Red Glass (9 page)

Mr. Lorenzo took Dika’s neatly folded shawl from a chair and wrapped it around her shoulders. They stared at each other. They looked like creatures from two different species. A sea lion and a basset hound. A hippo and a chipmunk.

Ángel said, “We shouldn’t be looking at this.”

But I was transfixed. Now Dika was holding out her arm, showing Mr. Lorenzo the inside of her elbow. I knew what they were looking at. Three parallel scars across the inside of her arm.

“Scars from the prison camp,” I said.

Ángel was watching them intently now, too.

Mr. Lorenzo moved his thick fingers across the scars, then pulled Dika’s inner arm up to his face and brushed his lips against them. He seemed to be kissing each scar. And then, he turned so that his back was facing her. She moved her face close, then far from it, the same way she squinted at maps. She brushed her fingers, weighted with cheap rhinestone rings, slowly over his shoulders, down the curve of his backbone.

“His scars,” Ángel said. “What the soldiers did to him.”

“What did they do?” I asked.

He shook his head, said nothing.

Dika put the flannel shirt on Mr. Lorenzo and buttoned it up, starting from the hem.

Ángel shivered. “They tortured him. Burned him with cigarettes. Cut him with knives.” His voice cracked. “Look, they’re coming out. Pretend we didn’t see. Pretend we’re talking about something else.”

“Like what?”

“Like our stars.”

But they barely noticed us as they walked through the courtyard to Dika’s room. She gave us a little beauty queen wave and a soft smile. Mr. Lorenzo nodded at us and returned to his room.

Ángel and I stayed outside for a while, talking about distant celestial things. It seemed easier to talk about things hundreds of light-years away.

“I wonder if our stars have planets,” he said.

“I wonder if there’s life on our planets,” I said.

“If there ever was life.”

“If there ever will be.”

I must have fallen asleep on the plastic patio chair, because sometime during the night, Ángel woke me up and led me into my room. I sat down on the bed, groggy, and took off my sandals, watching Ángel tiptoe out of the room and shut the door behind him. A few sparks lingered like a comet’s tail, then disappeared.

Explosions

I woke before dawn the next morning, first jarred by the sound of a firecracker, and then, a moment later, by Dika screaming. She was out of bed, holding Pablo, then leaning over me, grabbing me, pulling my arm, sobbing and ranting in another language.

I struggled to make my mind work, my mouth move.

Another explosion of fireworks.

Dika ran to the doorframe of the bathroom. She crouched down, one hand clutched in a fist in her lap, the other shaking, its fingertips digging into Pablo’s arms. “Sophie!” Her voice was high, frantic, and she gestured for me to come.

“Dika, it’s okay. It’s just—” I stood up to turn on the light, to try to snap her out of this.

With the light on, I saw it. Blood dripping down her bare arm, turning Pablo’s white T-shirt red. I knelt beside her and pried open her fist, which was soaked with blood.

Inside her hand was the piece of red glass. She had been squeezing it tightly, the way a baby clutches a finger. So tightly it gashed open her palm. Her eyes were wide, two terrifying circles.

I put my arm around her shoulders. Her whole body shook.

“Dika, you’re okay,” I said. “I’m here. It’s okay.”

And then our eyes connected and it was as though she’d come back into her body. Her expression now was pure confusion. “The bombs? The guns? What happens, Sophie?”

“It was just fireworks, Dika.”

Mr. Lorenzo was at the door, banging on the metal. “Dika! Dika!”

I opened the door with bloody hands. He ran to her and sank beside her on the floor and held her. He rocked her and held her bloody hand and spoke to her in Spanish, murmuring like a father to a child.
“Chchch, tranquila, tranquila.”

In the bathroom I wet a washcloth and wiped the blood off her hands. I examined her palm. There were three jagged cuts, but they looked shallow, with the blood slowly oozing. I wrapped a clean towel around her hand. Meanwhile, Mr. Lorenzo was holding her, pressing her face to his flannel shirt, murmuring and stroking her shoulder.

She’d loosened her grip on Pablo enough that he squirmed away. He had tears too, silently flowing. I sat with him on the bed and rocked him the way Mr. Lorenzo was rocking Dika and whispered to him in Spanish.

“Just fireworks,
principito
,” I said. “For the town fair. They just scared Dika, that’s all. Just fireworks.” Once Pablo stopped crying, I took off his white shirt, wiped Dika’s blood away, and put a clean blue sweatshirt over his head.

Ángel appeared in the doorway in loose basketball shorts and a T-shirt and his black leather coat that skimmed his ankles like a robe. “Dad? Sophie?”

I led Pablo to the door, and on the way out, took Ángel’s hand. “Let’s go, Ángel.” We went out into the cool air of the courtyard. I was wearing my white nightgown, the same one Ángel had seen me in that morning when I’d had chicken feathers in my hair.

“It’s okay,” I whispered to him, trying to convince myself as much as him. “She’s upset. Not badly hurt. Your dad will take care of her.”

“What happened?”

“They bombed her house in the war. She must have thought the fireworks were bombs.”

Once, she’d showed me a picture of what her house used to look like. It was old and big, three stories high, with stained glass windows. The backyard was shaded with trees and bushes, and in the sunny spots, flowers and grapevines. In the picture, she was sitting at a picnic table full of people laughing and raising their glasses in a toast. “One day, we eat and drink together,” she had said. “Next day, they steal things, kill families, burn houses. Everything kaput.”

“Her house is gone now, Ángel.” Goose bumps sprang up on my arms. It was barely dawn, half-light, before things completely took on their daytime shapes, their clear boundaries, when hidden layers lay exposed.

Ángel said, “She’s an amazing lady, isn’t she? To be able to leave everything behind and start a new life.”

“You and your dad did,” I said. I remembered what he’d said the night before about his father’s scars.

“I don’t know.” He looked at the ground, at a line of ants. “Maybe my dad did.”

Pablo squatted by the ants, following their path around the patio, to the base of a flowering tree.

“Why did the soldiers hurt your dad?” I asked. “What happened to your mom?”

He shook his head.

“Tell me, Ángel.”

“Sophie, you don’t want to know these things.”

I looked down at spots of Dika’s dried blood on my knuckles. For once, I wasn’t worried about AIDS or hepatitis B or C. Fretting about germs multiplying on a toothbrush seemed ridiculous compared to what Dika or Mr. Lorenzo had been through.

“I do want to know, Ángel.”

He took off his coat and put it around my shoulders. “Here. You’re cold.”

The leather was lined with a soft fabric that held a hint of his smell. Pablo slipped inside the coat and leaned his head against my waist.

Ángel had left his sunglasses in his room. Through the dim blue air I could see his eyes. They were shinier than most people’s eyes, and I couldn’t tell if it was because of held-back tears or if they were naturally that way.

After we’d been sitting together in silence, I noticed the sound of trucks idling outside on the street, and voices. There was more commotion than you’d expect for six a.m. We peered outside the iron gate.

Dozens of people knelt, all the way up and down the street, pouring buckets of colored powder over stencils on the pavement. Very carefully, they sifted patterns through cardboard cutouts. Then they lifted the stencils to reveal perfect flowers and moons and stars and Virgins and crosses and hearts and birds. They worked intently and quickly. Back in Tucson, one of Mom’s artist friends had a painting of women in a tower, hard at work weaving the world into existence. Now, waking up before dawn, I had the feeling we’d caught them in the act.

A girl my age, covered with green and purple powder, spotted us watching and nodded. “
Buenos días.”

“Buenos días, señorita,”
Ángel said. “Excuse me. What is it you’re doing?”

“Decorating the streets with colored sawdust.”

“Why?”

“For the parade!”

Pablo wanted to watch, so we dragged two plastic lawn chairs from the patio to the sidewall and watched the pictures take form and color as the air grew warmer and the light changed from purple to lemony white. Pablo fell asleep in my lap and when his weight made my leg numb, I moved him to Ángel’s lap. Ángel closed his eyes and pressed his nose to Pablo’s hair and breathed in the little-boy smell. I smiled at the sight, as if we were married and Pablo was our son. Imagining this made my chest tingly at first, and then achy.

Another firework sounded, and I jumped and hoped Mr. Lorenzo was holding Dika tight.

“You think they’ll get married, Ángel?” I asked.

“My dad’s crazy about Dika.” He opened his mouth to say something else, and then closed it.

“What?”

“Nothing. Just—” He paused. “I want her to be happy.”

I nodded. A few weeks ago, I would have asked why on earth anyone would marry Dika without a gun at their heads. But now I wondered if her zaniness was a veneer for something tender and real. It reminded me of our doorframes, which used to be painted in a seventies palette of pea green and rust orange and dead-leaf brown—until Juan scraped the paint off. Underneath was solid maple that he sanded and polished until it was so pretty and smooth I couldn’t resist running my hand over it whenever I walked through.

In the weeks before our trip, Mr. Lorenzo would sometimes walk with Dika to the Salvation Army. That was her glass-collecting time. One day, out of curiosity, I followed them.

All business, Dika tromped down the streets carrying a plastic grocery bag. Mr. Lorenzo walked beside her in his flannel shirt. When Dika spotted a good piece, she bent down like an aging geologist and held it to the light, examining it, and offering it to Mr. Lorenzo. He admired the glass too, and sometimes ventured to pick up a piece himself. Once he found a red piece and spent about five straight minutes looking through it, tilting it this way and that, his eye only millimeters from the glass. Then he put down the glass and looked at her. I studied her too, and saw a large sixty-year-old body with tanned cellulite and orangish blond hair with an inch of gray-black roots showing. But the look on Mr. Lorenzo’s face said he saw something else, a goddess, saturated with colored light.

We watched the artists’ slow progress down the street. Right in front of our hotel they’d made a dove inside a circle of flowers. Now, farther down the street, they were making a picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe in her starry cape on a sliver of moon.

The sun was peeking behind a building now, illuminating the walls across the street, each painted different colors. Deep red, mustard yellow, lavender, candy pink. Next to the rainbows of sawdust paintings, so many colors were almost dizzying.

After Dika’s house was bombed, she stayed for a little while in the rubble—minutes or hours or days, I couldn’t tell, because she was crying as she spoke, and it didn’t seem right to ask questions. She shuffled and sorted through the debris, picking out pieces of green crystal wineglasses, sharp bits of vases, amber and violet, crushed wings of a blue glass angel. Some of the glass was smooth, melted in the heat of the explosions, some jagged. Finally, she picked out one shard of red glass, and put it in her pocket.

When I asked Dika why they bombed her house and why they put her in prison, she said, “No reason. No reason. Only the hate.” Juan explained what he’d gathered from the asylum paperwork and what he’d read about the war. Serbian soldiers had rounded up Bosnian Muslims to kill or imprison. Dika didn’t practice the religion, but that didn’t matter. The Serbian soldiers bombed her house, found Dika in the ruins, and sent her to a prisoners’ work camp. After her release, she got political asylum in Germany and worked in a factory there until her visa expired. That’s when she called us. Until then, I’d never known she existed.

The day of Dika’s phone call—the year before Pablo came—was my fifteenth birthday, in May, just before rainy season, when my allergies were worse than ever and I had to sit on my hands to keep from scratching my red, goopy eyes. We were celebrating, Mom and Juan and me. We sat at the kitchen table, drinking champagne beneath the fan that blew around hot, dry evening air. Mom always found excuses to pop open a bottle of champagne and celebrate life.

The phone call came just after I’d opened my presents—a book of e. e. cummings poetry and a moonstone ring—just as we were about to cut the cake that said
¡Feliz Cumpleaños, Sophie!
I was holding the knife, in the middle of a sneezing fit, getting my inner elbow snotty, when the phone rang.

Mom answered. She listened a few moments and looked confused. “I’m sorry.
Who
is this?” she asked in a few languages before she ended up back with English.

After she hung up, my sneezing fit had stopped, and the cake was cut and put on plates, the blackberry sherbet melting into pools beside it. Mom said, “Looks like my great-aunt will be coming to live with us.”

“Who?” Juan and I asked at the same time. Mom hadn’t had any contact with her family since she’d run away over fifteen years earlier.

“I don’t know, really. I think she said her name was Rika—or Dika—or Mika or something.”

Juan and I looked at each other and then at Mom.

“She’s Bosnian.” Mom drew out her words, looked out the window, squinting, as if there were a faraway TV screen. “She says she married one of my great uncles in England—met him on a business trip he took to Yugoslavia. They got divorced a few years later. I think I remember her. I think one time she had Christmas supper with us, when I was about your age, Sophie. And we drank bottles of spiced wine and ate loads of cinnamon biscuits together.” She bit her thumbnail and stared at the melting purple sherbet. “But that could have been someone else.”

At first, Mom figured she had only a vague, slippery memory of Dika because of the champagne, but the next day, she felt just as foggy. Over breakfast, she shrugged and said, “Well, whoever she is, relative or not, she’s been through a lot and she needs help.” Over the next few days, Mom wrote letters to INS and filled out forms to say she’d sponsor this Bosnian lady. We searched Mom’s single worn childhood photo album for a picture of Dika, but found nothing that jogged Mom’s memory. In the middle of getting the spare room ready, she suddenly said, “Hey! I think when we were drinking that spiced wine, she told me about her travels. My mum and dad were big worriers, hardly ever left our town. So this lady was refreshing. A free spirit. I think I wanted to be like her, fun and adventurous….” Her voice faded out, lost its confidence. “I think.”