Chapter 56
Driving to Louise’s house, I had a particular, familiar sensation—a tingling in my arms and legs accompanied by a quickening in my chest—that I had often had in childhood.
It was a distillation of rage, a hardening of will.
A preparation for battle. “Who the fuck do you think you are?” I said aloud.
“Who do you think you’re playing with?” I barked out a jagged laugh, then tried to slow my next exhalation, to calm myself.
She’s not worth it. Don’t make a scene. Just get the lithograph, get Ida, and leave.
At the door, she was all smiles, happy to see me. The bracelet that Tom had given me shone on her wrist as she lifted her hand in that now accustomed gesture of love and welcome, saying in a ringing voice, “I’m so happy you’ve come, Mia!”
“Don’t call me that.”
“What in the world has gotten into you?”
Quickly I stepped past her, scanning the room for Ida.
I saw it then, hanging in plain sight, right beside Allan’s painting.
The Navarro. My breath caught, as if I were staring down the barrel of a gun.
After all the hours of studying and rejecting and fetishizing it, I wasn’t even curious to see it in person. I only wanted it gone.
I turned, trying to move away. But Louise sidestepped, blocking me, smiling and signaling with a nod that we should admire it together.
I stared at her mouth, her white teeth, petrified by impotent rage.
Ida must have heard us; presently she trotted into the room, shouting at me that she wasn’t ready to go, then went onto the back patio, where I saw that Louise had set up the infamous easel, no doubt filling her with stories about who had used it and the mystical powers it conveyed.
Thinking this, I suddenly imagined Louise showing Ida the Navarro print, the two of them standing in front of it just as she and I were now doing, Louise perhaps explaining the lurid act in some way to make it seem normal to her. At the thought, disgust washed through me.
“What are you doing with this?” I said, pointing to the lithograph.
“Doesn’t it look wonderful beside Allan’s?
But you knew how much it would mean to me, Mia; truly, I’m so touched.
” She beamed at me—that loathsome smile suddenly so like my mother’s in my dreams it made me start.
Her eyes had filled ridiculously with tears.
“Oh, and now that you’re here I can finally tell you: I’ve found us a house—in La Cieneguita. ”
I had scarcely heard it—found “us” a house—before cutting her off, coming straight to the point: “We’re leaving Mexico. Tom lost his job.”
“Has he? I wondered how long that would take. Obviously it’s been in disarray from the start.”
The mildness of her reaction flustered me slightly, but I kept my resolve. I stepped to the print. “And I’m taking this.”
“To Tom? I hardly think so.” She laughed lightly. “I don’t really think he would understand it, any better than he does you and me.”
“Shut up.”
“Oh, please! Enough melodrama. Tom’s going back to the States? Good. Now you’ll see what you’re actually made of. Now it truly begins, Mia.”
I couldn’t stand it any longer, her smiling at me, asserting a reality in which Tom and I were no longer together, calling me Mia.
She moved as though to draw me into an embrace, my bracelet riding up her arm, and suddenly I grabbed at it, tugging frantically.
When I couldn’t pry the bracelet off, I shoved her, sending her stumbling backward.
I began to hurl insults at her. “Liar! Bitch!” More spewed from me, I don’t remember what, only that she didn’t defend herself.
An odd expression had come over her face, almost pleased, her gaze fixed on a point behind me. On an impulse, I turned.
It was Ida. She was standing stock-still in the doorway that long ago Louise had struggled to unlock, where I’d stood helpless watching Henry wail.
“Sweetheart,” I began.
“Don’t speak to her like that,” Ida said.
I shook my head. My mouth opened dumbly. I was trembling, still consumed with rage. “We’re leaving,” I panted out.
“No.”
“Ida, come here.”
Her lips puckered with distaste, as if I was a bad smell.
She took a few steps closer. As she drew near, I reached for her, but she darted past me to Louise, pressing her body against Louise’s, the two of them looking at me with the smug expression they shared, the haughty set of their mouth I wanted to slap off.
Looking to Ida, I said in a quavering voice, “Go get your things. We’re going home. ”
“No. I want to stay with Nonna.”
Nonna. A sour sound escaped me. I couldn’t believe my ears; when had she begun calling her that?
Slowly I moved my gaze between them, their cropped hair, ugly little replicas of each other.
I thought of grabbing Ida. I was still much bigger than her.
I could have dragged her to the car and hit her and slammed the door and driven off as she screamed.
But I didn’t. I didn’t want to give Louise the satisfaction of seeing that she had successfully turned her against me; I didn’t want her to watch me battle with my firstborn child, about whom I had once naively thought, holding her perfection at my breast, that if I love her as my mother never loved me, if I love her father, if I give her a beautiful home in which to grow and stability and support, if I myself am beautiful and joyful and beyond reproach—if I can do all of this, then she will not grow up to hate me.
Yes, I had been stupid enough to believe that.
Just as I’d believed I could have the lithograph that now hung on Louise’s wall; I could have the life Louise had, and then discard her and have a better one, Tom and Henry and Ida and I, when it was Louise who had taken my life, ruined my marriage, made my daughter despise me.
More than anything, it was this last thought—Ida’s despising me—that I couldn’t stand.
I cast my eyes over the bald concrete patio, thinking, If I find an egg on the ground, so help me, I’ll crush it and let the yolk drip through my fingers.
I’ll smash it against the painting Ida was working on at the easel, hurl it at her face.
If she wants to hate me, I’ll give her a reason.
But there was no egg. There was only me, myself the beginning and end, the sole focus of Ida’s hatred. So I removed myself. Fine, I silently chided her, be without me, if you detest my company so much.
As though I was watching a movie, completely outside of myself, I turned and walked to the front door, pausing only when I opened the car door, hearing the chiming, glancing around in bewilderment.
Men were working in the building site across the street.
Silhouetted against the horizon, I imagined I saw Tom—his height, the curve of his back, the gracious authority with which he gestured—speaking to someone, and I briefly thought to call to him, enlist his help.
But no, he wouldn’t want to help me with this or anything. He wasn’t even here. He was on an airplane, far above the earth. The project was finished.