Page 1 of Nights Without Night
PROLOGUE
The scent of oranges, that sudden, bright burst of sunlight smell, always reminds me of childhood. Of the orange farm I grew up on,La Portera,where my parents, immigrants from Argentina to the U.S., worked and lived. Of the sight of my dad. The solid, rectangular shape of him, shirtless and tanned. Of my mother, her eyes piercing from the window of the rumbling Jeep she would drive, checking on the blood and organs and bones of the working organism that isLa Portera.Of the scorching summer heat free from school. The adventures it brought.
And, of course, of Isadoro.
There is no story to tell about how I met Isadoro. It happened before memories were memories, when they are just the imprint of shape and sound pressed inside your head.
Isadoro’s parents died when he was three. He was taken in by his paternal grandfather, Frank, winning custody over Isadoro’s Brazilian side of the family due to little more than distance and jurisdiction. Although he died when Isadoro and I were twenty, Frank is chiselled coldly in memory, an imposing figure despite his rather slight frame. Then a caretaker of the grounds surrounding the worker homes near the farm, Isadoro’s grandfather was a veteran of the Vietnam war. He had been limber despite his age, his body having come back from war untouched, although his soul was altered. His face, a stone carving covered in leather; his voice locked in his throat, coming out in bursts, the rat-a-tat of it piercing the fabric of memory; his eyes watchful and still, sight landing on a target and digging its talons in. As a child, I had been terrified of him, but he had been, if not exactly nurturing, at least consistent and present in Isadoro’s upbringing.
My childhood memories are as full of Isadoro as they are of the scent of oranges. I have never met myself without him. As if to make up for his grandfather’s discipline and silence, Isadoro was a boisterous child, transferring that energy into becoming a charming young man. Even when he was five, he had a way of getting away with things that none of us could. He’d be able to wrangle an extra piece of candy from thetitas—the women living and working at the farm—or convince one of the softer workers to allow him a ride on the tractor with him.
We were constantly getting into trouble. When we were seven, Isadoro convinced me to slide into the newly laid-down plastic covering the expanse of the water reservoir that was being dug then, tying a rope to the surrounding fence to ensure our escape. The attempt failed, however. The rope snapped when I was trying to climb out and I had slid down again with a startled shout. Isadoro, who had clambered out first to pull the rope up as I climbed, immediately threw himself after me, almost barrelling into my startled body before I could get out of the way.
“Iván! Are you okay?” he had asked frantically, and I had brushed him off with a roll of my eyes.
“Dummy, now we’re both stuck here!” I’d said.
Someone found us five hours later, parched and sunburnt and scared. The first thing Isadoro said when we were on flat ground was a cracked-lipped,It was my idea!
No one was surprised.
Sometimes, when we were tired of running around, we would go down to one of the freshly ploughed fields with a bucket and fill it with dirt. We’d trudge up a path until we reached our favourite Mesa Oak and sit under its shade. With a pilfered sieve we’d turn the coarse dirt fine, and then mix it with water. The mixture would turn into a sister of clay; mouldable until it dried and kept its shape. I’d forget about the world when I was with the mud. From my child’s imagination sprung forth figures of fantasy, starting their adventure clumsy and malformed and then earning ferocity and sharpness with age and experience. Mostly, Isadoro would just watch me and it would feel like casting a spell. As if not completely in control, my hands would just move, pressing and cupping the clay, running their fingers across it. It was a force beyond myself, breathing and alive.
Falling in love with Isadoro felt a lot like that. Inevitable and organic, it was shaped without my knowledge or consent until it was suddenly there, fully formed. It came from the water, from the air, from the earth itself. Even if I had wanted to, I wouldn’t have known how to stop it, until I too was the malleable earth, shaped by that feeling. I am who I am because of Isadoro, pushed into a form by the friendship that was solidified in the impressionable years of childhood until being without the feeling was unthinkable. By the time I was sixteen, I knew every angle and curve of this unreciprocated feeling.
I am his best friend, and he is mine, but a deeper part of me will always belong to him.
Somehow, this imbalance doesn’t hurt. Not anymore. My skin has calloused where it rubs. Even when I used to see Isadoro with other people, his lips against theirs through the blur of alcohol and pounding music. Even when we were fifteen and he was my first real kiss. Even when I was seventeen and we fooled around, and at times it felt like I was dying, the way he would look at me, it didn’t hurt. Not really. It was too full of something else for that.
It was therefore inevitable that when Isadoro finally left me, armoured in a uniform and destined for the arid sands of a desert that not even my hands could shape, I would lose myself a little, scraps of me left in the IED craters of Afghanistan and then Iraq.
Isadoro left, but he took me with him. I would see him in the moments between wakefulness and sleep. In those Halloween hours, when minutes turned into stretched, thin things, I would poke through to him until I too could feel the heat and the dust, the voice of his comrades, the fear, the boredom.
I wondered which bonds would hold stronger; those forged in the fires of battle, or the ones eroded into shape by the waters of childhood.
He would stay with me during every leave. I would take him in and take him out, stay close and watchful until he disappeared again. And when he came back for good, eight years after first being deployed, shaped by the winds of the desert instead of my hands, I took that, too.
What else could I do and still be myself?
CHAPTER ONE
I can practically count the minutes by the twitch in Isadoro’s jaw. No one else would be able to tell, but I can see the slight strain in his mouth, the stiffness of his back, tucked against a wall. Even though we’re in the courtyard of the bar, he still checks the door every time someone comes in, head swivelling on the pike of his body. His brown eyes flicker around the room, landing on me periodically as if checking on me as much as I’m checking on him. I try to be subtle, but there are so many reasons I can’t keep my eyes off him. I take in his dark, short-cropped hair, in near-military style even though he was in the more uniform-lenient Special Ops for the last four years. Watch his jaw clench the more we stay here, the line of it darkened by stubble. I stare at his features; the wide nose I used to press to annoy him; the sweeping eyelashes I once covered in my mother’s mascara when we were nine; the square chin I’ve wanted to punch more than once in my life. Each is a familiar instrument, but their composition carries a foreign sound. A sort of still-held note that suggests a sudden crescendo, or a dip.
“I mean, I liked it fine. It was fine. It was good, whatever. It’s just…that romance was so…” Iva makes an incomprehensible gesture with her hands. Her long wavy hair is tied up in a messy bun, strands falling around her face, swaying with the gesticulation.
“That made sense,” Joaquin snorts. From what Iva has told me, Joaquin and she are childhood friends. Both their parents immigrated from Puerto Rico before they were born, and there is an easy comradery between them that causes an ache inside me. Although my interactions with Isadoro aren’t stiff, they are shadowed by the canyon of distance and time, and the secrets we have buried in its bed.
“What Imeanis that…I was just left a little like, ‘and the award for this year’s most unnecessary heterosexual romance goes to:Fantastic Beasts.’”
“Pretty sure that movie came out in 2016,” Ezra pipes up, his hand clasped around Joaquin’s, tucked in the space between them as they stand side by side. Iva rolls her eyes.
“I stand corrected. The award for this year’s most unnecessary heterosexual romance goes to your dry pussy trying to ride my huge dick,” she says. Joaquin snorts loudly and Isadoro lets out a laugh. I turn to him, grinning. I hadn’t even realized I’d been feeling tense until the knot of it loosens at the sight of his smile.
“Excuse me, the one here with a huge dick isme,” Ezra says haughtily, amber eyes closing and straight nose in the air. Joaquin lets out a burst of laughter and Ezra looks at him incredulously.
“Excuse me!Why areyoulaughing!” he says loudly. Joaquin presses the back of his free hand to his mouth, closing his eyes and shaking his head. We dissolve into giggles.
“Honey,” Iva says, “I’m a bisexual girl. I guarantee you that my dick is bigger. And detachable.Andit vibrates.”
