The Book of Unknown Americans: A novel (27 page)

“We’re in the car,” I said. My breath tasted sour, and I turned my head so she wouldn’t catch a whiff of it.

“But where are we?”

“We were on our way home, but the snow was crazy, so I pulled over. And then I guess I fell asleep.”

“It’s not snowing now,” she said.

I looked out the window. It was completely dark and everything outside was calm, like the snow had formed a cocoon over the world. Maribel pulled her hair off her face, and I saw an indentation along her cheek where she’d been resting it against the seat belt.

I put the key in the ignition. The car grumbled but didn’t start. I tried again. Nothing. I felt myself start to panic a little, but on the third try, the car came to life. I turned the heat on and held my hand in front of the vent until, after a minute, warm air pulsed through.

“Are you cold?” I asked.

“No,” Maribel said.

The clock on the dashboard said 1:14 a.m. Shit. We were in for it. Really, really in for it.

I was about to put the car in gear so we could nose back onto the road when Maribel said, “He pushed me against the wall.”

“What?”

“He told me he had something to show me.”

I didn’t know what she was talking about.

“He took my coat off and pushed me against the wall.”

And then somehow I got it. A prickle shot up the back of my neck. She was talking about Garrett Miller. “What did he do to you?” I asked.

“He started taking my shirt off.”

“What did he do?” I asked again, even though I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear the answer.

She turned and gazed out the passenger side window, her arms clutched around her.

“Maribel?”

“My mom came,” she said.

“Did he hurt you?”

“My mom came,” she said again.

And then we just sat there. I didn’t know why she was telling me now, after all this time. When she turned back to me, she picked up my hand and ran her thumb against my open palm. I closed my fingers and squeezed, pretending like somehow if I squeezed hard enough, I could hold on to her forever.

MY DAD WAS OUTSIDE
smoking a cigarette when Maribel and I pulled into the parking lot of the building. It was the dead of night, and the headlights lit him up in the dark. I got so nervous when I saw him that I stalled a few feet before the space. My dad
threw his cigarette into the snow and strode over, yanking open the driver’s-side door.

“Get out,” he said.

I did. Maribel had fallen asleep again on the drive home and she was curled into the passenger’s-side seat.

“Give me the keys,” my dad said.

I handed them over. I couldn’t bring myself to look him in the eye.

“Now get in the backseat,” he ordered.

I didn’t have the guts to ask why, but I thought I should probably just do whatever he asked, so I climbed in the back while my dad got into the driver’s seat and tore out of the lot.

It was a quiet drive. Not a single other car was on the road. My dad was flying—long grooves of slush that ribbed the pavement sprayed up onto the car—and the whole time I was shaking in the backseat like there was an earthquake under my skin. I had no idea where he was taking us, not to mention what might be open in the middle of the night, so I figured maybe he just wanted to drive around for a while until he collected himself. Maybe there was a lecture coming, and he was composing it in his head. Maybe he wanted to get Maribel and me away from the apartment so that none of our neighbors would hear what he was about to unleash on us. Maybe Maribel’s parents and my parents had decided between them that my father would be the one who would reprimand us when we finally came home. But after ten minutes in the car, when we pulled up to Christiana Hospital, I had a sinking feeling that I’d gotten it all wrong.

“Wake her up,” my dad said after he parked. “We’re going inside.”

I tapped Maribel on the shoulder. “We need to get out of the car,” I said.

“What?”

“You fell asleep again. We’re back in Newark. My dad drove us to the hospital and now he wants us to get out of the car.”

“Hospital?”

“Yeah. I have no idea what’s going on. But he wants us to go inside with him.”

I thought, Maybe he’s going to take us to see patients who were barely hanging on after car accidents as a way to teach Maribel and me a lesson about what could have happened to us.

My dad lit another cigarette as he cut across the dark, snowy parking lot to the entrance at the emergency room. Maribel and I followed. The doors slid open when we reached them, and my dad stubbed out his cigarette in a standing ashtray before we walked inside.

The second I saw my mom sitting in the waiting room, I knew it was bad. My dad walked straight over and put his hand on her shoulder. She jerked her head up, frightened. “Nothing yet,” she said.

My dad nodded toward Maribel and me. “They just got back.”

“One good thing,” my mom said.

But she didn’t get up like I thought she would.

“They’re okay,” my dad said.

It was only then that my mom looked at me. She curled her lips in between her teeth and blinked fast. Her nostrils flared, and I thought she was going to cry, but she just nodded and turned away again.

My dad sat down next to her and balanced his elbows on his knees, tenting his fingers and staring through them to the white
floor, to the radiators along the baseboards, to what? I had no idea.

A fat woman with a Phillies baseball cap and a plastic bag on her lap sat in a chair against the wall. A tattooed man in jeans and a jean jacket—his legs outstretched, his ankles crossed—was sleeping a few seats down.

“What’s going on?” Maribel asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“What’s going on?” Maribel asked, louder now.

I saw my mom form her hands into fists and then let them go again. She looked at my dad in agony, which was the same way he was looking back at her. They seemed to be questioning each other, and from the expression on both of their faces I doubted either had the answers the other was searching for.

Finally my mom locked her gaze on Maribel. She reached her hand out, but Maribel didn’t take it. “It’s your father,” my mom said. “We don’t know the details yet, but they brought him here. He had surgery and now we’re just waiting. Your mother is with him.”

“My father?” Maribel repeated.

“What happened to him?” I asked.

“We tried to call you,” my mom said, “but your phone was off. We called you a hundred times.”

“I didn’t know …”

“We called the police, too.”

“The police—why?”

“Why?” my dad said. “Because when I came home, the car—my car—was missing. I thought someone had stolen it.”

“I’m surprised they didn’t find you,” my mom said.

“What happened?” I asked.

Again, the agony on her face. Her mouth tightened into a lock.

“We don’t know anything yet,” my dad said. “Just sit down.”

“Ven, hija,” my mom said, reaching her arm out to draw Maribel in. Maribel took a step away and lowered herself into a chair. When I didn’t move, my mom said, “Please, Mayor. Just sit down. There’s nothing you can do. There’s nothing else to know yet.”

WE STAYED IN
those seats for hours. A nurse took Maribel back to the surgical waiting area, where Sra. Rivera was, while my mom and dad and I stayed put, waiting for word.

A television mounted in the corner was playing ESPN, and I stared at it until I couldn’t anymore. I kept pulling out my phone, checking the time. My dad walked out through the automatic doors at the entrance to smoke, and each time he did, I looked out at the sky, which lightened little by little with the coming dawn. My mom kept filling paper cups with coffee from the vending machine and then she’d sit down and drink it, staring at the floor, and stand up and get another.

Finally, by the time my dad was down to his last cigarette and my mom was out of money for more coffee and my ass was numb from sitting in one spot for so long, a doctor—a tubby, middle-aged guy in green scrubs and a pair of glasses hanging by a strap around his neck—came out and told us that Sr. Rivera was in recovery but that he hadn’t woken up yet.

“What happens now?” my mom asked.

“We wait,” the doctor said.

“Is he going to be okay?”

“We’ve done everything we can.”

We headed home after that, trudging through the parking lot in the white early-morning sunlight, the air as thin as paper, while my mom said, “Shouldn’t he be able to tell us more?
‘Everything we can.’ What does that mean?” But my dad didn’t have an answer, and neither did I.

I still didn’t know what had happened—every time I asked, my dad cut me off with some variation on “Let’s just wait. There’s no use worrying before we know anything”—except that I knew it was bad enough to land Sr. Rivera in surgery and bad enough that my parents didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t need to know much more than that to feel sick to my stomach. Whatever was happening was all my fault. I knew it. I’d taken Maribel away because why? Because I’d wanted to see her? Because I was trying to be romantic? Because I was trying to free her from the confines of her life? Because I’d wanted to show her the snow on the ocean, the thing that had made my mom fall in love with this country, and I had wanted to make Maribel fall in love, too? With me?

My parents wouldn’t tell me anything, so all Saturday morning I waited for news. My mom wanted me to try to sleep, so I went to my room for a while, but all I managed to do was sit up in bed—awake and fully dressed—waiting for the phone to ring so that maybe my mom would answer it and I could overhear what was going on. As soon as my dad came home from his newspaper shift, he asked if my mom had heard anything, but she told him no. By then my mom was sitting at the kitchen table with the telephone next to her elbow. Her eyes were red. Her hair was flattened at the back.

“Can’t you just tell me?” I said.

My mom started crying.

“What? Did something go wrong?” I asked.

“Everything went wrong,” she said.

“Did he have a heart attack or something? Or did he fall on the ice and crack his head? Just tell me. Please, Mami.”

She cried for a while longer, then wiped her cheeks with the heel of her hand. “He was trying to find Maribel,” she said. She looked at me, her eyes wet, her cheeks broken out the way they always got when she cried. “They shot him.”

“What?”

“They shot him.”

“Who shot him?”

“I don’t know, Mayor. I wasn’t there.”

“Like with a gun?”

“Oh my God,” she said, and threw her hand over her mouth, like hearing me actually say it out loud was too much for her. She pushed away from the table and ran to the bathroom where, even after she closed the door behind her, I heard her heaving and coughing. I stood there like an idiot, blinking. I felt—what? Nothing. The blankness of incomprehension. They shot him, I kept repeating to myself. They shot him.

THE PHONE STAYED QUIET
most of the day, even though the doorbell kept ringing. Quisqueya and Nelia came over to see if my mom knew anything, and when she told them she didn’t, the two of them chattered on about what they’d heard. Micho stopped by and told us a story about a buddy of his who got shot in Afghanistan and survived. “Lucky bastard,” he said. “God gives out a few free passes like that every year. Saves them for the best people. But listen, Arturo will be fine. He’s one of the best people.” Sr. Mercado dropped in, and then Benny, and I hung around enough that little by little the story emerged: Sr. Rivera had gone to Capitol Oaks. There had been a confrontation, and at some point a man walked out with a shotgun in his hand. He fired, and that was that.

I couldn’t stop myself from imagining it, like some sort of television show. I saw Sr. Rivera in his jeans and cowboy boots, his hair wet from the snow, combed to the side like he always wore it, wandering down Kirkwood Highway, peeking behind the Steak ’n Shake and the bowling alley and the Panera Bread, looking for Maribel. I felt his breath in the air as he walked. I heard the hard soles of his boots on the pavement. I saw him approach Capitol Oaks and walk past the entrance, shouting Maribel’s name into the cold. I saw people in their houses, pulling back their blinds, peeking out their windows at the noise. And I saw someone come outside—Garrett Miller, I thought, because I had the feeling that somehow all of this had to do with him. In my mind, I heard Sr. Rivera ask him about Maribel, and I saw Garrett screw up his face because he didn’t understand what Sr. Rivera was saying. But Benny had said it was a man—a man—who came out with a shotgun. So what had happened then? Maybe Garrett’s dad saw Sr. Rivera on his front lawn. Maybe he was drunk or high or maybe he was just pissed off. He came outside, carrying the gun, pointing it toward Sr. Rivera.

Sr. Rivera stepped back, raising his hands in the air to show he meant no harm. “I’m looking for my daughter,” he said in Spanish.

Garrett’s dad didn’t understand. “We speak English here,” he said. He came closer, holding the barrel of the gun in line with the tip of Sr. Rivera’s nose.

“Where is she?” Sr. Rivera managed to say.

What could Garrett’s dad have said in return? “Get off my property.” “Shut up.” “You fuckhead.” “This is what you get.” What could he have been thinking?

“Please,” Sr. Rivera said, in English this time, one of the few words he knew.

And then Garrett’s dad pulled the trigger.

THE HOURS WERE
like mountains we had to climb, enormous and exhausting. One after the other, and still no word from the hospital.

My mom foraged through her closet for clothes she could give the Riveras when they got home, even though my dad looked at her like she was crazy and asked, “What do they need with clothes?” My mom said, “I don’t know. I just want to do something!”

She devoted herself to the kitchen after that, preparing meals that she spooned into plastic containers and the tins usually reserved for Christmas cookies. She taped notes to the top that detailed what was inside and how to reheat it, and saved it all in our freezer to be delivered when the Riveras returned home.