Loving Time

four

Almost before dawn on November 1, Maria Sanchez heard her son, Detective-Sergeant Mike Sanchez, rise from his solitary bed and cross the hall to the bathroom, yawning loudly. The bathroom door closed. Five or ten seconds later his water splashed loudly in the toilet. The toilet flushed. Then came the sound of heavy rain as the shower pounded the bathroom tiles. Each day it was the same. It took Mike exactly twenty minutes to urinate, shower, shave, and dress.

Each day Maria spent those twenty minutes waiting for her bitter coffee to brew and watching the joggers stretch at the entrance to Van Cortlandt Park, then disappear, their legs pumping easily up and down. The joggers ran in the summer heat, in the chilling rain. In the winter months they appeared before the sky began to lighten, some not even wearing sweatpants or jackets, their breath making steam. Maria knew who some of them were, what buildings they lived in, at what hour they took the Broadway elevated train that ran within view of her window into Manhattan.

Mike told her she was the kind of witness they liked to have on the stand in court, a person who knew what was going on around her, noticed when something was different and remembered it later. It made her feel good when he said that. Her hijo was an important man. He didn’t have to patrol the streets or wear a uniform anymore. He’d had his picture in the newspaper. Maria still showed the clipping of her son to her friends. She was proud that everybody in the neighborhood knew him, came to him asking for things. They thought her hijo could personally fix all their parking tickets, speeding tickets, all their problems with any government agency, including the IRS. She never told anyone otherwise.

She also knew her son could have any woman he wanted. Even without the uniform, he was a good-looking man, still excited them. The single women in the neighborhood kept their eyes on him, flirting all the time. And some of the married women, too. Maria didn’t blame them. No one had trouble when Mike was around.

The walls in the old building were thin. Behind the bathroom door she heard him burp, then adjust the water in the shower. The faucet whined as he turned up the hot and the pipes began to clank. She hesitated, unsure of what to do. She had a box of wooden matches in one hand and her favorite rosary with the pink cut-glass beads in the other. She was a superstitious woman, knew timing and ritual mattered. Yesterday was Halloween. She wouldn’t have lit a candle yesterday for anything. This year God had finally intervened for Mike. Mike’s wife, Maria, who had left him five years ago, was finally dead of her leukemia. Halloween was over and November 2 was tomorrow. Could she start the ceremony a day early, light just one candle now, or should she wait?

Maria Sanchez had celebrated November 2, Mexico’s Day of the Dead, faithfully for all of the thirty years she had lived in this Bronx apartment overlooking Broadway, the elevated train, and Van Cortlandt Park. This year, however, she’d begun her shrine to the dead two months earlier than usual. She took out the old, old photos of her mother and father, uncles and aunts long gone; mementos of other half-forgotten relatives; the relics of her two babies, dead in infancy many, many years ago in Mexico, and those of her husband, Marco, when he was young. She studied them one by one, then arranged them on the heavy, carved wooden table, along with offerings of food, candles, and the prayer cards she got from her church.

The shower droned on in the bathroom. As she weighed the odds of her desire against the possibility of doing wrong, the coffee perked, and the sky lightened to day. Because her daughter-in-law had been too religious to divorce, Maria was glad she was dead. Then, ashamed of the sinful thought, she quickly extracted a match from the box, struck it, and inhaled the pungent sulfur odor.

Instantly, a thousand memories jumped out of the smoke, crowding the match tip as it flared. Then, as she reached out and lit one of the dozens of candles she had placed around the table and sideboard, her memories began to separate and go to their places. Some traveled to the silver pocket watch that had not worked since the day her grandfather died, some to the baskets of fresh and dried fruits, some to the chilies and herbs tied in bunches with thin bakery string, some to the stacks of letters with ink so faded on the brittle paper that the words could hardly be deciphered anymore. Still others flooded into the bright, artificial lilies and roses that reeked of plastic no matter how many times they were washed.

As the candle smoked and guttered, Maria lowered herself to her knees and began to pray. This year she did not pray for the dead, who were either in Heaven or not as God saw fit, but for the soul of her son, whose heart had refused to heal for so many years in spite of the many eager women who took him to their beds. Mike had been a husband with no wife for a long time. But now the wife-who-was-not was dead. It was only right that her son should have his soul back, so life could begin again.

“Just take a look at him, Todopoderoso, a man of thirty-four, almost old enough to be an abuelo and not yet a padre,” Maria complained softly to the Almighty in her own mix of Spanglish.

“Está un crimen en contra la naturaleza, no? I ask you not for myself, even though I wouldn’t mind taking care of dos bebes, or even tres. I ask for m’ijo. My only child. You took the first step. Now take the second. Whisper in his ear, Todopoderoso, tell him it’s time to love, to marry again. Dios, are you listening …?”

Maria never prayed to the Son of God. At the center of her shrine she had placed one lone crucifix, a very small and painless one that showed no signs of suffering on the serene face of Jesucristo. There were no nails sticking through His hands or blood dripping down His chest, and His crown of thorns was all but obscured by His healthy head of long, curly hair. The crucifix was surrounded by small prayer cards colorfully adorned with rosy angels and many poses of the Virgen y Jesu. Maria preferred the Mexican Church with its emphasis on the love of mother and child to the endless Italian celebration of tortured saints—skinned and beaten and burned—and otherwise martyred Christians in the church she attended. She always prayed to Dios Todopoderoso and to the Virgen. No one else.

Her fingers moved to the next bead. “Ave Maria …”

Her son, Mike Sanchez, stood in the hot shower for a full five minutes, savoring the only privacy he had. He dreamed in the hot rain, scrubbing at his skin absently with a rough loofah, wondering, as he always did these days, if April Woo was showering in Queens at this very moment. Wondering if indeed she showered. He didn’t know if she showered. Maybe she bathed instead, in green- or blue- or pink-scented bubbles.

So which was it—shower or bath? Every day he thought about it, and every day not knowing made him anxious. He could not imagine her asleep at night either, since he didn’t know what she wore to bed. This was the kind of thing that irritated him. He was a detective. He could find out anything about a dead person he hadn’t even known, but there were a lot of very simple facts about April Woo he just couldn’t find out. The living could be tricky. Every time he asked April a question she didn’t like, she flashed him the kind of look that proved her claim that Chinese torture was the best.

It also annoyed him that he couldn’t get a grip on his feelings about her, a female cop who didn’t need a gun to waste a guy. Tough. And he never liked the tough ones for more than a few hot New York minutes. Still, she was the one he thought about.

Okay, so say it was a shower. He visualized April Woo taking a shower. That wasn’t hard. He’d driven her home a few times and knew she lived on the second floor of the neat red-brick house she shared with her parents in Astoria, Queens. There were white curtains in the windows. He had no trouble imagining her soaping her slender body behind the white bathroom curtains. For a few seconds he allowed the vision to turn him on.

Then suddenly, without any warning, April’s sharp, beady-eyed mother intruded on the scene. She leaned out the window and screamed at him in Chinese. Mike could hear the harsh guttural sounds, the meaning as clear as any deep-throated growl of a well-trained guard dog. April’s mother was as thin and mean as his own mother was plump and sweet.

As Mike washed the soap away and then turned off the water, he realized he had heard something after all, but it wasn’t in Chinese. It was a passionate whisper in Spanish. He stepped out of the shower, straining to hear. He felt a chill enter the steamy bathroom and was puzzled. He could almost see the cold air drift in under the door and freeze the moisture. He knew what it was. His mother’s prayers had summoned the ghosts of her family all the way from Mexico. And now they were beginning to arrive.

Mike didn’t know any of those long-gone relatives. He didn’t want anything to do with them. Of all those lost to his mother, only his father had died here. Three years ago Marco Sanchez had collapsed in the kitchen of the Mexican restaurant where he had been chef for twenty-three years, and no one had thought of calling 911. They had called him. He was the cop who had a handle on the system. But it had taken him over an hour to reach the restaurant. By then his father was dead.

“What are you doing, Mamita?”

Maria looked up, snapping her mouth shut so hurriedly her soft chin quivered. She hadn’t heard her son move back across the hall to his room to dress for the day. Now he was wearing a gray shirt and shiny silver tie, gray tweed jacket, cowboy boots. She didn’t see the bulge of his gun under his jacket, but she knew it was there. Mike stood at the far end of the living room jammed with bright heavy furniture studying her as if she were a suspect in a crime.

She frowned. It didn’t take a famous policeman to see she was on her knees praying. Her fingers moved to the next bead. “Do you know what tomorrow is?” she asked softly.

“Yes, tomorrow is the Day of the Dead.” In Mexico, not here.

She nodded. Correcto. “I am praying for the dead.”

He didn’t say he thought it was too late to pray for the dead. She already knew he thought that. She knew his job was to collect the dead and study their lives to find out how they died. She knew he didn’t want those dead, or any others, to follow him home. But as long as he was unmarried and fatherless, the dead were all she had.

“I’ll pray for you, too.” She leveled her gaze at him defiantly, willing her prayers to enter his heart.

“Thank you, Mami, my prayers are for you, too.” In a weak moment after his father died, Mike had moved back to his childhood home to keep his mother company for a few months. That had been three years ago. He wondered if she planned to dismantle the shrine any time soon.

Then, as he did every morning, he told her he had to get an early start on his day and took off after coffee without having breakfast. As he left at seven-thirty A.M., November 1, it occurred to Sergeant Mike Sanchez that it was time to move out and get a place of his own.