On the day Maria Sanchez became engaged to Iosif, she told her mother that she knew, at last, why she’d waited to marry; she’d found the man she was destined to love. He’d been persecuted and tortured for his political beliefs, so he said, and lost his wife during that time, which was why he was living in Arizona. He was in his early fifties, divorced, and had no children. She liked to massage his feet. He would sit in the red leather high-back chair in their bedroom with the view of the Catalina Mountains, she facing him on the matching stool. He said she was a foot fetishist. She said she was merely a specialist, a slave to his feet because it gave him pleasure, and pleasure was what she wanted him to have.
The day she turned thirty-four, he sent yellow roses to her office in the resort where she worked in accounting. By that time, they’d been married a year. For dinner he prepared steak au poivre. Three candles in silver holders flickered on the table between them. Cognac and cream coated her lips. She said, “My love, please give us a child.” He set his cutlery down, lowered his gaze. He was balding just at the crown. When he raised his eyes to hers, they swam with tears. He then told her the first lie: “I didn’t want to lose you. But—you understand—I can’t father children.” The words imprisonment and torture moved through the ether between them. She shuddered. “I am so sorry to have brought it up.”
Later that week Maria drove to her mother’s house in an older, elegant section of Tucson, on a street lined with palm trees. In her mother’s living room, which smelled of lavender and anise, Maria stroked the fine lace antimacassars on the arms of a chair, the lace an old-fashioned touch that contrasted nicely with the flat-screen television on the wall, before she made her announcement: “Mama, there will be no grandchildren.” The grandfather clock chimed the quarter-hour.
Theresa Sanchez, who was fair-skinned and patrician, said, “I am not surprised.”
Maria sighed. “Mama, I’m falling into one of the traps you always set for me, but here I go. Why are you not surprised?”
“Iosif is Gestapo.”
“Ay, Mama. He is not Mexican, he will never be Mexican.” Theresa Sanchez did not trust him, she’d told her daughter, and therefore, to her, he was “Gestapo.” Her houses and property would go to her daughter, but not to her daughter’s husband.
Her mother’s bracelets jangled as she set the small glass of sherry on the mesquite hardwood table beside her. “I always wanted a boy.”
Maria smiled—this gambit, too, was familiar. She came forward, took her mother’s soft hands between her two palms, and knelt at her feet. “I also wanted a boy.” In this way Maria maintained the balance between them.
Her mother laughed. “I can’t shake you, can I?” She spoke in Spanish, referring to a popular song. She touched her lips to Maria’s hands and Maria laughed and went back to where she’d been sitting. Her mother was full of surprises—now, Mexican pop songs. Maria watched the doves fluttering on the patio behind the open blinds. Small birds, tiny yellow verdins and goldfinches, took turns ruffling their feathers in the three-tiered fountain that looked like a wedding cake.
Her mother rolled her eyes heavenward, lifted the cross from her neck, and kissed it. “I apologize. You are my one and only child, and for you I am grateful.”
Maria felt a shiver up her back. “Mama,” she said. “Stop being nice. It’s upsetting.”
“You will have a boy, a boy will come to you.”
“Mama, we would need a miracle.”
“Milagros vivos.” Miracles live.
Theresa Sanchez died of a brain aneurysm. Maria inherited the house in Tucson and her mother’s properties in Yuma, on the other side of the state. Maria arranged for the funeral mass, held at the Mission San Xavier del Bac—the White Dove of the Desert—on the Tohono O’odham reservation south of Tucson. The restoration of the eighteenth-century mission—an eclectic mix of Moorish, Byzantine, Mexican, and Indian influences—had been Theresa’s passion; when she was able, she had volunteered every week. Mission San Xavier del Bac was famous among the religious for the carved figure of Saint Francis Xavier, said to bring answers to prayers, that lay under a yellow cotton coverlet on a platform in an alcove. Notes, cards, photographs, and Milagros, religious charms, were pinned to the fabric—tiny photos of children, Milagros of arms and legs, a horse, a foot, and a heart, things that had been found or healed.
After the mass and the receiving line, Maria stayed to touch the bosom of the saint and pray for intercession for her mother’s soul. She reached out her hand and placed it on the saint’s chest among the treasures. She could feel tingling as energy from his heart lifted hers. Her mind opened and a light entered—a mysterious and breathtaking light—her mother, blessing her.
Iosif waited outside.
The following Monday Maria found a letter on the hall table. It lay hidden under a copy of the Arizona Daily Sun and a Harper’s. She saw Iosif’s name on the front but opened it because the handwriting was childish, the letters rounded. She assumed it was from one of her foster children. Mail back and forth was slow—she’d told “her children” about her wedding, and for an eleven-year-old girl in Africa or Peru to write “Joseph” on the envelope might be childish teasing. She smiled and opened the crumpled note. It read: I am sick. I have made many mistakes in my life. I need your help Papa. Sephara.
Papa? She thought the office that handled her foster children had made a mistake. She flipped the envelope over. Joseph. It was addressed to Joseph Cizardi. The name spelled differently than she knew it.
She looked at the note again. There was an e-mail address at the bottom.
She drove to the resort and walked across the path, past hummingbirds tissing in the shrubs of desert honeysuckle, and into her office. She shut the door. Iosif had told her practically nothing of his past. “Please,” he would say. “I’ve had enough—” Torture. The word lay always between them. In empathy her heart rose; her love made her quiver. He would detect her vulnerability, her desire, and he would sweep her into bed, undress her, layer by layer until she was shivering with anticipation, and then undress himself. Slow and tantalizing, he would wrap his arms and legs around hers, penetrate her carefully, hold her until they both could hardly stand it and would cry out together.
Iosif was only her third lover. The first was careless and bit her lips, and they occasionally bled. Then she’d let herself become engaged to a man uninterested in sex. He invariably couldn’t come, and his hands were clammy. Afterwards, Maria volunteered at the hospital in the maternity ward, adopted foster children in three countries, and had decided sex was overrated until Iosif touched her.
She swirled the chair to the computer screen and typed a simple, truthful response to the note addressed to “Papa.” She signed it: “Maria, Iosif’s third wife.”
She pressed Send. Her chair squeaked as she sat back, as it always did. It started to rain, the afternoon monsoon. Maria thought: A second wife is a rebound. A third wife is a stranger.
Iosif read the note. He told Maria that the writer wasn’t his biological daughter; she was a stepchild. This was his second lie, Maria would discover. Iosif said the girl had been wild—she’d had mononucleosis more than once, he said, from her careless sleeping around.
“How long have you been her father?”
“I was never her father.”
“How long were you married to Sephara’s mother?”
Iosif said, “It is in the past.”
Maria received an e-mail answer, typed at a library in Albuquerque. Sephara was twenty-seven. She hadn’t lived a careful life. She had been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She said it was her fault. She asked her father’s forgiveness.
Maria wrote: “Hodgkin’s lymphoma isn’t your fault.”
Around then, Iosif and a colleague from the university, a fellow enthusiast of antique musical instruments, made plans to attend a three-day conference in Phoenix. Maria made her own plans for her first trip to Albuquerque. She stayed at a good hotel downtown. She felt uncertain of herself, as though her spirit was someone else’s—someone unpredictable, a woman who would deceive her husband for the truth.
She touched the cross she wore at her throat when the taxi stopped at Sephara’s address. The taxi driver had already told her it was a bad neighbourhood. “Pueblo people,” he said, watching her, trusting that Maria, in her business clothes and shoes, was not Native. Maria opened the door, heard rap music, and picked her way around broken beer bottles. The taxi waited while Maria rang the buzzer. A young woman appeared, wearing grey sweatpants and a T-shirt. The young woman was the spitting image of her father, Maria’s own Iosif. Behind her tumbled a child.
Sephara said, “I couldn’t tell you about my son. I was ashamed.” She introduced her three-year-old, Jorge. Jorge had a mop of black hair. He had fine bones and was the colour of frothy Mexican chocolate. He had a space between his teeth, laughing lips, and the light-hearted attitude of a pixie.
Maria cited issues with tenants in Yuma as her excuse to Iosif for her three-day weekends. She went back and forth to Albuquerque. Over lunch at a McDonald’s, Maria learned that Sephara’s mother had become ill with breast cancer and died when Sephara was fifteen, and that her father, disapproving of her tattoos and her lifestyle, left her when he moved to Los Angeles to marry again. Staying in an abandoned building with friends her age, she quit school, worked as a waitress. Later she went back to night school to finish her degree and, instead, became pregnant.
During another visit, Maria learned that the father of Jorge was probably Mexican, from a good family that wouldn’t acknowledge a child out of wedlock. Then Sephara lowered her head and confessed that she did not know for sure.
On her third visit, Maria rented a car, and she and Sephara and Jorge drove to the suburbs to a big grocery store with fresh vegetables and good-quality meat. Coming out of the store, pushing the cart loaded with good food, Maria glanced in the grocery store window. “Stop, look,” she said to them. “Take my hand.” Maria, Sephara, and Jorge lined up and examined themselves. They looked related. The child had Maria’s unruly, curly hair. He had his grandfather’s eyes.
Sephara needed radiation treatments. Maria flew them back with her to Tucson and put them up in her mother’s house, with some trepidation. A young woman who had lived on her own in squalor might turn her mother’s beautiful home into a mess, but Sephara was respectful and kept it clean and shiny. She was a good cook. The house was close enough to the university, where she went for radiation treatments. Hodgkin’s lymphoma was treatable and her prognosis was good. Maria arranged for Jorge to begin preschool in the neighbourhood.
She bided her time. On the anniversary of her mother’s passing, in Iosif’s big house with the view of the Catalina Mountains, she said to her husband, “I expect a miracle today.” She was hosting a remembrance for her mother at Mission San Xavier del Bac, and many volunteers, as well as Theresa Sanchez’s friends, would be in attendance. Sephara and a friend of Maria’s would be there also, with Jorge, to introduce the child to his grandfather. Maria felt very hopeful, because on her side she had two saints—her mother and Saint Francis—against one man, his soul imperilled by deception.
At the mission standing in line at the saint’s image, Maria asked that Iosif be with her. “Please,” she said. “For me.” When it was their turn to touch the carved wooden image, Maria placed Iosif’s soft hand on the heart of the saint. “Why didn’t you contact your daughter?”
“I never had a daughter. It is a great sorrow.”
Maria’s smile faltered. The third lie. They moved quickly out of the line and moved without touching each other from the church. Outside the sky was the lilac blue of the Sonoran desert on a winter afternoon. Against it, Iosif’s forehead looked sunburned.
“Please. She was wayward,” he said. “Nothing more,” he said.
Maria’s love took flight at his words.
She tilted her neck to gaze at the ornate wooden doors of the church and its two white domes, and the doves flying overhead. She turned again and noted a pilgrim climbing the hill to a shrine. Near the top she saw a palm tree, and behind it, in the glittering rays of the sun, she saw her mother.
Maria turned her body again, this time toward the parking lot. She spotted Jorge waving from the back window of the car. Sephara, in the passenger seat, waited for Maria’s signal.
Maria stared at the lids of her husband’s downcast eyes. She lowered herself to catch his gaze, tilted her head to search for the light, saw darkness.
His soul was lost, unrepentant; she had nothing more to say to him. She stepped back and walked way, leaving him standing where he was. If his eyes turned to follow her, she did not feel them on her back. Within her mother’s radiance, she strode toward Sephara and the little Jorge, laughing with joy to see her, the two a testament to her mother’s belief that without a doubt, sin duda, miracles live.