Esmeralda
Mia Alvar
That morning you are woken by an airplane, humming so close overhead it seems to want to take you with it. The clock says fiveâan hour ahead of your alarm. Youâve lived close to two airports for almost two decades. Youâre used to planes. They even show up in your dreams. In last nightâs dream, you died; your body crumbled into ash. Before you could learn what came next, before you could see where your soul went, a machineâsome giant vacuum cleaner, which in real life was this planeâcame down to sweep you off the earth like dust.
After today, youâll never hear a plane in the same way again. But you donât know that yet.
The boy whose bedroom you sleep in is now a man. He moved out long ago. His mother, Doris, keeps his room the way it was when he lived here: school pennant, baseball trophies, dark plaid bedspread. You pay low rent, and have agreed to leave this room and sleep out on the sofa when the son visits. (He never does.)
You know you wonât fall back asleep, so you switch on the lamp. Because the years of work have given you a bad back, bad knees, and bad feet, you like to pray in bed. A wooden Christ Child and Virgin Mary live inside the nightstand drawer. You lay them on the pillow next to you like shrunken lovers, wrap a rosary around your wrist. You interlace your fingers, shut your eyes, and squeeze your lips against your thumbs as if kissing His feet.
The God that you imagine looks like Father Brennan, the man who baptized you: tall and Irish, with white hair and kind blue eyes, shooting a basketball in black vestments on the parish playground. The Virgin is one of the nuns who ran the adjoining schoolhouse: a spinster with a downy chin, her veil a habit. Old and sacred words, they taught you. You would not invent your own any more than you would try to build your own cathedral. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Bead by bead, you whisper the same words Saint Peter spoke in Rome, the same words spoken today by all believers in SĂŁo Paulo and Boston and Limerick and Cebu:
He rose again from the dead.
Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.
You pray by heart the way youâd plow a field of soil, the way you push a mop across a floor. One foot before the other. After looping your way around the rosary, you coil it in its pouch. You tuck Mary and the Santo Niño back into their drawer, thanking them for the strength to rise another day, on two aching feet.
âLIKE THE GYPSY,â John said, the night he asked your name.
You werenât listening. âEee, Ess, Em, Eee,â you started spelling in reply, as you changed the trash bag from the can beside his desk.
âMineâs John. Not quite as fancy as yours.â He held out his hand.
âPleased to meet you.â You stared at the freckles on his long, pale fingers. When he didnât pull them back, you wiped your latex glove, still damp from the dustrag, on your uniform. Then, embarrassed, you snapped off your glove and tossed it in the mother trash bag hanging from your cleaning cart. His hand was moist and smooth. The hand of a man who studied numbers on a screen and now and then picked up the phone.
He had the kind blue eyes of a priest. His hair was white (though he had all of it), his face almost as pale, but pink in sunburned places. On his desk, three computer screens folded outward like a panel painting at church. A woman with gold hair and green eyes, probably his wife, smiled in a frame beside his keyboard.
This new night job had just begun. You were still learning the floor, along whose windowed edges sat men like John, who had their own offices. These men stayed later than the ones who worked in open rows along the middle of the floor. Youâd notice, over time, that John stayed latest out of everyone.
SINCE DORIS IS still asleep, you hold off on the vacuuming and step into the kind of fall morning that really does remind you of a big apple, bright and crisp. You buy skim milk and grapefruits, whole wheat bread and liquid eggs that pour out of a juice box and have less cholesterol. Nineteen years of Tuesdays you have shopped and cleaned for Doris. Longer than her son lived in the room you rent for two hundred a month. On Wednesdays you clean the apartment under you, for the Italian landlord and his wife, whose children you have watched grow up and have their own. Thursdays you are in the city early, cleaning Mrs. Helen Millerâs loft downtown. And Fridays you clean uptown, for the Ronson family, who own a brownstone top to bottom. Saturdays your fingers smell like pine oil from polishing the wood pews of the same old church that found you Doris and her extra room, those nineteen years ago. And in between youâve cleaned for other people, onetime dealsâafter a party, or before somebody sells or rents out their apartment, or as a gift from one friend to anotherânever saying no to an assignment. Nineteen years of cash in envelopes, from people who never asked to see your papers as long as you had references and kept their sinks and toilets spotless.
The other day you pulled a knot of Dorisâs white hair from the shower drain, trying to remember when those knots were brown.
Now that youâre no longer hiding, you have one job on the books, at night, in the tower where John works.
The living room TV is on when you get home. âGood morning,â you call out, unloading bags onto the kitchen counter. Doris doesnât answer through the wall. She likes to do Pilatesâcounting bends and raises, pantingâto the news.
Putting the milk away, you hear a sob.
âDoris?â
She isnât doing leg raises. You find her on the sofa, eyeballs red, fist covering her nose and mouth.
âDid Matthew call?â you ask. Over the years, her son has said things on the phone to make her cry.
She shakes her head and reaches for your hand. âOh, Es.â Her other hand points at the TV screen. A city building, gashed along the side and bleeding smoke. You almost fail to recognize it. You never see it from this angle anymore: the air, the view on postcards and souvenir mugs.
A pipe or boiler must have burst, you think, watching the ugly crooked mouth cough flame. You think, A man in coveralls will lose his job today. Thereâs an Albanian gentleman whose name you know only because itâs stitched across his shirt. Valdrin. You never speak to one another. He bows as you pass him in the staff lounge; he blows kisses as you leave the elevator.
Youâre wrong. They show a plane, show it and show it, flying straight into the towerâs face and tearing through the glass.
âWhat if this happened late at night?â says Doris. âEs, thank God youâre here.â
She weeps as you two watch, again, the black speck pierce the glass, the smoke spill from the wound.
Trying to count floors, you stand. âI have to go.â
âWhat? Absolutely not.â
âIâll clean when I come back.â
âForget about that. Jesus! What I mean is, youâre not going anywhere.â
âI have to see about . . . my job.â
But Doris will not hear of it. âNo oneâs working now. Not your boss and not your bossâs boss. Youâve been spared, donât you see? Youâre staying here. End of story.â
âOK.â You sit. âIâll get your coffee, then.â You stand and go into the kitchen, think. You pour Dorisâs coffee and bring her the cup. âI have to try to call my boss, at least.â
In Matthewâs room, you lock the door. You change into your panty hose and uniform, as if itâs afternoon. Beside the bedroom door, you hold your shoes, a pair of hard white clogs a nurse friend from your church suggested for your troubled feet, and listen to the wall. As soon as you hear Doris go into the bathroom, you tiptoe through the kitchen. You grab your bag and jacket from the closet by the door, race downstairs, and slip into your clogs outside.
A BOOK SAT open on Johnâs desk, the next time you walked in.
âAha!â he said. âThere she is.â He pointed at the page and read aloud. âLa Esmeralda. Formidable name! Sheâs an enchantress.â
You thought about hiding inside the cart, between the toilet paper rolls.
He stood and came around his desk, still reading. âYour parents never found that name for you at the baptismal font.â He closed the book and smiled. âWhere did they find it, Esmeralda?â
âNot there,â you said, pointing your chin at the book. (Your parents would have used a book that size for kindling.) âThey liked the sound of it. Or liked somebody with the name, maybe.â
John wanted to know, if you didnât mind saying, where you were from.
âSo I was right,â he said, when you told him. âMy wifeâs nurses are Filipina.â
âYour wife is a doctor?â
âNo.â He looked down. Darkness, like the shadow from an airplane overhead, passed over his face. âA patient.â
âOh.â The woman with green eyes and gold hair, smiling next to his keyboard, looked healthy, but you didnât say that.
Before Johnâand this is terrible to say; youâd never say it, butâthe lives of Americans with money were not very interesting to you. Even the troubled ones, their troubles did not seem so hard. Youâd ask, âHow are you?â and theyâd heave a sigh, winding up to tell you some sob story: how much they worked, who had it in for them, the things theyâd wished for and were not getting. Try hunger. Try losing your house, a voice inside you, that would never leave your mouth of course, wanted to say.
But Johnâs troubleâthat moved you. Enough to ask, âYour wife is sick? What kind of sick?â
âThe kind you donât come back from,â John said. Sheâd been sick for fifteen years. The photograph beside his keyboard was how he preferred to remember her. Before nerve cells inside her brain began to die, before the tremors started, before her muscles stiffened and her spine curled in. Back when she could walk without losing her balance, back when she could eat and use the bathroom on her own, without Johnâs help, and then a Filipina nurse, and then a second one for nighttime. Before she started to talk slowly, like the voice in a cassette recorder on low battery, and then stopped talking altogether. Back when she still knew who John, her husband, was.
âIâm sorry.â
âI am too,â he said. âIt started fast, and now itâs ending slowly. When you love someone you never think a time will come when theyâre a stranger.â He looked and must have felt alone. But the photo that you kept at home, on Matthewâs nightstand, was your brotherâs baby portrait. Long before the lies, the cruelties, the face scarred up beyond recognition.
Johnâs family was Irish, and he grew up in a harbor town where his brothers still lived. âAll five of them,â he said. âAll firefighters, like our father. Or policemen, like our uncle.â
âYou are not a fire- or policeman,â you said.
John shook his head. âDid you ever hear of a family where the finance guyâs the rebel? Me, and my cousin Sean, the priest. Plus weâre the only two who didnât have kids. No sons to raise into cops or firefighters, either. I guess I never grew up dreaming Iâd be some hero. No, I just looked across the bay at this skyline and thought, Iâll work there someday. âPlusââhe tapped his wedding ring against the picture frameââshe wanted to work in publishing. No better place for that than in this city. And we decided that if one of us was gonna work in books, the other better work in money.â
He asked after your family. You told him that your parents raised coconuts, coaxed copra oil from them, sold gallon cans of it to men who came in boats once a month. That you had just one brother. âPepe.â
He said, âYouâre not a farmer.â
âNo. Iâm not.â
âAre you and Pepe close?â
The first time Doris asked you this, you shook your head. Almost nine thousand miles. She laughed. âI donât mean close o...