A TINY BLUE CROSS PULSED WITHIN THE SCREEN AND SET THE world to trembling. Luz stared at the cross for a moment and then left the stall. She looked like herself in the mirror, but beneath her feet the earth labored, lurching onto a new axis. She looked again at the test in her fist. She’d been afraid of the confirmation, had kept running from it. But here was the truth, inescapable as her ghost runner. She squeezed the plastic stick and closed her eyes, and then she moved, chucking the test into the trash and leaving the ladies’ room.
Saturday morning found the private school quiet. She padded barefoot down the dim hall. Her running spikes hung from her fist. There were glass cases full of trophies, medals. Photographs of merit scholars, smiling white girls in plaid skirts. Outside, she looked across the lawn and the lot to the track. Someone shouted in the distance. A ringing cowbell in the grandstand. She laced up her spikes and jogged over.
Luz’s hair was drawn tightly into a bun. The sun soaked into her neck, and sweat slid beneath the mesh of her jersey. At the starting blocks she normally had a stretching routine, but she forgot it just now and crouched, readied. Four hundred meters was a distance to think through, to plan for. But today, she wondered whether she could run hard enough to bleed. To alter this reality before she must share it with anyone else.
Guilt wormed through her with the thought. She apologized quickly, to God and also to her mother, and she saved a word for Jonah’s mother as well. Once you tell yourself that they are there, watching . . . well, her acts were subject to their judgment, and she remembered this.
And there came the sound of the gun.
Luz accelerated low into her sprint, gaining ground with long strides. Normally, there was a point early in this kind of lengthy race where she would settle into a tempo that reserved something for the final stretch. Not today.
Her ghost runner hugged her hip—she must outrun him now more than ever. Get somewhere new. The claustrophobic white borders of her lane. Run. Breathe. Through the first turn, into the straightaway, her legs already dragging. She couldn’t keep this pace up, but she already knew that. For now, she outpaced her ghost runner.
The girls on the team teased her, saying she was fast because she had an ass like theirs. Luz usually laughed and let it go. Her body was her mother’s. Luz remembered her strong, brown legs. Mamá’s back glimpsed when she spun out of her towel to dress, muscles sculpted in graveyard nights at the laundry where she worked, hunching and lifting and scrubbing. Mamá’s hands, rough when placed along Luz’s cheek.
Luz leaned through the bottom of the track. Her bronchi burned and her breath tasted like copper. Luz had always been a runner, of a kind. She ran from Las Monarcas. She ran to America, to San Antonio. She ran to New Orleans.
Into the homestretch, secondhand spikes gripping the fine rubber track, each footfall bringing her somewhere—somewhere, she had to believe it. Her quadriceps were going wooden. Mouthfuls of oxygen caught in her trachea like cotton. The other girls began to pass her. Their ragged breathing. Blond ponytails bouncing, track shoes gleaming. All the while, Luz’s ghost runner gained. Cold, sliding past. Her body wanted to quit, a little begging voice. Yes, that’s right. Quit. Quit. She must run hard enough to undo it. She craned her neck, pulled at the air, threw her feet forward.
Luz was the last to cross, arms and legs wobbling out of form. She came to a jerky halt and hunched and retched dryly. Four hundred meters. Nothing had changed, of course: the finish line was the starting line.
She stood, hands locked atop her head, and this was when she spied her father—Papá, who had never seen her race—down at the belly of the turn. He stood outside the track, gripping the chain-link. He wore jeans and work boots and a T-shirt, plastered to him with sweat. He held on to the fence, watching her. He turned away, toward some Uptown mansion, perhaps, where today he would undersell his carpentry skills to hang drywall. The boughs of the live oaks swung low over the street. Plastic beads were still wound about the limbs, put there during the Carnival parades last month. Her father looked alone, shrinking as he went.
Luz slipped through the crowd. She saw Jonah across the lot. Tall and sandy haired, she couldn’t miss him. He was with Colby. She thought briefly of Jonah’s arms and the freckles she traced with her fingertips, but when he scanned in her direction she ducked out of view. She was afraid to speak with him. What would she say? How would he react? She made for the street, where it shaped itself to the river, bending in both directions. Another kind of track, another kind of loop.
The streetcar lumbered to a stop in the neutral ground between lanes. She boarded and closed her eyes. The whirring against the rails, the buzz of the stop cord.
She went up the concrete steps of their place, and inside, Rodrigo lay on the futon, head propped on his fist. A baseball game played on the television, splotchy through the antenna, broadcast muted. Luz was surprised to find him home while her father worked.
“¿No estás trabajando con Papá?”
Rodrigo’s eyes flicked toward her. “El hombre sólo quería uno.”
Luz passed through the rooms of the shotgun, one after the other. Her father’s guitar rested against the wall in his bedroom. When Luz sang with him, she used words her mother had taught her. She climbed the ladder to the loft and her mattress and reclined, but the more she tried to quiet her mind the more suffocated she felt. A drumbeat swelled behind her eyes, like the one from the drum corps they’d stumbled on during Mardi Gras. She woke, her heart pounding and her body still stinking from the track meet. Rodrigo was calling up to her to see if she’d like some lunch. “No, gracias,” she told him, adding that she had work.
When she left, Rodrigo was again sprawled on the futon. The local news flickered soundlessly on the screen.
She paused in the doorway. She said, “I’m pregnant.”
The words were real, heard aloud. They took shape and had weight to them. They forced acknowledgment. Everything seethed. Inside, she seethed. Her skin was nothing more than a thin veneer. Hold yourself together. Rodrigo only looked at her in the way he did when she forgot to speak to him in Spanish. It was a patient look. Luz’s stomach twitched—she felt she might be sick. But she held on to her calm appearance and told Rodrigo, “Nada,” and he sat there uncomprehending as she exited, steadied herself against the railing, and marched down the steps, thinking of Jonah.
JONAH AND COLBY STOOD IN THE GRIDDED SHADE BEHIND THE grandstand. The starting gun popped again and some parent in the bleachers began to shake her cowbell. Families and students and other runners in their uniforms milled about. Across the lot reared the Uptown private academy. The sun balanced, swollen, on the rampart.
“You see Luz anywhere?”
Colby shook his head. “She don’t usually run that shitty, do she?”
“No,” Jonah said. He loved watching her go. Strong legs, reaching and recycling with natural grace. Watching her reminded him that some things in the world did indeed work as they should. Until today, though, he had never seen her finish last. She wasn’t always first, but she was never last. “She should be out here by now.”
“Don’t see her.” A kid with long hair passed and Colby said, “Get high, player?” but the kid only glanced at him with a slightly frightened expression. Colby grunted. “Thought Luz would run better for me, Mickey-Bee.”
Jonah looked for the shimmering black length of her hair. There wasn’t another remotely like her in the crowd. Anxiety coiled in his gut. She had known he would be here. He had hoped to spend the afternoon with her.
Heat rose from the fissures in the asphalt. The big school loomed. Jonah’s first high school had been a private academy much like this one. His experience there had ended fairly quickly, however.
Colby had moved into the shade beneath the bleachers, where he exchanged something with a lanky, pimpled kid and then sauntered back.
“You know,” Jonah said, “this is a Catholic school here and shit.”
“I’m good, Mickey-Bee.”
“Think they’ll look the other way if you get caught?”
“I ain’t worried about no teachers.”
Jonah thought about Davonte, who had skipped school since he’d been caught slinging and still hadn’t surfaced. It wasn’t the authorities he was hiding from. It was your employer, not the law, that made getting caught a dangerous thing. “I could get you on down at the Walmart, man. Show you how to do a few things, get you started.” And one day, Jonah thought, I could hire you at McBee Auto. When it’s up and running again. If Luz isn’t through with me.
“Don’t start that shit again. I’ll stop when I have to.”
Jonah knew what had propelled his brother Bill toward the Marines: a lack of purpose. Bill was looking for something. After Mom died, there were no answers to be had. Nothing made sense. Bill enlisted as soon as he’d been able. Jonah had imagined the causality over time, the need for something that would offer definition, parcel out the world and say: Look, this is how it works and why. Contentment might come with the promise of a collective purpose. Just give yourself over and pare away the personally threatening or existentially burdensome questions—those things just wouldn’t matter anymore. Jonah saw this same need in Colby. Even if Colby’s reasons were different, the need was the same. But Jonah knew how false the promise actually was. All he had to do was look at his brother’s picture on the wall, the flag hung beside it. Jonah’s chance at purpose now resided with Luz. He saw it in their future together. And he saw their future becoming more and more unlikely.
Jonah dropped Colby off in front of his house just as Colby’s mother came out. She wore black slacks and a teal polo, the casino logo embroidered over the breast pocket. “Why don’t you stay and eat something, Jonah? Left some lunch in the fridge.” She beckoned with red fingernails. She had told him that the better her nails looked, the better she slung the cards.
“No,” Jonah said, “but thanks. Got some things to do.”
“All right, then.” She collared Colby and kissed him. “You need anything, Jonah, you holler.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
When Jonah pulled up to Luz’s house, her father’s friend—whose name he never remembered—looked at him from the front steps. Jonah got out and waved. The man barely nodded. Jonah knew he didn’t speak English. “Luz?”
The man shook his head, grumpy look unchanged. Jonah got back into the truck and laid into the horn, two bursts. The man on the steps jolted, glared at him. Jonah waited. She wasn’t home.
People were on their stoops with beers. A group of children shooting hoops in the street halted to let his truck pass. He drove to the Quarter and parked near the wharf. He hiked through the gravel around the streetcar tracks and climbed to the levee and the riverwalk. A man on a bench was playing the saxophone for tips. A steel container ship stood in the water downriver. Jonah sat on a bench, watching the seabirds. The tourist steamboat swung out, wheel churning. The saxophone submerged into the wind and surfaced again. The Hidalgos owned a cell phone, but her father usually had it. Jonah thought about that first trip to the river with Luz, last spring.
When the McBees used to come to the river, it was all because of his mother. They sat on a blanket on the grassy stretch of park. Here was a rare memory. Bill and Dex played catch, and sometimes Bill would hand the ball to Jonah so he could heave it, bouncing, back to Dex. Jonah couldn’t have been more than five or six. The remembrance was flimsy, like Jonah might wake up tomorrow and it wouldn’t be there at all, scrubbed away like so much detritus in his sleep. And if the memory left him, who could tell him that a family trip to the river had ever taken place? Luz, maybe. He told her about those times. Is that the point, then—to remind each other of who we are as we move on? And so Jonah sat on the river, sheltering himself from the unknowns of both future and past by thinking of the bars of light that fell through his window and lay across Luz’s brown back. Her fingertips, rough from washing dishes at the restaurant, tracing out the patterns only she saw in his skin. Her hair in his fist, her sigh into his mouth. Her heartbeat mere inches from his own. Tell yourself there is no border between them. Believe it because you must.
He needed everything to be all right.