Apology by Jon Pineda (good novels to read .TXT) 📗

come back toward him, she had kicked her leg out and grazed one long, beaded strand. Nematocysts anchored her. Though she was able to swim free of the tentacle, the poison drew her back. It pulled her breath into a shallow place.

Manny grabbed her and lifted her into the air. If he were to head toward the shore now, he would have to navigate through the sudden colony. Behind him, the boat was a dash. His cousin and the other boys were mere silhouettes warbling. They could have been gulls buoyant on the surface.

All he knew was that Fely was swallowing water. She was trying to say something, but winced instead, as if the words were barbed, catching in her throat.

She was crying. Manny kissed her face and said, “I’m here, I’m here,” and he thought her breathing was slowing so he screamed toward the distant shadows, lifting one arm as high as it would go, and the distant shadows screamed back.

Mario had just graduated from high school and had taken it upon himself to go alone. It had scared him. His mother and father wanted nothing to do with the man they had taken into their home, who had given them nothing in return but years full of glares from the community. That and hate mail. Crank calls equally venomous and at all hours. Mario remembered those the most.

He went to a parole board interview. He didn’t know the rules. He sat quietly behind a small table in the middle of a poorly lit room as, from a distance, a large black woman with a lazy eye gazed back at him. She smiled to reveal a violent smear of dark lipstick stuck to her tiny front teeth, settled in the grooves.

“Son, what is your relationship to the inmate . . . Exequiel Guzman?” the woman said. She pronounced his uncle’s name Execute All Goosemen.

“I’m his nephew,” Mario said.

The woman shook her head.

“I’m afraid you’re not allowed to . . .”

“I just need to tell you a little bit about my uncle,” he interrupted.

He could feel the words. He had read them countless times, folded and refolded the pages so that they fit into the front pocket of his pants. He ran his finger over the blistered papers where they now rested in case he should need to refer to them again.

“When I was a boy, my uncle Exequiel came to live with us. It won’t mean anything for me to say this now, but he saved my life.”

The woman leaned forward so that the gray foam head of the microphone on the desk covered her mouth completely. Then her voice filled the room with clipped static: “Son, I’m afraid . . .”

Mario didn’t hesitate now.

“A bunch of us were out playing in the street, and this car comes flying around the corner. Its headlights were busted, I think. I don’t know. The point is, you couldn’t see it coming. No one could. Especially me. I was standing there in the middle of the street, and my uncle comes out of nowhere and just pushes me out of the way.”

“That was very brave,” the woman said.

“It was,” he said, looking down. “It was.”

“Son?”

“Yes?” Mario said.

“Are you finished?”

The woman was still smiling, and there was something about her tone that made Mario feel her curiosity was put on. He had known it the moment he walked in the room, when he had shaken her padded hand and the padded hands of the other parole board members. In her, though, he had sensed it immediately, that it wasn’t going to happen, which is why Mario had stopped his rehearsed story halfway through.

He’d had it all planned out, had worked up how the car would have thrown his uncle’s body into the sky, and how the limp each of the parole examiners had surely seen, or would see eventually, might be connected to this moment of sacrifice. It would unfold perfectly. So much so that it was a story Mario felt he could continue to carry with him after this day. It felt real.

It had almost happened that way, he told himself, or if he had truly been standing there and a car had been careening toward him, he knew his uncle would not have hesitated and would have rushed into the street to save him.

“The car missed him,” Mario said finally, wiping his eyes.

“Do you need a minute, son?”

“Thank you,” Mario said.

He rubbed his sleeve across his face.

The woman put her hand over the microphone, but Mario could still hear her words. “He really shouldn’t be here,” she said to a pinkish, splotchy-skinned white man sitting to her left. His eyes fluttered like peeling paint on a fence post, where barbed wire had rusted through. The man lifted his face from the folder he had been inspecting. He had been reading with his eyes close to the words and images, studying the collage of evidence. He kept regarding the picture of a young girl, the clear line of sutures that resembled two continents coming together. Plate tectonics.

He had helped his own daughter with her homework weeks before, and the lesson was fresh in his mind. Then the photo of Exequiel Guzman after he was arrested, his withdrawn glare and the stooped way he held his body within the frame—that and the photocopy of the smudged fingerprints, squiggly lines that appeared to avoid one another for a short time just before their collision. They could have been symbols for water on a map. Rivers bunched together, then running their separate ways into the sea.

Mario went home and told his parents. He had gone to the parole board hearing even though he wasn’t supposed to, and he told them he was sorry. At first, they thought he was talking about how he had lied to them and taken the car so far away when he knew he shouldn’t have.

He could not bring himself to say it at first.

His mother