House Arrest by Mary Morris Read Free Book Online Page A

about him. It seemed that I was always waiting for him. And probably I still am.
    Whenever my husband was out of town, I left our daughter, Serena, with my mother and stayed with El Caballo in the little apartment. He was a restless sleeper, up half the night, smoking cigars, drinking white rum. Fitful. He was always going to the window, looking out, coming back to bed, turning on the light.
    I am a sound sleeper, but when he was with me I could feel the bed rise and fall. One night, I don’t know what it was, he fell asleep hard and for almost the entire night he did not move. Suddenly, near dawn, he woke with a jolt as ifsomething had startled him. He sat up and had difficulty catching his breath.
    I opened the windows wide to let in the air. He asked for water and I brought it to him. Then he told me his dream. He said he saw himself as a horse, beautiful, sleek, galloping across an open field. He watched himself racing across fields, until it occurred to him that he couldn’t stop. All night long, he said, he’d ridden on and on because he knew that when he did stop he would be dead. He was frightened then. He told me, Rosa—that was what he always called me, Rosa—I can never stop.
    Recently there have been rumors of illness. Talk of colon cancer, rare diseases of the blood. But the people call him a
bicho malo
—a bad bug who will live to be very old. We have been apart for over thirty years, but I know that he will come back to me. People say he won’t, but someday he will. I think he will come back when it is time for him to die.
    For years now, she said, I have hardly seen him, but it is as if I know where he is, what he is doing every day. And, of course, there is Isabel. My daughter, you know, she is everything to me. Serena went to America long ago and Isabel is all that I have left. I cannot look at her and not think of him.
    The shadows of the day were growing long when Rosalba finally rose. “Well,” she said, “I’ve just gone on and on. Really, it’s so unlike me.” She went to the edge of the patio and peered at the road. “I can’t imagine what’s keeping my daughter. It’s so rude of her, if she told you to come, not to call.”
    “It’s all right. Probably she was delayed. Or maybe she just forgot …”
    “I worry about her. Here I’ve gone on and on, but I know nothing about you. Do you have a child?”
    “Yes, I do …”
    “Well, then you know what it is. To worry about someone so.”
    “You can’t really ever forget or get away when you have a child, can you?” I asked.
    Rosalba looked up at me sadly. “Oh, some people can.” She poured the last of the warm lemonade into my glass as darkness settled over the holes in the roof of the house. The absence of cooking smells brought a despair over me, as heavy as the one within those walls.
    “My life,” Rosalba said, with a tinge of remorse, “would have been completely different if I hadn’t had her. But, of course, I can’t imagine my life without her. If she could just get along with her father, I wouldn’t worry so. The problem with them, you know, is that they are so much alike.”
    When I left, no taxi could be found. Though I was only a few miles from the center of town, no buses came there either. Rosalba had to bribe a neighbor to drive me to the Miramar, where I found a taxi driver who for five dollars would take me to my hotel. I asked him to take the Miramar though it was longer because I wanted to be close to the water. Opening my window, I breathed in deeply. Spray moistened my arm. In the distance out to sea I could see a gathering storm.

Six
    M ANUEL says I look well and healthy with my tan. He leans against the barstool, dressed in a blue T-shirt and jeans. He asks if I have been island-hopping, but I tell him that my tan comes from a half hour on the Hotel España roof deck.
La isla
, I tell him, was to be my only stop. I ask how it is that he knows I am here, but he says he didn’t know. This is just