I raised my fingers again and made sure that he could see them. He struggled briefly against his straps, and then broke down. “Twelve. I have twelve children. And you.”
The feeling in my hands returned, at least enough so that I could take hold of the pillow and press it over his face. It’s an unpleasant business, suffocating a human being. It’s not like in the movies; even when immobilized, the victim can still thrash his head in such a way that, together with the sweat, water, and vomit on his cheeks, makes it extremely difficult to form a tight seal over his mouth and nose. I had such a hard time, in fact, that he was able to fire off some final words as the pillow slipped. “Filth. You’re filth.” That was the last thing he said, the final insult to cap off a perfectly malicious life. I got up on top of the bed with my knees dug into the mattress and pressed the whole weight of my body against him so that eventually his thrashing changed to twitching which in turn lessened by degrees until he finally stopped moving all together. And even then I remained fixed in that position far longer than reasonable caution required, scrunched up against the side of the headboard, enveloping his entire face with my body, like a fetus attached to the mouth. By the time I uncurled myself and took the pillow away, more than twelve minutes had passed. Sometime during the struggle, as the fire of his life prepared to flicker out, the whites of his eyes had turned red from all the burst blood vessels, and whatever power or mystery those eyes held for me when he was alive, it flickered out as well.
ANTHONY
Father. My father. What did I do? What did I ever do to cause you such shame? Is it in me, or is it me? The heart of me?
My mother only drank when taking Holy Communion, or when the pain of the moment became too much to handle on her own. Either way, I think she liked the ceremony, the ritual of it, priest and incense with one, stemmed glass and candles with the other. She only drank alone, and always in the dark, the wax light glowing against the dark of the bottle, and the dark of the room always on the outer edge, always waiting. The night word reached us of Dad’s death, she put my brothers and sister to bed early and hid away in her bedroom with a jug of cooking wine, which was the only wine we had in the house. Around midnight I looked in to make sure she hadn’t gone to sleep with the candles burning. I saw her lying there in the dark with glowing tears falling down her face and the jug of wine on the nightstand. She slipped her finger through the small glass handle and swung the jug over her lap. She pressed the cork into her palm and pried the cork loose and refilled her glass and shoved the cork back in. She raised her hand and beckoned me to come closer. I dropped to my knees beside the bed. It was one of the few times in my life when I saw her without makeup. In the dim light, only one half of her face was visible.
Mijo, she said. What I’m about to tell you, you must promise to keep to yourself. Your brothers mustn’t find out until I figure out how to explain it to them. And there are other things I’m going to tell you, deep and shameful secrets, things I’ve never told anyone, not even your father. No one must know these things, mijo. Not your brothers, not anyone. Promise me, mijo. Promise before God that you won’t tell a soul.
She kept calling me mijo and I didn’t know why. Spanish wasn’t spoken in our house, not even while Dad was away. I promise, I said. I promise to God I won’t.
There are things about my past I’ve hid from you until now, because I was ashamed, or because they were too painful to speak of. I was born in California, back when it was an American state, but my parents came to this country from Mexico, escaping the violence that had destroyed their families and so many others like them. Before I was even born, boy cousins on both my mother’s and father’s sides had been killed in the fighting down south. The only way to escape the savagery of the cartels was to run, and so that’s what my parents did. They came here, to the valley. I went to school in Orange Cove just a few miles away. But they were faithless people, my mother and father. All their belief, all their faith in God, had been buried in pieces alongside their murdered loved ones, sacrificed on the altar of an Aztec pretender clothed in the red and blue of the blessed Madonna. I grew up attending mass only on holidays, and without ever hearing the Bible read aloud in our house. I’m not telling you this to make excuses for myself, but so you will understand where I came from and why it was easy for me to make the mistakes I made when I was young.
You’re seventeen years old now. Practically a man. In my heart, I still see you as a little boy, but when I was your age I was already pregnant and determined to spend my life with the man I loved. That man was not your father. I hope you won’t think less of me for admitting this. So many girls my age were already having babies, and when I fell for a boy from school, who had graduated two years ahead of me, I felt like I was an adult who could make my own choices. Your grandmother tried to convince me to have an abortion, but I was in love, and I thought I was ready to handle being a mother. And so I gave birth, in the final year of American history, to a baby boy, your brother, who I named Oscar, after the grandfather you never met. There was no way I could have known what troubles lay ahead or what tragedies were in store for us. I was only a girl. My pride told me I was ready to handle the responsibility of caring for another life, but God Himself told me I wasn’t. And He told me in the cruelest way possible.
Your brother was the best thing in my life in those days. His father went out with friends and got drunk, but still I kept faith in our little unwed family. He cheated on me with other girls, and brought disease into our house, but even then I couldn’t make myself leave. It wasn’t until the very bad years that followed, when everyone was suffering and your grandparents decided to take their chances back in Mexico, that I realized we were all doomed from the start. At fifteen months, Oscar was taken from us, dead from measles along with so many other little ones. If he had been born a few years earlier, he could have received a vaccination. But all the doctors were leaving the valley by then, and anyway, there was no way we could have paid for it on our own. My sins, mijo. I blamed myself for your little brother’s death, as I blame myself now for failing to have him baptized. I hope you know I say a prayer for him every day. Same as with all of you.
I should have seen then that God wanted me to turn to the correct path, but I was still young and foolish, and the pain of losing a child is worse than anything you can imagine. As Jonah tried to escape God’s command, I tried to escape the pain of a grief so terrible it stayed with me even when I was asleep. I started drinking all the time. Wine, beer, whatever I could get my hands on. When that didn’t work, I started smoking weed, and eventually the man who sold it gave me my first taste of methamphetamine. That was all it took, just a taste. Like the fruit of forbidden knowledge. From there, things got so out of control so fast that even Oscar’s father deserted me. I was alone for years, working one awful job after another just to feed my addiction. There were times when I prostituted myself, mijo. I’m sorry if that’s difficult for you to hear. Selling her body is one of the lowest things a woman can do, but I can talk about it without guilt now, because I know I’ve been forgiven. But at the time I thought I was the most wretched creature in existence. I even thought about killing myself, I was so lost. It’s only by the grace of God that I’m here at all. He saved me from the nightmare of my own mind. That’s what the mind is, a nightmare, and to live day after day inside a mind as tortured as mine was a hell worse than anything death seemed to offer. I can say without exaggeration that, if I hadn’t found salvation when I did, I would have succumbed to despair a long time ago, mijo, and you and your brothers and your sister never would have been born. So you see, it was all worth it in the end. It was all a part of His plan. Even marrying your father, and all the pain and loneliness I’ve suffered over the years, even that was worth it because it gave me my children. I know what you’re thinking, but before you say anything, let me explain.