The Iguana Tree. Michel Stone

with him to the door where deep shadows in the courtyard announced the end of this day. How often she’d stood in this doorway as a child, waiting for Crucita to return from the market after a day of selling her pottery. Rosa hummed in the kitchen, washing a dish. Music and laughter filtered into the house from outside, somehow more ghostlike than silence.

      “I am sorry Emanuel was not here.” Rosa said, drying her thick hands on a kitchen rag.

      “Nonsense. He has no business coming to mourn Crucita,” Lilia said.

      Rosa filled her cup and one for Lilia, sloshing mezcal in the sink as she did so. “Not to mourn Crucita, silly girl. But to comfort you.”

      “You have comforted me. My friends have been here all day. I do not know Emanuel anymore. He is like a dream to me now, so distant is my friendship with him.”

      Rosita entered the kitchen. “The baby is asleep now,” she said.

      “You have been good help to me today, Rosita. Please go on home now and rest,” Lilia said, squeezing the girl’s hand.

      “Yes,” Rosa said. “Run along home. I’ll be there in a while.”

      The girl nodded to her mother and left, saying nothing more.

      Rosa swallowed a gulp from her cup, shaking her head. “You need a man to comfort you, a reliable man. You do not have that. You have me, José, and our children. We are like your family, but we cannot be for you what Emanuel could be. What your Alejandra needs. José says Emanuel asked him about you. That boy has always had a fondness for you, Lilia. I know this talk bothers you, girl, but with Crucita’s passing you must consider your options. You should believe that Héctor is gone.”

      José entered the kitchen from the courtyard, his face flush from drink.

      “Oh, poor Lilia. Come join us. Listen to music and play cards with us. Oh, and here for you is a note from the shopkeeper Armando. He stopped by but could not stay. He asked I give you his condolences.” José pulled from his pocket a small scrap of paper, folded in half. He handed the message to Lilia.

      “Thoughtful of him to stop by,” Lilia said, fingering the folded paper.

      “Come play cards, Lilia,” José said.

      “This day has been long. Perhaps I will watch you play,” Lilia said.

      “My God,” Rosa said, flailing her hands in the air. “Crucita is with God now. She has no pain. And you mope so for Héctor. Be strong, girl. Lift yourself up, Lilia.”

      Someone in the courtyard called for José. “Come out, Lilia,” he said.

      “She’ll be along in a moment. I need to finish speaking with her the way her own mother would have spoken to her,” Rosa said, motioning her husband out the door.

      “That old woman lived a long and rich life,” Rosa continued, jerking her head toward Crucita’s corpse. “She died happy, cooking. Your own mama died giving you life, a life she anticipated with great joy. But you … I suspect your constant sorrow is as much about Héctor’s leaving as Crucita’s passing. Crucita and Héctor are gone. Drink something. Laugh a little. Dance. I guarantee you that is what Crucita is doing in heaven now with your own mama, perhaps with Héctor, too.”

      “No, Rosa,” Lilia said. “Not Héctor.”

      Rosa spun on her heel splashing golden liquor from her cup onto the floor and Lilia’s sandals as she marched to Crucita’s casket.

      “Crucita,” Rosa shouted at the dead woman’s face. “I cannot get through to Lilia. She cannot even celebrate your life without depressing me. Give this child a sign that Héctor is there with you, if he is not in hell for abandoning his family.” Rosa took the cup of mezcal and poured it into Crucita’s casket. She then tossed the cup in at the old woman’s feet.

      “Enjoy yourself, Crucita. Someone in your family should.” Rosa turned and glared at Lilia.

      A rage exploded inside Lilia. “Never speak Héctor’s name again! You are crazy.”

      Rosa shook her head. “And you are a fool,” she said, brushing past Lilia.

      Lilia grabbed a kitchen rag and went to Crucita, dabbing at her grand mother’s burial garments. The music outside stopped as Rosa barked at the card players in the courtyard. The white lilies had fallen from Crucita’s dress into the casket, and Lilia returned them to her grandmother’s breast, their perfume lingering, despite the mezcal’s strong odor. The drunken voices in the courtyard faded as the card players’ party moved elsewhere.

      Lilia fingered the cream-colored lace on her grandmother’s pale blue dress until long shadows overtook the room. When finally she stood, her shoulders relaxed for the first time in hours.

      She walked to the courtyard and sank to the ground beneath the tree, fishing in her pocket for a handkerchief to blow her nose. She felt a scrap of paper. What was that? Oh, yes, the shopkeeper’s note of condolence. She would read it tomorrow.

      She clutched her knees to her breasts and listened to faint laughter somewhere down the lane. She ached, tired from mourning, from visitors, and she welcomed the courtyard’s familiar solitude this evening. No hint of stew drifted on the thick air, no scent of Crucita’s incense permeated this place. And how could that be? Who, but God, knew if Héctor were dead, too? And maybe even God didn’t know some things. Some mysteries remained unsolved, complicated, and senseless.

      Slats of moonlight fell into the courtyard through the shade tree, shaping silhouettes of leaf and limb, light and dark, illuminating a small white crescent, perhaps a child’s sock or a crumpled bit of paper. The slight object glowed in the moonlight near the center of the courtyard. Lilia rose to fetch it. She bent, caressing the leathery strip between her fingers, uncertain of what it could be. She lifted the thing to her face, examining it in the soft moonlight. Then she recognized the shell of an iguana’s egg, curled and dried, and she wondered what had become of its insides. How often she had seen the iguana sunning on a low limb, constant company for her and Crucita in their courtyard.

      She considered the egg’s innards, long gone, once swelling from liquid into a living creature inside the opaque shell, life coming from life, something substantial from something less. Perhaps one of the yellow-headed blackbirds that often scattered leaves and droppings and petals from the limbs above had pecked this egg, had drunk the slick insides. If so, the egg would never become an iguana, would never become what the mother iguana set out for it to be. The egg had served, perhaps, as sustenance to a bird. The bird—careless, distracted, and indifferent-soon flying off to other trees, other courtyards.

      Lilia stretched her arms, leaning against the wall of the courtyard, the remnant of eggshell in her fingers. She thought of Héctor’s dreams, of the mother iguana’s dreams, the yellow-headed blackbird’s dreams.

      And Héctor, she considered, like the life-giving substance within the eggshell, existed to provide for his family, to nurture his and Lilia’s future children and Alejandra’s future children, but perhaps he, too, carried a fate like the unformed iguana, a slippery yolk destined to be destroyed for the sake of others. Perhaps Rosa had spoken truthfully.

      The thoughts unsettled her, and she held the shell up before her eyes, turning it in the moonlight.

      She whispered, “Is this my Héctor? Is he dead?” Lilia pictured Héctor’s white bones unmistakable and jutting from his corpse, a vulture pecking his flesh in the hot desert until the winds came and blew sand over what was once her Héctor, covering him, dissolving him into the earth like a raindrop, and he would be gone, save for the memories of those who knew him. “Can this be Héctor, Iguana?” She shouted the words at the limbs above, “Tell me, Iguana! I must know.”

      The iguana’s response came as words spoken by the breeze rustling the leaves above, and the words of the breeze blew foreign and indecipherable, and Lilia understood the iguana would offer no answer this night. She closed her eyes, her head against the courtyard wall, and hoped sleep would come soon.

      “Lilia?”