Carry Me Like Water

by Saenz, Benjamin Alire

• ISBN13: 9780060831332
• ISBN10: 0060831332
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

This immensely moving novel confronts divisions of race, gender, and class, fusing together the stories of people who come to recognize one another from former lives they didn't know existed -- or that they tried to forget. Diego, a deaf-mute, is barely surviving on the border in El Paso, Texas. Diego's sister, Helen, who lives with her husband in the posh suburbs of San Francisco, long ago abandoned both her brother and her El Paso roots. Helen's best friend, Lizzie, a nurse in an AIDS ward, begins to uncover her own buried past after a mystical encounter with a patient.With Carry Me Like Water, Benjamin Alire Sfenz unfolds a beautiful story about hope and forgiveness, unexpected reunions, an expanded definition of family, and, ultimately, what happens when the disparate worlds of pain and privilege collide.

Excerpts

Carry Me Like Water

Chapter One

When Diego woke from his uneasy sleep he was lost and sad and far away from himself. It was as if he was alwaysfighting to belong to his body, to himself, to the city he lived in. Always he woke wondering where he was, his body hurting. Naked, he felt himself trembling as though he were a tree whose leaves were being torn away by a wind that had no respect for anything that was green and growing, anything weaker than itself. His limbs felt bare and raw -- exposed. In the winter, he shook from the cold; in the summer, from the heat. He took one hand and grabbed the other to make it stop shaking. He wanted to yell, scream, clear his lungs of everything that had settled inside him. When he woke, he always had the feeling he had taken into his lungs a million grains of sand -- had swallowed all of the desert's dust in one night, dust that cut into him like tiny pieces of crushed glass. His lungs and throat felt dry as ashes. He was drought itself. He was dust.

Diego wanted to wake and see a morning made of more than gray, colorless shadows that stood motionless and large before a dawn that was dark despite the rising sun. He wanted to wake to a good and perfect sun that would lift all the gray and dirt from the air. He wanted to wake. Instead, he remained in his noiseless trap of a body, caught in the endless repetitions that were his life. He always woke before the light entered the room. It was always the same, always black: black as his coffee, black as his eyes, black as his hair and the dreams he tried to keep himself from remembering. He stared at his hands, his legs, his feet. He stared at himself until he remembered where he was: in this room, this room where he slept but which would never be his. He felt himself to be always on theedge of homelessness. He could not talk. He could not hear. But in the morning that was all he ever thought of doing.

Carry Me Like Water. Copyright © by Benjamin Saenz. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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Excerpted from Carry Me Like Water by Benjamin Alire Sáenz
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.