13. David Walks Through the glass

David and Machi raced down the stairs to play in the yard. Marina and Ori stood by the kitchen window, looking down on them. “They look so happy, like wild horses. I love how little boys are like a species of their own, so vibrant. Do you remember when you were that way?”
Ori poured milk into the pot, set it on the burner and stood closer to Marina than he usually did. “I remember running up and down Moon Park, sometimes running all the way down to the river.” His face glowed for an instant and reset into the sad mask. “I’d been running with Victor, back from the park, straight up to the roof of his building the day he fucking jumped off. I never knew why. He wasn’t around to ask and everybody had a theory.” Even Ori's happy stories led to a tragedy. Marina wished he could keep his attention off catastrophe for even one minute. Was that why she liked to spend time with owning class men like Danny and Hal, have a break from raised poor Ori? Did she fall for them because with them she could pretend there was room in life for tennis and hiking and plays. With them, for a little while, she could be blind to catastrophe.
Marina patted Ori's arm. “Pobre Victor, he’d hit a few too many walls. Oppression sucks.” She tried to take his attention off dead Victor. “Look at them run. How can they get up so much speed in that small space?”
Ori shrugged, poured hot milk into coffee mugs, handed Marina hers. She sipped the comforting, sweet hot drink, gambling that this time she would be spared a migraine.
“My students gave Amanuel a hard time about the budget but of course he wheedled out of answering their questions. It’s hard to sit with them, knowing what I know and not able to tell them a thing. Truth is we may have no program, and I may have no job. There’ll be other layoffs at the Settlement.”
“Jimmy?”
“I hadn’t thought of Jimmy but probably yes. He’s one of the last hired.”
Marina turned away from the window and faced Ori. He was stirring a sofrito at the stove. How easily they could slip into their old routine, their endless conversation.
“Will you come with me to Paco’s memorial?” She could hear it in his voice that he couldn’t face going alone. Anything to do with the Partido was still painful to him. She wanted to help him see that catastrophe in a different light. “What if nobody was the bad guy when the Partido fell apart? Do you ever consider it was the coyuntura?”
“Paco was left on his own after he was arrested. It took months to organize the Free Paco Committee. I came to politics doing prison work. I know the Partido failed him.” He looked at her so hard she turned away. She stepped closer to the window and stood watching the boys in the yard two stories below her. They were playing tag, running in a frenzy around the glass framed summer house the previous owners left behind.
“Remember when we were in the car last month, and I asked you why you left me, and you said you were dissociated at the time, somebody else…like a multiple…what did you mean?”
“I don’t remember saying that. Maybe I was somebody else.”
“I’m not joking.”
“It’s humiliating to talk about how I don’t remember so many things you tell me I’ve done or said. To say I was somebody else…that’s humiliating too. It sounds too much like I’m trying to avoid responsibility.”
“Me not taking you back…”
“Feels like the right punishment.”
“What was so hard about being with me?” He was afraid to ask. She could always hear fear in Ori’s voice and that made her frightened.
“I counted on you to be the brave one and you’d come back shaking from an action. That made me scared. But what was worse was not being able to know where you’d been and what you’d done. You’d be gone, and that was too much like my childhood with my Father always gone. And then you’d be back and you’d be gone in a different way, licking your wounds, silent and withdrawn playing your flute or listening to your records, Machi and I walking on tiptoes to protect you.”
“I didn’t help matters. Didn’t make up for that lonely childhood, made you relive it. Put you back in the place where god was your imaginary friend.”
“I was lonely with you, Ori, and you and the Partido even took god away.”
“I was a fool. I left all that room for loneliness and that predatory prick Danny walked into all that loneliness with his owning class charm…
“See…It’s too painful to talk about this..It’s too raw.”
“Why, because he dumped you the minute you were free? He just wanted a no strings married woman…”
“Not a falling apart just broke up…”
“Psycho bitch…”
“And he probably never saw you go into a crazy cleaning frenzy, staying up all night tossing out stuff and moving furniture and mopping…”
Marina doubled over laughing. “It’s not funny. When you start one of those big cleans there’s no natural stopping point…
“Yeah. Especially if you only clean up once a year…”
He came to join her at the window and they were both looking down when David ran full speed through one of the glass windows of the summer house.
They ran downstairs just as David emerged from the interior of the house covered with shards of glass, bleeding from his face, and neck and wrists and hands, anyplace skin was exposed. He was grinning, looked almost euphoric.
“We’ve got to get you to the emergency room.” Ori bent down and reached for his hand. “We’ve got to call your Mom.”
His eyes widened and he shook his head. “Are you crazy? She doesn’t know I’m here. For real then there’d be no chance she’d ever let me come back here again.”
Before Ori could catch him he’d run to the back of the yard and climbed over the fence the way he’d come.
Only then did Marina notice Machi was shaking. She knelt beside him and enfolded him in her arms. “He was bleeding all over. Is he going to die?” He sobbed. She could feel his small body racked from the belly. She could barely hear him say, “I’m scared.”
What had she been thinking leaving this family, this boy? Every minute life here needed her. How was it that some people managed to break away, divorce, start new families? She could barely manage to meet a few of the needs of the family she had.
Ori squatted beside them. “David’s going to be alright. He’s a fighter, a survivor.”
“Like you Papi, like you after they dunked your head in the kitchen sink in the foster home?”
“Like you Machi, after Rusty the cat got run over on the avenue.”
Marina looked at Ori. She could read what he was thinking. “Like you after your Mother ran away from home.”
Ori carried Machi up the stairs, all the way to the top floor. Marina trailed them. He set Machi down on his futon in the eaves, along the window. Machi rummaged among the books and action figures and cars wedged between the bed and the window fram and pulled out his blanket, once yellow now gray, which he did not allow to be washed. He hadn’t been needing it lately to go to sleep. “Maybe he should eat?” Marina didn’t want to leave him for one minute even to get him food. Machi shook his head then nodded. “Macaroni and cheese.” She rose to fix the food and stood for a moment at the door watching Ori curl up beside his son.
Ori still kept the block of cheddar in the same drawer of the fridge, the pasta shells on the same shelf. Marina put on the water to boil and sat herself at the table to grate cheese into a bowl. The tree branches were barely visible. Night had come fast. The supplicant branches, still partly bare, moved slightly. She thought of bleeding David and terrified Machi and moaned. “What had she been thinking? Was anything worth causing her son pain?”
She put the shells into the water and walked out of the kitchen along the hallway, through the living room to the front windows, just underneath Machi’s room. She remembered that if she put her face on the glass and craned her neck far to the right she could catch a glimpse of the river. This was one thing she loved about living in Moon Park, it was built on a hill, and from all the street corners, and even from her own window, she could see a shred of river. She couldn’t bear to feel landlocked. Below her awareness there was a way she was always missing the Island and needed to remember that the City peninsula was nearly an island. She walked back to the kitchen, mixed the shells with the butter and cheese and served Machi a bowlful.
Machi was asleep against Ori’s chest and Ori was also sleeping. Marina spooned against Ori with her head propped on a pillow, staring out at the street. This was what Machi saw every night. The street lights came on, the people ambled up the block, home from work. She saw Julia across the street making her way up the hill in her high heels and little red suit. She saw her turn into the arched entrance to the courtyard of her tall apartment building, partly blocked from view by a tree. She heard her scream, the same horror film scream she’d given the day they lost the boys on the train. She screamed until the neighbors on both sides of her building came out and joined her. “Dios mio, que te paso?” One of them must have called the cops and within minutes there were two patrol cars spinning their lights, their noses parked on the sidewalk.
Ori and Machi woke up and the three of them watched in silence as the ambulance pulled into the hydrant space in front of Julia’s. Marina could feel Machi’s body trembling as David was put into the back of the ambulance. She looked at Ori. Were they stupid for not getting David to the emergency room right away? Should they have guessed where he would have gone? Should they have called his Mother? Was it respect for David or fear of Julia that kept them from doing so? Ori was smiling. “David takes care of himself.” For a few minutes after the ambulance was gone they watched the neighbors clustered around the tree by Julia’s stoop, lit by the streetlight, talking. What story would David have made up?
Ori gathered up Machi from his little bed under the eaves wrapped him in the threadbare gray blanket and carried him through the toy room back into his own bedroom, the one he and Marina had shared. “Tonight you get to sleep here.” He tucked Machi into the bed. Marina handed him the bowl and sat next to him with a stack of picture books under her arm.
“I don’t want a book. I want Machimbili.”
He ate one mouthful of macaroni, and then another. But he pushed the bowl away.
“Machimbili was traveling through space in a spaceship made out of his Mother’s love.”
Machi looked at Ori. “Can it be made out of his Father’s love too?”
Marina nodded. “In a spaceship made out of his Mother’s and his Father’s love.”
“They didn’t know where in space they were. This was a part of the Universe they hadn’t seen before.”
Machi gripped her ear with his fist. He spoke softly. “He couldn’t see the planets. Because they were made of glass. He didn’t know there were any planets around or if the invisible people in the glass planets were good or bad.”
He sat up. He’d gotten himself excited instead of sleepy. “His spaceship crashed right into one of the glass planets and next thing he knew he was covered with little tiny sharp pieces of glass and his red blood was getting all over everything. He really wanted his Mother and his Father to come help him but he didn’t know how to reach them…”
Ori crawled in behind Machi and as he leaned into the backboard of the bed he pulled him onto his lap. “He remembered his powers just then, the magic panel on the dashboard. It was only to be used in dire emergencies but Machimbili thought that maybe maybe this could be one. He pushed the button..”
Marina nestled against them. “When he pushed the buttons Mami and Papi materialized beside him, they beamed there.”
Machi took her hand. “O yes. That’s right. He can beam them whenever he wants them, they’re always there, they’re the spaceship.”
She stroked the hair pasted with sweat onto his forehead. “And now that they were there, so real that he could touch them, what were they going to do to help him?”
Machi thought, scrunched up his face, opened his eyes wide. “They brought the glass magnet and pulled off all the glass, and the healing elixir and closed off all the holes, but best of all, they brought the book with the space maps. The book with all the secret pathways between the planets that no one can see.”
Ori laughed. “And what about the special magic glasses that let you know at a glance if somebody is good or bad.”
“And there he found his friend Davimbili who’d flown into the glass before him and he pulled off the glass and wiped him with the elixir and through the magic glasses he knew, that no matter what Davimbili’s mother said, or what the teachers in school said, he was good.”