Sanctuary Line (23 page)

What happened next is almost too painful to describe. The trailer windows flooded with light, and then there was yelling and commotion, a terrible howl and Dolores’s voice pleading for something – could it have been mercy? – in Spanish. Instinct should have kept us, the children, out of the fray, but instead it propelled us directly into it, where we saw everything. My uncle standing there naked, slowly turning to the wall. Teo’s mother, also naked, with her hands clasped over her skull as if she were being brutally pushed toward execution. And my aunt, her mouth twisted into a hard silent line, unleashing all the fury she had bolted inside her, bringing her fists down over and over again on Dolores’s brown flesh, her breasts, her thighs, while my uncle stood motionless, his back turned, doing nothing. Though it must have been only seconds, all of this seemed to go on for hours, and I remember thinking first that my uncle would stop it and then, when he remained silent and still that it would never stop, that Teo and I would be standing forever inside a trailer while this collision of outright violence and brutal immobility unfolded before us.

It was when my aunt turned to lift a chair from the corner of the room that Teo intervened, ripping it from her hands, then pinning her by her shoulders against the wall. She struggled for a moment or two, then wrenched herself from his grasp and fled into the night. Silence entered the room. The only sounds I remember were Teo’s sharp breath and the ironically peaceful lapping of the great lake. Then Dolores removed her hands from her head and looked toward my uncle, who was stepping into his trousers. “Stanley …” she began, “Stanley,
por favor
…” Her voice left her and she sank back onto the bed. He looked in her direction.
“Naufragio,”
he murmured, shaking his head. His face was grey, his expression almost empty, and without looking back, he moved into the dark, following his wife.

He had done nothing. He had said nothing but that one word. He protected neither his lover nor himself. Instead he followed his wife back to the house to receive the full force of her rage, leaving the woman he had been making love to in the custody of her son. I was still reeling from the brutality that had exploded out of my aunt and that seemed to be reverberating in this small space. I was also processing the fact of adult nudity with what I believed then to be the ugliness of that mature flesh, and the ugliness of what I realized must have passed between my uncle and Dolores, and I knew that Teo would have been trying to deal with all of that as well. He was on the other side of the table now, closer to where his mother lay.

“¡Yo la mato!”
he said, breathing hard.
“¡Yo la mato!”
The anger in his voice terrified me.

“No,” his mother said. She had a pale blanket around her. I couldn’t stop staring at the swelling around one of her eyes. Teo was speaking rapidly to his mother. After one statement or another, he would hurl himself at a wall, either with his fists or with his body. Dolores said nothing except the word
no
and then more urgently, in English, “No fight!” Even humiliated and wounded, she was proud, and there was something pitiless in the tone of her voice; she didn’t seem to pity herself and, she did not appear to pity her young son, as if she felt that he had no right to the fury that was coursing through his blood. No right at all, even after he had seen his mother as no child should ever see his mother, beaten, dishevelled, and in the immediate aftermath of love.

“Amor,”
she was saying to him now, as if to answer the question he kept asking, a question I would have been unable to understand.
“¿Porqué?”
he had kept saying.
“¿Por qué?”

Teo stopped at the sound of the word his mother had spoken and stood completely still. Then he looked, just for a moment, at me. I was standing on the left side of the door, having moved not one inch since we both plunged through the cedars my aunt had planted and into the insane adult world contained by the four walls of that old rusting trailer. “
Amor,”
Teo repeated, with bitterness in his voice.

“The keys,” he said, thrusting his open hand toward me. “Give them to me.” And then more softly, “Please.”

“I won’t,” I said, now starting to cry.

“Please!” he said again, begging. “I ask you to give them to me.”

“No,” Dolores said. Was she speaking to me or to her son? “No.”

Perhaps he was going to drive into the town to find the local doctor. Maybe, just maybe, that is what he had in mind. Certainly, he could not have entered the house to use the phone. But, and this is what haunts me, what I can’t forgive myself for: I could have done that. I could have shaken myself out of my own paralysis, walked right past whatever viciousness was unfolding in the kitchen, gone into the parlour where a phone sat on my uncle’s desk, and made the call. I could have kept those keys firmly in my pocket.

It was Teo’s helplessness, his desperation, and my own confusion that must have caused me to hand him the small sliver of power contained in the two flat fragments of metal I had in my possession. “I’m coming with you,” I said, but even before I had finished the sentence he was out the door. I could hear the sound of tires spinning on the white gravel drive and I knew he was gone.

The inside of that trailer has never left my mind, and it will never, I’m certain, leave my memory. It presents itself each time I insert keys into the ignition of any car I’ve
driven. It surfaces when I am shopping for groceries or bending over a microscope in the lab, and it slams itself into my consciousness any time a man has tried to make love to me. Dolores appeared not to notice me. She lay down instead on her bed, under the picture of the Virgin that hung on her wall. She rolled onto her side, away from me, and pulled the sheet over her shoulders, but even through this sheet and the blanket that still covered her, I could see that she was shaking. The chair my aunt had lifted lay on its back like a dead animal. There were two glasses and a half-bottle of wine on the arbourite table, and one other chair, still upright. I remember wondering, pointlessly, whether my uncle had sat on the piece of furniture my aunt had later chosen as a weapon. Dolores’s voice cut right into this thought. “Go,” she said. “Just you go.”

Halfway across the yard I found Mandy, still partly stunned by sleep, standing like a white pillar on the lawn. Unlike the others who had remained in the house, she had been blown right out of her room by the tornado of invective that had burst into the house, a storm that must have brought to her attention in fragmented detail the scene I had witnessed, and shards of her parents’ relationship.

I had no idea where to place my own feelings, no idea who was guilty, whose heart had been more painfully broken, how this terror had been born or why it had chosen to visit us. The attacker and the attacked, the adulterers and the spouses all seemed like one grotesque, vindictive adult
to me. But seeing my cousin in her pyjamas, so disoriented and forlorn, her face still smudged by sleep, her eyes filled with such terrible knowledge. What could I say then, what can I say now about that? Except that all this year I have wondered what Mandy’s lover might have felt had he seen her right there, right then. What would he have said to that thin child who stood in the dark yard with her arms and legs shaking in reaction to the ugly words she had heard and the hostile faces she had seen. Would he have taken some pity on the human side of her and drawn her with real affection into the comfort of his arms? Would there have been something in him that could recognize her vulnerability, something that would cause him to want to console and protect her?

I took Mandy’s hand that night and led her over to the picnic table where that useless Monopoly game still sat, its pieces in place on various squares of property as if we might simply resume the game. We sat together on the bench, facing the lake and waiting out the night, neither of us saying much. We were still there when the dawn began to appear over the water, still there when the police cruiser bringing news of Teo’s death turned off Sanctuary Line and made its way down the drive.

Mandy and I sat in the back seat of my uncle’s car late the next morning, waiting to be taken somewhere by some adult or another. Not my uncle, no, it wouldn’t have been him. It was likely my mother, wanting to get us out of there, telling us to get into the car, then being detained by the emergency in the house, talking to her brother, her sister-in-law, trying to add calmness to what was by then an impossible situation. The boys were in their room. There was no way to know what they were doing, but hearing the sound of the little television set when we’d passed by their room suggested they were looking for ways not to have to think. Something in them would have been broken. My uncle was refusing to speak to any of us. When we had last seen him, he was in the living room, sitting at the kitchen table he had recently moved there, staring out the window at the lake and smoking one cigarette after another. My aunt, on the other hand, having dismissed the painters the minute they arrived, was standing by the counter in the empty kitchen, one hand on either side of
the sink, her arms tensed as if she feared she might vomit or collapse. She was looking out the kitchen window toward the road at the end of the lane, waiting. Rain fell softly and covered the car’s windshield with small bright bulbs of water, but I could still see my aunt at the window, her face blurred by moisture. For a moment only, I recalled being a child in the back seat of another car, one sold years before, how I had been placed in the back seat for safety, and how, when I wasn’t looking out the window, I could watch the small crescent moons refracted from the face of my mother’s wristwatch tremble on the fabric ceiling.

There is no misery like a young person’s misery, no tears like a young person’s tears, no thought that grief should be concealed: grief is the dictator of this small brutal state, and its edicts control everything. I don’t believe I have wept in any significant kind of way since that late-summer morning, even for Mandy, my partner in early sorrow.

The police had arrived about six in the morning, had delivered their news, and had gone away again. The car, they said – the car with Teo in it – had crashed through the cement railing of the overpass that crossed the highway and had fallen, nose first, onto the pavement below. The two officers had taken Dolores with them when they left. Had taken her to see her only child one last time at the
hospital where the ambulance had delivered him. What my aunt was waiting for at the window was Dolores’s return, though how she could have faced her under the circumstances was more than I could imagine. But face Dolores she would, with all the practical arrangements for her return to Mexico efficiently taken care of. The two plane tickets waiting at the airport: one for Dolores, one for her brother. The procedure for the transport of the body, the phone calls, the discussions with officials, had been interrupted by the heated and unanswered questions she flung in the direction of her silent husband.

The orchards were filled with empty ladders: the whole operation had ground to a halt. Not a single Mexican worker had left the bunkhouses that morning except for Dolores, of course, and her brother, who had walked with her to the squad car and had sat beside her in the back seat, his thick arm over her shoulder. I don’t recall the police vehicle pulling away, but I do remember thinking for the first time that the man who was always referred to as Dolores’s brother was also Teo’s uncle. All those years he had had an uncle too. That one thought penetrating the wall of anguish inside me.

There are large patches of time from the days following the accident that are completely unavailable to me, but I do have a distinct visual memory of being in the car with Mandy. The older maples had begun to turn and their coloured leaves were slick with rain. Now and then a leaf
would descend through the air and paste itself to the windshield of the car like some kind of bad-news propaganda that had drifted down from an enemy plane. The monarchs were nowhere to be seen, having begun their migration, I suppose, unnoticed in the midst of this human tragedy. Quite a number of them would never reach the south side of the lake, never mind their eventual destination. None of them, I have come to know now, would ever come back.

Strangely, I was thinking about “little Nellie’s grave,” how Teo could never understand the wit behind the adults banishing us from their day in such a fashion.
She is dead in a funny way?
Now I knew that no one was ever dead in a humorous way, particularly not a child. Poor old Reverend Thomas Sanderson must have written his bad poetry in a state of helpless grief. The fact that his child’s carefully chosen resting place had gone missing in less than a century just added to the tragedy. I thought about the lost Nellie. I knew no one would write a poem for Teo.

Mandy was wiping her wet face on the sleeves of her shirt. “The Mexican whore,” she said, echoing her mother’s words.

“Don’t,” I said, the word torn from inside me.