Read Say Her Name for Free Online

away.

3
    That first day back in the apartment with Valentina and Adele Ramírez, it was like stepping into an absolute emptiness, outside of time—after I’d brought the suitcases in and we’d hung the wedding dress and built the altar, I said, I wonder where Aura kept her engagement ring? (Or did I say, I wonder where she keeps her engagement ring?) She hadn’t brought the ring to Mexico, not wanting to risk having it stolen. She’d never worn it regularly, anyway. It was too ostentatious to wear to school, she’d decided. She worried about giving the other grad students the impression that she was a bourgeois rich girl from the Mexican upper class, hypocritically playing at the austere life of a grad student of literature so that she could return home someday wearing her Ivy League doctorate as just another expensive bauble. Aura believed, or rather had painfully discovered, that she often gave people, American academics especially, that totally false impression.
    I used to worry that Aura had lost her engagement ring and was afraid to tell me. She lost things all the time—so did I—and I’d already settled with myself that if she’d lost it, I wasn’t going to let it bother me. Why should it bother me? Whenever I decided that she really had lost the ring, because I hadn’t seen it on her finger in such a long while, I’d also decide to not even mention it, to let its disappearance pass in silence as if there’d never been a ring in the first place. It was silly, probably even wrong, to have spent so much on a tidbit of a diamond, one that had maybe been mined in Africa in some unethical and even murderous way but that even I could see, when compared to its rivals for purchase on the diamond dealer’s tray, seemed to be waving minuscule twinkle hands in the air to call attention to its own happy radiance. It’s not likediamond engagement rings are the only enduring rite or institution on the planet with a possible connection to conveniently overlooked criminal and bloody doings. Once the momentous, life-changing invitation had been made and accepted, wasn’t the money well and joyously spent? Once I’d slipped the ring on Aura’s finger and she’d said yes and we’d kissed—I proposed in Puerto Escondido—maybe the most satisfying act would have been to throw the ring away into the ocean right after, cleaving our moment and our memories of it from this expensive trifle you always had to worry about losing. Or maybe she could have taken the ring back to Mexico City, shown it off to her mother, to her tío Leopoldo, and to her friends, and then we could have thrown it off some highway overpass, where some street kid might eventually find it, altering his life for the better or the terrible. That way I never would have wasted a second wondering whether she’d lost the ring and was keeping it a secret.
    Then we’d be out for dinner at her favorite restaurant for her birthday, or our wedding anniversary or Valentine’s Day, or for whatever occasion we’d decided merited an expensive New York City night out, and there it would be, sparkling away on her finger. That diamond came and went like a wandering star in the night sky, visible from earth only two or three times a year.
    But I knew how much she cared about the ring because of the one time she did almost lose it, when we were in Austin, Texas, for a book fair. Aura had studied at the University of Texas during the two years that a student strike shut down the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where she was majoring in English literature. Her mother, Juanita, an administrator at the university, wasn’t going to let her daughter just languish at home or waste her days roaming the vast, nearly abandoned, apocalyptic city that was the UNAM campus during the strike years, lying around with her friends in the grass, smoking pot in el aeropuerto— as students called the tree-shaded stretch of lawn where they met to get high—or hanging out