Student of the Month January 2014 Featuring: Noah Perales-Estoesta
University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
Copyright © 2014 by the Board of Publications, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa If you are a student and would like to feature your work in Student of the Month or an instructor for a creative writing course and would like to submit exemplary University of Hawai‘i student work to Hawai‘i Review’s Student of the Month, please send submissions to our Submittable account at bit.ly/submit2HR Contact us at hawaiireview@gmail.com
A Note on the Series:
Our Student of the Month series features on our website stellar student writing and visual art from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, the institution where our roots dig deep. In print for more than 40 years, our journal has been an established voice in the Pacific and beyond for decades, featuring work from emerging writers alongside literary heavyweights. The Student of the Month series is our latest effort to expand Hawai‘i Review’s reach in local and far-reaching literary communities. For the third installment of the Student of the Month series, we are thrilled to feature the following fiction writer: Noah Perales-Estoesta. We are super excited about this short story, “Paul and Maria,” which is the first piece of fiction to be featured for our Student of the Month initiative! “Paul and Maria” is the latest draft of a short story that Noah wrote in UH Mānoa Professor Shawna Ryan’s fiction workshop a few semesters go. The story is now being included in Noah’s honor’s thesis, which Noah hopes to complete next spring. Professor Ryan made the following comments about Noah and his short story: What I find remarkable about Noah’s work is that such a young writer can so empathetically and convincingly inhabit so many voices. He is skilled in his storytelling, but beyond that, he also possesses strengths that arise from a more mysterious, intuitive place: an alertness to the world, a curiosity about people, and a drive to puzzle out the complexities of storytelling. Enjoy! —The Editors
Paul and Maria
A
ll day long, seventy-four year old Maria Rosa has felt herself being jerked around by memories. Images and sounds and smells hijacking her consciousness and pulling
her years into the past—it all started when she and her husband Paul left the office of Paul’s doctor earlier that morning.
Her drive through the pharmacy parking lot that afternoon—to fill one of Paul’s
prescriptions—was interrupted by the sudden, vivid recollection of an incident in that very lot from four and a half years prior: her husband in a shouting match with an obnoxious 21 year old who had rear-ended them.
Even later on, back at the house, Maria called their daughter Gabi to update her with
the news about Paul’s dementia. Gabi wept, but told her, If you need anything, just call me, and Maria remembered how those exact words, in that exact cadence, used to be how Paul said goodbye in the morning. Through Gabi’s mouth, Maria could hear her husband’s voice, as she had heard it nearly every morning for decades.
These flashes, feelings, impressions from the past, struck Maria while she was sorting
bills and cooking dinner, while she was washing laundry and taking out the trash. And they strike her now, at 11 p.m. on a cold, drizzling night, as she watches Paul from the porch.
He is wandering down the road, pausing in front of each streetlight he encounters,
tilting his head up in reverence at it, and making the sign of the cross. This show of streetlight piety he performs every night as a kind of bedtime ritual, always turning around and coming back home after the seventh or eighth Father-Son-Holy-Spirit. Maria knows this. She does not understand it—or anything about how her husband’s brain functions anymore—but her familiarity with the routine is what permits her to focus on the past: how she and Paul spent so many evenings on this porch, curled up on the bench. Gabi would be inside, watching TV or doing homework. Their dog Max—a golden Labrador—would be lying curled up at their 4
feet. They were content.
Maria cuts her daydream off just in time to see Paul turn left into a cul-de-sac. This
he has never done before, and she stares for a second at the corner where he made his turn, blinking in disbelief. She squints through the darkness and the rain, but cannot see him any longer.
Beneath her skin, a kind of coldness blooms. Maria feels it spread outward from her
chest to her limbs, to her hands and her feet, to her fingers and her toes. It is not the kind of coldness produced by weather; it makes Maria feel as though she needs to act—to find Paul and bring him home.
But she does not want to go after him. Not in the sheets of falling rain, or the inky
darkness that has taken the sky. And certainly not alone. Maybe, Maria thinks, she will not need to go find him. Maybe he will realize he has turned into a dead-end and come back on his own, or maybe he will simply follow the sidewalk until it brings him back onto the main road, into her field of vision. But, then—the sidewalk is wet, and maybe he’ll slip. Maybe he’s standing somewhere he shouldn’t be, and a speeding late-night driver won’t see him. Maybe Paul will confuse one of the cul-de-sac houses with his own, try to force his way in. The police will be called; explanations will have to be given, apologies made.
Maria has to go after him.
One timid step at a time, she walks down from her porch and through her front yard.
She is wearing a pair of slip-on sandals, and as she walks, they launch little flecks of dirt and rainfall against the back of her legs. These flecks of rock and water—they are like the wet sand that Maria’s rubber slippers would kick up behind her at the beach. She and her family would pass entire Saturdays there.
They would swim, in shallow water at first, until Paul pulled them out as far into the
ocean as he could. Maria hated the feeling of it, of the deep, blue sea opening up beneath her. 5
Paul would see the fear in her face, the fearlessness in Gabi’s, and smile. There is nothing, he would say to Maria, to be afraid of. It’s just water. Once, he dived beneath the surface and shot back up, his fingers wrapped around a rock the size of a baseball. He held it out to her, said with a joking smile, For you, my love, from the ocean floor.
The deep, deep ocean—this is what it feels like for Maria now, to step from her front
yard into the street. The sensations are all the same. As Maria draws nearer to the cul-de-sac, the wind blows rain against her back, but she cringes like a wave has just slammed into her. She is walking slowly on rough concrete, but the coldness in her hands and feet, the weakness in her knees—these are her limbs, anxious for the touch of solid matter.
Maria wonders if this is how Paul feels when he drifts through these streets by himself.
She asks herself: What kind of solace does he find in the streetlights? What kind of solace is there for a person who’s lost his past?
Maria steps from the sidewalk to the asphalt when somewhere in the distance a dog
begins to bark—an old dog, Maria can tell. She detects the fragility, the throaty hoarseness, in its yapping. It’s the same weakness that was in the barks of all the older dogs she helped Paul look after at the pet clinic they once owned. It’s the same weakness that was in Max’s bark before he got sick.
The dog barks again, and Maria is pulled from her place in the street to thirty years
into the past, to where Paul is wearing his white veterinarian’s coat, standing before a raised metal table. Max—ten years old and sick with an infection—lies spread out before him, newly euthanized. A teenaged Gabi hugs herself in a corner and weeps; Paul drags a gentle hand back and forth across the dog’s unmoving stomach.
The memory is enough to make the coldness beneath Maria’s skin bloom anew.
She walks toward the cul-de-sac, past houses to her left and right, trying to ignore the dog’s 6
continued barking, trying to ignore the memories swelling in her mind—the memories of every dog, cat, bird, and rodent that Paul had failed to save throughout his practice. Working around so much sickness and death—she and Paul had made it easier for each other.
Maria draws nearer to the corner where her husband had turned into the cul-de-sac.
She tries to inhale, deeply, but she shivers against the cold. Her breath quivers. Little step by little step, she turns left into that dip in the road.
And then she sees Paul. He is at the farthest end of the cul-de-sac, standing beneath
a streetlight, ensconced in its cone of radiance. His back his is to her, but she spots him by his messy gray hair. Streaks of rain catch the light around him, and fall to the ground like tiny strips of silver ribbon. Paul stands completely still, unaffected by the cold. As she approaches, Maria sees that his hands are clasped together. He looks as though he’s praying.
Maria inches her way up to him, calls his name: Paul!
He keeps his back to her, remains completely still.
Paul! she calls again, drawing closer. She steps into his ring of light and reaches for his
forearm from behind. He pulls it from her grip, slippery in the rain, and doesn’t even look at her. So she tries again: his left hand in hers, her right arm around his shoulders. He does not resist, but being so close, Maria can smell the musty stink of his clothes. He hasn’t changed them for the past three weeks, she recalls. She was so ashamed to bring him to the doctor’s this morning, smelling like garbage and sweat. She was worried the staff would think she wasn’t taking care of him—that she wasn’t even trying.
Maria begins to turn Paul around, to guide him back toward the main road. She does
this slowly, with her shoulders tense. She is worried Paul might yank himself from her grip again. He might get angry and shove her into the road.
But Paul does not. He asks, Where are we going? And she says, Home. Then he lets 7
Maria guide him from the streetlight to the sidewalk.
And yet Maria’s shoulders do not loosen. Even as she walks Paul back toward their
home, past barking dogs and through the rain, she cannot help the beating in her chest or the coldness in her palms. Her stomach flutters, because Paul’s hand in hers, his shoulders beneath her arm—she can feel, in a way she could not feel before, her husband’s bones. She can feel what should be cushioned beneath the pounds and pounds of flesh that have melted from his body.
She can feel, for the hundredth time that day, her mind unravel.
This is what she remembers: the doctor that morning telling her how Paul will
only continue to shrivel going forward; the doctor using phrases like unfortunately, rapid deterioration, steep decline; the doctor explaining how Paul has entered stage six of seven, and how within the next twelve months he will stop walking, speaking, swallowing, and breathing.
Maria wants these memories to stop. She wants to give them back to Paul and restore
his mind to him. This is what she wishes she could do as she guides her husband back into their yard and up their porch. But this is what she knows: that once they are inside, the front door closed behind them, the only things for her to do are dry Paul off and try to change his clothes.
Noah Perales-Estoesta was born and raised on O‘ahu. He is currently a senior at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, where he is double-majoring in English and Spanish.
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www.hawaiireview.org Hawai‘i Review Staff, 2013-2014 Anjoli Roy, Editor in Chief Kelsey Amos, Managing Editor Donovan Kūhiō Colleps, Design Editor No‘ukahau‘oli Revilla, Poetry Editor David Scrivner, Fiction Editor
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