Make Your Home Among Strangers (4 page)

My knock on the apartment door was answered only by the suddenly-gone sound of the television as someone on the other side muted the volume, pretending no one was home. I heard Dante's baby-quack, then a sharp
Shh.
I'd planned to yell
Surprise!
from outside the door just as it opened, but instead, after knocking two more times, I had to say, You know I can hear you guys. It's me.

Then, a few seconds later, Me as in Lizet?

I heard the chain slide back, then hands moving down to the other locks. My sister opened the door, Dante on the floor behind her.

—What the fuck are
you
doing here? she said.

Her emphasis should've been on the word
fuck
, or maybe on
here
, but not on
you
. She'd been expecting someone else? But seeing how much she looked exactly like herself—her smooth cheeks with only the left one dimpled, her almost-black eyes and their long lashes, her dark and falsely blond-streaked hair pulled up in the same loose, messy bun she always wore around the house to avoid denting her blowout—made me so happy that I didn't think to ask what she meant.

—Leidy! I screamed. Oh my god, Dante! He's so big!

—Lizet? my mom said from somewhere behind the door, which Leidy still hadn't opened all the way. I pushed it slowly with my whole hand just in time to see my mother rushing at me from the couch, already crying.

—Pero niña, she said, her hands in the air like someone getting called on stage for
The Price Is Right
, que tú haces aquí? You're supposed to be at school!

I didn't even recognize the squeal of my voice when I said, Mom!

She coiled her arms around my neck, latched her hand to the back of my head and pulled, buried my face in her shoulder. Her own neck was damp—wet from sweat or tears—and the salt from either or both met my lips.

—You're not supposed to be here, she said, then said again.

She swayed our hug side to side. Her fingers fanned open to cradle my head, and one of her rings got tangled in my hair, tugging my scalp. Instead of
ouch
, I said, I know, I know.

Behind her, the TV glowed with the still-silent news, which wasn't normally on at that hour. On the screen was the dirty, tanned face of a little boy not looking at the camera: my first glimpse of Ariel Hernandez. A young woman was dragging a wet towel up and down and across his cheeks. Without me knowing, without me even being aware of the race, he'd beaten me to Miami by a few hours. I looked away from the TV and over Mami's shoulder back to Leidy, whose hand still rested on the doorframe, her mouth a half smile.

—But – here I am, I said. Surprise, happy Thanksgiving.

—Get inside, come come, Mom said, ending our hug by pulling my arms, her rings taking with them several strands of my hair. You must be starving, que quieres?

She hurried toward the kitchen and began listing what was in there—did I want a snack like crackers with cream cheese and guayaba, or should she microwave the leftover rice and chicken, or some plátanos, or she could also slice up the rest of an avocado that was going to go bad any minute now so
someone
should eat it. The stream of options trailed away as Leidy swooped down and grabbed Dante, who let out a sharp, brief scream, then went silent. He raised his hand and smacked Leidy flat on the mouth. She seized his arm and pinned it to his side with one hand, and he turned and gawked at me, his mouth open but grinning, as Leidy, left with nothing else to do, dragged my bag in from the hallway.

*   *   *

After searching for soap to wash my face in a bathroom that felt more foreign than the massive one in the dorm, I eventually emerged from that white-tiled closet and sat next to my mom on the couch. A plate of cold chicken and rice waited for me on the glass coffee table as the news about Ariel played in front of us. I told my mom detail after detail of my trip, all the planning that went into it, every word of my story bouncing back to me off the side of her face.

—It's a Thanksgiving miracle, Mami said, echoing the news anchors.

But she was talking to the TV. She turned to me only during commercials, staring at me while I ate, her mouth wrinkled with a sort of regret.

—I was looking forward to getting you at the airport your first time home! she said during a local commercial for Mashikos Menswear. And during the next commercial—this one ringing with the familiar jingle for Santa's Enchanted Forest—she said, I was gonna bring you flowers, that first time! You stole that from me!

I pushed my food around my plate.

The jingle played on, and over it she said, How could you keep this from me all these weeks? All this time you've been lying.

—I wasn't lying, I just didn't tell you –

She shushed me as the news came back on. The coverage seemed to reset her reaction to me: she forgot she was shocked I was there each time the screen flashed back to the live shot of the house belonging to the relatives who'd claimed Ariel—a house not two blocks from our building. Leidy tried to ask me if I'd seen the news truck when the shuttle dropped me off—I hadn't—but Mom silenced us with a palm in the air before I could answer. So during the next commercial, I invented a story about my night in Pittsburgh that involved a sad Steelers fan and a prostitute in the room next to mine, hoping it would keep my mom's attention.

—I couldn't sleep thanks to the crazy sex noises and all the crying, I said.

But she cut off my mocking of the groans I'd supposedly heard.

—You think it's funny? A place like that, you could've gotten raped. You know that, right?

I half scoffed a
Mom, please
but she was glaring at me. I pulled my legs up and hugged my knees to my chest, and she turned back to the screen, the corner of the nail on her middle finger rooting around her bottom teeth for leftovers. Around that finger, she said, It's like you don't think about things, like about anyone but yourself. Like you forget how bad the world is.

Leidy gave a collaborative grunt, and I thought about confessing my lie to undo the very unintentional direction my story had taken the conversation. I hadn't really heard anything while trying to fall asleep the night before in Pittsburgh—just sirens outside, cars rushing down the street below, nothing I wasn't used to from home—but I didn't know how to tell them, without it sounding like bragging, that once I figured out how to turn off the disco ball overhead and got used to the weird staleness of the sheets, I fell asleep watching myself breathe in the mirror on the ceiling, my too-long hair fanned around my head like a dark cloud, amazed at where my own planning had landed me.

Leidy paced around the living room with Dante in her arms, bouncing him in an effort to make him fall asleep but shouting questions at the TV at the same time: But this Ariel kid, why is he famous? So okay, he just got here but so
what
, take a number, bro. I mean, what makes
him
so special?

—His mother died, my mother said, then kept saying: a new chant, this one to the TV, to the bare walls of her apartment.

She grabbed the remote and scanned up a few channels, but every one of them ran the same footage on a loop, my mom engaging with it through a one-sided call-and-response that reminded me of the very few times we'd gone to Mass. They'd show the shot of the inner tube, and she'd whisper, His mother died. The snippet from an interview with the fisherman who'd first spotted him: His
mother
died. The beachside reporter (why was he even
on
the beach when they'd brought Ariel in hours earlier?), foam-topped microphone in hand: His. Mother.
DIED
.

When the Spanish-language news showed, for the eighth time, Ariel's hand being waved for him by his uncle's grip as they left the hospital that afternoon, I asked my mom if she was trying to tell me something. She said to the TV, Tell you what? and so I stood up and walked away—she yelled to my back, Well I'm glad you're home even though you lied to me!—and went to what I thought of as my sister's room. It was technically
our
room, but I hadn't slept there enough nights to really feel that, and I didn't have a real bed; we had left it in our house, knowing it wouldn't fit in the new room. I'd be sleeping on the pull-out sofa that separated Dante's crib from my sister's mattress.

I pushed a pile of blue and white baby clothes and blankets to one side of the sofa and lugged my suitcase up onto the other, unzipping it just as Leidy came in behind me.

—We could've cleaned if we knew you were gonna be here.

—No, I know, don't even worry about it, I said. Did you guys do Thanksgiving dinner?

She lowered Dante into the crib and handed him a stuffed bunny, the long ear of which he shoved in his mouth. I opened the top drawer of the dresser and tried to make space for my stuff.

—Sort of. It's Dante's first Thanksgiving so yeah, we made like a chicken and some mashed potatoes or whatever, and Mom said grace.

She sat down on the floor next to the pile of baby stuff and pulled a shirt loose from it, then folded the shirt into a tiny square.

—But this stupid kid on the news! Mami couldn't stop watching it, and so I was like
hello?
So in the end dinner sucked.

I should've asked for details about the day then, for more about Ariel Hernandez, or about Dante's dad—if he'd called or been over—or about our own dad (same questions), but I thought I already knew the answers. As recent as the end of our parents' marriage was, Leidy and I were not at all shocked that they were no longer together. They got married a couple months after Mami found out she was pregnant with Leidy, and they each blamed the other for having to drop out of high school so close to finishing. They should've left each other dozens of times before that summer, maybe right after my dad refused to buy Mami a plane ticket to Cuba to see the dying mother she hated for disowning her from afar after getting pregnant before marriage; or later, when I started middle school and Mami became a Jehovah's Witness for a few intense months and bullied my dad to convert or else she'd take us away and go live with my tía Zoila. Because my parents married as teenagers, their relationship sort of froze there, stuck at that age where every fight is The End and probably should be. We were known on our Hialeah block as the family whose arguments spilled into the front lawn. Leidy and I knew to listen for the words
Are you fucking crazy, Lourdes?
—which meant: time to go outside, get in the grass on our hands and knees, and look for Mom's wedding ring. They fought constantly, more so in the couple years leading up to that fall and mostly about Leidy's pregnancy and her boyfriend's refusal to marry her—the exact inverse of the choice my dad had made when he got my mom pregnant. It should've been a family disaster except that it coincided with me announcing that I'd applied to out-of-state schools months earlier without their knowledge and would be leaving at the end of the summer. Which is why my father decided to leave, too: he no longer saw the point, he said, of being around women clearly set on behaving as if he hadn't stuck around in the first place.

The air conditioner kicked on, sending a buzz through the window trapping it in place. It jarred me to hear an AC in the winter, and the whole room, with me in it, seemed like a huge freaking mistake. I felt stupid for even wanting the attention I thought I'd get by coming back. The processed air hit me and I shivered. If I was going to be invisible and miserable and cold, I could've stayed at school, saved myself the money. I kept unpacking my suitcase.

—Why did you not tell me you were coming? Leidy said.

I shrugged. I said, I wanted it to be a surprise.

—So nobody – like nobody
here –
knows you were doing this? Not even Omar?

—No one, I said.

She sucked her teeth and stood up, a tiny tower of folded baby clothes in her hands. And you're supposed to be the smart one? she said.

Her face suddenly next to mine at the dresser, I said, What the fuck is your problem?

—Mom's right, something could've happened to you and who would've even known?

—Oh come
on.

—I'm just saying you should've told me. I can keep a secret, okay? I mean, at least I would've kept her away from the TV so she could enjoy how you showed up here. Now she's like all
distracted
.

I crammed my underwear into my half of the dresser drawer, then went back to my suitcase for more clothes.

—Look, maybe you know how to buy a plane ticket on a computer to go wherever, but that doesn't make you somebody that can just be all like whatever about it. That's not what being independent means.

—Okay Leidy, I get it.

—I'm not trying to say anything, okay? I just get why Mami's pissed, because honestly, you had
me
you could've told, and for like a whole twenty-four hours no one knew where you were, and just because we didn't know that we didn't know doesn't mean it's all fine now, okay?

—Fine.
God
, I said.

I slammed the drawer shut. She opened it back up slowly and tucked the baby's things next to mine.

—That's it, all right? I'm not gonna say anything else about it. I just feel like somebody should say it, and it's not gonna be Mami right now.

She stood by the dresser and raised a hand to her mouth, chipped away at her nail polish with her teeth.

I sat down on the sofa bed, my arms folded across my body. Beyond us, in the living room we could see if we poked our heads out from the bedroom door, the TV screamed with an interview of some government person saying Ariel's arrival could turn into a political issue, and our mother screamed back,
Political
issue? Is this guy serious? His
mother
is
dead
!