“Like pink symbolizes love,” I said. “Yellow is friendship. White orchids express purity, red is for desire. Gardenias are for secret love. And sunflowers are a symbol of happiness.”
“You learned all that in one morning?”
“Monica’s quite the talker, and I realized I’ve got a knack for memorizing these things. I guess having to remember all those choreography routines was good for something.”
Lucas stood and started gathering the dishes. “I’m not surprised,” he said.
“I am. It’s a miracle I got my high school equivalency.”
“So what, Maya. You did other things. Much more important things.”
I nearly sighed. Why did my name sound so wonderful on his lips?
We cleaned the kitchen, then sat together on the couch. I kicked off my sandals and pulled my feet up under me. Lucas had closed the blinds and turned on the ceiling fan to relieve the heat a bit. At that hour, the sun shone directly on the roof. Leaning back andrelaxing, Lucas turned on the TV and started flipping channels. Then he stopped.
“Shit! I love this movie!” he said.
“Doesn’t ring a bell for me.”
“You can’t be serious!”
On the screen I saw strange images, wacky, old-fashioned. I was sure I’d remember if I’d seen it before.
“It’s hilarious,” he said. “It’s about this doctor and his helper who go to Transylvania to confirm their theory that vampires actually exist. The plot gets super complicated from then on. There are some slapstick scenes that are just brilliant.”
I grabbed a cushion and tucked it under my head. “Have we missed a lot?”
“No, they’re just reaching the inn now. I think it’s just been a few minutes. Why? You don’t want to watch it, do you?”
“Maybe I’ll like it.”
“You’ll love it,” he said, settling down and edging even closer to me. His leg now grazed mine, and his arm was resting against my side. My head was close to his shoulder, and whenever he spoke, I could sense his breath on my temple. No matter how much I tried to focus on the film, I couldn’t ignore him, I kept thinking how I could just reach out my pinkie finger and touch his hand.
But then I fell asleep. And when I woke, my mouth was dry and my hair matted and covering my face. At first, I didn’t even know where I was. Then I noticed Lucas was gone. I stood and stretched out my arms. The TV was still on, but the volume was turned down. I shut it off and went to the kitchen for a glass of water.
The clock on the microwave told me it was six thirty.
I put on my sandals and looked at the books on his shelf, finally taking down one he seemed to have read many times. I leafed through it as I walked downstairs to the back garden.
Roy was out there, sitting in a hammock under his favorite tree, typing on a laptop that was in his lap. I waved at him and he tipped his hat courteously. He was quite a character.
I walked on toward the lemon fields and found a comfy spot under the leafy branches where I could sit and lean my back against one of the trunks. As I read, the hours passed without my realizing it, and I followed the lives of the characters, who kept drawing me deeper and deeper in.
I closed the book when it had gotten too dark for me to make out the words. Then I held it to my chest and stood. I wasn’t in a hurry to get back: My head was still too full of stories, too full of the feelings those stories had aroused.
“‘Melancholy’ is such a dramatic-sounding word, but sometimes it’s the right one. When you’re feeling both a little happy and a little sad,” the story had said.
Melancholy—that was how I felt most of the time.
Happy sometimes, because I was learning that life was full of new beginnings. That you can lose things and the void they leave behind can be immense, but that you can treat this as a new place for new things that may fulfill you better than whatever was there before.
Sad sometimes, because I was more aware than ever of how alone I’d been as long as I could remember, and that loneliness had led me to confuse my urges with my longings, my deficiencies with desires. To convince myself that I deserved anything bad that happened to me because I wasn’t enough. Because I had always been lacking.
I put those thoughts aside as I passed through the gate into the garden.
The light bulbs were shaking in the breeze, and music was coming from a window on the ground floor. The kids were running around and shouting, chased by Marco, who was pretending to be a monster. Angela was pacing and talking on the phone, and she waved as soonas she saw me. Roy had emerged from his hiding place and was listening to Julia tell him in a torrent of words about a new technique for shaping hair that was apparentlythe bomb. Sitting at the table, Catalina, Iria, and Blas were playing cards and waved me over.
I felt light in the chest just then, because I could sense them there.
