Make Your Home Among Strangers (31 page)

I say all this because I felt in that moment the power he held and wielded by accident. He was more than a cute little boy. I had the very strong desire to carry him myself, to fold him into a little ball that fit in the circle of my arms. Hidden behind the pebbles of his baby-toothed grin, you sensed a loss so profound it made anyone want to hold him, to cradle and rock him and say you were so sorry, over and over again. For so many people there, he was a mirror, some version or idea of yourself, some Baby You, fresh off a boat or a plane and alone but still hopeful that what's been set into motion around you is just fine. I wanted to lift him to my face, to ask him what it felt like to go outside and see yourself staring back at you from the chests of so many strangers. I say all this because if it wasn't for me wanting to see my mom's face more than I wanted to see his, I could've stayed in that trance—happy to be among a tribe, each one of us tapping into the love the person beside us radiated toward Ariel—for as long as anyone. I say all this because I recognized then how things could get out of hand.

Someone knocked into me, pushed me forward, then another push, and suddenly I was pressed up against Myra's back (she'd let my mom, shorter than her, slide in front). Myra wasn't as easy to jostle as I was, and soon enough my face smashed up against the back of her T-shirt. She held her ground by trying to step backward—right onto my foot. She planted it on the outside of my sneaker, managing to find the one blister I had from walking in heels the night before—I hadn't even known it was there until water first hit it during that morning's shower. Now it sent a charge of pain over my foot. It hurt, but I was grateful for Leidy's advice to wear real shoes. People yelled in Spanish and English, all hoping to say the question that would catch the uncle's attention: Did you stay up until midnight to greet the new year? What have you heard from the government? Then I heard my mom's voice, just a few feet in front of me: Where is Caridaylis? How is she?

The government question won out over the others.

—We'll know more Tuesday, the uncle said as if we were one person, a friendly neighbor talking to another friendly neighbor, nothing at all weird about the mass of us hanging out in front of his house.

—We're talking to the lawyer all the time, he said.

He shook the boy's sneaker-clad foot and said, Ariel, you wanted to say something?

—Happy New Year, Ariel said, suddenly shy with his voice.

Many in the crowd said it back. I didn't: I'd slinked around Myra, favoring my non-blistered foot, to get a clear view of my mom's face. Mami didn't say it back, either.

Her mouth threw me off the most—lips bent in a practiced, forced smile showing more bottom teeth than top. She looked like she was holding her face for a photo, stale lines fanning away from her eyes, which ticked back and forth, searching somewhere behind Ariel. I'd expected some glow, one reflecting what Ariel gave off, what I'd seen in him, but she looked used to this moment, content but close to bored. But then, as all around me rose new cheers of welcome, my mom's face broke open, her mouth cracking the mask-smile and coming back to life with one that reached her ears, tears rimming and glossing over her eyes. She stood on her toes, lifted her chin to see over the crowd. I sometimes forgot that she was still young, still two years away from forty, the flicker of gray that might've winked from her hair by then hidden under the dye job and the chunky blond highlights. Leidy was almost a year old by the time Mami was my age; she was weeks away from learning she was pregnant with me. Happy New Year, my mom yelled, and she raised her hand to wave, a strong smooth arm: she looked too young to have daughters as old as us.

Close to my ear, someone yelled
Cari!
and lifted a bangle-clad wrist in greeting. So I understood before I even saw her that my mom's new face was for Caridaylis, the uncle's daughter who'd been assigned, more or less by default, to fill the role of Ariel's mother.

I'd never seen her in person either, but when I took in her pretty round face, her tan shoulders under the straps of a white tank top, I had to look away—up at Ariel, then into the sky, at the dark shadows bellying from the clouds. Because I almost recognized her. Because she was, to me—and I hate that I still haven't thought of a better yet equally accurate way to put it—painfully generic, the quintessential girl from Miami, a girl who could've gone to my high school and blended in so seamlessly I would've flipped past her picture in the yearbook without really registering it: with her small hoop earrings, the gold chain from all the photos still around her neck, her thick, straightened hair and her long bangs skirting her face, her arms reaching up behind her uncle to take Ariel from his shoulders and carry him herself. Her
regularness
struck me as tragic, because to the people surrounding me she'd never be regular again. Ariel made her special; everyone around me saw it that way. But I must've been broken somehow, because as Ariel climbed onto her, wrapping his legs around her waist and his arms around her neck and tucking his head into her shoulder, he
lost
whatever specialness I'd seen on him. He was now some kid being held by some girl from Miami. I listened harder to the crowd as they yelled
We love you
and said they were praying and lighting candles, but I couldn't get it back, couldn't see Ariel the way I had seconds before, because I couldn't give that feeling to
her
.

Caridaylis sent a little wave—four fingers folding down to meet her palm in a curl, three or four times—right at me, and my face felt hot. She'd caught me somehow, sensed that I saw through to her secret that she was a regular person, but my mom's hand flicked ahead of me, waving back. Caridaylis was waving to my mom—she even mouthed,
Hi Lourdes,
which killed my hope that maybe I was wrong about the wave—bequeathing for a second her specialness to my mother by singling her out. She knew my mother's name. How could that be true? I wanted to launch over the fence and shake her, ask her why: Why on earth do you know my mother's name? She rested the hand she'd waved on Ariel's head.

Mami finally remembered me then, grabbed my hand and pulled me to her, making me step on the toes of people crowding the short distance between us. She clenched the meat of my upper arm and said, Did you see that? There's something so special in her. God bless her, she is trying so hard.

She looked back at Caridaylis, probably hoping for another wave, but my hands balled into fists. My mom knew I was the first student from Hialeah Lakes to go to Rawlings even though she never acknowledged it. In the grand scheme of human achievement, I recognize this is not a big deal, but still, when I eventually showed Mami the acceptance letter and pointed out the handwritten note near the bottom stating I was the first, she'd said, Maybe you're just the first one who ever applied? And I wrote it off as exhaustion because she was, at that point, the new grandmother of a sleepless two-month-old baby, a woman whose husband had just left her.

—Mom, I said. It's not the first time someone's taken care of a kid. I mean, I get it, but it's not like what she's doing is actually that
hard
. She's – she's a glorified babysitter.

She released my arm, almost threw it back at me. Her now-shut mouth, the way she rolled her shoulders to push out her chest, the ugly flash of a tendon in her neck: I knew then this was the wrong thing to say. I didn't even really believe it, but I needed to say it to her.
I
was trying hard. What
I
was doing was fucking hard. My mom stared at me so long that her eyes seemed to shake in her head.

—What? I said. It's the truth.

—I'm waiting for you, she said, to take that back.

What Caridaylis was doing was hard, too, of course it was, but I couldn't understand that. What woman who I knew from home
wasn't
taking care of a kid?

—Why does that girl even know who you are? I said.

—Because I've been here from the beginning, Mami said. She's my friend.

—No she's not, I said. She's
not
your friend.

She grabbed my face, hard, squeezing her nails into my cheeks.

—You know what? she said. I look at you now and I don't even recognize you.

She let go of my face, said, You're a bad person.

I took a step away, knocked into the side of Myra. Mami dropped her arms and turned her face up again, back to the house, to Caridaylis.

—No I'm not.

I shook my head and snorted out half a laugh to show how little I cared, but it stung to breathe. If there'd been a way out, I would've charged down it away from her, but people blocked me in on all sides. I'm not a bad person, I said again.

For a few seconds I thought she hadn't heard me. But then she faced me finally, her face tight like she was going to cry.

—Only a bad person could say that about her.

—I don't really think – I just –

But I couldn't speak. I wanted her to give me the kind of attention she gave so easily to Caridaylis, someone she barely knew, a girl she wanted so much to count as her
friend
. I wanted us home, not at that rally. I wanted Ariel gone.

The closest I could get to that was to say, I'm sorry. I just wish none of this were happening.

I let myself cry. She watched me. Mami, I said, I just –

—I know, she said. She let her tears crest and glide down her face. She wiped mine with her thumb and said, Ay, Lizet, none of this should be happening.

I hiccupped more tears, and she stepped closer and put her head on my shoulder, the way she had the night before, when I'd left with Omar for the club.

—We shouldn't have to be fighting for this, she said. It shouldn't be so hard. I don't know, I don't know.

I put my hand on her back but regretted it right away. I didn't know if I should move it or hold it there. Myra came over and encircled us with her arms, shushing and saying, It's okay, it's fine. We don't know anything yet. Save it for Tuesday, huh? Everything's gonna be fine. Just look.

She tucked her hand under my mom's chin and pointed her face toward Ariel, now off the girl's back and scampering around the front yard, the Santa hat—abandoned on the grass by his uncle's feet—replaced by a teal Florida Marlins batting helmet. When he reached the porch steps, he crawled over the door of some four-wheeled contraption: a Christmas present, the uncle said, from a local congressional representative. It looked like a beach buggy, complete with a fake roll cage and fake lights and everything, but was powered by him—by his feet, which stuck out of the thing's plastic shell at the bottom. He steered it around the yard, growling out driving noises as he trampled every single blade of grass.

*   *   *

The camera crews and reporters hovering at the fringes of Leidy's and Omar's warnings eventually materialized when Ariel's uncle stood on the highest porch step and gave a formal statement concerning the motion for Ariel's asylum made before Christmas. He said they had every reason to be very optimistic, that they looked forward to Tuesday. The reporters asked a few questions. Cameras clicked with each calm, measured answer. Mami waved, yelled
Amen
when other people did, but I witnessed none of the craziness Omar and Leidy had described, though Mami did seem sensitive, and people did step on my feet. I read my mom's admiration of Caridaylis—or as I saw it, her admiration of the attention people paid Caridaylis because of Ariel—as displaced jealousy. She'd never put it that way, but that's what
I
felt—jealous—at how lovingly she looked at that girl. Mostly I was disappointed in Leidy and Omar for not recognizing what was really going on with Mami: she was becoming her own person finally, trying to learn who that even was via a newfound passion. So maybe she'd retrofitted the circumstances of her life to fit in to her new surroundings. So what? I of all people couldn't fault my mom for having the wherewithal to adapt her behavior, for being a creature thrust into a new environment and doing perhaps exactly what it took to survive there. I admit this was a flimsy conclusion given the small sample size, given my now-obvious observation bias. But it's easy to stand on the fringes and mistake your distance for authority.

 

24

OF COURSE THERE WAS ANOTHER RALLY
on Tuesday in anticipation of the court's decision, and of course I went, convinced that going was really just a form of supporting my mom. We were up front, having gotten there early to meet Myra and the others near Ariel's fence. A crowd hundreds wide and ringed with camera crews formed around us, and at the promised time late that afternoon, Ariel's uncle came out, Caridaylis at his side. Ariel was nowhere to be seen—not in the shadow of the house's screen door, not in any window. Caridaylis looked as if she'd been up all night, her eyes puffy and strained underneath new makeup. The lines around the uncle's mouth seemed more pronounced. He had his arm around her shoulders, Caridaylis small enough to be a child herself, fitting snug against his side like a purse.

From their posture and somewhat bloated faces, the people nearest them—us—intuited that the news was bad. A few feet away along the fence, a woman let out a moan. There was a collective holding of breath as the uncle made his way, while guiding Caridaylis, to the spot from which Ariel had wished us a happy new year. People around me muttered preemptive
Ay dios mío
s, and even my mom—so calm on the two-block walk there, so eager to greet her friends after work and to again not feel the need to introduce me to any of them—held her breath longer than was, to me, safe.

The uncle's exact words are hazy to me, partly because I knew as he spoke them that his statement would end up outlasting that moment, recorded by dozens of camera crews, reported by dozens of writers. There'd be a transcript, and someday, if I ever needed to look it up, I'd be able to find it. So I could lift those words from a document now, put them here as what I heard him say, but even though that's the fact of it, that wouldn't be the honest way to tell it, because all I remember hearing—his voice isolated from all other noise like Ariel's laughter on the first day of the year—was this: Our worst fear is here. Everything he said after this is lost to me because as he spoke, I looked over at my mother, who appeared to be melting. Her chin went toward the sky as she sank. I remember, more than anything, her scream. A long
No
with a softness to the vowel that told me she meant it in Spanish, though of course it means the same thing no matter which accent surrounds it. The wail ripped through her body, then the crowd surrounding her, then me: a scream fit for TV, and I felt them rush in—the cameras—their zooms finding and catching her.