The Sea of Light by Jenifer Levin

awhile.”
    “Still thinking things over?”
    “Yes, sure. Don’t worry about me. I’m all right, you know.”
    I nod apologetically. Yes, I mumble, I know, Babe, I know. As if I am the child and she the parent, and I’ve been caught after bedtime with the lights on and quietly scolded. As if I’ve never grown up, after all. I stand to clumsily kiss her forehead. Her skin is cool in spite of the heat, slightly damp. Damp clings to my lips as I head upstairs.
    *
    Sacrifice. It begins.
    With the house, she said. Wind tears through it, blowing wood from the walls. Look at these patterns. There, your house, land of treasures, honors, the world. Cold as the bones that flesh hangs on. Here, the sacred heart. Burning. Heart of fire, of light. In between, the clock. It keeps you chained to both worlds. Call the Powers—they’ll set her free. And you, too. But the price is great. Choose, Felipe. Flesh, or the walls?
    Now calm your tears. They’re here—the Powers. To hurt and to heal you. Look.
    One pointed magenta fingernail spanned the sparkling trail of altar powders. In candlelight thick red tears dripped down, clung damply to my lips.
    *
    I brush by the clock’s ticking. Half past one.
    The bed is warm, Barbara long and perfectly outlined under the sheet. Normally I would press against her, put my arm around her and rest my face along the back of her neck while she sleeps. Tonight, though, I stay apart. On my back with my eyes shut. I’m still not tired. Ever since then, sleep has become less and less possible. I’ll be beat by morning, will walk through the office corridors like a feverish ghost.
    If you want a good troubleshooter or systems analyst, try Phil Delgado, he’s our man, recommend him for anything. He’ll set you up the right way from the beginning, root out whatever’s causing you grief and fix it on the spot. A great guy, Phil is. Terrific professional.
    What sort of business are you in? she asked that first time. And I answered, Computers. The wave of the future. Then reached across the restaurant table to take her hand. The fingers were long and slender, nails shone darkly, their gloss reflecting crystal reflecting dark sweet wine by candlelight. She wore silk and her bracelets were from expensive places, heavier than fourteen-carat. I knew that, to have her, the money would count. Success, winning. To be not just good, but the best.
    There would be a house, I thought, and children. A very big house. She was everything I wanted, everything I still want, in this land in which I had come to be. Strong eyes, refined clothes, a cream-softened touch that would seek out and discern those with the talent for winning.
    *
    Twenty-two years ago. Both of us were so young—yet somehow, even then, exactly what we would become. I liked to see our different complexions in the summer, my skin against hers.
    What is he? some friend of hers asked once, when she thought I couldn’t hear, Not Puerto Rican, is he?
    When I saw that all the hair on her body was pale, too, even the hair between her legs, I was shocked, and laughed, and thought about how beautiful our children would be. I worshiped her, worshiped this, her country. Strove with every fiber of my conscious life to be fully American, to obliterate all traces of foreign behavior and appearance. To be pale-skinned, accent-less.
    To be white. But there are certain genetic predispositions somewhere in here—latencies that, in the summer, dominate. Browned by sun, I always looked like some kind of mestizo. Barbara loved this secretly, though she blushed over it in public.
    *
    There are other public things she’ll never know about. My trip across America with college buddies, years before I met her, in a rusting Ford with chrome on the sides and torn red vinyl seats. From east to west, across the most exquisite farmland I had ever imagined, between two rivers big enough to be arteries of ocean, across the newest mountain range on the earth, jagged desert peaks