B0061QB04W EBOK (40 page)

We stood in the kitchen looking at each other. Soon, we heard the sound of sirens approaching the house. Papi went outside and told us to stay inside. Through the window we saw the police and the ambulance arrive. We were too curious to do as we were told, so we went outside just as the paramedics were prying the cholo’s fingers from our gate. They lay him on the sidewalk and tore open his shirt. He wasn’t moving or breathing. To the right of his chest was a small bullet hole. I stared at the pool of blood beneath our gate. I reached to grab my father’s hand, and he squeezed mine tight.

The next day, Papi decided to go to adult school and improve his English once and for all. He was still going through the process of legalizing his status through President Reagan’s amnesty program, IRCA. He hoped that soon that green card he so desired would help him become more than just a maintenance worker. But, first, he had to learn the language. “Once I’m a legal resident, and I speak better
English, things are going to change,” he said. “I’m going to move us out of this neighborhood.” So far, he had depended on Mila for everything. She had to write out the checks to pay the bills. She had to take me, Mago, and Carlos to our doctors’ appointments because Papi didn’t feel comfortable doing it. Mila went grocery shopping. Mila went to our parent-teacher conferences because Papi made her go in his stead. Mila dealt with their Asian tenants who couldn’t speak Spanish. Papi would stay in his room and wouldn’t come out, except to go to work or to the liquor store.

Papi bought himself a notebook and borrowed a pencil and a sharpener from me. I even gave him my eraser that smelled of strawberries, for good luck. We watched as he left the house and headed to Franklin High School, where they had night classes for adults. It filled me with pride to see my father go to school. All his talk about education, about the importance of school, seemed to mean so much more when I saw him full of determination to learn. My father’s desire for a better life was palpable. It was contagious. It was one of the things I most respected about him. And I hoped with all my heart that he would be granted amnesty and be allowed to step out of the shadows.

Yet a few weeks after he’d started going to school, Papi found out something terrible. Tía Emperatriz had stolen his dream house. My aunt had finally gotten married, but at that point she had been so desperate to do so that she found herself a man who was much older, who had already been married once, but who could not take care of her. The bitterness of her disappointing marriage changed her. Somehow, she managed to get Abuela Evila to sign over to her the deed to her property, which included the land on which Papi’s house had been built. My father had been allowing her to stay in the house in his absence, since he wasn’t there anyway and he needed someone to take care of it. But he never imagined his sister would outright steal the house from him.

“How could she do that?” Mila asked. “Your own sister. And your mother, why would she hand over your house to Emperatriz, just like that? You’ve been a good son. Look at all the money you’ve been sending her all these years. Without you, she would have starved already.”

“What are you going to do?” Mago asked Papi. We knew what that house meant to him. We knew it was his backup plan in case things didn’t work out for him here in the U.S. It was an investment that had cost us our relationship with our parents, that cost Mami her marriage with my father. The price for that house had been too high to pay, as Mami once said. And now, it had been stolen from him.

“I’m going to go over there and get my house back!” Papi said, slamming his fist on the kitchen table.

“You can’t go, Natalio. If you get caught on your way back, your green card application will be denied. Do you really want to jeopardize your chance at becoming legal?” Mila said.

But Papi wasn’t listening. “I’m not going to lose that house. I can’t lose that house. It’s all I have.”

“But we don’t have money to pay for your plane ticket. We don’t have money to pay for a smuggler to bring you back,” Mila insisted. “We’re barely making it as it is.”

But Papi wouldn’t listen, and by the next day, he was gone.

While he was in Mexico, it took a lot of effort for me to stay focused in school. I wondered what Papi was doing. I wondered if by now my aunt and my grandmother had realized their mistake and given the house back to its rightful owner. It hurt me to know that Tía Emperatriz had acted in such a dishonest way. She’d been so kind to us, and I had always remembered her fondly. Now, she had not only betrayed Papi but us as well.

I wondered if Papi was already on his way back to us. I prayed that he would cross the border safely. I prayed that he wouldn’t get killed or hurt or caught by la migra. My stomach hurt knowing that if he did get caught, he would lose his chance at becoming a legal resident, at finally having that security he desperately desired. And what would become of his dreams, which by then were also becoming my dreams?

Two weeks later, we came home from school to find Papi sitting at the kitchen table, his head hanging low. His face was pale, despite the sunburn he’d gotten while crossing the border. His eyes were red and puffy from lack of sleep. He looked thinner than when he’d left. We
rushed to him, happy that he had made it across the border safely. He turned to us and said, “I’m never going back there again.”

I thought about all those times Mago, Carlos, and I had helped to carry bricks and buckets of mortar to the bricklayers. I thought about those nights when we couldn’t sleep because we had been so sore. I thought about the years that Papi was gone, that Mami was gone, so that they could build that dream house.

“What happened, Papi?” Mago asked.

He told us that Abuela Evila was ill and frail, and somehow my aunt had managed to coerce my grandmother into deeding her the property. While he was there, my aunt had said that what was done was done. She said Papi didn’t need a house when he had so much already. Didn’t he live there in that beautiful country? What more could he want? He said that neither his father nor his mother stood up for him, that neither parent fought by his side. He said, “I’ve never felt so alone in my life.”

I wished I could go to my father and wrap my arms around him, tell him that I understood his loss, tell him that it hurt me as much as it hurt him, that he wasn’t alone—he had us, his children. But I didn’t know how to hold him. I didn’t know how to say what I felt, so I said nothing at all.

In the evenings at five thirty, I would look at Papi’s bedroom door and wonder if that day he would finally come out with his notebook under his arm, ready to go back to school. But the door remained closed. After two weeks of looking at his closed door, I realized that the dream house wasn’t the only thing he had lost.

13

B
Y THE END
of the summer before eighth grade began, I had two things to celebrate: I had become a señorita, and unlike my sister’s, my body bled in silence. I had also successfully completed the ESL program and had gotten rid of my status as an ESL student.

When the new school year started, I was enrolled in regular eighth-grade English. Over the last year, I had become addicted to reading, in part because I was not good at making friends. I shied away from kids because there was always something for which they would make fun of me: my ridiculous name, my height, my Payless tennis shoes, my thick accent, the unfashionable clothes I would wear courtesy of the old ladies at Kingsley Manor.

Every Friday before heading home, I would stop at the Arroyo Seco Library for books. The maximum I was allowed to borrow was ten, and I would read them all during the week. At first, I mostly read the fairy-tale collections the library owned, from the Brothers Grimm
to
The 1001 Arabian Nights.
Fairy tales reminded me of Iguala, of story time on the radio. When I was done with those books, the librarian then led me to the young adult section and handed me books she recommended. They had titles like
Sweet Valley High
and
The Babysitters Club.
As my reading skills got better, I started to read thicker books. My favorites were by an author named V. C. Andrews.

I enjoyed the Sweet Valley Junior High and Sweet Valley High series, but those books had nothing to do with my own life. The characters were twin sisters who had sun-kissed blond hair, a golden tan, dazzling blue-green eyes, perfect size-six figures—characters whose world was so different from my own. And yet I kept reading those books because I was seduced by the twins’ lives. Those books gave me a glimpse into a world I wished to belong to, where there were no alcoholic fathers, no mothers who left you over and over again, no fear of deportation. I wondered what it would be like to live in a place like that. That world was the perfect place I had imagined the U.S. to be.

But with V. C. Andrews’s books, I found a connection. Even though she wasn’t writing about my Mexican culture, I could relate to her characters and their experiences. I was blown away when I read
Flowers in the Attic
, which was a story about four kids who, when their father died, were taken by their mother to live with their grandparents. The kids were locked up in the attic, and soon the mother started to visit them less and less and began dating other men, leaving them at the mercy of their evil grandmother.