The Book of Unknown Americans: A novel (17 page)

He had seen me, I realized. He’d been watching me wander down the street. He came out here on purpose.

The two of us stood maybe ten meters apart, fixed in place, for a long time. Finally the boy stood the trash can upright. He walked closer, and I felt the world constrict, my heart pulsing
against my ribs. When we were only an arm’s length apart, he stopped.

I squeezed my hands around the lining of my pockets and whispered, “Leave alone.”

He stared at me from under the hood of his navy sweatshirt.

From somewhere in my depths, somewhere beyond where I knew I could reach, I summoned enough courage to say it again, louder this time. “Leave alone.”

The boy locked his eyes on me and said something I didn’t hear. He repeated it, and the second time I understood.

“Go home,” he said.

I knew those words, and I knew by the way he said them that he didn’t mean I should go back to the apartment.

Then he lifted one hand and pointed at my face. He took a step forward and touched his fingertip to my cheek, to the bone that curved just under my left eye. He twisted his hand forty-five degrees and cocked it like a gun, three fingers drawn back, his thumb up in the air, and let a burst of air explode from his lips, his warm breath like a ball of fire against my face.

“¿Comprende?” he said.

I felt light-headed. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to leave. I wanted to run out of there and never see the boy again. But my feet were like dead weight. Move, I told myself in my head. Go, Alma.

I turned around and forced myself to start walking, listening for the sound of his footsteps, bracing myself for him to run up and shove me from behind or knock me down or do whatever he was going to do. But there was only the swish of my jeans as my legs scissored past each other until I got to the main road.

I WAS ON EDGE
the rest of the day, the encounter with the boy sticking to me like burs pricking at my skin. I couldn’t shake it off. When Arturo and I sat together at the kitchen table that night, I was quiet and preoccupied, staring into my cup of tea, the only sound the knocking of the radiator. I could feel Arturo looking at me—I knew he could tell something was wrong—but unlike last time, he didn’t ask what it was.

I ran my fingers around the rim of the mug. Arturo cleared his throat and took another sip of tea. I lifted my eyes enough to watch him raise it to his mouth, to see his hands around the lacquered clay—those rough hands, the onion-thin peels of skin around his thumbnails where he’d bitten them, the scrapes on his knuckles where they rubbed against the top of the crate when he pulled mushrooms out from the soil inside. I saw the drooping neckline of the Baltimore Orioles sweatshirt we had bought from the Goodwill store and that he wore around the house, the field of dark stubble along his jaw. I knew every inch of him, it seemed, and yet, in the last year, we’d had such trouble finding our way to each other. Before the accident, we had been the happiest people I knew. “No one else,” Arturo used to say to me, “has ever been in love like we are. No one else even understands what that word means.” We believed we were special. We believed we were indestructible. But after the accident, under the gathering clouds of fate, something changed. We still loved each other as much as we ever had, but it was as if neither of us knew what to do with that love anymore. It was as if our sorrow was so consuming that there was no room for anything else. When we did fall into bed together or into each other’s arms, pressing our bodies together skin to skin, it was out of desperation, a longing to somehow rediscover what was familiar
and what was good. But what used to feel like a communion only emphasized our grief and eventually we had stopped trying altogether.

Looking at him now, though, a fire roared up inside me. I was tired suddenly of feeling so bereft, so unmoored by sadness. I wanted to smother that feeling, to clear it from our lives like cobwebs from a dusty corner. I wanted to erase the anguish and the distance, the remorse and the blame, and replace it with something new. I wanted to figure out how to grope our way back to each other. Even now, even after the day I’d had. Especially now.

I lifted my foot under the table and rubbed it against Arturo’s leg.

He looked at me, startled. “What?” he asked.

I pushed back from the table and walked to him.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

I put my hand on the back of his neck and leaned down, kissing his skin, breathing in the scent of his hair.

“Alma,” he said, curling away.

I lifted his hand from the mug. “What is all this?” I asked, touching the frayed skin around his thumbnail. I raised his hand to my lips, closing my mouth around his thumb, waiting to see if he would protest. I sucked each of his fingers one by one while he watched.

And then I climbed on top of him, straddled his lap. “I miss you,” I murmured.

Arturo put his hands on my hips and pulled me toward him. “I’m here,” he said.

“Closer,” I said.

He shimmied me closer and buried his face in my neck. I
spread my fingers through his hair, feeling the warmth of his scalp, the faint scratch of his mustache against my skin. And by the time he pushed himself inside me I believed that even after everything, even after the accident, and having traveled so far, leaving behind the landscape that we had woken up to every morning our whole lives—cedar mountains and citrus groves, a blue lake and mango trees—no matter what else happened, we would be fine as long as we had each other. Contigo la milpa es rancho y el atole champurrado. And then, the rush. It was as if the whole world sighed. As if every human and every creature and every gas and liquid and speck of dirt and granule of sand and gust of air settled all at once, and all was right in the universe. If only for that moment.

Not long after New Year’s, my tía Gloria called my mom to say that her divorce had gone through.

“Esteban is no longer part of my life,” she said.

My mom burst into tears.

“Why are you crying?” my aunt asked. “It’s good news. And listen to this—he has to pay me!”

“What do you mean?” my mom asked, sniffling.

“I’m getting eighty thousand dollars from the settlement!”

My mom’s tears dried up immediately. Her voice turned serious. “How much?”

“It’s from that summer house he had. The one his father gave him that we never went to. He has to liquidate it and I’m getting the money!”

“And,” my mom told us over dinner that night, “she’s giving some of it to us.” She was pink in the face, barely able to contain herself.

My dad wiped his mouth with a napkin. “How much is she giving us? Fifty dollars?” He smirked.

“Well, that was nasty,” my mom said. “You’re going to feel bad when I tell you the real number.”

I peeked at my dad, who was waiting with the napkin clutched in his hand. My mom started eating again, delicately picking the capers off the rice with the tines of her fork.

She took at least four bites before my dad finally said, “Well? Don’t keep it a secret.”

A grin played on my mom’s lips.

“Never mind, then,” my dad said.

“You don’t want to know?”

“Why would she be giving us money anyway?”

“Because we need it.”

“Who needs it? Not us. We’re fine.”

“We’re fine? Now we’re fine? For months you’ve been talking about how you might lose your job, but now you’re telling me we’re fine?”

“Yes.”

“Unbelievable.”

My dad shoveled rice into his mouth, probably to stop himself from saying anything else.

But my mom couldn’t let it go. “I’m only saying we could use the money.”

My dad dropped his fork onto his plate with a clatter. “Jesus, Celia! I told you we don’t need it! What’s she giving us? A hundred dollars? Two hundred dollars? We don’t need it!”

“If you don’t want to take it, you don’t have to! I’ll just keep it for myself, then.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“What I said.”

“You want to leave?”

“Who said anything about leaving?”

“You take this, I take that. Is that what you’re doing? Just like Gloria?”

My mom rolled her eyes.

But my dad was in a groove. He lifted his plate from the table and slammed it down, scattering rice and capers and peppers and chicken across the floor. “Goddamn it, Celia! How many times do I have to tell you that I will take care of this family?
What do you think I’m doing out there every day? You think I’m working my ass off for fun?” He stood, toppling his chair.

My mom pursed her lips and stared at her plate.

He reached across the table and seized both of her wrists. “Look at me when I’m talking to you!”

But as soon as she did, my dad threw her wrists back at her in disgust.

“I don’t know how many times …,” he muttered, shaking his head. Then he turned, using his leg to sweep aside the chair, which was on its back on the floor, stepped over the food, and walked out of the kitchen.

The clock on the wall ticked faintly. The glass bottles of vinegar and hot sauce that my mom kept on the shelves inside the refrigerator door rattled. I felt embarrassed for my mom, who sat across from me screwing up her face like she was determined not to cry, but I stayed absolutely silent, waiting to see what would happen next.

Finally my mom said quietly, “Mayor, finish your chicken.”

TWO DAYS LATER
, my dad and I learned the news: Tía Gloria was giving us ten thousand dollars. After the heat between my parents died down, my mom blurted out the number during dinner. My dad nearly choked on his food.

“I can’t believe it,” my mom kept saying.

“Well, we’ve probably given her almost as much money over the years,” my dad said once he’d recovered from the shock.

“Ten thousand dollars, Rafa? Come on.”

“We did what we could,” my dad said.

“Of course we did. And now she’s doing the same. It’s just that she can afford to do more. Ten thousand dollars! I can’t believe it.”

It didn’t take my dad quite as long to wrap his head around the idea. The morning the money landed in my parents’ bank account, my dad said, “I think we should buy a car.”

“A what?” my mom sputtered as she snapped a piece of bacon and popped it in her mouth.

“Nothing fancy,” my dad said. “I’m not talking about an Alfa Romeo here. But a car. Something that runs.”

He was happy, I could tell, at the mere thought.

“A car?” my mom asked, dumbfounded.

“Yes. You’ve heard of it? Four wheels. Takes gasoline.”

It was no secret that since he was a boy, my dad had lusted after cars, and the pinnacle of his obsession would have been to own one. Once, he bought an issue of
Autoweek
at the Newark Newsstand, and for the past few years he’d consoled himself by flipping through it while he lay on the couch, licking his thumb before he turned each thin, glossy page, staring for what seemed like hours at a sleek black Maserati or a balloonish blue Bugatti. Enrique and I used to make fun of him about it, but even when the pages eventually started falling out, my dad just taped them together and flipped through it again.

“But what will we do with a car?” my mom asked. She looked at my dad now with mild amusement, as if he had just suggested they buy an elephant.

“What do you think?” my dad said. “We’ll drive it.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere. You could drive to the Pathmark.”

“I don’t know how to drive.”

“You’ll learn.”

“Can I drive it?” I asked.

“You don’t have a license yet,” my dad said.

“But when I get one, I mean.”

“Rafa, be serious,” my mom went on. “We don’t need a car. We could go to Panamá ten times with that money.”

My dad rubbed his chin. He looked at the two of us, sitting there, eating breakfast. I could tell, and I’m sure my mom could, too, that he had made up his mind.

“We’re getting a car,” he said.

THE AUTO DEALERSHIPS
in our town were on Cleveland Avenue. Cars waxed and gleaming, plastic pennant flags crisscrossed over the lots. But of course, because my dad was always looking for a bargain, Cleveland Avenue wasn’t where we went.

We took a bus instead to a used-car lot that my dad had found through an ad in the newspaper. It was in the middle of nowhere, and the winter sun shone over the acres and acres of land that surrounded it. The hard grass crunched under our feet as we walked and the wind squealed, tearing holes through the air.

My mom grimaced and pulled the collar of her coat up around her face. “Is it supposed to snow today?” she asked.

My dad was already way ahead of us.

“It’s supposed to snow?” I said, excited by the prospect.

“I don’t know. I’m just asking. I can’t believe it’s January and we haven’t even had flurries yet.”

I looked up at the sky. Even though the air was frigid, it seemed to me like the sun was too bright for snow, but maybe I was wrong. I hoped I was wrong.

The only reason I’d come was because my dad thought he might need a translator. I told him, “You use English every day.” But my dad had argued that he didn’t know the language of cars. To him, everything had its own language—the language
of breakfast, the language of business, the language of politics, and on and on. In Spanish he knew all the languages, but for as long as he’d been speaking English, he believed he knew it only in certain realms. He never talked about cars with anyone in English, he said. Therefore, he didn’t know the language. It was no use explaining to him that I didn’t exactly spend my days talking about cars with people, either. To him, I knew all the languages of English the way he did those of Spanish. And as proud as he was that I was so good at one, I think he was also ashamed that I wasn’t better at the other.