By the end of March, the Loudermilks had chopped down all the orange trees. Without shade, the sun-scorched lawn grew pale as straw. Tree stumps like broken teeth were now corralled within temporary fencing installed to protect building materials that would soon be arriving. All that remained of the barn was a crumbly concrete slab and rusted rebar that twisted out of it like insect appendages. Still, on mild days, Caridad would set her manual typewriter outside on a charred picnic table. Here, while she composed a paper or poem, Mimi and Miles would play with the squat peg people—a chef, a farmer, a nurse, a fireman—and their toy homes that Gray’s mother had bought for Miles at garage sales. Almost two, Miles walked ably on his short, well-muscled legs. Unlike many toddlers, he was not willful or demanding of attention, nor was he inclined to run off, climbing and jumping from things. Instead, he preferred manipulating the stubby “people dolls,” playing with Mimi.
One warm Friday afternoon, Gray—after finishing his shift—joined them in the yard with his Super 8 camera, a plastic crate containing his moviemaking paraphernalia, and a tall can of Budweiser. Lately, he’d been making stop-action films, all of them involving Baby Beans, one of Mimi’s dolls. The last of these, “Baby Beans Climbs the Slide,” was so similar to the one that preceded it, “Baby Beans Goes Up a Tree,” that Caridad didn’t see the point to a sequel. Gray’s films were herky-jerky “anti-epics,” as he called them. All of them began with the Styrofoam pellet–filled doll stuttering up an incline and ended with Baby Beans’s pink plastic face leering down at viewers from some zenith perch before vanishing from sight in the last frame. Caridad appreciated the craftsmanship in Gray’s films but was troubled when she speculated on autobiographical influences in his work.
Now he affixed wads of tape on the doll’s hands and feet so these would adhere to the fence for a new anti-epic called “Baby Beans’s Great Escape.” Gray shot frame after frame of the doll inching up the fence, intermittently sipping beer from the can nearby. Shoot, sip, sigh, and shift the doll’s position, replacing the tape if needed, shoot, sip, sigh, shift—Gray developed a rhythm to his process. As he filmed Baby Beans and the children played with “people dolls,” Caridad struggled to find a way into her paper, wondering if there could be anything more obstructive to ideas than the contented industry of others. She was taking a course in realism and naturalism at a community college because it offered transfer credit and Gray already owned many of the required books, though not the one she was writing about. She’d had to buy her secondhand copy of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, which was now propped open on the blackened tabletop before her.
Caridad’s throat tightened each time Gray sipped beer. She typed: In Henry James’s novel, it is evident that . . . But what exactly is evident in the novel? And why bother mentioning this if it is evident? Shoot, sip, sigh, and shift. Caridad ran her tongue over her teeth. She’d not tasted beer or wine since last summer, the night she lost her shoes and called Nash to drive her home. (She hadn’t seen Nash again either.) For nearly seven months, she’d been sober—that much, she thought, is evident, though not at all relevant for her paper. These days, she climbed into bed soon after settling Miles down for the night. If he was tired, Gray would join her. But most nights, she read alone while Gray watched television or sometimes smoked in the kitchen as Leslie. On Saturday nights, Leslie would go out to Dante’s or the Queen Mary. Almost every day, Caridad would wake before dawn, clearheaded and refreshed. She’d huddle under a quilt in the lamp-lit living room with a mug of coffee and a book, reading until Miles woke up.
She still quaked sometimes, but not from craving wine. Instead she’d tremble when yawning, shaking long after the yawn subsided, as if at the same time torpid and terrified. She thought of Lady Chatterley, whose tremors signaled frustrated sexual longing. Isabel, in The Portrait of a Lady, quivered, too, but Henry James presented this to suggest his heroine’s anticipation of new places. Caridad picked up the book and glanced at a phrase she’d marked in the book: “the sin of self-esteem.” In the margin, she’d printed Is this sin? The transgression was supposed to be Isabel’s problem—hubris, the false pride that encouraged a woman of her milieu to imagine an unfettered life of travel and discovery. Pride was the flaw that marred the portrait of a lady. She twisted the roller to type the phrase as a title at the top of the page.
Unlike Chekhov, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dreiser, and Nabokov, Henry James was not that lovable to Caridad. Bald-headed and cloaked in shadows, his domed face glared at her from the book’s jacket, eyes narrowed as if he were about to complain. His prose was dense and unyielding. Isabel emerged an infuriating heroine, flirtatious but headstrong—naïve beyond belief to succumb to Osmond’s scheming charm. For Caridad, the novel argued against providing bold and bright women the resources to live life on their own terms, suggesting they would, like Isabel, squander these on ruthless and controlling men. Night after night, Caridad forced herself through the pages, and still she hadn’t finished the book.
A small shadow flashed in the periphery, and Mimi appeared at her side. Glad for the interruption, Caridad turned to her niece with a smile.
“What is today?” Mimi’s eyes were wide, her expression solemn.
“It’s Friday,” Caridad told her, dreading what would come next.
“Mommy’s not picking me up today.”
“No, your daddy’s coming for you.” Caridad kept her tone light. Mimi had only recently stopped hiding in the house when her father collected her on Fridays, the day that Esperanza worked a split shift at the hospital—four hours before and after her classes.
“I don’t like Fridays.”
“I know.” Caridad didn’t like them either. Over time, Reynaldo had lost whatever attractiveness he’d once possessed. He’d grayed and put on weight in his early thirties, especially in his midsection and buttocks, giving him the look of a grizzled boar. He was brusque with Mimi, often exasperated by her reluctance to leave her aunt’s house.
Mimi’s dark eyes filled.
Caridad pulled her niece onto her lap. She held Mimi close, rocking her.
“Mimi,” Miles called out, his voice husky and insistent. “Come here. We need you.”
The little girl clambered down. “I got to go play now.”
Her brother-in-law in mind, Caridad removed her glasses and pinched the skin between her eyebrows, forestalling a headache. Already, an engine roared into the long drive. Moments later, a car door clicked open and slammed shut. It was too early for Reynaldo. Caridad and Gray exchanged curious looks before the gate swung open. A gray-suited man with close-cropped black hair strutted into the yard. There was something familiar in the way he held himself, in his confident stride. Without her glasses, Caridad couldn’t tell much more about him. Mimi took a few tentative steps toward the stranger. “You’re not my daddy,” she said.
Gray set his camera in the crate and grabbed up the beer can as if to have it handy for chucking. “What are you doing here?”
Caridad slipped on her glasses. With a heart-squeezing jolt, she recognized the gray-suited visitor—Daniel.
“I was in the neighborhood.” He grinned at Gray, turned to Caridad. “So I thought I’d stop by. Lately I’ve been visiting old friends, just to catch up on things.”
The way crystal chimes before an earthquake, agitation in Caridad vibrated out, tremors rippling like sound waves from her core. She squinted through smudged lenses. Daniel, and yet not Daniel—this was a revised and edited version of him. Coiffed hair, stylish sunglasses, and well-cut suit, he approached Gray, one stiff arm extended for a handshake.
Mimi pointed at Daniel. “He’s not Daddy.”
Caridad rose from the picnic table, backed toward the kitchen door. “Miles, Mimi,” she said. “Come inside for your snack.”
Miles groaned, but he trudged from behind the burnt picnic table to join his mother and Mimi at the threshold. When Daniel caught sight of Miles, he winced. Caridad shepherded the children inside, and through the open door, she heard Daniel ask Gray, “Those your kids?”
She couldn’t make out Gray’s answer. While she spread peanut butter on saltines for Miles and Mimi, Caridad strained to overhear the conversation between Daniel and Gray in the yard. The children grew silent, as if they, too, were eavesdropping.
“I’ve been driving around, seeing people,” Daniel said. “I just bought a new car, so I’m breaking it in.”
“How did you find us?”
“The phone book.”
The cracker in her hand snapped. When Caridad married Gray, she had taken his name. In the directory, their number was listed under his name alone.
“So, you came to see me?” Gray said.
“Say, is that your car out in the drive? The green one? What kind is that?”
“A Fiat.”
“Want to have a look at my car?” Daniel asked.
Their voices faded, growing inaudible. The gate whined open and banged shut.
After a few minutes, Gray bustled indoors, lugging his crate of moviemaking equipment and bringing the warm smell of beer and sweat into the kitchen.
Caridad searched his sun-flushed face. “Is he gone?”
He nodded and carried the crate into the back room. Gray then returned and tossed a small rectangle of purple plastic on the table. “You left this in the car.” It was the name tag Caridad wore at work. In bold cursive letters, it bore the bookstore’s logo. “It was face up on the dashboard.” Gray hoisted Miles out of his chair and lifted him over his head. He gazed up at the toddler’s laughing face. “Daddy’s boy, Daddy’s boy, who’s my Daddy’s boy?”
“Me! Me!” shouted Miles.
“Mimi, that’s my name,” Mimi told Caridad in an undertone. “But I’m not a daddy’s boy. I’m a girl, and I don’t like daddies, do you?”
“They’re like anyone, I guess.” Caridad’s father, out of work and no doubt overwhelmed by his fast-growing family, had disappeared, deserting her mother and two older sisters before Caridad was born. When she was a young girl, Caridad imagined he’d been struck on the head, that he was a wandering amnesiac with no idea about the family he’d left behind. She’d fantasized that he’d recover his memory and return to them, envisioning herself meeting him for the first time in countless scenarios—a bakery, a bank, a museum, a church. But as a teenager, she’d overheard her aunts gossiping about another wife and sons, his job as a factory foreman in Juárez. “Some are good,” she told Mimi. “Some could be better.”
At the bookstore on Saturday afternoon, Dora, the manager, handed Caridad a list of tasks before leashing her two Siberian huskies, sluggish dogs that slept in the stock room while she worked. Appalled by the length of this list, Caridad drew breath to speak. But the manager slipped out the back door with her dogs, her bright red braid no more than an afterimage flashing in the shadowy room. Caridad shook her head, cursing Dora under her breath.
The door chime sounded from the front of the store. At the two-toned bing-bong, Caridad’s heart vaulted to her throat. Now that he likely knew where she worked, she feared Daniel would appear. And since she worked alone that afternoon, Caridad couldn’t hide out in the back room. She stepped out onto the sales floor. In relief at the sound of unfamiliar voices, Caridad strode up front to find a man with a little girl. “Can I help you?”
“Go on, honey pie,” the man said. “Ask the nice librarian.”
Caridad flashed an encouraging smile. No point in correcting him. People often confused bookstore clerks with librarians. On the phone and in the store, customers so routinely requested reference information from staff that Dora kept an almanac and a two-volume encyclopedia set near the register.
The man nudged the child forward. The little girl, blond and blushing, squirmed out of his grasp and hid behind his legs.
“My daughter wants Goodnight Moon,” he said. “We don’t know who wrote it, and everything seems to be arranged by the authors’ last names.” He indicated shelves of hardcover fiction, as if he expected to find the picture book among novels by James Clavell, Stephen King, and Colleen McCullough.
Caridad led them to the children’s section. The man limped after her, his daughter clinging to one leg. She handed him the book, thinking it babyish for a child who looked to be about Mimi’s age. The man sank to the parquet floor to sit cross-legged with the child in his lap. He opened the book and began reading it in a loud voice. He grinned up at Caridad as if enlisting her as his audience.
But the phone rang. Caridad slipped behind the sales counter to answer it. “Periwinkle Books,” she said. “How may I help you?”
A reedy voice strained through the earpiece. The caller was an elderly man, his voice creaky as a bad saw on green wood.
“I beg your pardon,” she said.
Amplifying, the oldster tried again. “I said do you have your drawers deliciously low?”
Caridad now and again received obscene calls at the store, but never one from someone as ancient as this caller sounded. Was there no cut-off age for perversion? Caridad would deal with this the same way she handled all others. “Please hold.” She pressed a button that pulsed with red light, while Muzak streamed into the caller’s ear. Caridad took her list to the display window to rearrange best sellers. She’d just finished with hardback fiction when the phone rang again. Caridad returned to the register area to answer it.
The nasty old man again—he’d hung up to redial the store. “Well, have you or haven’t you got your drawers deliciously low?”
“Listen, sir,” Caridad said, “this isn’t—”
“It’s my daughter’s idea,” he told her.
“Your daughter’s idea?”
The caller chuckled. “You see, I crave sweet things.”
“Sir, I hope you know I can report—”
“Problem is,” he continued. “I’m borderline diabetic, so she ordered the book for me. I just want to know if it’s come in. My name is Wilkes, Chester Wilkes.”
Caridad scanned the shelf of special orders. Shame furnace-blasted her face when she spotted a book tagged for Wilkes: Deliciously Low by Yuri Dross.
“One moment, sir.”
“Now, don’t you dare—”
Caridad pressed the hold button. Its ruby eye blinked just once before she snatched up the receiver again. “How may I help you?” she said, affecting a British accent.
“I’ve called twice already.” Impatience sharpened the caller’s voice. “Some gal put me on hold for so long I had to call back. Now, do you or don’t you have Yuri Dross’s Deliciously Low for Chester Wilkes?”
“We do, indeed! That title is on hold for you at the register.”
“Okay then,” he said. “I’m coming by to pick it up.”
“Very good, sir, we’re open until six today,” Caridad said. “Please accept my apologies for the delay. We have a new girl here—rather slow, I’m afraid.”
“Listen here, I don’t want to get anyone in trouble. I just want my book.”
“It is ready and waiting for you, sir. Cheerio!” Caridad hung up the phone.
The blond child stood before the register, twisting her pudgy hands together. “Got more books with bunnies?”
“I’m about to open a box of books with bunnies and chicks and lambs,” Caridad told her. “Give me a minute to bring it out.” As she made her way to the back room, the door chimed again. Once more, Caridad’s heart shot to her throat. Still, she lugged the large box of Easter books to the children’s section, peering over it to see who had entered. It was just the Pilot, a thirty-something Lebanese man who enjoyed thrillers. He visited the store weekly to stock up on paperbacks, and he would often invite Caridad or her coworker Lisa to join him in the cockpit of the chartered plane he flew. Though he had shown them photos of the small aircraft, Caridad and Lisa, put off by the word “cockpit,” refused these invitations.
The chime sounded several times more as customers came and went throughout the afternoon. Caridad’s heart no longer leapt at the electronic bing-bong. Instead, she grew busy with customers, phone calls, her many tasks. At seven-thirty, Caridad bolted the back door, expecting to feel relieved and invigorated as she usually did at the end of a shift. Instead, a heavy mantle of lethargy freighted her as she closed the store. After dimming the lights, Caridad slipped her purple badge into her purse and shuffled to the entrance, where she glimpsed a young woman timorously approaching in the dark. “Stupid mousy thing,” she snapped, knowing her voice would not carry beyond the heavy glass door. “Can’t you see we’re fucking closed?” Her focus sharpened, and Caridad realized the late-arriving customer was just her own image reflected in the darkened glass. That tentative step was her walk, the fearful expression issued from her face. Caridad let herself out and locked the store.
While Caridad was at work, the Loudermilks had stopped by. Rusty told Gray that he and Helga had been approached by a film production company on the lookout for demolition sites. If they’d allow a film crew to stage an explosion in the rental, the filmmakers would cover the costs for razing the structure and removing all debris, in addition to paying the Loudermilks four thousand dollars. Rusty offered to split this with Gray and Caridad, provided they could move out in one month instead of two, to accommodate the production schedule.
“That’s a nice nest egg,” Gray said when they sat down to supper that night.
Caridad had barbecued a chicken with skewered vegetables on the hibachi, and while the chunks of zucchini, mushroom, and green pepper had roasted nicely, the chicken had charred. Her hands and hair reeked of charcoal smoke.
“We could move just about anywhere we want. There’s no reason we have to stay here.” Gray often complained to Caridad about living in the city—the traffic, the smog, the crowding. He wanted to live in the mountains where the air was crisp and clear. He’d found a warped and rusted Colorado license plate in a Dumpster, and taking this as a sign, he’d nailed it above the front door. “Just think—in six months, we could be learning to ski.”
“Ski!” echoed Miles. “What’s that?”
“It’s riding over snow on long wooden slats.” Caridad held her hands out, flat and parallel to each other. She swerved these over the tabletop. “Swish, swush, swish.”
“There’s a place called Trinidad that would be perfect for us.”
“Trinidad? Why there?” Trinidad, Trinity—Caridad flashed on fragments of the catechism she’d learned as a young girl: The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
“It’s nestled in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains,” Gray said, as if reciting from a tourism pamphlet, “between Santa Fe and Denver. It’s got a pretty interesting history. Bat Masterson was the law out there at one time, and Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday holed up in Trinidad after the shootout at the O.K. Corral.”
“Really?”
Gray nodded. “Earp took off the next day, but Doc remained. Arizona tried to extradite him for the O.K. Corral thing, but Bat Masterson had him arrested on trumped-up charges, so Doc wouldn’t be sent back to face the gallows.”
“What’s that?” asked Miles.
“A bad punishment,” Gray told him.
Miles knitted his brow. “Like time out?”
“A really, really long time out,” Caridad said.
Later that night, Gray climbed into bed beside Caridad, who was reading Henry James under the amber glow of her oil lamp. Before he reached for a fashion magazine, Gray talked to her again about moving, describing what their lives might be like in Colorado, with the mountains, the crystalline streams, the vast blue sky. “Don’t you see?” he said. “This is our chance to be whatever we want to be, wherever we want. Most people never have a chance like this.”
Drowsily, Caridad pictured the three of them under the clear Colorado sky. Gray could repair intricate machinery—a job that tapped his skills for meticulous work—instead of cleaning metallic surfaces in buildings as he did now. He’d wear a shirt with his name machine-stitched on the breast pocket. He could grow a beard, and Caridad would weave her hair into a thick braid that dipped toward her buttocks. She’d let herself fill out, widening in the hips and bust, and wear calico skirts and hiking boots. She would bake bread each week and hang laundry to flap outdoors in the thin, sweet-smelling air. She pictured Miles playing in a field of wild flowers, his eyes shiny, his mouth opening to speak: Mimi, come here. We need you.
Caridad jerked upright in bed. “We can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Mimi,” Caridad said. “We can’t leave Mimi.”
“Mimi’s not our child,” Gray whispered. “She has a perfectly good mother and a father. She’ll be starting preschool soon and then kindergarten. Trust me—she’ll be fine without us.”
Caridad shook her head. Maybe Mimi was resilient enough for this, but how would she manage without Mimi? “And what about my mother?” she said. “Her health’s not going to improve as she gets older. She’ll need me nearby. And my sisters—I can’t leave them.”
“But that’s what people do,” Gray told her, his tone gentle. “They grow up and leave. They move where they want to live. They lead their own lives.”
Caridad gazed at the open book before her. Early in the novel, Isabel Archer was avid for the adventure of travel. She leapt at the chance to visit an estranged aunt in England without a second thought about the sisters she’d left behind. And Isabel soon departed for Florence, then Rome and Bellagio, leaving disappointed suitors in her wake. How disgusted Isabel would be with Caridad’s unwillingness to move just a few states away.
“At least, think about it,” Gray said.
Caridad shrugged, staring at the printed pages without taking in a single word. Then she marked her place in the book, set it aside, and huffed out the oil lamp’s flame.
Over the next week, Caridad was infused with brisk energy at the bookstore. When she and Gray moved, they’d likely have to pay more rent than the Loudermilks charged for the orchard office. Caridad hoped to gain an extra shift, maybe even a promotion and a raise. The following Saturday, Caridad asked to speak to Dora before she vanished with her large dogs, planning to make a case for more hours as a start.
Leashes in hand, Dora stood with her dogs at the back door.
“I was just wondering,” Caridad began, “I mean—I’m doing okay, right? At work?”
Dora’s freckled face wore a bemused expression. “No one’s thinking any bad thoughts about you.” Her tone suggested no one was thinking about Caridad at all. And before she could get another word out, Dora pushed open the door and rushed out, dogs trailing in her wake.
Again Caridad issued a soft stream of curses as she made her way to the front of the store. Dora barely took notice of her staff, except to criticize their work, and she was impatient with customers. The woman had no business working with people. Dora ought to run a kennel, not manage a retail store. Caridad was sure she could do a better job than Dora, and she wondered how much managers—salaried employees with benefits—were paid.
The door chimed when the Pilot entered the store. Caridad waved, and he grinned at her. He would usually select his books before approaching the register to chat. After several minutes, the Pilot made his way to the counter with an armload of paperbacks.
“What do you do with these after you read them?” Caridad imagined the walls of his apartment lined with shelves of paperbacks.
“I donate them to prisons.”
“How kind of you,” Caridad said, though she wondered if books about murder and mayhem made the best reading material for the incarcerated.
The Pilot shrugged. “Say, are you free this weekend?” He wore a hopeful look on his tanned face. With his well-shaped eyebrows, large eyes, and glossy moustache, he was the kind of man who should have no trouble attracting women. If only he didn’t use the word that triggered for Caridad the image of a penis-filled chasm. “I’m flying to Denver on Saturday. Maybe you could take a ride in my cockpit.”
Caridad shook her head. “I can’t.” She keyed in the sale and began bagging the books. “But tell me something. Do you often fly to Colorado?”
“Denver, Telluride, Aspen—”
“Have you ever been to Trinidad?”
The Pilot nodded. “Perry Stokes Airport in Trinidad—I get chartered there some.”
“Really?” Caridad said. “What’s Trinidad like?”
His moustache twitched. “It’s not a good thing to talk about with a lady.”
Caridad considered Isabel Archer and smiled at the idea of being a lady. The Pilot could be courtly, even prim, despite his passion for pulp fiction. “You can tell me,” she said. “I have a friend who wants to move there.”
“How can I say this?” The Pilot handed Caridad his credit card. “The people there are not always what they seem to be.”
“Meaning?”
“In Trinidad, you might meet a woman who is maybe not a woman.”
Caridad’s face grew warm. “It’s a place for—”
“Operations,” the Pilot told her. “That’s what Trinidad is known for—gender reassignment surgery. I fly lots of passengers out there for that. It’s strange to me, not my thing, but it takes all kinds, right?”
She tore off his receipt, placed it atop his books, and slid the bag toward him. “Thanks for telling me.” Caridad kept her tone light, though she was anxious to usher him out, to call Gray to release the hot blast of fury scorching the back of her throat.
“Tell me.” The Pilot gathered up his books. “When will you take a ride in my cockpit?”
“Honestly, I’m really not a cockpit kind of person.”
He issued a two-fingered salute before leaving the store.
As she reached for the phone, Caridad glimpsed one of the Pilot’s paperbacks near the register; she’d neglected to put it in his bag. The door chime sounded, and Caridad reached for the book, but it slipped from her grasp and plummeted to the floor. She ducked behind the counter to retrieve it, and when she stood, Caridad gasped at the sight of Daniel standing before her. “What are you doing here?” she asked, surprising herself with the sharpness of her tone.
“I’ve missed you, Caridad.” His voice was soft and low.
“I can’t talk,” Caridad told him. “I’m working.”
The chime sounded again. A middle-aged woman stepped into the store with a teenaged boy in tow. The boy clutched a sheet of notepaper. The woman grabbed this from him and handed it to Caridad. “Summer reading list,” she said. Caridad scurried into the stacks to pull books from the shelves with shaking hands. A small wave of customers entered the store, and after ringing up the woman’s sale, she helped them, too. Following this burst of busyness, the store emptied, and Daniel again approached the register to speak to her as she processed special orders.
He remained in the store for the last hour of her shift, telling Caridad how he’d changed. He no longer enjoyed arguing, he said, and he’d given up philosophy after earning his degree to become a sales representative for an office machine company. Daniel gestured at the navy blue suit he wore, as if offering it in evidence of his transformation. The suit became him—what an apt phrase. The suit became Daniel, and Daniel became the suit. Its sharp lines elongated his compact form, rendering his large head more proportional to his body. After telling her about himself, Daniel asked about her, his voice low and urgent, as if he deeply wanted to know how she was.
It had been such a long time since anyone but Mimi had shown any curiosity in her that Caridad was tempted to tell him about moving, about Colorado, about Gray—though this would be a mistake. So she asked about Beryl instead, expecting to hear of her enthusiasm for Daniel’s transformation. Beryl was probably in the parking lot, waiting in the car.
He examined a display of bookmarks, slowly spinning the revolving rack. “I’m not with Beryl anymore.”
“What happened?”
Daniel grimaced. “I want to be honest, really honest, with you because I care about you.” He explained that when Caridad left school, Beryl had at first been cheerful and affectionate, presenting him with small gifts and treating him to movies and baseball games. At a Dodgers game with her one afternoon, he’d had the physical sensation of being crushed, as if a tremendous weight was bearing down on him, squeezing his lungs so he couldn’t breathe. Alarmed, Beryl asked what was wrong. “You know what I told her?” Daniel said.
Caridad shook her head.
“I said, ‘I miss her.’ That’s all I had to say, and the pressure lifted. I could breathe again, really fill my lungs.” Daniel flashed Caridad a rueful smile. “Beryl didn’t say anything. She just gave me this look. A few weeks later, she moved out. We said we’d always be friends, but I haven’t seen her since the day she left.”
“Have you tried to find her?”
“No.”
“What other old friends have you looked up?”
“None, really—just you.”
At closing time, Caridad told Daniel he had to leave.
“I’ve taken up so much of your time that I should probably buy something.” Daniel strode to the business section, where he picked out a book titled Getting to Yes.
Caridad rang up the sale and took his check.
“Your little boy,” Daniel said, “is he—”
“You’d better go.”
“Can I see you again?”
“That’s not a good idea.”
“At least, you didn’t say no.” Daniel held up the book to display its title before heading out of the store.
Caridad wrote the Pilot’s name on a slip of paper and tucked this between the pages of the paperback he’d left behind. Then she hurried up front to lock the door. This time she recognized her reflected image, though the bounce in her step was as unfamiliar as the brightness in her face, flame-bright in the darkened glass.
Since Caridad had no time to call Gray from the store, she planned to wait until after Miles was in bed to confront him about Trinidad. That evening, Miles refused to eat his supper. He was cranky and fitful. Caridad palmed his warm forehead and then took his temperature. It was only a few degrees above normal, so she held off giving him baby aspirin. Caridad bathed him and tucked him in bed earlier than usual. After reading to him, Caridad sat by Miles’s side, stroking his hair until his slow breathing thickened into snoring.
She tiptoed into the kitchen, where she found Gray washing dishes. “He’s asleep.”
Gray dropped a plate into the sudsy water. “You startled me.”
“I need to talk to you about something.” She sat at the table.
He fished out the plate. “What is it?”
“No, I mean, when you’re done there. We need to sit down and talk.”
“Sure.” He twisted on the tap to rinse the plate. As Caridad watched his swift movements, wistfulness twisted in her. Why couldn’t he always be like this, in his denim work shirt, gray sweatpants, and gym shoes? She even felt fondness for his oily, unwashed hair, and especially for his whiskery face. Why wasn’t it enough for him to be this comfortable-looking, easygoing man?
He wiped his hands on the dish towel and turned to her. “What’s up?”
“Sit with me,” she told him.
Gray scooted into a seat facing hers. Working in the sun had seamed his forehead and leathered his neck. He wasn’t yet thirty, but silvery strands threaded the curls at his temples. His eyes, though darker, were still avid as a child’s. “Okay?”
“Trinidad,” she said, “sex-change operations—why didn’t you tell me?”
He dropped his gaze. “I didn’t think you’d go for it.”
“So . . . your plan was—what? To move us there, hoping I wouldn’t pick up on all the transsexuals, and what then? One day you’d check into a clinic or whatever and just come home as Leslie from there on out—was I not supposed to notice that either? What about Miles?”
“Miles is too young to—”
“But Miles knows you. He loves you as Gray. Leslie is someone else altogether. He will lose the father he knows, the one he loves.”
Gray picked up the salt and pepper shakers—miniature ceramic chefs, scavenged by his mother from a yard sale—and he held these to face each other in the way Miles handled his people dolls.
“And I’ve got to tell you, losing Gray for Leslie is not a good deal for me either. There are probably lots of men who’d make really great women. Isn’t that the point—to explore emotional depth, to add dimension to the self? But you’re already a complicated person. You’re a creative and sensitive man who becomes a silly and shallow woman.”
“You just don’t like Leslie,” Gray said.
“Why should I? She shows up, and I lose you. I don’t like that at all.”
Gray looked up at her, his eyes thickening. “Everything can’t be for you. I can’t live my life just to please you. Before you know it, I will have lived half my life pretending to be someone I’m not. Do you have any idea what that’s like?”
Caridad shook her head.
Gray gazed at the pink-cheeked shakers in his hands as if addressing them. “I’ve worked all this time at a shitty job I hate. I help in the house, and I take care of Miles, even though . . .”
Caridad’s throat tightened.
“That doesn’t matter,” Gray said. “Really, I don’t care. I love you both. I’m sorry I wasn’t honest about Trinidad. I wasn’t trying to trick you. I guess I hoped we’d get there and things would change, that you’d love me enough to accept me the way I’m meant to be.”
“But you never touch me.”
“After the surgery, things can change.”
Caridad shook her head. “But I’m not—”
“You never know.”
“I know,” Caridad said. “In the same way you know you want to be a woman, I’m sure I want to be with a man.”
“So? What happens now?”
Caridad shrugged, staring along with Gray at the grinning shakers in his hands. The clock above the stove clicked when the minute hand shifted, and Caridad imagined she could hear the flow of blood through her veins, the whisper of waves rolling over fine sand.
Then a howl rent the quiet kitchen. The shakers clattered onto the tabletop, and Gray and Caridad bolted to the bedroom. Half awake, Miles wailed, thrashing about in his small bed. Gray gathered him in his arms while Caridad hurried to phone the pediatrician. The nurse on call told her to keep Miles cool and hydrated and not to give him children’s aspirin. Instead he should have a small dose of liquid acetaminophen. While Gray stayed with Miles, who had settled some, Caridad drove to an all-night drugstore for the medicine. When she returned, Miles had fallen back asleep. She and Gray debated waking him for a dose. He slept so deeply that they decided not to disturb him.
Before tiptoeing out of the bedroom with Caridad, Gray grabbed a coral skirt and ruffled blouse from the closet, along with a pair of heels.
“Unbelievable,” Caridad said. “You’re going out?”
“I’m meeting someone. I’d already made plans.” Gray brushed past her on his way to the bathroom.
In the middle of the night, Caridad was jostled from her sleep. She opened her eyes to Leslie’s chalky face. “What’s going on?”
“Miles is worse,” Leslie said in Gray’s voice. “He’s burning up.”
Caridad lunged to Miles’s bedside. He was twisting and turning, flopping in the sheets like a fish trapped in a net. “Turn on the light,” Caridad said.
Under the glow from the overhead fixture, Miles’s cheeks were rash-red, though the skin around his lips was blanched as if bleached. His eyes were half-open and unfocused. Miles muttered about people dolls and Mimi before opening his eyes wide and clearly calling out, “Daddy! Daddy!” But when Leslie reached for him, he flung his head back. Miles’s chest bucked, his arms and legs jerking. His eyes rolled, the irises walling in his lids. A terrible rattle emanated from his throat. Pinkish foam filled his mouth, trickling to his chin.
“Oh god, he can’t breathe,” Gray said.
Caridad gulped back the panic rising in her like floodwaters. “We’ve got to take him to the hospital.” She swaddled Miles in his blanket. “Go start the car. I’ll carry him out.” As she hurried through the yard, holding her son close, Miles’s rigid body grew limp in her arms. She kissed the damp and salty crown of his head. “You’re going to be okay,” she whispered to him. “You have to be okay.”
When they pulled up to the emergency room entrance, Caridad sprang out of the passenger seat with Miles. “I’ll wait in the car,” Gray said.
“What? You’re not coming in?”
“I can’t.” He gestured at the coral skirt and blouse he still wore. “Not like this.”
“Go home and change, damn it! Then come right back.” Caridad banged the car door shut with one hip and turned to bear Miles, now breathing evenly, into the buzzing fluorescent glare of the emergency room.
When Gray returned, Caridad was seated in a plastic scoop chair, Miles sleeping in her arms. She waited along with nearly a dozen other people whose faces were washed-out, ghoulish-looking under the tubed lighting overhead. The undead, thought Caridad. They were all silent and listless, except for a raw-faced blond, an emaciated woman in a grubby tank top and cut-off jeans, who begged the admitting nurse for pain-killers. “Come on,” she said, her voice harsh and gritty. “I’m fucking dying here. I’m in pain. Can’t you see?” Gray gaped at her as he made his way to the vacant seat near Caridad’s.
Caridad glanced at her watch. She’d been waiting with Miles for almost an hour. “What took you so long?”
Though his cheeks were rubbed pink, foundation cream clotted his hairline and his hair was sweat-flattened, plastered by the wig into a crimped cap of curls. He held up the book from her bedside, as if retrieving this had detained him. Gray tucked the novel between her hip and the seat. He extended his arms and reached for Miles. “Here, let me take him.”
She handed her son over and flexed her arms.
“He seems better,” Gray said. He stroked Miles’s hair. “He’s cooler now.”
Caridad set the book in her lap; its pages fell open. Gray didn’t know she’d finished it that night, gaping in disbelief when Isabel chose to go back to Osmond rather than to start anew with Caspar, who’d loved her all along. Maybe Isabel would turn around, or one day she would return to him from Rome. Caridad’s eyes slid down the page, fixing on a random phrase: “To read between the lines was easier than to follow the text.” She snapped the book shut.
The ruddy blond pounded on the admitting desk with her fists. “Come on,” she said, “come on! What’s wrong with you? Can’t you see I’m dying here?”
The receptionist glanced at her, stifling a yawn.
“What are we going to do, Gray?”
He rocked Miles in his arms. “First, we’ll find out what the doctor says—”
“I know that,” she said. “I meant after this—what will we do?”
“We’re going to have to move pretty soon. Maybe we can stay with my mother, if we don’t find a place right away.”
“What about your plans?” Caridad said, thinking again of Henry James, whom she still did not love, but who had once written: “Three things in human life are important—the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.” “Don’t you want to move to Trinidad?”
He glanced at her over Miles’s head, his eyes brightening. “More than anything.”
“Then that’s what you should do.”
“Really?” Gray’s voice rose. “We’d move there?”
Caridad shook her head. “Not we—you. You should take the money from the Loudermilks, that nest egg—all of it—and use it to move, to become who you’re meant to be.”
“And leave you? I don’t think I can live without you, without Miles.”
“This way, at least you’ll have the chance to find out,” Caridad said.
He took her hand, squeezed it. “You’d let me do that?”
“I’m not letting you do anything. It’s what you want, what you need, and for us, something has to change . . . because this isn’t working—not for me, not for you—is it?”
Gray dropped his gaze, shook his head.
“Aren’t you human? Don’t you have any kind of heart?” The blond fell to her knees and clasped her hands together. “Look, look at me. I’m fucking begging you!”
A tense and tired-looking Filipina wearing aqua scrubs and holding a clipboard shuffled into the waiting area. “Kessler, Miles Kessler, the doctor will see you now.”