Make Your Home Among Strangers (38 page)

—No one's saying they don't believe you, Caroline said slowly.

I slid my foot off her boot.

The third girl, now the farthest from me, said in too cute a voice, I just feel like he needs to go back, get back to his life, to his school and stuff.

—You
feel like
? Let me ask you, what kind of life do you think he's gonna have in Cuba? Tell me. You
really
think he can go back? He can go back to school and say to the kid next to him, Oh in Miami I had a puppy and I ate steak every day and we had soap and toilet paper and freedom of speech and the air inside buildings was freezing cold? You
really
think Castro's gonna allow a liability like that on his island? In a place where the news is censored? You're telling
me
that can really happen? After how good he's had it here?

They watched me with steady faces, with thin lips parted, as if dealing with someone holding a knife to their own wrist. I said, That kid's life in Cuba won't be worse because it's
Cuba
. It'll be worse because he knows what life is like
here
.

—He doesn't
belong
here, Tracy huffed. Just because he got a taste of the good life –

But Caroline raised a hand up to her and said,
No
, Tracy. She looked at the TV, and I wondered if she remembered how she and Tracy and Jillian had left me behind the night of the dance party before the last week of classes, if she saw this moment as karmic payback for leaving without me. She said slowly, her hand still holding off Tracy, If that's all true, then once he's back in Cuba, if something happens, can't his family just call the police?

I had no words. I smacked my own cheeks. I yelled, It's a communist country. The police? The
police
!

She tugged her vest down at the waist and looked crushed. Her attempt to manage my anger was over, and behind me I heard my mom say, Of course this is personal, of course we are taking it personally.

—But they showed his desk in Cuba, the quiet girl half whispered. His classmates are saving it for him. It had the saddest sign on it.

Tracy whispered to no one and all of us: Their news is
not
censored.

—How do you know that they can't call the police? Caroline said.

I said what I thought would convince them: I'm
from
there! Did you forget that's my mom on the fucking television? Besides, look it up! Look up
communism
and fucking learn something.

Tracy said, Wait, you're
from
Cuba?

—
Trace
, leave it
alone
, Caroline said as I pushed right up to Tracy's face.

—Yes, I blurted, because I was tired of saying no and then explaining that maybe it didn't matter. I said, I left when I was a baby. I still have family there and they all want out. And yeah, their news is fucking censored. You get arrested for speaking out against the government, or for being gay or trying to buy meat, so yeah, go smile at your fucking Che Guevara poster like you know some shit, you stupid bitch.

I spat all this out, my fury somehow making my mom's new version of herself a fact: I'd made myself the True Daughter of Dusty Tits. This invention was the only way to explain the woman behind me to the women in front of me. It was the only thing I could do from so far away. In the silence surrounding their shock—
of course
calling this white girl a bitch had been the thing to produce shock—I heard my mother say, How can we deny her wish for her son to have a better life? How can we deny him his inheritance?

Tracy tried to sidestep my body and said to the others, You guys, she's not really from Cuba. Jillian told me she's not.

—What people have to understand, said my mom's voice, swelling and cracking with grief now, is that this is our story, too. I came here with
my
girls the same way Ariel's mother came with him. Ariel's story is my story, the story of my daughters.

I took the help; I even wanted it. I got between Tracy's blank face and the screen and said, You're a fucking idiot.

She looked at my hands then, which I'd raised between us. I pulled them closer to my body and, because it came to this or hitting her, I said, Ariel's mother died to get him here. Do you realize that?

I couldn't believe I was saying it, but I kept talking.

—She
died
, I said. His mother drowned trying to get him here. That doesn't mean
anything
to you? That sacrifice?

Tracy nodded. Her hands checked the position of her headband. She jutted one foot out in front of her, twisted her lips in this ugly way, pointed with her whole hand at the TV. Through her smirk she said, So what did
your
mother sacrifice for you to get here? For
your
taste of the good life?

The quiet girl gasped,
Jesus, Tracy
as Caroline came up behind me before I could do anything, hooked her hands on my elbows in a way that was so assured, so soft but strong, that they trapped me. I pulled with everything against her, couldn't believe how much power her small frame held.

Tracy said, None of this would be happening if she'd stayed put.

—Trace, for god's sake
stop
, Caroline yelled.

I know Tracy meant Ariel's mother. But the proof that she meant me too was on the TV screen. And I don't know why, but Caroline was crying, and all I got to yell at Tracy as the other girl pushed her down the hallway and away from us was, Who the fuck are
you
? Say that to me again! I fucking
dare
you, come say it to me again!

I pulled and pulled then gave up. Once we were both breathing normally again and she saw I wouldn't chase them, Caroline let me go.

She wiped her face and said, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have touched you.

Her calm voice made me feel so much shame. What had my yelling and my stepping on boots like in some fight at a Hialeah dollar movie theater made her think of me, of any Cuban she'd ever meet from here on out? Me and my mother on television, both of us spectacles, the two of us and the rest of the crowd a big enough sample size. My face began to burn, my eyes too, and as Caroline turned to shut off the TV, now blaring with news of a shooting at a Miami-area Chili's thought to be connected to the Ariel situation, I swooped down for my book, then sprinted to the stairwell, ignoring her
Liz, wait!
and taking two steps at a time up to my floor, barreling toward my room, where I grabbed the phone, panting and dialing our house number with my thumb.

Of course it just rang and rang and rang, and I pictured Leidy holding Dante in a crowd behind the cameraman, keeping the knowledge of whatever the hell Madres Para Justicia was all to herself. My mom was lying to the whole country, was roping me into these lies, and me being far away had let that happen. I was supposed to call about the internship, but I couldn't now: leaving home had been a mistake—one I needed to undo as best I could. When I slammed the phone back in the cradle as the answering machine beeped on, I saw my hand was trembling but didn't feel it doing that—the hand seemed not mine. I picked up the receiver again, this time to call my dad. The day I'd seen him at Latin American Grill, he couldn't even talk about my mom, couldn't even bring himself to properly warn me. His phone would ring in that Hialeah apartment, and Rafael would reach for it, and my dad would say,
Just leave it, don't answer, I don't want to hear it
—not guessing that the person calling was me, trying to talk to him, trying to segue from what we'd seen on TV to my own news, the internship, which seemed silly and unimportant now. So a teacher, a weird one, thought I was a good student and wanted to work with me: Who the hell cared? It was garbage, a frivolous reason to miss summer at home, another selfish mistake.

I put the phone down and decided I wouldn't call Papi, that there was no reason to do so. And it was fine if I didn't do the internship, because I didn't deserve it anyway. My grades weren't high enough, and Professor Kaufmann knew that as soon as I admitted it but had wanted to spare my feelings. I sat at Jillian's desk, and while I could barely make out my face in the bright computer screen, I recognized what I was: Professor Kaufmann's pity case. Still applying for the internship meant that I didn't get whatever subtle clue she was either too weird or too smart to emit. I wasn't who she thought I was, and I'd tried to blame a boy and let her believe that lie—and I'd just done it again with my mom's help, had tricked a whole new group of people into thinking I deserved to be outraged about the wrong thing. I didn't deserve the spot. I knew it, and I couldn't face Professor Kaufmann in the lab, much less show up in California and work by her side. I knew, too, that I'd never take a morning shower in the main bathroom on our floor and risk seeing Caroline or Tracy in a towel again—I'd go back to showering at night, like I did when I lived in Miami. As I typed
MIA
into the destination field of the travel Web site whose link I'd clicked so hastily that I'd brought up five of the same window, I wanted more than anything to disappear, to fix everything by disappearing and reappearing somewhere else, to not be the person who'd lied and lied and caused a scene and who now only deserved to go back to where she came from.

I scrolled through the prices of the flights: spring break, being just a little over a week away, was out of the question, with every ticket available costing more than the meager limit on the credit card I rarely used. But the prices dotting the calendar later in the month said I could swing Easter, the final day that my mom would be—what? Sprawled on the floor in prayer? I had no idea. I'd never seen her pray in earnest, had never really been taught how to do it, but there was, on the screen, a flight listed that I could afford, that got me there to see that spectacle, to pull her off the ground myself if I had to, this time before any cameras caught her and added importance to her name. I stood and rolled the chair away from Jillian's desk, just crouching in front of it with my credit card in one hand, my head down and bent over the keyboard, saying the numbers on the card out loud as I typed them, wondering if this was a kind of prayer.

 

29

MADRES PARA JUSTICIA BECAME A FAST
favorite of the news media thanks to one of their favorite pastimes: pressing their backs against asphalt while acting as human speed bumps on the road in front of Ariel's house. Equally camera-worthy was the way they stood in a circle, hands linked and bound together by rosaries, praying in front of his house, always in head-to-toe black because they were in mourning, they said, for Ariel's mother. When I saw a photo on CNN's Web site of my mom on the ground with these other women, I called home that night—it wasn't our regular day to talk, so Leidy should've known I was upset about something. But when I asked, So how's Mom, Leidy just said: Mom? She's fine. She's not here or else she'd talk to you. But she's good. She's doing real good.

In the days leading up to spring break, Jillian wasn't ignoring me exactly, but since hearing from Tracy about my outburst (I guessed it was Tracy, though more likely it was all of them, probably sitting on my bed after shuffling into our room while I was at work or in lab, somberly debriefing Jillian on what had happened in the TV lounge, their voices measured and serious like in an intervention), she'd practically moved in with her All-Nighter, saying only
Hey
and
Sorry
and
Excuse me
when we happened to be in the room at the same time. Aside from her, no one but me and Professor Kaufmann knew about the internship, and though I'd been looking forward to bragging to Ethan about it at Happy Hours that week, I didn't want to tell him now that I felt I should turn it down.

In theory, Ethan was someone I could talk to about the problems back home. At the very least, his RA training would kick in—he'd listen and say
I hear you
in all the right places—but he'd be better than that: he'd actually understand the very real impact the cost of the Easter flight had on my budget; if anything even remotely urgent had called him home over the last four years, he could tell me what he'd done about it. But I didn't want to make Ethan work for me that way. I'd kept everything about my mom and Ariel from him because, unlike everyone else who knew I was Cuban and from Miami, he'd (purposefully, I thought) never asked. He was the only thing at Rawlings that home hadn't contaminated, and I'd wanted to keep him like that. No one but him consistently called me Lizet—not Liz, and never El—and though neither of us said this outright, I took it as some agreement between us to keep each other intact.

There were some Thursdays or Sundays, before or after the study silence began, where he'd seem more stressed than usual to me, and if I asked if he was okay, he'd say simply
My mom
or
Money stuff
. He'd say,
You know, the usual
, and having the same shorthand for our worries made me feel close to him despite the abstractions. I'd come to think of him as a version of a grown-up Dante, and I think it was this—that I'd found a way to metaphorically insert him into some hopeful version of my family—that made me realize I now wanted to confess everything to Ethan, to admit that I needed him.

So I got to Donald Hall early, to find him before Thursday's Happy Hours got started. My plan was to drop off my stuff in the lounge, then go up to his floor and look for his room (RAs universally announced themselves as such via the random shit they taped to their doors in an effort to seem approachable and cool, though it almost always backfired). I probably didn't need to talk to him in his room, but I justified wanting to by convincing myself that being alone—without the imminent arrival of the rest of the Regulars looming over us—was vital to us moving past our joking to whatever came next.