Candlelight Bridge, page 22
“Señor Rivera?” Yankee blocked his path.
The other man lowered his chin but raised his brow. “¿Sí?”
“She is a little girl only if you say. If she is a wife, then she is a woman. For a father, less children means less worry.”
Her father pulled himself to full height—which made him only as tall as Yankee—and looked him dead in the eye. “Children are a blessing.”
“They’re important to Chinese too. So, I give you gift: Your family will be my family, my fortune your fortune, and if Candelita gives me children, then I give you lucky money.”
But Señor Rivera was looking past him. Yankee turned to see Candelaria standing behind him, gazing up at her father like a penitent child. Was she ashamed he was the best suitor she could get?
Her father dug his boot-heel into the floor and stared at its toe, maybe contemplating the space where his actual toes used to be. “When you have daughters, you’ll understand.” He held up two fingers. “Two years,” and offered his other hand to seal the deal.
Yankee shook it, having pushed as far as he dared. “Please, now I am Candelaria’s novio, may I visit her, Eduardo?”
Her father looked startled but said, “Yes. Tomorrow is Sunday. Please join our family for dinner. And please, don’t call me Eduardo.”
“Sí, claro, Señor Rivera.” He let go his hand and bowed.
He turned to Candelaria with a hopeful smile. But her eyes remained fixed on her father, who turned his back on her, limped to the café window, and looked out. She remained rooted to the spot, eyes brimming. Yankee didn’t move, unsure how to reassure her with her father there.
Señor Rivera called out without turning around. “¡Graciela!”
Grace sprang out of the kitchen, ran past her sister, and flew into the arms of her father, who carried her out the door without looking back to see if Candelaria followed.
If his future father-in-law was going to take this attitude, Yankee didn’t know how he could wait through two years of it.
24. The Virgin
1912 – El Paso, Texas
Candelaria despaired at the prospect of waiting two years to marry Yankee. Her family needed another working man now or they’d lose the roof over their heads, such as it was. But the justice of the peace wouldn’t allow her to marry any man, let alone a Chinese man, unless her father came to the courthouse to speak for her. She hoped to discuss a way around this with Yankee. But next time she saw him was at Sunday dinner, and her parents wouldn’t let them out of sight.
At dinner, Yankee and Grace were the only ones who spoke more than a few words, as if he was as oblivious as a five-year-old about how much this match worried her parents. Afterward, he suggested they all take a stroll. Papá said his foot hurt. So only her little sister and hugely pregnant mother went along, waddling behind them like nosy dueñas.
Yankee whispered, “I have an idea so your papá will let us marry sooner.”
“Shh!” she hissed. “Not here.”
“Here is good. At café, too many people listen.”
“Mamá always is listening, everywhere.”
He shook his head. “She isn’t now.”
She looked over her shoulder. He was right. Mamá’s attention was on Grace, whose babbling drowned most other sounds. “Okay, tell me.”
“We will make a baby.”
She clapped a hand to her mouth and halted. “No. Papá. He will…angry.”
“Yes, but what will he do?”
“I will bring dishonor to my family.”
“But what will he do?”
“I don’t know. Throw me from the house?”
“No. He will let us marry, so no dishonor.”
Maybe. Her neighbor, Augustina, got married and had a baby five months later. She couldn’t marry Yankee in the church anyway because he wasn’t Catholic, so what did it matter? Would she burn in hell? He said there was no hell, that people made up hell to scare other people into doing what they wanted. She was shocked to hear him say so, though she often wondered this very thing. But what if she got pregnant and he changed his mind about marrying her?
He answered her unspoken question. “In China, a man cannot break his word. The ancestors will know. He will lose face.”
He took the same risk she did? This was hard to believe. She could think of nobody as defenseless as a pregnant woman. She pictured her mother giving birth in a gush of blood, inside a smoky hut, along the icy edge of the Río Grande, her baby just one more mouth to feed in Chihuahuita—at this thought her hand convulsed in his. She swallowed her doubts and nodded.
“You’ll do it?” he asked.
“Yes. We will make a baby.” Except her voice went up at the end, like a question.
In answer, he took her hand and rubbed his thumb over the back of it.
She cast a sidelong glance at him. It was the first time she ever saw him smile with his whole face. Was this what love looked like? She didn’t feel like smiling. She didn’t love him. Not like that. She wanted to—he was her novio, the man she was to marry. She remembered Angel handing her the bouquet of purple salvia, her arm linked in his as they strolled the Sunday paseo in Mata Flores, the stars under her skin when her lips brushed his.
Yankee kept rubbing her hand with his thumb till it tickled. She pulled free and scratched, till she realized something else nagged at her: a hole in his plan. There was no place in the city where a Chinese man and Mexican girl could go together unnoticed. She told him this, and he dumbfounded her again, by leaving it up to her to solve the problem.
“I trust you,” he said.
But did she trust him?
Not exactly. Not the way she trusted Papá. Not the way Papá trusted her. And she was about to break that trust. Never before had she defied her father so completely. She told herself she was doing it for him, for all of them. A gift unlikely to make him proud.
In the coming nights, she lay on the narrow mattress she shared with Grace, mentally scouting locations to surrender her virginity. As usual, her sister proved distracting, thrashing with nightmares that bruised Candelaria in the oddest places: behind her knee, below her ear, along her hip bone. She warded off one after another of Grace’s feet and fists as she stared at the ceiling, trying to imagine a safe place where she and Yankee might go at night:
Not his boarding house.
Not her family’s apartment.
Not a hotel, where no unmarried couple would be admitted, much less a mixed-race couple, much less a man with a girl of fourteen.
Not an abandoned camp in Chihuahuita, where a non-Mexican would attract notice.
Not an empty train car at the railyard, where young americanos went to spoon but where she and Yankee would look out of place.
They needed a remote, unlit, secret place where their presence would go unremarked. The map in her head insisted no such place existed. Unless she considered…the border itself.
***
They agreed to seal their promise on Isla de Córdoba. It wasn’t a true island but a peninsula surrounded on three sides by the Río Grande; a sliver of Mexico trapped in America; a patch of wilderness nobody owned. Nobody went there at night. At least, nobody who could afford to notice them.
Candelaria waited for silence to bury the city, for her parents’ breathing to grow heavy, for Grace’s thrashing to subside. Then she slipped into a dark skirt and dark sweater and floated across the dark apartment the way her friend Marcela might—light as air. She felt for her chanclas amid the other sandals near the door, looped them through the fingers of one hand, then used the other to inch the door open. The hinges squeaked. She held her breath, squinted at the cracked open door of her parents’ room, and listened.
Papá snored on.
But Mamá called softly, “Careful, mijita,” her voice a startling caress in the dark.
She knew? And gave her blessing? It marked the first time she knew her mother to grant permission for anything important without consulting her father, much less in a whisper while he slept—implying this was their secret. That whisper broke a fact of her life. She couldn’t ask what it meant without waking her father. So she said nothing, just reached for her mother with the beats of her heart while the rest of her went on its way.
Her eyes burned with unshed tears as she slipped out into blurry moonlight, so at first she didn’t recognize the man on the corner. He wore a loose cotton shirt, red-and-brown woven blanket slung over his arm, face so tanned that in the half-light Yankee looked Mexican. She slipped on her chanclas, holding his shoulder for balance, inhaling his familiar smells of sesame, ginger, and that sour tang she had yet to identify. Then he crooked his elbow. She pretended not to recognize the invitation to take his arm. It would feel awkward on such a long walk.
For the next hour, they silently traced the crooked black line of the Río Grande, the edge of America.
At a sharp left turn of the river, she removed her chanclas again to wade through the chilly water, a trickle this time of year but still challenging to cross. Mud sucked at her toes and rocks jabbed her soles. On the opposite bank, the chanclas went back on, but her muddy feet threatened to slip out of them, so she hung onto Yankee to avoid tumbling into thorny brush. She looked up at him. In the moonlight, he looked handsome, like a hero, like a lover.
People said that bandits camped at Cordova Island, but he said not to worry because such men treated it as neutral ground where everyone pretended not to see each other. She could swear she heard distant footsteps and whispers, but if so, they blended with the river’s soft music. The swirl of stars overhead painted the palo verde trees’ yellow blooms into lanterns, but they didn’t shed enough light to reveal whether anyone else shared the island this night.
Yankee spread his blanket under a scraggly desert willow, its pale pink blooms dangling over them like eavesdroppers. She sat rigid at his side, not wanting to appear frightened, or eager, not sure if she felt either. Her arm tickled where it brushed his, but she resisted the urge to scratch. Their muddy feet wafted a smell of decay to her nose.
She told herself a man who loved her was about to take her virginity, that this was the Garden of Eden, that they were Adam and Eve. She looked up at the River of Stars, pulled her knees to her chest like a child, and asked if he knew the story of The Cowherd and Weaver Girl.
“Everyone in my country knows this story,” he said.
“Please, tell it to me?”
“If you lie with me.” He pulled her back onto the rough blanket and nestled her head in the crook of his shoulder.
Her heart threw itself against her chest as if ready to run home without her. A twig dug into her side, but she dared not shift against him, worried he’d take it as a signal to start making love to her. She wasn’t ready. She tried to listen to the story.
He told it differently than Benito. The fairies had no wings, the children didn’t cry, and the queen who kept the star-crossed lovers apart didn’t sound wicked at all—she asked why.
He explained, “What will happen if Queen of Heaven let stars live anywhere they want?”
She thought about it. “Travelers will get lost at night?”
“Exactly. Very smart.”
His unexpected praise put her more at ease. He must have felt her relax against him, because he turned and kissed her in a way he never had before: soft and slow, till their breath became one. He had searched her mouth with his tongue before, but this time it hesitated as it touched hers, like a question. For the first time, she let him reach under her blouse. His fingers traced her breast, thumb brushing her nipple like a ripe strawberry that might bruise.
A pulse twitched between her legs. Startled by her own response, she bolted upright.
He sat up, held her shoulders, and gazed into her eyes. “What’s wrong?” Beneath his husky murmur she heard a deep rumble, like an approaching train.
“Promise you won’t hurt me.”
“I promise.”
He went on patiently, his kisses a long, slow drink of water, like a lost man in the desert who hesitates to quench his thirst. He suckled her nipples like a baby. She stifled an embarrassed giggle, but she liked it. It made her prickle hot and cold all over.
He reached under her skirt, up, up, up to her private place, which not even she had touched that way before. Liquid seeped from her, and she was ashamed to think she’d accidentally peed. He pulled down his pants, guided her hand to his pito. She’d seen one before—on a dare, she and Angel had traded peeks in the cornfields—but she’d never touched one. She didn’t expect it to leap against her hand like a wild animal. Wasn’t he supposed to put it inside her? What did he expect her to do with it?
She pulled her hand away.
He guided it back.
So she stroked it, like a pet, something she might tame.
He yanked his shirt overhead, then slid her blouse off and pressed their warm skin together. His heart knocked at her chest, insistent as a soldier at the door. Her heart fled into her throat, made it impossible to breathe. Was this how love felt, like dying? Her thighs parted, and her wet opening reached up to welcome him. Yet as he tried to enter, she felt sure his key wouldn’t fit the lock, a crooked little gap so tucked away she hadn’t been sure it existed till now. She braced herself, scared he would split her open.
He broke his promise. It hurt.
He forced her legs wider apart so he could bury himself deeper, bruising her inner flesh, filling her with pressure until something snapped. He pushed inside again and again till she felt cramps that made her want to double over, except she couldn’t because he was on top of her. She wanted to ask him to wait, stop, slow down, but his chest pushed the wind from her and all she managed was a moan. He moaned too, but she realized for him this meant pleasure.
They were speaking two languages, and he didn’t understand hers.
In some distant part of her she sensed pleasure waiting, but it remained out of reach while she lay crushed under the weight of this sudden stranger. She wanted to cry, but the feeling was too deep. He shuddered and spurted inside her, or maybe it was she who burst open and bled. Before she knew it, he rolled off, leaving a dull ache between her sticky thighs.
The ache spread, carrying her mother’s whisper, “Be careful, mijita.” She had thought those words a blessing, but maybe they were a curse. Why had her mother let her wander into the night to suffer this emptying of herself? Wasn’t it a mother’s job to protect her daughter? Papá never would’ve betrayed her to this fate.
Yankee wrapped himself around her limp body. “You okay?”
“I don’t know...” She tried to hold back tears, but it was no use. Her face became a floodplain where rivers multiplied, crossed, and recrossed, drowning the person she used to be.
He turned her face to his. He looked puzzled, not by her tears but by her very features, as if he expected someone else. “Don’t worry. First time for woman always hurt. Better next time.”
She didn’t believe him. He’d already broken his promise not to hurt her. She shivered.
He tightened his arms around her. “You cold?”
Before she could answer, he pulled the blanket over her, leaving none for himself, and this tenderness was more than she could bear. This time it was she who shuddered, in surrender. She huddled against him and let him hold her. Who else did she have to comfort her now?
25. Childbirth
1913 – El Paso, Texas
Candelaria and her mother panted hard, warm breath bouncing off greasy walls till the bungalow was stifling. She knelt with her head pillowed on a kitchen chair while Mamá stood behind her, pulling the ends of the blue rebozo wrapped around her belly to ease the cramps, rocking her side to side. She’d gone into heavy labor at sunset, a lifetime ago, vowing not to yell and upset her new neighbors. They were kind but not what she’d call friendly, not once they’d seen her with her Chinese husband, and she didn’t want to push their goodwill.
Each pain grew more pitiless than the last. Still she refused to voice the scream inside her.
Was this what her mother had tried to warn her about, with her whispered “Be careful,” that first night she’d snuck off with Yankee? More stolen nights had followed. Within three months, she got pregnant, forcing her parents to let Yankee marry her. By then, Papá had found enough odd jobs to prevent the eviction that set her on this path. Yet he forgave her right away, while Mamá grew distant, till they barely spoke at all.
Even now, she was relieved Mamá stood behind her rather than before her, so she didn’t have to meet her eyes.
She wished Papá had never promised her to Yankee. But she was angriest at Mamá, for making no effort to stop her that night, for never warning her against marrying a man who rarely laughed, who didn’t speak her language, who she knew little about. For failing to at least warn her of this bottomless pain—then again, she never would’ve believed it.
The only advice Mamá gave now was, “Push!”
To which she shouted, “I hate this pinche baby!”
The pain passed, the rebozo slackened, and she collapsed to her side. Her mother dropped to the floor with her and said, “I promise never to tell the baby.”
They both burst into laughter.
After that, the pains came harder, her shouts grew louder, but her bitterness at her mother faded.
She knew women often died in childbirth, but only now, when her belly, hips, and changuito filled her mind, did she fear she was too small to give passage to an entire human. Why had she thought she could save her family by having a baby? For nine months, she carried this insatiable beast, and it was about to repay her by tearing her in two. If she died, who’d take care of it? Not Yankee. Her family would have another mouth to feed and one less worker instead of one more. Stupid, stupid, stupid girl.
