The Book of Unknown Americans: A novel (29 page)

I leaned against the glass until daybreak, until the sky began to lighten over the earth. When it did, I thought, Maybe it’s over now. I turned back toward the bed to see if maybe, just maybe, he was stirring, stretching his arms overhead and rubbing his eyes. To see if he would swing his legs over the side of the mattress and stand up and wander to the bathroom and shave his face, the smell of soap wafting out to the hallway. But when I turned, there was only the sheet thrown back, the mattress still depressed from where he had last lain.

CELIA CAME OVER
the morning after—everything to me now was either before or after, the way that previously my life had been divided by the accident—and sobbed into my shoulder. She apologized over and over, and though at first I mistook her apologies for condolences, I realized soon enough that she believed she had a role in what had happened—or maybe that Mayor did—and I had to tell her, “No. Stop. Please.” Because while it was true that Mayor had taken Maribel away, he hadn’t done this.

Still, Celia kept coming every day, sometimes twice a day. She stayed for hours at a time. She brought empanadas and sugared breads wrapped in tinfoil, arroz con pollo and chicken soup packaged in plastic containers. She brought brown paper bags filled with clothes we didn’t need and could barely use. She brought the prayer notes from Mass where Arturo had been listed that first Sunday in the bulletin.

“Father Finnegan did a beautiful service,” Celia reported. “He asked if there was anything he could do. He wanted me to remind you that his door is open. If you want to talk.”

“I know.”

Celia put her hand on mine and left the prayer notes on the counter.

On Monday, a woman from the hospital called to ask what I wanted to do with the body. The question was so absurd it made me laugh.

“What do I want to do with it?” I said. “I want to bring it back to life.”

When I told this to Celia, she laughed, too. “Of course! What else would you want to do with it?”

“Exactly!”

“What did she say then?”

“She said she was sorry and that what she meant was whether I knew where I would like to bury him. So I said, ‘I would not like to bury him!’ ”

“Oh, Alma.”

“What questions!” I said, shaking my head.

Celia twisted the coffee mug in her hands. “But you’ll have to make a decision, won’t you?”

“I want him buried in México,” I said. I didn’t tell her that I
wanted him in the Panteón Municipal, where we could celebrate him on el Día de Muertos. I wanted to bake pan de muerto and prepare calabaza en tacha for him. I wanted to make an ofrenda with the cempasúchil flowers that grew in our yard. I wanted to put candles on his tomb. I wanted to honor him. I wanted him near me.

Celia said, “Of course he should be buried in México.”

“But the woman from the hospital said it would cost five thousand dollars to send his body there.”

“Five thousand dollars! Qué escándalo. What are they going to do? Build a house around him?”

“I told the woman, ‘Thank you, but I’ll carry him to México myself if I have to.’ ”

Celia nodded.

“He has to go back with me. I need him—” The inside of my nose, the whole inside of my face, burned. I clenched my teeth until I could go on. “I need him with me.”

Celia looked at me sadly. “So you’re going back?”

“I don’t know what else to do. We’re not even in status. The police know that now. They’re going to send us back anyway if we don’t leave ourselves.”

“Where will you go?”

“We still have our house. My parents have been checking on it since we left. They’re waiting for us.”

“And then?”

“I don’t know. I can barely even believe that the days will go on. It seems like it should all stop somehow.”

“But it doesn’t,” Celia said.

“No,” I said. “For us it doesn’t.”

I WELCOMED VISITORS
. They made the passage of time tolerable. Gustavo Milhojas came over with a bouquet of flowers in his arms.

“They’re marigolds,” he said, handing them to me. “The girl at the flower shop said they were the right kind.”

I raised them to my face, inhaling their grassy scent.

“Come in,” I said.

Nelia Zafón stopped by with a greeting card that had an illustration of seagulls flying over a crucifix.

“I saw this in Walmart yesterday and thought of you,” she said. “They have a good selection of cards in Spanish.”

I opened it and read: “Con el pésame más profundo y las bendiciones de Dios por la pérdida de alguien tan querido para ti.”

“Come in,” I said.

Micho Alvarez knocked on our door, balancing a photograph on his open palm.

“I meant to give this to you sooner,” he said. “I had it developed a while ago. It’s from Christmas.” He handed me a photograph of Maribel, Arturo, and me, smiling in our winter coats in front of the Toros’ door. Looking at it, the most exquisite pain seared across my chest.

“Come in,” I said.

Fito arrived and stood in the doorway, stricken, the skin on his face sagging. I waited for him to speak and when he didn’t, I said, “It’s okay.”

Quisqueya never stopped by, but I saw her on the balcony one morning and raised a hand in greeting. She waved back, but hurried into her apartment. I understood. For her and any others who didn’t come over, I understood. They simply didn’t know what to say.

José Mercado and his wife, Ynez, came over without anything but condolences, and after I invited them in, they talked for an hour about what a good man Arturo was and how much they had liked him and how he had helped José carry paper bags of groceries into their apartment on more than one occasion. I hadn’t known anything about the groceries, but I wasn’t surprised, either. It sounded just like Arturo.

“Not that he was a saint,” I told them. “He never cleaned his mustache clippings out of the sink.”

“That sounds familiar,” Ynez said, poking her husband in the side. She had long gray hair that she wore in a low bun. Her face was gentle and kind, pleated with wrinkles.

“Arturo was stubborn, too,” I said. “He threw his back out once trying to raise cinder blocks over his head in a contest with his friends. This was in Pátzcuaro. I kept telling him he was lifting too many at once. ‘It’s too heavy,’ I said. But he wouldn’t listen to me. He just wanted to prove he could do it.”

“Men,” Ynez said, nodding in amusement.

“You’re more stubborn than me!” José said.

Ynez looked at me. “You see? Stubborn even in his belief that he’s not stubborn.”

I smiled.

And in this way, the days passed.

But when no one was there, no one but Maribel and me, the days vibrated with sadness. I had called Phyllis, the school district translator, and told her that I was keeping Maribel home with me. “I don’t want her out of my sight,” I said.

“Is she ever coming back to the school?” Phyllis asked.

“No.”

“Her teacher will be sorry to hear that.”

“I’ll find something for her in México,” I said. “I know it won’t be the same. But I’m not giving up on her.”

And because through the phone I could feel Phyllis’s sympathy, I added, “I promise.”

“She did well here,” Phyllis said. “Maribel’s a different girl now than when you arrived.”

“We’re both different now,” I said.

When no one came over, Maribel and I watched television, hours and hours of it, finding small comfort in its ability to numb, to keep us from losing our minds. And yet, sometimes out of nowhere, Maribel asked where he was, or when he was getting home from work, and I had to remind her, “No, hija. No.” I would hold her hands in mine and explain everything again. I hugged her and let her cry as often as she wanted. Once, because repeating it was too much to bear, I let impatience get the best of me. I snapped, “Stop asking me that!” She looked at me so woefully that I collapsed in shame and said “I’m sorry” again and again, repeating it until I hoped maybe she believed me.

When I wasn’t watching television or receiving guests, I spent time packing, preparing for the journey back to Pátzcuaro. I stood in our bedroom and looked at Arturo’s clothes folded in neat towers on the floor. I took his shirts and his underwear, his socks and undershirts, and stuffed them all into plastic trash bags. I held up the one extra pair of jeans he had besides the ones he had been wearing that night. These were Wrangler, and he rarely wore them because the others were Levi’s, which he claimed were better, but he’d kept the Wranglers for years anyway. They were stiff and smelled of detergent. I shoved them in the bag. I took his razor from the shower floor, bits of his black hair still caked between the blades. I took his toothbrush from
the sink counter and sucked on the bristles, trying to find the taste of him, but there was only the flavor of watery mint toothpaste. From behind the faucet, I took the scissors he used to trim his mustache and slipped them into the bag, too. I pulled the sheets off the bed with the idea that I could gather up the imprint of him and save it. I thought, I can unfurl the sheets on our old bed at home. I can lie in the creases formed by his body. I can sleep with him again. I plucked his used toothpicks out of the trash and clutched them in my hand before dropping them all into a bag. I watched them scatter and sink into the crevices of the things I had already packed. And then I came across his hat, the cowboy hat that he’d worn for almost as long as I’d known him. At the hospital, they had given it to me when we left. I remembered when he had bought it, how proud he had been because it was a good hat, finely woven and crisp. Now it was soft, and dirt had settled into the notches where the pale straw fibers crossed each other, especially in the crown. Parts of the brim were frayed. I put it over my face like a mask, feeling the sweatband, soft as felt, against my cheeks. I took a deep breath. And there he was. The smell of him. I closed my eyes and felt myself sway. There he was. ¡Dios! I put the hat on my head.

I learned something about grief. I had heard people say that when someone dies, it leaves a hole in the world. But it doesn’t, I realized. Arturo was still everywhere. Something would happen and I would think, Wait until I tell Arturo. I kept turning around, expecting to see him. If he had disappeared completely, I thought, it might be easier. If I had no knowledge that he had ever existed, no evidence that he was ever a part of our lives, it might have been bearable. And how wrong that sounded: part
of our lives. As if he was something with boundaries, something that hadn’t permeated us, flowed through us and in us and all around us. I learned something about grief. When someone dies, it doesn’t leave a hole, and that’s the agony.

Two days before the scheduled burial, I started packing everything in the kitchen. I had spoken to someone at a funeral home that partnered with the hospital and confirmed yes, we would lay Arturo to rest there. For a week, his body had been in the morgue, waiting to be taken
someplace.
The burial felt wrong, but what could I do? I didn’t have the money to fly him back. I had no way of getting it. I called my parents, who cried and cursed the heavens when they heard the news, but they had nothing either. I was told I couldn’t drive him because it was against the law and the authorities would take him at the border rather than let his body cross. I didn’t know any other way to get him from here to there. It would have to be this. Arturo would be buried on Thursday morning at the All Saints Cemetery. He would be lowered into the ground in a casket I could barely afford, even though I had instructed the funeral home to use the most inexpensive one they could. “There’s no shame in a pine box,” I told them. In fact, I thought Arturo, who had been so humble, would have appreciated it.

I put most of the silverware, loose and clattering, in bags. I packed the comal, the escobeta brush, the plastic baggies filled with spices we had brought, the molcajete and pestel. Except for the coffee mugs, which I thought we would use until the very end, I packed every cup. And then I started with the dishes.

I pulled the top plate from the stack. It was solid green and glazed with a clear lacquer. I held it in my hands and remembered when we had come, how carefully I had set the plates in
the cabinet once they were unpacked. How carefully I had set up our lives here. How naïve I had been to think I could control any of it.

And then I let the plate drop on the floor. It plummeted straight down from my open hands and landed with a crash, shards of ceramic bursting apart and skittering across the floor.

“What was that?” Maribel asked from the other room.

I didn’t answer. I took another plate from the cabinet and dropped it, too, watching it bloom at my feet. Then another. Then another. I thought suddenly, What is the meaning of all these
things
? All these bags and bags I’ve been packing? We could take everything we have with us. We could take every single thing that every single person in the world has ever had. But none of it would mean anything to me. Because no matter how much I took and no matter how much I had for the rest of my life, I didn’t have
him
anymore. I could have piled everything from here straight to heaven. None of it was him.