Everybody Wants to Escape

Everybody wants to escape
Marina came early to pick Adela up for work. She knocked softly. She kissed Adela by the door and whispered, "Let's go to La Morada. Let's not go to work. I want to escape today." Adela put her finger to her lips. Noel was still sleeping. He slept through everything. She slipped into her bathing suit, patted her rounding belly. "It's a bit tight." Marina shrugged. "You barely show." Adela pulled a lose flowered dress over the suit, kissed Noel softly on the cheek, and walked outdoors. Clotilde raced past her. She sniffed the driveway for traces of her own scents. Adela lingered a moment as she shut the door. She liked to watch Noel sleep. He slept on his belly, the sheet tangled in his legs. He stirred and his white boxers slid below his waist.In this blue light, the curve of his lower back, the small ridges of his backbone, aroused her tenderness. Her life was good.
Walking down the driveway they heard Zuleika yell at Lydia, "Diantre muchacha levantate." The women picked up their pace, threw themselves into Marina's car. Clotilde jumped into the car and settled between them. Zuleika screamed louder, "Devil child wake up." Adela covered her ears. "Let's get away from here." Marina lurched the car and screeched her tires. "We're escaping. Everybody wants to escape."
They set out before dawn. Marina was a fast, careful driver. In the early light she drove in silence to the sea. She'd just come back from a silent retreat at the Manantial Paraiso Spa. She liked silence. Not until the sun they were chasing to the West burnt the morning sereno and shone into their faces, did Adela want to speak. "One day maybe I'll regret wanting to turn my back on the Party." She spoke more loudly than she meant to. Marina turned sharply to face her, nodded, put her eyes back on the road. She could show she was listening without saying a word. Her silence made room for Adela to go on. "Last night Betzaida came by and when she was gone I wanted more than anything to feel my revolutionary hope. Tomasa Monte never wavered."
"Do you want to stop by Nati's?" Adela shook her head and they drove past the turnoff for the center of La Morada. Nati would be getting Guille ready for school and Guillermo would be on his way to Old Town with a carful of La Morada artesanias to sell to tourists in his cooperative store. "Sometimes their domestic bliss is too much. How did my sister get herself such a normal life?" Adela stared at the small pink, turquoise, lavender, bright green and yellow wooden houses on the edges of La Morada, peered into their dark front doors, open to the morning breeze. "This is where Noel and I should live."
"With the baby, pretty soon you'll be needing a place of your own."
Adela stroked Clotilde's head resting on her lap. "Betzaida's going to be pissed both of us are out today." Marina turned right, toward the beach. "What's the point of escaping if you're going to worry? What goes on at Infodes that can't wait until tomorrow?"
"All those women who can't find their husbands, those mothers who can't find their sons."
Marina said nothing. They both knew Infodes almost never found anyone.
They walked to the low sea grape. Clotilde knew their usual spot, ran ahead and waited, well planted on all fours. Marina spread a blanket in the concave sand by the roots. They lay on the faded, striped cloth and watched Clotilde chase a crab, burrow her snout in the sand after it, and jump away, not used to its claws. The tide was coming in but the sea was still far away from their burrow.
Adela told Marina everything. She told her thoughts she didn't know she had. "I'm afraid to be a mother. If I get a girl I'm afraid I'll kill her the way my mother almost killed Nati. "
Marina listened.
"If she's a girl Noel will love her more than he loves me. The way Leo loved Nati more than he loved Elsa. It's going to make me want to kill her. One day I'll find her dead by my side and it will have been me who killed her without knowing I was killing her."
Adela sobbed. Marina held her.
"The way your cousin Zuleika is killing Lydia."
" Every day she does a bit more killing and not for stealing her husband but because a daughter wasn't enough to keep him. Now she's alone stuck with a girl."
Marina kissed Adela's cheek. "It's good to have a friend like you who doesn't need to pretend." She pointed to the sea. They rose and walked hand hand into the radiance,to the water. Flat stones in the sand glistened in the sunlight. "The ocean is mirror still after last night's storm." Marina stepped into the water. "We'll be friends forever. We'll grow old together. I'll never have to be alone because you, Adela, are with me." Marina's father was a protestant preacher. and she liked parodying his sermons "I don't believe in the christ out there. I believe in the interior christ." Her loud preacher intonation rose over the sound of the waves. They laughed hard.
Adela sang a made up lullaby for Pulgarcito with a tune half hymn, half bolero. "Christ is you," she sang.
"You and I are christ." Marina joined the song as she threw off her dress and ran into the water in her bathing suit. Adela followed. Clotilde ran back and forth along the edge of the surf. They floated on their backs, eyes closed to the sun. "The universe is red," Marina said.The water was pulling her away. Already she was several yards closer to the reef. Adela felt the sea pulling her to the deep, to the corals. "There's undertow." They tried to swim to the beach but couldn't fight the pull of the corriente. Adela thought of Pulgarcito. She wondered what Noel would do when she never came home. Next time she looked to the shore she saw the knees of two young men, scissoring in and out of the flat water. Two fishermen came into the tide and pulled them to shore. It wasn't easy to pull the women and their own weight against the current. Clotilde met them in a frenzy of leaping and barking. Her small body trembled.
"If you hadn't walked by we would have drowned." Marina took off her gold hoop earrings and gave them to the taller boy, who'd pulled her out. "For your novia."
Adela gave her earrings to the shorter one, her rescuer. "For your novia." He held in the palm of his big hand the tiny silver orchids which once had been her mother's.
After the young men were gone Adela lay on her back under the seagrape branches. "I shouldn't have given him my mother's earrings."
"No. That's good. That's better. Spread her inheritance. Maybe her spirit made them come by precisely this morning, precisely this moment."
Clotilde lay in a ball at their feet.She whimpered and barked softly in her sleep, her body still trembled.
They ate the sandwiches Marina had packed, and stared at the water, so smooth, so treacherous. They drove home in silence. As Marina pulled into Tio Nestor's driveway Adela could see Noel was not at his studio. "Thank God he's not home. I won't have to tell him yet I almost got his child drowned."
Lydia was screaming.They jumped out of the car and ran to where Lydia lay on the edge of the porch, pounding her legs and arms up and down, screaming. "Mami, no te vayas. Mami, no te vayas."
Zuleika walked out the front door, climbed over her daughter and told Adela, "Llevame." Not waiting for an answer she headed for Marina's car. "Almost drowning was enough telenovela for one day." Adela looked at Marina, willing her friend not to let Zuleika commandeer her car. Lydia jumped up, ran after her mother and grabbed onto her legs. Zuleika raised an arm as if to strike her, but instead knelt and whispered to the child, "Te voy a mandar a buscar." Lydia's screams grew louder. Zuleika shook her off. "I'll send for you." She climbed into the back seat of the car. Adela stood, torn between loyalty to the child and the command of her cousin. She remembered all the times she'd gone along with Zuleika, as cover for dates she didn't want Nestor to know about. She'd been her lookout and stood guard by the kitchen window of their old house, before Nestor became a successful contratista, so that Zuleika could neck in the back yard with Chucho, one of her first novios. They'd been dropped off together at the movies by Nestor, but Adela had watched the film alone, while Zuleika met one novio or another. This was one time she should tell her to go on her own. She should tell her to do whatever she would have done if Adela hadn't shown up when she did.
Now Matilde was standing beside them. Lydia clung to her grandmother's legs, her face pressed into her thighs.
"Si te vas vete ya que por ahi viene ya tu padre." Matilde bent down, put her head into the back car window and commanded her daughter. "If you're going you'd better go now. You're father will be home any minute." She pushed Adela into the car. "Llevala." Marina backed the car onto the street.
From the back seat Zuleika spoke.
"No aguanto mas. No aguanto mas." Her voice got louder, close to a screech. "I can't take it one more minute."
Domingo was waiting for her in his old, shiny Lincoln, at the intersection near the dog racetrack, a few yards beyond the bustop. Zuleika jumped out of the car and ran to meet him. She didn't say goodbye.

By the time Marina dropped Adela off at the curb Noel was in his studio, painting. Adela walked up the driveway. The house was quiet. She imagined Matilde and Lydia were curled up on her king size bed eating arroz con leche. She entered the studio quietly, kissed Noel softly on the cheek, and sat in her rocker, to watch him work. She didn't break his absorption. Inside his ignorance Pulgarcito had nearly drowned and Lydia had been thrust into the horror story. She envied, she hated, his absorption, his ignorance. She no longer competed with his art, no longer walked into his studio to do a "Papi mirame" the way she used to do in Leo's study while he wrote his lectures on steno pads. She thought: "What I envy is that he knows what to make. What is my artifact? She felt a rush of gratitude that she and Marina had not drowned. She felt Pulgarcito in his own safe sea. She closed her eyes and listened for his blood inside her own. For now this secret creature was artifact enough.