Girl in the Mirror (38 page)

Luis went into his back office and began stuffing papers and photographs into a tote bag. Michael ran into the kitchen, his light slithering across the cabinets as he ripped through the shelves and drawers until he found a plastic-coated tote bag, then hurried back to stuff supplies into it. The water was pouring in through the doors. It was already two inches deep on the first floor.

“Papa! Do you have a rubber raft?”

Rosa stopped on the stairs, her eyes bulging as she stared at the rising water in the house. She moistened her lips.

“Oh, my God…”

“I have one of those blow-up boats in the garage,” Luis replied, wading back into the living room, the tote around his shoulders.

“We can’t go out to get it. Forget it, Papa. Go on upstairs.”

“I think Cisco has one of those Boogie boards in his room,” Rosa cried.

“Go get it, and stay up there. Hurry up! Papa, come on!”

“Who is giving the orders around here?” Luis bellowed, rearing up and yanking his arm from Michael’s grip. “I said I have a raft. I’m going to get it.”

Before Michael could stop him, Luis strode angrily to the front door and swung it open. He was met with a five-foot tidal wave.

“Papa!” Rosa screamed as the water gushed in, sweeping Luis off his feet and swirling him madly around the room. Michael dove after him, stroking hard and furiously in the angry water that filled the small, dark space, crashing them both against the wall. As he swam through inky water up to his chest, he felt a bruising bump on his shoulder by something hard and stiff in the water. A broken branch? A piece of furniture? An animal? He didn’t want to know. He pushed on, toward his father’s voice, grabbing hold of his hand before he floated out the front door.

Rosa was screaming to them from high up on the stairs. “Where are you? I can’t see you!”

“Grab his hand!” Michael shouted, pushing toward her narrow beam of light. “Pull him up.”

Rosa was glad—for the first time in her life—for her size and strength. Bending far over, she grabbed hold of her father’s hand and pulled him out of the water to the second floor. Michael climbed up right behind them.

Exhausted, numb with cold and weary to the bone, Michael slumped against the hall wall beside his sister and his father and lay his head back, chattering and breathing heavily.

“I’m sorry,” Luis sputtered beside him.
“Lo siento.”

Michael draped his arms around his father and Rosa.

They huddled together for an unknown length of time, gaining comfort in their nearness. Outside, they could hear the storm roaring and shrieking, and the rain battering and shaking the roof. Inside, the water swirled below as black and thick as steeped tea. Michael could smell the sour stench of spoilage, and his shoulder and cheek were throbbing where he was hit in the water.

“We’d better see what’s going on,” he said when he’d caught a second wind. Turning on the flashlight, he shone it down the staircase. The beam of light revealed that the water was rising, step by step. Rosa sucked in her breath, and her hand clenched his arm. Luis swore softly in Spanish. Michael flicked off the light and leaned his head back against the wall, closing his eyes tight.

“Are we going to die?” Rosa’s voice was shrill.

“Not if I can help it.
Ojala!
Giving my time to this place is one thing. I damn well don’t intend to give it my life.” He mopped his face with his palm, then ran it through his hair, pushing the long, damp tendrils clean from his face.

“At least the children are safe. Thank God Manuel had the guts to buck you for once and protect his children.” He swung his head to face his sister. “Think what would have happened if they hadn’t left. Do you think you could have saved them from that water down there? Could you save them now?”

“What business is it of yours?” Rosa cried back. “Don’t stick your nose where it doesn’t belong!”

“I’m making it my business! Ever since I came home you’ve been rubbing my nose in my efforts here. You’ve got a chip on your shoulder the size of California, and even though I can take what you dish out, I can’t sit by and watch you take your anger out on your kids. I know about Cisco. I should have said something long before. Think of your children, Rosa. You put your need for Papa’s approval ahead of your need to care for your children. If you’ve got a problem with me, deal with
me.
”

“Yeah, I’ve got a problem with you,” she replied. Her resentment was clear. “You come home and suddenly you’re
El Patron.
The big man in charge. Just because you’re a male, a son, you get everything.”

He thrust his jaw forward, unaware how much he resembled his nephew. Unaware that his sister was making that same comparison. “I’m just doing my job.”

“Shut up, Rosa,” Luis thundered. “This is no time to go into this.”

“Again, you tell me what to do! This is the perfect time to go into this. We are forced together here. For all we know we might die here. I want you to listen to me for once!”

“Even now, at such a time, you talk to your father like…”

Michael cut him off. “Papa, let her talk.”

She skipped a beat, registering his support. “Miguel is right,” she said in a calmer tone. “I am angry at him, but it’s really between you and me, Papa. I am never good enough for you. It was always Miguel and Roberto who mattered. The good sons. Always it was ‘Rosa, don’t yell, don’t fight, don’t be like a man. Listen to your mother.’ Yet, just tonight you told me I was macho, as if that was the greatest compliment you could give me.” She wiped her eyes with angry strokes. “Even my body was not good enough. It was too big. Too strong. A body that should’ve been Roberto’s. All my life I felt I wasn’t worth much. That a woman wasn’t worth much.”

“I always tell you a woman is worth her weight in gold, but you never act like a woman!” Luis cried back.

“But I
am. I do!
” She shook her head sharply, sending droplets of water across their faces. “Your ideas of what I should do as a woman are just as warped as your ideas of what Roberto should do as a man. Or Miguel should do as a son. They are ancient. Out of touch. Like telling us to endure.
Aguantar.
” Her movements rustled the dark.

“When I was young, all I wanted to do was go to college, like my brothers. But you said, ‘No. What does a woman need to learn besides how to take care of her family?”’ She swallowed hard, gathering her control. “I did what you wanted, Papa. I got married. I gave you grandchildren. I worked for you in the business when your sons left you. And still that wasn’t enough. When they came home, you took it all away.

“Do you know how that makes me feel? The anger goes deep into my soul. It blinds me. I try to hold it in. But sometimes I can’t control it. I explode.”

“And Cisco gets the brunt of it,” Michael said softly.

Rosa’s eyes widened, then she averted them, turning her head and shrugging. “Just a few hits. It’s nothing you and I didn’t get from Papa.”

“Do you want Cisco to grow up to hit his kids, too?”

Luis grumbled and barked out, “So it’s my fault again. Always it is my fault.”

“No,” Rosa said in a strangled voice. “No, this is my fault. When I think how I put my children in danger. They could be here now. My babies.” The mountainous woman slumped.

“Cisco is a lot like you,” Michael said gently. “You should be proud of him.”

She buried her head deeper into the crook of her arm. “I love him.”

“Rosa, this goes too deep,” Michael said. “You’re so mad at Papa, at me, that it’s eating you up inside. Love isn’t enough. You need help. You need to see someone.”

Rosa stretched out her hand in the darkness to grasp Michael’s. Her hand was large and strong, her fingers damp and cold. The squeeze she gave him spoke eloquently of understanding and agreement. Of shame and forgiveness. Michael felt a rush of emotion and squeezed her hand in reply, sending her a silent message from brother to sister, that needed no words.

Gradually the howling wind quieted and the pattering of rain silenced. Looking out the hall window, Michael saw that the rain had at last stopped, that the swirling black clouds were moving out. Though there was neither moon nor stars to illuminate the dark sky, it was clear the worst was over. Someone would be coming after them soon.

“We made it,” he said to them, his voice hoarse and rough with fatigue. “We’re alive. That’s all that matters.”

“We got through this together. The Mondragons,” Rosa said, triumph audible even in her exhaustion.

Luis raised his head and met Michael’s gaze in the dim light. “No, we are not all together,” he replied soberly. “
Mi hijo
Roberto. He is not here. Or my wife.”

Michael tightened his lips. Tonight, his father appeared humbled. Laid low, like the rooster that had fallen in the sand.

“You were right to tell Manuel and Rosa to protect their children,” Luis continued in his low, gravelly voice. “I almost got you and Rosa killed with my stubbornness. I could have killed those
bebés.
”

His voice cracked and he shook his head. “What kind of father would put his family in danger? Abandon his child? Break his daughter’s heart? What kind of man?”

A week later the water had subsided and the families were allowed past the police barricades back onto their land. Michael, Luis and Marta drove in one car. Manuel and Rosa in another. They drove slowly across the mud strewn roads, a sad, defeated caravan, as the sun shone in a brilliant blue sky overhead. It seemed a mockery of the drenched and soggy earth below.

The nearby town was in ruins, the schools were ravaged, and it would take months to clear all the mud from the church. The pumping station had broken down and sent raw sewage spewing out, polluting every river in the county. Officials told the residents to disinfect everything, shampoo the rugs, wash the clothes and to boil anything that came in contact with their eyes or mouths.

It was hard to return to the nursery, to the house, to see all that they’d spent a lifetime in building destroyed in one night. No one said much as they walked around their ruined property, trying to determine what could be salvaged from the soggy masses littering their home and the fields. Everything inside and out was coated with a thick, gray, fur-like silt that stank to the heavens.

Marta, who had not been there during the flood and didn’t know what to expect, stood at the front door to her home, tears streaming down her face. All her beloved possessions—her mother’s clock, her photographs, her furniture—lay in ruins. The sofa was a mildewed lump on the front lawn.

Luis walked to the crest of the hill overlooking his beloved nursery and stopped, his hands clasped behind his back, his shoulders slumped. Rosa and Manuel followed him, flanking him on either side. Michael looked up from his work and saw them, a tableau of dejection, all slumped shoulders and bent heads. Laying down the sodden carpet he’d dragged from the house, he walked up the hill, placing one foot carefully ahead of the other as he traversed the slippery terrain. Reaching the top, he looked out over the nursery and saw what they saw. Acre after acre of rotting plants and marshy bog spread out before them. The nursery that he’d given up his architectural career for, that he’d spent the last four years building instead of skyscrapers, lay in desperate ruins at his feet.

Nature had stripped him bare. She had cheated him of any joy or satisfaction he might have felt at the end of this four-year rotation. It seemed to him as though she were mocking him and all his well laid plans. The Bible quote,
Pride goeth before a fall,
played in his mind.

Luis was devastated. He looked as though he’d aged ten years.

“I have seen this land, these plants, fail many times before,” he said in a low, somber voice that seemed to come from deep inside. “But always I found something I could save. Something, eh? But this…” He stretched out his callused, wrinkled hands, then bunched them into fists at the sky. “Why?” he called out to heaven, his heart breaking.

“Why did you have to take everything?”

“We’re bankrupt,” Rosa cried. “We have no stock left at all. Look! It’s all just lying in the fields. The trees, the shrubs, everything!”

“Everything,” Manuel agreed, walking to Rosa’s side and slinging his arm around her shoulder in an offer of comfort. Rosa was taller than Manuel, but she leaned over to rest her head against his.

Michael expected to feel the same despair, or at least a fiery rage. These emotions he would have welcomed as old friends. Instead, he felt neither. He found, oddly, that he took it philosophically. Nature was an unpredictable mistress. A few years back she withheld her water from them. Now, on a whim, she poured it over them, almost drowning them. They could bunch their fist at the sky and cry out for vengeance, or they could shrug their shoulders and begin building again. He’d tried it the first way. Now, a little older, a little wiser, and a little more tired, he decided he’d try the other. Besides, all the swearing and cursing he’d done in the past had done nothing but make him all the more tired. It hadn’t done a damn bit of good, as far as he could tell.

“My beautiful land,” Luis cried out, dropping to his knees. “Look at her. She is ruined. Fouled. Her stench is putrid. I am lost. We have nothing left.”