B0061QB04W EBOK (43 page)

A few days before our trip to Raging Waters, I came home exhausted after band practice. Mago arrived after I did. Together, we cleaned the apartment and made sure all our chores were done before Papi got home. He didn’t like coming home to a dirty house. Carlos wasn’t back yet. That whole summer he’d been going to the park to play soccer with his friends. We’d told him to get back before Papi arrived from work. Papi didn’t like to have us out in the streets too late.

When Papi and Mila came home from work, there was still no sign of Carlos. “Where’s your brother?” he asked. We told him we didn’t know. He grabbed a beer from the fridge and went to his room.

Soon, it was seven o’clock, and we still had no idea what was keeping Carlos. He had never stayed that late at the park. Mago and
I asked Papi if we should go look for him, but he shook his head no. “You can’t be walking around in the dark by yourselves. Besides, your brother is already in big trouble, with me.”

Mago and I went into our room, and, while I practiced my sax, Mago bleached her arm hairs. Now that she had a job, she was always doing things to herself. She bought tons of makeup and was always practicing in front of the mirror, but no matter how much she put on, she couldn’t hide the scars on her face to her satisfaction. Then she came home one day with a pair of underwear that had padded buttocks because she said she hated her flat butt. Another time, she bought packets of gum that curbed her appetite because she said she was too fat.

“Come here, Nena. I’ll do your arms. They’re hairier than mine,” she said. “And look, when you bleach the hair it makes your skin look lighter!” she said as she extended her arm for me to see.

What saved me from getting my arm hair bleached was that we heard the door open, and we ran out to the living room to see Carlos being carried in the arms of two men.

“What happened?” Mago said as we rushed to help. Carlos’s face was pale and covered in sweat. He groaned with every step the men took. They carried him over to the couch.

“His leg is hurt,” one of the men said as he wiped his dirty, sweaty face with his soccer shirt.

“One of the guys from the other team tried to get the ball from him and kicked his shin instead of the ball,” the other guy said. “Your brother doesn’t have shin guards. We took him to a bonesetter, but I think that huesero only made things worse. I think his bone is broken.”

We thanked the men, and they left. Carlos was trying hard to keep from crying.

“I told you!” Papi yelled as he came out of his room and saw that Carlos was back. “I told you to stop going to the park. I told you to stay out of trouble, but you don’t listen to me. Ahora te chingas!” Papi started to walk away, heading to his room.
What does he mean that now Carlos is screwed?

“Where are you going?” Mago said. “You have to take him to the hospital!”

“Well, I’m not going to,” Papi said as he paused at his bedroom door. “That will teach him a lesson.” Then he slammed his door shut.

Mago and I looked at each other in horror.
How could he not take him to the hospital? What if his leg really is broken?
We turned to Mila. We were waiting for her to say that
she
would take our brother. Hadn’t it been she who had always taken us to the doctor, anyway? Instead, she said, “Let me try to convince him,” and went into the bedroom.

We sat on the couch with Carlos. He winced in pain at any little movement. He said, “It really hurts, Mago. I can’t stand it anymore.” And then he started to cry. I couldn’t remember the last time I saw him cry. Even when Papi beat him, he held in his tears, even though this made Papi get madder and hit him harder.

Mago got up and went to knock on Papi’s bedroom door. I didn’t know why Mila hadn’t come back out. “You can’t leave him like that! He’s in a lot of pain!” Mago said through the door. But there was no answer. She just kept talking to the door, and no matter how much she yelled, Papi never came out.

Mago went to the kitchen to boil water. She came back with a pot of hot water, a container of salt, and clean kitchen towels. She poured the salt into the hot water and said that maybe that would keep the swelling down.

I wished I had the courage to do something. Call 911. Go get the neighbors.
Something
. Mago and I glanced at each other and quickly looked away, shame choking us up inside, for neither of us was courageous enough to defy our father.

All night long we took turns putting hot towels on Carlos’s leg. We gave him aspirin and tried to get him to sleep. It was a long, long night for the three of us. I thought about those nights in Mexico, of how Mago had helped us pass the time by telling us stories about our father, by digging out the memories that made her happy, like the one about the Day of the Three Wise Men when he had brought us gifts. But that night, as Carlos and I looked at her for comfort, she could not say anything. What was there to say? I thought about the Man Behind the Glass, of how I wished I hadn’t left him behind in Mexico. In his eternal silence, he had been a much better father than the one we lived with now.

Morning came and Papi still refused to take Carlos to the hospital, saying that he wasn’t going to miss work because of my brother’s stupidity. We looked at Mila, pleading with her, but she simply looked away, not wanting to go against Papi’s wishes. They both left for work. Mago left for work, too, promising to come back with help. That day was my last day of band camp and Carlos said I shouldn’t miss it. He said, “Go, I’ll be fine.” But I didn’t want to go. I couldn’t go and leave my brother like that.

At work, Mago told her coworkers about our situation and they volunteered to help her take Carlos to the hospital. They arrived during their lunch hour. It took five people to get Carlos out of the house. Two were supporting him by his shoulders, and the other three were holding up his legs, being especially careful with the left leg to keep it from moving. Any little movement would make Carlos cry out in pain.

Just as they were about to put him in the car of one of Mago’s coworkers, Papi got home. “I came to take him to the hospital,” he said as he got out of his truck.

“Well, it’s too late now,” Mago said. “
I’m
the one who is taking him.”

“He’s my son. I’ll take him.”

Mago stared angrily at Papi, and I thought she was going to argue with him about it. But she was smart enough to realize that Carlos had to get to the hospital, and it didn’t matter who took him, as long as someone did. She asked her coworkers to put Carlos inside Papi’s truck. They ended up putting him in the bed of the truck so that Carlos could keep his leg straight. We watched as they drove away, and poor Carlos kept wincing every time the truck went over a pothole. He came home with his leg in a cast. He had broken both his tibia and fibula.

“That’s the only way your father knows how to be,” Mila said to us later that evening. “He was abused by his parents so that is all he knows.”

We didn’t tell Mila we were sick and tired of her justifying Papi’s
behavior with the same lame excuses. We understood what Papi must have gone through because we knew what Abuela Evila and Abuelo Augurio were like. But that didn’t make us feel better. If Papi knew what it felt like to be abused by his parents, then shouldn’t he understand how we felt? Shouldn’t he try to be a better father? Also, it wasn’t our fault that his own family had turned their backs on him, even going as far as stealing the house he worked so hard to build. So why take it out on us? Why take out all his frustrations and disappointments on us?

“I came back for you, didn’t I?” he said to us sometimes when we would speak up.

Then we would shut up and lower our heads, and we would continue to take his beatings. Even the time he punched me in the nose so hard it broke, as I watched the drops of blood landing on my tennis shoe, I told myself that maybe he was right. We shouldn’t expect anything better from him. He didn’t forget us, after all. We were here because of him.
I
was in this country because of him. I
begged
him to bring me. I got what I wanted, after all. How could I complain now, simply because things weren’t all that we had hoped for?

On Labor Day weekend, we went to Raging Waters as planned. Mago brought along her boyfriend, Juan, a guy she met at school and who lived down the street from us in the large apartment building by Fidel’s Pizza—her first official boyfriend since Papi had finally given her permission to date. They told me I could join them, but I knew I was just going to be in the way. Besides, I didn’t like Juan. Not that there was anything wrong with him. It was just that now, instead of spending time with me, Mago spent her free time with him. I wished Papi hadn’t allowed her to have a boyfriend. But Mago would be turning nineteen the following month, and even Papi couldn’t keep her from growing up. I was afraid of the day when she would no longer be
my
Mago, but someone else’s.

Mila and Papi spent the day together, talking to their coworkers. Because Carlos had his leg in a cast, he had no choice but to stay in the same spot, watching over our stuff. I spent the day by myself. I walked from one side of the park to the other, wondering what rides I could
go on. Most of the kids had someone to hang out with. I seemed to be the only person at Raging Waters who was alone. I tried to go on the rides, but on the third one, when I went down a waterslide and landed in the pool and couldn’t touch the bottom, I freaked out. I didn’t know how to swim, and the death of my five-year-old cousin Catalina still haunted me.

I decided to call it quits and went back to hang out with Carlos. “Why don’t you go on the rides?” Carlos asked, looking longingly at the blue pools glittering in the sun and the big waterslides all around us. So many years dreaming about swimming in the pools of La Quinta Castrejón, and now that we were in a place a hundred times more beautiful, we couldn’t enjoy it.

“It sucks going on them alone,” I said.

“Well, it sure sucks being here like this,” he said, raising one of his crutches. So he and I sat there, watching dripping wet kids run from ride to ride, laughing and screaming, until finally, it was time to go home.