2016
January
Sunday, January 10th
The twins were here one minute, gone the next. Conceived in vitro, Diana and Andrea had enjoyed the care, nurturing, and love that their parents selflessly offered in abundance after having birthed them under such desperate, artificial, anti-natural, miraculous, controversial, and diabolic (as Aunt Belinda had pointed out in a hush-hush tone outside the delivery room to her friend Bertha, who heard nothing since she’d forgotten her hearing aid at home) circumstances. And so, over their three-year life span, the girls had accumulated a wide array of colorful beach balls and inflatable cartoon characters that were kept in their grandparents Keila and Oscar Alvarado’s oversize, kidney-shaped pool. This kind of swimming pool was a near-mandatory feature in almost every West Los Angeles backyard, but regrettably, due to a state of neglect that had lasted well over ten months, it was filled with greenish, standing water up to four feet deep, in which colonies of mosquitoes and other winged and long-legged insects thrived with no reason to envy life in the humid thickness of the Amazon rain forest. Permanently suspended on a blanket of rotting leaves from the sweet gum trees that lined the yard, the half-deflated toys had developed layers of slimy mold. But still, the girls loved their toys and knew where they were, even in the after-dusk darkness. And so, Diana tried to reach a mermaid and Andrea a hippo, and both girls fell in, one right after the other, while Grandma Keila opened the door for the pizza man. It was 6:48 P.M.
Holding the large deep-dish pepperoni and anchovy pizza warm in its box, Keila called her granddaughters for dinner, searching for them in their secret hideouts around the house. Not quite sixty, she moved about the rooms with the agility she had perfected over years of yoga practice. Her complexion showed barely a wrinkle, mostly ironed out with a little Botox here and a little filler there. A meticulously selected strand of gray hair fell on one side of her forehead; the rest of her soft-curl bob, she colored dark brown.
She first went out the back door to the end of the yard and checked in the detached garage, home to everything but cars. Oscar had used the right side of the space as a gym before he acquired the habit of watching the Weather Channel for eight hours at a time. Now, the dumbbells, the Nautilus, the treadmill, and the Soloflex were under a tarp, waiting for the next guilt-driven exercise outburst, which would not come. Oscar’s lack of interest in things, especially his inattention to the backyard and the swimming pool, had been gradual but complete. Her husband of thirty-nine years—a passionate, entrepreneurial, honest, faithful, charming, thinker and achiever—was no longer himself and so her vagina became off-limits to him at the same time the backyard went feral.
Next to the exercise equipment were three bikes last ridden twelve years ago. The blue one belonged to Claudia, Keila’s firstborn. The pink one was Olivia’s, her second daughter and mother of the twins. And the red one with the basket was Patricia’s, the youngest of the three.
To one side of the bikes, a file cabinet, which Oscar kept under lock and key, acted as a partition wall. Its top drawer contained folders and more folders filled with love letters postmarked in the seventies by the Mexican and the U.S. postal services, organized chronologically. The second and third drawers stored tax returns going ten years back, just in case; the birth and marriage certificates of Oscar, Keila, and their three daughters; school diplomas and special papers and projects; old insurance policies; and anything else from the past that might be needed in the future. Kept in an acid-free envelope was Keila’s U.S. Certificate of Naturalization, along with an American flag no larger than a handkerchief and a welcome letter signed in facsimile by President Reagan. In the bottom drawer, the original grant deed of the family home in Rancho Verde (owned free and clear since day one) had developed a slight musty smell caused by the humidity that seeped from a slowly leaking pipe below.
Next to the cabinet, an artificial Christmas tree, divided into four sections carefully wrapped in heavy-duty trash bags for protection from dust and vermin, was leaning against three large suitcases from the pre-wheels era. Two of them were packed with ornaments and lights and fireplace stockings and a Nativity complete with the Holy Family, shepherds, sheep, an angel, and the three Wise Men mounted on their elephant, camel, and horse, respectively. The third suitcase contained a menorah, a box of candles, honey jars, Seder plates, and other celebratory Judaica. To the side of the door, in the most accessible area, were the earthquake survival kit with enough emergency supplies for the entire family and the fire-evacuation suitcases ready to go at a moment’s notice. “Be prepared, always prepared,” Oscar would often tell his wife and children. Keila, now a bit annoyed, called out to her granddaughters again. They were elsewhere, definitely. It was 6:53 P.M.
Her next stop was her art studio, adjacent to the detached garage. The door, featuring a colorful mezuzah attached to its frame, was ajar, so the girls could well have wandered in, even though they’d been instructed not to. The place wasn’t large. A turntable, a stool, a worktable, a toolbox, a gas kiln, and various buckets of different sizes and colors with dry and hardened glazes, slips, and clay were spread around haphazardly, making the room seem even smaller. At the far end was a shelf with several boxes marked with art piece titles and dates, but the absence of new work was evident, and more so to Keila, who ran her hands over the smooth surface of the empty table and sighed. She had stopped creating her coveted stoneware sculptures of nude couples for the Brik & Spiegel Gallery in Mexico City as part of her Crossed Legs Strike, a protest against Oscar’s apathy. She missed the feeling of her fingers squeezing the malleable clay into bodies that burned with desire. Her last series conveyed the opposite: lack of interest.
The girls were obviously not in the studio, so she continued her search in the house. After making a stop in the kitchen to leave the pizza on the counter, Keila went upstairs, to the bedroom that had once been Olivia’s, the twins’ mom. Two pink blankies were tossed on the unmade bed where the girls had taken a nap that afternoon. The winter sun had set a while ago, but the moon was bright among gray clouds and offered Keila enough light for a quick search behind the couch, in the closet, under the bed. She wondered why she had agreed to babysit the twins again, after the last scare, when Andrea had put a pinto bean up her nostril and she’d had to pull it out with a pair of tweezers, the toddler kicking and squirming in her arms. She looked in the other bedrooms and went downstairs. Maybe the girls were exploring the forbidden forest, the once-dazzling backyard’s landscaping, now in full deterioration.
It was now 6:59 P.M.
Two minutes later, Keila heard Olivia calling her. She and her husband, Felix Almeida, were back from their lunch at the Marina—a six-hour affair at Vittorio’s involving altogether too many hugs and kisses and promises to schedule future get-togethers with friends they hardly ever saw, following the baptism of the Donosos’ forty-seven-foot-long Hans Christian Offshore Explorer sailboat, the Ugly Duckling. Keila came out of the shrubs, annoyance gone, frustration vanished, and now quite a bit worried.
“I can’t find the girls.”
Olivia dropped the doggie bag with quail egg ravioli in saffron cream sauce and shaved Parmesan cheese leftovers and yelled to Felix, “Look in the pool!”
It was 7:03 P.M.
Olivia jumped in and sloshed in waist-deep murky water looking for her girls among plastic hippos and mermaids and rotting vegetation. Keila and Felix waded in behind her. The moon was no longer sharing its light with the early evening, so they had to rely on what their feet could sense, a frenzied search for bulk, a body. Olivia bumped into something. A bucket. Keila’s leg got tangled in kelplike weeds. A timid drizzle announced an overnight downpour, a cause for celebration, given the drought. But no one was celebrating. Not in that pool. Before he knew for sure his twins had drowned, Felix dialed 911 on his cellphone and yelled incoherent sentences, like “They must be in the water!” and “Get here now!” until the operator managed to obtain enough information to dispatch an ambulance. Dragging their feet, the three combed the bottom from the shallow side to the deep end.
In the same high-heeled shoes with which she’d accidentally put a tiny scratch (unnoticeable, really) on the Ugly Duckling’s polished deck that afternoon, Olivia was now frantically kicking decomposing debris around the pool where she’d learned to swim, barely a toddler, thirty-three years ago. Until she found Andrea. Then Felix found Diana, a few feet away. They pulled their daughters out onto a lounge chair and began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Keila ran to open the front door for the paramedics, two young men loaded with rescue equipment who ran straight to where the girls were, no need for directions, as if they’d performed previous drills in that particular house. The twins were hastily resuscitated. Both coughed up water and began to cry almost simultaneously. “A miracle,” cried Keila. It was 7:12 P.M.
Olivia rode in the ambulance and Felix and Keila trailed behind in her Jaguar. While the paramedics worked on stabilizing the girls, who were now wrapped in thermo transport cocoons, Olivia compressed herself into a corner so as not to get in the way, nauseated and half listening to the EMS responders talk about a certain condition, the diving reflex, some medical explanation of the girls’ impossible survival. Was she making this up, or did she really hear it? She blamed her mother for her unfit, careless babysitting, blamed the Donososes for buying a new sailboat, blamed Felix for having talked her into going to the Marina, and most of all, blamed herself for insisting on having babies when not just nature, but the entire cosmos, had been against the idea. She wished she could blame God, but all of a sudden she doubted He existed.
Once the girls were rushed to the ER, Olivia, Felix, and Keila were guided to the waiting area, where what seemed to them hundreds of hours went by. Olivia’s wool dress, Felix’s slacks, and Keila’s sweatpants dried while they paced around. Felix held Olivia’s hand tight and looked out the window, as if he were about to jump off a cliff and drag her with him into the void.
A janitor came by to mop the little puddles of muddy water that had been dripping off their clothes. That’s when Olivia noticed that she’d torn a strap of one of her fuck-me-now shoes, as Felix called them. She never wore high heels to work. She spent most of her days walking around dusty construction sites full of obstacles in houses and small apartment buildings she bought to flip and sell. High heels were for weekends, not scaffolds.
“How did you know to look in the pool?” asked Keila, breaking an hour-long silence.
Olivia could not answer Keila’s question. Her jaw had become locked and her teeth ground against each other as if trying to block her rage from escaping in the form of words. But her attempt at keeping the situation civil failed as she let out a loud, injured-animal-like squeal.
“I’m never, ever letting you watch the girls again! Never! And Dad? Where was he?”
Monday, January 11th
Oscar’s chair had developed a concave shape over the years, like a hammock, punished by his persistent weight. He had logged several hours in front of the TV in the sitting area outside his bedroom without minding the fact that it was turned off. He’d do that sometimes, more so lately. He’d spend the entire night staring at the dark monitor before making a decision. Eventually he’d point the remote control and hit the power button.
The skies had no intention of clearing up. The Weather Channel said so. Though the much-announced thunderstorm had become a broken promise, an upper-level trough of low pressure was expected to close in on the Pacific Northwest, pushing a deep marine layer over Southern California’s curved coastline. Oscar leaned forward to get a glimpse of the sky through the window, his personal corroboration of the forecast. He scratched his head and squinted to focus. People marveled at the fact that at sixty years old he still had a headful of hair, albeit completely gray, to which he always replied, “It’s a Mexican thing.”
The light of day, although shy and dreary, was starting to creep into the sitting room adjacent to the master bedroom. The house was quiet. Keila should be up, he thought. Every day at six in the morning she’d pick up the Los Angeles Times from the sidewalk and bring it inside to read over breakfast. Before, they’d share it, splitting the sections in harmony and then swapping them. Lately, she’d only read the comic strips. He’d read the obituaries (always with a faint fear and desire all at once of finding his own). But now, not even reading about people’s passing entertained him.
He got up from his chair and peered into his bedroom, where he found no sign that Keila had slept there. The bed was made. Her clothes, her shoes, were not scattered all over the floor as usual, haphazardly, in the manner of obstacles for him to trip over. Standing at the top of the stairwell he listened for noises downstairs in the kitchen—perhaps the twins had stayed overnight and were getting their Cheerios, their strawberries with yogurt—but he heard nothing. How could he? The girls were barely breathing through respirators three miles away, no one knowing for sure if they were going to survive without permanent damage.
“Where is everybody?” he wondered aloud into the empty house.
It was 7:12 A.M.
* * *
Claudia Alvarado kept her maiden name after she got married because she was famous. She had invested thousands of hours building her reputation as a chef and creating a persona under this name and was not willing to lose that asset just to comply with tradition. She and her husband, Gabriel Breene, had been together only long enough to still be trying new sex positions. Had she not married him two months after they met at a party that she’d catered in San Marino, she’d still be living in the world of singledom, or singledoom, as she jokingly said in her speech at her wedding rehearsal dinner, which she also catered. Her crème-fraîche-white gown, no frills, no lace, no bulk, just silk, smooth and fluid like a waterfall sliding down her skin in slow motion, only accentuated her tall, thin body. Who can trust a skinny chef? That was the predictable question frequently asked by her unoriginal nemesis, a rival cook who used her blog to attack Claudia and turn her readers’ attention to her suspicious waistline, partly a gift from nature and partly a result of her habit of running marathons.
It didn’t matter to Rancho Verde that she had her own cooking television show, La Cocina de Claudia, with great ratings according to Nielsen, by the way. It wasn’t significant at all that her business was reviewed in most food magazines, that her television show had millions of viewers, and that her two cookbooks were among the favorites of every Mexican-food enthusiast in the country, both those who sought traditional recipes and those who ventured into the cultural mix that was Angeleno cuisine. What everyone talked about was the fact that at her ripe age of thirty-six she hadn’t found the man of her life, and even her most beloved relatives, like Aunt Belinda, agreed that the longer she waited the slimmer her chances would be to bless the family with a child.
But when she married fashionista Gabriel, with a taste for pink shirts of all shades, patterns, and textures, even Aunt Belinda raised her eyebrows and proclaimed, “Well, there,” agreeing with everyone that it had been worth the wait. Never mind that he presented his credentials to no one; his pedigree, as Oscar would refer to any form of résumé or proof of a particular social status, remained unknown. The fact that Gabriel spent a great deal of time comparing Los Angeles to New York, where he was from, puzzled most of Claudia’s relatives, who had no interest in the subject. What gained him immediate access into the family was that on his first date with Claudia he came bearing two dozen red roses for Keila. Soon he asked Oscar for his daughter’s hand in marriage in a rather pompous ceremony considered by all who knew about it as a bit much: the mariachi serenade below Claudia’s window and the professional photographer who recorded the entire event and produced a video that went live across social media that same night. Before long Gabriel had moved in with her, bringing along no more than a couple of suitcases and his Russian Blue cat, Velcro.
But that morning, when her nieces Diana and Andrea were being kept in a hospital across town, Claudia did not wake up to the thought of her marital status, as she had for years. The call came when she was sitting in her kitchen in her pajamas, perusing the ashtray she’d lifted at the party she’d catered Saturday night. It was not fancy, quite the opposite. No one would miss it and that bothered her. Why would she bag an ordinary, square glass ashtray, the kind that, if you came across it in a roadside motel room, you’d throw in a drawer just to get it out of sight? She’d eyed a box of Riedel wineglasses in her client’s pantry and could easily have packed them in her van along with her chafing dishes and taken them home without anyone noticing. But rather than making thoughtful decisions in such circumstances, she inevitably acted on impulse. This habit of hers, this need to accumulate other people’s possessions, was not something she could or cared to explain. As she considered returning the ashtray to its owners before Gabriel discovered it—anonymously of course, say, dropping it in their mailbox in the middle of the night—the phone rang.
“The girls? Where?”
The cheap ashtray’s image, bird’s-eye-view and sideways, remained in Claudia’s mind, looping intermittently with other loose, random thoughts, during the entire drive to the hospital. While zooming down the freeway, she imagined a gigantic glass ashtray filled with water and the lifeless bodies of her nieces lying at the bottom. Surely Olivia would kill herself for having lost her daughters in such a careless way.
Why was her sister’s life like a soap opera while hers was so predictable? “Wait a minute,” she said aloud. “Soap operas are predictable.” Where did the difference lie, then? Perhaps in the fact that Olivia’s life happened to her, while Claudia planned her life and accomplished her goals. She promised herself to revisit this insight some other time when she wouldn’t have to pay attention to the road. She’d already missed a few exits, and that set her back ten minutes.
As she corrected her route, she wondered if she’d have the strength to cater the funeral, God forbid, and concluded that she would. In situations of deep grief people tend to get busy and helpful as a way to alleviate sorrow, and she knew that’s what she would do. She quickly put together a menu of finger foods and stored it in her memory, just in case one or both girls did not make it. She’d avoid the chicken taquitos with guacamole held together with a toothpick, a greasy cliché. She’d also stay away from the tortas ahogadas. A dish with the word “drowned” in its name could not be part of the menu. Instead, she’d serve the small squash-flower tamales. Edible flowers were sensitive and appropriate to the occasion, she thought. Then she’d add to the menu the grilled lobster tail skewers with tamarind dipping sauce, the silver-dollar quesadillas with chilorio, the scallop ceviche tostadas from Culiacán smothered in lime juice, plenty of tequila to drown the despair, and she’d also bring a sample of fine wines from Baja’s Valle de Guadalupe, smuggled through Tijuana to avoid the excessive export tax.
She stepped on the accelerator and jumped into the car-pool lane. She knew she could get fined, but ever since she’d allocated a budget to pay for this kind of ticket a few years back, she’d only gotten busted four times, which proved that she didn’t overuse this self-awarded license. Her strategy had been so successful that in the past year she had saved hundreds of hours of dreadful Los Angeles traffic at a very low cost, considering that her tickets averaged out to just a few dollars for each time she sped along the car-pool lane with no companion in the car.
“They’re in stable condition,” Keila told Claudia as she walked into the waiting room of the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, where the girls lay in adjoining beds. “Olivia is inside. We’re only allowed to go in one person at a time.”
Claudia didn’t seem to hear the last part. She rushed past Keila and Felix without offering a greeting and went straight to the unit, opening random doors along the way until she found Olivia. Seeing the girls hooked up to respirators and tubes and monitors finally made the crisis real. I will never have children, she vowed to herself.
Olivia hugged her long and tight. “Thanks for coming, sis,” she whispered. “They’re going to be fine.”
Claudia clearly heard “They’re not going to be fine.” She could always tell when her sister said words to convince herself of anything she didn’t really believe. It was the nearly unnoticeable tremor in her lips, the way her voice struggled to find its way out of her mouth in hesitant little bursts that told her the truth.
“The doctor said they’re doing more tests to check for any brain damage, and there’s a possible risk of infection, since they inhaled a lot of contaminated water, but I’m praying, we’re all praying,” said Olivia.
“Is there anything I can do before I go?”
“But you just got here,” Olivia said.
“I have to run to the fish market, but call me with any news.”
Truth is, fish was not on Claudia’s menu that day, but watching her nieces in such a state provoked a feeling of hopefulness that she tried to repress, as in her view resorting to hope meant she did not have control and that angered her. Regardless of how much she loved those girls, there was nothing she could do to save them. She measured life’s events on a scale of hope versus control. The less control one had over a certain situation, the more hope one needed to face it. Once, when she was illustrating her theory to Olivia, she used a medical example: one had to have much more hope for a positive result when afflicted with terminal cancer than when healing a scraped knee. To her, that was the core principle of hope: people turn the management and resolution of a situation over to a higher authority—whether it’s a doctor or God himself—when they are incapable of handling it directly, therefore demonstrating the need for high hopes in desperate situations. Because she refused to relinquish her power to third parties, she left vowing never to set foot in a hospital again.
Copyright © 2021 by María Amparo Escandón
