Make Your Home Among Strangers (44 page)

—You know him? I said to Mami.

She used a new, empty plate to gesture around the room.

—I know everybody.

I nudged my bag a foot or so along the floor and turned to lean against the table, my butt pushing over a stack of napkins. As I shoveled rice into my mouth, I saw the things I'd expected to see: banners with too many words on them, their messages confused and in two languages; Cuban flags propped in corners; women standing in pairs, bent in to each other, holding hands and praying. But it was creepy because it was not that creepy. People smiled, people laughed. People weren't posing; they had no clue how crazy the cameras blasting their images around the country made them look. My mom asked, You okay here for a second, and before I answered she left for the kitchen.

Near the house's rear entrance, in what was once a back porch now converted into a full-blown room, the guy named Victor and other younger guys—guys my age or a little older—stood on the brink of the cinder-block-walled backyard, the people outside smoking cigarettes, their caps backward or to the side, the smoke pouring from their nostrils as they talked at each other. I ran my tongue over my teeth, hoisted my bag to my shoulder, lifted my plate over my head, and moved toward them.

I stood just inside the house, eating and listening for a minute to the guys outside. People speared food off Victor's plate, but he didn't acknowledge it. He just stared at me with his borrowed eyes, with no shame in a way that made me nervous. He chewed and swallowed. Crickets cut in and out between the words of another guy's story about how he'd almost punched a reporter, and in the middle of all that, Victor blurted out, I know you.

The other guy looked at him but kept on with his story, turned a little to push Victor and me out of it.

Victor forced his way closer, came up a step to stand next to me inside the doorway. He pointed his fork in my direction.

—You went to Hialeah Lakes, he said.

He leaned against the doorframe and slipped another chunk of avocado in his mouth. I reached up and back with the hand holding the fork to tug my ponytail forward and drape it over my shoulder, but I accidentally poked myself in the cheek with the fork's tines.

—Yeah? Yeah, I did.

Having gone to the same high school didn't mean much when a few thousand people a year could say the same thing: he might as well have said,
I know you, you're from Miami
. But he still hadn't faltered in his eye contact. He didn't seem to need to blink. His chewing looked more like teeth grinding, the small silver hoops in his earlobes dancing a little with the motion of his jaw. Thanks to the help of the streetlights illuminating parts of the backyard, I made out the surprise of red hair glinting from his chin.

—Oh shit! he said. He repeatedly stabbed his fork into a greasy plantain and smiled. You used to go with Omar, right? You're that smart girl.

—I'm not that smart.

I'd said this too many times to guys from Miami, though the reflex had never kicked in up at Rawlings, didn't show up, for instance, when I talked about lab with Ethan.

—But yeah, I said, I go with Omar.

—Oh so you're
still
going with him?

I rolled my eyes, mostly to see if I spotted my mom anywhere. She hadn't turned up behind me, and I didn't hear her voice in the crowd. Victor stroked his chin in mock concentration. His fingernails were ringed with dirt, and I imagined his hands wrist-deep in a car engine. I let my bag slip off my shoulder, let it dangle in a way that I hoped looked casual and that tugged down my shirt a little from the side.

—No, I said. Sorry, I meant what you said. Used to. See how I'm not smart?

He laughed like fast hiccups—too rough—but still stared at me while he jerked his shoulders and bent forward. I decided to think of him as
intense
—as one of those
intense
guys looking always for the
one woman
who
gets
them—and made myself stare right back at him. He picked up the plantain he'd basically shivved and flung it in his mouth, all without looking at anything but me.

—So you know my mom? I said.

He shook his head no.

—I know
of
your mom. Like how I know
of
you.

I nodded and said, Okay. You know
of
my mom.

—Don't change the subject, he said. You're that girl that went to New York for some scholarship.

I smiled, said, Yeah.

He made ticking noises with his tongue. So did you cheat on Omar up there?

I squealed
What?
as my bag swung and hit the doorframe. Rice spilled from my plate.

—I see it all over your face, he said.

He laughed again, big stuttery bursts, shoulders jumping. Then he finally looked away and down at his plate, mumbled, I'm-kidding-I'm-kidding.

He smashed an avocado piece into mush under his fork tines. I decided to laugh, too, giggled a halfhearted
Whatever, bro
as I lowered my bag to the floor.

—Why have I never seen you here before? he said.

—I'm just down for the weekend. Just visiting.

His face snapped back up and I tried to match his new stare without smiling but couldn't hold it back. My teeth came out like a white flag.

—Oh so you're a
visitor
, he said. I got it. Hey guys, she's
visiting
.

But no one outside even looked at him. He lowered his voice and said just to me, You might want to
visit
the beach too. While you're
visiting
. Fucking ghost.

—Funny, I said.

He used the edge of his fork to nudge a single grain of rice around his plate. He pushed the grain all the way to the plate's edge, then laughed at it for a few seconds.

—So! he said. He dropped his head down so that it was closer to my face, gave me an exaggerated scowl. You think Ariel should go back or stay here?

He reached out with his fork and stole a piece of avocado from me even though he had plenty on his own plate. I knew I should just say
Stay here
, but I still thought maybe we were flirting, the green eyes making me feel like we were someplace else.

—Why are you asking me that? I raised one side of my mouth. Why do you think I'm here? You know my mom is –

—I know
of
your mom. Get it right.

He pointed the fork at my face again and closed one eye, shifted his weight to his other foot.

—No wait, he said. Why
are
you here? That's actually a good question.

He chewed like the cows on the farms lining the one major road into Rawlings. I started to answer, but with his mouth full he blurted out, Because you left once, right? You're already a sellout, right? So what makes you think you can just come back like nothing? With no consequences?

My mouth went dry, and I could taste and smell my own sour breath despite the bits of food. I remembered I had on no makeup—no eyeliner, nothing on my lips. My hair was frizzy, freaked out by the sudden onslaught of Miami humidity, the ponytail on my shoulder fluffing up like a squirrel's tail. There was no way I looked pretty enough to flirt with. He reached for another avocado chunk from my plate. He pressed down harder—much harder—than he needed to snare it.

—I'm not a sellout, I said.

—So what, are you doing like a report for school on this?

He held his fork up and lassoed the air with it. A couple of the other guys turned and flicked their eyes over my body, waiting for me to say something.

Victor said, You like a little baby reporter? You reporting on us here, Smart Girl?

He bit his bottom lip—a chipped and turned-in front tooth flashed out like a warning—and lifted his chin. Stray grays sat shrouded among the reds I'd noticed before. He was older than I thought, maybe much older. The skin circling the base of his earrings, I saw now, was blue-black, the holes ragged and peeling. I fixed my bag on my shoulder, grabbed the strap with my free hand.

—I have to go look for my mom, I said.

—You do that. Say hi to Omar for me.

—I won't, I spit over my shoulder, trying to move away fast.

—Good, because I don't fucking know him or his stuck-up ex-bitch.

I pretended I didn't hear him or the snorts from the few guys who'd started paying attention to our conversation. I shoved my way into the crowd and moved in the direction of the kitchen, leaving my half-empty plate of food on a picture-lined table behind the couch. I pulled the rubber band from my hair and ran my fingers through it, arranged it on my shoulders, smoothed my thumb over each eyebrow. I lowered my head and pinched each of my cheeks as hard as I could stand it, trying to force some color into them. When I passed the bathroom, I ducked inside and slammed the door, the sound lost under the tumult of voices. I sat on the toilet and cried without wanting to, without letting myself look in the mirror at any point. I didn't want to know what a sellout looked like.

*   *   *

That guy Victor took off not long after I emerged from the bathroom. He waved at me before leaving like nothing had happened and said, Good talking to you, as he held two fingers and his thumb like a gun in my direction. He kissed my mom goodbye, hugged the owner of the house on his way out. I worked up the courage to ask my mom, How do you know that guy, and she said, His abuela spends the days down here. I think he went to your high school, but a while ago.

She watched me as I stared at the front door after he left. He's not for you, she said.

The crowd inside the house continued to thin as the night deepened, which was sort of a relief, but sort of not: with fewer people there, you could tell I wasn't talking to anyone, just standing around with my bag on the floor next to me or between my legs as I pretended to be part of conversations about the Easter march and how well negotiations were going, about the mayor's leadership and whether or not the attorney general was a lesbian, me just eating grains of rice one by one in an effort to look too occupied with food to chime in. My mom floated around the house talking to people, making them laugh, bringing them cups of water or soda or café, like she was part of another family's Noche Buena, a family she liked more and wanted to be in, one that understood her better.

Around midnight, she came up to me and said that anyone still there would be staying the night (most were women, most were dressed in black). I thought of them as the core; I recognized some of them from TV or from news stills, where they'd stood in Ariel's living room and prayed through phone calls, prayed before and after press conferences, put their hands on lawyers and blessed them.

—We're going to bed now to be up early, she said. But a few of us will stay awake to pray all the way through.

—What are
you
gonna do?

She shrugged. Pray, she said. Try to keep people focused. But
you
should sleep, that way you can take the couch. If you wait, someone'll take it. You don't want to be under there.

She pointed at the long wooden table with the food.

—They don't ever put the food away, she said.

After a lap of picking up abandoned plates and tossing them out, she set me up on the couch, pulling a flat throw pillow off another chair and setting it where my head would go. I tucked my bag beneath that spot, leaned it against the couch, and decided not to change into the sweatpants I'd brought since it didn't seem like anyone else was making themselves more comfortable. I pulled my legs up on the seat and out of nowhere my mom bent down and kissed me on the forehead. And so I ignored how the sheet she'd found for me smelled like cigarettes, how the couch was covered in material so coarse it paved a pattern on my skin. Her lips left a cold spot for minutes afterward, and I wanted to grab her, pull her to the couch, not let her go outside. I wanted to call Leidy and say,
I did it
, though I didn't do anything. All I can say is that her touch made me feel close to her in a way we'd never been, despite the fact that she would spend the night outside with strangers praying for a child that wasn't hers. She pushed my hair off my forehead and said, Tomorrow will be a beautiful day, and I closed my eyes and nodded.

*   *   *

I fell asleep that night trying to rewrite the conversation with Victor into something else, something where he was flirting with me and not trying to fuck with my head, not trying to tell me where I stood in the neighborhood now—an echo of Omar's last words to me. I remade his smile into a sweeter one, took the squint out of his eyes and reshaped them into something more open, something impressed with what he saw. And I put even more of Ethan's red in his beard, under his chin, which made him kinder, more familiar. I revised the memory so that his laughs were better timed, in sync with what I said the way Ethan's always were. I turned my face into the dank throw pillow I'd folded in half. When I still couldn't fall asleep, I told myself Victor's venom came from his knowing I was too good for him, out of his league. What did I want with him anyway? Why did I care what some loser thought? But a year earlier I would've given that loser my phone number. A year earlier I would've found a way to press my arm against his, would've laughed at his jokes in a voice higher than my real one. For years after that night, the real memory of that conversation made me wince—and it does, still, much too often, whenever I catch a decent-looking man watching me from a nearby table during the breakfast remarks at a research symposium, or at the beach bar my colleagues and I sometimes visit during happy hour on Thursdays to drink a beer and watch the sunset. I still perceive some intensity from someone and instead of recognizing it as attraction, I immediately assume it's disgust. I want to blame Victor for that reflex, but it was there already, had shown itself for the first time the day I saw my mother in the airport, waiting for me at winter break; all he did was verify for me that I would always use that double vision against myself. All he showed me was that I couldn't go back to not having it.