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“No,” I say out loud to my dark apartment, slinging my backpack over my shoulder, glancing back at the now-dirty dress that I tossed on my bed, the heels haphazardly kicked off next to it. “No. Come on.”
I leave. I close the door, lock it, barrel down the stairs. Caleb’s car is still there, waiting in front, and I practically throw myself into the passenger seat.
“All right?” he asks, putting it into gear.
“All right,” I say, and we pull away from the curb.
Then I realize I left something behind. Without thinking I pull the door handle and the car door swings open, nearly hitting the parked sedan next to us.
“Whoa!” Caleb shouts, slamming on the brakes. “Thalia, what —"
“I forgot something,” I say, already running back to the apartment, taking the stairs two at a time. I drop my keys twice as I’m unlocking the door, practically counting the seconds because this is two more minutes, and what if five minutes is the difference between seeing my mom one last time and —
The door swings open. I leave the keys in the lock and dart into my bedroom, open my closet, find the jewelry box on the floor. It’s dark but I find what I’m looking for anyway, worn wooden beads that I know by touch.
I leave, lock, run. Caleb’s back in the spot where he was waiting, and I get in again, buckle up.
“All right?” he asks for the second time, and I nod.
“You’re sure?”
I turn in my seat, look at him. I search his face for clues that he’s ribbing me, giving me a hard time for nearly jumping out of a moving car, but he’s calm, serious, intense.
“Sorry,” I say, squeezing the wooden beads in my hand, letting them dig into my fingers.
We drive in silence. In ten minutes Marysburg is in the rear view mirror, fading. The road we take out of town narrows from four lanes to two and then we’re in the country that surrounds the college town, where farms give way to forests that give way to farms, over and over again.
Caleb doesn’t say anything, just drives, the rear windows of the car cracked for air, the breeze shuffling my hair. I check my phone every thirty seconds, I think, but we’re in and out of cell service and nothing comes through.
After twenty minutes, I unclench my hand and the wooden beads click against each other softly, rearranging themselves in the absence of pressure, and I look down, take it in, like I’m seeing it for the first time.
I forgot to call her on Sunday, I think. I had so much homework and I had to meet with Nathaniel about the sources for Dr. Castellano’s paper and I just completely forgot until it was almost ten.
I pull the beads up, through my fingers, until I’m holding the crucifix between my thumb and fingers. I can’t see it in the dark but I can feel the figure of Jesus there, on the cross like always, and I press it against the pad of my thumb until it hurts, trying to remember the last time I talked to my mom.
Was it the Sunday before that? I think, still pressing the metal into my thumb. Had it been that long? What did I say? What did she say?
I can’t remember. I can’t remember a sentence, a word, a phrase. We end every conversation with I love you and you too, but did we end the last one that way?
We must have. Please, God, we must have.
I run my thumb over Jesus again, in the dark, and just like that the words are there in my brain, fully automatic.
I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth…
I look down again, and the words feel wrong. They feel like school assemblies, like going to Mass every Wednesday and Sunday, like the one time that I got detention for being late to class.
They don’t feel like my mother. I open my palm, still looking down, and the light from the dashboard catches the centerpiece.
It’s faded with the years, but there she is, La Virgen, resplendent and sad. Cloaked in stars. Crowned by faded red and gold.
Creo en Dios, Padre todopoderoso, creador del Cielo y de la Tierra…
I close my eyes and keep the prayer to myself, and I think not of myself and not of the last time I spoke to my mother and not of her on a gurney, being wheeled into surgery, but of her mother, my grandmother.
I think of her, near the end. Sitting in her chair in the living room of the house in South Texas, all the doors and windows open despite the heat. I think of coming and sitting by her feet, the way she’d put her hand on my head and keep praying, the Spanish words flowing over me like cool rain in the blistering heat.
