WHEN LUZ RETURNED TO HER GRANDMOTHER’S, JONAH WAS waiting in the wash of a streetlamp, sitting against the wall adjacent to the gate. He got to his feet when he saw her.
“Hey,” he said. He put his hands in his pockets. “I went to the hill again.”
He didn’t have to say it because Luz remembered. “It happens every year,” she told him. “It’s like they get lost here.” And that was part of the problem—when it came to God’s vengeance and its dispersal, the worst were spared but the simply lost were not.
Jonah bounced on the balls of his feet, and Luz sensed the words piling up. She wanted to tell him that she had killed a man, wanted to describe the wet slap of the rock against his eye, the final sound of it. She needed Jonah to understand that she had orchestrated that finality, and for that knowledge to help explain, in turn, the gathering distance between them. But she didn’t think he’d be able to understand—she didn’t think anybody ever would—and so what she said instead was, “One day we’ll look back, I think, and see that all this made us who we are.”
He sighed. “I love you.”
“I know.” And Luz still loved him, too—she thought she always would—but not in the sense that he meant or wanted. Her love had become a kind of fossilized thing. She would never be able to deny the love’s existence. She would never wish to deny it. But it was no longer something she felt capable of acting upon.
“I still want you to come back to New Orleans with me,” Jonah said. “I want to take care of you. I want to build a life with you.”
Luz averted her eyes because there were no tears in them.
“We can make it work. I’m serious, Luz.”
“I believe you.”
“But you don’t think I can.”
“It’s not that,” Luz said. She remembered well Jonah’s despair the evening they’d been robbed at gunpoint in the French Quarter. She knew that the losses in Jonah’s life made him feel incapable, but he wasn’t that. “I’ve never believed you were helpless, Jonás.”
“Let me prove it. Come back with me. Or let me bring you back soon.”
“It’s not about that, either,” Luz said. She met his look, then cast her eyes up the quiet street. Her ghost runner had arrived, heavy and cold, and the soles of her feet began to itch. Luz thought through their origins, through their histories. As she had done times before, imagining their love in older, improbable eras. The millions of things that had to happen over the millennia just to bring them together for a little while in New Orleans. It was good fortune, and she was grateful for it. She really was. But that period was at an end, and she could not separate them each from the places they came from or the places they had yet to go. “I’m a runner,” she said. “I think I’m always going to be.”
“It doesn’t have to be that hopeless,” Jonah tried.
“Hopeless isn’t the right word for it.” Luz had been pregnant, and the landscape that would have been her future had formed and forced itself to her feet, and she had prepared herself for the long journey because there was nothing else to do. But now that it was over, it was as if that landscape had eroded. It was still there, only unrecognizable.
She had placed her hand over her stomach; she let it fall back to her side. There were no more cramps. There was no physical reminder left at all.
“We can make something good happen. I’m going to go into the army—”
“Oh, Jonás,” Luz said, hearing her voice rise in spite of herself, “you don’t want to join the army. I know you don’t. And you don’t need to, now.”
“Well, okay, I mean—maybe now there’s just no hurry. I can start working on McBee Auto, I’ll get it working . . . We can go back to how things were.”
“I don’t want to go back,” Luz said. “There’s no going back for me, Jonah, that’s what I’m telling you.”
“Forward, then!” Jonah cried. “We used to talk about it. I know you dreamed about it, too. I’ll reopen the shop—damn it, you made me start thinking I could!”
“You still should,” Luz said. “But you don’t need me to do it.”
“Then what’s the fucking point, Luz?”
“Think of your mother, Jonah. Your father. Your brother. Speak to them. Do it for them. Do it for yourself. Build the life you want.”
“You are part of the life I want,” he answered.
Luz was sorry. More sorry than she’d ever been. Sorrier than when she didn’t give the dying man in the desert her water. Sorrier than when she’d brought Felipo home, beaten and battered, to his grandmother and brother. But perhaps it was merely the same old guilt. The same guilt regenerating into new spaces and new regrets. Here was Jonah, standing before her in Las Monarcas, waiting for her to speak.
Luz said: “I can’t go with you. Not anymore. I’m sorry I can’t explain. I do love you, Jonah. I’m glad I know you. I’m glad I met you. But I don’t belong in New Orleans.”
“Luz,” Jonah said, “you can’t want to stay here, not after what’s happened.”
“That’s what I’m saying, Jonah. I don’t even belong here anymore. I don’t know where I belong. I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say.”
“You told me I was responsible,” Jonah said, teeth clenched. “Remember?”
“I meant it when I said it.”
He looked at her. “What were you saying to me that day out in the street, in Spanish, when you were saying good-bye?”
“I was telling you to forget about me.”
“No, you weren’t. That’s not true.”
And it wasn’t true. But they were where they were, now and only now. What she had said to him then didn’t matter. It was better for him to not even know.
“Forgive me, Jonah.” And she went in through the gate.