The Language of Sparrows (16 page)

Chapter Twenty-One

Luca called April a few days later. His house was so bare she was almost surprised to learn he had a phone. After all, she had not been able to find a phone number when she looked up his address for their first meeting.

His voice carried over the line, old and faraway. “I will tell you my story.” He drew in a long, shuddering breath. “I will tell it to you only. I do not think my son would listen if I told it to him in person.”

A few days later, April joined Luca in his library. Luca’s home, simple as it was, enchanted her. It was a place of natural light and warm wood. Did he feel it too? Did his neat selection of books and armchairs give him charm and meaning where he would otherwise have nothing else?

She felt like a reporter with her minirecorder in hand. The strangeness of helping Luca tell his story struck her all over again. Yet, it felt so right.

She eased into a chair.

Luca, standing at the window, turned to her. “I will tell you the beginning and the end of the story. But the middle I cannot tell you. I do not think I can tell that.”

“Okay.”

“Nicolae needs to know why I went to prison. And he needs to understand why I did not join him in America when I was freed. But I cannot talk of prison.”

“This is your story to tell as you want to tell it, Luca.”

She was relieved to see the haunted look leave his eyes. He even had a lightness in his movements. April pressed the Record button.

Luca sat down, and only then did she see the black-and-white photo in his hand. He handed it to her. It was an image of a fresh-faced girl with braids. She was a Balkan beauty—dark hair, high cheekbones, and sleepy-lidded eyes. She was in a school uniform, but something about her seemed older than a schoolgirl. The jaunty angle of her scarf and her bold stare into the camera spelled trouble.

Luca’s face brightened. He saw her studying the girl in the photo and gave a faint chuckle. “What is your freedom worth, eh? For me, it was worth her. I was sixteen when I first set my sights on her.”

“What was her name?” April asked.

“Tatiana Cǎlinescu.”

Luca looked at the picture, and then away, his mind traveling far away from this place. He was a natural storyteller. His voice trailed off, soft and lilting, carrying April with him as he began his story.

“Freedom. There was little of it in Romania. The only freedom I knew had to be whispered. The communists had been in power since before I was born. At school, in unison, we shouted out slogans of devotion to the state until our throats ached. We sang folk songs to honor our leader. On television, there was only more of the same thing.

“In our apartment, my parents spoke in whispers so the neighbors would not hear. They listened to
Vocea Americii
—the Voice of America—on the radio, but only at the lowest volume. They whispered about escaping to freedom in the west. They whispered their prayers.

“It was wisest not to have religion or politics. Success could only be achieved by conforming to the masses. My future appeared bright. I was a clever student preparing for a career in mathematics. It seemed very safe, as math was a language without religion or politics. This is what I thought.

“I only wanted one thing to make my future the brightest: the prettiest girl in the school. All the boys flirted with Tatia, but she would not acknowledge them. She would not even look their way. She was clever, too; second in marks only to me.”

“Tatiana was your wife?” April asked, holding up the photo. “This is Nick’s mother?”

“You are skipping ahead in the story.” Luca wagged his finger at her.

It
was
his wife. The woman in the photo at Nick’s had aged into sophistication and motherhood, her hair puffed up in a 70s do instead of braids, but it was the same woman. April had imagined the woman who linked Nick and Luca as a quiet saint of a woman, someone who waited patiently for her heroic husband during his imprisonment and dutifully raised her son alone. This vixen of a girl was something of a surprise.

Luca coughed and rested back in his chair, his eyes closed.

“I knew I could not win her by paying court to her. The other boys had tried all their romantic tricks. So I pretended she did not exist. If she even asked me to borrow a pencil, I acted as if I did not hear. I courted other girls. But of course, I worked hard in my schoolwork so she would be impressed. And on the soccer field, if she should be there, I was an acrobat.

“She did not seem the least interested. I knew I would have to find a new method. But what? My marks fell then. I did not sleep or eat properly.

“Finally, one winter day while we waited on the sidewalk for school to start, I decided I would do whatever it took to win her attention. I put on what I believed to be a very funny skit. Our leader was so lauded he was not allowed to be shown on television doing normal things, such as blinking or wiping his brow. There was also a list of words that could not be used in public. Not even the very powerful used these words.

“So I pretended to be Ceauşescu. I stood tall, giving a speech about the greatness of Romania and socialism, but I wiped my brow, shivered in my coat. I sneezed. And I coughed out sections of my speech where it was obvious I was talking about such things as informants. I did not say his name. My comedy was a great success. My friends laughed, but not too loudly.

“As we went in to the school, Tatia pulled my scarf to stop me from entering the doors. She looked at me and me alone. I would have gone to be burned at the stake to win such attention.

“‘Are you such a great fool?’ she hissed. ‘What if someone reports you?’

“‘I thought you were a lover of truth,’ I retorted. I gave her my most careless smile.

“She said to me, ‘Nothing is worth going to prison. Nothing!’ She was very vehement.

“I promised to be good from then on, for her and her only. She shook her head and walked ahead of me into the school, but from then on, she did talk to me. I got into terrible trouble at school for the scene. They even threatened to report me to the authorities. But I was a favorite with my teachers.

“Tatia became my friend, and then after a warm kiss one summer evening, something more. We were in love.

“But when I returned to school that fall, my best friend, Andrei, said to me, ‘Are you mad? You cannot be Tatiana’s boyfriend!’

“All the boys were in love with Tatiana. They had all tried to win her. I stared at my friend, certain he was the mad one. But Andrei said it was only a contest to see who could get a response from Tatia. Comrade Snow Maiden, he called her. But no one would be seen with her. Her grandfather was an Orthodox priest who’d spent ten years in prison for his refusal to pollute the Bible and prayers of his church with communist rhetoric. Her father also had been interrogated for sheltering nonconformists. Somehow, I did not know this.

“The man who married her would already have a mark against him. But I loved her madly.”

April handed Tatia’s photo back to Luca. He took it and quietly put it back in the desk drawer.

“You were so young,” she said.

“We were children. It is hard to think now of having such power to determine our lives at such an age.”

April smiled. “How old were you when you married?”

“We were nineteen.” He looked long at the library window. “We do not have photos of the wedding. We ran away to a small village and married in secret. I was allowed to attend a teacher’s college, but I lost my place at the university. My star had burned out.”

“A great loss.”

“I never once regretted it. All of my plans blurred next to Tatia.”

April felt a small pang. What must it have been to be Tatiana, to be loved like that? “You were fortunate then?”

“So I was. So I am still to have been loved by Tatia. But in Romania, we have a saying. Good fortune is made of glass.”

“Luca,” she said, “I was ready for a story of espionage or a mystery of some kind, and here you’re telling me a love story.”

“Yes. I suppose you are right. A love story.”

He seemed pleased with the idea. April rather liked it herself. What a romantic thing to say. All of his plans blurred next to Tatia.

Communist Romania had been such a severe place. She wondered exactly what loving Tatia cost him in the long run.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Pale sunshine leaked into Sierra’s bedroom, all citrus and morning dew. On her bed, her World History book lay open to a chapter on the Renaissance, but her mind wandered. She thought of what Mr. Foster had said. “Don’t you see yourself doing something?”

Why was her future so blank?

She took out her journal and a black pen. Sierra wrote “There’s a future with me in it” in dark letters across the top of one page. She underlined the words. She drew a box around them. It didn’t feel any more real for having written it. She drew bars through the corner, then the middle, until the box was a checkerboard of crisscrosses, and the words were illegible.

At school she tried to focus but found herself translating the word future into every language she knew, writing it in every script. At the end of the day, she stopped at her locker and then headed toward her usual exit. Emilio and his friends stood just outside on the steps, throwing mock punches at each other.

Once Emilio saw her, he swung around to rest his hand high against the door frame. She’d have to slink close to him and under his arm to get out. She turned back inside to take another exit, but he, and all his friends followed her in. The halls were empty. Within seconds, he’d trapped her against a locker.

“Sweet Sierra,” he crooned.

She looked around for someone, for a way out, but she was on her own this time.

“I guess I better act fast before that Doberman of yours gets here, eh?” Emilio said.

He smelled of good things—cologne and mints—but all she could think was that the close smells would suffocate her. She was going to throw up. His face moved too close to hers. Sierra squeezed her eyes shut and choked out a single word. “Stop.”

“You don’t mean that, baby.” He massaged her neck, moving his hand slowly down to her shoulder. “Let me show you what feels good.”

Her throat squeezed tight. She heard laughter around her.
Please, Emilio,
she tried to say.
Please stop.
But the words wouldn’t form on her lips.

“Ever heard the saying ‘No means no,’ Emilio?”

Sierra opened her eyes. Mr. Foster stood in the hallway with his arms crossed. Emilio backed off. “Aw, man, Mr. F. I wasn’t disrespecting her. I was just helping her know her own mind, you know.”

Mr. Foster shot her an encouraging look. “Are you okay, Sierra?”

She nodded, afraid of what her voice would sound like if she spoke.

He looked over his shoulder to Emilio’s friends. “It’s time to leave the campus. School’s over.” He waited for them to leave and then walked with Emilio down the hall. “We’re going to have a talk about what respect means, my friend.”

Sierra hugged her arms to herself, waiting for the trembling to stop before she practically ran out of the school. The citrus sunshine the morning had offered was gone. Thick, gray clouds roamed in a windy sky instead.

Carlos leaned against his car in the apartment parking lot. He didn’t say hello or anything. In fact, he looked kind of annoyed and she suspected one of his friends had already texted him about Emilio. Or worse, they’d recorded the whole thing and posted it for everyone to see.

“You got anything to do this afternoon, Sierra?”

She shook her head, still afraid if she spoke her voice would break.

“You want to spend the afternoon on the beach? It’ll be quiet this time of year. I’ll have you home before ten.”

Sierra shrugged and went back inside to call her mom. She washed her face and put on lip balm. She took a few deep breaths before coming back out. “My mom checked you out with Ricky. He says you’re all right.”

Carlos surrendered a small smile at that, but he wasn’t his normal cheerful self.

High winds battered the sides of the car as they drove the hour-long span of freeway. Sierra ignored the landscape as they sped by. It was all chain stores and McDonalds anyway, with the metal towers of oil refineries in the distance.

By the time they got to Galveston, the sky had descended low and wintry. They drove down a hilly road toward the water. Weather-beaten mansions spoke of another time, another class of people long gone. They passed a gothic castle and in a flash Sierra was nine again. They were visiting Grammy and Gramp in Houston and took a day trip to Galveston. Her father drove them, pointing out Bishop’s Palace to her.

The name reminded him of a story, and he told her about the nuns of St. Mary’s tying orphans to themselves with clothesline, hoping to save the children from the crashing tidal waves during the hurricane of 1900. She shivered. Another memory.

Carlos gave her a sideways glance but didn’t say anything. He drove down to the seawall. Waves lashed the sand. The ice-cream vendors and little shops with flip-flops and sunglasses she remembered were closed today. The beaches and piers were empty, but there were a couple of surfers on the insane waves in the distance.

“You ever ride the ferry?” Carlos asked.

Sierra shook her head. “I haven’t been here since I was a kid.”

He drove past the restaurants, past the brightly painted beach houses on stilts, past everything, until they reached land’s end and the ferry dock. At this time of day only a few cars lined the entrance, and in a few minutes the ferry docked, and Carlos drove the car on.

Sierra stole a look at Carlos as he stopped the car. He was really quiet, but it seemed like a quiet filled with squalling thoughts.

After the captain finished his safety speech and the ferry pulled out of the dock, Carlos inclined his head. “Come on.”

“Are you okay, Carlos?”

He didn’t answer. They got out and went to stand on the other side, where waves beat against the side of the ferry. They were all alone over here. Most of the passengers seemed to have stayed in their cars.

She didn’t blame them. It wasn’t much of a sight. The water was brown, and the narrow strip of water leading out to the gulf bobbed with tankers. It smelled like fumes.

But something about the lights on the tankers against the gray sky and the rolling waves beneath them made Sierra feel free. The wind blustered against her face. There was space and movement. And Carlos’s silence didn’t echo so much.

The ferry chugged to open water. With a swift movement, Carlos reached out and grabbed her wrists, turning her toward him. Sierra jerked back, but he had her wrists in a lock. She waited for the joke, but he didn’t deliver any punch line. His grip was iron-tight.

She stared at him.

“Tell me to let you go, Sierra.”

“What are you doing?” she said in a harsh whisper.

“Tell me to let you go.”

She shook her head. She wasn’t playing this sick game, whatever it was.

His voice grew more insistent. “Say it so I know you mean it.”

The wind whipped her hair into her face, and she couldn’t see. “Let me go.”

“I don’t believe you yet.”

His hands tightened, and her wrists stung. “Stop, Carlos. You’re hurting me.” She gave a hard jerk of her wrists.

“I almost believed you that time.” He dropped her wrists. “But you’re going to have to do better.”

Sierra flipped her hair back and stalked back toward Carlos’s Mustang. She planned on getting inside and locking the doors, but he reached it first and blocked her. He leaned against it, his arms crossed. The ferry engines thrummed beneath her feet. She could feel fear flash into her face, like a burning flame. This wasn’t like Carlos.

“Tell me you want in.” His face grew stiff again.

“I thought I could trust you.” She threw the hot words out. “So much for that.”

Sierra searched for safety. She crossed to the back of the ferry in sight of a woman with her little boy. Holding on to the gate post, she leaned her face against the wonderful cold metal. The rigs disappeared in the gray, and only the lights of a ferry going the other direction winked under the darkening sky.

Water churned in streams behind them. She thought about calling her mom to come get her, but it would be better if she could get Carlos to take her home. Then she’d never speak to him again.

His hand touched her back, and she stiffened. “Don’t touch me.”

“I believed that. If you’d said that to Emilio, he might have believed you too.” He dropped his hand and moved beside her.

She glared up at him.

He tipped his head to her and spoke just loud enough to be heard over the engines. “You can trust me, Brown Eyes.”

“Is that what this was all about? Emilio?” Her voice broke.

“Yeah, Emilio.” The rail vibrated as he wrapped his hands around it. “I know Emilio, Sierra. He won’t understand if you whisper you’d rather not. You have to tell him to get lost. You have to show him you mean it all the way. Scream if you have to.”

The sound of the waves, muffled by the low-lying clouds, slapped against the sides of the ferry. She tried to imagine herself telling Emilio to get lost or screaming at him.

“Hey.” Carlos picked up her wrists, gently this time. Red cuffs circled them. He rubbed the marks with a calloused thumb, as if he could heal them with a touch. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay if someone hurts you. Not even me. Tell me it’s not okay.”

She closed her eyes.

“Don’t shut me out, Sierra. You’ve got to do this.”

She opened her eyes, but she looked out at the water. Why wouldn’t he leave her alone?

“And when you’re done telling me it’s not okay, there’s more. You’ve got to push me away. You’ve got to tell me to get lost the first second I get in your space.”

“Carlos.” It was all she could think to say to make him stop. The grayness beat against the ferry. The fluttering flags on the pike above them seemed like they were battling the wind. But how could you battle the wind?

He took her chin in his palm and lifted it so she looked at him. “You’re not trash people can just throw around any way they like. It’s okay to let people know they need to treat you right.”

She looked away.

He lowered his voice. “Look, Sierra, you’re doing everyone a favor if you tell Emilio to treat you right. Every time he pushes you around, you lose a little bit of yourself, but so does he. Every time you make him stop, you get a little piece of yourself back and so does he. I’ve seen how it works on the street.”

He was quiet for a minute. “You got something special, Brown Eyes, but you won’t get to keep it if you don’t stand up for yourself. You got that strength in you. I know you do.”

She shook her head. She didn’t have that kind of strength. She didn’t have any strength at all.

Carlos gave a short laugh. “You do. You were pretty good all those months at letting me know you didn’t want anything to do with me. You just need to take it further. Louder, you know. Let Emilio know you mean it and don’t back down when he doesn’t give up.”

They docked at Bolivar Peninsula, and Carlos drove them off the ferry, past the convenience store and the beach houses, out to a grassy, deserted beach. They got out and walked down an incline and through the sand weeds to the water’s edge. The waves were a little calmer on this side of the water. She picked up a few shells to put in her pocket and followed a crab. She dipped her finger in the surf, but it was too cold to wade. They walked side by side in silence as the sky turned from gray to black.

“It’s time, Brown Eyes.”

Time to go? She didn’t want to go yet. Now that she knew what was going on in his head, she wanted to spend a little more time with Carlos. It was nice out here with the waves and wind, and she was getting used to hanging out with him.

But Carlos didn’t head for the car. He backed up to the water’s edge and made a running leap at her. She dodged his impact just in time.

“Good. That’s a start,” he said.

She stared at him, her teeth clenched. Talking back? Self-defense? She started to walk back to the car. She didn’t need this.

He intersected her path. “You’ve got to learn, Sierra. If you won’t do it for yourself, do it for the people who care about you.”

It was no use arguing with Carlos, so she opened her hands in defeat. For a full hour he came at her and showed her how to block him with her arms. He got close to her and wouldn’t get out of her face until she made him stop.

“Look me in the eyes, and say it again louder, Sierra,” he said.

“I don’t want to yell, Carlos,” she sighed.

He held her shoulders. “Yell, Sierra. I’m Emilio. And I’m about to do something you don’t want. You’ve got to make me get out of your face.”

“You’re not Emilio. You’re not going to hurt me. And I want to go home.”

He lifted her wrists. “Oh, yeah? I did hurt you. Tell me to stop before I do it again.”

He grinned, and she submitted. “Get lost,” she said.

Carlos laughed. “I didn’t believe that for a second, Brown Eyes. Say it so loud it hurts your throat.”

She didn’t think she could yell. But one more time, as loud and clear as she could, she called, “Get lost!”

When she said it, he started it all over again. He showed her how to kick, and told her to think of places to go when she ran.

“You did good,
Ojos Cafés
,” he finally said. “I think you could stand up to Emilio if you needed to.” He paused. “And you will need to. Juan and Danny and Logan have all been watching; he’s got something to prove now.”

Sierra collapsed onto the sand, afraid she’d break into hysterical sobs or hysterical laughter. She didn’t know which. She felt so weird. Carlos sat down beside her. “What do you say to some fried shrimp and hush puppies?”

She pulled her hair back when it blew around in a ruffling wind. The cold felt good against her warm skin. They watched as clouds drifted out to sea, leaving a clear patch of starry sky. Far away, they could see the lights of oil tankers come into focus.

Carlos drove back to the ferry, and when they got back to the other shore, they ate at a quiet restaurant across the street from the seawall. From her perch by the window, the waves looked calm, but Sierra knew their height was only hidden by the dark.

She took a sip from her Coke. “Thank you, Carlos.”

He reached out, not quite touching her wrist. “I’m sorry I hurt you. I just don’t want you to put up with Emilio again.”