Rosa’s Choice

Until two weeks ago, Rosa has always slept so deeply that her Abuela accuses her of stealing sleep from the dead. Accused, she corrects mentally. Past tense. Where exactly does correcting grammar fall on the five stages of grief? She doesn’t know. She only knows that the sun is about to kiss the horizon and begin another sweltering day in her corner of the desert, and that Abuela is not here to see it.

“It is what it is,” she whispers almost silently, “and always will be.”

She feels a memory coming with a pang, and allows it to wash over her.

They are standing in the kitchen, side by side, making enchiladas. Her Abuela is speaking a steady stream of pure Spanish—no Spanglish, not Abuela, no, never think it—while Rosa dips corn tortillas one by one into the wide-mouthed container of coconut oil by the stove and her grandmother plops them into the pan. They make them in the old way, stacking them and covering them in homemade red chile sauce. Rosa yawns and Abuela bumps Rosa’s wide, youthful hips with her own sharp, bony ones. Rosa bumps her hips back into her grandmother’s. It is their little joke, a form of physical banter that belongs only to them.

“Stay awake, little one,” says Abuela. “You steal enough sleep from the dead after midnight.”

Rosa giggles. This idea used to frighten her. She imagined dead things coming to her window in the night, unspeakable skeletons with black, tacky flesh still hanging from their bones, tapping on the glass and demanding she return their stolen sleep. Now she imagines herself gathering wisps of cotton from plants that line the rock wall of an overgrown cemetery, filling a burlap sack with puffs of sleep. She sees herself eating from it absently, like cotton candy, as she reads books late into the night, disturbing no one because she is in her own room. An unfathomable luxury that would be—her own room—and she shares this part of the imagining with no one, and it thrills her.

The memory fades, a beautiful painting on a ceramic plate falling towards the floor, shattered by the pain of a newer memory: hearing in a school counselor’s office that Abuela was gone, and knowing that all of her life and knowledge and stories had gone with her. She had died on the linoleum floor of their tiny kitchen, under the wood-burned sign she had lived by: "Asi es y siempre sera asi." In English, according to Uncle Juan: “It is what it is, and always will be.”

Rosa rolls onto her left side quietly, her movement no longer covered by Abuela’s snoring. Her younger sister Elena now sleeps between Rosa and her mother, promoted from the tiny mattress Hernando and Julio share on the floor at the foot of the bed, and Elena sleeps much more lightly than Abuela did.

Her eyes fall on the things she keeps in the gap between the mattress and the wall. She sees a battered paperback, The Great Gatsby, and her poetry notebook with a pencil stuck in the spiral binding. She often writes lyrics and poems in its pages to keep the night away, more these past two weeks. She sees Abuela’s black notebook, and extends a finger to stroke the spine.

“It’s my lucky notebook,” Abuela had told her years ago. “I always carry it with me. When I join Abuelito, it will pass to you.”

Rosa had failed to hide her disappointment, which delighted Abuela rather than offending her. It was one of the things that Rosa loved most about her. Her reactions were never predictable, and she found joy in everything.

“You have a question,” Abuela said, leaning back in her rocking chair and closing her eyes.

Rosa struggled internally for a moment and then blurted, “Why?”

Abuela laughed, a sound drier than the corn husks she used to wrap her Christmas tamales. “I know you would rather have something else,” she said, flexing one arthritic, ring-clad hand at Rosa like a claw, “but this I trust only to you.”

And she would say no more. At night, Rosa lay awake with Abuela snoring next to her—notebook still safely tucked away in the pocket of her nightgown—feeling almost electrified with curiosity. For four years she lay and imagined a book full of treasure maps or hundred dollar bills carefully taped to each page. She imagined a key-shaped cutout in the pages, and in the hollow space a key that would unlock a safety deposit box full of jewels or a storage unit full of interesting and valuable antiquities. Or maybe—this one had lost some of its fervent excitement as she had begun to leave her girlhood behind—the pages of the notebook would contain a lengthy and detailed genealogy, proving her to be the last in a great line of Spanish monarchs, heiress to power and fortune beyond her wildest dreams.

The black leather of its cover is cracked and ancient, but the pages inside are oddly bright and clean. On the title page, in fancy printed script, it reads, “This book holds only truth.” She turns the page and sees Abuela’s cramped, painstaking longhand: “Rosalita Carolina Esperanza Estevez.” On the following page, the only other page in the book with writing of any kind, there is also only one line of writing: “I will know the true meaning of happiness in my life.”

And that’s it. The rest of the book, a hundred pages or so, is blank. What does it mean? Wordplay, perhaps? A motto? A manifesto? An affirmation? Rosa has read about affirmations. You’re supposed to stand in front of the mirror every day and repeat the good things you want to happen. Then you go live your life and wait for the universe to deliver what you want. Sure. But that isn’t how life works. She believes in her Abuela’s true mantra, the one she had lived by and quite literally died under: It is what it is, and always will be.

She turns the page and writes her own name in a large, looping cursive that is far more flamboyant than her Abuela’s. Rosalita Santana Esmerelda Fabiana. She looks at the symmetry of the letters, pleased with how they came out. She turns the page and tries to think of her own motto. The seconds tick by. The blank page stares back, and she does not feel the rush that she usually feels in this situation, the endless possibilities of a clean page and the worlds she could create here with her pencil. She feels empty, alone, and a grief so large it threatens to crush her.

The pre-dawn light of the room blurs, and a hot tear escapes one eye. Her Abuela is gone, and this strange relic is all she has to remember her by. She does not know what she expected, not really. She is too old for fairy tales and treasure maps.

What she really wants is one of Abuela’s gaudy rings, the last link to Abuelito, the last things of any real value still in the family. Her mother always says it that way, in the family. If you were born into it, you could be in the family. If something worth keeping came home, it was in the family, too. You could abandon the family, of course, like Rosa and her half-siblings’ fathers all had chosen to do, or you could die, like Abuelito had. The family was a destination, a physical place, sometimes a prison. Rosa overheard her mother and Juan talking once about how it would cost twenty thousand dollars to clear their debts and move the family out of this one bedroom apartment and to a better city. Are the rings worth that much? Rosa doesn’t know.

There is a terrible urge to tear the notebook in half. All this need, all this want, in a world of plenty that exists beyond the glass windows of her reality. She grabs her pencil and scribbles furiously on the blank page. She shuts the book and stuffs it back where she found it. Scalding tears flow freely, and she relishes the anger, despair, and, yes, she can admit it, even the self-pity that drives them.

My life will change dramatically this morning. That is what she has written. “Am I doing it right, Abuela?” she thinks bitterly.

Rosa weeps. The pain is enormous. She feels it on her mind like a brooding spider, weighing her down and sinking spiny legs into her brain. She shifts onto her back, knowing the tears will run into her hair and the snot will run down her throat and not caring. She wriggles slightly, feeling something pressing into her side. She arches her back and slides her hand underneath, finding a small, sharp-edged object and pulling it free.

She holds it up in front of her face and wipes the tears from her eyes with her other hand to get a clear look. A simple white envelope, thick, like it has a few decks of playing cards inside it. How could she not have noticed this in the night?

She cracks it open. Inside are two thick stacks of what are unmistakably, even in the dim morning light, crisp one hundred dollar bills. They are bound together with yellow and white bands of paper labeled “$10,000,” just like in the movies. Rosa feels her head start to swim, and as little black dots begin to populate her vision realizes she has stopped breathing.

She does not feel exhilaration or elation, on the contrary, she feels terror. She lies there, her whole body covered in goosebumps despite the warmth of the morning, adrenaline pumping freely through her veins, feeling horribly exposed.

Her eyes fall upon the notebook. It can’t be. It simply cannot be. Hands shaking violently, she stuffs the envelope between the bed and the wall and pulls the notebook free, lifting it with a feeling that is two parts fear and one part wonder, like someone picking up a land mine they have just stepped on that didn’t go off. She slowly opens it, and the binding crackles like a fifty year old notebook should, but the pages inside gleam like they just came off the presses yesterday. It is the same, except… when she opens to the page she wrote on, there is a line of text below her own. She stares, heart pounding in her ears, her mind not just racing but flying through the stratosphere and nearing escape velocity. The meaning of the words is inescapable, and even as they fade, disappearing as she watches, she knows what she must do.

She erases the line of text that she wrote, barely hesitating as she sees the blanket that had been obscuring the envelope settle and collapse as though deflating. She puts the metal cylinder that binds the eraser to her pencil between her teeth and flicks the eraser with quick little stabs of her tongue as she always does when she writes her poems and is searching for the right word. These may be the most important words she ever writes.

She hesitates. She thinks of Juan and his pregnant fiancée, sleeping on the pullout couch in the living room, yes, but telling stories of Abuelito’s exploits and entertaining the young ones every night. She thinks of Elena’s asthma in this dry place, but also her drawings and Julio’s lovely singing voice. Of braiding her mother’s hair and then trading places so her mother can braid hers in exactly the same style. She thinks of shared meals with many smiling faces around a small table. Slowly she closes the notebook.

There is no hurry. You only get one, the notebook told her. But her life has already changed dramatically. The book only holds truth.

“It is what it is,” she whispers. And as it happens, what exactly it is may be her choice after all.