Grief is gray, the deadening flatness that strips away brightness and drains all that comes near. Grief is a mute button that blocks out everything except its own presence.
     In Gina’s voice, in her pronouncement, I heard life stripped of her. The person speaking to me sounded alive only in the sense that she was drawing oxygen and expelling breath in her words to me.
     "Oh God, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Gina."
     "I know," she said softly. Her voice, tremulous, was barely above a whisper.
     "How is… how is your family?"
     "Not good," Gina said. "It happened very, um, quickly."
     Gina’s breathing was shallow. Neither of us spoke. I felt the colors of my apartment, the minutiae around me, fade into distance. Buying stamps for bills and shutting off the lights to save on electricity seemed like the worst kinds of life-wasting activities at that moment.
     "Do you want me to come down?" I asked. "Do you need someone to help?"
     "Angie’s here," Gina said. "And Juan. My dad doesn’t seem to mind that he’s here. I’ll see you soon."
     "Are you coming back?" I asked. It was still a week until classes started and even before this, Gina hadn’t sounded too certain about her prospects for the next semester. I wondered whether she’d want to throw herself into another semester of school as her family pushed on without Gina’s mother.
     "I don’t know," Gina said. "This is unexpected. Everything is different. I’ll just have to see."
     "Okay," I responded.
     "I should go," Gina said. "They’re waiting for me. We have people over."
     "I understand."
     "Goodbye, Heather."
     "Bye, Gina."
     I put the phone in its cradle and stood by the kitchen sink. The temperature in the apartment was normal, I was sure, but the air seemed frigid. I felt a blanket of goosebumps cover my skin. I stood there next to the phone for several minutes, remembering the few days we’d spent in Harlingen, remembering the weak woman in the bed whose strong spirit had reared Gina.
     I remembered the woman’s kind voice, her words to me, a stranger in her home.
     I remembered the walk – Gina and I traveling in the dark of night to a church I’d never seen. Gina’s promesa had failed.

* * *

     You live. Something comes along and it is horrible, a tragedy whose shadow you believe you’ll never escape. Then the mailman brings a letter and the president gets impeached and Dawson’s Creek is new this week and little by little, evidence that a world exists beyond your pain begins to assert itself.
     And that is how we live, slowly breaking the shells of our pain and suffering rebirth into a world that has continued without us during our break.
     As I surfaced from the contact-grief, a few days later, Gina called again. She asked me to come down. She needed a ride; in her panic and rush, she’d flown to South Texas on one of the many daily flights that run to the Valley out of Austin’s Mueller airport. Now she needed to come back, to take care of things, to decide where her life was going, if only geographically. It was a ride that she needed, but my sense was that it was more than the ride she wanted. She could have flown back or hopped a bus or had her father bring her to Austin. She needed me and I didn’t know why. But I did know I’d be in my car soon, ready to bring her back, whatever the reason.
     I told her I’d be there the next day.

 * * *

     The meditating miles. Empty stretches of road are the real places to think, flying at nearly 90 miles per hour, more than 100 feet per second, cranking up the music so loud that it can be blocked out, the blasts of bass and timbres of treble a metronome, a hypnotism.
     It all came together in one glorious moment on a cloudy stretch of I-35 South. Life and death and love and lust and loss and Gina’s eyes, tears sucking life from them, the meaningless colors of skin and the language we share and those we don’t, the spinning hair on the dark dance floors of desire, the terrifying frights and the out-of-nowhere confessions.
     For one moment it came together, all of it fit as if connected by the tiniest threads of the most perfect quilt, connecting together until it made sense, every bit of it, the dense tapestry of Gina’s heart and the soul it kept warm in its folds.
     Then it was gone, blown away by a wayward sun’s shining in my face, disorienting, losing me in its glare. The answers were gone, leaving behind sunburn of the eyes, dark spots where the vision of a soul had been.

* * *

     The home was broken as surely as if the wrecking ball of the city had torn a wall to pieces. When I arrived, Gina met me in the driveway. She wore cutoffs and a white T-shirt, her hair waving lazily, unkempt, in the breezy cool air.
     There were two cars in the driveway. I didn’t want to block them, so I parked in the street. Gina walked toward me as I got out, her steps slow and unsteady. Was there a wobble there, a fight with gravity that could topple her, or was that my imagination?
"Hi, Heather," Gina said. I met her on the passenger side, unloading my overnight bag. Gina hugged me tightly. Before she’d even released me, I felt Gina’s tears wet my cheeks.
"Gina, I don’t know what to say. I’m so sorry."
     "Come inside," she said. "I don’t want to be out here."
     I followed her in. In the living room, Gina’s father rose to greet us. When last I’d seen him, he looked like a man at the edge of a deep crevice, holding on. Today, he looked like someone who’d fallen in, barely surviving. His eyes were hollow points within dark circles. His features were drawn, a frown that looked as permanent as the crevices of a mountain adorning his sad face.
     "Thanks for coming, Heather," he said, quietly. He hugged me, and unlike Gina’s tight embrace, this hold was weak, defeated and very tired.
     Gina led me to the room I’d stay overnight. We passed Sandra’s room, where rap music bled through the closed door. I put my bag in the closet. Gina closed the door and we sat on the twin-sized bed facing each other, like confidantes at summer camp.
     She told me what happened.

* * *

     "Mom was weak when we brought her home," Gina began. "You saw her. She was in bed and couldn’t move very much."
     Gina’s mother had stayed in bed for several days after the surgery, the family taking care of her until she felt she was strong enough to move around the house. She began to cook meals, watch TV and go with Gina’s father on errands. Throughout it, she never complained of pain or nausea.
     But a few days after the surgery, she began coughing and sneezing more often and it was becoming clear that she was sick and whatever was wrong wasn’t going away.
     Miguel had taken Gina’s mother to the hospital. The doctors gave her antibiotics, told her to take it easy. She rested in bed despite protests that she was feeling fine. By Christmas, most of her illness was gone and despite a nagging cough, she helped set up the Christmas tree and cooked tamales and cookies with Mari.
     By New Year’s, her flu symptoms were back and she was in bed again. The next visit to the hospital, a day before Gina’s flight brought her back home, revealed pneumonia. Gina’s mother was in the hospital, having survived a cancer scare and now fighting another kind of threat, when Gina arrived.
     When she got there, her mother was weak and tired, but speaking. Gina said prayers with her. She cried in her mother’s arms, terrified at every change in her mother’s breathing.
     "We were all there, the whole family, and she spoke to each of us. She spoke to us one by one. My father was last, and I was right before him," Gina said.
     "She knew?" I asked.
     "No," Gina said. "Or maybe she did. She told us she was feeling better, that she would be home soon, but maybe she knew. I wish I’d known."
     "What did she tell you?"
     "She said…" Gina sobbed, her flat hand wiping big tears from her face. "She said I needed to take care of the family, to watch after them until she got home."
     I reached for a green box of Kleenex on the dresser and handed it to Gina. She took two, wiping her eyes and blowing her reddened nose.
     "Then she said something else," Gina said. "She said I needed to be happy. She said, ‘you’ve never been happy, Gina. You’re not happy in your skin.’
     "She told me, ‘you have to let happiness find you. Don’t hide from it. Not from happiness, not from amor, not from amor de la alma.’ "
     Gina broke down again, her sobs overtaking her. She fell to her side, lying down leaning into the pillow.
     "Gina," I said, trying to hug her as she lay there, shaking. "Gina, I don’t know what that means, what you just said."
     She looked up to me, her face swollen. "It means ‘love of the soul.’ "
     Gina’s mother had spoken to all of them, and although not a word of endings had been spoken, it was the summation of her words for those she loved. An hour later, her lungs filled with fluid and, as the doctors struggled to drag her away from Death, she was overcome.
She was gone, her family left alone with words they hadn’t know were goodbyes to comfort them home.

* * * 

     Gina slept soon after, the early evening grief taking away the concept of night, day or bedtime. When I passed Sandra’s room, the music was gone. I went to the living room alone. Gina’s father Miguel was outside. I could see him smoking a cigarette, looking off into the expanse of the backyard.
     I sat on the couch in the living room listening to the sounds of the house. I heard nothing, not even the hum of an air conditioner or the cheeps of bugs outside. It was cotton silence, the muffling of cries and loss through pillows, through cushions, through the softness of still, cool air. The walls of the house seemed to lean inward, losing their support, unable to stand on their own any longer.
     It was an oppressive feeling at its center point. There in the living room I thought the ceiling might dip atop me. This strong woman, the one who’d imparted pieces of herself on those around her even as she lay dying, wasn’t here to prop up the spirits of her house.
     And despite Gina’s strength, her spirit, her passion and the love she had for her family, I didn’t know how long it could stand, there without its pillar.

* * * 

     "Love of the soul."
     I didn’t know of such a thing. I doubted Gina, for all her spirituality, knew it either. The phrase floated in my mind as I tried to sleep that night. I heard Gina’s every turn as she twisted her sheets in the other bed.
     The thinnest slices of moonlight slid through the blinds to illuminate the far wall. Amid the shadows, the light and dark, I thought I saw a dance. It started to coalesce, what was there on the plaster and what I’d seen on my drive. The tapestry of images was back, filling my mind with sound and color.
     I closed my eyes and the moonslits were still there, wrapping around the firing neuron spots behind my eyelids. Gina’s mother, or at least her words, formed their own sparks and music.
     I thought about the soul, the one I’d never believed myself to possess. The one buried so deep in agnosticism I wondered if it could even have survived the crushing weight of disbelief I’d placed upon it.
     I thought of love. Could I love this misshapen, malformed thing I’d neglected and betrayed for so long?
     It didn’t matter, I thought, drifting off into sleep. It doesn’t matter. Love is love and the soul, even withered, forgives…
     Not my voice. The voice, I thought, must be hers.
     Gina’s mother.
     "Love of the soul," she said.