Meghan Steed

This is home, a house the color of the sun in a valley surrounded by hills, sloping and green. Inside the house is a woman. Her name is Alejandra, but hardly anyone would call her that here. This is home, remember? She is who she is to them: m’hija, hermana, prima, profe, and mamá, names that she has collected, one by one. Names given or chosen. Polished or cast aside.

Not esposa, though. Which still, all these years later, startles her sometimes. And even though she was never officially a wife, the name itself feels like something that she had once and lost. Its absence is almost a physical feeling. She saw a man on Oprah one time that had to sever his own arm after it got stuck under a boulder. Years later, he said that sometimes the missing arm still itched. That he would occasionally wake up in the night scratching wildly at the air where his arm should have been. A missing limb: that’s what esposa felt like. And in every single childhood memory, Emilio is as present as her own arm or leg.  Their houses were right next to each other; they were two tiny seeds planted side by side. But then everything started growing, and the roots and shoots and leaves got all wrapped up together until you couldn’t tell which was which. Where one started and the other one ended.  Everything entwined: hopes, dreams, desires. Pain.

When they were seven, a fishing hook sliced a half-moon scar at the base of Emilio’s thumb. Alejandra pulled the hook out and wrapped his hand in her sock. And now, twenty years later, she still has moments when she looks at her own hand and wonders what happened to that half-moon scar. Not knowing something about him was the equivalent of not knowing something about herself, which was impossible.

Emilio was quiet, steady and kind in a way that made him stand out from the strutting and preening and rough machismo of most of the other boys. He helped old ladies carry groceries across the street, went to church with his mama. You’re a lucky girl! people would say to her, as if she had won some prize that she did not deserve.

As they got older, home began to chafe at Emilio like a shirt that was a size too small. He began to talk about other places: What do you think Canada’s like?

Cold, she would say, laughing, not understanding that he was actually interested.

She wasn’t interested in these other places, and as a result she never considered that he might be. Couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to float about the world untethered to anybody or anything. Alejandra loved home, its twisty lemon trees and cobblestone streets and buildings like colorful cement blocks.

The kitchen window is an almost square that faces the already dusty road, the river and the hills. That morning, like all the mornings, the bright, blazing sun had muscled its way in, and now the roads are dry and cracked and thirsty again. Alejandra can just make out the muted hum of the river, bursting at the seams, water the color of clay, churning as it winds below the road.   The heat settles in the house as heavy as cinder blocks. Her mama lowers herself onto a stool with a quiet groan. Wiping her brow, Alejandra puts the lid back on the pot, glances west. Notices that beyond the hills the sky has turned a deep, bruise blue. It is the rainy season now, and each afternoon the skies howl and rage and hurl pounding torrents of water into the dirt of the earth, onto the corrugated metal of the tin roofs. And each morning the heat crawls in like a living thing, thick and heavy, and lifts the morning mist up and over. Beyond.

“Mamá!” Martin tugs at her hand. She hadn’t noticed him come in. “Can I go down to the soccer field?”

She rests a hand on his head, a benediction.

“Okay, but lunch in one hour.”

He is already out the door. She yells it again, “One hour!”

Sunlight pours through the lopsided window, makes triangles of light on the counter. She watches the tiny shape of her boy round the bend just as a figure appears at the end of the road, approaches. Somewhere close, the sound of children’s laughing and yelling rises and falls like hills –

***

– which is the direction that Martin heads, zipping and zooming. Imagining he is a race car, a fighter jet, motorcycle. The cobblestones are hard balls under his feet. He sees all of the usual people in their usual places.

Vendors with their bright textiles.

The sweet and spicy mango lady.

The old men on the benches.

A cracked, hairy coconut.

A coconut?

Kick it!

To the west, the sky is the color of the darkest blue in the crayon box: midnight.

A storm –