On a Clear Day (3 page)

“You want me to run and shoot them?” Rafael asked.

“Not yet,” I said, smiling.

Rafael smiled back. He told me not to trust them. “They don’t know you are Dahlia,” he said. “They come tomorrow and we’ll tell them we don’t know her or you.”

I kissed the old man and shook Rafael’s hand. He took the pistol out of his pocket and showed it to me. It was old and rusted around the barrel.

“If you need me …,” he said.

“Yes,” I answered.

I
rushed upstairs and to my dresser. Bottom drawer. Photos. A folded program from my mother’s funeral. Two notebooks. Then, still in the manila envelope they came in, two copies of the
Math Journal
. My heart was beating faster as I opened the envelope and turned to the page where I had not resisted the urge to put in a bookmark. There, under a picture of me trying to smile, was my name—Dahlia Grillo.

They had seen my picture. They had known who I was.

Footsteps in the hall. For a wild moment I thought it was the boys coming up the stairs, but then I recognized the pattern of the steps. Mrs. Rosario.

“You shouldn’t be alone,” she said. “Come down and help me cook.”

I didn’t want to cook, but I wanted to be with Mrs. Rosario. She reminded me of my Dominican heritage more than anyone I knew. She was memory in the way she walked, the way she moved.

She took me by the arm. She smelled of onions and garlic, and my arm felt good against the side of her heavy chest. We went down to her apartment, and it was warm and inviting. My mind was racing, and I could feel the excitement in my legs. The boys had read my article on computer modeling and said they wanted me. If they had pushed me harder, if they had said “Come right now!” I might have done it.

We cooked. I was cutting up the meat. Mrs. Rosario said that it was pork, but the small bones told me that it was goat.

“One time, maybe a thousand years ago, two boys came to visit me.” Mrs. Rosario’s voice was low, husky. The voice of a woman who had lived. “They wanted me to go camping with them. They were going to climb some mountain—Pico Duarte, I think, I don’t know. I had to ask my mama, but I had to ask in a way that made it seem like I didn’t want to go. You know what I mean?”

“Did you want to go?”

“No, because I thought they just wanted to do the bang bang with me,” Mrs. Rosario said. “I didn’t want to do that, but at the same time I wanted to go. My mother grabbed a wooden spoon and chased them from the house.

“They took another girl, a skinny girl named Lisette, and they went off for a whole week!”

I put flour on the goat meat and dropped it into the
heavy skillet. It sizzled nicely as I pushed it around with a fork.

“When I was very little,” Mrs. Rosario said, “a woman told me that women in love always cooked with their fingers in the pot. I used to turn the meat with my fingers. You get lots of nice burned fingers that way.”

“So what happened to the other girl?” I asked.

“Nothing. She swore it and I believed her, but her reputation was ruined anyway. No woman in our village thought the same of her after that. I think they felt as I did. We were mad at her but a little envious too.”

“You were lucky you didn’t go,” I said.

“That girl was stronger than I was, but her reputation was ruined,” Mrs. Rosario said. “All my life I wished I had gone with those boys. I think of it a hundred times a year. Most of the time I imagine being out there in the rain, on Pico Duarte, and being cold and shivering as I huddle between them. Even today I love the taste of rain. It brings back memories of what I just imagined. Isn’t that strange? Nothing happened, but you remember what you thought might have happened?”

We took the seared meat out of the pan and put it in a bowl as the cooking garlic filled Mrs. Rosario’s kitchen with its magic odors. I scraped the pan and put the little bits into the bowl with the meat.

“Don’t be afraid of adding salt,” Mrs. Rosario said. “When you’re cooking, a time comes when you have to take a chance. With the spices, with life.”

My mind was already racing ahead, much too fast for
me, much too close to the edges. Thinking became impossible even as I kept telling myself to think.

I put salt and red pepper on the meat and put it back into the black iron skillet in big handfuls. Mrs. Rosario pushed the meat around with a wooden spoon until each piece had touched the hot iron of the ancient pan again. Then we added the canned tomatoes and oregano. More stirring. We turned the heat down and poured cold chicken broth into the center. It smelled good, and I thought that maybe I would eat it.

She talked as she mashed some of the chickpeas with chili flakes, adding just enough water to make them mushy. Woman stuff. Good.

“Not too much, not too much,” she said as she lifted the salt with her fingertips from her palm and sprinkled it on the meat.

I knew the mushy chickpeas would go in first, and then the whole ones later. The fragrant smells were filling me up, comforting me.

“Did you ever speak to the girl?” I asked.

“To Lisette?”

“Yes.”

“At first she was upset because people thought of her as a bad girl.” Mrs. Rosario leaned against the table. “Then she began to walk with her head up and her back straight and look everyone in the eye. When I spoke to her, she said, ‘Who I am is who I am!’ ”

When we were finished cooking, Mrs. Rosario called in the old man and Rafael. Rafael brought a young girl with
him. She was eight, maybe nine. She sat at the far end of the table, at Rafael’s elbow, and bent her head slightly forward to see me at the other end.

The old man was talking about the van the boys had come in. He said that it was probably an old army vehicle.

“Maybe bulletproof!” he said with a nod.

“You can always shoot the driver,” Rafael said. “Even if the glass is shatterproof, a good bullet goes right through.”

The little girl was looking at me, watching me. Big, dark eyes that questioned me from five feet away. Who was I? Would she be like me one day? I was closest to her age. I was the next step in her life.

“They might have got your name from the school records,” Rafael said. “They’re selling the lists of students to private teachers. They sell everything these days.”

Mrs. Rosario was watching me too. She was thinking about the time when she could have gone away with some boys.

And who were these boys? I had glanced at the handout they had given me. It was the same crap that everybody knew about. The Central Eight had become a huge force that ruled the universe. If C-8 had been around at the time of the Incas, virgins would have been sacrificed in the volcanic heat of their power. C-8 postured like they were some kind of modern gods, while the poor, the old, the millions of children scurrying like roaches around the world were supposed to thank them for their very existence. Taking C-8 down wasn’t the work for strange boys with a half-assed idea.

There had been other groups that had tried to stand up to the Central Eight. They had protested in mass meetings, had locked arms and tossed flowers at the police, had done all the crap people did, and then had gone away to their own little holes. The boys had said they were going to a conference somewhere. Big deal. What difference did it make? They would be beaten back, knocked down. Maybe killed if they were too convincing. What difference did anything make anymore?

Like my cousin, they would see the futility of it all and stop singing.

But the boys had asked for me. They had known my name, had read my piece in the
Math Journal
. I was breathing faster just thinking about it. What were they going to do? I thought of Mrs. Rosario thinking about the boys who had come for her. What would she have done in my situation? What was she telling me to do?

I remembered Michael. He had fronted a band known as Plato’s Cave, or something like that. It was hot for about three years and he had made buckets of money with music the zines had called the Flare sound. They’d start with one melody over a hard driving beat, follow that up with a different melody over a counterbeat, and then bring them closer and closer together until they overlapped. It was edgy and frantic and I liked it a lot. Then, in the middle of a concert in Australia, Michael had walked away from it all. Some people said he had just made enough money, and some said he was working on something new, but his band died after that. I heard he had been accused of
supplying money to some kids in Oregon who were protesting something, but that didn’t make the papers for more than a day or two. Hardly anything did anymore.

The boy in the wheelchair looked as if he had money. His clothes fit too well; his haircut was too perfect for him to be poor. He had something going on. I didn’t know what.

But what if their shtick wasn’t real? What if they had their own separate agendas and just wanted to use me? What would I do? Or say?

“I do math,” I would say. “I don’t fuck.”

Rafael was wiping his plate with a roll he had broken in half, sopping up the gravy. The girl was still scoping me out. I looked at her and smiled, but she didn’t smile back.

How had the boys expected me to react when I read the literature they gave me? Hadn’t they noticed that anger wasn’t in anymore? That only the struggle to survive had real meaning?

For a moment I was mad at the boys, but I couldn’t stop the feeling of excitement coming over me. I felt like a starving person waiting for a wonderful meal to be cooked. I didn’t want to wait. I wanted to start eating.

Mrs. Rosario kept talking. I think she was afraid that when she stopped, I would leave. She needed to talk, and I understood that. She said we might have used too many tomatoes.

“It’s just right!” Rafael protested.

“Better than that!” the old man said.

“What do you think, Lydia?” Mrs. Rosario asked the girl.

“It’s nice” was her answer. A trace of a smile flickered across her face. She was wearing braces.

There was still some yellow rice left, and a few plantains. It was so good. When everything was finished, when the old man and Rafael and little Lydia had left, I helped Mrs. Rosario clean up and she hugged me tightly.

“You always have to be careful with boys,” she warned. “Whatever you do, keep your soul in your mind.”

I walked slowly up to my room and looked at the handout again. I started to read it, but there was nothing new in it, so I put it down. Then I took out my article in the
Math Journal
and looked at my picture. Pushing my hair back as I looked in the mirror, I saw that I was the same. Almost pretty.

I cloud-groped the Eton Group on the Internet and got nothing. Eton came up as a place in the UK, and I knew it from crossword puzzles. A school that had been for boys but that was now a big deal for the children of the British elite. A pop-up ad asked if I wanted to go there.

I was completely conflicted. One part of me was cautious, scared. Another part felt that nothing they could do would work. It was all hopeless.

I thought of Mrs. Rosario’s story. She was still longing for the adventure she’d never had. I thought of the girl. Lisette. A lovely name. A name Mrs. Rosario still remembered after so many years.

Options. What were my options? Get a job and hope to improve my life. Be good at something and always have food to eat and a safe place to stay. Then how did I call that life? What would I do to pretend I was doing more
than stringing along the moments of my existence? Maybe I could get ahead and do better than the people around me. I knew I was smart. What did my math professor say? “Most people take ten to the third power and are glad to reach one thousand. But the smartest people take ten to the power of pi, and they are always ahead, always moving faster than the rest.”

It had pleased him to say that, but I hadn’t seen anything in it. Life was personal, not a friggin’ competition.

Before my mother died, I sat with her in the hospital. She was crying because she had nothing to leave me. She said she could give me a small piece of advice if I wanted it.
If I wanted it
? I wanted anything from her at that sad moment, a touch, a kiss.

“Know what’s in your heart,” she said. “Not just what’s in your head.”

In my heart, I knew I was going with the boys.