Read Say Her Name for Free Online Page B

our dirty breakfast plates was still on the floor by the unmade bed. We looked everywhere.Aura began to resemble a mediocre mime on barbiturates as she bumbled about the room, her repertoire of searching motions depleted. I said that we’d better get going back to the airport so that we wouldn’t lose our flight, too. It doesn’t matter, mi amor, I said, I’ll buy you a new one. But I couldn’t have afforded another ring like that one, and I silently sulked over Aura having taken the ring and what it had cost for granted. But she hadn’t asked for or required an expensive engagement ring, I argued with myself, and if I’d decided to go further into debt to buy it, that was 100 percent my problem.
    The ring was lost: Aura’s helpless, stricken expression told me this was so. She sat cross-legged on the floor, slumped forward, her head in her hands, and sobbed. Though many things could make Aura cry, these were the bereft sobs that erupted only at moments of sorrow or terror or hurt or extreme humiliation or some combination of these, and that as the minutes passed, instead of subsiding, only seemed to mount in hysteria and grief and could actually make you feel afraid for her or for her sanity. How could so much strong emotion and so many tears fit into this one little body, I’d think, helplessly looking on, stunned, or bending to embrace her—me who practically never cried, who felt like I was having a romantic poet’s epiphany of feeling if my eyes got a little humid at a movie and then I’d try to call Aura’s attention to it, like a cat showing off its hunting prowess by dropping a mauled mouse at its master’s feet, exaggeratedly blinking my eyes, grabbing her fingers and raising them to the debatable teary moistness under my lashes, mira mi amor, I’m crying! At my father’s funeral I did weep, for about five minutes. Little did I suspect what could come pouring out of me, that I would ever learn what it was like to feel swallowed up by my own sobbing, grief sucking me like marrow from a bone. Aura sat on the hotel room floor, alongside the tray of breakfast plates, crying over having lost her engagement ring. Irina was kneeling in front of her, holding one of Aura’s hands in both of hers and raising it to her lips, and I was crouched on her other side, and we were both calling her sweetheart, both of ussaying things like, Oh dear sweet Aura, oh my baby, it’s okay, it’s not the end of the world, it’s just a ring, forget it, let’s get going, let’s go to the airport. Then Aura moved her hand toward the breakfast tray and just bumped one of the plates aside—and there it was, glinting away, it had been hiding under the rim of that yolk-smeared plate. Screams of astonishment and joy!
    In Brooklyn that day, it occurred to me that maybe I’d never see the ring again. It was such a tiny thing, and God knows where Aura had hidden it, if in fact she hadn’t lost it. If I find it, I should probably sell it, I thought. I have a lot of debt.
    I bet I’ll never find it, I told Valentina and Adele.
    Wait, let me think, said Valentina. I’m good at figuring things like this out. Anyway, women tend to use the same logic when they hide their jewelry.
    She stood in the middle of the bedroom, one arm crossed under her breasts and the back of her hand propping her other arm’s elbow, chin resting on her fist, sunglasses dangling by one stem between two fingers, slowly swiveling her head. Hmmm, she said. Where. Wherewherewhere … Valentina walked directly to Aura’s chest of drawers, pulled open a lower one, parted the sweaters and shirts folded and balled-up in there so that she could reach toward the back, and, as if she’d hidden it there herself, retrieved a Mexican trinket box of lacquered painted wood and opened it. Inside that box was the little dark velvet box; she snapped the lid open, and there was that familiar happy sparkle.
    I guess I would have found it eventually.
    About a week after