Free The Boy by Lara Santoro Page B

Mamma? Promise me you’ll fix the brakes.”
    Esperanza had to be paged by airport security and was belligerently drunk by the time they hooked up at baggage carousel number four. “Stole my money,” she said, spitting on the floor. “Fucking Indians stole my fucking money.”
    Anna drove in silence through a fantasy of gradually graying rock until the New Mexico border, when Esperanza awoke from a dead sleep and said, “We should have a border, no? How come we don’t have no border?”
    “It’s the same country, Esperanza.”
    “No it’s not. I know history, that country is Indian country.” Anna shrugged.
    “I know history,” Esperanza said. “That thing back there is Indian country.”
      
    Anna took the car to the shop the next day and was treated to a stinging display of hostility. “You’re lucky to be alive,” the mechanic said, tossing her the keys.
    Her little girl called from London. “You fixed the brakes?”
    “Yes, my love.”
    “Were they bad?”
    “Yes, my love.”
    “I told you.”
    “I know, my love.”
    The boy kept calling and Anna kept standing there watching the phone ring, incapable of lifting the receiver.
    She could conjure only fragments of what his presence in a house without Eva would bring: his smell on her sheets, his music on her stereo, the collapse of time, the erasure of time, the thinning out of sounds, the muting of voices, the heartbreak of flesh against flesh—and she was ready for none of it.
    “I nearly killed my little girl driving up to Phoenix, my brakes were so bad,” she informed Mia’s machine. “Don’t go to Phoenix, by the way, no point in ever setting foot in Phoenix. The guy at the car shop was appalled. He asked me if I had children. I said no. He said, ‘Haven’t I seen you with a little blondie?’ I said, ‘Me? A little blondie? Look at me, I’ve got Bedouin blood.’ He gave me a dirty look. The guy’s got children. His brakes don’t need fixing.”
    Mia called back within half an hour. “I know the guy. He beats his wife.”
    “He beats his wife?”
    “Kicks the shit out of her.”
    “How do you know?”
    “Have you seen her?”
    “No.”
    “That’s all you have to do. Take a look at her.”
    “That’s terrible. I was just saying, though, I should have gotten those brakes fixed sooner.”
    “Not by that motherfucker.”
      
    Summer progressed, Eva was gone, judgment suspended, so it wasn’t long before the phone rang again, and Anna took the call.
    “What are you doing?” Eva asked her mother the next time they spoke.
    “Nothing,” Anna said, watching the boy come out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist.
    “Nothing? You must be doing something .”
    “I swear to God, I’m doing nothing.” The boy approached, his intentions clear, and she waved him furiously away but he sank slowly to his knees and ran his hands up her calves.
    “Mom,” she heard Eva say as if through a fog, “you never just do nothing .”
    “I do too.”
    And her little witch, her little magician, her miniature Merlin, from across a continent and the incalculable density of an ocean said, “Is somebody there?”
    Anna shot to her feet. “Is somebody here? Why would someone be here?”
    “Mom.”
    “What?”
    “You’re sounding all strange.”
    “I’m sounding strange? What about you? Are you picking up a British accent?”
    “Mom, I’m in Britain.”
    “I know you’re in Britain, but that doesn’t mean you have to pick up a British accent. I’m leaving you at baggage claim if you come back with a British accent. You can hitchhike home.”
    “Daddy says I sound like a Yank.”
    “Don’t listen to a word your father says. You know what he’s like.”
    “I know,” Eva sighed. “Daddy’s irresponsible.”
    “Crazy irresponsible. Off the charts irresponsible.”
    “It’s what he says about you.”
    “Like I said, don’t listen to a word your father says.”
      
    She emerged from sleep the next morning in a