Apology by Jon Pineda (books to read this summer .txt) 📕

of books they used as a nightstand, he read the shadows. They were spread in paragraphs along the warped ceiling. He tried to make sense of what he felt now. “Rachel?” he said, though he knew she was dreaming. He wanted to wake her just then, but instead, he let her sleep.

Teagan had helped her mother clean the kitchen, even getting down on her knees to scrub the floor like Cinderella. She had the picture book in her room. It was one of her favorite things.

“Sissy, get up,” her mother said, but Teagan would not relent. She wanted to be the one who was a prisoner. She wanted to clean and then be locked up in a room, and she wanted very much to put on a dress and go to a dance and have people look at her and think she was pretty.

“Tommy needs to see the floor,” Teagan said.

“He’ll see the floor,” her mother said.

“Dad said he wants me to clean it good. Wants to see our faces in the floor.”

“He was kidding.”

“I see my face.”

“Sissy, get up,” her mother said, but Teagan refused. She gazed down at her face and kept trying to wipe it away.

After they finished in the kitchen, she helped tidy up the living room and then Elinor started cleaning the main bathroom. Elinor wanted her daughter to take a nap, but there was too much excitement. There was no way Teagan would calm down enough to rest. She had made the mistake of telling her that Tommy and Rachel were coming over later. Manny would be home by then, too. Tommy supposedly had good news to share.

Elinor stood in the shower and sprayed down the tile and let it sit.

“Sissy, what are you doing now?” she called out.

Teagan didn’t answer.

“Where are you?” Elinor said.

She heard Teagan laughing quietly, talking.

Elinor went down the hall to Teagan’s bedroom.

She found her sitting in the middle of the floor. Teagan’s dolls were grouped by size, smallest to biggest, and facing her. They gave Teagan their full attention. She was reading to them. “Isn’t this exciting?” she said slowly, enunciating the word. She brushed the hair away from each of their faces.

“I’m the teacher, and you better be thankful,” she said to the biggest. “You could be locked up for doing that, you know?”

Elinor cupped her mouth and leaned forward in the doorway, but Teagan still hadn’t noticed her.

“What was that?” Teagan said to the smallest doll. “What did you say? You don’t want to go? Well, that’s too bad. Too bad, too bad!” She started repeating the words, even dropping the book to her side so she could use both fists to pound the air.

Elinor saw that Teagan had changed into a dress, but when Elinor looked closer now, she realized it wasn’t one of her daughter’s dresses, it was one of hers. Taken from the back of the closet, a dress from a long time ago. She wanted to ask her daughter why she had taken it without asking for permission. It had been wrapped up because the pale white cloth was delicate. It was old. Couldn’t she see that it was fragile? Why couldn’t she?

Tom and Rachel met on Tom’s lunch break from the sports equipment store where he had recently found employment. It was the kind of place where his father would love to work. Tom’s days were mostly spent replenishing the shelves. If he wasn’t helping customers, he was signing off on pallets. New shipments of uniforms. Rows of boxed, untouched soccer balls. Basketball shoes. Boxing gloves. The flow of inventory seemed endless.

Tom might have been consumed by the monotony if he hadn’t, only months before, heard the gurgling static of their child’s heart. Rachel had tried to keep from laughing. She cupped her mouth. The heartbeat had sounded oceanic to Tom, something immense. It wavered and cradled him. He didn’t want to stop hearing it.

Today, they were to meet in a different room. They had been called in because of some questionable test results. An ultrasound had been scheduled and would rule out concerns. Rachel had repeated these words more than once, even that very morning. Now, preparing for the technician’s arrival, she said them again under her breath. Tom could only stare at her.

Rachel laughed when the technician squirted a thick, warm dollop onto her stretched belly.

“Look familiar?” she said to Tom, trying to get him to laugh.

“Stop,” he said. He nudged her.

Had she forgotten about Teagan? Things could still go wrong.

On the screen, a smear of pixels revealed the shape of their child. He quickly tried to discern the image. He looked at the technician’s face, her small nose and smaller eyes. There were no signs of change in her expression. He studied the screen and listened as the woman told them everything looked good. She counted out the eyes and measured the distance between them with the computer program. She counted out the fingers and the toes for them. He could listen to this lesson all day long, counting and counting. In the middle of the screen, the heart announced itself in quick bursts of steady flashing.

“I couldn’t remember, did you want to know?” the technician said to Rachel.

“Know what?” Tom said.

“The sex,” Rachel said to him.

“What about the other thing?” he said.

“It’s fine,” the technician said, smiling. “Nothing out of the ordinary.”

Rachel leaned her head against his neck. He exhaled.

“So, do you want to know what you two are having?” the woman said.

six

When Exequiel was a boy, he lay not in the woods, for the surrounding area near his town was not referred to as such, but in the realm of trees nearest the ravine that he and his friends called el más allá. The beyond.

Where the others had run off to that day, he didn’t know. His older brother Paul was gone by then. Exequiel had been