Halloween Carnival, Volume 3 Read online

  I got my keys, put the skull for my costume in my bag, and left.

  —

  The first time Jasmine asked to paint my face for the festival I refused. I would enjoy her culture, but I’d never be that gringa. I mean, right? Her answer, “My party, my rules. I’m painting your face.” She sat in the bathroom on the edge of the tub while I sat atop the toilet cover. Her face was inches from mine, close enough to kiss, and she worked for more than an hour. When she worked on the side of my head, her breast pressed against my arm and I held my breath for fear she’d move. Focused on her work, she leaned that way for a delicious while.

  I had told her only half a face—that way, maybe only half the people there would be irritated by my Polish face and blond hair pointing out my poseurness. But when I saw that half a face, so perfect and haunting, my skeleton grin straight across, my eye surrounded in a rainbow of petals, the perfect broken heart on my forehead, I realized I had just become a piece of Jasmine’s art. She had left her stamp on me. That I could live with. I wore that face with pride, and each subsequent face she painted me every year, relishing each turn of the brush on my cheek, forehead, chin, each moment of intense concentration in her eyes as she worked on me, each touch, each breath when she exhaled, that vanilla perfume in her hair. And it was about me, not that fucking asshole Hector.

  We had gotten into a routine, living together. Friday night was beer and binge-watching. Saturday morning we’d sleep in way too late, do errands, then get together at dinnertime before we went out. Sunday mornings were waffle mornings with my mom’s old ozone-burning-when-you-plugged-it-in 1970s waffle iron. That thing weighed a ton. Back to the work routine on Monday.

  But Hector fucked up our routine. Binge-watching night wasn’t the same. After two episodes, when we’d just gotten to the can’t-turn-back phase of a series, you know that time when you know you’ll be up all night? Hector and Jasmine would slink off to her room for sex so noisy I had to turn the volume up to 18 so I wouldn’t hear them. You can forget about Saturday nights. Hector always had plans for them…and they didn’t involve me. He’d have “only two tickets,” or “only a plus-one,” or “It’s a family event, you understand.” I began to think “family event” was code for “no gringas allowed,” like I wasn’t a part of her life and family for five years longer than him. I knew her mom still asked after me. I caught her on the phone telling her I was busy, couldn’t make it.

  That was when I started calling her mom, putting ideas in her head. Hector’s gloomy temper, sudden rages. I made her mom swear to keep it secret. “I just wanted you to know…” Are lies really an issue if they’re doing some good? Hector was all wrong for her, it would end sooner or later.

  And when Hector was in the apartment, the worst thing? They were always, always speaking Spanish to each other. Like I wasn’t there. And Sunday-morning waffles weren’t the same with some jerkoff who didn’t even bother to shower after sex, showing up in his boxer shorts. Seriously, I do not need to see your tired junk. On top of the sex, he reeked of—Vodka? Tequila?—whatever liquor he’d drunk too much of the night before, and he demanded butter or juice or milk from the fridge like I was his stinking servant.

  But when he said they’d be looking for an apartment together in Highland Park? That’s when it really hit the fan. And he has the nerve to fucking call me now?

  —

  I was fuming along Sunset Boulevard in costume. The night was unnaturally warm and the air so dry my nose pricked—the Santa Anas were heading in for sure. We were in that eerie, dry, still part, before they blow hard. As a bead of sweat trickled down my neck, I realized the turtleneck might’ve been a bad idea.

  We always walked. Parking was a nightmare, and we lived too close to the cemetery to bother with the bus. I passed the carts with the ladies selling hot dogs wrapped in bacon, which looked gross now. I knew that after a couple twelve-dollar margaritas and three hours of cruising the festival, they would prove irresistible. I moved through oceans of people, all headed to the same place for the same purpose. It felt so nice to be part of that again.

  As comfortably as last year, she fell into step next to me.

  When I turned my head all the way, she wasn’t there, but if I looked only in my peripheral vision, she was there, skull face shining in the tungsten streetlamps. The green dress looked better on her, of course; her gait always had a fluidity I couldn’t master, not for want of trying. The Lucy wig made her blend in; people wouldn’t notice her lack of a neck with that thing on. The red flowers at her forehead, half obscured by the wig, looked like—looked like I didn’t want to think about. I never knew she could fit in my shoes, but I heard them there, walking in time with mine. I guess Hector hadn’t taken her after all. She’d gone for a walk and was now here with me. Of course she was with me. This was our thing.

  I didn’t want to say anything for fear of scaring her away.

  We stood in the Disneyland-long line that wound back and forth to the entrance.

  She said, as clearly as if she were flesh and blood standing next to me, “No makeup this year?”

  I laughed and turned to her, forgetting for a moment, but she wasn’t there. I turned my head and looked straight forward and her presence filled my periphery again. It felt so good to have her there, I welled up with it. I tried not to cry.

  “I’ve missed you.”

  “Whose fault is that?”

  “Hector’s a fucker. You know he’d leave you crying on the curb within a year.”

  “Wasn’t that up to me to find out?”

  I didn’t answer but instead focused on this gorgeous little girl in line in front of me. Someone, probably her abuela, had done her whole face, and she had a crown of bright red marigolds, her braids wrapped up behind. She turned her head toward me and Jasmine said, “Eek! Frida-ized.”

  I laughed again, smiled at the girl. Jasmine always said this when the calavera tended toward Frida Kahlo, unibrow and all. The girl stared at me an extra-long moment, no smile at all, and turned around. I wondered if she’d heard Jasmine.

  I said, “Complete with attitude.”

  We fell quiet for a moment. Music spilled out from the stage inside and combatted pop music from a kid holding a speaker in the palm of his hand. When did they get so small?

  She said, “What did you bring me?”

  I was going to bring her the calavera, but I realized, now, I was empty-handed. I changed the subject. “So, what are we going to hit first? Food tents?”

  Jasmine laughed shallowly.

  I said, “I guess not.”

  She said, “How about some waffles?”

  I pretended I didn’t hear.

  The line was moving along, and when I got to the ticket booth I said, “Two please,” without really thinking. I paid and we went in.

  We walked quietly for a while. The first altar was over-the-top: PVC piping, a skull with light-up eyes, more Jethro Tull than Día de los Muertos. “Gringo altar!” we called out in chorus and then laughed. I turned to see her again. Mistake. She was gone.

  We moved along the pavement and stopped at a beautiful home-grown altar, deep in flowers and pictures of a man in his mid-thirties, mustache, sad eyes. One picture had him laughing at the beach with his children. There were some older black-and-white photos of family. These were surrounded by pan de muerto, favorite foods, and personal objects. The centerpiece was an enormous calavera, lovingly made, with sugar skulls laid out beside. An older woman, mid-fifties, sat in a chair. I smiled and nodded at her, and she at me. Jasmine murmured, “Gracias,” as we moved on to the next altar. Even in her condition, she was feeling a connection here I’d never really own.

  We walked this way through a good portion of the festival to the edge of the artificial lake in the middle of the cemetery. Someone had projected images of paintings onto the side of one of the crypts, where a line of people snaked down the walk waiting to see the art exhibited inside. Local painters and sculptors used the mausoleums as galle
ries. I stopped and said, “Wait.”

  “What?”

  “Why are you back?”

  She said, “You invited me.”

  “So? I’ve been begging you for weeks now.”

  She shrugged, “All Hallows’ Eve colliding with Día de los Muertos, papier-mâché hijinks, who the hell knows? All I know is that I’m here.”

  “How long can you stay?”

  She didn’t answer. And did I want her here?

  “But why are you back?”

  She and I both knew that answer.

  I said, “Hector’s really mad. He keeps calling me at work.”

  I wish I hadn’t said that. I felt her mood change and darken. After five years, I had a knack for these things. I knew when to back off, when she’d had too much. I knew that if I kept the mood just light enough—binge-watching night, waffles—if I kept her comfortable and didn’t push things…I knew then that she’d stay with me.

  As if she’d heard my line of thought, she said, “You have to let me go.”

  “But I miss you.”

  “That’s not what I mean. You know that’s not what I mean.”

  “I have to keep you with me.”

  She turned to face me, but I wouldn’t turn my head. She was as close as she’d been all the times she painted my face, her breath cool on the tears I didn’t notice were on my cheek until now. “You have to let me go.”

  “How? Where?”

  “Here. And you already know how.”

  My bag felt suddenly heavier. I slogged it up on my shoulder and moved forward. Jasmine’s mother’s altar, which she put out every year with her tías, would be in its traditional spot along a path behind one of the mausoleums. When we came every year, we’d sit in the soccer chairs to the left of it and drink our watered-down margaritas, take a load off, and watch as people stopped and admired their handiwork honoring their mothers. I had meant to give this particular altar a miss, I wasn’t sure how I’d be received, but Jasmine had willed it, and here we were again. Her tía Maria had painted a beautiful portrait of her, a swirling of paints, her hair black as black, her green eyes, she’d gotten it all just right. This painting captured Jasmine in a way I’d never really ever touch. I knew that now.

  But it was her brother, Javi, who saw me first. He was up out of his lawn chair and right to me before her tías had a chance to see me. “What are you doing here? Get the hell out of here!” He put his hands up and came at my shoulders, but his mother stopped him and pushed him aside. “She knows what happened, Mama, I know it.”

  “Javi, shush it.” She stepped out in front of him and opened her arms to me, but I was frozen, my bag heavy in my hands. I hadn’t seen or spoken to her in a few weeks. Not since I pointed her to Hector. Not since they found Jasmine’s suitcase at Union Station. Her wallet in a nearby trash can, money and credit cards gone, but inside, a ticket to Houston, where she had family.

  What was inside my bag, now so heavy, had found its way home, I just didn’t know how to make it right. There was no way to make it right.

  Calavera Jasmine was crying now. She pulled off her wig and her white skull shone in the moonlight. Was the full moon on this Hallows’ Eve in the graveyard more magic? She moved up to the painting of herself and drew her head in closer to see it. She touched it. Without looking full at her, I saw her skeleton hand reach out and scratch the surface of the painting, causing the canvas to stretch, concave. The paint and oil, still not dry, smudged. Jasmine’s mother stopped looking at me and looked to the painting, gasping. Tears formed in her eyes and she sobbed. Everyone at this booth was very, very quiet, creating a pocket of silence with the sound of the festival going on somewhere around the corner, behind us, behind the mausoleum, somewhere else. Because here, Jasmine’s skeleton hand went from the painting to the crown of her painted papier-mâché head, right for the red flowers on her brow, and scraped. But the sound changed from the scrape of hardened papier-mâché to bone to something that squished and the bones of her fingers slid inside her head and they came out covered with dark, blackened, aged blood and brain matter.

  Jasmine looked at me, her papier-mâché black eyes streaked now with blood from her forehead. I started to cry. Because I hadn’t meant it to come to this. I hadn’t meant for any of it to happen.

  —

  On that Sunday morning, the bad morning, she was leaving. She never did that, and I had just made the waffles. But she didn’t even want one. She was meeting Hector to look at some apartments.

  I said, “You can’t leave. You haven’t had any waffles.”

  She’d been increasingly irritated with me in the past two weeks. She said, “You’re gonna have to get used to eating waffles alone, you know. This’ll be good for you. You need…” She paused in a way that let me know she was dismissing harsher words for just the right thing to say. I could fill in those harsh words, even though what she actually said was “You need to own your independence. Figure out who you are.”

  “Why’d you tell your mother I couldn’t make it to your birthday?”

  She was about to object but recognized the look in my eyes. Resigned, she sighed. “I can’t. What do you want me to tell her? You got creepy all of a sudden? That I feel weird when I’m with you? That I don’t want to hang out with you anymore? I tell her you’re busy. It’s easier.”

  “You can’t leave. Without you I’m nothing.” I hadn’t meant to put it that way. It just slipped out.

  She rolled her eyes and huffed at me, annoyed. “I can’t do this anymore. Look, get a fucking life. Meet new people. I gotta go. I’m late.” And she was out the door. And it slammed. I was so suddenly bereft, everything leaked out of me and black emptiness crowded in.

  But a second later, her key was in the lock with a click of hope and she was back again, moving for the charging station on the kitchen counter.

  She’d forgotten her phone. She picked it up and started wrapping the cord, which knocked a stack of mail onto the floor. She bent over to get the mail when I hefted the waffle iron by its sticky rubber-footed base, raised it as high as I could reach with its cord still attached to the wall, and brought it down on her head. She fell back to the floor, dazed and struggling, when I yanked the waffle iron, jerking the cord out of the wall. I lifted it over my head, heavy and hot and burning my hands, and hurled it down at her. And the noise it made when it hit her? That is not something I will ever forget. Like an anvil hitting a roast beef. Kind of. But there was a crack in it also. Bits of uncooked waffle spattered out the side with blood.

  I wanted to undo it the moment it happened. I took the waffle iron off her and her skull was cracked open, right across the forehead. I tried to put her back together, but it wouldn’t take. So I took the head. I would give it back when it was fixed. The rest? Well. That took some doing. But binge-watching Breaking Bad helped with what not to do. Fortunately, my bathtub was made of the right stuff to handle the sulfuric acid. And those calls to Jasmine’s mom about Hector, combined with her suitcase and wallet, a quick trip to Union Station, and the cops were diverted.

  Now, standing at her family’s altar, I didn’t know how hard I was crying until I heard my fat, phlegmy voice say, “I didn’t mean to hurt her.”

  “Motherfu—”

  “Javi. Not another word!”

  “I told you, Mami.”

  I put my bag down on the ground. I took a moment and cleared a part of the altar, moving some sugar skulls out of the way, framing it with marigolds.

  It was always our thing. And I promised I’d bring her back.

  You see, the calavera I was making was too small. So I used the only armature I could. It was in the closet in an old hatbox she had given me on my birthday. She’d filled it with candy, DVDs of movies she knew I loved, and colored tissue paper. Every time I got a new silica packet out of the snacky foods I got in Little Tokyo, I’d throw it into the hatbox. The smell got less bad over time. Especially given the heat. Our apartment was always hot through October.
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  She died three weeks ago, but she never really left.

  It was two weeks before the police showed up in the first place. They’d found the suitcase, the wallet. Her family was worried. Not that they hadn’t tried calling me, but all I had to do was fan the flames a little. I’d been a constant in her life for years now, why wouldn’t they believe me? I said, “She hasn’t been home in six days and I’m frantic. Hector was so angry the last time we talked.” This was true. Little truths help. He was angry with me because of the apartment thing. I hadn’t exactly made things easy for him. But what do they care? Angry young man.

  Her mom put on a brave tone. “All right, mija, tell me if you hear anything. See anything. Saw anything.”

  Mrs. Rodriguez always loved me.

  When the police showed up to question me, I gave them a solid description of Hector. Put on that worried voice. I talked about the way he stalked her for months, his controlling nature, the look in his eyes. I didn’t accuse him of anything. Technically, at least. But when I did say she may have skipped town to escape from him? That she was too scared to leave a forwarding address?

  They took a brief look around her room for any other evidence, journals, whatnot. I was nervous they would really search, but when you’re crying with worry over a roommate and—let’s face it, when you are a white girl crying with worry over a roommate—the cops mostly want to leave. Especially when they’re hot on the trail, and thanks to a prior Hector had—carrying—they were convinced.

  That trail had run out. That much was obvious.

  —

  Now, with Jasmine’s family looking on, I lowered the bag to the ground and pulled her head out. I lifted her, still heavy, her eyes so black and perfect! The red blood seeped through the red of the flowers I’d painted. I saw Javi reach for his phone and start dialing as I put her on the altar, where she really should have been all along.

  Sometimes, no matter how much we feel a thing, want a thing, no matter how much we celebrate, say the right stuff, some things were never really meant to be ours.