THE GATE WAS SET INTO AN ORANGE STUCCO WALL. IT SQUEALED open. She walked into the courtyard, gravel sloshing under her shoes. Wooden wind chimes clacked. A sprawling vine flowered along one interior wall. The center of the courtyard contained a thin tree, an iron table and chairs, a few potted plants. Doors were set into the walls, a total of four separate apartments. Luz remembered. Her grandmother’s door was in the highest corner of the courtyard, amid the flowering vine.
A vacant hummingbird feeder hung from the eave, rotating in the breeze. It slowed and reversed direction. Luz moved toward the door, feeling strangely detached. As if she was physical form only, all motion and no spirit. A homemade wreath encircled the door knocker. Luz knocked, and the door opened almost immediately.
Her grandmother was short and thin. Long slacks folded over her feet, bare toes sticking out, and a linen shirt draped loose past her waist. Her silver hair was cropped close and ruffled. Her eyes blinked through their spectacles. She stared at Luz, and Luz could smell the leather goods, and the spices from the kitchen—the ground corn and the dried chiles that would be strung on twine across the window above the sink—and there was another scent, too, something more difficult to name. The scent of years, perhaps, of a childhood. Something unremembered until now, and yet still no memory gave it a face. But it was there. This was where she had lived.
“Luz,” her grandmother said, water glistening in the corners of her magnified eyes. She pulled her inside and embraced her, and Luz felt her sharp bones.
Abuela brewed coffee and told Luz that she’d waited the entire first day and night, sitting up and worrying. Her father had called, saying he’d heard nothing, and finally two days later called to say that Luz had been delayed because of an auto problem of some kind. Her grandmother had waited in the apartment each day since then, not going to the market, not going to Mass, fearing that Luz might arrive when she wasn’t home. And as the days stretched, her grandmother began to fear much worse things. She had called Luz’s father. He knew nothing.
The living room was painted a bright blue. Sunlight slanted in through a skylight. There were plants on the windowsill and a watercooler in the kitchen and woven rugs over the concrete floor. A sagging couch, a couple of rattan chairs, a small table. A miniature crucifix on the wall. In an alcove at the back of the living room, her grandmother kept her workbench and tools and strips of tanned leather hanging from hooks. Luz remembered a television, but there wasn’t one anymore.
Her grandmother brought coffee to the table. “I’m sorry for thinking such terrible thoughts while I worried,” she said. “But you are here now.”
Luz smiled weakly. She lifted the coffee mug to her face, felt the heat on her lips, and her grandmother jolted and said, “Wait!”
Luz set the mug down and her grandmother took it and shuffled toward the kitchen. “My mind,” she muttered. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. No coffee for you.” She slung the coffee from the mug into the ceramic sink. “I will pour you some juice. That is good. Very good.”
Luz got up and crossed to the kitchen entrance, stood barefoot on the cool cement.
“I have orange juice,” her grandmother was saying, peering into the refrigerator.
“Abuela,” Luz said. “I can have the coffee.”
“No, you cannot.” She shook her head.
Luz stepped toward her and gently gripped her shoulders. Luz looked her in the eye and spoke slowly: “I can have the coffee.”
Her grandmother blinked through her glasses. She swung the refrigerator door shut. Her grandmother opened her mouth, closed it again. Luz let go of her and returned to the table. Through the front window she watched the hummingbird feeder turn, refracting sunlight. Two birds blurred into view.
When her grandmother shuffled back to the table, her question was a whisper. “What happened, Luz?”
Luz shrugged. Tears welled and burned beneath her lids. She pulled her hair back over her ear, where her scalp was sore to the touch even as the cut itched and healed. “Do you see this cut?”
Her grandmother leaned and squinted. She shook her head, reaching tentatively for the spot Luz indicated. “I make my works by feel now.”
“Don’t I look terrible?” Luz asked. “Can’t you see?”
The old woman seemed on the verge of weeping. “You look beautiful to me.”
In the window, a collection of large red hornets zipped toward the bird feeder and harassed the hummingbirds until they flitted away.
“Have you been to a doctor?”
“In Monclova. Yes.”
A hummingbird timidly returned, and a hornet zoomed after it. There was silence in the apartment.
“It was a car wreck, Abuela,” Luz said. “I only told Papá the car broke down. I didn’t want to worry him. I’m okay now.”
“I don’t understand,” her grandmother said. “A car wreck a week ago. Are you sure you are all right? If it was violent enough to induce—”
“Well.” Luz swallowed. She sought an answer. “I was in the hospital.”
“Luz! Nobody called—”
“I’m okay now,” Luz said. “Please, Abuela. I’m okay.”
Her grandmother sighed. “You should have called, Luz. Or the doctors should have.” She looked out the window, but Luz doubted that the old woman could see the hornets ransacking her bird feeder. She sat and watched her aged and battered hands rest in her lap. “Maybe I should not tell you this,” she said.
“What?” Luz asked.
“I told your father not to send you back here.”
“You did.”
She nodded. She removed her glasses and wiped her eyes. She left her glasses off while she spoke. “When you left me six years ago, I was devastated. But I knew it would be for the best. I knew you needed to be with your father.”
The bird feeder spun and the hornets scrabbled over the sugar-water trough.
“And I told him, two weeks ago, that you needed to stay in New Orleans. To be near this young man whose child you carried. If, of course, you did indeed love each other.” She put her glasses back on and looked at Luz. “Your father had no answer for that, or he wouldn’t talk about it. He was adamant. New Orleans was more awful than I knew. I told him he had forgotten the trouble one can find here. The truth, of course, is that every place has its trouble. There is no perfect home. He insisted that you must be with me, that I could help. It wasn’t feasible for you to stay, he said. I told him that mistakes do happen, but their outcomes are not always what we expect. Mystery, Luz, shrouds God’s plan. If we are true, then our mistakes might be made useful. But there was no talking to your father. He wouldn’t even tell me the young man’s name.”
Luz swallowed. “Jonás.”
Her grandmother hummed. Repeated his name. “Did he love you and did you love him?”
“Yes,” Luz answered, though it seemed a very long time since she’d seen him. “I believe so.”
Abuela took hold of Luz’s hand. “Then I am truly sorry.” She turned her face to the window. They sat. “Well,” she said after a while.
The bird feeder spun. The red hornets, vile looking, clung to it. To this thing that was not made for them. She wished for the hummingbirds and their furiously pumping hearts to return, for the hornets to vanish. She wished for it in a desperate way she couldn’t quite understand.