The Book of Unknown Americans: A novel (28 page)

My dad paced around the house with a drink permanently in his hand and a cigarette permanently in his mouth. He didn’t even bother to smoke outside, and my mom didn’t bother to make him. He would wander to the couch, sit for a while, stand up, then check the phone again to make sure it still had a dial tone. When he heard it, he would put the receiver back down and stare at it, like he was trying to exert some kind of mind control over it to make it ring.

And me? I was mired in a feeling that was heavy and sick. Once, I walked out onto the balcony and looked up at the Riveras’ door, where bouquets of flowers wrapped in cellophane were piled at the threshold. I ran over and started kicking the shit out of those flowers until my dad came out and asked me what I was doing.

I didn’t have an answer, at least not one that I could articulate.

My dad said, “He’s going to be fine.”

I tried to slow my breathing.

“He has to be,” he said.

BUT HE WASN
’
T
. Close to eight o’clock that night, the phone finally rang and when my dad, who answered it at my mom’s terrified urging, hung up, he shook his head.

“No!” my mom wailed. “Rafa, no!”

“He died,” my dad said.

“Who was on the phone?” my mom managed to ask.

“A nurse.”

My head was pounding.

“He died,” my dad repeated in disbelief.

“No,” my mom said again. “No, no, no, no, no!” She dropped her head into her hands.

I couldn’t swallow. It had to be wrong. We had to be able to rewind. It couldn’t be real. It felt so weightless. It felt like an idea, a particle of dust floating around in the air that hadn’t landed yet. There was still time to catch it. There was still time to stop it, right? It had to be a mistake. I tried to swallow again, but my throat was huge.

IT WAS MY DAD
who drove Maribel and Sra. Rivera from the hospital back to the apartment.

When he returned, my mom asked, “Where are they?”

“What do you mean? I drove them back.”

“But I thought you would bring them here.”

“They’re going to bed.”

“They can’t stay in that apartment tonight. They can’t be alone at a time like this.”

“They’re tired, Celia. You should have seen them. They need to sleep.”

“But in that apartment?”

“They have each other.”

“That’s not good enough.”

“You’re right. It’s not. But what can we do? Listen to me. They were calm in the car on the way home. Neither of them said anything except to thank me for coming to get them. You can go over there first thing in the morning. Just let them get some sleep.”

“They’re our friends!”

“Alma is a strong woman. They’re going to be okay.”

My mom let out a shaky sigh.

“Tomorrow. You can go see them tomorrow.”

AS SOON AS
the sun came up, my mom and I went over. Sra. Rivera answered the door and my mom fell onto her in a crushing hug. “¡Qué horror!” my mom cried into Sra. Rivera’s neck. I crept past the two of them to the bedroom where, through the open doorway, I saw Maribel sitting on the floor, her legs extended in a narrow V. I hesitated for a second, waiting to see if she would look up. I thought I might be able to tell from her expression whether it was okay for me to go in. But she was just moving her feet from side to side, staring absently at her toes. I went and sat down next to her, straightening my legs in the same way, and tapped the side of my sneaker against her foot. I didn’t say anything because there wasn’t anything to say. I just sat, listening to the muffled sounds of our moms from the other room—low voices and sniffling and even, once or twice, what I could have sworn was laughter.

After a long time, Maribel said, “Do you think it was my fault?”

“What happened to your dad?”

She nodded.

I looked at her face. I could see that she was going to live with that question for a long time. I’d been living with it for less than a day myself and it was tearing me up. But I said the only thing I could. “No. It was just what happened. That’s all.”

“But we left México because—”

“No, Maribel. It was just what happened. It had nothing to do with you.”

“Then was it our fault?”

I shook my head.

“But the only reason—”

“Listen to me. You can’t do that. You can’t think like that.”

I was trying to comfort her, but both of us were trying to make sense of it. And sitting there, I started thinking, Who can say whose fault it is? Who can say who set this whole thing in motion? Maybe it
was
Maribel. Maybe it was me. Maybe if I hadn’t left school that day, or if I had answered my stupid phone when it rang, or if I hadn’t fallen asleep in the car on the way home, none of this would have happened. But maybe if our parents hadn’t forbidden us from seeing each other, I wouldn’t have needed to steal her away like I did in the first place. Maybe if my dad had never bought that car, I wouldn’t have had a way to get to the beach. Maybe it was my tía Gloria’s fault for giving my dad the money that allowed him to buy it. Maybe it was my tío Esteban’s fault for being a jerk who she would need to divorce to get that money. You could trace it back infinitely. All these different veins, but who knew which one led to the heart? And then again, maybe it had nothing to do with any of us. Maybe God
had a plan and He knew from the second the Riveras set foot here that He was putting them on a path toward this. Or maybe it really was completely random, just something that happened.

I DIDN
’
T KNOW IT THEN
, how close to the end I was with her. I mean, I should’ve been able to figure out that they’d go back to México. I just didn’t know how soon. I didn’t know that the last time I’d see Maribel would be just a week later, when I’d find her sitting on the curb outside our building next to a full-size mattress.

I went outside and sat next to her, the cement cold through my pants, the ground mostly clear by then except for a few patches of dirty snow.

“What are you doing out here?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“I thought you weren’t allowed outside by yourself.”

“My mom is sleeping.”

I peeked at the mattress. “On the floor?”

“She doesn’t want to sleep in the bed anymore.”

“Oh.”

“We’re leaving tomorrow,” Maribel said.

“Tomorrow?” I said, looking at her.

“My mom wants to go back.”

“So that’s it?”

“She says we have to.”

The melting snow trickled into the street grate next to us. I didn’t know how to comprehend it, really, the fact that she was leaving. I mean, all my life people had been coming and going—neighbors came and left, kids at school showed up and were gone again the next year, but the difference was that none of them had been her.

The green notebook I had gotten so used to seeing her carry around was on top of the mattress. Maribel picked it up and thrust it toward me. “Here,” she said.

“What? Did you write me a letter or something?” I asked. I was only half joking, hoping that maybe she had.

But when I took the notebook and flipped through it, there was nothing but the lists she kept and her notes to herself. I closed the cover and fingered one of the rounded corners, feathered and frayed from overuse. I tried to hand it back to her, but she shook her head.

“You don’t want it?” I asked.

“Not anymore,” she said.

It seemed like a measure of something, evidence of how far she’d come. She hadn’t even talked that first time I’d seen her in the Dollar Tree, hadn’t even made eye contact.

“You could come back one day,” I said. “Or I could come there.”

“Maybe.”

“I could find you.”

Maribel shook her head. “Finding is for things that are lost. You don’t need to find me, Mayor.”

She had her hands on her knees and I touched my fingers to her knuckles, tracing the peaks and valleys, staring at her skin. The only girl who had ever liked me. It wasn’t fair, I kept thinking, even though I had no right to complain. There were worse things, way worse, that happened in the world. If I hadn’t known that before, I knew it now.

They were gone by the time I got up the next morning. I didn’t want to wake up early just to see them leave. I thought it would come pretty close to wrecking me to stand at the front window and watch them—two of them this time—walk out
with their things in their arms. Besides, I could imagine it well enough. Maribel and her mom climbing into a truck similar to the one they had climbed out of seven months earlier. Maribel with sleepy eyes and uncombed hair, sitting cross-legged on the seat, turning around and looking back for me. But it would be okay, I told myself, that she wouldn’t find me. It was like she had said—finding is for things that are lost. We would be thousands of miles apart from now on and we would go on with our lives and get older and change and grow, but we would never have to look for each other. Inside each of us, I was pretty sure, was a place for the other. Nothing that had happened and nothing that would ever happen would make that less true.

I detached from myself. I saw my life as a spectator would, from outside, from a distance so remote that I couldn’t feel any of it. “Señora Rivera,” they said, “we’re sorry. The surgery was more complicated than we anticipated. There was nothing we could do.” The translator at the hospital, a woman about my age with a wide, round face, cried as she delivered the news. I stared at her hands trembling against her chest as she spoke. “Mi más sentido pésame,” she added, on behalf of herself. I reached out and gave her a hug. I saw myself doing this, but I didn’t feel her shaking in my arms. I went to Maribel. I saw myself walking, but I didn’t feel my feet upon the thin carpet. “It’s time to go,” I told her. I saw myself talking, but I didn’t feel the words crawling up through my throat.

“Is the surgery over?” Maribel asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Get your things.”

“Are we going to see him?”

She looked so hopeful, so nervous. She stared, waiting for me to say more. Are we going to see him? Are we going to see him? Had she really asked that? Are we going to see him? My God! I blinked and came back to myself. Are we going to see him? What a simple question to break my heart.

“No,” I said, the word as fragile as an egg.

“Why not?”

My breath rose up through my lungs and emptied out again. Blood swept through my veins. My lips were dry.

“Is he … resting?” she asked.

He was, in a manner of speaking. So I said, “Yes.” Then, “No. No. Maribel, come here.” I pulled her to my hip, feeling her wiry, warm body against mine. “The surgery didn’t go well,” I said.

“Why?”

“He …” I took another breath. “He didn’t make it.”

Maribel closed her eyes, and I tightened my hold on her. “What does that mean?” she asked.

“He—” I started. But I couldn’t go on. There weren’t enough words in Spanish, not enough words in English no matter how many classes I might have gone to, not enough words in any language on earth, not the right words, nothing to match the depths of what I felt. My tongue fumbled against the back of my teeth, trying to give shape and sound to what had happened, struggling to explain, when Maribel opened her eyes and said, “He died?”

When I nodded, she let out a sound like a baby seal. I felt tears gathering at the edges of my eyes. And then, as quickly as a gasp, the world shrank, and I felt the ground open up beneath me.

IF I SLEPT AT ALL
, I slept on the floor. Of course, that first night home I didn’t sleep. I lay on the floor next to the mattress and shivered under a blanket. I stood up in the middle of the night and looked at the bed to see if it had all been a dream. Maribel was tucked into her sleeping bag against the wall, but Arturo wasn’t where he was supposed to be. He wasn’t breathing long, rhythmic breaths, lying on his back. He wasn’t in his undershirt and briefs, the comforter pulled to his chin. He wasn’t there.

I wrapped the blanket around me and stood at the window, my hair loose over my shoulders. If I turned my head enough, I could see the street and the traffic lights and an occasional semi-truck driving through town. I stood at the window for hours that first night. There was no comfort in it. Cold air slipped through the window sash and cut across my skin like razor blades. The caulk Arturo had tried to apply lay splintered in the seams. I stood there and thought about what must have happened, about what it must have been like, although I tried very hard not to imagine what he must have felt. At the hospital, Officer Mora, the same officer I had spoken with at the station months earlier, tried to console me. He had knocked on our apartment door only minutes after Arturo had left. He had told me he was there about Maribel. He had asked, “Do you think it had something to do with that boy, the one you told me about?” I explained that Arturo had gone to find him. “He lives in Capitol Oaks,” I said, and Officer Mora pulled the radio off the belt of his pants. He spoke into it in English, then clipped it back on and said, “I’ll head over there now.” Which is what he and another officer did. Only by the time they arrived, it was too late. They found Arturo on the ground. They called for an ambulance. They found the boy and his father standing outside, a gun still in the father’s hands. All of this Officer Mora told me later, at the hospital. He said that the boy’s father—his name was Leon Miller—was in custody and would be charged. The boy—his name was Garrett—had witnessed the whole thing.

“What happens now?” I asked.

“Mr. Miller will probably be locked up for a long time. We’re trying to determine if the kid was involved, but so far it doesn’t seem like it. We haven’t been able to track down his mother yet,
either.” Officer Mora looked me in the eye. “I’m sorry about before,” he said, “when you came to the station.” His face was grave. “We’re going to get justice for you now, though, I’ll make sure of it.”

But it was only a word—justice. It was only a concept, and it wasn’t enough.

As I stood at the window, I thought, If I saw the boy or his father now, I would take a gun and kill them myself. But of course I didn’t have a gun. I would throw my heavy winter boots at them. I would tear at their flesh with my teeth if I knew it would make a difference. But of course, it wouldn’t make a difference.