Make Your Home Among Strangers (5 page)

—Fine, you know what? I'm sorry I'm here.

—It's not like that, Leidy said. Don't be sorry. I'm happy you're home.

I thought then that she'd sit next to me, but she stayed standing up, pulling another soft thing from the pile shrinking next to me, this time holding a onesie against her chest as she folded it in half, then in half again.

—I don't gotta work tomorrow, she said.

—Awesome, I said, meaning it.

She stopped mid-fold and almost laughed.

—
Awesome!
she parroted back, her voice high and in her nose. She threw what she was folding into the drawer, pushed it shut, then slung her hands under Dante's arms. She raised him to her face and cooed to him,
Awe
-some,
awe
-some! What other stupid words you picking up at that school?

 

5

MAMI WOKE UP BEFORE THE SUNRISE
on my first morning back—a habit left over from marriage: she always made our dad his café before he headed to a jobsite—and learned from Radio Mambí that the very first rally to support Ariel's Miami family not only was happening that morning but would be held just two blocks away, in front of the house owned by Ariel's U.S. relatives. She kissed me on the forehead while I was still asleep, told me she was going and that she'd left café con leche for me in the microwave. All you gotta do is press start, she said, and from the bedroom door, she either said or I half-dreamed,
I'll be back by lunch.
So I spent Friday morning on the living room floor, playing silly singsong games with Dante, who I was surprised to realize I'd missed. He was eight months old by then and could do several new things that made him more appealing to me: crawl, talk a little, sleep through the night. More than my mom's new apartment, or our old house belonging to someone else now, or the things from my old room stuffed into half a new one, it was Dante's unexpected heft when I lifted him out of his crib that made me understand how much could change in three months.

Thanks to the holiday, Leidy was off from the salon, where she mostly worked the phone and booked appointments, swept hair off the salon floor, and sometimes did makeup. She spent her day off just sitting on the couch, flipping between back-to-back episodes of
Jerry Springer
and the news coverage about Ariel, avoiding what seemed like the chore of playing with her son or taking him to go see his father. I wasn't sure if Leidy and Rolando were talking to each other and, though I never admitted this to Leidy, I didn't blame him for wanting to stay away from her, considering what she'd done: When Roly didn't propose to her during the last slow dance at prom, or in front of Cinderella's Castle at Grad Nite, or while receiving his diploma in front of a couple thousand people at graduation, Leidy decided to force the issue and stopped taking the pill the week after school finished in June. On a mid-July morning the summer before my senior year, while our parents were at work, she screamed my name from the bathroom, and seconds later, she blasted into my room holding a stick she'd peed on three minutes before. I figured from her joy that the test was negative, but then she showed me the plus sign as she laughed and cried at the same time. She smashed me in a hug and said, Roly is gonna
freak out
! I started crying too and saying
Oh no oh no
—the same reaction I had while waiting those three minutes for my own results from my scares with Omar. What was happening inside Leidy, I realized, was my own worst-case scenario, but Leidy shook my shoulders, the stick still in her fist and now against my skin, and said, Aren't you gonna congratulate me?

—You're
happy
about this?

—Of course! Lizet, I graduated from school. So did Roly. This makes sense, this is what's next for us.

Leidy looked down at the test again, and I wanted one for myself: some test that would measure whether or not I was really headed for the same future. When she left for Roly's house, I went to the library and found those lists made year after year by important people, the lists of the very top schools in the country. These schools, I saw, were next to impossible to get into, but like the plus sign on Leidy's test, I wanted whatever result my actions brought—positive or negative—to indicate something irrefutable about me.

Leidy correctly predicted Roly's freak-out, but she didn't predict him leaving her once she confessed, a few weeks later, that she'd stopped taking her birth control and had purposely not informed him of that decision. Our dad wanted to step in, maybe talk to Roly's parents, but Leidy said she didn't need his help: she was certain Roly would see his son growing inside her and forgive her, would go back on his decision to throw away the four years they'd been together—basically since
freshman year
! she told anyone who'd listen—and do the right thing, even if it was true that she'd lied to trap him. We all kept waiting for it, buoyed by her certainty, by the example of our own dad's choices, our own family's origins. I made a mistake of my own, thinking that the biggest difference between a college and a university was that a college (which I thought must be more like Miami Dade Community
College
than Florida International
University
) was easier to get into. So I sent off applications to that year's top three colleges without anyone's knowledge or help or blessing just to see if I could get in: just to know if I was meant for something other than what Leidy and my mom had done for themselves.

A couple days after mailing them, I told Omar I'd applied on a whim to only one out-of-state school: getting rejected from one wouldn't sound as bad as three come April.

—I thought you didn't want to leave Florida, he said.

His hand reached around and hugged the back of his own neck, and I knew for him
Florida
was another word for
Omar
.

—Leidy's pregnant, I said.

He made the requisite
Whoa
s and
Holy Shit
s, but those eventually led to
I'm not totally surprised
and, finally,
At least you'll make a cute maid of honor.

I thought of how three phone calls and a few faxed pages of the tax return copies my dad had already given me (for verifying my reduced school lunch application) was all it took to get the fee waivers for those three applications, and for the first time, I wanted not just to get into one of those colleges but to go—like immediately. I wanted to be gone already. It was a relief to think maybe I'd given myself a chance, and with that came a new feeling: guilt.

Omar elbowed me in the ribs and said, What? You know it's true. He's gotta marry her, probably should've proposed to her already.

But he never did, and even when Leidy went into labor, he refused to show up, instead dropping by the hospital hours after (with a couple friends but no gift) to see Dante—just Dante—on his birthday: March 25, six days before the arrival of my Rawlings acceptance. I'd spent the intervening months driving Leidy to her doctor's appointments, going with her to Babies R Us and La Canastilla Cubana, planning her a baby shower that Roly's mom refused to attend but for which Blanca—Omar's mom—made three kinds of flan; all this while barely missing class and staying on top of the clubs I'd joined as a freshman, back when I had time to waste. I didn't know the rule about thick or thin envelopes—I wouldn't get the two rejections for another week—so when I read
Congratulations
on the Rawlings letter, I thought the sleep deprivation from having Dante in the house was making me see things. But I read it again, right there with the driveway's hot concrete burning my bare feet, and I started to organize my arguments as to why I should be allowed to go. I folded the letter back into the envelope and ran on my tiptoes to the house, already knowing none of my reasons would work: unlike with Dante, my parents hadn't been warned this was coming. And unlike Leidy, I couldn't even try for a little while to pretend this was an accident.

The next morning, on the anniversary of Dante's first full week around and with no more visits from Roly to hint that meeting his son had changed his mind about Leidy, I faked my mom's signature on the deposit waiver the school had mailed along with my letter and returned with it the card saying I accepted my spot in the class of 2003. I eventually mustered the ovaries to show them the folder full of papers Rawlings had sent me with my financial aid package, using the official-looking forms to confuse them into thinking it was too late to fight me about it. Leidy didn't really care; she'd miss the help but was relieved there'd be one less person around to see how completely wrong she'd been about her own plan and Roly. But my betrayal—that is the word my parents used over and over again for what I'd done—gave them permission to finally abandon their marriage, and my dad took my impending fall exit to mean he could do the same, but even sooner.

 

6

THE STREET IN FRONT OF OUR BUILDING
buzzed all morning, the sidewalks overflowing with crowds that trampled each yard's overgrown grass. From our apartment window, the rally below looked more like spectators camped out for a choice spot along a parade route than an actual rally. Some people had salsa or talk radio playing out of boom boxes. Some sat on coolers and handed out water and cans of soda whenever a new person they seemed to know walked up. Wisps of conversations reached our window from the street: such-and-such reporter had said something about Ariel going back by the end of the weekend, so clearly she was a communist. The people down there, on the street, all nodded their heads and said, Claro que sí. I leaned forward more, Leidy, Dante, and the TV behind me, my cheek touching the window screen, and looked up and over the blocks of houses and palm trees spreading far out like stripes parallel to the horizon. It was gorgeous outside—bright white sky, not so hot you could kill someone, not so humid, almost a breeze—the beginning of winter in Miami. I couldn't believe I had to go back to the gloomy half-lit days of upstate New York, to snow turned to dirt-slush pushed into every corner for miles, to inescapable cold everywhere you turned. Before ever seeing snow, I thought that even if I couldn't bear the cold that came with it, its novelty would carry me through at least four years, no problem. I'd actually been eager for it to come after the surprise of fall colors wore off, after maybe half the leaves on campus ended up pressed between the pages of my textbooks. Once those were gone, everything looked stark enough that I asked Jillian one night, while she studied on her bed and I sat at my desk highlighting pretty much every sentence in my chemistry textbook, when the snow would show up and cover it all.

She pulled her headphones off and said, My brother told me that one year, they had snow here on
Halloween
. Three, four feet overnight. He said all the girls in slutty costumes couldn't stand to put coats on over them, and like a dozen stupid bitches ended up in the hospital due to exposure.

—Wait, you have a brother? I said, and she gasped and smacked her book with both her hands, then pointed with a
He-llo?
to a photo of her and a guy much taller than her, their arms wrapped around each other's waists, her in a bikini top and shorts and him in a tuxedo. I'd assumed he was a boyfriend she only talked to when I wasn't around, the way I did with Omar. I asked if he'd gone to Rawlings too, and she told me no, he went to another college—one I'd never heard of but that was just a few hours away by bus, and so he'd come to Rawlings to visit a high school friend a few years earlier. He was already a senior, she said.

—I can't believe you've never even
seen
snow in real life, she said.

I looked out our window and tried to imagine a snow-friendly sexy Halloween costume. Sexy astronaut? Sexy female polar bear?

—I can't believe you didn't know I had a brother, she said a few seconds later. That's weird, I thought you knew that.

A door slammed in the hallway and a male voice laughed.

I eventually said to my reflection in the window, It's not
that
weird. You don't know I have a baby nephew, do you? His name is – my sister named him Dante.

I'd imagined this moment already—the moment where I'd explain Dante's name to my roommate—back when Jillian was just an idea, just a name printed in a letter from the school. I'd planned to tell the theoretical Jillian that Leidy named Dante after the famous writer, a name she came across when she looked over my shoulder at something I happened to be reading (not for school, just for fun, I'd say). This was nowhere near the truth: Leidy said the name Dante was
super original
and that's the only reason she gave anyone for picking it. At the sonogram appointment where we learned the baby's sex—I'd skipped sixth period to drive her—the tech had swirled a finger over the screen and said to us, There's the penis, and Leidy was relieved: she thought Roly would be more likely to forgive her if she gave him a son instead of a daughter. I was relieved, too, since by then I'd learned about history's Dante, and I could tell people, when they asked, that she took the name from that.

But I hadn't anticipated utter silence as my roommate's response when I planned this conversation in my head, hadn't visualized the bags under my own eyes staring back at me in the dark window. I couldn't bear to turn around and see Jillian's open mouth, or maybe she was laughing so hard that she couldn't make a sound. I waited for the rustle of her turning a page, but there was nothing. Down the corridor from us, a rollicking song with a female singer started playing from someone's stereo, but the stereo's owner closed their door seconds after the first notes hit the hallway. From the kitchen came a peppery smell—someone cooking instant soup.