Afterlife - Julia Alvarez Page 0,39

a flush of protective tenderness.

You’re going to be all right, she reassures the girl.

Once inside the trailer, Antonia is not so sure: Mario is grim and silent; José is all over himself, filling the silence with chatter; Estela, tentative, head bowed, her thank-yous barely audible. José shows the two women around: the tiny dirty kitchen, the dirty tiny bathroom, two tiny bedrooms—José has vacated his for Estela; he’ll join Mario in the other one.

The time has come. Antonia pulls the worried girl to one side and slips an envelope into Estela’s hands. It’s my number and la doctora’s and un dinerito. Anything . . . anything happens you go right next door to el patrón. The note explains what he’s to do.

And then, she repeats again, you’re going to be all right.

The young girl’s lips tremble, tears well in her eyes. A child who has realized that her mother will not be staying with her on the first day of school.

I really have to go, Antonia pleads. She touches the red string on the girl’s wrist. Acuérdate: you are armed with good luck. God will protect you. The tears fall. Estela’s crying is noiseless. Her sorrows aren’t meant to disturb anyone.

But they disturb Antonia. The girl, the two boy-men, the world of impending doom in which they and others like them live. Antonia has veered from her narrow path. Looked over the guardrail at the reflection on the water below. As in a dream, faces shift into each other: Izzy’s, Sam’s, the face of the girl she is leaving behind, her own.

Who is the most important one?

seven

Objects in mirror are closer than they appear

On her way to her sister rendezvous, Antonia can’t stop thinking about Estela. Not just the immediate solution to the girl’s problem, but what will become of this kid with a kid?

At the mountain pass, a car has pulled into the overlook area; a man and a woman are pointing out the landscape to each other. Never again will she do that with Sam. No matter the sips, the narrow path, grief keeps ambushing her: unsuspecting moments, nooks, crannies, cracks where the root system of loving is embedded in her life. Brutally yanked out with that tearing sound of detaching a clump of grass from the ground.

Antonia recognizes the very spot where in her recent dream she went off the road. No snow now, no icy patch sending her flying over the side of the mountain, no frost on the windshield. The trees are showing the faintest halo of green and gold. Spring, at last. Sam’s favorite season.

She has been listening to a podcast. A therapist, recently widowed, is discussing her experience of loss and grieving. The woman is saying some wise things; in fact, she is quoting some of Antonia’s own chestnuts—in the midst of winter . . . an invincible summer. In a dark time, the eye begins to see, and so on—but instead of feeling comforted, Antonia feels irritated. What is wrong with her? She listens to podcasts, reads books on grief, searches for answers to her questions. But any suggestions she is offered annoy her. She has already tried that—and guess what? It doesn’t work.

The widowed therapist brings up Rilke. More chestnuts. Love consists in this: that two solitudes protect, touch, and greet each other . . . Perhaps we are here in order to say: house, bridge, fountain . . . Cómo se dice parir, me duele, tengo hambre, tengo miedo? (Estela intruding again.) In a letter to his good friend, a countess with too many surnames, Rilke has this wonderful insight, the therapist widow is saying. She doesn’t want to mess it up. Give her a second to find the quote. The sound of turning pages and the woman reads, Death does not wound us without, at the same time, lifting us toward a more perfect understanding of this being and of ourselves.

Does Antonia really understand Sam any better now than she did before? Or herself? Perhaps with time she will. Everything is still too recent, though the year anniversary is fast approaching, the maximum she can ask of anyone’s indulgence. Right now, she doesn’t need to understand; she needs to stop the leakage of spirit, plug the hole in her heart.

She turns off the widow-therapist and plays a recording Izzy sent her recently. A medium who communicates with the dead. Izzy had gone to a group session in a large auditorium and the medium had picked her out of the