Libardo? Is that you, honey?” our grandmother asks.
“No, Gran, it’s Julio.”
Gran, standing in the doorway, blocks the entrance and looks at us warily. “Oh, sweetie, you scared me,” she says. “Come in, come in. Why are you here so early?”
“Early?” Julio looks at his watch and kisses her on the cheek. “It’s ten, Gran.”
Our grandmother holds out her hand to me and says, good morning, young man, come in. Julio stops. Don’t you recognize him, Gran?, he asks. She looks me up and down and says to Julio, you never come by, especially not with friends. I’m Larry, Gran, I say. She goes pale. It’s Larry, Gran, Julio says, and she brings one hand to her heart and the other to her mouth. Oh, honey, she asks me, what are you doing here, what happened, what are you two not telling me? The house smells of damp, of confinement, of old age. It’s the house they moved to after the Libardo situation, but inside it’s the same as ever, frozen in time.
“Dear God,” our grandmother says. “Come in, come in. Have you had breakfast?”
“Yes, Gran, thank you.”
“What’s going on? Why are you here, Larry? Are you back for good?”
“No, Gran, I just came because of Dad.”
“Dear God.”
The curtains are the same, heavier now with accumulated dust. The furniture is the same Louis XV stuff that Gran always used to impress visitors. They’re French, supposedly from that Louis fellow, she’d say, the real deal. The only new thing I spot is the shrine, which may not actually be so new, but I’ve never seen it before. In a gold-framed photo is Libardo, smiling and lit by church candles, perfumed with white flowers. I get goosebumps, and my breakfast stops short on its journey through my guts.
“Oh, honey, what a tragedy,” Gran says, grabbing my hands. Her eyes well up and her voice is nasal and sad.
“Yes, Gran,” I say, “but at least now . . .”
Now he’s dead? Or now we know he’s dead? What can I say to her that won’t bring her more torment? What can I tell myself to assuage my guilt over the peace it’s brought me? She must have hoped for another outcome, that after a dozen years we’d be informed that Libardo was alive, that he’d survived Los Pepes’ attacks and been hiding out all this time, and that she wasn’t confused and in fact it was Libardo, and not Julio, who’d appeared a few moments earlier at her door.
“What’s wrong, Larry?” Gran asks, and says to Julio, “Sit him down over there, Julito, before he falls over.” She points to an armchair and asks again, “Are you sure you’ve eaten? I bought pastries yesterday.”
I just need air, that’s all. There’s not a single window open. The candles and flowers smell like death.
“I’ll bring you some blackberry juice,” Gran says, and then complains to Julio, “You didn’t bring me any guavas or cheese from the farm, honey.” She frowns and says, “Or won’t your mother let you bring me anything?”
“No, Gran,” Julio says. “It’s been a hard summer.”
She makes a face like she doesn’t believe him and heads for the kitchen.
I ask Julio where our grandfather is, and he shrugs. She doesn’t like for him to come out, he says. I want to say hi, I say. He’s not going to recognize you, Julio says. How long has it been since she set this up?, I ask, nodding toward the shrine. Years, Julio says. I’ve never seen that photo before, I say. I hadn’t either, he says, she gave it to me so I could get it blown up, it’s a photo of a photo. I’m going to open a window, I tell Julio, and I go over to the sliding glass doors that lead out to the balcony. Behind the drapes is a sheer that used to be white. The door is locked, the balcony crammed with flowerpots of parched plants. Gran appears with a tray loaded with a plate of cookies and two glasses of blackberry juice.
“All right, boys,” she says. “Here you go.” She stares at Julio and asks, “What have you got there, honey? Set that bag down and have some juice.”
Julio looks over at me. The question in his eyes is, do I tell Gran we’ve got her son here? My response is a look that says nothing. She sets the glasses and plate on the coffee table. Her hand shakes as she deposits each thing, but she makes sure it’s all arranged neatly. I take the plunge and say, “I’m hot, Gran, could we open the window?”
“Oh, I don’t know where I put the darn key. I haven’t even been able to water the plants, so they’re dying on me.” She thinks a moment and then adds, “I think that old coot lost it.”
The old coot is our grandfather.
“No worries, Gran.”
“I’ll open the dining room window, but drink your juice. It’s cold—it’ll be refreshing.” To Julio she says, “Put down that bag, honey, and come over here.”
“Gran,” Julio says, and looks at me.
Now I’m the one who’s shaking. I grab the glass and sip the juice, just to have something to do.
Julio continues: “This is Dad.” He raises the bag a little. Gran doesn’t understand and stares at him, puzzled.
“This is your son,” Julio says.
It sounds pathetic; it sounds biblical, absurd, awkward. Julio holds out the red bag and she asks, “Where? Where is he?”
“Here.”
“There?”
When they told her Libardo’s remains had been found, she’d pushed back right from the start. How do I know it’s him? They’ve analyzed the data. What data?, she asked. The DNA. What’s that? It’s like a kind of ID that all human beings have in their bodies. Where do we have it?, she’d asked. In the body—skin, hair, bones. Well, to be sure it’s him, I need to see him. But maybe there isn’t anything, Julio tried to explain, we have to trust the DNA, I gave them a sample of mine so they could do the analysis in case he was ever found. Oh, sweetie, don’t confuse me with that stuff, Gran said, bewildered, and added, if I can just see him, I’ll know if it’s him, after all he’s my son.
“Here he is, Gran,” Julio says, and holds out the bag as if he were giving her a present.
Our grandmother wobbles; she doesn’t know what to do with her hands, whether to bring them to her mouth, or press them to her chest, or fan herself with them, or wipe away her tears, or use them to prop herself up so she doesn’t collapse on the floor. She goes quiet, her own words stifling her. Julio takes a step toward her and she steps back.
“Are you O.K., Gran?”
She shakes her head and points to the red bag. She tries to speak, Li, Li, Li. I hold her up and try to lead her to a chair. Suddenly, from somewhere, a voice booms out, saying, where’s Carmenza the Dense-a? Where’s Carmenza the Dense-a?
“Where is he?” Julio asks.
“In the kitchen,” Gran says.
Julio starts to go off to look for him, but I gesture to him to let me go instead. And there I find him. He’s in pajamas, and his hair is a mess, as if he’s just gotten out of bed. He slaps the table in the breakfast nook and chants, where’s Carmenza the Dense-a?, but as soon as he sees me he goes quiet, watching me with his yellow eyes. He blinks with difficulty because of the pterygia growing over his corneas, which have left him almost blind. Nevertheless he smiles at me.
“Hi, Grandpa,” I say.
He laughs. He doesn’t have a single tooth. Maybe he never did. I mean, maybe he was using dentures before and now he doesn’t bother. He’s drooling. There are stains of dripped food on his pajama top. He stops laughing, but he keeps studying me up and down.
“I’m Larry, Grandpa.”
He raises his eyebrows, opens his mouth a little, and burps. He utters something that sounds like my name. In some corner of his memory, my face or my voice must have set something off that tells him, it’s Larry, Libardo’s kid.
“I arrived yesterday from London,” I tell him.
Grandpa slowly lifts his arm and points to the cupboards. I don’t see anything worth notice, just jars, battered cookpots, a pile of dirty dishes, a basket full of blackened bananas.
“Do you need something?” I ask.
The nail on his finger is long and untrimmed. His hand trembles, and his voice isn’t able to pull together what he wants to tell me. The glibness with which he’d been taunting my grandmother is gone. Now he looks like a spoiled child who’s trying to get attention by using baby talk.
“What do you want, Grandpa?”
He’s not even trying to talk now. He looks like a tragedy mask; he groans, still pointing, looking back and forth between me and the cupboards.
“Do you want something to eat?”
His groan sounds like a complaint. His old finger looks like the one God points when issuing punishment. His eyes glare at me as if in warning. I go over to the cabinets next to the stove and ask, “Here?”
Grandpa shakes his head. I point to the lower cabinets and he again says no. He tries to lift his arm a little higher, and I point to the upper cabinet. He nods. I open the doors and find only old glass and metal containers full of unidentifiable substances, full of food and time.
“In the back,” he says, quite clearly, with perfect pronunciation.
I push the jars aside to look in the back and there, in the shadows, I see an old revolver that doesn’t even have a cylinder. I look at my grandfather, and he looks back at me with his eyes very wide open, translucent and full of fear.
“Whose is it?” I ask, and close the cupboard.
My grandfather looks toward the living room, where Julio and my grandmother are murmuring over a bag of bones.
“She’s going to kill me,” he says quietly.
Now he uses his finger to signal me not to say anything. Or maybe, from having lived with her so long, he knows what’s going to happen, that she, her curiosity piqued by our silence, will come in right at that moment, as she in fact does, and asks, “What’s going on?”
“Nothing, Gran. Just saying hi to Grandpa.”
“Did he recognize you?” she asks, not caring that he’s right there.
“Of course, Gran.”
“See?” she says. “He’s faking it to manipulate us.” Her tone changes and she pleads, “Larry, come tell your brother to leave your dad here. He’s insisting on taking him to that woman.”
That woman is Fernanda. Gran not only demeans my mother by referring to her without saying her name, but she also makes a contemptuous face that hurts my heart. Julio walks in with the bag.
“No, Gran, stop making things up,” he says. He looks at me and says, “I just want to take him so I can find something decent to put him in.”
Gran crosses her arms. “I wasn’t born yesterday.”
“I can’t leave him here.” Julio tries to convince her. “I have to take him to make sure he’ll fit. Dad deserves something dignified and comfortable.”
“What’s more comfortable than his own home?” Gran asks defiantly. She defies all of us by ignoring the fact that Libardo’s real home was our house, the one he built for us.
The tension intensifies with the din of stool legs scraping against the floor. Grandpa has gotten to his feet and, again with the same finger, points at the red bag Julio’s carrying.
“Is that him?” he asks Julio.
“Hi, Grandpa,” my brother says, as if he’s just spotted him.
“Don’t listen to him,” Gran says. “He doesn’t understand what’s happening.”
“Is that Libardo?” Grandpa asks again.
Gran turns to him and tells him to go to his room, to leave her in peace, to stop bothering her; she says he stinks to high heaven, tells him to take a bath, shave, go to bed, die. I look at my grandfather and think about the revolver she’s got hidden. He looks at me, and at Julio too, and in that rheumy gaze I read a litany of complaints and humiliations. And I ponder, I wonder how Grandpa figured out we were talking about Libardo and discussing where to put his remains, and how he guessed that the plastic bag contained his son, the one he’d mourned, when Gran insists he has no idea what is going on.
“Gran,” Julio says gently, “you’re going to be able to be with him forever, but I need to take him with me right now . . .”
“He’s my son,” Grandpa breaks in.
“We’re going to look for a container for him, something worthy of him,” says Julio, who’s gradually losing his composure.
“Where are you going to put him, huh?” Gran asks, and Julio loses his shit.
“How the hell do I know?” he says. “This is the first time I’ve had a father die on me. I don’t know what to do with the dead, but we can’t leave him in this bag. A box, a chest, an urn, what do I know . . .”
“Julio . . .” I try to soothe him.
“What, what, what?” he yells, balling up a fist.
“Calm down.”
“My son,” Grandpa says, the sad-mask expression on his face once more.
Julio goes off like a rocket without a fuse, as if it were I or Fernanda or somebody else complaining about dead Libardo’s return to the land of the living.
“A cardboard box or a trash can!” Julio yells. “As far as I’m concerned, they should have left him in the dump where they found him—that’s where he always should have been.”
I turn my back on him so I don’t have to deal with his tantrum. Until I hear a blow that shuts him up, a sharp slap, and a my God from our grandmother that causes me to turn around and find that it wasn’t her who hit Julio but our grandfather. My brother looks at him in bewilderment, and our grandfather stares back at him, irate. He’s returned from another planet, or from the galaxy to which our grandmother banished him, to scold his grandson:
“Show your father some respect, damn it.”