The Book of Broken Hearts (26 page)

I shuddered as his tongue traced my bottom lip and slid into my mouth, setting everything inside me on fire. I pulled him on top of me as we leaned back onto the boulder, and I let my entire body go boneless, nothing but heart and spirit and maybe, way down underneath the shadows, a little hope that everything would be okay after all.

I wrapped my hands in his shirt and peeled it off, tugged it over his head. My fingertips traced the lines of his arms, his chest, the thin white scars, the mysterious gouge that snaked across his abdomen. I stopped there, lingered, looked into his
eyes for an explanation I was too scared to ask for with words.

I thought he’d look away, but he held my gaze, his eyes full of a raw honesty I’d never seen in another person. There were nerves too, something uncertain and vulnerable. And in that moment I felt alive. Whole. Protected from the ravages of time and completely immune to its passing.

Nothing about this could ever end in tears.

He smiled, shy this time, and I smiled back, and then we were kissing again, pressing our mouths and bellies together while the rest of the world eroded around us, one pointless breath of wind, one insignificant grain of dust at a time.

We stayed tangled up on the boulder, pausing only for a late and hasty lunch, falling into each other again and again until the sun dipped behind the canyon and the rock cliffs blazed red-orange in the fading light. Emilio helped me onto the bike when it was time to go, pulling me into a long, deep kiss before navigating us along the winding road home.

As we rolled down the Million Dollar Highway, I closed my eyes and held him close around the waist, and he squeezed my hand like it was forever, like we’d really found a way to stop time, and I wanted so, so badly to believe it.

Emilio and I stopped for mango shakes in town on the way back, but we hardly spoke—nerves, I guess, everything between us still hot to the touch—and the intense good-bye in my driveway was cut short by Mari’s cigarette smoke puffing out the kitchen screen door.

“You were gone awhile,” she said when I walked in. She gave me a hard stare, but a smile lit her face too, undeniable. “Papi said you guys went up the Million Dollar Highway? I’ve driven it before, but not on a bike. I’ve never been on a bike, actually.”

“Seriously? You should,” I said, and then her smile stretched, huge and bright. No warnings. No third degree about how I’d been out fraternizing with the enemy and how I’d come home with swollen lips and windblown helmet hair and guilt tattooed all over my face.

“I’m glad you had fun.” She stared at me a few seconds, and I thought she might ask for more details, but she just smoothed my hair down, hands lingering. “You look happy, Juju.”

Her voice broke at the end, but she turned to wash her hands at the sink,
RIGHT FOR COLD/
FRÍO
.
LEFT FOR HOT/
CALIENTE
, and I slipped away unnoticed.

My heart was still buzzing when I downloaded my photos later. But once I saw them up close, they didn’t feel worthy.

That was the thing about pictures. No matter how beautiful, they couldn’t capture the truly
felt
parts of a moment. Life was different looking through the lens, the colors less vibrant, the beauty less grand.

By the time you took the shot, the moment had already passed.

I sipped maté from one of Celi’s hand-painted mugs, a big white one with sunflowers, and inhaled the tea’s beer-bitter scent.

I certainly didn’t need photographs to remember looking out across the canyon today, feeling small as we watched the dust erode the world. To remember being in Emilio’s arms, his lips on my collarbone, my fingers tracing his map of scars. I didn’t need photographs to believe in the story. To remember that I’d lived it, even if I was doomed to forget.

Pictures couldn’t tell the whole story anyway. That was the other thing about them—they were always a carefully edited glimpse, a story out of context. My pictures of Papi and Emilio working on the bike showed the successes, the good days, but I didn’t capture evidence of Papi’s meltdown at Grant’s Pharmacy. The doctor’s appointments. The lines
in Mom’s face after all the bad news. Even the scrapbook I’d given Zoe was make-believe, a best-of-the-best highlights reel that fast-forwarded over the snags.

Through pictures, we cut reality in pieces. We selected only the choicest moments, discarding the rest as if they’d never happened.

So did El Demonio.

“You’re up late,
queridita
.” At the sound of Papi’s voice, I looked up from my computer. He leaned against my door frame, an old Harley manual tucked under his arm with a hundred blue Post-it flags waving from the pages. “I couldn’t sleep either.
Ay
, your mother snores like bears!”

“I think you woke yourself up, Papi. Mom doesn’t snore.”

He laughed. “You all do,
querida.
Trust me. How was your ride?”

“Pretty much awesome.” My cheeks hurt from smiling so hard. “It was cool. Really great views.”

Among other things.

The skin around Papi’s eyes crinkled. “I’m sorry I never got to take you myself, Juju. When you’re young, you think you have so much time, and then life comes and tomorrow turns into tomorrow, and before you know it . . .” He sighed and waved away the words. “Ah, don’t listen to this cranky
viejito
.”

I smiled and watched him watching me, and I wondered how much he really understood about what was happening to him. Every time that bastard demon devoured another of his memories, did he feel it? Was it like a scraping, a chipping
away? An inexplicable, gnawing loss? Could he hear it? Did he know when it would happen, which thoughts or words or faces it would consume next? Which parts of his life story would end up on the cutting-room floor?

“I’m glad you had fun with Emilio,” Papi said. “I knew he’d take good care of you. That boy knows what he’s doing.”

Yeah, no kidding.
I shivered at the memories from the day, but Papi didn’t seem to notice that my central nervous system had been replaced with a tangle of electric wires.

“Look at all the different parts,
queridita
. He knows all of them by heart.” Papi laid the Harley manual on my desk and pointed to an illustration, charcoal-colored twists of metal and gears. He circled things with his finger, named them as if he were helping me study for a biology test.

He’d never actually helped me with homework—that task always fell to my sisters, and then I was too old for it, studying instead with Zoe and Christina at Witch’s Brew. But Lourdes, he must have helped her. Celi, too. I imagined them huddled around the kitchen table, puzzling out one of those math problems about train speeds or some word association thing. He was probably really good at it, smart and patient.

Focus on the good memories you have with your loved one. Family members often find comfort in remembering the person how he was, not how the disease has changed him. Hold on to those precious moments. . . .

That’s what one of the brochures said, something I’d repeated to myself in the early days after the diagnosis. It
sounded like good advice, and I’m sure for many people, it worked. But what if all your memories of a person belonged to someone else?

God, my sisters had so many. I’d heard them, tried them on, borrowed them as my own. Playing backgammon by candlelight one night when the power went out. Camping at Rocky Mountain National Park, that hike up Twin Sisters with the bighorn sheep. Piling into the car for the
Jurassic Park
double feature at the Silver Gorge Drive-In. Even the stories of how my sisters had gotten their names were magical: Lourdes, after Mom’s grandmother, who risked her life to fight for women’s rights in Argentina. Mariposa, “butterfly,” for the bright blue-and-orange butterflies that flooded my parents’ garden the week before my sister’s birth. Araceli, “altar of Heaven,” who sent Mom into labor on an airplane and was born in an ambulance on the tarmac after an emergency landing. Their names had their own memories, so different from mine, which my sisters loved to tell me was hastily chosen after the first thing Mom had seen after delivery: the doctor’s medallion.

Saint Jude, patron saint of lost causes.

My sisters got the good stuff first. All I had of their precious moments were imprints, shadows of the real thing cobbled together from the faded scraps of their reminiscing, bits and pieces that changed each time in the telling.

Like so many things in my life, the best memories of my father were a legacy, passed down to me like their hand-me-down clothes and toys and the Vargas oath.

Until I’d discovered the Harley, out in the storage barn under a blue tarp.

The motorcycle project was mine and Papi’s, a real story that only he and I shared. Every time we talked about the bike, helped Emilio disassemble and reassemble parts, Papi told me about his life in Argentina—wild, impossible stories unearthed from places in his mind that had been buried under the landslide of marriage and parenthood and career. Stories that even my sisters and mother hadn’t heard. Every one was like a gemstone I could keep in a box under the bed, something I could take out and hold up to the light whenever I longed again for its specialness.

Was that the reason I’d been so eager to help with the bike? So I could have something of Papi all my own?

Is that why Papi continued to work on it and read the manual and wear his leather jacket? For me?

Tomorrow turns into tomorrow, and before you know it . . .

“Papi?”

He jumped at my voice, eyes hazy from squinting at the manual. It took him a second to process; I could almost see the synapses firing behind his eyes, the slow passage of electricity along the nerves to and from the file cabinet of his central cortex, serving up my picture and my name and all the required information.

“I need to ask you something,” I said. “It’s important.”

He closed the book and stared at the cover, tapped it with his finger. “Are you sure you don’t want to talk to Mom? She’s
probably better for this kind of thing. Or your sister. I can get her if you—”

“No! It’s nothing like . . . It’s not a female issue or anything.”

He let out an exaggerated sigh of relief and wiped a hand across his forehead. “In that case, your papi is at your service. But after this, we’re watching
Ace High
. It has our friend Tuco from
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
.”

Papi cleared his throat, prepping for an inevitable Tuco impersonation. “There are two kinds of people in this world, Juju. Those who watch westerns in the middle of the night, and those who are disowned by their father.”

“When you put it that way . . .” I looked him in the eyes, steeled myself for the worst. “Papi, do you
like
working on the motorcycle? Is it fun for you? It’s not too much or anything?”

“Too much. Now that’s a big question, isn’t it?” Papi tapped the manual again. “What do you think, Panqueque? Do we like working on Valentina?”

At the mention of his Spanish name, the dog trotted over from his blanket on the floor at the end of my bed and nosed Papi’s leg.

“There’s nothing else I’d rather do than work on that Harley with you and Emilio. In fact . . .” He trailed off, his eyes seeming to focus on something in the distance, something out in the hallway.

“You okay?” I asked.

He squeezed his eyes shut, but when he opened them
again, they were as clear as the Animas. “
Sí
. I want to ride her again,
queridita.
That’s what I decided. One more time, as soon as she’s ready. What do you think?”

I started to protest, to remind him of the doctors’ warnings about his heart, his head, staying safe. But the words turned to dust as I thought of my ride today, the rumble of the bike, the snap of the wind in my hair.

Don’t settle. . . . You see something, some chance for something great, you take it. You grab your keys and jump on your bike and go, no regrets.

“I think there are two kinds of people in this world, Papi. Those who suck, and those who rock.” I returned his broad smile and deleted my pictures from the Million Dollar Highway. “You rock.”

Don’t be awkward don’t be awkward don’t be awkward. . . .

By the time Emilio showed up for work the next morning, I’d totally brainwashed myself—if such a thing was possible—to not be a freak show about everything that had happened between us. In fact, his lips were the furthest thing from my mind. Well, second furthest. Third? Fine. They were pretty much the main event, but I wasn’t about to show it. Besides, I couldn’t wait to tell him about Papi’s plans—a safe, nonkissing topic we could agree on.

“So check it out.” I sauntered up to the bike, smoothing out my hair as I went. It was raining today, a rare storm, and my locks were about five times bigger than normal. The moment Emilio saw me, he smiled, all dimples and dares, and my insides got a jolt.

“That an invitation?” he asked.