The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (19 page)

The lawyer was pissing in the toilet and casually asked if she had told the cops anything about the “import-export business.” He got no reply. Seese was lying in the center of the bright white sheet of the king-size
bed. All feelings, all sensations, had gone from her skin and the surface layers of her body. Her eyelids were open and motionless. She was floating free of gravity. The child was gone as if he had never been born. If you simply looked at the everyday surroundings—palm trees outlining the beach at Mission Bay—nothing had changed.

Seese had been numb since Monte disappeared. Seese is still numb ten nights later as the lawyer punches his cock into her. She would have killed herself the first night, but she does not want to die until she knows for certain Monte is dead. The lawyer pumps above her as if he is doing push-ups, a brief down-curve and thrust before he rises back up, and all Seese can imagine is being fucked by a strange machine. Seese remembered it had all happened as if on cue: David’s phone call before the lawyer had rolled off her. David shouting. He demands to see the baby. Seese shouts back; she is in tears. If David doesn’t have Monte, then he is lost. Her baby is lost.

The lawyer is already straightening his tie. He can dress rather quickly into a three-piece suit. The lawyer could tell something was up with the child because Seese was screaming, “Then where is he? Who has him?” over and over into the receiver. Seese accused David of lying, but David’s voice was strangely quiet and a little halting. He almost whispered to her, “I swear I don’t have him. Jesus, Seese! Don’t do this!” Seese screamed back, “You took him! I know it was you, David! You took him! Where is he? Where is my baby?”

The lawyer sat on the edge of the bed, careful not to wrinkle his trousers or shirt when Seese reached out for him. He lit one cigarette after another while she cried. Finally Seese had screamed at the lawyer, “What the fuck is this? Whose side are you on? You’re supposed to help me!”

Later Seese told the detectives David had called asking for Monte.

Seese could feel the detectives’ contempt for her; she had got what she deserved. They weren’t interested. The file on Monte was turned over to the Missing Persons Bureau. Seese knew once a file was sent there, hope was all but gone.

Afterward, Seese had drifted as if she were a sea-green ribbon of kelp caught in a current with a voice that accused her over and over. A less distinct voice said she had done the best she knew how. Her baby had not drowned in his bathwater. He had not been born addicted. But she could find no consolation for this loss.

When she tried to cry, she felt no relief, only greater pain from her anguish. She recited to herself endlessly all the ways she might easily
have protected him, how she might have saved Monte
if
she had not been high that day;
if
she had not worked with criminals such as Beaufrey. Her breasts had been swollen and hot. The slightest contact with the silk kimono sent stinging to her nipples. Her milk began to soak the rose silk in wide moons. She had been too high on pot and coke to know if the wetness came from the tears off her chin and cheeks or the flow of milk leaking from her breasts.

Gradually Seese realizes she had been fooling herself for a long time. David had not been able to love the baby any better than he had loved her. It was Beaufrey, not David, who was obsessed with the baby. Beaufrey had feared David might love the child, that the child might somehow interfere. Week after week Seese had waited for a phone call or letter.

After the bullet had shattered the bedroom window, Seese realized David would never telephone about Monte. David would never let her see her baby again. Seese had been seized with a compulsion to jump, to smash through the glass and fall thirty stories into the Pacific. Shaking and sweating, Seese filled the sunken marble tub off the master bedroom. She rolled fat marijuana cigarettes and set them on the edge of the bathtub. She slid under the hot water and imagined glittering-blue salt water filling her lungs, sucking away her breath. But a voice inside her head argued she wouldn’t die yet. Because her baby might still be alive. Her baby might need her.

Seese awakened when the bathwater was cold. Outside, a yellowish wedge of moon hung low over the ocean horizon. She wandered from room to room dripping water, leaving faint damp footprints on the pale-gray carpet. She kept the door to the baby’s room closed. The kidnappers had stolen the white leather album filled with Monte’s baby pictures. They had also removed a framed photograph of Monte from the wall. All Seese had left were snapshots she’d kept in her purse. David had taken all the negatives with him. The police seemed to want proof that she had really had a child in the first place. But the neighbors did not recognize her or remember Monte in the stroller.

Seese had suddenly been aware that her own words sounded thin, and the details of her story did not seem convincing even to her anymore. She could imagine how she must sound to the police detectives. Seese threw herself over the lowered side rail of the empty crib and buried her face into Monte’s blanket, to breathe the sweetness of her baby.

The day he moved out, David had argued that Monte would be better off living with him. Seese never forgot Beaufrey standing in the background where only Seese could see his smirk. “Smirking, sucking
mouth!” Seese had screamed at Beaufrey. Afterward David never came alone to see Monte. Usually Beaufrey came, but sometimes David brought Serlo. “Are you afraid?” Seese taunted. Beaufrey had answered for David. Their lawyers had suggested a witness be present at all times. Seese felt Beaufrey’s presence far more strongly than David’s. “Your fairy lawyers?” Seese had burst out laughing, spewing a mouthful of vodka on both of them. Beaufrey had tensed so rigidly Seese thought he might slap her face, but David only turned for the door. He had not even asked to see Monte. At that instant, despite the vodka and cocaine, Seese realized it was Beaufrey who was interested in her baby. “You can buy anything else, can’t you? But you can’t have babies. You can’t do that, can you?”

Beaufrey had stopped in the doorway and stared at her as if he dared her to continue. Beaufrey had panicked after Monte was born. Later Seese remembered his clenched fists and the unblinking eyes that seemed to pierce through her and the child. Beaufrey had misread David’s interest in the baby. David was only interested in the child so long as he saw his own image reflected. Seese had been too stunned with cocaine and vodka to think clearly about Beaufrey. She had assumed Beaufrey would take David to the other side of the world to keep David away from Monte, but she had been wrong.

YOEME HAD APPEARED suddenly. Lecha and Zeta had been playing with the other children on the long wooden porch. From a distance the twins had both spotted the rapidly moving figure no taller than they were, a black shawl pulled tightly around her face so only her blazing dark eyes were visible. They all felt the eyes examining them.

Instinctively the children had huddled over the sunflowers they had picked and were arranging in old tin cans. They had waited for the strange figure to pass. Out of the corner of her eye, Zeta had seen it was a very old woman, dressed in a long black dress and black shawl. She had whispered to Lecha the old woman was an Indian. At that instant the tiny figure in black had turned into their gateway and stopped. In a clear voice as strong as Auntie Popa’s, the old woman had said,
“You
are Indians!” Zeta had never forgotten the chill down her backbone. Lecha had cowered closer to her. Their cousins had jumped up screaming and fled inside.

But the girls did not run because the old woman was laughing, and she was not very big, and they both were. “Don’t beat me up!” She laughed some more. “Dumb girls! I’m your grandmother!” Zeta and her sister had never heard anyone talk the way Yoeme did. But they had heard their uncles and aunties discuss a certain someone. Zeta had overheard them wishing the old woman had died. The discussion had been how many years had passed since the she-coyote had run off leaving the smallest ones, Ringo and Federico, sobbing and running down the road after her.

Yoeme’s name often came up with the subject of cottonwood trees. Somehow the morning she had abandoned her children, the long drive-way
from the big house to the mine shafts had been blocked by the huge cottonwood trees felled across the road.

Auntie Popa had ordered the others to lock all the doors and windows, despite the summer heat. Yoeme sat on the porch swing and talked to Zeta and Lecha. What she did not understand was how her own children, conceived and borne in pain, could behave so shamelessly to their flesh and blood mother. Yoeme had said “flesh and blood” so everyone inside would hear it. Popa screamed, but the sound was muffled through the window glass: “Run! Run for your lives!” The girls laughed with the old woman. They would not get rid of her, so the girls should not worry. Yoeme could not be stopped. See? Already, she had the two of them on her side. If she wanted water, it was right there. She reached for a can full of sunflowers and drank the water. Both girls had squealed, and the windows of the house were crowded with suspicious, sweating faces. Yoeme was back and there was nothing any of them could do to get rid of her. Yoeme had slept on the porch glider until the winter rains came, and then she had moved into the old cook-shed behind the big house.

Late at night Zeta had awakened to loud voices in the rooms below them. Popa and Cucha wanted the dirty Indian out of there. Yoeme liked to lie to them all the time, but very quickly the twins had realized that what was important came true. The morons would not be able to drive her away from the big house, Yoeme told the girls, don’t worry.

Yoeme teased the girls, telling them she had advised their mother to get rid of one or the other of them right away. Twins were considered by some to be bad luck. If she had been around then, Yoeme said she would have taken care of the problem. She had watched both girls’ faces for reactions. Zeta had asked, “Me or her?” and Lecha had said, “You kill me when I’m a baby and they’ll hang you!” which had caused Yoeme to clap her hands together and laugh until their mother had come out to see what was the matter. Amalia had already been ailing awhile when Yoeme had reappeared. Like the others, Amalia seemed powerless against Yoeme. “I was just telling them how I urged you to get rid of one of them.” Their mother had looked away quickly. “You’ll scare them talking like that,” she said, but Yoeme had paid no attention. She had even coached the girls to ask Amalia who had given birth to her. Their mother had given one of her deep, hopeless sighs. “Yes, she is my mother, although I do not remember her well.” Amalia had clasped both hands to her stomach because the pains had come again. The twins had jumped back in awe of the pain. Yoeme had told them the pain was
actually a jaguar that devoured a live human from the inside out. Pain left behind only the skin and bones and hair.

Amalia had leaned back in the wicker rocking chair on the big porch and managed to tell them more. There had been a terrible fight. A fight involving big cottonwood trees. “She left you and all her other children and her husband because of trees?” Zeta had wondered if her mother’s pain was also confusing the facts. Amalia had not been able to do any more than shake her head at her twin daughters. And then Lecha had said, “No, it was because she is an Indian. Grandpa Guzman’s family didn’t like Indians.”