The Book of Unknown Americans: A novel (16 page)

“¡Viva México!” Micho shouted from the corner of the room.

“¡México!” Arturo said.

“¡Panamá!” my dad said.

“¡Presente!” my mom said, and everyone laughed.

“¡Nicaragua!” Benny shouted. “¡Presente!”

“¡Puerto Rico!” José said.

“¡Presente!” Ynez and Nelia chimed at the same time.

“¡Venezuela!” shouted Quisqueya. “¡Presente!”

“¡Paraguay!” said Fito. “¡Presente!”

Then “Feliz Navidad” came on the radio.

“This goddamn song again!” my dad said.

“Oh, come on!” my mom said. She started singing along and swishing her hips while my dad eyed her skeptically.

“What?” she said. “You don’t want to dance with me? Fine. Benny, ven.”

And Benny took my mom by the hand, spinning her around.

Ynez and José joined in, José leaning on his walker while he rocked back and forth, and Micho pulled Nelia up off the couch into a twirl. Almost everyone in the room started singing along and eventually my dad put his drink down and cut in on Benny and my mom, sliding his arm around her waist.

“Now this is more like it!” my dad yelled above the noise. “This is like the Christmases I knew!”

I took the dancing as the opening I’d been waiting for and stole Maribel away so that I could give her my present. We sat at the end of the hallway outside my bedroom where no one could see us, and I handed her the square lumpy package I had wrapped.

“You can open it,” I said. “It’s for you.” I felt nervous all of a sudden, like maybe it was too much or maybe she wouldn’t like it.

“It’s light,” she said, and I nodded, anxious for her to get on with it.

She pried off a piece of tape and folded open the tissue paper at one end. She held it up at eye level and squinted inside.

“It’s a scarf,” I said before she’d even pulled it out all the way. “It’s alpaca.”

She unfolded the whole thing and laced her fingers through the yarn fringe at the ends.

“Do you like it?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“I picked out a red one so that it would match your sunglasses.”

“It’s so soft.”

“It’s alpaca,” I said again, like I was suddenly some kind of alpaca salesman or something.

She wrapped the scarf around her neck.

“I’m sorry I haven’t seen you,” I said. “My dad grounded me.”

“What is that?” she asked.

“It means he’s not letting me go anywhere besides school. Whatever. It’s not a big deal. I just wanted you to know why I haven’t been around.”

She nodded.

“I wanted you to know that it isn’t that I don’t
want
to see you.”

“Okay.”

Then, there in the shadows of the hallway, I kissed her. This strange electricity shot through my body. My first real kiss. Her skin was warm, and she smelled like laundry detergent and frost, as fresh as the winter air. She pulled away first, but she peeked at me and smiled. All I wanted was to do it again—to kiss her, to inhale her, to feel her mouth against mine. I was fuzzy with the
thought of it, like I’d somehow slipped underwater. But then, from the living room, my dad started singing along in English: “I want to wish you a Merry Christmas from the bottom of my heart,” warbling like a yodeler on “heart,” and Maribel giggled and the moment passed.

I came here in 1972 because I wanted to be a boxer like the great Juan Carlos Giménez, who was from Paraguay. Like me. There was a trainer in Washington, D.C., who was good, who was very good, legendary, and who specialized in flyweight fighters. Which is what I was. Skinny but strong. I wrote the trainer a letter. Sully Samuelson. What a name! And he wrote me back. A letter signed with his name. He told me he wasn’t taking on new fighters but that if I was ever in D.C. I should look him up. Maybe he assumed that because I was all the way over in Paraguay, the chances weren’t good I would ever be in D.C. Maybe it was just a bluff, is what I’m saying. But I thought if I could just get a meeting with him, if I could show him what I was capable of, that I was going to be the next Giménez, there was no way he wouldn’t want to work with me. So I went to his gym, and every day I bounced around, pow pow pow, light as air on my feet, and then, boom! a hook you never saw coming. I wore red satin shorts and the best pair of boxing shoes I could afford. I was waiting for Sully to take notice, to see me and recognize that I was a champion. But after a few days, nothing. And when I finally asked one of the other guys about him, I found out that Sully had moved to Vermont, which was a place I’d never heard of back then. Vermont? What is that?

I thought I would go. ¡Vermont, jaha! But I only made it as far as Delaware. I ran out of money on the way, so I got off here and
found a job laying blacktop for a few days, trying to earn enough for another bus ticket. It was supposed to be temporary, but I was sealcoating the parking lot of this building and the landlord, he used to stand out on the balcony, smoking a cigar while I worked. Name was Oscar. Turned out he was heading back to Montevideo, where he was from, and the guy who owned the building back then wanted him to find a replacement to manage the property. For some reason he thought I could do the job. “No way,” I told him. “I’m gonna be a boxer!” He took one look at me and laughed. “You?” he said. I challenged him to an arm wrestling match. I said if I beat him, he had to give me the money for the ticket to Vermont, but if he beat me, I’d take the building manager job instead.

Well, here I am. No shame in it.

Who comes to the United States and ends up in Delaware? I for one never thought I’d be here. But I’ve been surprised. It’s popular with the Latinos. And all because of the mushroom farms over in Pennsylvania. Half the mushrooms in the country are grown there. Back in the seventies, they used to hire Puerto Ricans to harvest everything, but now it’s the Mexicans. And they used to set up the workers with housing, too. Shitty housing with rats as big as rabbits, boarded-up windows, no hot water. After Reagan’s amnesty deal, the workers started bringing their families up from México. They didn’t put their wives and children up in that shitty housing, though. They found other places to live. Places like Delaware. It’s cheaper than Pennsylvania. And no sales tax. We have all the Spanish supermarkets now, and the school district started those English programs. I know some people here think we’re trying to take over, but we just want to be a part of it. We want to have our stake. This is our home, too.

I like it here. I started off as the manager, but now I own this building. Bought it out almost ten years ago after working jobs on the side, saving up. I got a good deal. The area is changing, though. A clash of cultures. I try to make this building like an island for all of us washed-ashore refugees. A safe harbor. I don’t let anyone mess with me. If people want to tell me to go home, I just turn to them and smile politely and say, “I’m already there.”

I hadn’t uttered a word to anyone about finding the boy with Maribel, but ever since it happened, I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it, either. I was suffocating under the weight of it, and I was furious at myself for letting him get to her, for creating an opening just big enough for him to slip through and find her.

So finally, just after the new year, I did what I should have done in the beginning—I went to the police. In México the police were corrupt and often powerless. No one trusted them. But maybe here, I thought, they would be different.

The police station was a brick and glass building with an American flag cemented in the ground out front. Inside, it smelled of cleaning solvents. I strode up to a window behind a black counter where a woman in uniform sat, turning the pages of a magazine.

“Me llamo Alma Rivera,” I said when I got to the counter, shouting so she could hear me through the glass.

The woman held up one finger, got off her stool, and disappeared into another room. When she came back, a male officer with a chiseled face and a cleft in his chin accompanied her. He stood behind the glass and said in Spanish, “I’m Officer Mora. Can we help you with something?”

“I’m Alma Rivera,” I shouted again in Spanish.

“I can hear you fine. How can we help you?”

I took a deep breath. “I’m here about a boy.”

Officer Mora nodded. I waited for him to invite me behind the glass so we could talk in private, but he simply stood, waiting for me to continue. There was no one else in the lobby, so I went on. “I came home one day and a boy was with my daughter.”

“How old is your daughter?”

“Fifteen.”

“And the boy?”

“He’s her age, I think.”

“So a teenage boy was with your teenage daughter?” Officer Mora said.

“He had her against the wall of our building.”

“Did he assault her?” Officer Mora asked.

“He had her against the wall,” I said again.

“Did you see him punch her or kick or physically harm her in any way?”

“No. But the only reason he didn’t was because I got there.”

“Did he say something that made you think that?”

“No, but he came for my daughter,” I said again, frustration burning my throat.

“Maybe she’s friends with him.”

“No.”

“In our experience parents don’t always know what their teenaged children are up to.”

“You don’t understand …,” I started. I had the urge to tell him about her brain injury, but I didn’t want his pity. I only wanted his help.

Officer Mora planted his hands on the counter behind the window. “What I’m hearing is that you came home and found your daughter with a boy her age. That’s all you know. Is she a pretty girl?”

“He looked at us when we went to the gas station,” I said.

“Who? The boy?”

“He was staring at my daughter.”

“Staring at her? Señora Rivera, that’s not criminal.”

“He had her shirt up,” I said. Shame had kept me from revealing it sooner. I didn’t want anyone, not even the police, to envision Maribel that way.

Officer Mora’s expression changed. “When?”

“When I found them the other day.”

“You saw him pull her shirt up?”

“No, but—”

“So she might have done that herself?”

“She’s not like that!”

Officer Mora rubbed the back of his neck, rolled his head around once, and took a deep breath. “Señora,” he said through the glass, “this is a police station. We don’t deal with teenage relationships here. Unless he assaulted her in some way, or unless he made some kind of verbal threat, there’s nothing we can do.”

I stared at him in disbelief. “I thought you would help her.”

Officer Mora sighed, as if it were a great exertion to have to deal with me any longer. He said, “We can’t protect her from a boy who, honestly, probably just has a crush on her. That’s your job.”

In English, he said something to the woman officer, who shook her head before flipping another page of her magazine. I was a fool, I realized, to believe that they would care about any of this. I tightened my lips and straightened my purse strap on my shoulder with all the righteousness that I could muster. Neither Officer Mora nor the woman seemed to notice.

“Gracias,” I said sarcastically.

“De nada,” Officer Mora said in earnest, as if he believed he had done his job.

I SHOULD HAVE
gone home. But anger roiled in my belly, and after I boarded the bus back to the apartment that day I was seized by another idea. Fito had said the name of the neighborhood where the boy lived once. Capitol Oaks, wasn’t it? If the police weren’t going to help me, I thought, I would go over there myself.

I walked up the aisle and tapped the bus driver on the shoulder. In my best English I said, “Capitol Oaks?” He nodded and said something I didn’t understand, but I waited behind him, hoping that when we got to the right stop, he would signal for me to get off.

As the bus drove on, I pulled my dictionary from my purse to look up the words I wanted. I hadn’t learned them yet in my English class—I had been to a few more since the first time—so I would have to teach them to myself. I looked up dejar. Leave. Sola. Alone. Leave alone. Leave alone, I said in my head. I practiced the words, mouthing them silently, until the driver stopped the bus and fluttered his hand over his shoulder at me. “Capitol Oaks,” he said.

As soon as I got off the bus and turned around, I saw it: a neighborhood that was probably only two kilometers from us, a place I must have passed a dozen times and never noticed. Capitol Oaks, with a sign screwed into a low brick wall at the entrance, half covered by weeds.

I crossed myself and whispered, “Dios me lleve,” then clutched my purse and walked past the sign to the rows and rows of ranch-style houses. The yards were dry and overgrown, and
lighted reindeer and inflated snow globes from Christmas still littered some of the front lawns. In México, Arturo had built our house before we married. He and some friends had dug a plot of earth with shovels and pickaxes. For weeks, they had poured cement and laid rebar. They had stood in a line that stretched from a pile of cinder blocks to the foundation, heaving each block from one man to the next until Arturo, who was nearest to the house, laid it. Until they had laid enough blocks that they rose high enough to call them walls. Into the hollows of one of the cinder blocks, the one centered just above the front door, Arturo placed a print of San Martín Caballero encased in a plastic bag, to bring us luck. Here, on the house fronts, the paint was peeling and the porches sagged. Pickup trucks and two-door cars were parked in the driveways. I could feel, like some sort of mist that hung in the air, that I was unwelcome.

I walked for ten minutes, maybe more. There was no sign of the boy nor of anyone. Just a chill in the air, an arc of gray sky overhead. This wasn’t going to work. There was no one here but me. And how did I think I was going to find him anyway without an address? I was heading back toward the entrance when behind me I heard a sound.

I turned. And there, walking down the driveway of a brown clapboard ranch-style house with rusted gutters and a storm door askew on its hinges, I saw him—the boy—dragging a trash can down the cracked driveway.