Drowning Tucson (34 page)

While Claudia was thanking her husband and hugging him and kissing him all over his face, Lavinía returned to the house, excited to tell her parents about a girl named Rosa she’d met down the street and her awesome outfit with butterflies on her jeans that matched the butterflies on her pink and purple shirt—Lavinía’s two favorite colors. At first she thought her parents had abandoned her and a pang of terror pierced her chest. Then, thank god, she heard her mother’s laughter coming from behind the house and she ran to the backyard to find her parents. The smile on Lavinía’s face when she came bursting through the gate running toward Octavio almost made his knees buckle. It was so pure and innocent and full of beauty and life, and at that exact moment his mind fast-forwarded fifteen years to see the respectable woman his daughter was going to become. All of a sudden he decided he must guard her at all costs. He devised a set of strict rules in his mind that would keep his only daughter from ever being mistreated by the boys who would inevitably try. He’d kill them first. At that moment he saw the awkward flaws of adolescence beginning to surface in his child—the crooked teeth they’d fix when all her grown-up teeth came
in, the way her face would grow strange as it stretched out to form the face of an angel—and he vowed to protect her to the death.

And at the precise moment Lavinía hugged herself to her father’s legs, Octavio fell deeply in love with his daughter. Not in the way a parent often falls in love with his child at the moment of birth, after seeing his own flesh and blood emerge from between the legs of the mother. No. This was deeper. He felt it in his chest. It was her delicate hands with dimples above the knuckles that he wanted to kiss in place of his own wife’s hands. Her hair that looked so fresh and full of life. He fell in love with her smoothness and the way she naively flipped her hair over her shoulders after her mother finished curling it. How she stepped into her panties after a bath, as if they’d been handwoven out of the finest Chinese silks just for her, contoured to every curve of her body. These were the things he fell in love with in the backyard of their new house on 25th Street.

From that day on, Octavio became obsessed with Lavinía. He went to work forty-five minutes late so he could drive her to school, just in case someone tried to mess with her. His wife laughed at him when he told her his reasons for wanting to drive her to school, but she didn’t know, as he did, that young boys were capable of the same passion and cruelty as adults. He remembered—but didn’t tell Claudia—how he’d been madly in love with a girl in grade school named Heather, and often fantasized about bringing her home and tying her up so he could caress her hair and face, pull off her shirt and smell her beautiful white and freckly skin. And yet, despite his passion and distorted sense of love, the day her mother came to school to inform the teacher of her daughter’s absence due to diarrhea, she whispered a little too loudly, and he realized she wasn’t an infallible creature but was as flawed and human as himself, and he wanted to take her long red hair and cut it off and use it to choke the life out of her. It made him sick to know that Heather, the epitome of perfection, could fall ill to the same common and disgusting sickness that infected boys like himself. He wanted to strangle her for being normal. For being human, goddammit, because he had elevated her to a pedestal reserved for perfection. And she had failed him.

Octavio never told his wife these things, but he had good reason for going in late to work—to protect his daughter. So each morning he made sure she was well fed and, on the way to school, he allowed her to apply the slightest bit of lipstick and he pulled out a trial-sized stick of deodorant and told her to put it on because it made him happy to have the best-smelling girl—her armpits already developing a very slight stench to them.

This became the ritual every morning, and each day when he pulled up to the entrance of Robinson Elementary he hugged and kissed her goodbye, his arms lingering around her small body just a second longer every time. But after a year of this—now Lavinía was eight and in third grade—he slowly became aware of his obsession and began to back off his daughter a little, disgusted with his secret desire.

He reminded himself that he was simply in love with his daughter the way a father should be. But deep inside he knew it was sick and he slowly began to despise himself for wishing he could take his daughter home and lay her down in his bed in place of his wife.

Over the next few years, Octavio watched his daughter grow into a teenager. Her features were changing into those of a young woman. The fingers growing longer. The pudgy baby face becoming slimmer. The slight, graceful curves of womanhood appeared, and the elegant gestures to match. He longed for the lost innocence of his Lavinía’s childhood. The eager way she used to throw herself on her father had begun to dissolve as she grew older, and by the time she reached the eighth grade at Mansfield Junior High, his little girl rarely spoke to him. On the few occasions when she turned to her father for help or conversation, it was distant and sterile and it tore his heart in two.

Octavio knew Lavinía’s actions were typical of a girl her age, but he couldn’t help feeling betrayed. She used to need him so much. Used to come crying to him in the middle of the night when she’d had a bad dream. But no more.

Octavio developed a number of techniques to deal with his daughter’s maturation. He began to seek out other young girls to be around, in the hopes that one might notice him and smile and bring that feeling of innocence and pure love back that he’d been missing for so long.

At work he was always relieved whenever a customer brought a little girl along. He kept a jar full of lollipops on his desk for these occasions and even if he was busy with a customer, when he heard the squeal of a girl, he’d excuse himself and run to the child, pulling a lollipop out of his pocket and offering it to her with a warm smile, patting her head and maybe complimenting her eyes, dying to lean in close and smell her skin and kiss her just once, to feel her tiny soft lips pucker and return his kiss. But he always stopped short of grabbing up the young girl and, instead, began the self-deprecating sales pitch he’d refined to the point of being able to do it without thinking, pointing out the makes and models his years of experience had proven women with children preferred while concentrating his thoughts on imagining what the child’s skin might feel like and wanting to run his fingers in between each of her ribs, to press down on the springy muscles that attached them together, to kiss every part of her tiny body while he sang her to sleep so he could pull her close and feel her heart beating and her chest rising and falling while she lay dreaming in his arms.

It didn’t take long, after his own daughter had grown foreign and distant, for a feeling of emptiness to engulf his body, a vacancy in his heart that temporarily filled with joy each time a young girl came into Betancourt’s Used Car Sales, but emptied again when he sealed the deal and the mother or father buckled their child into the backseat and drove away. It made his chest hurt every time.

And even these, his chance meetings with children at the dealership, began to leave him unsatisfied, merely whetting his appetite for the companionship of children, or at least the constant presence of a youthful and pure girl. He knew they all grew up eventually and became tainted by the hands of men, and it made him nauseous. Everywhere he looked girls were growing into women and spending every waking moment trying to capture the attention of men. But when they’re still young they laugh and it isn’t fake. They aren’t trying to impress a boy who only sees them as a new piece of ass. He knew. He’d been there.

The more he looked around and became disappointed in his own daughter and the other boy-crazy girls, the more bitter and sad he became. Each day the vacancy in his chest grew greater, and it required
the vision of youthful girls to temporarily fill itself and once again be happy so Octavio could go on with his daily routine. If a day went by without coming into contact with a girl, Octavio’s life reflected it, from his sales to the way he greeted his wife when he came home at night. Certain he would go crazy if he couldn’t find a solution, Octavio began taking his lunch breaks away from the dealership. There were several elementary schools and parks nearby and he decided the best thing to do was to park a short distance away during recess, so he wouldn’t be noticeable, but still would be close enough to see the playing children clearly. He kept a detailed record of the schools he visited, so as not to become repetitious and draw attention to himself. He varied his methods as much as his creativity would permit, pulling his car up outside of schoolyards during lunch and putting on a hardhat he’d bought at Goodwill so it would look like he were a construction worker on his break. The type of man who often eats in his car. Each day he sat, wearing his hardhat and eating his lunch with no concern for what he consumed because his eyes watched the girls being chased by boys, their scraped knees and calf-length socks exciting him. He silently thanked the boys whenever they caught up with a girl and flipped up her skirt.

Other days he parked beside a playground in one of the nearby parks and gazed in fascination at the girls whose mothers pushed them on the swingset, the wind blowing through their pigtails and fanning their hair out. And every now and then, if he was lucky, a gust of wind sent the skirt of a swinging girl flying up around her waist and Octavio would stop chewing and stare, his mouth full of mushy food that he didn’t taste, the image frozen in place for a few glorious seconds until the swing reached the end of its arc and the girl rushed backwards, laughing as her skirt fell around her legs again.

His routine eventually grew stale. It wasn’t enough for him to merely watch the girls from a distance. He wanted to hear the laughter and smell the dust kicked up into the crisp desert air. It made the pain in his chest grow even greater, to be so close and not be able to touch them. So, seventeen weeks after he first began his lunch break visits, Octavio pulled up to the playground at Reid Park and stepped out of his car with his lunch pail in one hand and a fistful of lollipops in the other. He was
nervous and afraid someone might recognize him from one of the other days he’d sat in his car eating—even though he’d only been to this particular park seven times over the last seventeen weeks—and they’d call the cops on him for stalking kids. But he knew his fears were foolish and the chances of him being recognized were very slim, so he strode confidently and calmly to a picnic table in the middle of the playground and opened his lunch pail, taking out the ham and cheese sandwich Claudia had packed for him.

As he ate he realized he hadn’t thought about his wife in some time. Claudia. She was nice enough. In fact, she’d turned out pretty well—had mastered the craft of cooking, kept a pristine house, always made sure the laundry was done and Lavinía was where she needed to be. But she bored him. Terribly. There was something missing that he couldn’t quite place. All he knew was that he never grew excited about returning home anymore, now that Lavinía was growing into a woman. And even when his wife was freshly bathed and treated him like a prince—removing his loafers, massaging his feet, serving up a plate of steaming food on a nicely set table, making entertaining conversation—he wasn’t satisfied. He spent the whole time wishing Lavinía were eating with them instead of out at a friend’s and that she was young again so he could watch her flip her hair out of her eyes or push food around on her plate or giggle with a mouthful of food. Now, whenever she did eat at home, she barely made eye contact with either of them. She spent the entire meal scowling and picking at her food and looking at her nails until everyone finished eating and she was finally excused from the table. After that she disappeared into her room for the rest of the night to talk on the phone or dream about boys.

There was nothing at home that made him happy anymore. Sure, their house was beautiful, and Claudia had done fine things with it, spending his earnings wisely on redecorating and remodeling, but it no longer brought him any joy. Not the way it used to when Lavinía met him at the door and jumped into his arms.

He wasn’t sure why happiness eluded him when, by all rights, he should be thankful that the woman he’d accidentally gotten pregnant turned out to be so perfect. And Lavinía, well, she had changed his life.

All he knew was being at the playground right now, so boldly and in broad daylight, was giving him a sense of wholeness that filled the place in his heart left vacant by his growing daughter.

He’d placed a couple lollipops beside his lunch pail when he first sat down, and as he sat eating his ham and cheese he watched the children at play with their mothers or babysitters. Their shrieks and laughter delighted and excited him so much it became difficult to finish his meal because he could only think I’m so close. So close and maybe I can think of a way to approach the girls without being too obvious.

He sat thinking, tuning out all of his surroundings and focusing on a girl in overalls who was sitting alone atop a concrete tunnel just a few feet away, playing with a lizard whose tail had fallen off. She raised the writhing lizard to her lips and kissed it, saying I’m sorry, poor lizard, your tail all gone, and Octavio’s heart swelled with love for the girl he longed to talk with, to sit her on his lap and play with her hair while she told him about the lizard and how it was probably so sad to have lost its tail and maybe was lost and looking for its mommy, and he’d ask her about her mommy and her favorite flavor of ice cream—I’ll bet it’s neapolitan, but you probably call it napoleon, hehehe.

Before he realized it, he was standing beside her with a lollipop in his outstretched hand, smiling a reassuring smile that made the girl feel comfortable enough to take it, not really paying attention to him as he reached down to tie her shoes while she slowly unwrapped the candy, placing the wrapper between her teeth and biting it open. He let his hand brush the dirt-stained skin of her ankle, feeling a great sense of relief and happiness at the softness of her skin, smiling at the tiny hairs that covered her legs and shone blond and wispy in the afternoon sun. He wanted to feel each individual hair, to pull lightly on each one and scrub the dirt off her legs in a bathtub full of nice warm water. Just as he was about to propose a bath to the little girl, a police cruiser pulled up to the playground and an officer leaned his head out the window and honked, waving Octavio over. As Octavio approached the car, his heart beating wildly in his chest, he tried desperately to appear calm. Excuses raced through his mind, reasons for being in a playground in the middle of the day when he had no child with him. But the reasons were all
so lame, so transparent and foolish, he began to imagine the officer slamming him up against the car and cuffing him, roughing him up good for the worried parents who saw the arrest of a potential molester going down in the middle of the day, parents who would want to be sure that the sick fucker not only was taken off the streets, but that he was also beaten for being such a despicable creature.