We Never Asked for Wings (23 page)

“We're making a pie,” Letty said, looking at Rick, who nodded at the suggestion. “Want to help?”

“I'm tired of cooking,” Luna said.

“Well, you're on your own, then.”

“But there's nothing to do.” This had been her complaint since they moved in. Letty hadn't brought their old TV because there was no room for the oversize box, but also because she'd felt guilty, all these months, plopping her daughter down in front of the screen anytime she needed to do anything, or anytime she needed a break—which was a great majority of the time. Maria Elena had rarely let the kids watch TV, and she'd managed. But now, after spending an entire morning with her daughter and with Rick in her kitchen, Letty wished she had the option.

“How about this,” she said. “If you can prove to me that you can entertain yourself without a TV, I'll look into getting one. For the
occasional
times when there really is nothing else to do. Which will be almost never.”

Luna nodded solemnly and stuck out a hand to shake.

“Now get yourself outside. Build a fort. Look for birds. Something.” The screen door opened and banged shut. “Stay where I can see you!” Letty called after her, but Luna had gone no farther than the bottom porch step, poking her fingers into the joint of earth and wood, where the pill bugs liked to gather. Letty turned back to the kitchen and started to collect the ingredients for a pie: apples, flour, butter, sugar, cinnamon, washing the mixing bowl while Rick washed his hands and opened the bag of flour. He was already dressed for work in his black button-down; the white flour clouded and drifted in dusty marks onto the black.

“Do you mind?” he asked, unbuttoning his shirt to reveal a white undershirt beneath it.

“Of course not.” Letty said, but her heart raced, watching him disrobe in her kitchen. She remembered their first kiss, and their second, which had lasted long enough that she'd been late to pick up Luna—a mistake that had cost her fifteen dollars in fines. He hung the shirt on the edge of the bench and leaned over the cookbook. Poking out from the top of his T-shirt were the scripty letters of his tattoo.

“You don't seem like one to have a tattoo,” she said, turning on the oven and leaning over the recipe beside him.

“I know,” he said. “I've thought about having it removed, but I've had it so long. I can't really imagine myself without it.”

“How long?”

“Since I was eighteen. So, almost twelve years, I guess.”

Letty thought of the photo on Rick's driver's license while she handed him a peeler and a bag full of green apples.

“Are you going to tell me what it says?”

He pulled the neck of his undershirt down, so she could see the Latin; Letty stepped closer to read it. The ink was fuzzy at the edges, a shaky hand or cheap ink seeping into his skin, but she loved it anyway, the blue-green mystery painted across his body.

“I might,” he said, lifting one eyebrow. “It depends.”

Stepping toward her, he grabbed one of her hands and lifted it to his skin. With the lightest touch, he traced the words, translating them as he moved her fingertip across his body:
the origin of our identity is love.

Just then Luna raced into the room. Letty dropped her hand, but not before Luna had seen, and she saw her daughter's cheeks bloom red as she ran into their bedroom and out again, a blanket in her hands. With the slam of the screen door, she was outside again.

Letty got to work on the crust. Drying the mixing bowl, she measured the flour, silently stirring in salt and cutting in butter, adding water a tablespoon at a time while Rick peeled apples in perfect circles beside her.

“So, what's the story?” she asked finally.

He sighed. “Do you really want to know?”

“I do.” Setting down the peeler halfway through the last apple, he told her: there was a girl—a woman, really. He had met her working at his father's restaurant, just after his eighteenth birthday.

“I fell crazy for her,” he said. “The way you only can when you're young, you know?”

“Oh, I know.”

She regretted saying it. Rick looked at her and asked: “How old were you?”

“Sixteen when we got together. Eighteen when he went to college.” With her hands she began to work the dough into a ball, waiting for Rick to continue, and when he didn't, she prodded: “Tell me about her.”

“She was beautiful. Although sometimes I wonder if I saw her now, if I'd still think so.”

Letty thought of Wes the afternoon he returned, his tangled hair streaked over one eye, his sun-spotted skin smooth. “You probably would.”

“Maybe. But she was ten years older than me—the closing chef when I was managing. Not classically beautiful, but confident. She'd get naked under the fluorescent lights of the walk-in as easily as in the total dark of a hotel room, and the fact that she flaunted her body—God, I loved that. The girls at my school, they were all sticks, had their nails done every week and always looked like they were on their way to church, but Mel—that was her name—she was kind of sloppy. And loud, and fun. She made me fun, and funny, and daring, and romantic, and all these other things I didn't know I was before I met her. Thus the tattoo.”

“You were a deep eighteen-year-old.” Letty smiled, thinking of herself and Wes at that age, full of similar prophetic declarations.

“Something like that.”

“We would have liked each other.” The dough was dotted with flour, but it held together. From the cabinet she pulled a cutting board and floured it. “And then what happened?”

“And then she moved to Connecticut with her husband.”

“Ouch.”

There was a pause in the conversation, while Rick finished the final apple and dumped the peel into the trash.

“So why do you still have it? Why didn't you have it removed right then?”

“I don't know,” Rick said, thoughtful. “I guess I just still thought it was true, even after what she'd done.”

“It is true. And it's part of you,” she said. “You should keep it.”

She handed him a knife and watched him cut the apples into careful cubes. From where she stood she could see only the middle word:
amor.
Love.

“Did you ever see her again?”

Rick shook his head no. Letty flicked a wet blob of flour into the sink, her mind on Wes.

“I never thought I'd see Wes again either.” It was a leap, from his scar to hers, and Rick nodded, following. “After the first few years, I stopped even imagining trying to explain.”

“Explain what?” She'd said it on purpose, the need to purge greater than the desire to conceal her worst self, and before she could second-guess her decision, she heard the story pouring out of her. The unplanned pregnancy, the shock of it and Wes already gone, and how she'd meant to tell him and all the reasons she couldn't bring herself to do it, and then the shame, the horribleness that was her as a mother. “It was a stupid, awful, selfish decision. Now that I'm a parent—
really a parent
—I understand what I did to him. And it makes me sick.”

“What do you mean—
really a parent
?”

“Oh, God, Rick, don't you remember me when we first met? I had no idea what I was doing.” While he tossed the apples in sugar and cinnamon, she told him the second secret, the secret she couldn't even bring herself to tell Wes, the years and years she'd stood by as her mother raised her kids, missing everything that mattered. She hadn't told anyone, ever, and she felt it like a physical weight, lifting.

When she was done, Rick washed his hands and turned to her. “It makes sense, now. The first time I bought Luna a licorice rope, you acted like I was Houdini, escaping an underwater burial.”

“It was practically the same thing,” she said, and then, remembering: “Oh, my God, do you even remember that day?”

“I am NOT fine!”
Rick mimicked, his fists banging his thighs in a spectacular impression of her daughter. Letty laughed so hard Rick had to hold her up, and when he finally let go, her eyes were watery.

“Seriously, Rick. I don't know what I would have done without you.”

He reached out and wiped a tear away with his thumb. She backed up until she hit the counter, and he pressed himself onto her, the full length of his body against hers. Weakly, she tried to wriggle out from underneath him, but she couldn't and she didn't want to—so he was already kissing her, and she was kissing him back, heat in her body, when she finally succeeded in forcing herself to push him away.

“What's wrong?” He glanced out the front window, to where only Luna's feet were visible under a rosebush fort.

Letty sighed, trying to find the words. “I just don't want to mess this up.”

“So you push me away?”

“I'm not,” she said, but her flour handprints were still on his chest, white against white. “I'm just trying to keep you above the fray. At least until I can figure things out.”

“It's way too late for that,” he said. The flour flaked off his shirt and landed on his black socks. “Is it Wes?”

Letty nodded, then shook her head no. “I don't know.”

“You have to know.”

“But I don't.”

Rick studied her face, looking for the truth. “Well,
I
know,” he said and waited for her to ask what, but she didn't, too sure, all at once, what was coming.

“I'm falling in love with you,” he whispered. The words hung there, unrequited. She looked out the door, trying to find Luna in the roses, and he took a step back before he continued. “But I'm not just going to sit around while you see if you can work it out with someone else. I won't be your backup, Letty.”

“I don't want you to be my backup.”

“So what do you want, then?”

What
did
she want? She didn't have an answer. All she knew was that everything good that had happened in her life in the last few months had happened because of Rick. If it weren't for him, she would still be stuck slinging crap drinks, making no money, and living in an abandoned apartment building at the Landing. But instead he'd walked into her life, seen her struggling and messy and incompetent, and somehow—impossibly, it seemed—fallen in love with her anyway.

She turned away from him and scanned the recipe, looking for something to hold on to, but the next direction was a dead end:
refrigerate for four hours
. Giving up, she thrust the bowl with the ball of dough into the refrigerator and slammed the door. Turning back to Rick, she placed her hand on his stomach, then the button of his jeans, pulling him toward her.

“I just want you,” she said. “That's all I know. And I need you.”

Rick sighed, his body relaxing under her touch. “What do you need?”

Standing close enough to feel his scratchy chin on the top of her head, her mind filled with all the things she needed and couldn't say. She needed him to teach her how to be with her children, how to distract and redirect and laugh; she needed him to teach her how to make drinks, how to set a goal and work toward it; more than anything, she needed him in her home, needed him to press her hands against his chest, needed to feel his heart beat under her hands, a slow, steady rhythm.

“I need you to come to my Christmas party,” she said quietly. Rick looked at her hard, and Letty hoped he could see in her eyes everything else she needed and couldn't say. “I need you to cook dinner.”

Rick's face was a jumble of indecision. Finally, he spoke, his voice rough with conflict: “Okay,” he said quietly. “I'll be there.”

Grabbing his shirt, he buttoned it quietly and slipped on his shoes. In the garden he said good-bye to Luna, who jumped into his arms, wrapping her legs around his waist and begging him to stay while Letty watched, wishing desperately she was six years old again and could do the same.

But she couldn't.

She was thirty-three, a woman and a mother, and all she could do was sit, silent, and watch him go.

H
e needed to borrow Mr. Everett's keys. As Alex worked on his project, he tracked his teacher's whereabouts in relation to his keys in relation to the eyes of everyone else in the class. But a week before school let out for winter break, he was still watching and waiting, no closer to achieving his goal.

Today the classroom was especially noisy and chaotic, students arguing over glue sticks and permanent markers as they put the finishing touches on their science posters. Alex had left his at home, the row of feathers he'd glued on still drying, and so he sat at his desk, his attention divided between a book on hummingbird migration and his cell phone. He was waiting for a text from Wes. Mr. Everett allowed cell phones (as long as they were used as tools of science, not tools of gossip or romance), so he didn't have to hide it, like he did in some of his other classes. Picking it up, he scrolled through the history of his texts with his father.

Their first exchanges were short and awkward:
Doing? Nothing.
And then two days of silence before:
Dinner? Yes.
They'd picked up, though, as his project had picked up. The first time Alex had sent his father a science question, Wes had responded with eight texts, two photos, and a link to a website for a lab at Purdue, and their exchange had continued, almost without pause, for days after. Once, Wes had even texted him in the middle of the night:
We need to talk about statistical significance
—and then
I'm sorry—I didn't realize the time!
to which Alex had replied:
I was awake! And thinking the same thing!

He had just set down his phone and turned back to his book when the phone buzzed on the desk. It was the text he had been waiting for. Wes had located a scientist known for his isoscapes—maps that showed the stable isotope ratio of the water in every region on the planet—and had sent Alex a link to the most recent map of the Americas. Alex clicked the link and zoomed in on the coast of California. He opened his notebook to check his own numbers—Wes had paid to have a few samples run, while he was waiting to see if they could get access to the lab.

“Yes,” Alex said, when he saw the numbers matched. “Yes!”

Mr. Everett chuckled from where he stood behind him. Alex didn't know he'd been speaking aloud.

“Carry on, carry on,” Mr. Everett said. “Don't mind me.”

His teacher turned back to the bookshelf, a heavy-looking box in his arms and his keys clutched in his hands underneath. Setting the keys on the shelf, he began to empty the box, lining up a row of shining Erlenmeyer flasks before returning to his desk with the empty box.

He'd left his keys.

Alex stood up to go to the bathroom, swiping the key ring and walking immediately out the door.

As soon as the last bell rang he called Yesenia, and he kept calling until she got home from school and answered.

“I have them.”

She didn't say
Finally!
Even though he knew she was thinking it. He was too. It had felt like forever, those weeks. He'd thought it would be easier, with everyone focused on their projects, but it was already the week before Christmas vacation—their big presentations would take place the next day.

“Where should I meet you?” she asked.

“At the top of the pedestrian bridge. At eleven?”

She agreed and they hung up. Full of nervous energy, he decided to cook something for his mother and sister and tore the kitchen apart looking for something he knew how to make. Settling on fried eggs and bacon and fruit salad, he made heaping plates before he realized he'd never cooked dinner for his mother, not once, and so instead of setting the table he dumped all three plates in the garbage, took out the trash, and lit ten matches in every room to mask the smell of cooking. Nothing could be out of the ordinary when Letty got home—he didn't want her to think for even one second that he was up to something.

But if Letty noticed the smell, she didn't say anything. She came home late with Chinese takeout and they ate from Styrofoam containers on the front porch, Letty exhausted but trying to ask Alex questions about his project, to prepare him for the next day. It wasn't necessary; Alex was prepared. He answered them all and then started his homework for his other classes while his mom put Luna to bed. Letty fell asleep mid-song, and Alex left the house right then, not wanting Yesenia to get to the bridge first and have to wait for him alone in the dark.

It took him over an hour to walk from his new house, though, and when he arrived she was already there, leaning against the wire cage. She wore all black—a good idea, he realized now, although he hadn't thought of it. He hadn't thought of it because until that very moment he hadn't thought of what they were doing as breaking the law. He wasn't hurting anything, wasn't stealing anything—just borrowing the keys and borrowing his teacher's password and borrowing his computer. Still, he knew it was probably illegal.

“Hi,” Yesenia said, her face full of fear and excitement.

“Are you ready?” Alex asked.

“I think so.”

“You don't have to come, you know.” He'd been thinking this on the way over—that if anything about Operation Enroll Yesenia started to feel dangerous, he'd make her wait down the street.

“I want to, though.”

They were quiet on the walk to school, apprehension growing with each step. Alex tried to calm himself by listing all the reasons they wouldn't get caught: it was the middle of the night, it was dark, and he had the key. He knew the password and knew exactly how the computer system worked. The whole thing would take ten minutes, at the most.

The lights were on in the art wing; through ten-foot windows Alex could see Mr. Mendoza, with his rolling trash can, moving through the ceramics studio. Alex was glad he was there—it meant the alarm wouldn't be set, if there was one. He hadn't thought of an alarm until that moment either, and the possibility made his heart beat faster—what else hadn't he thought of? He kept going, leading Yesenia around the side of the building, past the tables where he ate lunch every day and to the long, open-air halls of the science wing.

Yesenia stood guard at the end of the hall while Alex unlocked the door. With a nod of his head, he summoned her, and they slipped inside together. She clutched his waist hard as he felt his way to the front of the room from memory and reached underneath Mr. Everett's desk to push the power button on his desktop.

It took forever for the computer to turn on. The screen went from black to blue, and then there was a moment that stretched on indefinitely, when everything looked as it should but the cursor wouldn't move. When it finally did, Alex opened PowerSchool and clicked through the enrollment tab to create a new student profile: Yesenia Lopez-Vazquez, gender: female, age: 15, address: 7 Woodbridge Court; where he should have put her phone number, he made up a ten-digit number. The form was much longer than he'd expected, and required information he didn't have, including immunization records and dates. He entered a date beside each vaccine listed, at first trying to remember at what age he'd gotten certain shots and then, when that took too long, entering dates at random. Beneath the immunization records was a blank field in which to describe medical conditions. He looked at Yesenia for direction, and when she shook her head he wrote:
none.
Her profile complete, he was directed to choose her classes, and he entered his own spring schedule in order: first-period English to last-period gym. He'd already told her she'd have to wait in the library for zero period—it would be too risky to put her in honors science without prior consent from Mr. Everett.

She would start in January, the first day after break. No one would ask questions. They would walk from class to class and he would introduce her to everyone and tell his friends she'd just moved here and no one would wonder why or where she'd come from, because no one had ever wondered why or where he had come from. He was just there, and soon, she would be too. Finished, he pressed
PRINT
; the single sheet of paper slipped out the printer on the far wall. Alex retrieved it and handed it to Yesenia.

“That's it?” she whispered.

He nodded and closed himself out of PowerSchool. In the cold light of the computer screen, they made their way silently to the door, closing it firmly and locking it behind them.

They sprinted all the way back to Bayshore, Yesenia running as fast as she'd ever run in her life. When they reached the pedestrian bridge they were panting but full of adrenaline, their silence turning to loud laughter. They'd done it. Yesenia pressed her schedule flat against the wire fence of the bridge and read it in the pulsing light of the headlights passing below.

“Thank you,” she said, but it was unnecessary; they had done it together.

“Are you tired?”

Yesenia shook her head no. There was no one waiting for her at home, and no one was awake to miss Alex either. Holding hands, they walked down the stairs and straight up Mile Road, past the Landing to the water.

It had been a long time since they'd been to the pier together, and the ocean air was colder than he remembered it, and damp. They sat down, and Alex peeled off his jacket and then, pausing, took off his shirt too. He spread the sweatshirt out on the pier and lay down on top of it.

“Aren't you cold?” Yesenia asked.

“I won't be.” He reached out and grabbed her, pulling her down on top of him and covering them both with his jacket. He was warm but would be warmer if she would take her shirt off too, if they were skin against skin. She must have thought the same thing, because she pulled off layers of clothing until she was wearing only a bra before lying back down on top of him. She pressed her body against his.

“What's that?” Mr. Everett's keys were still in his pocket. He adjusted her until he could slip his hand inside his pocket and pull them out.

“I meant to put these back where I found them before we left.”

“But what about the fingerprints?” she asked. “Better to destroy the evidence.”

“You watch too much TV,” he said and thought of Maria Elena, her disapproval hitting him hard and unexpected.

“I'm right, though.” She nodded toward the bay.

Maybe she was. He didn't want to cause Mr. Everett the trouble of having to make new keys, but he wanted even less to get caught. Before he changed his mind, he sat up and threw them into the water, watching the surface until the ripples became waves and the keys had sunk to the bottom of the bay.

When he turned back to Yesenia, she was naked from the waist up. He was equal parts excited and terrified, to see her chest exposed in the moonlight. Her breasts and belly were perfect above the line of her black jeans, without the scars that crisscrossed her lower back and legs, and as much as he wanted to look at her, he wanted to cover her too, wanted to hide her away where no one but him could look at her body this way again, ever. He pulled her down and rolled over on top of her, kissing her hard while she worked at the button on his jeans. She'd never been so bold, but he didn't stop her, tried to follow her lead, pulling on the clasp of her pants for what seemed like an indefinite stretch of embarrassment before she got his pants off and pulled her own off too.

They lay naked, then, for the first time. Their bare legs stuck out from underneath the jacket, his own long and pale and hairy, and hers short and dark and perfect only to him. He was shy all of a sudden, but his body wasn't, was in fact the opposite, bold and reaching toward her. He arched away, but she rolled him over on his back and pulled herself on top of him again, so there was nothing to do but let himself be pressed up against her belly.

She held his face and kissed him, softly, and he kissed her back, and he wanted to cry it was all so perfect, and he wanted to do what she expected him to do, but he also had no idea what that was. And he hoped it wasn't everything. He'd promised himself he wouldn't have sex, not only until he was married but until he wanted a baby, so that a child of his would never, not even for one moment, not even at conception, feel unwanted; but he would, if she wanted to, to show her there was nothing he wouldn't do for her.