They spend the weekend trying to turn the alcove into a passable home. Claire lets Jory choose the paint colors and bedspread, a few throw pillows and a poster of a dancer’s muscular legs in ragged warm-ups and frayed toe shoes. The room doesn’t actually have a bed in it yet, only an inflatable mattress. But then, it doesn’t have a tenant yet, either.
“So when are you going to ask her?” Jory asks, her hair streaked with turquoise paint.
“I have to find her first. She’s always found me. Maybe you should tie your hair back.” Jory looks at the blue ends and tries to peel the paint off with her blue fingernails. “Or paint the other side so it matches.”
“Speaking of, Mom, can I make a suggestion?” Claire tries to make her face look open, since she knows she will hear it whether she agrees or not. “If you’re going to use the drugstore dye you should add in some highlights.” After a pause she adds, “That didn’t hurt your feelings, did it?”
Claire draws a strand of hair in front of her face. “It washes out. I think I’ll just highlight it with gray.” Jory seems to find this joke hysterical. “Now you’re hurting my feelings!” But it has been a long time since Claire has seen her laugh so unself-consciously. Not since her father was last home.
Addison had been quiet on the phone for a long weighted moment when Claire told him her decision about Miguela. “It’s an awfully small house, Claire. And you don’t know that much about her.”
“No. But Jory likes her. We don’t have a lot of options at the moment; everything is so up in the air.” She’d waited, then, to hear him contradict her, part of her was always waiting, fatigued with waiting, for the screen to go black and the lights to come up at the end of this movie.
“Well,” he’d finally said. “I guess it’s better than having her stay alone so much.”
And maybe only because of the rush of disappointment his agreement stirred, she asked him, “Did you call Ron Walker?”
“I will. I’m still planning to.”
Jory had been watching a music video while her parents talked, a blond babe crooning for her Romeo so she’d never have to be alone. After Claire hung up the phone she walked over and shut it off, telling Jory to do her homework, but wanting, really, to cry for all the trouble that still lay ahead in her daughter’s life. Wanting her to find love and to be loved and wanting to warn her all the same. And in the end, wanting most of all to smash the money machine that produced these videos that made Jory long for love before she even knew herself.
Claire looks around the freshly painted room—and it feels more like a room now, less like a laundry alcove. “It reeks of paint in here,” she says. “I like the color, though. What do you think? Should I talk to her next week?”
Jory stretches to open the small window above the washer and in only a moment the air feels fresher. Claire sees a new stripe of turquoise paint on the other side of Jory’s hair—maybe she’d taken Claire seriously. “Why not find her tomorrow?” Jory asks.
There is no cell phone number in Miguela’s medical chart, or in Anita’s database. Claire drives to the orchard after work and parks near the cabins, wishing she knew which one Miguela inhabited. After twenty minutes the car is getting cold, and she decides to ask the foreman where Miguela lives.
She rings the bell, a little nervous about how he’ll react, how much he’ll want to know. But it is Miguela who opens the door, with a mop in her hands. She accepts Claire’s offer without even asking the salary. The foreman shows no more annoyance than a shake of his head when he writes out Miguela’s last paycheck. The strangest aspect of it all, Claire thinks, is the feeling that she and the foreman are brokers for this woman’s labor.
Jory is upstairs when they get back to the house, but a flowered bedsheet has been tacked up in front of the alcove and a glass jar with the earliest wildflowers, bluebell and yellow bell mixed in with the dark spiny leaves of Oregon grape, is sitting on the washer.
“We have an air mattress for you. Una cama,” Claire says.
Miguela smiles, lifts her dark brows, suggesting as much a confidence in Claire’s intentions as any delight with her new quarters. But then she sets her pack down and opens the door to the toilet stall, picks up the jar of flowers and puts it down again, runs her hand down the flowered bedsheet. “It’s good,” she says. “Perfecto.”
When they come out of the kitchen Jory is sitting on the stairs hugging her knees to her chest. Claire sees a blush of color in her cheeks. A small crush, she thinks, like she has a little crush on Miguela. But then it’s gone, and Jory jumps up, remembering something, leads them both back into the kitchen and shows them the little hook she has made for the bedsheet out of a broken coat hanger, so the curtain can be held open for more light. Jory takes Miguela on a tour of the house—the two bedrooms upstairs, and the bathroom, making it sound like they have always considered the utility alcove a spare bedroom, once even taking her hand for a moment as they start back down the stairs.
Claire unpacks the air mattress from its zippered bag and plugs in a hair dryer, watches the vinyl bed inflate with soft popping sounds. It fills the small space, leaving only a single foot of room to walk along the opposite wall. When the noise of the dryer stops, she hears Jory talking. She is kneeling on the end of the sofa explaining the photographs on the mantel to Miguela, who points to a picture of Jory at about age eleven, only three years ago. They had gone to Costa Rica for a vacation over Christmas break and Jory had built a snowman in the sand, three half spheres lying supine on the beach under a palm tree, as if the tropical heat had knocked him flat—that or he was going for a suntan. Jory is wearing a bikini that shows her scrawny, prepubescent body, sand sticking to her thighs. It is stunning, really, how recent that trip feels to Claire, how fast her baby has grown up. When they were emptying out the house for the movers Claire had discovered a box of diapers tucked at the back of a linen closet, still sealed up and good as new. She’d given them to the mother of a new baby down the street.
Coming home from work the next day she hears voices through the front door and stops with the knob half turned. Listening. It has been so long just the two of them, mother and daughter. Two women sharing a small space, one still struggling to be in complete control and the other trying to take more control than she knows how to cope with. She doesn’t intend to sneak in on them, but still, opens the door more quietly than usual, hangs her coat on the hook without a sound, takes an extra moment to smooth the folds. The room is warm and Claire smells cooked onions and garlic.
Miguela is laughing. Claire hasn’t heard her laugh like this before—without a tangling catch in the undercurrent. “Pero el perro no es perfecto.” Miguela releases the r’s in a light tap, then a snare drum ripple, then a single tap again.”
“Peddddo,” Jory says, sounding like she has held ice in her mouth long enough to partially freeze her tongue. Claire steps fully into the room now and sees Jory pushing the point of her tongue against the roof of her mouth with her fingertip. Miguela sits with her heels on the rung of her chair, head bowed over her knees and her shoulders shaking. When Jory sees her mother she stiffens like she’s been caught with a cigarette.
Miguela stands up and smoothes her hair back, wedges her hands into the pockets of her jeans. “¿Quiere comer? I make a small dinner. Gallo pintó.” She waves her elbows toward the set table. Two plates are already streaked with bits of rice, beans, and tomatoes. A third, clean place setting is laid out at the other end with a cloth napkin folded under the fork and a pitcher of water, thin slices of lemon floating among the ice cubes like pale aquatic flowers.
The following day Claire comes home after work with a collapsible metal bed frame and twin mattress she picked up at the consignment store south of town. She has also bought two new mattress pads with the hope they might make sleeping on top of a stranger’s nocturnal history more hygienic. It would make Claire sleep better, at least. She stacks up three plastic milk crates to make a cabinet for Miguela’s clothes and brings one of the narrow bedside tables down from Jory’s room.
Sunday night the wind wakes Claire up from a sound sleep. “Shoulder winds,” she’d heard them called, because they swept through at the turning of seasons, blowing down the valley channel hard enough to fell trees that hadn’t survived winter. It should inspire her with the anticipation of full spring, but they sound too lonely, howling and buffeting the house. Now and then she hears the crack of a tree limb, now and then the clatter of the old barn.
She gets up to make some tea, forgetting that she risks waking Miguela. But when she steps into the hall she sees a candle burning on the dining table, Miguela sitting up already, bundled in Addison’s jacket. Claire goes back into the bedroom and finds a bathrobe she hasn’t worn in years, brings it downstairs and folds it over Miguela’s chair.
“I am sorry. Did I make noise?” Miguela asks.
Claire shakes her head. “The wind.” She bundles her own robe around her neck. “Do you want some tea?”
“No.” But then she starts to get up. “I can make you some?”
Claire puts a hand on Miguela’s shoulder. “I’ll get it.” She brings two cups back to the table with a saucer for the tea bags. “Were you reading a letter?” she asks, indicating a worn envelope in Miguela’s hand.
Miguela picks it up, folds it along a smudged crease and holds it in her lap. “No. Only thinking.”
“Are you comfortable enough? The bed is okay?”
“Yes, the room is very nice.”
Claire lowers her tea bag into her cup and watches the color bleed through the hot water, caught in the strangeness of sharing her house with someone she knows so little about. “I wish I could pay you more right now. I know you’re probably trying to send money home.” She leans forward over the table and sets her teacup on the saucer; the sound of glass on glass is jarring. “It’s very helpful to have you here right now—with Jory. That’s the main thing, just being here with her when I’m at work.”
Miguela nods. “It is a hard age for a girl. A special age.” Her eyes are too far outside the low light for Claire to see them clearly. “I am not sending money home.”
“You said you had a friend here. Someone else from Nicaragua.” Miguela shakes her head, either unclear about the question or denying it, Claire can’t tell. “I thought you said you’d followed someone here. When I first met you.”
Miguela opens her mouth as if she has just recalled the conversation; a flicker of surprise crosses her face, perhaps that Claire would remember such a small detail. “She is not here now.” She hesitates a moment and adds, “No one will come to your house.”
Claire hadn’t meant the question to sound so self-concerned, but feels a tinge of relief at the answer that makes her press on, admit that while she does not need to hear everything, she has to trust what she does hear. “Miguela. I hate to ask you this.” She hesitates, not knowing any easy way to put it. “You told me once that you had never had a child. Is that right?”
Miguela’s face is perfectly still, as if she is holding her breath, holding her heartbeat. Claire feels a little ripple crawl up the back of her neck, thinks it could as easily be guilt about pressing her on such a personal topic (the breach it requires of a physician’s secret, the fierce certitude that women hid births for reasons only God could know) as a revelation that Miguela is quite capable of deception, may even have cause to hide this particular truth from Claire. Another gust of wind buffets the windowpanes and a tree branch tumbles against the roof. Something scuttles inside the wall.
Finally Miguela answers, her voice almost toneless, her face unusually still. “I had a child. But I lost her.”
Claire drops her face into her hands, a rush of heat flowing out from the center of her chest. “I’m so sorry.” She rubs her palm down her face and looks up. “And I’m sorry I had to ask you.” After a moment she stands up and puts the extra bathrobe in Miguela’s lap. “Please. This is for you. And if you need anything—we live so far from town here. If you want to go into the store for something… tell me. Okay?”
“Thank you, doctora.”
“Claire. Just Claire.”