Drowning Tucson (41 page)

Thankfully, he always arrived. Wearing his ironed pajamas, her grandfather tapped lightly on the bedroom door twice with his wedding band—she thought it romantic that he still wore it even though her grandma had died of emphysema years earlier—and then opened the door and switched off her nightlight. In the darkness she heard him remove his glasses and set them on the dresser. Then she heard the rattle of ice in his glass when he took one last swallow and placed it on the nightstand. And then the rustling of the sheets on what had now become his side of the bed. It was at this point that her heart finally calmed, knowing she was going to allow her grandfather to love her. Knowing he would soon call her his little pomegranate and kiss her lightly, brush her hair away from her face, pull her to him in his warm, strong embrace. It made her feel safe, being beneath her grandfather. Nothing could get to her under there. And she knew how much he loved her. She could feel it when he gasped and quivered and held her extra tight for a few moments, his heart bucking in his chest, before letting out the breath of air he held in the entire time. It made her feel more loved than all the other girls in the world.

Rainbow preferred her grandfather’s company because even though he always drank, like her mom, he was never actually
drunk.
He never
passed out. He never raised his voice or hurt her. He didn’t do crazy embarrassing things like the afternoon near the end of third grade, when her mother had shown up at her classroom unannounced and demanded through a slur that the teacher allow Marísol Delgado to leave class early, she needs to come home and clean the house with me. She NEEDS to come take care of me, her mother, Paloma Cynthia Alvarez Delgado, because she’s all I have and I just need to take her home now, please. PLEASE. The teacher stood staring at Rainbow’s mother, trying to identify the strange woman and decipher her drunken request, and finally remembered that this was exactly the kind of occasion for which they’d installed classroom intercoms. So the teacher backed away from Rainbow’s sobbing mother and held out her chalk in front of her, the only object she had to defend herself with, and hit the intercom button, smashed her palm up against it over and over until finally the bored voice of the principal’s secretary answered, and Rainbow wished she could just lift up the lid of her desk and crawl in there, among the pencil shavings and the gold stars she always peeled off her perfect spelling tests and lined up on the underside of her desk top, maybe hide between two of her textbooks, anywhere but here, where she was so ashamed of her mother Rainbow ended up peeing in her seat, right there in front of her classmates, who snickered and looked around to make sure everyone knew she’d just pissed herself. She could feel it soak the bottom of her dress and heard it drip over the rim of her chair and splash onto the floor, drop by humiliating drop.

But her grandfather never did anything like that. Instead he woke every morning, shuffled out to the front yard and to the pole where he raised the flag—the soothing clink of the chain against the flagpole was Rainbow’s wakeup call—then shuffled into the kitchen, pouring his first glass of Jack for the day, and out to the back porch to do a crossword puzzle while she staggered sleepily toward the restroom to take a shower and ready herself for school.

On the day her grandfather died, two months and eleven days after Rainbow’s fifteenth birthday, she found him lying in bed surrounded by rotting pomegranates. She’d always thought death was supposed to smell horrible. She’d assumed the decaying body would make her puke
and pass out. But the smell was wonderful. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply and knew her grandfather loved her so much he had even made his death beautiful for her. Since her mother had already left—she always just dropped her off at the front gate and drove away without even waving goodbye, just a light tap on the horn—Rainbow crawled into bed with her grandfather one final time, and draped her arms over his chest and her legs over his waist, and breathed in the smell of pomegranates and grandfather until her mother arrived in the morning to pick her up for school.

After her mother called the police and dropped her off at home the next day, Rainbow locked herself in her room, lying in bed weeping and chewing on her pillow until it was little more than a soggy mass of feathers. She didn’t leave her bed for three days, instead slipping the one rotten pomegranate she’d smuggled out of her grandfather’s house into the pillowcase and pressing her face into it, breathing the smell she would forever associate with her grandfather. I was his little pomegranate.

The fourth day after his death, she emerged to find her mother gone and their home emptied of all the dishes and furniture and clothing. Rainbow wandered through her empty home in confusion, trying to see if maybe her mom had gone a little crazy with the cleaning, or taken all their belongings to another place so she could scour the entire home. Maybe her mom wanted to go buy all new things, or better yet, maybe she wanted to replace all of their old broken-down crap with the nice sturdy furniture in her grandfather’s house. It made her happy, thinking maybe her grandfather’s stuff will be here soon, and then I can sleep in our bed every night and feel safe because his smell is probably still in the mattress.

What Rainbow didn’t know was that while she had been mourning, her mother had methodically packed the house, room by room, loaded the boxes into a U-haul, and driven to Bisbee to start a new life. She didn’t leave a note. She didn’t kiss her daughter goodbye. All she left was a fifty taped to the inside of the front door, where Rainbow would be sure to see it, and a house so clean and empty it appeared as though no one had ever lived in it. Rainbow didn’t blame her mother for leaving, convinced she’d left with a broken heart, just like her own. So it was okay.

It took Rainbow two more days to realize that she had been abandoned. When she realized she was all alone,
really
all alone, she knew she had to leave and go to the only place where she had good memories—her grandfather’s neighborhood by Reid Park.

The only things she took with her were her wedding plans envelope and the fifty.

When she first met Brightstar she was wandering the alleys behind her grandfather’s house, where she returned because even though she couldn’t live in his house, she could at least walk by it unnoticed. She enjoyed sneaking down the alley to the spot where the pomegranate tree grew, gathering pomegranates to eat until she found work or a place to live. After all, the fifty her mom left her wasn’t enough to feed her for long, and it certainly wouldn’t pay rent anywhere.

Wandering aimlessly in the days following her mother’s disappearance, Rainbow often sought out shade, a place to nap in the shadows since she couldn’t sleep at night. The neighborhood where her grandfather lived had, in fact, slowly been going to hell, as he had complained so many times—she heard gunshots frequently, saw the way men looked at her when she walked alone through the park, ignored the catcalls of the thugs hanging out in front of Torchy’s yelling about her sweet ass and all the things they wanted to do to her.

When she suddenly realized just how vulnerable she was, alone in Tucson, fifteen years old with fifty dollars and an envelope of magazine clippings, Rainbow knew she had to act soon if she were to survive. She knew it was time to get rid of the wedding plans envelope. It wasn’t realistic to wait on a man to come around. It was dangerous to keep up the charade of being a princess when there were no princes in the world. But before she threw it away forever, Rainbow decided she wanted to wear her lace and tissue dress one last time.

It was at that moment she stumbled upon the cement drainage tunnels beneath Park Mall. They were all dark and foreboding even in the blinding sunlight. And if anywhere in the city was likely to be neglected by the police and other adults, it was there. Still, the tunnels looked large
enough to stand in, if she crouched a little, and wide enough to lie down, if that’s what she needed to do. Rainbow slid down into the arroyo with her manila envelope because the dark and cool entryway to the tunnel was the perfect place to perform her imaginary wedding one last time, then bury Marísol Delgado forever.

She stood alone before the entrances to three drainage tunnels whose ceilings were roughly shoulder-level, trying to decipher the colorful graffiti that covered the entrance like a hieroglyphic welcome mat. There were letters that looked vaguely English or Spanish, but they were turned on their sides or upside-down, they were pointy in the wrong places or round and bubbly, or there were street names and numbers and crowns and grotesque nudes, and she stood admiring the variety and thinking that probably kids come down here to skip school or smoke cigarettes and drink, or maybe they come down here to hide from their moms driving by right when they are about to make out and touch each other, when they’re supposed to be in the mall with their friends. Rainbow stood for the first time outside the tunnels, listening for any sound that might signal danger, wondering what might be inside. However, the potential of such a place and its privacy—how far in would regular kids venture, and for how long would they really risk staying?—made her decide to brave the tunnels.

Stepping inside, she walked a few feet into the shade and brushed a spot clear of broken glass with her foot. Then she knelt down, opened her envelope, and spread out all the clippings she’d been collecting for years. She lined up the cakes, the flowers, the tables full of smiling guests, the bridesmaids, the minister, the ice sculptures, and finally she removed the dress with all the tenderness of a bride handling an heirloom wedding gown. She gently pulled it over her head, arranged it lightly on her figure, and unfolded the paper with her wedding vows. She read them aloud and wept. Not imaginary tears as she had done so many times before, but an actual steady flow of tears. She wept for her grandfather. She wept for her mother. She wept for her missing father. She wept for the hard times ahead—the pangs of hunger she would suffer, the cruelty men would subject her to, the love she’d never know. She sobbed and collapsed to the floor, ready to call the whole thing off,
to just give up now and grab one of the large chunks of broken glass and slit her wrists and lie down bleeding to death all over her wedding pictures and her paper wedding gown. She wept until she finally slept, beneath the parking lot of Park Mall, where Marísol Delgado died in her sleep and Rainbow fully emerged.

As the sun began to set, Brightstar shook her awake, having witnessed Rainbow’s heartbreaking wedding performance from deeper within the tunnel. He didn’t want to startle her, so he let her cry herself to sleep, resisting the temptation to reach out and pull her close. She looked as fragile as her paper dress. But now it was getting dark out, so he had to get the girl out of here before anyone came to take advantage of her.

When Rainbow awoke to a strange-smelling man crouching above her, she gasped, then remembered where she was and that she was still wearing the paper wedding dress, now soggy with tears. She ripped the dress from her body and crumpled it up, then gathered the rest of the clippings and tore them apart, flinging them to the floor while Brightstar watched in silence.

He asked where she had come from so he could escort her back to safety. When she answered with a growl—I’m from nowhere, I have nothing—he knew she’d been sent for him to watch over.

He kept his distance, but explained to her how the tunnels were dangerous. There’s gangs and druggies down here all the time. Dangerous people. They stopped messing with me after I put them in their place. This one tunnel’s mine and they know it. But you, you’re young and all alone and they’ll eat you alive.

Rainbow knew what Marísol Delgado hadn’t fully seen was true. She recognized some of the symbols outside the tunnels, the same spray-painted crowns and curses covered the alley walls behind her grandfather’s house. She knew who ran this part of town and the south side, so she asked Brightstar if she could stay with him. Just until I find some work and a place to live or something, you know? He nodded and walked her deep into the concrete tunnel to what he explained was the tunnel’s halfway point, where he had a mattress laid on top of cardboard layered on top of plastic milk crates to protect it from snakes and scorpions and rain whenever a storm came and the water flowed through the
tunnels and out into the wash. He lit a candle and showed her their surroundings. There were many half-burnt candles, a battery-powered radio, and a pile of clothes Brightstar had taken from the clotheslines of nearby houses. Nothing else.

You can lay here, he told her. I’ll sleep on the ground next to you, and don’t worry about anyone coming back here to mess with you. I’ll be here and I’ll take care of you. She wondered if he was trustworthy. She worried he might try to hurt her while she slept. But he didn’t look at her the same way other men did when they wanted to do bad things to her. As she grew older, she had gradually become aware—acutely aware—of men and how they looked at her when they wanted her for sex. No, Brightstar wasn’t one of those men, she decided. He’s safe.