Make Your Home Among Strangers (18 page)

I found the calling card I'd used the few times I'd tried to reach him stuffed far back in my desk drawer, his work number—a cell phone assigned to him by his boss—scrawled in red marker on the front of it, the phrase
(emergency only!!!)
underneath.

He picked up by saying, This is Ricky, and I was so thrown off by that—and by the fact that he answered at all—that I just said,
Papi?
without realizing until later how pathetic it must've sounded.

—Lizet! he practically screamed into the phone. Hey! Wow!

It was late afternoon, and he was on his way to a jobsite, a middle school expansion that should've been done by the time classes started but got delayed when some investigation exposed the contract as being full of kickbacks for the brother-in-law of the school board's superintendent. Work could only happen when kids weren't there; they paid him overtime because of the shift in hours. He blurted out these details as I got used to the sound of him talking, of his voice suddenly in my ear, that easy.

—I haven't heard from you in so long, he said, as if it were my fault.

He told me he'd finally managed to talk to my sister a couple days earlier, that she'd bragged about how I'd been home for Thanksgiving. He didn't sound hurt that I hadn't tried to see him while in town, but him bringing it up in the first place meant this was definitely the case—and that Leidy had told him hoping to produce that exact effect.

—Yeah, I said. It wasn't the best idea. Ariel Hernandez showed up and kind of stole my thunder.

—What about thunder?

—I just shouldn't have gone, I said. It wasn't worth the money.

Cars honked on his end of the line. I imagined him sitting in his work van, his cooler sweating on the floor in the space between the seats. I wondered where he was picturing me, if he had any idea how beautiful the snow outside my window looked with the sunset gleaming off it.

—Is it cold there? he asked.

—Yeah, it's snowed a lot.

—I saw that on the Weather Channel, that it's been snowing there.

I said yeah.

We didn't talk for long. He didn't ask about my mother or Leidy or Dante, not that I expected him to do that. I waited for him to give me the number to wherever he lived now so I wouldn't have to call him on the work cell phone he'd said was only for emergencies, but he never gave me that. He didn't ask when I'd be home next (granted, the date on my return ticket hadn't changed, but still). He just kept saying, So you're doing okay? So you're really doing fine? So you're really okay? And I kept wishing he'd believe me when I answered yes and ask something else.

—I went ice skating a couple weeks ago, I told him before hanging up.

—No shit, he said. I bet you fell a lot.

—Not
a lot
, I said. But yeah, I did, like three times. No big deal. It was still fun.

—Falling is fun? He laughed in a tired way and said, Okay, if you say so.

The sound of the van's engine disappeared on the line, and when I said, Hello?—thinking we'd been disconnected—he said, No, I'm here. I just got to where I'm going.

He said, I guess good luck on your tests. I said thanks.

As he hung up he said, See you later, and those words loomed like a forecast behind each chemistry-related fact I reviewed that night. Hours later, at exactly midnight, every student on campus stuck their heads out of whatever window they were closest to and screamed. It was a Rawlings tradition: a campus-wide shriek the midnight before the first scheduled exam. But I didn't know about it that year, and so when I heard those screams, I thought for sure I was going crazy: that all the various voices in my head—my dad's, those of my professors, even an imagined one for Ariel that I'd silenced—were hell-bent on pushing out the facts and formulas I'd lived in for the last three weeks. And I was even more convinced the screams were in my head a minute later when I decided that, after I made it through finals and got back home, I would figure out where my dad lived, go there, and make him answer for selling the house, for not caring if he ever talked to me while I was away. And the second I made that resolution, the very instant that goal was certain to me, the screaming—it stopped.

 

15

THE FIRST THING MY MOM SAID
when she saw me—what she screamed right into my ear as she hugged me in the airport terminal—was, You are so skinny!

It sounded more like a compliment than anything she was worried about. I lost eleven pounds that fall, seven of them in the weeks between Thanksgiving and my last exam. Unlike most students, who'd put on weight all fall like pigs before a Noche Buena slaughter, I had a healthier diet at Rawlings than I did at home, having finally made use of that famous salad bar to get through finals.

—I could say the same about you, I told her.

She looked several pounds thinner, her makeup weirdly askew, her body draped in a faux-silk gold blouse and matching leggings I'd never seen. When she broke our hug, she looked down at the airport carpet and tucked her short, coarse hair behind her ears. Her roots needed a serious touch-up, the gray and brown pushing up in a solid band around her head. The blond streaks she'd always maintained looked detached from her scalp. She pried my fingers from my carry-on bag and started wheeling it away from me.

—I've been so busy since you left, I barely have time to eat, she said. But look at you, you look so smart!

I didn't ask what looking smart meant. I scanned the crowd of waiting people around us for Leidy, to give her a hug and take Dante off her hands, but my mom was alone. She was already walking a few steps ahead of me and then, as if realizing she'd left something behind, she stopped and said, It's so good to have you home!

—Where's Leidy?

—Work, Lizet. She's at work.

She looked at the inside of her wrist, her watch's face having rotated there.

—Though she's probably on her way to get Dante from daycare by now.

—Oh, I said. Of course, right.

She started moving again, my suitcase in tow. I jogged to her side, and she fished something out from between her breasts and handed it to me—the ticket from the parking garage, stamped almost an hour before—and told me if we hurried, we could save the extra five dollars. I was secretly relieved that her rush was due to something unrelated to me: I'd barely talked to Mami without Leidy as my go-between since the last trip, and I worried the whole flight home that she was still angry about Thanksgiving, about how I'd planned that trip on my own—that it had made her draw some conclusion about me, that I was turning into someone she either didn't like or didn't trust.

As we swerved around the parking garage looking for the way out, my mom's left leg shook and jumped under the steering wheel. We made it to the bottom level of the garage and paid—a breathy
Yes!
from Mami when we came in under the hour—and then she asked a slew of questions: about the trip, the planes, who I'd sat next to on each and what they were like, whether or not I'd had a chance to sleep, how many degrees it was when I left—each question interrupting the answer to the one before it.

What Mami didn't ask about was school. She spent the bulk of the car ride in conversation with the drivers of other cars, cursing them or begging them or ridiculing them, then saying to me, I'm right, right? She asked me if I was too hot or too cold, or hungry or tired, and I kept answering, No, I'm fine. I was exhausted and very near tears, actually. I was shocked to find that it did not feel good to be home, to have seen her standing there in the airport. The entire three hours of the last flight, though I'd been nervous about seeing her, I mostly felt very happy to be getting away from Rawlings and that first semester. But spotting her before she saw me in the terminal—in that fake gold outfit, her face oily, her hands fidgeting with the rings on her fingers—had made my stomach turn, and I just wanted to be alone somewhere to catch my breath, to have a minute to sync up my idea of home with reality. I'd seen my mother in that moment as
not
my mother; I saw her as a tacky-looking woman, as the Cuban lady the girls on my floor would've seen, alone in an airport. And I did not like that I suddenly had this ability to see her that way, isolated from our shared history. I didn't know if she'd changed or if she'd always looked that way but now I could just see through my feelings somehow. I felt instantly cold, and then I panicked: if she looked that way to me, what did I look like to her, with my uncombed hair and my newly pale skin and the greenish, studying-induced bags under my eyes, with my horrid plane breath? By the time I'd spotted the sign for the restrooms, it was too late: she'd snagged me, thrown her arms around my neck, had said I looked
smart
.

As much as I was ashamed of my hearing results, by what that long letter stated the committee had decided—that I was the product of a poor environment—I willingly took it: I wanted to be at Rawlings, and I was grateful that they'd taken my background into consideration. I wanted to rise—I used exactly that word in the thank-you e-mail I wrote to the committee after printing out the resource list—to
rise above
what I'd come from. I'd felt sick as I typed it, felt like a traitor after I hit send, but now, at the clash of my mom's bangles as she turned the steering wheel to cut off a car in retaliation for
them
cutting
her
off moments before—all the while lowering her window, her arm extending out, then her middle finger at the end of that arm, waving a
fuck you
as she yelled the same phrase in Spanish at the driver—I knew I'd meant it.

I eventually stopped paying attention to the street signs and turns and let myself feel lost in what still felt like my new neighborhood. Leidy was right: Little Havana
did
feel reffy, in a different way than Hialeah did—more like theme-park reffy, the reffiness as main attraction, on display. At a red light, we stopped a few cars back from a tour bus. A voice from its loudspeaker floated to us: And next up, on the left, you'll see the eternal flame monument dedicated to those who died in the Bay of Pigs Invasion. The light turned green, we kept going, and then, as if they were getting paid to do it, some old Cuban guys were actually there by that flame, in sparkling white guayaberas, saluting at it and everything, and people from places like California and Spain snapped pictures of them, and the Cuban guys smiled for these pictures.

We eventually turned onto the street of my mother's apartment building, something I registered only because she slowed down. What I saw there was another kind of spectacle: signs down the whole block, saying
WELCOME
and
YOU ARE HOME.
I blinked and breathed through the rush in my chest, then remembered who the signs were really for.

There were Cuban flags and American flags, signs with writing in too many fonts declaring:
¡ARIEL NO SE VA
! Blown up and hanging on almost every fence was a picture of Ariel—looking chubbier than he had a month earlier—hanging onto the neck of some girl maybe a year or two older than me. Above the photo, in bold print, were the words,
NO DESTRUYAN ESTA FELICIDAD
.

—Who's that? I said.

When I pointed, I touched the glass of the window, something my dad spent years training me and Leidy never to do. I smashed my fingertip against the glass and left a greasy print. Mami's leg was still shaking.

—Esa muchacha, she said, is Ariel's cousin but is like a mother to him now. Her name is Caridaylis. Cari. They are never apart.

Mami now had both hands firmly on the steering wheel. She sat up too close to it. I imagined, in an accident, how it would ram her chest into her spine just before her head hit the windshield.

—She's like an angel, Mami said. She is like a saint.

—I don't remember her from the news.

—She's only nineteen. Think about taking that on, being a mom to him when he's gone through so much. I bet you can't even imagine it.

The girl had coppery hair and dark eyebrows. In the picture, she's smiling widely and looking behind her, at Ariel. She has a too-thick gold chain around her neck, and I imagined it as on loan from a boyfriend, having belonged to him first. She looked less like a mom and more like a big sister to the boy hanging on her back, but I kept this to myself.

I shrugged. Leidy's twenty and she's a mom, I said.

—Your sister's different. She went looking for trouble.

She didn't say anything else, but it seemed important for me to try: Yeah, but Dante's still a baby, I mumbled. And I'm sure that girl Cari has help.

If my mom heard me, she pretended not to.

As we pulled into the complex's parking lot, Leidy swung through the building's door, keeping it open with her hip. Dante sat perched on the other. She grabbed his chunky arm and made him wave to us, staying put on the tiled entrance because she was barefoot. She looked tired in a way that suddenly made me incredibly sad—her hair greasy after a day of washing dozens of other heads. As she and Dante waved, the baby looked at the car, at my mother and me opening and shutting its doors.

Mami tugged my suitcase out from the trunk before I could get to it—I was waving back to Dante and yelling, Hey, Big Guy!—and slammed the trunk closed before I could make it back there to help. She rolled the suitcase up to the front entrance and left it there, then squeezed through the doorway past Leidy after an automatic hello kiss that caught more air than cheek. Dante reached for his grandmother's hair but missed.

Leidy bounced him on her hip and he started grunting
Bah! Bah! Bah!
She looked down and traced the grout surrounding a square of tile with her big toe as I came up from the parking lot. When I reached her, she hugged me hard with her free arm and kissed me on the cheek—real and sloppy—and that's when I admitted something big had been off about Mami's welcome.