Finn (9 page)

Silvia made me take a test to prove that I was really me. She asked a bunch of questions, things that only I would have known, such as, What was her favorite kind of pizza? I answered, “Ham and pineapple.” What was her favorite movie? “Gone with the Wind.”

“See?” I said. Silvia grimaced.

“That doesn’t prove anything!” she said.

I told her it wasn’t my fault if she asked bad questions.

“You confused me,” she said. “It wasn’t fair.”

“How?” I said.
“How?”

“You’ve got ways.”

“All right,” I said. “One more question.”

Silvia had already thought up the ultimate puzzler. “What was the name of the first teddy bear Roberto gave me?”

“That’s a trick question!” I said. “He gave you about ten, all at the same time.”

“Then the first big one.”

“Fuzzy or hairy?”

“Fuzzy.”

“Tito P.,” I said. “After some dumb musician.”

Silvia started sobbing again. “Oh, Chica,” she said. “It
is
you. Thank God.” She reached up and pinched my cheeks, which stung like they were sunburnt. Then she pulled me down next to her and kissed my lips and said, “Sweetie, we thought you were dead!”

From what I could gather between blubbery hugs—which were still punctuated now and then by sudden piercing looks, just in case I really was a demon—Silvia was overdue to have her baby. “The baby won’t come and the doctors tell me nothing, but then I figured it out—God is unhappy with me. I’m so unfortunate! I left my saints.” She opened a paper bag and showed me what was inside: two picture frames made out of flattened coffee cans, with tacky religious scenes in them; some fat candles with printed hocus pocus that’s supposed to come true as the candle burns; some bits of metal in the shapes of human body parts, that she said were for praying. And of course the tin cross, which she still wouldn’t let me touch and which she kept more or less pointed in my direction. For insurance, I suppose.

Silvia had somehow gotten it into her head that God was punishing her for leaving all that stuff behind. That’s the kind of thing I hate most about religion, that it takes perfectly good people with real problems and gives them the worst kind of nonsense to worry about.

I personally didn’t agree with her convictions, but I didn’t argue with her—she was still very freaked. She thought that the explosion upstairs was the Devil come to destroy her. “And you, Chica, are my angel, sent from God as a sign that coming back here was the right thing.” I thanked her for that, because thinking someone is an angel is pretty nice, even if it is a load of baloney.

I told her we had to get out of the house because it was still on fire. “Whatever you say, anything. Really,” Silvia said, brushing my shoulders. I was a mess, there’s no denying it, but she was treating me like a Hollywood celebrity or something, so I told her to please cut it out.

Silvia objected to taking the Dodge. She never called it “stealing,” exactly, but that was clearly what she was thinking. I told her we had to take it. I asked her if she wanted me to be kidnapped again. It was a low blow, but we had wasted too much time already playing twenty questions. “Oh, no,” she said. “In that case, the car is necessary.”

This was
my
escape,
my
plan, and I wasn’t about to let Silvia drive, but I banged my wrist against the steering wheel as I was climbing into the Dodge. The pain was so harsh I had to twist my legs out of the car and put my head down between them to keep from throwing up. I had never seen a bruise like the one that was coming in—it was all yellow-green and nasty. Now there was no question about my driving. Even I knew better than to try it one-handed.

I wasn’t sure Silvia could fit behind the wheel, on account of her enormous belly, but together we managed to push the seat back. Just as we figured out how to tilt the steering wheel up and out of the way, we heard the first fire truck pulling up around front. Its idling engine made the hanging garden tools rattle against the wall of the garage.

The Dodge started up fine, but instead of getting going, Silvia sat there with her head bowed. “Can we please just go?” I said. Silvia said she wasn’t going anywhere without saying a prayer first, and that I had to say it with her. She could be extremely stubborn. I helped her say her stupid prayer. At least I let her glom onto my good hand while she said something very fervent in Spanish. She looked up at me with her big gooey eyes when she finished and squeezed my hand until I said “Amen.” I was annoyed with her for holding me hostage to a prayer like that. People shouldn’t do that to one another. It’s bad manners.

Then there was nothing holding us back. I got the garage door going. Silvia wasn’t quite used to the new distance to the pedals. When she released the emergency brake, the Dodge gunned forward. We shot out of the garage and down the driveway, narrowly missing a fireman who had made his way around the house. I waved to him as we lurched around the corner. I meant it as an apology. The fireman waved back with his yellow-handled ax. He didn’t seem too angry, but then, I might have been reading into it. He mouthed the words, “Take it easy,” like a teacher whose students are crazy for recess.

G
o! Go! Go! was all I could think as we left the house behind. My stomach muscles were all tensed up from wanting to go faster. It didn’t feel much like freedom, at least not at first. I ducked down at the first sign of anything remotely resembling a van. After a while, though, Silvia’s constant chatter about Roberto, and the familiar insides of the Dodge—the creaky vinyl, the smell of cherry cough drops—all went to work on me and I began to relax. I stared out the window while Silvia drove. She took us up on the freeway. The road hummed reassuringly. The highway lights smiled down on us. Everything started to fall away: the explosion, my mother, the whole sleeping city, with its empty factories and broken down houses.

I was feeling a strange mix of lightness and heaviness, as if I had just hauled myself up onto a sun-baked raft after a long night treading water. It was a while before I even asked Silvia where we were going. She said “California,” as if crossing the country was the easiest thing in the world. In my frazzled mind, California seemed as good as any place. I had a hundred dollars in my pocket. We had a full tank of gas. I asked Silvia if she knew how to get there. She said something about God pointing the way. At the time, even that kind of thinking didn’t annoy me too much.

I dozed with my head rattling against the window, but it was the worst kind of sleep, where something really hurts and you wake up every two minutes because of the pain. I had seen a teething baby cry in its sleep. I suppose that’s what I was like. When the pain in my wrist wasn’t jarring me, it was Silvia, gently shaking my thigh and saying, “It’s just a nightmare. There’s no need to cry, Chica.”

Then I must have finally fallen into a deeper sleep, because I opened my eyes to the morning sun in the side view mirror. Silvia’s window was half open, which made it very loud inside the car, but I didn’t mind. The wind chafed my face, but I loved all that air anyway. I asked if we were in California yet. I meant it as a joke, because California is days and days away by car, but Silvia apologized for the trip taking so long. She said she thought we might be getting close.

At that point, I started to pay attention to the road. There was something familiar about it, but then there’s always something familiar about highways. They’re all pretty much the same, at least the big ones, except for the signs. We were in a stretch where the signs weren’t particularly helpful, but occasionally we spotted one that told us we were going west. I figured we couldn’t be doing all that badly. California was nothing if not west.

But then, after about twenty minutes, the sign changed and told us we were going south, which was strange because we hadn’t taken any exits. The traffic started to get heavy, which was also suspicious. After crawling along for ages, we came to another sign. This one said we were going east. Then I recognized one of the exits from when my grandparents used to take me over to see one of their friends who lived on the other side of town. “We’re on the Beltway!” I shouted.

The needle on the gas gauge said, “Empty.” Silvia had been circling the city all night. I tried to explain what had happened, but Silvia refused to understand. In her mind, we were halfway to California. “I didn’t make a turn,” she said, shaking her head confidently, “never once.” She at least agreed that we needed gas, so we pulled off at the next exit.

I was sure Silvia was hungry, even if she was too sheepish to admit it just then, so I suggested that we stop at a Taco Palace. I felt guilty about getting so mad at her. It wasn’t her fault that she didn’t know how to navigate. The roads are more complicated in America than in Mexico. That’s why we use maps here.

Silvia pooh-poohed the Taco Palace. She said that the food there wasn’t what Mexicans really ate, but what Americans
thought
Mexicans ate, which, in her mind, painted an ugly picture of Americans. I didn’t want to get into a fight with her, although I liked the food at Taco Palace. I thought it was pretty ungrateful of her to reject it as not Mexican enough.

We finally stopped at a hamburger place, but Silvia didn’t approve of that, either. When it came to ordering, she just got some orange juice and toast. She threw most of it out. I told her she had to eat, for the baby, but she claimed she wasn’t very hungry and that she’d eat tons when we got to California. She said that Roberto was a great cook. As for me, I wished that it was lunchtime, because what I really wanted was a hamburger, or maybe even two, but it was still early in the morning, and all they were serving was breakfast. It’s funny how you can be hungry for the wrong meal. My appetite clock had gotten pretty messed up at my mother’s house.

After breakfast, we gassed up the car. Silvia spent a lot of time in the Mini-Mart at the gas station. She came out with some surprisingly nice fruit, some cookies, and a bottle of lemon-lime fizzy water, which is my favorite. She also had a carton of milk, which she opened before we got back in the car. She asked me to hold it and give her sips as we drove.

When we were back on the Beltway, Silvia said that the sooner we got to California, the better, so we should keep driving as long as we could, not even stopping to pee, if we could help it. I knew that not stopping to pee would be a big personal sacrifice for her, because her bladder was so tiny on account of the baby.

I was making a big sacrifice, too, but I didn’t mention it. My wrist was so swollen I could barely move it. I had borrowed some scotch tape from the gas station attendant to wrap my fingers together and keep them still. Moving them—even the slightest jiggle—caused the worst pain, even worse than the time my jaw was broken and nobody found out about it for almost a week.

I was playing with the bendy straw in Silvia’s milk carton, trying to straighten it out, because when it was bent back, it reminded me of my wrist. Silvia asked for a sip. I held the carton up to her. There was a fuzzy picture of a lost kid printed on the side, under the words “HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL?”

It was a picture of me!

I never paid much attention to the missing children ads on milk cartons. The faces didn’t look real to me. And then there was the problem of not knowing the story behind the ad. What if the kid had run away for a good reason, like a live-in uncle who kept trying to climb into her bed, or a father who spent too much time sitting at a table with a gun and a bottle of whiskey? I had heard that sometimes they used computers to age the children in the pictures, and that idea bothered me, too. It was as if you were never allowed to get away. You’d be running all your life, or at least the years until you were 21, which is the most important part of a life, anyway.

Silvia got all excited about my being on the milk carton. “Hey, you’re famous!” she said, but that was the whole problem. Luckily, they had chosen an awful picture, the one they took on my first day at Field. The photographer had literally forced me to smile. I hadn’t wanted to. I hated being photographed. It always made me feel like a criminal. Back then, I was especially sensitive, which made me lash out. I asked the photographer why he didn’t have a
real
job. He said he had nothing better to do than wait all day for me to smile. So I said I had nothing better to do all day than make him lose a lot of money for being an idiot. That got him. I could tell from his ratty shirt that he needed the money. He walked over to me, put his fingers on the corners of my mouth, and pushed upwards. “Smile,” he said. “Like
this.”
The fact that he touched me was pretty shocking. His assistant took the picture before I had time to react. So I did have a smile in the picture—at least an ironic one—but the rest of my face was extremely pissed.

There was a description of me under the picture. Most of it was right, but they listed my eye color as “hazel,” which was a surprise because I had always thought of them as plain brown. “Hazel” had to have been my grandmother’s touch. I could just picture her talking to the HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL? people over the phone and pausing for a minute when they asked what my eye color was, thinking that I might read the milk carton someday, and wanting to help with my “positive self-image,” so telling them that my eyes were “hazel,” which was a real stretch. My grandfather would be hovering around while she placed the call, playing out the telephone cord so she wouldn’t get tangled in it, because she tended to pace when she was making a difficult call, and then, when she was finally a little calmer and sitting down at the kitchen table, standing behind her and rubbing her neck with his papery hands.