Make Your Home Among Strangers (7 page)

I knew I wanted to go by our old house and see it. Maybe the family there now was nice and I could explain everything and they would let me really say bye to my old room. Before he moved out, my dad kept saying to me, You betrayed us, this is a betrayal. He said it so much that the word stopped meaning anything—
betray betray betray betray betray betray—
until the woman from the bank sat us down in our own living room and explained what was about to happen. No one said
betrayal
, but as I filled out my financial aid appeal form—alone in my room, the door closed, half my things in boxes marked
Send to Rawlings
and the other half in boxes marked
Lizet's stuff
—I knew exactly how much hurt could fit into a word.

The backs of my hands burned red, the skin flaking in rows like fish scales.

—You want to drive by the house? I asked Leidy.

—You don't want to do that.

She switched an earring out from the first to the second hole in her earlobe, then said, They fucking paved over every fucking piece of grass. They have like eighteen SUVs parked there now. Probably they're running a garage or some car-alarm installation thing. It's freaking the
worst.

—So you been there then?

—Relax, she said. I went by there maybe once.

She adjusted her other earring and said, But it was like –
too
much.

The news came back with some of the same footage from the day before of Ariel being carried from place to place, in some new relative's arms in every shot.

—Why are they always carrying him? I said. Can't that kid fucking
walk
?

—I should change Dante's name to Ariel, Leidy said.

We laughed a little, and in it she said, Maybe then Roly would want to be around.

—Don't say that, I said.

The people in the street—on TV and behind us, outside—started pushing each other, wrestling for a spot in front of Ariel's new home.

—Should we be worried about Mom? I said.

I faced Leidy, wanting to look serious and grown-up, but she stayed focused on the TV.

—She misses you I think, she said. I know she's like happy for you now, for your new life or whatever, but it's hard. A lot's different for her, what's she supposed to do?

On the floor, Dante flailed his arms, looking to climb up to my lap, but I couldn't move, couldn't bend forward to haul him to me.

—I didn't – I wasn't asking that. I meant now, outside with the –

—No, I know, she said. I'm just telling you Mom's probably not really happy.

She leaned down and grabbed Dante, squeezing him around his basketball of a belly. She said, Obviously it's my fault too. She doesn't talk about it when you call. She doesn't want you to worry. She doesn't want to mess up your
awesome
life.

—Things
aren't
awesome, I said, but Dante blasted over my words with a high scream, and instead of trying to explain, I reached down and grabbed the toy Roly had brought him. I held it in my lap and waited for Leidy to say
What did you say
as Dante punished it with smacks.

Leidy switched fast between the commercial on the Springer channel and the commercial on the news channel, flipping to see which came back to its program first. The news won, showing the weather, focusing on the swirl of snow hovering over New England before zooming down to Florida. I was twenty-four hours away from the plane ride back to New York: I'd booked the return for Saturday afternoon because it was two hundred dollars cheaper than leaving Sunday morning. Dante kept slapping the toy, and I felt the sun through the window pressing on the back of my neck. Then a new feeling: the skin stinging a little, maybe starting to burn. I hadn't been sunburned in years. None of us ever really burned; on days we'd go to the beach, we never wore sunscreen—we were dark enough that we didn't think we needed to. I touched my neck, felt how hot my skin had become in those few minutes on the couch, and couldn't believe how cold I would be again so soon. That heat made me feel brave, as if the sun were pushing me, gently on the back, to say what I knew would make Leidy turn off the television.

—So I'm having some – issues. Serious issues, I said. Up at school.

I moved the toy off my lap and Dante froze.

—Holy. Fucking. Shit, Leidy said. She slid Dante over to me and stood up. She pointed the remote at the TV. Look who
that
is!

I stared at the screen and blinked hard. But when I opened my eyes again, the camera was still on the same person—our mother.

—That's our freaking mom, Leidy shrieked. She snatched up Dante and bounced him toward the TV, saying, Es Abuela. ¡Abuela! ¡Abuela!

She grabbed his arm, made him point.

Our mother's mouth moved, a microphone in front of her face. Leidy dropped Dante's arm and turned up the volume, the green bar on the bottom of the screen creeping right.

—But he
is
home. That's the end of it. His mother made the ultimate sacrifice to get him here. That
must
be honored. That
must
be the end of it, Mami said.

Her eyes suddenly filled and she swiped at the bottoms of them with her middle fingers, like she was flipping off the cameraman.

—Ah-Bee! Dante screamed. He clapped wildly.

—Mom's fucking famous! Leidy said. She spun around to face me. Let's go down there. We can get on TV! Where are my earrings?

I couldn't find the words to say,
You're wearing them
. She tossed the remote on the couch and ran off to our room, whispering in baby talk, We gotta get your shoes!

Our mom kept talking. Her voice was too deep—it sounded like a stranger's. I lowered the volume, lowered it all the way to nothing. The camera zoomed in on her now-silent face—the new, heavy lines framing her mouth—then zoomed out to show her arms flailing down the street.
I live right on this block
, she was probably saying. Never mind that she didn't want to be here, that she was from Hialeah, not Little Havana. There was a pause in her talking, then a nod, then her mouth moved again as she held up a peace sign. Peace for what? And then I realized it was not
peace
, it was
two
. I have two daughters, she was telling the world.
This is personal; we live right on this block; I have two little girls.

I stood up from the couch and shot at the TV with the remote, afraid of what she'd do next. My mother's wet face disappeared.

—Leidy! I yelled into the next room. Forget his shoes, we need to hurry.

Only when the ghost of my mother's image—her metallic outline—faded away into the now-dead screen did I let go of the remote, its thud against the carpet the last sound I heard as I ran out the front door.

 

7

LEIDY DIDN'T SEEM TO HEAR
my almost-confession about Rawlings, never asked,
What were you saying?
Not even when she caught up with me on the sprint to Ariel's house, me wearing a broken pair of my mom's flip-flops that she left by the mailboxes downstairs, her in a red tube top and cutoffs and strappy sandals, earrings still in, her nameplate now dangling from her neck—
camera ready
, she called the look. Dante spent the run trying to rip the nameplate free from the gold chain.

The cameras had moved on to someone else by the time we got there, though Leidy did manage to stand—as seductively as is possible when one is holding an eight-month-old—behind the man they were then interviewing. My mom was on the sidewalk, watching the new interview, and when I asked her what the hell was going on, she shushed me hard and crossed her arms over her chest, then rose up on her toes to see better.

That night, as we sat to eat dinner in the area we called the dining room but which was really just a table and three chairs set off by a square of linoleum a few feet from the couch, my mom was too frantic—too happy—talking about being interviewed, about the people she'd met, and I didn't want to spoil that for her with news of my Rawlings hearing, not after what Leidy had told me that morning. Mami was in such good spirits that she'd cooked bistec palomilla—my favorite, with tons of extra onions, the meat pounded so thin that before she'd fried it you could see light through the sinewy slab—and I knew from the meal that she'd forgiven me for my stupid plan to come home without telling her. I lowered my face over my plate and let the steam and the smell of almost-burnt onions fill my whole head and displace the foreign college-world terms—
plagiarism
,
academic integrity
,
student code of conduct
—as well as the word those would boil down to were I to try and explain things to them:
cheating
. For most of dinner, I was grateful for the distraction of the Ariel conversation. My mom smiled at how slowly I chewed, not knowing that I was just trying to keep my mouth busy.

—What everybody's saying is that he made it here, right? Mami said. So that's it, he can stay, that's the law. If you're Cuban and you make it to dry land, when you ask for asylum, you get it. Done. Everybody knows that.

She worked a chunk of the thin steak between her molars. I didn't want to say that what she thought of as
the law
was probably very much open for debate; he hadn't made it to the U.S. unassisted—he'd been picked up at sea and brought in—so the wet foot/dry foot element, which already seemed like a tricky way to distinguish which Cubans got sent back and which got to stay and eventually apply for political asylum, was more complicated than my mom wanted to admit. Plus, Ariel Hernandez wasn't just a minor; he was a little kid. How could my mom—who was friends with so many people who'd been brought by their parents from Cuba—think that someone so young would get to decide in which country he'd grow up? I cut another sliver of meat, speared a perfect loop of onion for the same bite, chewed and chewed.

—You know the coast guard? She pointed her fork at me, then Leidy, then said, They almost didn't believe the fisherman that called them. They thought Ariel was a doll when they saw him, he was sitting so still on the raft. They almost left him there.

She told us that pretty much everyone she met—her vecinos, she called them now, neighbors she hadn't talked to until that day—was somehow related to Ariel's relatives here or to Ariel himself. She would not be surprised, she said, if we were somehow related to him, too.

I asked what I thought was a simple, obvious question: What about his dad?

My mom stopped chewing, swallowed, and said like a speech, Well it's the father's family that's taken him in. They knew Ariel was coming – it was the father that told them. And what does he care? He let them leave. He has a whole new family in Cuba. New wife, new baby, everything. He gave them his blessing.

She had her fork in her fist as she said this. She stabbed the next piece of meat on her plate and shoved it in her mouth.

—Where'd you hear that? I asked.

—From everyone!

I closed my eyes, the word
citation
suddenly coming to me, and said, Right, okay.

Then, after more chewing, But who exactly?

—What is your
problem
? Leidy yelled. What do
you
care who said it? Of course it's true. We're on the freaking front lines here.

—I'm just asking about sources, Leidy. Not every ref standing on the street knows –

—So you don't believe me now? Mami said.

She threw her fork onto her plate. The clang of it sounded like the start of so many other fights, but my question really came from an honest desire for accuracy. She picked up her napkin and started wiping imaginary crumbs off the edge of the table and into her hand, mumbling something about disrespect, and I wanted to tell her how my writing seminar professor had—as we sat in the high-ceiling box of her office three days after I'd handed in my first research paper—shown me a highlighted block of sentences in my work, then pulled out another sheet, a photocopy from a book I remembered using at the library, the same sentences surrounded by a red square. She placed them side by side and asked me what was going on. I said I didn't know, because that was the truth: I did not know what the problem was. I said, I copied that from the book I cited in the bibliography—the last page of my paper? Had she missed it? No, she hadn't missed it. What's wrong then? I said, but she slid the pages away from me, tucked them into a folder she'd already labeled
Ramirez, L. (plagiarism issue)
, and suggested we hold off on the rest of this conversation until we each spoke with the Dean of Students. I was so bewildered that I'd stupidly said
Thank you
and then bolted, my chair making a hideous noise against the wood floor. My mom wouldn't understand any of this as an explanation for my sudden sensitivity to how one cited their information; she'd backtrack and ask me,
Wait, why's a teacher talking to you outside of school?
She raised the hand catching the crumbs over my napkin and dumped them on it, her fingers opening and closing to shake them loose.

—I believe you, Mami, I said. I didn't mean anything bad by it. I was just asking if you heard that on the news or something, is all I meant.

My mom leaned back in her chair, calm now, but Leidy snorted and said, We
are
the freaking news, Lizet. She tore a slice of steak into tiny gum-able threads and pushed them one by one into Dante's mouth with the tip of her finger.

Like the TV still running in the background but on mute during dinner, my mom eventually circled back to the facts and events she'd started with, and I piled more rice on my plate, ready to pack my mouth with food if she asked,
Now tell me the truth, Lizet, how are things really going up there?
I would need the chewing time to figure out what to say that wouldn't be considered lying. When she noticed the hill of rice, she stood at her chair and leaned over the table, picked up the serving plate in the center and slid the last hunk of steak from it, tipping it so that all the juice and onions smothered everything. There was no way I could finish it, and I said, Mom! I'm fine! I just wanted rice!