The women in the bus seats around her this morning had no such compunctions. One woman was cautioning the others against leaving the living-room drapes open at night this weekend, and Elizalde at first assumed that it was a precaution against being shot in a drive-by shooting; and it might have been, partly, but after a few moments she understood that it was mainly to keep from calling to oneself the attention of the witches that would surely be flying around in calabazas y bolos fuegos, gourds and fireballs. Another woman said that she would be smoking cornhusk cigarettes every night for the next week or so; and one old grandmother in the very back seat said she’d be going out to Santa Monica on Friday night to feed her “piedra iman” in the sand and seawater. When Angelica Elizalde had been growing up, a piedra iman was a magnet; perhaps the term now meant something else.
Mundane borders too were commonplace with these ladies—secure in the supposed secrecy of the Spanish language, they casually traded adventure stories of how they’d stolen across the California-Mexico border, and a couple of them even discussed holiday plans to travel back and forth across it again to visit relatives in Mazatlan and Guadalajara, and they traded bits of advice for dealing with the coyotes who guided parties north across the broken wasteland of gullies and arroyos into the border cities of the United States.
Altogether they made Elizalde feel…incompetent and unworldly, a frightened fugitive with an out-of-date tourist’s map.
It should, she thought wearily, be the other way around. These women were housemaids, paid stingily in cash under the table, and they lived in the neighborhoods around Rampart and Union and the east end of Wilshire, where the families who were crowded into the shabby apartments did “hot bed” sleeping, in shifts, and Sunday dawns no doubt found these women stirring steaming pots of menudo for their hung-over husbands, who would have towels beside them to mop the sweat off their faces as they ate the spicy stuff. Elizalde had gone to college, and medical school, and had thought she had moved up, out of this world; now she wished she could trade places with any one of these women.
On the south side of the street, a sign over the bay door of a onetime gas station read CARREDIOS, and—in the few seconds it took her to realize that it was just a badly spaced, and misspelled attempt at CAR RADIOS—she read it as carre dios, which would mean something like the god of the course, the god of the run; and she had fleetingly thought of getting off the bus and going in there and lighting a candle.
She would have to be getting off soon anyway. Alvarado was the next stop. She sat up and tugged at the cord over the window, hearing the faint bong from the front of the bus, then got stiffly to her feet. Only a few blocks south of here was the office she had rented on Tuesdays, when she had first gone into private practice. Frank Rocha had been one of her patients even back in those early days, and later he had attended the group “séances” when she had opened her clinic up on Beverly.
She grabbed one of the upright steel poles as the bus squealed to a stop. What on earth, she thought helplessly as she let go and shuffled toward the opened back doors, do I think I’m going to do here? If his widow and kids even still live in that house? Apologize? Offer to…help. What money I’ve got I do need.
The letter in her wallet seemed to be heavy, seemed to be almost pulling her pants down on that side.
Do yardwork? Tune up the car engine?
Madam, she thought, suppressing a hysterical giggle, I accidentally ran over your cat, and I want to replace it.
Fine, but how good are you at catching mice?
She stepped down to the curb. Apologize, I guess. I can at least give her that, I can let her know that her husband’s death has shattered me, that I’m aware that I was responsible for it, that I haven’t been blithely forgetful of it.
As the doors hissed shut and the bus pulled away from the curb in a cloud of diesel smoke, Elizalde looked across the lanes of Sixth Street at the receding green lawn of MacArthur Park. She sighed and turned away, toward a ripped-up construction site where, according to signs on the plywood hoardings, city workers were digging tunnels for the proposed Metro Rail; and she started trudging that way, north up the Alvarado sidewalk.
SHE RECOGNIZED Rocha’s house by the willow tree in the front yard. It must have had deep roots, for its narrow leaves were still green, while the lawn had not only died but gone entirely away, leaving only bare dirt with a couple of bright orange plastic tricycles knocked over on it. The old wood-frame house was painted navy blue now, with a red trim that Elizalde thought looked jarring.
Under these twittery surface impressions her mind was spinning. How on earth could she dare approach Mrs. Rocha?
How could she not? Only two nights ago, when she had weirdly begun reacting to events a second before the events happened, she had finally decided to confront whatever it was that had happened in her clinic on Halloween two years ago; and part of confronting it, as far as she could see, had to be facing the victims of it. Trying to make amends.
But she herself was a victim of it! Walking wounded! How would this ordeal—subjecting herself to this unthinkable meeting—be making amends to Angelica Anthem Elizalde?
Just to…apologize? No one would be better off.
But she was shuffling up the concrete walk toward the front porch. And when she had stepped up to the front door, she rapped on the frame of the screen. Brassy mariachi music was blaring inside.
Peering through the mesh of the screen door, she could see the blue-and-pink flicker of a television reflecting in framed pictures on a living-room wall. The music and the colors both ceased at the same instant.
The gray-haired woman who appeared behind the screen stared at Elizalde for a moment, and then said something fast in Spanish.
“Perdón,” said Elizalde, as light-headed as if she’d just bolted a stiff drink on her empty stomach, “estoy buscando por Señora Rocha?”
“Ahora me llamo Señora Gonzalvez.” Her last name was now Gonzalvez, but this was apparently Frank Rocha’s widow. Elizalde didn’t recognize her, but after all she had seen the woman only once before, three or four years ago. She didn’t recall her hair being gray then.
“Me llamo Elizalde, Angelica Anthem Elizalde. Necesito—”
The woman’s eyes were wide, and she echoed “Elizalde!” slowly, almost reverently.
“Si. Por favor, necesito hablar con usted. Lo siento mucho. Me hace falto…explicar que yo estaba…tratando de hacer—”
“Un momento.” The woman disappeared back into the dimness of the living room, and Elizalde could hear her moving things, a shuffling sound like books being rearranged on a table.
Un momento? Elizalde blinked at the again-vacant rectangle of the screen door. One of us isn’t understanding the other, she thought helplessly. This woman can’t be Frank Rocha’s widow, or else I can’t have made it clear who I am—otherwise, surely, she wouldn’t have just walked away.