Then there was the incident when I snuck into Lexi’s bedroom and stole the Indian arrowhead she’d found Down Back a few days before. I can still shut my eyes and perfectly recall her running up out of the field that evening, her strong thighs in short pants rising and falling, excitedly shouting, Look what I found! In the palm of her hand she held out a white quartz arrowhead, about three inches long, perfectly shaped, lethally sharp. I’d been desperately searching Down Back and our town’s forests for an Indian arrowhead like that one since about forever. Jealousy rose inside me like a boiling magma that subsided into distilled malice and calculation. Then I played innocent for about a week, probably longer, waiting for the scandal of the missing arrowhead to blow over. If our parents never suspected me, that must be because it just seemed too cruel and far-fetched a thing for a boy to do to his little sister, steal her arrowhead and then do what with it, keep it hidden forever? (But, I’m remembering now, there was a girl I wanted to give it to, I think her name was Beth, though I only met her once, that Sunday afternoon when my father and his friend Herb, her uncle, took us to a Celtics game in the Garden, and to Durgin-Park for dinner after.) Because Lexi was always losing and misplacing things anyway, our parents tried to convince her that maybe she’d taken it to school and left it there and had just forgotten or had dropped it somewhere without noticing. After all she had so much else on her mind, with her violin recital imminent and Aunt Hannah coming twice a week now to give her lessons and coach her. Did she want Aunt Hannah to see her crying over the missing arrowhead instead of concentrating on her music? One evening a week or so later while my father was barbecuing in the backyard, Lexi sitting on the porch steps, I came running up out of Down Back excitedly shouting that I’d found an arrowhead, too, just like the one Lexi had found. Even now, sitting here on the train, I feel what a heavy sack of rotted flour would feel if it were infested and swarming with mealworms of shame. My father moving toward me, that look of revulsion on his face, uncinching his belt and knocking over the grill, the still-raw steaks falling like lopped-off faces to the grass. Those few whacks with a folded belt across the back of my thighs were nothing out of the ordinary, certainly when compared to what lay ahead in coming years. Hearing the commotion, my mother had rushed outside. The real punishment, as I lay there on the grass pretending to whimper from the sting of the belt lashing, was hearing my father explain to Mamita what I’d done and the way she looked at me, lips tightly closed, her narrowed gaze without pity, direct yet somehow absent, as if in reality she was staring inward, forced to face the truth about her life, trapped in a gringo suburb with this alien family, even this son who’d at least provided the reassurance of seemingly taking after her in temperament, who didn’t scream or throw tantrums, whose cheerful disposition rebounded even after those savage boys tried to murder him, now exposed as a conniving little fool who’d just committed an incomprehensible perfidy against his little sister.
While I lay there on the lawn, curled up with my arms over my head, displaying my penitence, Lexi must have recovered her arrowhead and carried it back into her bedroom or wherever it was she took it. I never laid eyes on it again. Thankfully Feli wasn’t with us anymore when that happened and didn’t witness it. By then María Xum had succeeded her.
Feli had come to live with us right after Lexi was born. I’m meeting her for lunch the day after tomorrow. You really had two mothers, she always likes to say, meaning my mother and herself. Yet despite how close I’ve felt to Feli practically all my life, the last time I saw her was nearly two years ago, when I came through Boston promoting my little book on the bishop’s murder and she drove in to meet me for lunch in Coolidge Corner. From when I was three until I was about nine and from when she was fourteen until she was twenty, Feli lived with us. I made up the name Feli, though only my sister and I and sometimes my father called her that. Her real name is Concepción Balbuena. Abuelita, who’d found her in a nuns’ orphanage in Guatemala City, had sent her to help my mother but also to keep her company. All her life, my mother had only lived in cities where she’d always had lots of friends and a social life; now here she was isolated with a tubercular small boy and an infant in a little town outside Boston, in a two-road, mainly working-class neighborhood overlooked by a cemetery, amid rocky field and cold forest. The bedroom my father had built for Feli
