Make Your Home Among Strangers (45 page)

And then there's the bigger reason that Victor has stuck in my memory like a splinter. I didn't know it then, replaying and revising our conversation while falling asleep on that couch, but he was the last person to talk to me before this double vision became the
only
way through which I saw anything. My mind defaults to that small conversation with Victor because it's easier than thinking about what happened to Ariel hours later, about the different waves of betrayal that surged in and around me that night and since. I've focused first on someone I never saw again because he's an easier specimen to dissect, an easier result to write up—one where I'm only a small variable, one that my mother isn't part of at all.

 

33

I WISH I COULD SAY
I
woke up with the screams, with the sound of breaking glass, or even before all that—with the rumbling engines of the vans as they pulled up, with the boot stomps charging up and down the block and kicking in doors. But it was a stranger who woke me, a woman dressed in black who was not my mother. I had no idea what time it was, only that I'd been dreaming, I think, because I'd heard someone snoring and thought it was Omar, that I'd slept over at his house and I hadn't yet seen my dad or Leidy or my mom or anyone—that Omar was on the floor next to me and I wanted to pull him to the couch but couldn't move. Then a woman's hands were digging into my shoulders and she was shaking me and yelling in Spanish, They're coming! Get up! Get outside now!

Sleep evaporated from me—of course Omar wasn't on the floor, this wasn't Omar's house, I didn't know whose house it was. I sat up as the woman hurried away, the shapes of people following her out the door. There was no time to change, and then I looked down and remembered that I'd slept in my clothes. The bag I'd brought with me—I stumbled over it as I got up. I slipped on my sneakers and ran with the others into the morning dark.

Later I would learn that the raid lasted less than four minutes. Like the rest of the world, I'd see the picture of a screaming child with an assault rifle in his face, a soldier in riot gear carrying that rifle and demanding the person holding the boy let him go. By the time I made it to the gate of the house, that photo had already been taken by the one cameraman who, like my mom, had stayed across the street that night, and by the time the house's gate clapped shut behind me, the raid was in its final seconds. My mother was still inside Ariel's house, pepper spray searing her eyes as she groped the walls and tried to find her way back to Ariel's bedroom, careening against other screaming people left in the wake of rifle-lugging soldiers, the last few of whom I would see run from the house and into waiting vans. But the very first thing I saw—what I later thought I must've dreamed, because I remember the whole street going quiet when that couldn't be true, because I know he was crying, yelling for help, one small scream among dozens of others—was Ariel in the arms of a woman I'd never seen before, a blanket trailing useless from her side, his legs dangling and his feet hitting her knees as she ran into a van. He looked huge. His terrified wet face shined right in my direction as I stopped in the middle of the street, and I couldn't move, couldn't breathe, because I knew he was big enough, old enough to remember this, that when he would have the nightmares brought on by this moment, I would be in them.

The van door slammed—I thought I saw his skinny leg almost get chopped off by it, but that didn't happen—and I found my voice. Wait, I screamed. Not
No
. Not
Stop
. Not
Ariel
. I screamed
Wait
like there was something I needed to ask him, and I ran after the van like a bus I'd missed. My arms reached out toward it as if that would help, my fingers splayed and clawing. I thought I had a chance to catch up—there was a stop sign at the corner—but clearly they were going to blow through it. The men already in front of me came into focus: other people running, trying to catch the vans and—do what? One of the men veered to the curb and grabbed a metal garbage can, hauled it up over his head and hurled it through the air. It landed near the ignored stop sign, garbage spewing in an arc and more flying out as the can rolled into the intersection. Something smashed into my back as I slowed down, and when I turned around, a couple dozen people ran past me, all of them with anything they could find in their hands. They charged down the street, launching debris at the vans as they sped away, and I leapt sideways, toward the fence surrounding Ariel's house. People poured out from the front door, screaming and cursing, but none of them was my mother. I had no way of knowing she was in there, but I felt it somehow: no other place made sense anymore. A fire—seconds old—burned in another garbage can out front and someone ran up to it and kicked it over. I ducked beneath the carport, looking for another way in. I ran through the yard and around the house, darting between people with their hands digging at their eyes, all of them stumbling around like drunks. Sirens started up a few blocks away, and the yells from the front yard rose higher, sounded more organized. I stepped over a small bike with training wheels, the handlebars bent. A back door hung all the way open, the bottom hinge busted, and I rushed inside.

I'd never been in the house, but what I was seeing was not the way my mom knew it in the months leading up to that moment. Huge gashes at shoulder and waist height tore through the plaster in strips, exposing the wood partitions. The closet door in the room I'd entered stood propped up against another wall, ripped off, the closet's contents gushing onto the floor. A trail of mud and orange liquid—more pepper spray—splattered ahead of me. I followed it deeper into the house. I stepped over plastic toys, slipped on sheets and blankets strewn across the tile. People ran around me yelling,
He's gone! What happened! They kidnapped him! He's gone!
at each other in English and Spanish, moved from room to room with purpose I didn't understand.

—Stop, what the fuck's going on? I screamed to no one and everyone.

Nobody answered, but a bald man with a mustache put his arms around me and squeezed me so tight I couldn't breathe. He wept into my ponytail for a second or two, then ran outside. I pushed past people crying in the living room, all of them jockeying to find the front door, and I moved into a hallway toward what I figured might be Ariel's room.

—Mom, I screamed. Mami! Where are you!

The hallway walls were empty, but on the floor were picture frames: gold rectangles in all different sizes, the pictures in them curling at the corners and covered by fresh shards of glass. I put my hands on the walls to keep from slipping on the orange-slicked floor as I leapt over the piles. Something tore into the heel of my hand—a nail that minutes earlier had held up a frame. I wiped the blood on my jeans and kept moving. I stuck my head into what I saw was the bathroom, pink tiles gleaming, the shower curtain in a heap in the tub, a towel rack busted on one side, hanging straight down and useless.

—Mom, I yelled, the word cracking against the tile.

The next door down: the door itself was
in
the room, resting in a nest of stuffed animals against the room's back wall and blocking the window, the side with the hinges broken into splays of wood jutting from it like palm fronds. Inside, people cried to each other as they stood around what looked like a car—a racecar bed, red and low to the ground, though I could barely see it through everyone's legs. The crowd was two or three deep in some spots, and from its center—from the bed itself—came howls so raw I thought someone must've been shot, that the sirens—much closer now—were an ambulance coming to take this person to a hospital to be sewn up and saved. I stepped over a muddied Donald Duck—thought for a second that someone had ripped off his pants before remembering he didn't wear pants—and pushed into the crowd where the bed met the room's back wall.

My mother was on that racecar bed with her arms wrapped around Caridaylis—who now bolted her screams directly into my mom's shoulder. Caridaylis was pounding on my mother's chest and arms. She punched my mother in the sides, struggled to get free. My mother whispered
Shhhh
and
No no no
and dragged her hand up to Cari's head, her fingers wide apart and tangling in her hair and holding the girl's face in place.

—Ya, ya, she said into her ear. My mother kissed Caridaylis there, on the ear, then on her hair, then her temple, three or four more times at least, rocking her slowly until the girl's fists fell and she pulled them into herself.

—Go away, my mother begged us. Give us a minute. Please, give her
one
minute.

No one moved. No one even backed away. The chaos outside grew louder, pressing up against the window: glass shattering, every dog for miles barking and howling. Caridaylis hiccupped into my mother's shoulder, the soft sound unmuffled only when she turned her face to the side, to the back wall of the room, away from everyone. Only I could see it—her face—from where I stood on the circle's edge up against that wall. A face puffy with sleep and tears, a young face—no makeup at this hour of the morning, no lipstick to make her seem older—her eyes closed, the lids hiding them thin enough to rip. A face smashed up with grief I'd never known. It looked like my mother's face, which hovered close to Cari's in that moment, streaming its own tears over cheeks tinged the orange of pepper spray, over skin rushed old by the weeks of lost sleep. Both of them with their eyes closed like that, their mouths distorted and wet and swollen and open in breathy crying—they could've been related. Cari could've been her daughter.

My mom opened her eyes and I stepped back, feeling caught.

—Jesus I said leave her alone, she hissed.

She clutched Caridaylis to her chest, and her eyes passed over every one of us in that ring of people. They passed right over me. They kept moving until she shook her head no and then looked back down at the top of Cari's head and kissed it. She began rocking her again, cradling her tighter than before, and that squeeze pushed more of Cari's sobs out of her. She flung her arms around my mom's neck and wailed into my mom's collarbone, pulling herself up and leaving behind a patch of wet—saliva, tears, snot—on my mom's chest. My mom closed her eyes and ran her fingers through the length of Cari's hair. Her hand trailed down to the small of Cari's back, rubbed a wide, warm circle there, a comfort she'd given Leidy and me hundreds of times.

—Mami, I whispered.

—Ya, ya, she said to Caridaylis, as if she'd been the one to call for her.

I watched my mom's hand circle, press and circle, my own back cold against the wall.

Someone grabbed my elbow and tugged me toward the door. When my feet didn't budge, the pull came again, harder, then a clamp of fingers into the crook and these hot words from a stranger in my ear: Un poco respeto. No kiss followed it, no reassuring hand to guide me from pain, no sweetness or memory of sweetness. Just the lesson: Have some respect. Have some respect for the dead, grieving mothers.

Another pull, now at my hand, and a shot of pain seared up to my elbow. I brought my hand to my face. The chunk of skin the nail in the hallway wall had torn from the meat of my palm dangled in a strip, still attached to my hand's heel at the very edge of the tear. Blood smudged all the way down my wrist, and the cut was still bleeding. I put the gash in my mouth, thinking I could flip the strip back over it, press it into place with my tongue, set it up to heal that way. But at the taste of iron and salt, my teeth clenched down—an unknown reflex—and bit the sliver at the spot where it clung, the top teeth and the bottom teeth finally meeting as they severed it completely.

*   *   *

In the years since that night, I've reimagined what I did next every which way. In some daydreams, I ignore the people tugging my arm and tell them to get the fuck away from me, that that woman holding Caridaylis is
my
mother and I will not be leaving without her this time. In others I stand against the wall long enough that she sees me again, then she opens her arms and we all cry there, on that ridiculous racecar bed, her real daughter and her adopted one merging into one girl she could admire for a whole host of reasons. (In no version does Leidy show up, which reflects the real truth of that early morning.) My leaving had allowed for someone new to come in, and I'd been wrong all that time in thinking it was Ariel. The real replacement was right there in my mom's arms: someone she could be proud of, someone whose decisions she understood and would've made herself had it been her life, a daughter who'd taken on more than anyone thought possible but who'd done it through no fault of her own, who was blameless. My hand stopped bleeding, and there was nothing left for me to do except for what I did: I walked away, back to where I'd come from, grabbed my bag, then left that house and eventually that city, kept leaving, year after year, until where I was from became, each time, the last place I left, until home meant an address, until home meant only as much as my memory of that morning would betray.

*   *   *

Leidy never forgave me for leaving my mother there. She told me much later that she'd spent most of the night driving around, debating whether or not to take Dante to Roly's house for one of those surprise visits Roly hated before remembering that her last attempt (on Dante's first birthday, weeks earlier) had resulted in Roly's mother threatening to call the police. Eventually, the smell of shit worked its magic again, making its way to the front seat, and the thought of changing Dante's diaper in the backseat of the car rather than in the small comfort of the apartment made her turn around and head home. She'd slept through the raid, through almost all of its aftermath, only waking up when I got home hours later, after walking in the opposite direction everyone else headed until the sun was high enough that I wasn't afraid to turn back.