Authors: Heidi Ayarbe
I look around at the blur of faces. People are shaking hands now, saying “Peace be with you.” They comfort each other. More prayers. More kneeling. Then people go forward to eat wafers, drink grape juice.
The mass ends with “I Shall See My God.”
Four pallbearers heave the coffin onto their shoulders, and some greenery shifts and falls off the polished wood when they walk past us. Mocho’s wearing black glasses. The other pallbearers include Tío Martin and two other cousins—all but Tío Martin wear la Cordillera armbands. Their cheeks glisten with tears and sweat.
They walk through the heavy church doors, leaving us in silence.
The cars caravan to the cemetery. Lillian drives Josh and me. Kids play in their yards. A homeless man pushing a shopping cart piled high with everything from dingy blankets to shoe boxes stops and removes his hat, placing it over his heart as we pass. Nobody else on the streets seems to notice the funeral procession, or care.
We walk to the gravesite. The fresh earth piled next to the massive hole in the earth.
She was my family!
I want to scream into the sky.
“Let us pray.” The priest reads the Book of Isaiah, chapter 35: He talks about strength, divine compensation, a holy way only for those who are pure and wise—a place of happiness, void of sorrow and mourning.
He’s describing Babylonia.
In the middle of the sermon, Moch rushes toward a man standing on the outskirts of the crowd—the doctor who treated Mrs. Mendez at Urgent Care. Moch pushes him. “The flu. You racist bastard. The fucking flu.” The doctor doesn’t even block the punches. Moch’s hands get heavy, his fists leaden with grief until they drop to his sides. Useless.
Mr. Mendez wraps his arms around Moch, but Moch pushes him away. He points at the doctor, shoving his finger in his face. The doctor’s tired, watery gray eyes meeting hate.
The doctor’s shoulders slouch. He turns and leaves, making his way to the cemetery entrance, to mourn in his own way. I want to think he didn’t dismiss Mrs. Mendez as a typical system abuser because of how she looked, how she dressed, how she talked. Everybody has the flu this week.
Everybody
.
Josh’s mom and dad stand in the back of the crowd, appropriately dressed, looking just-right sad. Josh’s ears burn red and I understand his memoir:
Reconciling parents’ sins. Retracing. Backtracking. Sorry.
OVER A TASTELESS DINNER
,
Lillian brings up Luis. “I found out about your friend Luis. He’s in critical condition at Washoe Med. Up in Reno.” She looks me in the eyes. “He took a brutal beating. I’m sorry.”
I try to swallow down the cardboard pasta slathered by what Molto Bene tries to pass off as “just like nonna’s chunky garden variety bolognaise sauce” . . . in a jar. Lillian reaches her hand across the table, but I can’t bring myself to meet her halfway. It just lies there. Empty.
There’s nothing to bet on this weekend. There won’t be anything for a couple of weeks. Between Super Bowl and NCAA basketball games, there’s a bettors’ lag—like a kind of black hole of nothingness in sportsbook. Kids at school don’t usually bet on golf, cricket, or horses. It’s my equivalent of a post-Christmas slump. And it sucks. I have too much time to think.
That night Josh calls. “Do you want me to pick you up?”
“No. I don’t want to do anything,” I say, feeling the ice creep into my body and throat.
“Why not?” Josh asks.
“I just need a break from this stuff. I’m tired. I need to focus, get my head back into classes, AP tests, and all that stuff.”
Silence. I rub my temples, lying on my bed, putting the phone on speaker. Tears trickle and pool in my ears.
“So we’ll hang out tomorrow,” Josh says.
“Josh. The game’s over. I can’t do this.”
“What’s
this
?”
“Pretend it’s okay. It’s not. Nothing we do can makes any of this better. I can’t play make-believe like you.”
“I wasn’t pretending,” Josh says. “About anything.”
I feel a tightening in my chest that swells and creeps up my throat. I wipe my arm across my eyes and click my phone shut.
A couple of weeks go by. Lagging. Purposeless.
PB & J
reports about the toxicity of the
Olé
lunch specials and the probability of the health department shutting the school down. There are some really good articles about our fragmented student body, a Czech cuisine recipe section, and a series that compares University of Nevada’s flailing basketball program with a woman going through rehab in
The Real Housewives of Washoe County.
The freshmen stage a sit-in—parallel rows of kids singing “The Rivers of Babylon”
—
demanding the Coke machine get put back. We were something—
meant
something. They totally missed the point.
Babylonia is a distorted memory.
Moch comes to school, off and on. I always bring his homework to his home, leaving it on the porch. The house feels empty—lifeless.
One night, I find Mr. Mendez eating a chicken pot pie. It looks so out of place on his plate. The smells I so loved before are almost gone. Microwaved cardboard has replaced eye-burning chili powder, shredded beef, and the sweet smell of crushed corn to make tortillas.
“Mr. Mendez, what about the restaurant?” I ask. He was going to be head chef. Mrs. Mendez always said she would be his assistant. “You can still do that. For Mrs. Mendez.”
Mr. Mendez shakes his head. I don’t think, though, it’s about the money anymore. It’s like Mrs. Mendez was the only thing keeping the family together.
At school I avoid Josh. Thinking about him makes me anxious and lonely and angry and tired. I try to nudge the memories aside, to go back to the way things were; the way things should be. I twirl the silver dice on my bracelet, glad it’s cold so I can hide it under the sleeves of my sweaters. I wear it every day.
Seth comes up to me one day and says, “Hey, Mike. What’s up with you and Josh? He’s the poster boy for dejection these days.”
I shrug. “Nothing’s up. Or ever was. We’re friends. It’s just I got behind on homework and stuff and need to keep focused on what’s important.” But I’m not sure what’s important anymore. It should be U-Dub. Getting out of here. Never looking back. It’s just hard to make sense out of anything.
Seth reads through my lies and nods. “Give the guy a call sometime, okay?”
It’s dark. Lillian’s at the clinic. I’ve done my homework, cleaned the house twice, and constructed a teepee in my room by hanging a blanket from a hook in my ceiling and attaching it to my bed posts with rubber bands.
I think I’m going crazy.
My phone beeps—my social phone. Josh’s name flashes on the screen. I turn it off. Nobody else calls me on it anyway.
Then I hear tapping on my window. “I know you’re in there!”
If I’m quiet, he’ll think I’m asleep. I hold my breath. Then exhale.
Just breathe.
It’s not like he can hear breathing through walls. My bookie phone rings—the ring tone about as subtle as our school fire drill. He bangs harder on the window. “Get up! Get dressed! Now!”
The banging has moved to the front door and I weigh my options. If I ignore him, I’m pretty sure he’ll pound on the door all night. If he keeps it up, someone will call the police. The police means Lillian means explanations means . . .
What does he want?
“Fine,” I mutter and go to the living room, opening the door a crack. “What do—”
Josh shoves the door open and pushes his way into the trailer house. “Get your coat on. Now.”
He shoves my coat at me, grabs my hand, pulling me out of the house, pushing me into his car. “Josh,” I say.
He holds up his hand. “Just . . . just pay attention.” He doesn’t put on any music. We drive in silence to Stewart Street to a burned-down homeless shelter, the ground scarred and blackened. He drives a little farther north until we’re in a field near the softball fields. “I followed a couple of guys from La Clinica Olé one afternoon. They work construction.” The makeshift homes are much like the ones I saw at the river. Soggy cardboard boxes sag at the top, plastic grocery sacks doing little to keep anybody dry. There’s a small group: three men, two women, four kids, tucked in what little shelter the barren lot offers, their homes in a semicircle under the limbs of a giant elm tree.
We drive to a trailer park, so worn down and poor it makes Lillian’s and my home look like the Ritz. Trailers totter on concrete blocks, aluminum siding bowing from the number of people who live in each place. I can’t help but picture God with a giant can opener, pulling back on an aluminum ring, peeling open each home. I know some kids who live around here. I’d just never really paid attention.
Josh pulls into an abandoned gas station off Highway 50. “This place here, this is where the workers wait. They get here before six a.m. and wait for a day’s work. Some stay all day—until four thirty, five. Too late for anything, but they stay until the day ends because leaving early would be like giving up, going home empty-handed.”
I remember the days Mocho’s dad had to do that, the days Mocho would eat dinner at our house. Lillian insisted on stuffing him until his stomach swelled, a funny sight next to his washboard ribcage.
We drive to back alleys and motels—like we’re discovering an entire new world within the limits of the city, a world I’ve never seen. A world of scattered lives, piecemeal dreams. Josh hands me a list of organizations including FISH (Friends in Service Helping), Brain Food, Clinica Olé, the Boys and Girls Club, Planned Parenthood. The names blur on the page.
“You don’t get to do this,” Josh says, his voice steady, hushed. “You don’t get to go back to your safe place and leave me here. Alone.”
Tears burn my eyes and I blink them back. I bite down on my lower lip. “What does this matter?” I pass the list to him.
“You act as if sadness is a privilege. Just for you and you alone.
Everything
matters.
They
matter.
We
matter. Babylonia.”
We
. Babylonia.
“Mrs. Mendez mattered,” Josh whispers. I hate that he says it past tense. Josh turns my face to his and cups it in his hands. “Were you pretending?”
I can’t catch my breath. I shake my head. He leans forward, lips touching my forehead, soft like raindrops. He tilts my head up, outlining my mouth with his thumb, never taking his eyes from mine.
I swallow. It’s like my saliva ducts have totally turned off, and if what’s going to happen is what I think is going to happen, my tongue has gone the way of the Sahara and feels like sandpaper. I swallow again.
He leans forward, pulling me toward him, and I feel his lips brushing mine, then pressing harder, sending a seismic jolt through my body. My teeth clack against his; I taste copper.
I jerk away, somehow managing to knock his nose with my forehead. “Oh. Oh crap. Crap. I bit you. Oh hell. And broke your nose. Did I break your nose?”
Josh holds his face in his hands, leaning back against the seat. A smudge of blood on the palm of his hand. He shakes his head. “No,” he says, in a stuffy voice, like Beaker from the Muppets. “I’m just fine. Really. I’m fine. Just give me a sec, okay?”
God hasn’t been particularly proactive in my life, so I’m hoping this one time,
just this once
, he might answer my prayer to be struck by a bolt of lightning. I wait.
Nope. Still here.
My face burns with shame. My hands feel like hot fields of sticky tar. The butterfly dance in my stomach has turned into a solid knot. Tears brim in my eyes because
I blew my first kiss
. As soon as I can control my voice without totally going blubbery and stupid, I say, “Do you think we need to go to the ER?”
Josh’s shoulders shake with laughter, which only makes me feel like more of a freak show. It looks
way
easier on TV and in the movies. “Can you hand me a Kleenex?” He waves to the glove compartment. “I’m sorry. I’m not laughing
at
you. It’s just . . .”
I pull out the box and hand them to him. He shoves a clump against his nose. His lip is already swelling. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m so so sorry. I’m just—”
He has one hand shoving piles of Kleenex against his nose. He puts the forefinger of his free hand against my lips. It’s like he
wants
me to implode, frazzle all my nerve endings paperback-romance style. He cracks a lopsided smile. “Wow,” he says.
“Wow,” I echo, and force myself to smile, which turns into a real smile, then a chortle to full-on snorting laughter. Tears fall. It feels good to laugh and cry and
feel
something other than anger and hopelessness. Even if it is biblical embarrassment.
“I missed you,” Josh says. He winks at me. “Maybe we’ll have to try that again sometime.” He taps his lip. “When the swelling goes down.”
I shake my head. “That’s okay. It was just one of those silly, heat-of-the-moment things. We’re good.”
“Heat of the moment?”
“More like beginner’s bad luck. I guess.”
I notice for the very first time he has a faint dimple on his left cheek—almost imperceptible. I really shouldn’t be noticing things like that. It’s just too distracting. “Babylonia,” I say, looking at the list. “Any ideas on how we can create a more equitable distribution of funds? We’re going to need a lot more than an airplane banner and ten Commandments.”
“I have a few,” Josh says, wincing when he moves his hand away from his nose, which is swelling as well. Josh squeezes my hand. “Can we go back to your place? Hang out for a while?”
“Lillian’s at the clinic all night. We’ve got ice.”
“Ice is good.”
“Ice is good.”
Josh drives me home and we go into my room. He doesn’t even think it’s weird that I have a teepee hanging from the ceiling. We lie down together in the teepee, his leg linked with mine. I pull my patchwork quilt over us and plug in my iPod, and we listen to Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “The Sky Is Crying.”