Blood Daughters: A Romilia Chacon Novel

Chapter 23

113 Chapter 23 I awoke with a hangover two days after the funeral and one day after the mandatory visit with one of our federally funded psychologists, a young fellow by the name of Larry who insisted I call him Larry so that we could be friends. Larry tried really hard. He ended up doing most of the talking, which obviously made him nervous, or at least frustrated. He ended the session with, “Okay, Agent Chacón, just remember, we’re here, all right? Our services, they’re part of your package. Got that?” I got it. Then I went home and drank. And cried. I sat in our living room with Mamá while Sergio pretended to watch television. Mamá and I talked; or rather, I ranted while she sat there. She listened, hoping I would calm down, yet not wanting to say that, as if trying with all her might to respect what had happened to me the past few days. On her face I saw the look of two losses: a mother who had nearly lost her daughter to a killer’s bullet and a mother who was losing her daughter, right now, one more time. She barely glanced at the bottle of Wild Turkey that I had oh so ostentatiously placed on the coffee table next to the couch. I had set the bottle on her copy of García Márquez’s El amor en los tiempos del cólera, which seemed an abomination and which somehow pleased me. Had I placed the bottle there as a way of being somehow spiritually close to Gabo? Or was it an act of disdain, and if so, for whom? Certainly not Gabo—my mother perhaps? Her sobriety? Her continuing rituals that we had both followed together once, that of reading books throughout the nights, waking up in the mornings and snatching a few pages before I went to work or she made breakfast for Sergio. Was I rebelling against that? I didn’t know; and I knew I didn’t know. While saying something about 114 ~ Blood Daughters Nancy and how she took that bullet for me—no other way to say it—I saw Mamá’s casual glance at the bottle. Then her eyes scraped over the cigarette in its ashtray. So I swiped at it. The cigarette and the tray went flying. A flick of ash flipped up between us. The tray thunked against the far wall, just under a primitive painting of a Salvadoran landscape. The lit cigarette’s coal landed somewhere to Mamá’s side. “Ya, basta,” she said. She walked to Sergio, who had turned around and who looked at me in the way I never wanted him to look. She shuffled him to his room and closed the door and stayed in there the rest of the night, leaving the borracha in the larger section of the house. Leaving me to pace about, mumbling, then yelling in Spanish and English about how fucked up this all was and how can you expect me to sober up and be such a jodida perfect madre when I’ve got people shooting at me and taking away my partner who always lied to me and who ended up being my only goddamn friend? And then I cried; and then I slumped against the couch and that’s all I remember. The next morning I awoke at five. Alcohol tended to trick me that way, making me think hey, not so bad. I’m awake. Okay, woozy, but still functioning, which at the time I told myself was only a half-lie. An hour later I knew none of it was true. I could hardly stand up. It felt like a good quart of alcohol was still in my stomach, siphoning its way into my system, an image I could have believed once I saw what was left in the bottle. Two inches, an inch. Only enough to assure myself that I hadn’t finished it off. Mamá took Sergio to school. She came home. She said nothing, but I could hear her sighs in the kitchen while she cooked us breakfast. Not forced sighs, not at all. Real sighs, real exhalations of weariness, fear. I ate what she made me. It actually looked good: eggs, rice, a small plop of refrieds, fresh tortillas. This did not surprise me, her going out of the way to make all this. But her taking my pack of cigarettes...