Make Your Home Among Strangers (2 page)

I was surprising everyone, even myself: I was home for a holiday we didn't really celebrate. Eating turkey on a Thursday seemed mostly arbitrary to my Cuban-born-and-raised parents, and so to my sister and me growing up. Still, my entire school career up to that point celebrated America and its founding—the proof: a half-dozen handprint turkeys stuffed under my mother's mattress, now in a Little Havana apartment instead of our house—and I must've been feeling sentimental for stories of pilgrims and Indians all getting along around a feast the night I scoured the Internet for a ticket home. Also, the fact that everyone at Rawlings (in the dining hall, around the mailboxes, before class while waiting for a professor to arrive, even in the morning bathroom banter bouncing between girls in separate shower stalls—all conversations in which I had no place until I decided to fly home as a surprise) couldn't stop talking about family and food only made me want the same thing even though I'd been fine without it my whole life. So as people talked around their toothbrushes about the aunts and uncles they dreaded seeing, I recast the holiday as equally important to some imaginary version of the Ramirez clan and booked the trip, then mentioned going home one October morning as I towel-dried my face. A girl from my floor who'd barely ever noticed me finally introduced herself—
I'm Tracy, by the way, but people call me Trace
—and told me, as she spat toothpaste foam into the sink, how jealous she was that home for me meant Miami Beach. I didn't mention that I lived miles from the ocean, just like I didn't mention—to anyone—that I'd drained my fall savings on this trip.

A day later than the Wednesday printed on my original ticket, and a good hour after most of East Coast America would've finished their turkey and potatoes and apple pie and all the other All-American things all Americans eat on Thanksgiving, I shuffled down the aisle of a plane, my bag catching on the armrests then slamming back into me the whole way out. I stepped through the squarish hole in the plane's side—I still couldn't believe this opening counted as a
door
—and the night's humidity swooped over me like a wet sheet, plastering my already-greasy bangs to my forehead. An old white man behind me huffed, Dear Christ, this place! Part of me wanted to turn around and snap,
What do you mean,
this place
, you stupid viejo? You want to freaking say something about it?
But the part of me that had calmly worked with the gate agent in Pittsburgh to find an available hotel room once it was clear they'd sold more tickets than seats on my connecting flight—the part that a week earlier had borrowed my roommate Jillian's blazer for my academic hearing without mentioning the hearing itself—knew exactly what he meant. My bangs, which I'd blown out to give the rest of my hair some semblance of neatness, curled and tangled in that oppressive, familiar dankness. When I reached up to finger-comb them back into place, a motion that had been a reflex throughout high school, my nails got caught in the new knots.

The Miami International Airport terminal smelled strongly of mildew. The odor seemed to come up from the carpet, each of my steps releasing it into the air. That terminal was one of the last to be renovated, so the only TVs in it back then had one of three jobs: to display a pixilated list of
ARRIVALS
, or of
DEPARTURES
, or to relay the weather, updated every fifteen minutes. There was no recap of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, no local news about a food kitchen blaring overhead—the TVs weren't connected to the outside world that way. If they had been, my ignorance about Ariel Hernandez might've ended right then, before I'd even stepped through the airport's automatic glass doors and into the Miami night. It would've been at least a warning.

After explaining my overbooked flight and how my original shuttle reservation had been for Wednesday evening, and after an absurd amount of clicking on a keyboard and many
Mmm-hmm
s and almost no eye contact, the woman behind the shuttle service's counter managed to squeeze me onto a ride-share leaving in ten minutes.

—But you getting off last
,
she told me, the clicking suddenly stopping as she held up a finger to my face. Her acrylic nails—pink-and-whites that needed refilling—had slashes of diamonds glued across their long, curved tips. I could see her real nails growing up under them, like echoes.

—I got you, I said, happy to recognize something I hadn't seen in months.

I sat at the very back of the blue van after reluctantly handing over my bag to the driver: I didn't have any cash for a tip and almost told him so as we wrestled over it, each of us wanting to make sure we got the credit for putting it away.

The ticket in my hand said
Zone 8: Little Havana
. I read it twice before remembering that it wasn't a mistake. I'd lived in Hialeah my whole life except for the very last week before I left for Rawlings. I'd memorized the new address, but only because I'd entered and reentered it on all sorts of forms during orientation, correcting and updating it on anything I'd submitted before that fall. Even to someone from Hialeah, Little Havana was a joke back then, the part of Miami only the most recent of refugees called home, a place tour buses drove through, where old Cuban men played dominos for tourists and thought that made them celebrities. But none of these geographical distinctions mattered at Rawlings. There, when people asked, So where are you from? and I said, Hialeah, they answered: Wait,
where
? And so I gave them a new answer: Miami, I'm from Miami. Oh, they'd say, But where are you
from
from? I was
from
from Miami, but eventually I learned to say what they were trying to figure out: My parents are from Cuba. No, I've never been. Yes, I still have family there. No, we don't know Fidel Castro. Once I learned what I was supposed to say, it became a chant, like the address I'd memorized but didn't think of as home.

People packed in around me. An elderly white couple—the wrinkled man helping the wrinkled woman up the steps of the van, holding her by her bracelet-crammed wrist—creaked their way onto the seat bench in front of me, spreading out in the hopes of keeping anyone from sitting by them. It didn't work: a young-looking lady pushed in beside them. She wore smart gray pants and a matching blazer with patches on the elbows, and she looked like she could maybe be a professor somewhere except for the fact that she was clearly Latina; I'd yet to see a Latino professor on the Rawlings campus, though I knew from pictures in the school's guidebook that there were a few somewhere. But then I thought, Maybe she teaches at FIU or Miami Dade. Maybe she's new there. Her hair was pulled back tight, slicked smooth with gel. To the old couple she said, Good evening, and they nodded back at her. The old woman scooted closer to her husband, the orange cloud of her hair touching his shoulder. She turned her face—the side of it dotted with brownish spots, a few whiskers sprouting from a fold under her chin—and inspected the young woman the way I'd just done before turning away.

—Coral Gables, the old woman said. She leaned forward, put her hand on the driver's chair. Our stop is Coral Gables, near the – Gerald, just tell him how to get there.

—The man knows, Sharon. It'll be fine.

He grunted this with a sturdiness that would've shut me up.
It'll be fine
. I rested my forehead against the window—surprised, after so many cold weeks in New York, by the warm glass. Outside, the sun dipped behind buildings and palm trees, only the red welt of it still visible. I hadn't decided yet if I should use this trip home to confess my issues at school to my mom; I'd bought my ticket weeks before things started to look so bad. I was straight-up failing my chemistry course, but by Thanksgiving this problem was only a footnote to a list of other issues, the most serious being that I had accidentally plagiarized part of a paper in my freshman writing class and would soon be meeting again with the Academic Integrity Committee about what this meant in terms of my status as a student at Rawlings. I'd testified at my hearing a week earlier: I'd
attempted
to correctly cite something, but I didn't even know the extent to which that needed to be done to count as correct. The committee said it was taking into consideration the fact that I'd gone to Hialeah Lakes High. Several times during my hearing, they'd referred to it as “an underserved high school,” which I figured out was a nice way of saying a school so shitty that the people at Rawlings had read an article about it in
The New Yorker
. They'd expected me to know about this article—
You mean to tell us you aren't familiar with the national attention your former school is receiving?
—as well as that magazine when the only one I ever read back then was
Vanidades
, which my mom sometimes mailed me after reading them herself during her shifts directing calls at the City of Miami Building Department. I'd swallowed and told the committee no, I was not aware. The committee was also, in general, worried about my ability to succeed at Rawlings given that I was considering a biology major. The truth was, I didn't really know if I should major in biology, but I planned to major in biology anyway because I'd read it was one of the largest, most popular majors at Rawlings, and therefore (I reasoned) couldn't possibly be that hard. The truth was, I had enough to worry about that Thanksgiving before my flight got canceled, before I'd ever heard the name Ariel Hernandez. And just like the fact of me even being in the city in a van headed her way, my mother knew about none of it.

 

3

IN PITTSBURGH, THE AIRLINE HAD
sent me to a hotel that was only a short “courtesy” ride away from the airport, and like the hotels we now passed—scummy buildings on the fringes of Miami International, on the fringes of the definition of
hotel
—the rooms could be rented either for the night or by the hour. There was a time when hotels like this terrified me, but I'd spent enough hours in them with my boyfriend Omar during my senior year of high school that I was no longer shocked to see a prostitute hanging out by a vending machine or waiting in a car and sniffing her own armpits, thinking nobody's looking. Still, I'd never spent the
night
in a place like that, and I was alone, and the room—which just as recently as that summer had seemed so fun and illicit and beautiful in this murky, hope-filled way—just felt gross, the sheets and towels, to the touch, all one step shy of dry.

We rolled through the city, our route apparently not needing the expressway. Around us, the noise of rumbling sound systems and way-too-much bass faded in and out depending on the stoplights. We eventually pulled up to a sprawling ranch house in a nice part of the Gables I'd never seen, and the old people left the van without saying goodbye to anyone, and I was relieved, now that I was back in Miami, that there was no need to be polite. Even this far inland, I could smell the salt in the air every time the door slid open. I hadn't been this close to the ocean in months, and out of nowhere, the air made my mouth water. My eyes welled with tears—more water rushing to meet the ocean that I didn't even know I'd missed.

My imaginary profesora and I were apparently the driver's last two stops. She'd scooted in from the edge of her row after the old people left and was now directly in front of me. The mass of her hair was corralled into this thick bun, shiny and hard from the gel keeping it under control. The dark center of the thing, like an entrance to a tunnel, seemed to stare right at me. I had the urge to stick my finger in it, see how far it would go, but then she let out this big sigh and her shoulders drooped forward and shook. She brought her hands to her face, sucked in a wet breath through her fingers. The driver's eyes swerved to the rearview mirror, and he lifted his eyebrows at whatever he saw there. He looked away to the road, but then his eyes met mine in the mirror and he shifted in his seat, cleared his throat when he looked away again like she was my problem. So I grabbed onto her bench and scooted forward, saying with mostly air so she wouldn't really hear me, Uh, hey.

She leaned back on the bench—I moved my hand out of the way just in time—and, still through her fingers, said,
God
. Then she wiped her cheeks with her whole palm, pushing with the same fierceness that Leidy's son, my baby nephew Dante, used when smashing his own hands into his face as he cried. She bent down and snatched something from off the floor—her huge purse. It hit her lap with a sound like steps creaking, the leather stretching as she rooted around in it. She pulled out a compact and flipped it open. In the mirror she used to inspect her face, I could only see a tiny circle of her at a time: her weak, ruddy chin; her bare, wide lips, the almost-straight teeth they revealed then hid; her flared nostrils as she used her pinkie nail to swipe something from the right one. Then, a flash of her full, dark eyebrow—and below it, her right eye, still ringed in perfect black eyeliner, the lashes still well-shellacked with mascara. None of it smudged by tears at all. I sat back against my bench, confused as to whether or not what she'd just been doing, not five seconds before, was crying. She tugged at the corner of her eye, lifting it, and I'd been staring for exactly too long when I realized what she watched in her mirror was me.

She snapped the compact shut, slid her purse off her lap and onto the bench, and turned to face me. She smiled—a square, forced grin that even showed the crooked bottom teeth I'd missed before—then dropped her head back to her purse. She said, Sorry, I'm being weird.

Her voice didn't sound like I thought it would, and I was surprised I'd expected something specific. It was deeper and quieter than I thought it should be, and there was no Miami accent in it, no sharpness to her
I
. And what she said made her sound like my roommate Jillian, who was constantly describing the things she did as
weird
or
random
, even when they were neither weird nor random. Her face still turned to her purse, she asked, Are you headed to Hialeah, too?