around. …”
“What’s changed?”
“Everything, Manuel. For a start, I’m sober, and besides it’s calm here, there’s silence and space. It would do me good to meditate, like my Nini, but I can’t, I’m always thinking, my head’s always full of ideas. Do you think that’s bad?”
“Depends on the ideas. …”
“I’m no Avicenna, as my grandma likes to point out, but good ideas do occur to me.”
“Like what?”
“At this exact moment I can’t think of any, but as soon as I get a brilliant one, I’ll tell you. You think about your book too much, but you don’t spend time thinking about more important things, for example, how depressing your life was before my arrival. And what will become of you when I go? You should think about love, Manuel. Everybody needs love.”
“Aha. Where’s yours?” he asked, laughing.
“I can wait—I’m nineteen years old with my whole life ahead of me; you’re ninety, and you could die in five minutes.”
“I’m only seventy-two, but it’s true that I could die five minutes from now. That’s a good reason to avoid love; it would be impolite to leave a poor woman widowed.”
“With thinking like that, your goose is cooked, man.”
“Sit down here with me, Maya. An old man on his last legs and a pretty girl are going to breathe together. As long as you can shut up for a while, that is.”
That’s what we did as night fell. And my Popo was with us.
When my grandpa died, I was left without a compass and without family: my father lived in the air, Susan was sent to Iraq with Alvy to sniff out bombs, and my Nini sat down to mourn her husband. We didn’t even have any dogs. Susan used to bring pregnant dogs home. They stayed until the puppies were three or four months old, and then she took them away to train them; it was hard not to get attached to them. Puppies would have been a great solace when my family dispersed. Without Alvy or any puppies, I didn’t have anyone to share my sorrow.
My father was involved in other love affairs, leaving an impressive trail of clues, as if desperate for Susan to find out. At forty-one years of age he was trying to look thirty, paid a fortune for his haircut and his sports clothes, lifted weights, and went to a tanning parlor. He was better looking than ever, his graying temples giving him a distinguished air. Susan, on the other hand, tired of a life spent waiting for a husband who never entirely landed, who was always ready to take off or whispering into his cell phone with other women, had succumbed to the wear and tear of age, gained weight, dressed like a man, and wore ugly glasses she bought by the dozen at the pharmacy. She jumped at the chance to go to Iraq as an escape from that humiliating relationship. The separation was a relief to them both.
My grandparents had been truly in love. The passion that began in 1976 between that exiled Chilean woman, who kept her suitcase packed, and the American astronomer passing through Toronto stayed fresh for three decades. When my Popo died, my Nini was left inconsolable and confused, no longer herself. She was also left without means, because in a few months the illness had consumed their savings. She received her husband’s pension, but it wasn’t enough to maintain the galleon cast adrift that was her house. Without giving me even two days’ warning, she rented the house to a businessman from India, who filled it with relatives and merchandise, and went to live in a room above my dad’s garage. She got rid of most of her belongings, except for the love letters her husband had left her here and there over their years together, my drawings, poems, and diplomas, and her photographs, irrefutable proof of the happiness she’d shared with Paul Ditson II. Leaving that big house, where she’d been so fully loved, was a second mourning. For me it was a coup de grâce. I felt I’d lost everything.
My Nini was so isolated in her mourning that although we lived under the same roof, she didn’t see me. A year earlier she’d been a youthful, energetic, cheerful, and intrusive woman, with unruly hair, Birkenstocks, and long skirts, always busy, helping, inventing; now she was a middle-aged widow with a broken heart. Hugging the urn of her husband’s ashes, she told me the heart breaks like a glass, sometimes with a silent crack and other times smashing to pieces. She didn’t notice as she gradually eliminated the colors from her wardrobe and ended up wearing only black, stopped dyeing her hair, and added ten years to her appearance. She distanced herself from her friends, including Snow White, who couldn’t manage to interest her in any of the protests against the Bush government, in spite of the incentive of getting arrested, which once would have been irresistible to her. She began to dice with death.
My dad did the sums on the sleeping pills his mother was taking and the number of times she crashed her Volkswagen, left the stove on, and suffered spectacular falls, but he didn’t intervene until he discovered her spending the little money she had left on communicating with her husband. He followed her to Oakland and rescued her from a trailer painted with astrological symbols, where a psychic earned her living by connecting people with their deceased—pets as often as relatives. My Nini let him drive her to a psychiatrist, who began to treat her twice a week and stuffed her full of pills. She didn’t “resolve her grief,” and kept crying over my Popo, but she got over the paralyzing depression she’d sunk into.
Gradually, my grandma emerged from her cave over the garage and peeked out at the world, surprised to see that it hadn’t stopped spinning. In a short time the name Paul Ditson II had been erased; not even their granddaughter talked about him anymore. I had withdrawn inside a hard shell and wouldn’t let anyone get close to me. I turned myself into a defiant and sulky stranger, who didn’t answer when spoken to, burst into the place like a whirlwind, didn’t lift a finger to help around the house, and slammed doors at the slightest annoyance. The psychiatrist explained to my Nini that I was suffering from a combination of adolescence and depression and recommended that she sign me up for youth bereavement groups, but I wouldn’t hear of it. In the darkest nights, when I was most desperate, I sensed my Popo’s presence. My sadness summoned him.
My Nini had slept for thirty years with her husband’s chest as a pillow, soothed by the steady sound of his breathing. She had lived in comfort, protected by the warmth of this kind man who celebrated her extravagances of horoscopes and hippie aesthetics, her political extremism, and her foreign cooking, who put up with her mood swings, her sentimental raptures, and her sudden premonitions, which tended to alter the family’s best plans, all with good humor. When she was most in need of someone to console her, her son was rarely nearby, and her granddaughter had turned into a lunatic brat.
That’s when Mike O’Kelly reappeared, having undergone another operation on his back and spent several weeks in a physical rehabilitation center. “You didn’t come to visit me once, Nidia, and you didn’t even call,” he said instead of hello. He’d lost twenty-five pounds, grown a beard, and I almost didn’t recognize him. He looked older, no longer as if he could be my Nini’s son. “What can I do to get you to forgive me, Mike?” she begged him, leaning over his wheelchair. “Make some cookies for my boys,” he replied. My Nini had to bake them on her own, because I declared myself sick of Snow White’s repentant delinquents and other noble causes I didn’t give a shit about. My Nini raised her hand to give me a slap, which I deserved, besides, but I grabbed her wrist in midair. “Don’t you dare ever hit me again, or it’ll be the last you see of me, get it?” She got it.
That was just the shake-up my grandma needed to stand up and get moving again. She went back to her job at the library, though she was no longer able to invent anything and only repeated the stories from before. She went for long walks in the woods and began to attend the Zen Center. She is completely lacking in talent for serenity, but in the forced quietude of meditation she’d invoke my Popo and he would come, like a gentle presence, to sit beside her. I went with her just once to the Sunday ceremony at the Zendo, where I grumpily sat through a talk