Until the Darkness Goes

The Cut

Molly ran up the stairs to catch the phone on the fourth ring.

“This is Betty Miles at Nugent Alverez’s school? His teacher, Mrs. Guzman? Asked me to call you to make an appointment to see her?” All of Betty’s pronouncements ended in a question mark even where there was no question, as if she were asking permission to actually be Betty Miles and the secretary at the school.

“Did Mrs. Guzman say why she wants to meet?” It was Molly’s turn to ask a question, only hers was meant to elicit an answer. Betty was quiet a long time at the other end of the phone, which made Molly nervous. She felt that she was somehow being judged by this little secretary and it pissed her off.

“She said to just tell you there was an incident at school today.” Her words were clipped and signaled that there was an end to the discussion. If Molly wanted to know more, she’d have to meet Ms. Guzman.

She wanted to say that getting off from work in the middle of the day, and from a new job, might cost her that job. She wanted to tell Betty that she was tired, even mid-way through the day, tired because she stayed up too late and drank way too many beers, something her Narc and Alcohol Anon session mates disapproved of, but that was how she got through her nights.

* * *

“I have to make arrangements at work. I’ll call you.”

When Molly asked for the number, Betty seemed somewhat surprised. Molly guessed she was used to some welfare chick. Or some type who made side money giving blow jobs to the locals, and not a real live gringa with a job. One who might just have to check with her boss before she ran over to meet Ms. Guzman.

She told herself to relax, settle in to the end of the day. The boy would be home and he needed her to be calm, even if he was beginning to act out in school. Her mind seized on Nugent becoming a pre-teen gangbanger, and she wanted to lecture herself about making way too much of this. Yet she knew there was that possibility, if not now, then certainly a year or more down the road. And how would she be able to piece her life back together if that were to happen? She pulled a beer from the fridge and took a long hard swig from the bottle. She had not been to an N.A. meeting in a week. She toyed with the label, ruminating on the thought of her many transgressions. Yes, beer was alcohol, and therefore outside the regimen, easier to fall all the way back to using if she was getting a buzz from booze. She didn’t want to think about that now. Her eyes hurt; the kitchen looked bright to her with the sunrays bouncing off the clean floor. How easy it would be to lose what she gained if her desire for something stronger than beer took hold. She opened a kitchen drawer full of odd pieces of things, straws, toothpicks, a can opener, a broken figurine of a small angel and on top of all of it the photo she was looking for. Stella’s christening. Javier’s family insisted, and she didn’t care. She thought of the joke on her mother, and what she would say if she knew her Jewish granddaughter was baptized, and a Catholic.

There was a close-up of Javier holding Stella. Stella’s round baby face was beatific, the first curl of a smile where her father kissed her cheek. “Stella.” She whispered her name and stroked the picture, and the loss of Stella became a keen and sharp pain. She took another long pull on the bottle and swallowed, the fizzy taste, the lime, all tasted good.

Molly thought she heard Nugent coming up the stairs, but it was too early for his bus to have dropped him off. And the footsteps were too heavy for a skinny ten year old. Instead Javier was standing in front of her with just a screen door between them. He reached to push the screen at the same time that Molly tugged and opened the door.

“Perfect end to my day.” She glared at him and the smile that momentarily played on his lips faded to a thin and bitter line. He looked tired, yet sober, in control anyway.

“Yes, Querida, I know how glad you are to see me.” She instinctively moved back although he had not moved forward.

“Nugent will be here soon.” It sounded like a lame excuse even to her. She knew that if Javier wanted to, Nugent coming home wouldn’t stop him from violence any more than it would stop him from making love to her, which was its own kind of violence. Molly told herself she was overreacting. He had a right to feel hurt. She used him to get a foster child. While he conjured images of the both of them together raising this boy, she pulled the rug out.

“I don’t see you too much anymore.” He must be reading her mind.

She felt tired and shaky from too much coffee and too much Toya. She opened the fridge for another Corona, cut the right size piece of lime and wiped the lime juice around the rim of the bottle before she expertly dunked it in. She kicked off her sandals, and stretched her legs out onto the chair in front of her, using it like a foot stool, and lit yet another cigarette. She knew he watched her drink, watched her stretch her legs.

“Nugent? That’s the foster kid? Funny name for a kid. I never got to meet him.”

This was a calmer Javier. He initiated the conversation with something benign, almost polite. She couldn’t decide if it was the beer that was marring her judgment or something new in him. She had to give it to him, he was something to look at. Dark, dark hair that flopped over his brow, taller than most other Mexican men she knew, maybe like a conquistador ancestor she liked to tell herself, and smooth skinned like the Mexican Indian blood that claimed most of him. He looked healthy, something the drugs never really made a dent in. His tee shirt was worn not too tight, just enough to push against the toned biceps, and tight abdomen. He’d probably look this good when he was sixty.

“You got the place looking nice.” Javier looked around the room at the fresh paint, the clean curtains in the windows. It wasn’t hard to notice the difference from the hovel they both made it in their drugged glory days when sweaty sheets stayed on the bed for weeks until she came out of her haze or the sun was slanting into the rooms in a way that she couldn’t ignore the dust, the grime, the mess she lived in.

She offered him a beer but he shook his head, no. Odd. The Javier she knew started his day with a shot of tequila and a joint.

“What, you just said something?” She was having trouble staying focused. Javier stood, leaning against the refrigerator and she felt overly scrutinized. He lit a cigarette and dropped the match into her ashtray, then moved away from her as if to say he was giving her space.

“I said Nugent is a funny name for a Latino. But he’s half black, no? So I guess that is where it comes from.”

Molly smirked. In the past, she thought, he exhibited a much more overt racism. “They could have just as well named him Jesus.” She pronounced the name in the Spanish, to sound like Heysuse. “His mother was Latina.” Her slur was not lost on Javier. His eyes narrowed, a sign in the past, anyway, that like a panther, he’d strike. But whatever storm lurked behind them seemed momentarily quelled.

“He going to be here very long? You like this kid?”

She could see how hard he was working to keep this even keel. Okay, she thought. I’ll be nice. “I don’t know how long. He’s the product of a messed up mother they can’t find. She took off with her boyfriend, to Mexico somewhere. The father is dead.” Her bottle was empty and she wanted another. She became impatient. “So what are you doing here?”

“Can’t I stop to say hi? My brother just moved on the street, so I was seeing him.” Javier opened the fridge and took out a bottle of water for himself.

“Making yourself at home? Give me another will you?” She held up her empty bottle. “Have to replenish.”

There was a puzzled look on his face, and she knew why. His English was very good for a first generation Angelino, but certain idioms and turns of phrase eluded him. It touched a nerve if he thought he was showing this deficiency, and now that nerve summoned a dark look, as dark as his hair because he most likely never heard the word replenish.

She was more than slightly buzzed having guzzled three beers, and to prove her own point she didn’t wait for him to give her a beer, but stood to take one from the fridge while he still held the door open. It was the wrong move, because her position placed her directly in front of him, all the ammunition he required to gently but firmly pull her to him. Javier stood so that their bodies were in alignment, and Molly felt herself come alive in a way she hadn’t felt since before Stella. The memory of his body, the memory of them both, carried her along. One side of her watched and stood back while the other gave in to what was comfortable and familiar. Yes, she told herself, he could be wonderful, he could be gentle in his lovemaking. And then, just as suddenly as she succumbed, she forced herself away from him.

“You drinking a lot?” He released her almost as if he read her conflict.

“What the fuck?” She became incensed with his remark. “Who are you, my mother?” She twisted the cap off the bottle and cut her palm as she did it. Javier tried to take her hand to look at it, but she pulled away and moved to the other side of the room.

“You go to the meetings, si?”

“Oh, I get it, you’re reformed. How many months, Javier? How many?” Her laugh was so full of irony that it might have choked her. “What? Let me guess. Six. Six goddamned months off of meth? Off of weed? Who the hell are you to tell me? Look at you, you're this close to drinking a beer. You’re already breaking a cardinal rule being near someone who does.” She ran water on her bloody palm and wrapped it in a paper napkin and pressed it tight. But the paper filled up and was red immediately.

“Querida. You’re hurt.” He took her hand, which she let him, and removed the napkin, and stretched the palm. She winced. “Just let me see.” They both saw a pulsing of bright red blood in the center of her palm.

“It’s an arteriole.” Molly put pressure on it again with a kitchen towel. “I’ve cut a small artery. It needs to be stitched.” She pushed past him to the back porch. “I gotta get someone to watch for Nugent when he gets home. Carlos should be home.”

They left the apartment together, Javier gently clutching her elbow to steady her. She was glad for the buzz, although unsteady on her feet. Carlos was at the landing of the third floor as they descended. “Can you wait for Nugent? He should be home soon?”

Carlos nodded recognition toward Javier. “Sure Molly.” It was the nod of one man to another, of one compadre to another that all was well or would be, that all was in control. He did not ask her how she hurt herself, so she was quick to tell him that she cut it on the beer bottle cap. Only after she told him did she realize that she didn’t want him to think it was Javier. She remonstrated to herself that maybe that was the first time she was kind to Javier in well over six months.

As she walked to the curb, she felt watched. The neighborhood was home. Everyone congregated at their front doors or on the back porches of the semi-slum they lived in. There were calls from the men to Javier in rapid fire Mexican Spanish that she couldn’t always follow. It was small talk. How are you? What’s new? Hey, I see you have a new car. Buena. The subterranean message was more like, She’s your woman again? Because to all of them, a woman of her age alone was against nature. She slid onto the highly polished leather seat of his vintage Camaro and thought how he must have massaged the oil into it until it was no longer thirsty, until it was as luminous as he could make it.

“Do you know where to go?” She flipped the mirror down to view her hair and she saw him smile at her vanity.

“Santa Maria, no?” The car’s engine purred, telling her that it was as well cared for inside as out.

“Yes, just drive to the Emergency Room. You don’t have to wait.”

“Fuck, Molly.” He whispered the words. Then, “Buena.” With a nod to his head.

The heat of the late afternoon blended with the beer and the motion of the car to lull her into a semi-sleep. She dreamt vividly in ultra-Technicolor, a hot sun, a man with very white teeth smiling at her, caressing her face, and woke startled as she felt Javier’s hand on her face.

“Molly. We are at the hospital.” Javier parked the car at the lot next to the entrance and escorted her inside where a wave of cool air hit her. Someone brought a wheelchair and she heard Javier saying her name slowly for the intake nurse. “Morris.” She told them her address. She heard Javier say, “Her husband.” The nurse didn’t seem to find the last name he gave for Molly juxtaposed against his surname as noteworthy. She probably thought Molly was just one more very independent woman, making her stand, holding onto her identity.

She must have fallen asleep again and woke to find herself on a gurney, hooked to an IV and Javier sitting next to her, gently touching her fingers. The hand was bandaged.

“It was as you said, arteriole. You lost much blood.” If anyone wondered how worried he was, his expression answered the question.

“Nugent.” Molly tried to sit up. Nugent would worry not to find her home, and while Carlos wouldn’t burden the boy, someone in the neighborhood might get the story all wrong. Besides there was blood in the kitchen, she remembered seeing it in the sink and it dripped on the floor before Javier pressed the dish cloth onto the wound. What a mess that kitchen must be.

Javier steadied her and the nurse wound the bed up so she could sit. “I talked to the boy. He is okay.”