New Beginnings

Word count: 2, 657

New Beginnings

  It’s easier to start a story than to finish one. The gringa washing clothes in the river reaches over her pregnant stomach to the basket with one of her daughter’s little dresses and holds it up to the sun. Now it’s faded and almost too small for her daughter, Karina.  Over a year ago she bought the dress for Karina’s first birthday. It was bright orange. When she washed the dress for the first time, the orange dye bled into the river. That was when Jose was alive.

 “Why don’t you use a paddle?” her sister-in-law had asked in her clipped coastal Spanish.

“Because the clothes don’t last as long when you beat them. Look at all the color washing away,” she had answered as she tried to knead the soap out.

“Well, I guess you’re an expert on washing clothes.”

Then, Luzia wasn’t sure she had heard it right. As she thought about it now, she knew she had.

 “These flies are eating me alive,” Luzia had gone on, oblivious.

Jose’s young cousin snickered, “Why don’t you rub soap on your skin? That’s what you do to keep the flies off.”

“I know. But the soap dries out my skin.”

“Soft gringa skin,” the old widow Carmen said as she raised her paddle to a lump of soapy clothes.

“I’m an orphan. Orphans don’t have soft skin,” Luzia had replied with a laugh.

Now Luzia uses a paddle. She works alone in the river. It’s the dry season. The dusty season. She looks over the slow current and rubs blue soap on her arms and neck. It is quiet except for the sound of the moving water. There is no laugher.

What’s next?

It’s like writer’s block. What she knows is that Jose is dead. She loved him and misses him. Five months after losing him, she’s seven months pregnant with their second child.

Nonnegotiable facts.

She raises her paddle to beat the soap out of the faded orange fabric. Her back aches and she is nauseated. The hot sun makes her feel doped. Her eyelids are heavy, and she only wants to lie down and sleep, but she still has more to wash.

An old pickup passed by on the road near the river. The dust rises, dissipates upward and darkens the sky as it cuts the light from the sun. She tastes dust, tries not to inhale and then spits. The foamy saliva hits the water and floats lazily with the current. She reaches for a black dress, hesitating for a moment to gaze up the riverbank at the cluster of houses that make up her pueblo.

She can’t think through to the next chapter.

At first it was effortless. She met Jose early in her Peace Corps term. She got married. She had a baby. She had learned Spanish quickly, but some subtleties took longer to master.  

When she used to wash in the cool of the morning with the other women, she enjoyed the companionship. They would work together until above them, on the bridge, Jose, his brothers, cousins and neighbors would come in for lunch.  She thought the strong, bare-chested men were beautiful as they walked with swinging machetes, their brown skin glistening with sweat. It was the cue for the women to finish their last garments. They lifted the heavy tubs to their hips and waded through the slippery riverbed to walk up the steep hill and feed their men.

“That’s good enough,” she says aloud and gives the last items little attention. She wraps the soap in a leaf and packs it with her brush and paddle in the tub of wet clothes. The rocks in the river are slippery and the tub of clothes is heavy. She struggles for breath as she walks up the hill and tries not to breathe in the dust that stirs around her with each step. In front of her mother-in-law’s house, Luzia yells for her daughter, Karina. Before, she would have gone to the house to visit, and maybe even stay for dinner. Luzia never really mastered the art of cooking the way Jose liked. But now she calls from the path. Karina comes running from her grandmother’s house. She’s two now, steady on her feet with strong little legs.

“I with grandma” she says in Spanish. Luzia isn’t sure what Karina wants to say but interprets it to mean she wants to stay at Rosa’s.

“Is it all right with Grandma?” Luzia says in Spanish. Karina doesn’t speak English.

“Sí.”

“Ok, I’ll come get you later.”

Karina turns back to the house and starts to run. Luzia stands with the tub against her hip. She starts to call her daughter but stops herself. She needs to take a nap.

Outside her cane house, she hangs the wet clothes on the line. She places the dry clothes over her arm as she goes. The faded orange dress slips from the line and falls into the dust. She swears and bends over to pick it up. Then she throws the muddy dress over the line again. She walks up the steps, through the cane doorway and drops the dry clothes onto the wood table before she falls into the hammock. In minutes, she is asleep.

This isn’t the first world Luzia has created. When she was in boarding school in fifth grade, she had told her classmates that the man who came to see her sometimes wasn’t really her father, and her real parents were spies in the witness protection program. She didn’t tell anyone that her mother had killed herself after her father left them for another woman. That was when Luzia was eight. Then she was supposed to live with that woman and her father, and it was best for everybody if she stayed at the boarding school. Her father had plenty of money.

The Peace Corps had accepted her into the agricultural program. She had always lived in the city. She had never been on a farm. When she had filled out the Peace Corps application, she created a rural girl who had grown up in 4-H. She’d gotten blue ribbons at the fair for raising cattle and sewing nice clothes. She raised rabbits, trained horses and had a garden. She had even led her own 4-H club of young people who were learning to raise sheep. The two years she spent as a Peace Corps volunteer hadn’t been very successful, but she had started her life with Jose.

Then five months ago, on what started as a normal day, everything changed. Luzia was just beginning to accept that she was pregnant again. The afternoon rain had been pounding so loudly on her mother-in-law’s tin roof that they couldn’t hear each other. Karina had fallen asleep on the cane floor while Luzia cleaned a pile of rice at the wooden table. Jose’s sisters had sat studying across from her. Nieces, nephews and cousins had played through the din of the downpour as Jose’s mother, Rosa, had started the wood fire for dinner. Rosa came over and flicked some of the rice kernels from Luzia’s cleaned pile. Luzia looked up at her with a smile. Rosa was never satisfied with how Luzia cleaned the rice.

At first there was just confusion, and then the pounding of the rain stopped as fast as it had started, and Jose’s brother was shouting that someone needed to get a truck and get someone to town. Someone was hurt, hit by a falling tree, maybe dead. A very grave injury.

During Jose’s funeral, forgotten memories of her mother’s funeral came back to her. The two events were very different.  Jose’s coffin was open. There was no secret about him being dead and how he died. She could smell his corpse. They asked her to get her camera and take pictures of the distorted body with the rag stuffed in its mouth to prevent leakage. She looked at them blankly when they spoke and responded in English because she had forgotten Spanish. Everyone cried and some wailed. Karina sat on Rosa’s lap as Rosa keened. Karina was just a baby. What would she remember of her father’s death?

She was eight when her mother died. The coffin was closed. No one cried. The only smells were of her father’s cologne and that woman’s perfume. She wrung her hands until her father grabbed her hand and tried to hold it. But she pulled it away. That man, she told herself, is not my father.

Jose had wanted to get married when her Peace Corps term ended. To her relief, he was clear that he didn’t want to leave his family. She was already pregnant, so it seemed a good plan.

They had built the house with her Peace Corps readjustment allowance. Jose had always come home from work on his family’s farm the same time every day.  The clothes and all the housework had been done and dinner of sticky rice and crusted fried eggs with hot sauce was ready. When Jose tired of that menu, they went to Rosa’s for dinner. Then they would go down to the river to bathe, or during the rainy season, they had bathed in back of the house where rainwater was collected in barrels.

They would light a candle as it got dark and read a story to Karina as she fell asleep. If there were batteries, they had listened to the cumbias, salsas and romantic ballads on the radio and talked.

“Have you ever thought that the world is only what you make it; that it’s really just your idea?” she asked him.

     “Oh, very profound,” he teased her, “and is Karina just an idea? Am I?”

A mosquito buzzes in her ear and Luzia awakes in the hammock. It’s dark. She stands up having no idea what time it is and stumbles down the stairs to the pitch-dark road where she can see nothing but the moonless, diamond spattered sky. She can see no candlelight from any of the nearby houses. She wishes she hadn’t fallen asleep like that.

 “Momma Rosa,” she calls softly when she gets to the house.

The dog barks.

“Come in,” Rosa’s answers from the darkness.

Rosa is lighting a candle as Luzia enters the house. As the flame catches, Luzia sees Rosa in a blue cotton gown with her greying black hair braided down her back. The gown is the only thing Rosa has worn in the five months since Jose died that isn’t black. Luzia sits down at the table. She knows she should get Karina and go, but she lingers at the thought of company.

“The Niña’s asleep. Why don’t you leave her?” Rosa says as she sits down beside Luzia. Rosa is sixty, with nine children, two dead. The shadows play on her pretty face in the candlelight, emphasizing her high cheek bones.

Luzia surprises herself by saying, “Rosa, I need to decide what I’m going to do.”

Rosa looks at her for a moment and asks, “What do you mean?”

“Maybe this isn’t working.”

“Obviously” Rosa says. “But I can’t understand you. I try to, but I can’t. Is your strangeness from where you come from, or is there something wrong with you? You have my grandchildren, but I don’t know who you are.”

“I am an orphan. I have no one but you.”

She sees Rosa’s frown in the candlelight.

“You always say that, but I don’t know what it means. You grew up, you have an education. You have to have someone. You are so strange!”

Luzia is stunned. She stays silent.

“You have to take care of your children.  Leave them here and send money until you get settled. If you sold your house, you’d have enough for a plane ticket.”

    Rosa has never been so cold or direct. She stands up.

“It’s time to sleep. Don’t wake up the child. You can put Diego on the floor and sleep on the bed. Blow out the candle when you get settled.”  

She disappears into one of the rooms and says from the darkness, “Let’s talk about it in the morning. “

 Luzia goes into the bedroom with two beds. Four-year-old Diego is snuggled against Karina on one of the beds. She lifts his warm, limp body and carries him to the mat with two of the other small children. She tucks the blanket around him and lies down next to her daughter.  All she hears is the breathing of her many relatives. Her unborn baby kicks and rolls.

Later, in the dark, a thump awakens her. Like in a dream, she hears Rosa’s voice,

“What do you want?”

“Becky, the gringa. Where is she?”

Luzia sees the outline of a man through the open bedroom doorway. From his outline she can see he’s carrying a rifle. Then the beam of a flashlight blinds her.

“She’s here,” the man says.

Luzia lifts herself onto her elbow and throws the blanket over Karina who has not stirred.

“What?”

“You’re coming with us.” He grabs her arm and jerks her out of the bed. He is small, but strong. He smells of sweat. She doesn’t resist. She is wearing only a t-shirt.

She is near the bedroom door now and sees Rosa’s outline against the back wall. Rosa is partly hidden by another man with a rifle. Luzia can only see his back. He is taller than the first man. He holds the gun with one hands and holds Rosa back with his other.

“You’re mistaken,” Rosa says sharply. “Her name is Luzia, not Becky.”

“Luzia? Ha. She’s a liar,” the man says to Rosa.  

“Her name is Becky, and her father is a rich man.”

Becky still can’t see him in the darkness and his voice isn’t familiar.

“What do you want?” Rosa asks again. “She’s pregnant.”

“Let me get dressed,” Becky says.

They let her pull on her skirt.

“Who are you?” she asks.

The man ignores her. He continues directing his words to Rosa. His tone is respectful, sympathetic. Becky can’t see Rosa’s face.

“We have information.” The taller man says. “Her father is looking for her. He made calls. He found us.”

“I don’t have parents,” Becky said weakly.

“Shut up,” the man barks back at Becky, then looks back at Rosa, "he said he would pay any amount to get her back. We are working for him.”

Becky’s eyes are adjusting to the darkness, and she is starting to see everything more clearly. Rosa is looking at her.

“Becky? Your name is Becky? Is this true?”

Becky doesn’t answer and the two men hustle her out of the house and to the town’s telephone. They are in a hurry and walk so fast in the darkness they pull her out of her sandals. They are impatient as she slips them back on her feet. The door to the concrete telephone room is locked, but the man with the gun easily kicks it open.

Then, inside, holding his rifle with two hands and pointing it at Becky, he orders, “Call your father. He has agreed to one hundred thousand dollars. You stay with us until we get the money.”

    Becky is coming around to being Becky again.

    “I’m not going to call anybody. You won’t get your money if you shoot me.”

    “Shut up and call him!”

    “I won’t and you shut up. You’ll get your money. You just have to wait until this baby is born. You tell him it will be another hundred thousand for my children and their family. Then give me the plane ticket and I’ll get on the plane by myself after he pays you. Now take me back to the house. I’ll let you know when I’m ready. You can all just wait!”

   Becky was starting a new, new beginning.