She fell silent for a minute, chewing thoughtfully, staring out across the parking lot at the other hot cars.
“There was a kid couple years back,” she said slowly, glancing at me. “Howie Gibson IV. Dressed like a prime minister. Couldn’t help it, I guess. He was a fourth and everyone knows sequels don’t do well at the box office. Two months into Fall Term his mother found him hanging from a hook he’d put up in his bedroom ceiling. When I found out”—she swallowed, crossed and recrossed her legs—“I was sad. But I also wasn’t surprised. His dad, a third, obviously no blockbuster himself, he was always here to pick him up in the afternoon in a big black car and when the boy got in, he sat in the back, like his dad was the chauffeur. Neither of them ever talked. And they drove away like that.” She sniffed. “After it happened we opened up his locker and there was all kinds of stuff taped to the door, drawings of devils and upside-down crosses. Actually, he was a pretty talented artist, but let’s just say in terms of subject matter, he wasn’t going to be designing any Hallmark cards. The point is — you saw signs. I’m not an expert, but I don’t think suicide happens out of nowhere.”
She fell silent again, examining the ground, her purple pumps.
“I’m not saying Hannah didn’t have her share of problems. Sometimes she’d stay late and there was no reason for her to—film class, what do you do, you pop in the DVD. I got the feeling she hung around because she needed someone to talk to. And sure, she had a lot of lint in her head. At the beginning of every school year, it was always her last. ‘Then I’m getting out, Eva. I’m going to Greece.’ ‘What’re ya gonna do in Greece?’ I’d ask. ‘Love myself,’ she’d say. Oh, boy. Usually I have zero tolerance for that kind of self-help crap. I’ve never been the type to buy improvement books. You’re over forty and you still haven’t won friends or influenced people? You’re still the poor dad, not the rich dad? Well, I hate to break it to you, but it ain’t gonna happen.”
Eva was laughing about this to herself but then, suddenly, the laugh fluttered awkwardly in her mouth and flew away, and she sniffed, staring after it maybe, at the sky and the sun tucked into the trees with a few wispy clouds.
“There were other things, too,” she went on, chewing the Nicorette with her mouth open. “Something awful happened in her twenties, a man was involved, her friend — she didn’t go into details, but said not a day went by when she didn’t feel guilt over what she’d done — whatever it was. So sure, she was sad, insecure, but vain too. And vain people don’t hang themselves. They complain, they whine, make a lot of noise, but they don’t string themselves up. It’d ruin their looks.”
She laughed again, this time a pushy laugh, one she probably used on the radio soap opera Oro Blanco, a laugh to intimidate bacon-fingered Radio-landia writers, beef-backed generals, yoke-cheeked compadres. She blew a small bubble and popped it in her teeth, a smacking sound.
“What do I know? What does anyone know about what goes on in someone’s head? In early December she asked to take a week off so she could go to West Virginia, to see the family of that man who drowned at her house.”
“Smoke Harvey?”
“Was that his name?”
I nodded and then remembered something. “She invited you to that party, didn’t she?”
“What party?”
“The one taking place when he died.”
She shook her head, puzzled. “No, I only heard about it afterward. She was pretty upset. Told me she wasn’t sleeping at night due to the situation. Anyway, she ended up not taking the vacation. Said she felt too guilty to face the family, so maybe I didn’t know the extent of her guilt. I tried telling her you have to forgive yourself. I mean, one time I was asked to watch a neighbor’s cat when they went to Hawaii — one of those long-haired jobs straight off a Fancy Feast commercial. Thing hated me. Every time I went into the garage to feed it, it jumped onto the screen door and hung there by its claws like Velcro. One day, by accident, I pressed the button to the garage door. It hadn’t gone up three inches before the thing motored out of there. Left track marks. I went outside, searched for hours, couldn’t find it. A couple days later, the neighbors came back from Maui and found it flattened on the road, right smack in front of their house. Sure, it was my fault. I paid for the thing. And I felt terrible about it for a while. Had nightmares where the thing was coming after me with rabies — red eyes, claws, the whole shebang. But you have to move on, you know. You have to find your peace.”
Maybe it had to do with her bastardized birth and impoverished Los Toldos upbringing, the trauma of seeing Augustin Magaldi naked at fifteen, shoving to great political heights the wide load of Colonel Juan, the twenty-four-hour workdays at the Secretaria de Trabajo and the Partido Peronista Feminino, looting the National Treasury, stockpiling her closet with Dior — but she had, at some point over the years, become uninterrupted asphalt. Somewhere, of course, there had to be a crack in her where a tiny seed of apple, pear or fig might fall and flourish, yet it was impossible to locate these minuscule fractures. They were constantly being sought and filled.
“You have to lighten up, kiddo. Don’t take it so hard. Adults are complicated. I’m the first to admit — we’re sloppy. But it doesn’t have anything to do with you. You’re young. Enjoy it while it lasts. Because later, that’s when things get really tough. The best thing to do is keep laughing.”
One of my pet peeves was when an adult imagined they had to encapsulate Life for you, hand you Life in a jar, in an eyedropper, in a penguin paperweight full of snow — A Collector’s Dream. Obviously Dad had his theories, but he always expounded on them with the silent footnote that they weren’t answers, per se, but loosely applied suggestions. Any one of Dad’s hypotheses, as he well knew, applied solely to a smidgin of Life rather than the entire thing, and thinly applied at that.
Eva checked her watch again. “Now I’m sorry, but I do want to make it to my spin class.” I nodded and moved out of the way so she could close the door. She started the engine, smiling at me like I was a tollbooth collector and she wanted me to lift the barrier so she could drive on. She didn’t immediately reverse out of her parking space, however. She turned on the radio, some jittery pop tune, and after a second or two of digging through her purse, unrolled the window again.
“How is he, by the way?”
“Who?” I asked, even though I knew.
“Your pa.”
“He’s great.”
“Really?” She nodded, tried to look casual and disinterested. Then her eyes inched back over to me. “You know, I’m sorry about that stuff I said about him. It wasn’t true.”
“It’s okay.”
“No, it isn’t. No kid should hear those things. I’m sorry about it.” She was giving me the once over, her eyes climbing my face as if it were a jungle gym. “He loves you. A lot. I don’t know if he shows it, but he does. More than anything, more than — I don’t even know what to call it — his political hooey. We were at dinner once and we weren’t even talking about you and he said you were the best thing that ever happened to him.” She smiled. “And he meant it.”
I nodded and pretended to be entranced by her left front tire. For some reason, I didn’t love discussing Dad with random people who had nectarine hair and careened between insults, compliments, terseness and compassion like a driver three sheets to the wind. Talking about Dad with these kinds of people was like talking about stomachs in the Victorian Age: inappropriate, gauche, a perfectly sound reason to look through them at future assemblies and balls.