Chapter 57
In jerking motions, I backed my car into the pitted dirty street with the thought that I was returning to the only person in the world who still loved me, whom I’d not yet disappointed.
I drove seeing no more than the few feet ahead of me, thanking God for Henry, repeating to myself like a mantra, Henry will always love me.
He was sitting on the couch, exactly as I’d left him.
“Henry, my darling,” I said, wrapping him into my arms. His eyes remained on the television while I kissed him extravagantly, his plump cheeks smeared with ketchup, his fist pressing his lips as he sucked his thumb.
I inhaled his breath. A mostly empty plate of homemade papas fritas sat on the coffee table—María always made them to spoil him.
“Do you want to go to the old hacienda?” I asked, holding him tightly.
He nodded.
“Only the two of us, won’t that be fun?”
Soon we were walking through the botanical gardens.
There was the exquisite huff and whip of bird wings that I’ve only ever heard in Mexico, maybe because the air is thin and pure and the altitude so great.
We listened silently as they beat the air.
We walked single file over the viaduct. When we’d moved here in the rainy season, it was submerged in an inch or so of water that perpetually fell, crashing over its edge, but now it was bone dry, the reservoir a moonscape of pocked mud.
“Is it this way?” I asked when we reached the fork on the other side, uncertain of myself.
“No, the other path,” he said. “Come on, let’s run.”
We ran through the tall grasses, Henry leading, my sole life guide a five-year-old boy.
Sometimes he would disappear for a moment, and remembering him bounding into the shallow sea on the day we found the end of the road, diving and falling backward, I had to bite back the urge to ask if he would always love me.
We stayed for a long time at the old hacienda, or so it seemed.
It was only the remains of a building, only its outlines, like the half-built structures in the field.
But we pretended it was our home, gathered sticks and built a “fire” and cooked food over it.
We played that there were people coming to take our home away from us, and so we had to defend it with other sticks that were swords and spears.
I kept wanting to assert that it was fun; wasn’t it fun? Didn’t he love this? Mexico? Me?
But I controlled myself. I looked at him and thought, This memory belongs to you. I give it over to you, I erase myself from it, I’m nothing. I’m nothing like my mother.