Dark Water - Laura McNeal [11]
“I’m going to le fall asleep now,” Robby said.
“You don’t want any coffee?”
“Staying awake is the last thing I want,” Robby said. “The very last thing.”
So I unfolded a quilt and laid it over him and he didn’t say a word, just turned his head deeper into the pillow like a little boy. I knew that feeling when you can’t move your mouth anymore or your eyes. I poured coffee into a mug, added too much cream and too much sugar, and then poured another one and fixed it the same way. I knew who I was looking for and who I definitely didn’t want to see. If I ran into my uncle, I knew he would look different to me now, as my dad did, and I hated, hated, hated that feeling. I supposed that was why Robby told me about it. You want someone else to share your bitterness at learning this person you’ve idolized your whole life is a big fat fabricator. Now I wanted to be with someone I couldn’t even talk to, someone who didn’t know anything about me or my family of unreliable men.
It was either the ostrich or Amiel, so I took one coffee in each hand.
Nine
The avocado grove looks nothing like it did that day. Nine hundred of Hoyt’s trees burned in the Agua Prieta fire. Lavar Mulveen’s white-shingled house, the needlepoint rug, the sofa, the three pictures I had saved of my father and me, the dish shaped like a heart that I made for him in sixth grade, the silverware, and every book we owned. Robby’s Tintin figures. My mother’s lock of her grandmother’s hair. All burned. The wrought-iron fence melted, then hardened into a roller-coaster rail, and the prickly pear cactus that grew along the ridge liquefied and sank into ghastly skin-colored piles. But the avocado trees didn’t completely die. The workers stumped every single one and painted them white. They replaced the sprinkler pipes that shriveled up like dead snakes, and they stacked the charred logs in neat pyramids beside the white, still-living trunks.
But on that April day the trees outside the guesthouse spread their green fluttering limbs high above my head. The leaves underfoot were copper-colored and the light was amber where the canopy broke apart and made an aperture for the sun. It wasn’t too difficult to find Amiel, but it was hard to approach him. First of all, he was still working with Gallo, whom I totally forgot, and I hadn’t brought three coffees. They turned at the sound of my feet crushing many layers of dried leaves. I held up both cups, and they nodded. They looked so hot and sweaty that I wondered why on earth I hadn’t brought water, but if they wondered the same thing, they didn’t say so. They leaned back on two different tree trunks and sipped. They didn’t look at me or at each other. I could tell they were waiting for me to go away, which was normal. Why would I stay?
“Hot,” I said in Spanish.
They nodded and Gallo said, “Sí, caliente,” though he might have thought I meant the coffee. I wished I knew the words for How long have you been here? or What’s wrong with your throat?
I realized the obvious, finally: getting to know a mute person was going to be tricky. I forgot about my heterochromia, too. I forget about it more than you might think because it’s not a limp or a missing finger or a port-wine stain on my arm. I can’t see the eyes myself. I remembered my freakishness a half second after I realized that Amiel was looking into my eyes with searing interest.
“¿De dónde eres?” I managed to say.
“Acapulco,” Gallo said, which of course he’d already said that morning.
Amiel pointed to his own matching eyes and then, gently, at mine.
Gallo nodded and studied me intently, as if making a medical diagnosis. He spoke to Amiel in Spanish, and I’d love to say that I translated every word in my head, but I just nodded pseudo-wisely until finally I gave up. “¿Cómo?” I said, which is Spanish for “Huh?”
Gallo pointed to my eyes again and then at the sun, or maybe the treetops. I understood the word for “cat” and the word for “worlds.” I was like a cat of the world? I belonged in cat world? Amiel