Delia's Heart Read online

  “Why are we paying all this money for you to attend college if you’re not there?” she demanded to know.

  “I’m there for what I’m supposed to be,” he replied.

  “College is more than attending classes. It’s a whole world,” she said.

  He didn’t reply.

  In my heart of hearts, I knew that Edward was worrying about me all the time, how I was being treated and what new injury or pain my aunt and his sister were planning for me.

  I tried to assure him that I was fine whenever he called, but he was still concerned, despite how unafraid I sounded. I did have far more self-confidence now, and I think my aunt realized it. I would never say she accepted and loved me. It was more like a truce between us, or even a quiet respect and awareness that I was no longer as gullible and as innocent as the poor Mexican girl who had just lost her parents. The events of the past few years had hardened me in places I had hoped would always be soft. I didn’t want to be so untrusting and cynical, but sometimes, more often than not, those two ingredients were important when building a protective shield around yourself. Here, as everywhere, it was necessary to do so, especially for a young woman my age, whose immediate family was gone and whose future depended not so much on the kindness of others as it did on her own wit and skill.

  In one of her softer moments, when she permitted herself to be my aunt, Tía Isabela admitted to admiring me for having the spine to return and face all the challenges that awaited me, challenges that had grown even greater because of the previous events.

  But her compliments were double-edged swords in this house, because she often used them and me to whip Sophia into behaving. As a result, Sophia only resented me more.

  “Instead of always doing something behind my back or something sly and deceitful, Sophia, why don’t you take a lesson from Delia and draw on some of that Latin pride that’s supposedly in our blood,” she told her once at dinner when she discovered Sophia had been spreading nasty lies about a girl in the school who disliked her, the daughter of another wealthy family. The girl’s mother had complained bitterly to Tía Isabela. “Believe me,” she told Sophia, “people will respect you more for it. Look how Delia is winning respect.”

  Sophia’s eyes were aching with pain and anger when she looked at me. Then she folded her arms, sat back, and glared at her mother.

  “I thought you weren’t proud of your Mexican background, Mother. You never wanted to admit to ever living there, because you were so ashamed of it, and you hate speaking Spanish so much you won’t even say sí.”

  “Never mind me. Think of yourself.”

  “Oh, I am, Mother. Don’t worry, I am,” Sophia said, and smiled coldly at me. “Just like our Latin American princess,” she added.

  Frustrated, Tía Isabela shook her head and returned to eating in silence.

  Most of the time, silence ruled in this hacienda, because the thoughts that flew about would be like darts if they were ever voiced. They would sting like angry hornets and send pain deep into our hearts. It was better that their wings were clipped, the words never voiced.

  There was little music in the air here as well. Oh, Sophia clapped on her earphones, especially when she went into a tantrum, but there was no music like there was back in Mexico, the music of daily life, the music of families. Here there was only the heavy thumping of hearts, the slow drumbeat to accompany the funeral of love, a funeral I refused to attend.

  Instead, I sat by my window at night and looked out at the same stars that Ignacio was surely looking at as well at the same moment, somewhere in Mexico. I could feel the promise and the hope and vowed to myself that nothing would put out the twinkling in the darkness or silence the song we both heard—nothing, that is, that I could imagine.

  But then, there was so much I didn’t know.

  And so many dark places I couldn’t envision.

  1

  Dark Place

  “I’ll make a deal with you,” Sophia told me one evening just after the start of our senior year. She had called me into her room when I came up to go to mine and start my homework.

  “And what is this deal?”

  “I’ll do our English homework if you’ll do our math. You’re better than I am in math, because you don’t have to speak English to do numbers.”

  “I’m better than you are in English, too,” I said.

  Tía Isabela had tried pressuring her into working harder last year by saying, “A girl who barely spoke English a year ago is now achieving with grades so much higher than yours it’s embarrassing, Sophia.”

  “The teachers feel sorry for her and give her higher grades out of pity, that’s all,” was Sophia’s response.

  “Every teacher? I doubt that.”

  “Well, they do! She puts on a look so pathetic sometimes that it is…pathetic.”

  Aunt Isabela shook her head at Sophia and walked away, which was what she usually did. She would rather retreat than spend the time and effort to cause Sophia to change or improve.

  “I’m trying to be more of a cousin to you, Delia,” Sophia continued, with a sickeningly sweet smile as a way of urging me to do her math homework. “You can at least meet me halfway.”

  “Okay, I will. I will help you with your math homework whenever you ask.”

  “Help me? I’m not asking you to be my teacher!” she flared back at me. Then she quickly calmed down and again slipped that phony smile over her face, a smile I had grown so accustomed to that it no longer had any effect.

  Why she never saw the futility of these antics, not only with me but with others, especially her teachers and her supposedly close friends, I didn’t know. She was so obviously being phony. I was tempted to tell her time and time again that she wasn’t fooling anyone with her false faces. Just be yourself, believe in yourself. And then again, I was beginning to wonder if she even had a self. Maybe she was just a mixture of this deception and that lie, a bundle of phoniness that when unraveled left nothing.

  “Look, if you do my math, I’ll help you make more friends. Everyone needs more friends, Delia.”

  Now I was tempted to laugh aloud at her. On my desk in my room was an invitation to Danielle Johnson’s birthday party, an invitation she had yet to receive. I had learned never to mention any invitation before she received it, because if she wasn’t invited to the same party, she went into a sulk and then a tantrum. It only made life more miserable for everyone in the hacienda, especially the servants she badgered and abused, such as Inez Morales, the assistant maid to my aunt’s head housekeeper, Señora Rosario. Poor Inez desperately needed the money, since her husband had deserted her and her twin boys, so she had to endure whatever abuse Sophia unloaded on her. Sophia was like that, quick to pounce and take advantage of someone who was practically defenseless. I remembered how defenseless I was my first days here and how she had abused me.

  Never again, I vowed.

  “I am pleased with how many friends I already have, Sophia. When your mother and your brother told me I would attend the private school, I was worried that so many of the other students would be snobby, but I’m happy to say it’s not so,” I told her with a deliberately exaggerated happy smile.

  Of course, there were snobby girls and many who were not friendly to me, but give her back the dishonesty she doles out to me and to others, I thought. Or, as my Señora Paz would always tell my grandmother whenever someone would say something insulting, “Páguela en su propia moneda.” Pay her in her own currency.

  I could see the frustration boiling inside Sophia, the crimson color coming to her cheeks, the tiny flames dancing in her eyes. I knew my grandmother Anabela would not like to see me so vengeful, but sometimes I couldn’t help it. Was I becoming too much like my cousin?

  More than once I had heard my father in conversation with other men say, “Cuando usted se convierte como su enemigo, su enemigo ha ganado.” When you become like your enemy, your enemy has won.

  Was that happening to me? Was my living in this
house with my aunt and my cousin turning me into a woman with a character just like theirs? Was I doing it to survive or because I had come to enjoy it?

  “Don’t be fooled, Delia. You speak English okay, but you’re not sophisticated enough yet to be an American. They’re lying to your face and talking about you behind your back. You don’t hear what I hear in the girls’ room. They still think you’re some wetback Mexican who just happened to fall into a good thing.”

  “If that is so after all this time, then there is not much you can do to change them, Sophia, but thank you for thinking and worrying about me,” I told her, smiled, and went to my room.

  Even before I crossed the hallway, I could hear her heaving things about in anger. It brought a smile to my face, until I looked into the mirror above my vanity table and thought I saw mi abuela Anabela shaking her head.

  “I’m sorry, Grandmother,” I whispered. “But I’ve turned the other cheek so many times, I feel like I’m spinning.”

  I dropped myself onto my bed and stared up at the ceiling. Yes, I was back in this beautiful room with this plush, expensive furniture, and I had a closet almost as big as the room Abuela Anabela and I had shared as a bedroom back in Mexico, but it still felt more like a prison at times.

  I’m the Lady of Shalott in the Tennyson poem we were studying, I thought when I rose and went to my window to look out on the estate. Just like her, I’m trapped in a tower, hoping somehow to be with my true love but cursed if I dared look at him. If I acknowledged Ignacio, I would have the same fate.

  All of the clothes, the cars, the riches of this hacienda, and the privileges I now enjoyed did little to relieve me of my aching heart. Sometimes I thought I was torturing myself by continuing to hope. On many an occasion, I heard Señora Paz bitterly say, “Quien vive de esperanzas muere de hambre.” Who lives on hope dies of hunger. In her old age, she could only look back at missed opportunities and be cynical, but I was determined not to be that way.

  I glanced at my desk. Under my books was the letter I had started, the secret letter I would have to get to Ignacio’s family so it could somehow travel through the clandestine maze and find itself in his hands. During these past two years, we had the opportunity to speak to each other on a telephone only a half-dozen times. He was afraid to call his home and certainly could never call here, even though, thanks to Edward, I had a phone in my room with my own number. Ignacio and, especially, his father were afraid that somehow someone would overhear or trace a conversation. It was better to be extra careful. Everyone except someone like my cousin Sophia knew that an ounce of prevention was worth a pound of cure.

  But when it was possible, I went to a pay phone in a strip mall and answered the phone for a secret, prearranged telephone rendezvous. Once, one of the girls at school, Caitlin Koontz, saw me do it and asked about it. I told her I had just heard it ringing and picked it up. I said I quickly learned it was an elderly lady who had made a dialing mistake.

  “Why did you speak so long?” Caitlin asked.

  “I was just trying to calm her down and help her call the right number.”

  “Was she desperate for some kind of help?”

  “No, just confused.”

  She smirked and shook her head. “Boring,” she sang, and sauntered off.

  I was afraid she would tell some other girls, but she either forgot or didn’t think it was important enough. Nevertheless, just that little confrontation filled me with such fear and anxiety that my body trembled all day. I knew Ignacio’s father didn’t want him to have any contact with me other than the letters, and he wasn’t happy about that, either. Reluctantly, because of promises he had made to Ignacio, he would get a message to me that a letter from Ignacio had arrived. I would have to wait until I could find a way to get out to the Davilas’ house to read it. Right after I had, his father would burn it, and his mother would turn away and cry.

  Ignacio’s father was a very proud, strong man, and he wouldn’t permit tears to be shed in front of him. I thought he forbid it because it would only make him more aware of his own pain and sorrow. Despite his attempt to be stoic and firm, I saw the glitter of deep sadness in his own eyes, too, whenever Ignacio’s name was spoken.

  Going to the Davilas’ house was difficult, not only because of the distance and the arrangements I had to make to get there but because my aunt disapproved. The first time she learned I had visited the Davilas, she summoned me to her office. Señora Rosario informed me that I was to appear immediately. It was as if she was bringing me a court subpoena. Edward was already away at college, but that didn’t matter. I hadn’t told either him or Jesse about my visits with the Davila family. I did not know how my aunt had found out. It gave me pause to think she might be having me watched, even followed, perhaps for other reasons. After all, I had been shoved down her throat, so to speak, and mi tía Isabela was never one to be told what to do. That I knew from what my family back in Mexico had told me of her.

  She made me stand in front of her in her office for a good thirty seconds while she shuffled papers.

  “First,” she began, lifting her eyes toward me and focusing sharply, like a sniper taking sight of his target, “I would have thought you would want to widen your relationships and take advantage of the opportunity to know young people from substantial families.”

  “Substantial?”

  “Rich, well-off, people with status, authority, people who could do you some good,” she rattled off. “Don’t pretend not to understand me, Delia Yebarra. I know you better than anyone else knows you, even Edward, and I know you’re not stupid, so don’t pretend.”

  “I’m not pretending anything. I just wanted to be sure I understood,” I said softly.

  She glared at me a moment and then took a deep breath before continuing.

  Forgive me, Grandmother, I thought, but I do enjoy frustrating her.

  “Second, this boy you knew from this family was a felon and would have gone to prison. He was selfish and foolish to take you along on a very dangerous desert crossing, and yet now I learn you still remain friendly with his family. Why?”

  “They have suffered.”

  “So has Rod Whitfield. And so has your cousin!” she added, widening her eyes.

  I knew that Tía Isabela would blame me for Edward’s loss of his eye forever, even if Edward did not. On more than one occasion, she had suggested that I should have kept what Bradley had done to me to myself, swallowed it back and forgotten about it, just like that, like snapping your fingers, and poof, it never happened. She could do that with unhappy events, disappointments. She had steel skin and an iron heart. She told me that if I had kept what Bradley had done to me locked away, Edward would have both eyes, and the Mexican boys would not be in prison.

  “And one wouldn’t be dead and food for buzzards,” she added, believing, as did everyone else, that Ignacio was dead. Maybe she was right. I did feel some responsibility for it all, even though I was a classic victim.

  “Continuing any relationship with these Mexicans, especially now, can come to no good. I forbid it!” she told me.

  I just stared at her.

  “Did you hear me?”

  I turned away and looked out the window at the clouds, which seemed to be reaching for each other. It was as if the sky were in sympathy with me, with my longing to reach out to Ignacio and feel his hand in mine.

  “Do you understand me?” she demanded.

  I did not respond. I went to that wall of silence so familiar in this house, that wall that fell so often between everyone in it. In this hacienda, it was safer to be deaf and dumb and even blind.

  “I’m warning you. I won’t stand for it,” she threatened. “Don’t you ever even think about bringing any of those people here!”

  I smiled.

  “What are you laughing at?”

  “Would you even know if one of them came, Tía Isabela? In your eyes now, all Mexicans look the same.”

  For a moment, she looked as if her face would bu
rst.

  “You insolent…get out of here. You’ll make your own disasters, I know. You won’t need me to help,” she said, nodding. Suddenly, she waved her right forefinger at me, her entire demeanor changing. “El pez que busca anzuelo busca su duelo,” she recited. I was certain it had been recited at her so many times when she was younger that it was embedded in her brain. A fish that looks for the hook is halfway cooked, a lesson her father had tried desperately to teach her.

  Her returning to her Mexican roots, even for a split second in anger, brought a gleeful smile to my face. Perhaps she hated me most because I reminded her of who she had been and who she still was. The moment the Spanish words came from her lips, she slammed them shut and turned away, angry at me but shocked at herself as well.

  “Thank you for worrying about me,” I said and left.

  She never spoke of the Davilas again, but I had no doubt that she would be infuriated if she knew I continued to defy her and visited them many times after her lecture. She did complain to Edward.

  “If you feel comfortable with the Davilas and feel you should visit them, that’s fine,” he said. “But it’s better my mother does not know. I have made her swallow as much as I can, but always be careful. She’ll always be looking for something she can use against you, Delia. Try not to give her any other opportunities. She’ll pounce on you.”

  I almost told him the truth about it all then, but fear of his deserting me, too, kept me from speaking about Ignacio. In the end, it would be okay, I told myself, even though I had no idea when such a conclusion would ever come.

  Lifting away my schoolbooks, I slipped out the nearly completed new letter to Ignacio. I wrote to him only in Spanish, just in case Sophia came into my room and inspected my things, looking for something she could use to make me look bad in front of Tía Isabela or the other girls at school. It was like living in the same house with a pair of scorpions.