The girls returned. Isadora smiled at him and Sebastian smiled back. There was some talk of going for a bite and Sebastian, tight on finances as usual, looked at his watch and pretended he was expected for supper back at home.
“I should go,” Sebastian told her. “But thanks for the invitation.”
“Maybe we can go out some other time,” she said.
“Yes.”
The boys glared at him. Sebastian walked out of the movie theatre.
G
RANDMOTHER’S NEEDLES CLICKED
together as she knitted, fingers steady, always knowing what movement would follow. Practice, she’d told Meche. All it takes is a little practice.
Maybe it was the same with magic. Meche thought they were getting better but there was still the need for practice.
They should have been in the factory that evening. But Sebastian was out with Isadora and her friends.
Meche glanced at the clock. The little hand had scarcely moved.
She sighed and looked at her homework. She had finished the math problems ages ago and was now stuck on some short story readings. The words seemed to jump and dance before her eyes. She could not concentrate.
“Can you tell me the story of the girl in the well, grandmother?” she asked.
“Aren’t you working?”
“I’m tired.”
“There once was a little girl who lived deep in a well. The
chaneques
had taken her when she was little, stolen her from her mother and placed her deep in the middle of the forest, inside a well—”
The phone rang and Meche rushed to pick it up, breathlessly holding the receiver.
“Yes?”
“Hey, Meche,” her father said.
Oh. She thought it might have been Sebastian. He would tell her the evening had been crap and they would laugh together about it.
“I’m going to be home late tonight. I’ve got some business over here.”
“Do I leave your plate out?”
“Just put it in the refrigerator. Thanks, sweetheart.”
“Okay. Night.”
Meche went to the kitchen and put some
picadillo
on a dish, then began covering it with plastic. Her mother walked in and glanced at her.
“Dad’s coming late.”
Her mother did not say anything. She dropped her glass in the sink and walked out, but Meche could see it in her eyes: she was angry. Dad was probably at the bar, getting drunk. She hoped she was not going to be sent out to find him. But, as was regularly the case, an hour later she was putting on her green jacket and gnashing her teeth.
She poked her head into the bar and looked around. Her father was not playing dominoes and he was not chatting with the regulars. He was not there.
Meche walked back home and poured herself a glass of milk before going to bed. Her mother, nestling a cup of coffee between her hands, was reading a magazine.
“He wouldn’t come,” Meche lied, though she did not know why she did.
Her mother turned a page and nodded.
V
ICENTE LAY IN
the arms of his mistress and thought of his wife. It was the worst time possible to be doing this, but he could not get Natalia out of his mind.
He needed to leave her. He was tired of sneaking around. He was just plain tired. When he woke up in the morning he saw a middle-aged man with grey hair and a forlorn expression in the mirror. He hated that man. He hated himself.
But there were some practical things to consider. Their daughter, for one. And, though it might sound crass, there was the issue of the money.
Vicente had none. His desire to move to Puerto Vallarta, to live by the beach and spend his days watching sunsets, drowned in the reality of his scant possibilities.
He wished he was fifteen, even ten years younger than he currently was. He wished he had never met nor married his wife. Then he didn’t wish that because that would mean Meche would not exist.
Azucena had told him about a business venture of a cousin of hers, something guaranteed to bring in dough. Vicente imagined himself rich, with a house in el Pedregal and a brand new sports car. Meche could live with them. She’d like it there. He’d buy her nice clothes and take her to eat out every night of the week.
“What is it that your cousin does, again?” he asked Azucena.
Mexico City, 2009
M
ECHE BOUGHT PISTACHIOS
and a Coke at the corner store. Catalina Coronado was there too, buying eggs. The old woman stood gossiping and Meche had to wait ten minutes as the gnarled witch informed the shopkeeper of the movements of everyone in the colonia. Finally, Meche was able to pay, dumping her coins on the counter. Then it was onto the bus, headphones on, until she reached her father’s apartment.
The apartment seemed to be getting more depressing every day and Meche was sure the flamingoes were growing anemic. Their ugly, faded, pink bodies blurred into one large pink blob when she stared at the curtains for too long. If she stared at the records the faces on the covers also blurred and changed, becoming faces of people she had known. Becoming her father.
K
EEP MOVING.
K
EEP
going. Keep running. Go through another pile of records, toss another box in a corner. Repeat.
Three more nights of prayer and then it was over.
She switched to her father’s papers, cramming pages from his book into a box, slamming the typewriter on the top. She emptied the bedside table and found his diary for the current year.
March’s entry. Written with his tight handwriting, filling every centimetre on the page.
I am planning on visiting Meche next year in Norway. She doesn’t know it yet. I have decided to save enough money for the plane ticket and go in the summer. I want to see Meche before I die.
Meche went into the kitchen and searched the cabinets for her father’s booze. But there was none. The old drunkard was disappointing her: he wouldn’t even share his liquor.
Meche laughed. She opened the front door, determined to leave for Oslo right that instant. Determined to escape the dark, dingy apartment, the singers plastered on the covers of an army of records, the notebooks crammed with his life. She was going to die if she didn’t get some air.
But back home there would be the food, the prayers, the people, the conversations and her father’s picture in a silver frame set high upon a shelf for everyone to see.
She hurried back to the bedroom, lay on the bed and turned up the volume on the iPod, searching for a recent song. Something fresh. Meche closed her eyes.
When she woke up there was a tall, dark shadow in the doorway, blocking the light which filtered from the living room.
“Sebos?” she asked, her mouth dry.
She must be dreaming of him, like she did in Europe, during the long winter nights when he used to come into her room and sit quietly at the foot of her bed. The ghost of a boy who had not died.
“Nobody calls me Sebos anymore,” he said and when he stepped forward she saw it was not the young Sebastian who had haunted her. It was the older one. The real one.
“What are you doing here?”
“I went to your home for the
novena
and nobody knew where you were. I thought you might still be here. We had a movie to watch.”
“How did you get in?” she asked, wondering if he still had some magic tricks under his sleeve. Turning into mist and slipping under the door maybe.
“You left the door open.”
How prosaic. Meche shook her head, still groggy. She pulled out the earbuds, stuffing them in her pocket.
“Is the praying over?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
“What are you doing?”
“I was taking a nap until you interrupted me.”
“No, I mean what are you
doing
,” he asked, the inflexion falling on the last word.
He sat on the bed and she sat up so that she was level with him.
“Thinking,” she said.
“I had a hard time when my dad died.”
“When did he die?”
“A couple of years ago.”
“You hated him,” Meche said. “He used to beat you up.”
“He did. But he also did nice things. He made toys for me. Little things of wire and tin. I try to remember the good things.”
“Then you’re a better person than I,” she muttered, folding her legs into a lotus position.
“When did you get so sad?”
“Oh, please,” Meche said. “Am I crying?”
“No.Then?”
“When I was seven years old I fell down and I said, ‘I’m not going to cry about this.’ And I didn’t. I’ve stayed true to that. Waterworks don’t work for me, all that stupid melodrama...”
“You didn’t cry because you wanted to show your dad you were brave,” Sebastian said turning his head and looking at her. “You told me that story. I remember.”
“Great. So what? Should I start weeping all over your shirt and you can wipe my tears with that God-damn nasty tie you’re wearing?” she asked, jamming a finger against one of the buttons on his shirt. Poking his chest. “You get your kicks like that these days?”
“I can go if you want.”
“You do that,” she said and grabbed the notebook she had been reading before. She tossed it at him, hitting him on the face.
It made her incredibly happy. If only she could pelt him with about two dozen other notebooks. Seized by a desire for destruction, Meche grabbed a bunch of records and flipped them at him. Sebastian evaded them this time, ducking. She kept throwing them, like Frisbees.
“Look! Take On Me. Now that’s a classic. And here, La Puerta de Alcalá.’ ‘Look at her, look at her, seeing time pass. The door of Alcala.’ It was a big hit back in 1985. Oh, look at this one?” Meche showed him the sleeve. “Mi Unicornio Azul by Silvio Rodriguez. My dad liked that song a lot.”
Meche buried her face in the pillow.
She felt Sebastian’s fingers on her shoulder; tried to shove him away and failed, then lay still and blinked.
“I hate this city,” she told the pillow, because she wouldn’t tell him.
Sebastian’s hand just rested there as it had so many times before: comforting her after the news of a bad grade; the nasty words some classmate spoke at school; even the time when she got so many zits she promised she’d never leave the apartment again and Sebastian had arrived, luring her out with the promise of the arcade.
A phone rang. His cell. The hand left her.
“Yes. Mom? Yeah.”
He walked towards the doorway and Meche rolled over, grabbing the blanket and wrapping herself into it. She was not cold in Oslo but this apartment packed the cold of too many winters in its heart.
Sebastian returned and sat next to her.
“Jimena said your mom is sick.”
“Cancer. Romualdo and I take turns looking after her. That’s why I’m back in the city. The chemo has worked. I’m betting she lives to a hundred.”
She thought of her own father, shuffling alone through his apartment in his slippers with no one to watch over him. Nothing but the songs for company.
“You’re going to go visit her now?”
“No. I can stay.”
“I’m not asking you to stay,” Meche said looking over her shoulder.
“You think I’d leave just like that?”
Well, you did once before,
she thought. Well, technically she’d left. But only after he completely abandoned her by the curbside.
“I don’t know you,” she muttered. To the pillow, again. “You’re a stranger.”
He turned her around and Meche frowned as she looked into eyes which were exactly the same as she remembered them. But the rest wasn’t. And this man... she had never ridden down the boulevard on this man’s motorcycle, never scrawled idly in his books, never listened to vinyl records in an old pantyhose factory with him.
And that was that. You don’t get to rewind your life like a tape and splice it back together, pretending it never knotted and tore, when it did and you know it did.
Didn’t he get that?
They’d never be friends again. Never care like they cared, never dance like they danced. Time had sucked the marrow out of her and they were both too old.
He stretched his arms and pulled Meche forward, resting his chin upon her head.
“I know,” he said.
Meche squeezed her eyes shut and let him hold her for a good, long time. They’d lain like that on the factory floor, Sebastian wrapping his arms around her as they fell asleep.
“I can’t see you again,” she said. Her voice sounded dinted and strained.
“Why not?”
“Compartments. Plus, it’s not as if I like you.”
Sebastian laughed lightly.
“Then pretend to like me for a couple more days.”
“Why?”
“Because you’ll be gone after that.”
Oslo, with the little apartment. The shelves and the books—yes, she had bought them. She even had
The Ambassadors
, damn it—and the vinyl records proudly displayed on the walls instead of photographs of her family. Yellow walls and little white dishes as she sipped her tea and looked out the window, facing north. For half a second she wished he could see the place right now.
Meche shifted and slipped from his embrace. She looked down at him as she stood beside the bed and she shook her head, just the slightest movement.
She headed to the living room, pushed her hands deep in her pockets, brushing a pile of records on her way and making it tumble onto the floor. The front door was two paces away.
The keys.
Meche sighed, heading back towards the living room and bumping into Sebastian, who was standing there, leaning on the doorframe, looking down at her.
Sebastian stretched out a hand, pulling her closer and pressing his forehead against hers.
She felt completely lost and tried to shove him back, gently. He didn’t budge, instead pressing a kiss against her cheek.
“Second movement,” he said.
He kissed her mouth. Meche shook her head and looked away, staring at the shadows. She stood like that for a long time.
Coda,
she thought.
You mean a coda
. She slid her hands up, touched the stubble of his jaw. It was odd, the texture of his skin beneath her fingers. Meche closed her eyes and kissed him harder than he had kissed her, wrapping her arms loosely around his neck.