Leery about touching his stereo since his outburst in the car, Caridad waited for Seth to tune in to Mystery Theater. But he lingered over dinner, telling her again about his trip to India, the Buddhist pilgrimage with his father and brother. At first, Caridad, who had never been east of New Mexico, had been eager to hear about his travels. She’d read E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India and nearly ached to visit those crowded cities, the hills, and the caves. But instead of describing the bountiful bowl of sky, busy bazaars, and pilgrims purifying themselves in the Ganges, Seth focused on the dysentery he’d contracted.
“I was so out of it,” he said, “that I just curled up on a mat when I wasn’t barfing up a lung or shitting water. Flies, constant flies swarming all over me.” As he spoke, Caridad recalled a family trip to San Bernardino County—heat, flies, and car sickness. India, as Seth described it, sounded a lot like Barstow. Her bowl of lentil soup had grown tepid. Caridad trickled a spoonful of the lumpy brown broth back into the bowl, her appetite extinguished.
“Isn’t it time for Mystery Theater?” Caridad rose to pour out her soup and rinse the bowl. Weeks ago, she would have slurped up every drop, but now that the refrigerator and cupboards were full, she rarely felt hungry. It was just as well. In the time that Seth had been living with her, her figure had filled out. She was tall enough to carry the added weight, but if she kept eating like a famine survivor, she would grow as plump as Esperanza. “Why don’t you find the station while I clean up?” Caridad reached for his bowl.
He held on to it, and a small tug-of-war ensued. Taking this as playfulness, she grinned, but Seth said, “Can’t you see I’m not done?”
Caridad released the bowl.
“Some people don’t gobble down meals in seconds,” he said. “Some of us like to linger over our food, enjoying it with conversation in a civilized way.”
“Oh.” She continued standing by the table, unsure whether to sit down until he finished or to wait near the radio. Slow heat crept up her neck to pulse in her ears. Just a roommate, she reminded herself. Sometimes roommates were aggravating.
Seth spooned lentils into his mouth. “By the way,” he said, his mouth full, “I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”
“What’s that?”
“Any idea why that jar of peanut butter I just bought is half gone?” He raised an eyebrow and narrowed his eyes, looking much like a silent-film sheikh who suspects treachery.
“No, I . . .” Caridad glanced at the cupboard, its scarred wood door and grubby knob. In truth, she had been eating his peanut butter, just a spoonful here and there, straight from the jar. Times like these, she almost missed Jorge, who never implied that she was uncivilized and wouldn’t have begrudged her peanut butter. “I have no idea.”
After paying for their first supermarket shopping spree, Seth had told her that he was sure she wanted to be autonomous in their relationship, so he’d suggested that they each buy their own food, in the spirit of roommates. At the time, she’d agreed. They now bought separate groceries, but she often wound up purchasing ingredients to prepare most of their evening meals. And he didn’t compensate her at all for her time and trouble in making meals for him.
True, he paid his share of the rent and household bills, and he’d even covered the reconnection fee to have the telephone service restored. Seth also built a water-bed frame and bought a mattress for it, although he charged Caridad half the expense of this, along with an extra fifty dollars to cover his labor. And he never footed his share of initial deposits for utilities or for the rent, expenses he would certainly have incurred if he’d moved into a place on his own. Discussing money matters flustered Caridad, though, and since Seth’s voice was louder and more insistent than hers, there was little chance of her achieving more than a quarrel if she mentioned any of this to him.
“That’s strange,” he said after a long pause. “Peanut butter doesn’t just disappear. It doesn’t evaporate, does it?”
She shook her head, staring at the cupboard as if her gaze could penetrate its scarred door. The telephone blurted a half-ring, and Caridad rushed for it, though there was no need to hurry. Fearing a call from Felicia, Seth rarely answered it. And in fact, it was her sister. Caridad covered the mouthpiece to tell Seth this. He glanced at his watch and shook his head, urging her to make the call short. She ignored him as she unspooled the plastic cord, taking the phone into the bathroom to talk to her sister in private.
While she and Felicia talked about Esperanza, covering Rey’s latest bad behavior and speculating whether the baby—due in April—would have any effect on this, a loud crash shook the guesthouse. Caridad told Felicia to hold on while she checked on the noise. In the kitchen, a chair lay on its side and the front door was wide open. At the threshold, Caridad caught sight of Seth’s car peeling into the street.
She shut the door, set the chair upright, and returned to the bathroom. Caridad picked up the phone. “You were right. He is an asshole, a total asshole.”
“Then what does that make you?” Felicia asked.
“I know,” Caridad said. “Believe me, I know.” But was there even a word for what she had become? In Dreiser’s novel, Sister Carrie was seen by the other characters as a loose woman, a prostitute of sorts, strategically moving from man to man to improve her circumstances. Readers these days might call Sister Carrie a victim, a powerless female in a patriarchal context. But Dreiser’s heroine did not see herself this way, and Dreiser, cupping his chin with one long-fingered hand and wearing a stern but thoughtful expression on his face in the photo on the book jacket, seemed to concur: Carrie’s situation—like Caridad’s—was too complicated to sum up this way. She considered the books she loved most and how heroines in these were labeled one thing or another only by the shallowest of readers, in the way that Jorge found Anna Karenina, who gave up everything for love, “selfish.”
She mulled this over as Felicia now explored the topic of Seth’s assholishness in a thorough way, along with its implications for her sister’s character, before hanging up. Then Caridad took a beer from a twelve-pack box that Seth had bought, though he rarely opened a bottle. She took it to the bedroom and turned on his radio to catch the last half of Mystery Theater. Caridad lit her oil lamp, casting a soft glow in the small bedroom, now dominated by the water bed and Seth’s stereo equipment. And then she sat on the floor cross-legged, sipping beer, listening to the radio program, and enjoying the sound effects, from creaky doors to the soft hiss of rain. Before long, she was immersed in the story, holding her breath as a strangler crept undetected through a sleeping woman’s house.
Seth returned to the guesthouse after ten, bearing a grocery sack. Since she was finished studying for the night, Caridad had just crawled into the water bed with Sister Carrie. The previous week, Gray returned for the book he’d left behind and asked her to have coffee with him during her break, so she checked out a second copy of the book to read on her own. “When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things,” Caridad had read early on in the book. “Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse.” Since then, she read the novel nightly as if it were medicine prescribed for a specific ailment. She now placed a marker in its pages and glanced up at Seth.
He smiled at her, his moustache parting above his prominent teeth. “I saw my folks,” he said. From the bag, Seth pulled two holly-paper wrapped bundles, which he handed to Caridad. One was soft and pliant, like a deflated cushion, and the other, a flattish box. “Christmas presents for you.” He pointed to the box. “That’s from me, and the other is from my parents.”
Since he was a Buddhist, Caridad hadn’t expected to exchange holiday gifts with Seth, so she hadn’t gotten him a thing, and it had never occurred to her to give his parents anything. Christmas was still a week away, though, so she still had time. Caridad’s mind flashed on the blue shirt he’d admired in the menswear shop on Laurel Canyon.
“I had a long talk with my dad.” With a sigh, Seth lowered himself onto the bed.
“About what?” She sniffed her breath for beer under the minty traces of toothpaste.
“Turns out, he sort of had a holiday gift for me, too.” He gazed at Caridad, a rueful look on his narrow face. “He’s offered to send me to law school.”
Now that he lived with her, Seth admitted that he no longer enjoyed going out at night to play music, and he didn’t have much inclination or aptitude for selling wholesale jewelry. He’d mentioned going to law school and specializing in contract law, creative copyrights, to stay connected to music in a practical way. “That’s what you want, isn’t it?” she said.
“Thing is—I’d have to move back home.”
As if the window to a stuffy room had been flung open, unexpected possibility gusted in and Caridad drew a deep breath. “You should do it.”
Seth touched her cheek with cool fingers. “You’re really sweet.” He leaned to twist off Caridad’s oil lamp before flicking on the overhead fixture that cast glare on the pages of her book. “Look at you, reading in the dark like Abraham Lincoln. You’re going to ruin your eyes like that, young lady.” He reached into the grocery sack to pull out a small blue box labeled Trojan-ENZ. “Hello. What’s this?”
“My stomach hurts.” Caridad removed her glasses and placed them atop her book. She turned on her side, pulling the peach comforter over her shoulder. The grocery bag rattled, floorboards creaked, and Seth snapped off the light before stepping into the kitchen, creating sounds that echoed the radio play’s effects, the intruder creeping about in the dark.
The next afternoon, Caridad stepped off the warm bus into a damp blast of frigid air. She buttoned her coat and jammed her fists in its pockets before heading to the bank. There, she withdrew forty dollars. Surely the shirt wouldn’t cost more than half that and she would have money to buy her mother and sisters small gifts. She’d been meaning to buy a maternity blouse for Esperanza, but whenever she and Seth were near shops that sold such clothing, he’d wag a finger at her in a joking way, as if visiting such a store might give her ideas. Thinking of this as she trudged toward the menswear store, Caridad winced. That skimpy ponytail, the loud clothing, that wagging finger—how could Seth think she’d want a child with him? Felicia’s words rang in her head: Then what does that make you?
In the empty menswear shop, the clerk, a wizened man wearing glasses atop the freckled dome of his head, approached her. As his gaze traveled from her high-top tennis shoes to her faded jeans to her pea coat, Caridad experienced a dizzying moment of acuity, as if she’d just wiped her eyeglasses clean. All she beheld took on an unfamiliar crispness and clarity. Though the store’s fluorescent lighting flickered, the metallic racks and hanger hooks gleamed as sharply spangled as the buttons on the clerk’s wool vest and the trio of straight pins in an ashtray near the cash register. Like her namesake, Sister Carrie, mistress to Drouet and then Hurstwood, Caridad perceived in this crystalline flash that though she hadn’t much loved Jorge and had cared even less for Seth, she’d flown from one to the other, like a trapeze artist near the top of a striped tent, expecting to be caught and held until she was ready to leap again.
“May I help you?” the clerk asked.
Caridad was tempted to shake her head. No, he probably couldn’t help her. But what would happen if she spoke her thoughts? I need a gift for someone I don’t like much, someone I’d be done with if I had more confidence or experience or even if I were a bit older. What would this freckle-headed clerk—who had looked at her and through her and clearly doubted that she had any business in this store—say to that? Though curious what advice he might offer, she said, “That blue shirt in the window—how much is it?”
He scuttled to the display and reached for the tag inside a sleeve. “Thirty-two dollars.”
Sunlight had blanched the front of the shirt, while the back was a deeper azure. “It’s faded.”
“Yes. But there are more on the rack—in all sizes. This is a medium.”
“Will you sell this one for less because it’s damaged?”
“Twenty dollars?”
She pulled a bill from her wallet. “Twenty, including tax?”
He nodded. With a groan, he climbed onto the platform to disrobe the mannequin.
Caridad arrived home before Seth and wrapped the shirt in gift paper. When she handed it to him, he said they should open their gifts that night. Caridad suggested they do this in the bedroom under the glow of the oil lamp, which she said would create more of a holiday mood, and which she hoped would be too dim to show the shirt’s discoloration.
“You go first,” Seth said. He handed her the soft gift from his parents.
Caridad peeled away the paper to uncover a flat square of brown- and-orange calico-printed fabric. She unfolded this, and strings and a neck loop spilled out. “An apron?”
“Pretty nice, huh?” Seth said. “My mom picked it out.”
“Your mother gave me an apron?”
“Look, it has pockets.”
“Great,” Caridad said. “Pockets.”
“Don’t you like it? They didn’t have to get you anything, you know.”
“Can’t wait to wear it.” Caridad folded the apron and handed him her gift.
Seth tore open the paper. “Oh no.” He unfurled the shirt. “It’s the one I liked. I went into that shop once, and when I found out what it cost, I thought it was too much.” He held it up to his chest, grinning. “Now I feel awful. I didn’t actually buy you anything, but I think you’ll like this.” He handed her the box.
Caridad opened it to find a tambourine packed in Styrofoam. She lifted it out of the case. The metal jingles were tarnished and rusted, the membrane peppered with mold.
“It’s actually my old tambourine,” Seth told her. “I bought myself a new one, and I thought you’d want this. It still sounds fine.” He took it from her and banged it a few times.
A smile stiffened on Caridad’s face. “Nice,” she said. An apron and a used tambourine. Now she hoped he’d notice the shirt’s imperfection.
Seth stilled the tambourine. “You probably think I couldn’t tell, but I saw how uncomfortable you were that day when I was busking near Barney’s. It’s got to be pretty awkward just standing around while I’m entertaining people. So I thought I could teach you some songs, and next time, you can join in, too.”
“Thanks.” Caridad smiled and kissed his cheek. Then she took the tambourine from Seth to wedge it back in its case. The percussive chinking was getting on her nerves. She folded up the wrapping paper. “I should call Esperanza,” she said, “and see how she’s doing.”
“Just don’t get any ideas.” He grinned and wagged a finger at her.
Caridad laughed. “Trust me, I won’t.”
On the phone with Esperanza, Caridad described their Christmas gift exchange.
“Are you serious?” Esperanza said. “He gave you a moldy tambourine and an apron?”
“Well, to be fair, my gift for him was a half-faded shirt,” Caridad said in a low voice, in case Seth were listening. “It was just like that O. Henry story, ‘The Gift of the Magi,’ but a screwed-up version, where the man and woman outdo each other by giving awful and unwanted presents. It’s like ‘The Gift of the Magi’ from . . .”—not hell, because Caridad was sure that hell, if it existed, would at least be an interesting place—“Barstow.”
In early January, Gray visited Caridad at the library and invited her to Thousand Oaks to try out the new ice-skating rink. Caridad, who’d enjoyed roller-skating as a child, accepted. A few days later, they headed north to Ventura County in Gray’s battered compact car. “Sorry about the mess,” he said when he picked her up after work. The backseat was crammed with boxes and books and clothing, and he had to remove a cast-iron skillet, a pair of antlers, and juggling pins from the passenger seat to clear it for her. “I’m kind of between things.”
On the way to the rink, Gray explained that he was staying part of the time at a former professor’s house, looking after her young sons, and living with his family in Thousand Oaks the rest of the time. His former professor had an unstable marriage. Her sometimes-estranged husband returned to the family when all was well, and he would look after the boys himself, making Gray’s presence redundant. But when the couple fought and separated, the professor hired Gray to care for the children, providing him with room and board, along with paying him wages.
“Seems complicated,” Caridad said.
“It can be.”
“So that’s your job? Taking care of children?”
“One of my jobs,” Gray said. “I also work on campus, like you. I’m in photocopying service. I wheel this huge cart—you’ve probably seen it—around to departments, replacing toner and fixing the machines when they break down.”
Caridad pictured him lugging the bulky copier cart from one end of the vast commuter campus to the other. “That sounds kind of horrible.”
“True, but it’s a work-study job, so I can’t complain.”
“I guess I was lucky to get the library.”
“Really lucky.”
Both unskilled on the ice, Caridad and Gray staggered about on skates that buckled at the ankles, often banging into the guardrail and colliding with one another. Black lights pulsed and disco songs blasted from wall speakers. More capable skaters bobbed to the music as they sailed around the rink. Early on, one of the rink attendants glided backward in Caridad’s direction. As the skater sped toward her, Caridad let her feet fly out to land on her bottom, and then she scuttled crablike to avoid collision. Stiff-legged as a mummy, Gray inched toward her. Other skaters shot around them, flashing annoyed looks. “Interesting approach to the problem,” Gray said when he reeled her to her feet. “Stop, drop, and scramble.”
“Hey, it worked.” She brushed ice from her pants and patted her behind. “I used to have a tailbone, some vertebrae back here.”
“It’ll grow back,” Gray told her. “You’ll get your spine back.”
A herd of teenagers barreled past, toppling Caridad and Gray in their wake. They laughed so hard that it was impossible for them to stand. Caridad crawled to the guardrail, towing Gray along with her. There they got to their feet and wobbled forward on the ice again.
Later, while they waited to return the rented skates, Gray said, “I wish I didn’t have to take you home.”
“So don’t.” Shivering, she huffed into her cupped hands. The smell of sweaty socks, leather, and hot chocolate permeated the pinching cold.
Gray cupped her chilly fingers in his warm hands. “Do you like beer?”
“Are you kidding? I love beer.”
“Peanuts?”
Caridad flashed on the depleted peanut-butter jar in the cabinet at home. “Apparently, I do.”
“I have an idea,” Gray said.
At the front desk, Caridad stood at Gray’s side, holding a paper sack with a six-pack of Busch beer and a large bag of salted-in-the-shell peanuts, while he registered them for the night. The lobby was as clean and bright as a clinic. The linoleum floor gleamed under overhead panels of light, and potted palms with shiny fronds stood near racks of sightseeing pamphlets and luggage carts. The clerk, a woman with cat’s-eye glasses, examined Gray’s license. “Kessler,” she said. “Aren’t you Doug Kessler’s son?”
Gray nodded.
“I know your family from church.”
“Oh yeah?”
“I see them every Sunday—nice big family. Haven’t seen you at Mass, though.”
Gray shrugged.
The clerk handed over a key. “Tell your folks hello for me, will you? I’m Marion Shockley from Sacred Heart.”
“I will.”
In the elevator, Caridad turned to Gray. “Is it okay that she knows you?”
Gray raised his eyebrows. “Sure.”
“What if she tells your parents?”
“Why would she? And it doesn’t matter to me if she does.”
“So your family’s Catholic?” Caridad asked.
Gray nodded.
“What about you?”
“Me?” he said. “I’m not anything.”
The elevator doors chimed, parting to open at the third floor. Their room was at the end of the long hallway. Gray keyed open the door and held it wide. “After you,” he said.
She stepped into the small room with double beds, a dresser, and a television. “Ooh, television! Can we watch something?”
“But of course.”
“Would you mind if we watched something stupid?” Caridad asked. “I’m ashamed to say it, but I love watching stupid things on television.” Though he watched sports on it, Jorge had called television the “boob tube,” and Seth referred to it as “the idiot box.” Both seemed to believe watching TV robbed brain cells. Perhaps this posed a danger for them, but Caridad felt she had sufficient cerebral matter to gamble a few cells this way.
“The stupider the better.” Gray turned, scanning the room. Caridad spied a paperback in his back pocket. “Ah, there’s the ice bucket,” he said.
“What are you reading?” She pointed at the book.
“What? Oh, Naked Lunch.” He pulled out the worn and dogeared copy and handed it to her. “It’s my favorite book. I read it over and over.”
“William S. Burroughs.” Caridad flipped through the yellowed pages, many of these underlined in green ink. Indecipherable annotations marked margins on nearly every page.
“What’s it about?”
“It’s hard to say,” Gray told her. “In a way, that’s what I like about it, that I can’t sum it up for you. I guess you could sort of say it’s about this junkie, but it’s really about more than that, much more than that. For me, it’s the best book ever written.” Gray released a relieved breath when Caridad returned the book to him, saying she’d have to pick up a copy to read.
“Now for stupid TV,” she said. But before flipping on the set, Caridad glanced at the telephone on the nightstand. “I should make a quick call first.” She planned to let Seth know she wouldn’t be back that night. When Gray left to find the ice machine, Caridad picked up the receiver and dialed her home number. Inspired by Gray’s unconcerned honesty with the hotel clerk, she decided to be truthful with Seth, who answered the phone almost instantly.
“It’s me,” she said. “I just want you to know I won’t be home tonight.”
“Where are you?” Seth’s voice was so loud that Caridad had to hold the phone away from her ear. “Who are you with?”
“Gray,” she said. “Gray Kessler, someone I met at school.”
“You just can’t—after everything—you can’t do this to me.”
“I’m not doing anything to you,” Caridad said. “I’m only calling so you won’t wait up.”
“Listen to me, Caridad, really listen. You have to come home right now. Got it? Just come home, or tell me where you are and I’ll pick you up.”
“But I just told you I’m staying out tonight.” She lowered herself onto one of the double beds. The quick call was taking longer than she’d thought.
“You realize I could legally kill you for what you’re doing.”
Caridad now wondered if Seth had any aptitude at all for a career in law. “I don’t think it’s ever legal to—”
“If you don’t come right home, that’s it, Caridad, and I mean it.” His voice grew deeper, sharper. “You’ll never see me again. Is that what you want?”
It kind of was, but Caridad said, “You do what you have to.” And she hung up.
“Is everything okay?” Gray asked when he returned with the ice. He opened two beers and handed one to Caridad.
“That I don’t know.” Caridad doubted Seth had it in him to pack his things and clear out by morning. He’d more likely remain at the guesthouse to carp at her more when she returned. “I just discovered someone I know would make a terrible lawyer.” While they sipped beer and cracked open peanuts, Caridad told Gray about the phone call.
Gray arranged the remaining beers in the ice bucket. “I’m no expert, but it does seem that killing a person, for any reason, is frowned upon by our legal system. Could be he’s thinking of crimes of passion, but then he would have to be in France. Maybe back in the nineteenth century that defense might work.” He scratched the stubble on his chin. “It would involve a cross-country and then a transatlantic flight—some time travel, of course—but I suppose anything’s possible.”
“He’ll probably sort it all out in law school,” Caridad said. She set her beer on the bed table and drew Gray close for a kiss. His warm face smelled sweetly sour, and his full lips tasted of beer and salt, like soft plums rinsed in a briny sea.
The next day, Gray drove her back to the guesthouse. Caridad spotted Seth’s car parked alongside the curb as soon as they turned onto her street. “I knew it. He’s still here.”
Gray parked and yanked up the hand brake. “Want me to go in with you?”
She shook her head, nodded, and then shrugged.
Gray removed the key.
Caridad made no move to open the car door on her side. “This could be weird.”
“I’m okay with weird.” Gray climbed out of the car and she followed.
They shuffled toward the door, kicking leaves off the paved path to prolong the short walk. While she doubted Seth would physically harm her, Caridad expected him to make a scene; he might yell or even throw a chair over as he had when she talked on the phone with her sister. Her heart thudded in her throat, and she unlocked the door with shaking fingers. The bedroom was nearly as empty as it had been when she and Jorge first moved in—water bed, stereo equipment, Seth’s clothing had all vanished—only the cinder blocks and her books, oil lamp, and peach comforter remained. Gray followed Caridad into the kitchen, where Seth sat at the table, staring into a cup of coffee. His bony face was sallow, grainy as a daguerreotype portrait. Shadows underscored his eyes and hollowed his thin cheeks; a blue vein pulsed on one side of his forehead, zigzagging like a lightning bolt above his temple.
“You’ve returned,” Seth said in a flat voice. He glanced at Gray and then trained his gaze on Caridad.
“I’m Gray Kessler. You must be Seth.”
“I see you’ve packed your things,” Caridad said.
“You know, I really loved you.” Seth’s dark eyes thickened, and Caridad felt a pang. He turned to Gray. “I loved her. I was even going to marry her.”
Annoyance flared in Caridad. “What makes you think I’d marry you?”
Seth lowered his head to the table, cradling it in his arms.
Unmoved, Caridad said, “Why do some men think that all women want is marriage? Why do they think that they are these great prizes that any woman should be thrilled to win?”
Gray shrugged. “Beats me.”
Seth mumbled something she couldn’t hear.
“What did he say?” Caridad asked Gray.
“No idea.”
“I said you enjoy this.” Seth raised his head. “Who do you think you are anyway? My mother’s right—you have no idea who you are. You read all these books like they’re written for you, like those authors are sending special messages to you. The books you love—they’re not for you.” He released a snort of laughter. “They never were for anyone like you.”
“Excuse me,” Gray said, “but what are you talking about?”
“Oh, you’ll find out,” Seth told him. “You’ll find out all about the books and the know-it-all quotes she copies down, the little messages she writes in the margins. She’ll shut you out with a book, trust me. She’ll put it up like a wall.” He turned to Caridad. “You just love doing that, don’t you? Just like you love this three-ring circus.”
“How is this a three-ring circus?” Caridad glanced about the kitchen—scarred table and chairs, open cupboards, half-empty shelves. She flashed on the image that she’d experienced in the menswear shop: a glimpse of herself at the summit of a striped tent, flying from one pair of hands to the next. Flying—or was she falling?
“Well,” Gray said, “I suppose since there are three of us, and I do juggle—”
“It’s all a circus to you, isn’t it?” Seth said, likely casting himself as the sad, sad clown.
“That’s just it. There is no circus with you!” Caridad’s hands buzzed, twitching to overturn the table. She felt like a hot-faced child, ready to bare teeth and bite. “You promise to tell me about India, and instead you give me Barstow! A circus would at least be interesting.” She drew a ragged breath, dropped her voice. “A circus might even be fun.”
Seth and Gray drew back, wide-eyed with alarm.
Caridad, overwarm in the coat she still wore, longed for the rush of water on her skin. “I’m tired,” she said. She couldn’t bear another moment of this prolonged departure, Seth wringing what melodrama he could from it. “I’m going to take a shower.”
Before she shut the bathroom door, Gray’s low voice sounded from the kitchen. “So Caridad tells me you’re a musician . . .”
In the days after Seth moved out, Caridad wavered before asking Gray to live with her. She wanted to be alone and not alone. By the end of January, she decided she enjoyed being with Gray more than she liked being on her own, and again, she needed help paying the rent. It took him less than an hour to unload his car. He found more cinder blocks, along with wood planks and plastic blue milk crates, out of which to fashion bookcases. He also had a small portable TV. Now his antlers and juggling pins were arranged on the top bookshelf near Caridad’s wall hanging of the woman’s torso in brick, and the television was atop a milk crate that held some of Gray’s many record albums. Before it short-circuited, Caridad and Gray put the TV to much use, laughing over the stupidest programs they could find, from beach movies to beauty pageants, soap operas to sitcoms.
One of their favorites was a science-fiction serial called Land of the Lost, in which contemporary characters slipped through a wormhole to a prehistoric island where—curiously—the fur-clad cavemen somehow spoke slangy American English. Whenever the program aired, Caridad and Gray rushed to snap it on because the best part was the opening when the deep-voiced narrator would list the events that landed the characters in “the Land of the Lost.” Caridad and Gray mocked that somber pronouncement, deepening their voices for mundane declarations. “It’s the toast of the toaster,” Caridad would proclaim when the bread popped up, or Gray would call out, “It’s the mail of the flap,” when the door flap clanked open in the morning, envelopes cascading to the floor.
Weeks after Seth had moved out, Caridad and Gray were enjoying a lazy Sunday afternoon, reading the paper and drinking coffee when someone rapped on the door. Caridad approached the threshold. “Who’s there?” she called.
A sonorous voice—sounding much like the announcer for Land of the Lost—intoned, “It’s somebody that you used to know.”
Caridad shot Gray a puzzled look. He glanced at her and shrugged. She turned the knob and cracked open the door. Seth, pink faced, stood on the doorstep. He’d snipped his ponytail and was wearing a denim shirt and jeans. An uncertain smile played on his thin face.
“Seth?”
Gray rose from the table and stepped beside her. “Hey, man, how’s it going?”
“Great.” His smile wavered, and he cleared his throat. “I’ve been busy, got some things going on.”
“Have you applied to law school?” Caridad crossed her arms and planted herself in the doorway with Gray.
Seth renewed his moustache-splitting grin. “I’m chanting a lot, two, three times a day.”
“Cool,” Gray said, though Caridad doubted he knew what Seth meant.
All three smiled, nodding. A woman’s voice rang out from a neighbor’s yard: “Erica! Erica! Erica!” Another car whizzed by. Leaves near the curb swirled in its wake. The day was bright but windy. A gust swept into the guesthouse, rattling pages of the newspaper spread on the kitchen table.
“So, did you forget something?” Caridad hoped he would not ask for the jeweler’s loupe he’d left behind. She liked having it handy when she needed a closer look at things.
Seth shook his head, glanced at his hands. His guitar calluses had vanished, his fingertips now smooth and pearly. “I just wanted to see you, and I thought you’d kind of like to know how I’m doing, since, well, we used to . . . since you used to know me.”
Caridad withdrew from the threshold, pulling Gray along with her, to make space for shutting the door. “Right,” she said. “Well, good seeing you.” Though Seth may well have been somebody she used to know, he’d never bothered to know her at all. “Take care of yourself.” She closed the door and leaned her back against it.
Gray’s amber eyes danced with amusement.
Caridad dropped her voice to mimic Seth’s. “It’s somebody that you used to know.”
“From way back,” Gray said, “in the Land of the Lost.”
They whooped and snorted, doubling over in mirth. Scraping sounds then issued from behind the closed door, Seth’s shoes rasping on the doorstep. “Oh no,” Caridad whispered, clapping a hand over her mouth.
“He had to have heard us,” Gray said. “That’s shitty.”
The rest of the afternoon, they were quiet, even somber, as if they’d returned from a funeral service. But when Gray went out in the early evening to buy beer, he forgot the house key and had to knock to be let in. Though she was expecting him, Caridad nevertheless stepped to the threshold to say, “Who’s there?”
“It’s somebody that you used to know,” Gray said, and it was hilarious all over again.
While Caridad’s Cuban landlords hardly approved of her living with three different men, as long as she paid the rent on time, there was not much they could do about this—apart from hissing “cualquiera” whenever she was in earshot. The elderly couple couldn’t hurt her with name-calling. One morning at the end of February, though, when Caridad handed over the rent, the old lady told her that her son would be moving into the guesthouse. Caridad would have to vacate the rental in four weeks. On a walk that same afternoon, she and Gray found a yellow cottage only a few blocks away from the guesthouse. The owner was just planting a rental sign in the front yard. They were shown the house within minutes, and early the next week, they signed the lease agreement.
They began packing up the guesthouse the weekend before moving. Caridad worked in the kitchen, while Gray boxed books and knickknacks in the living room. When she pulled out a low drawer they rarely used, a peculiar odor—the sweetish putrescence of spoiled peaches—wafted out. The drawer held grocery bags and plastic cutlery from takeout meals. She yanked it out all the way to find the apron Seth’s mother had given her, its brown-and-orange printed fabric wadded about the corpses of four newborn mice. Caridad reached into a top drawer for the jeweler’s loupe that Seth had left behind. Through its magnifying lens, she beheld the tarry ossifying creatures—their furless flesh scored like an elephant’s hide, their ears no more than nubs, and their eyes sealed slits.
Caridad dislodged the drawer altogether from the frame, and something thumped to the cabinet’s base behind it. She reached in to grasp the flat and rigid body of a gray mouse, its flinty amber teeth bared. No doubt this was the mother to those naked newborns, crushed when she or Gray—or most likely Seth in a fit of anger—kicked the drawer shut. Their mewling too feeble to be detected, the tiny mice had perished without her. Caridad stroked the stiff fur with her fingertip. Then she bundled all five mice in the apron, making a pouch that she knotted shut with the strings—a shroud for burying the tiny creatures in the backyard.