
My mind kept turning to Henry—maybe because he was more malleable than Ida, more adept at belonging.
I imagined him married to a woman like those who waited with me in the courtyard, with their painted nails and elaborate makeup, their easy jollity.
The thought chastened me; the idea that I would be replaced, and Tom, our culture of origin.
Henry with a brood of Mexican children, their hair gelled and expertly braided, their ears pierced and little glinting gold crucifixes around their necks.
In such moments, I was haunted by my revulsion toward my own mother, guilty that, as a child of Henry’s age, I’d cringed at the feel of her lips on my cheek.
I couldn’t stand for her even to smile at me, as though she perceived nothing amiss, clumsily attempting to love and care for me, beaming at me across the dining table.
How undressed I felt by that smile. As though she deployed it solely to invade my thoughts, physical spaces that ought to have belonged only to me.
So deep was my resentment that whenever I caught myself smiling at my own children with any semblance of longing, I chastised myself: Don’t smother them!
Don’t try to claim them as your own! And if they ever looked at me with lingering adoration, I chastised myself also: It isn’t something you’re owed.
If they express love, don’t grow to expect it. They didn’t ask to be born.
Yet it struck me, in the car beside Tom, that there must be a way for mothers and children to smile at one another that is correct.
In my confusion and ignorance, all I could think of were certain moments with Louise: The time in the coffee shop when she praised my writing.
The wordless seconds when we faced each other at the mouth of the tunnel, when the drops of water clung above her lip.
I was strangely calm as we made the drive back to San Miguel. I remember at one point, when we were again passing the huge wrinkled mountains, letting my hand fall onto Tom’s thigh and saying something sappily banal. I’m so happy. Everything is so wonderful.
As we reached the outskirts of San Miguel, we rolled down all the windows and put on the Star Wars music full blast. “We’re in the Millennium Falcon!” Tom proclaimed, and the kids hung out of the opened windows baying while Tom and I grinned like idiots.
In our absence, María had made everything perfect.
All the bed linens freshly washed, the beds made up, the children’s toys and stuffed animals arranged in tableaux as though at a beautiful toy store or on a movie set of a child’s room.
On the Saarinen table, a vase of flowers picked from the garden.
In the refrigerator, homemade tacos carefully wrapped, two kinds of salsa.
After the long drive, we were famished and ate hungrily.
We opened a bottle of wine. Tom said he needed to check his emails; after that, maybe he would wade through the messages on the answering machine attached to the landline in his office.
I went downstairs with Ida and Henry. I began to run a bath.
I went to their room and found their heavier pajamas that we hadn’t taken to the beach, laid them out onto their beds.
I pawed through the toiletries bag for their toothbrushes.
In the bathroom were big blue-and-white-patterned pitchers containing fresh filtered water, two clean glasses.
“Didn’t María leave everything so nice for us?”
“I liked when we brushed our teeth together at the beach,” they chimed. “Daddy, come brush your teeth with us!”
I went to the foot of the stairs, calling to him gaily, “Your presence has been requested.” When he didn’t answer, I ran up to the living room, eager to see him, to embrace and kiss him.
As soon as I saw him, I knew something was wrong.
The lithograph, I immediately thought. He’s logged into our bank account, found out about the money.
But that wasn’t it. It was Bill Barnes. The previous Thursday, while walking through the airport in León, he’d suffered a massive heart attack. He was dead.