The Book of Unknown Americans: A novel (30 page)

Calmly, I pulled the rest of the plates out one by one. I dropped them all and watched the shards spin across the floor. I did this not in anger, but in the spirit of release. Vaguely, I noticed Maribel standing at the edge of the show. I heard her asking questions. I kept going.

After I dropped the last of them—six in all—I looked up.

“Why did you do that?” Maribel asked.

“It made me feel better.”

“It was so loud.”

“It’s done now,” I said.

I swept the pieces into the trash can. I took most of the garbage bags that I had piled in the hallway out to the Dumpster in the alley. Maribel helped me carry the mattress down to the
parking lot, where we left it. Somebody else could have all of it if they wanted. I didn’t need it anymore.

CELIA CAME OVER
early the next morning, dressed in her bathrobe and slippers. Her hair was in rollers. There was a chill in the air and she shivered when I opened the door.

“You look awful,” she said when she saw me.

“I haven’t been sleeping.”

“You should take medicine. Like a Tylenol PM. I use it sometimes when I’m anxious.”

“It works?”

“De maravilla.”

“Come in,” I told her. “Maribel’s still sleeping.”

“No. I need to go home and get dressed. We’re going to eight o’clock Mass. Actually, you know what? You should come. We could go together.”

“No, thank you.”

“It might make you feel better to get out.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to come in?”

“I just came to give you something,” Celia said. She pulled a plain white envelope from her bathrobe pocket and handed it to me.

“What is it?”

“Look inside.”

I lifted the flap and saw the edges of bills—there must have been a hundred of them—open like a fan.

“We took up a collection,” she said. “Everyone chipped in. The teachers at Maribel’s school, the receptionist in the school district office. Oh, and the translator there, too. Arturo’s coworkers at the mushroom farm, the manager at Gigante, a teacher
from the Community House, the translator and some of the nurses from the hospital. The church made a nice donation, and Father Finnegan added more on top of that. Plus, everyone in the building.”

I stared at the money, overcome.

“Mostly it’s just a little bit from each person,” Celia went on. “Twenty dollars here, ten dollars there.”

I couldn’t speak.

“But Rafa and I talked it over. You know we got some money recently? From my sister? Of course there was hardly any discussion. The bigger bills are from us, so you can afford to fly Arturo back to México. I hope it’s not too late.”

The envelope felt weightless in my hand.

“It’s five thousand one hundred thirty-two dollars,” she said.

“You did this?”

“We all did. I just mentioned the idea to a few people in the building first. But word spread. And before I knew it people were contacting me to find out how they could contribute. People I didn’t even know you knew.”

I stared at the envelope.

“Everyone loved him, Alma.”

Until that moment, tears had welled in my eyes, but I had beaten them back with furious blinking or distraction. Somehow I had managed not to cry. But right then I broke down. I fell on Celia and cried with more gratitude and happiness than I knew I was capable of feeling anymore.

WE LEFT TWO DAYS LATER
in a black pickup truck, driven by a man Rafael had found who took people to and from the border. Apparently he had family in Texas, so he didn’t mind the trip.

“How much does he charge?” I asked Rafael.

“Nothing,” Rafael said. “He’s doing it as a favor to me. I used to give him free breakfast when he stopped at the diner on his way up 95. Don’t worry about it.”

I knew he was lying. It had to have cost something. But I let it go.

Maribel and I sat in the back with a blanket draped over our laps. I had Arturo’s hat on my head, my purse at my feet. Everything else—what little we were taking with us—was once again in plastic trash bags in the bed of the truck.

The man was quiet. He looked like a gringo, but what did I know? He didn’t introduce himself nor turn on the radio nor talk on his phone. He just chewed sunflower seeds that he kept in a plastic cup between his legs and flicked the shells out through the window, which he left rolled down. I was grateful for his indifference to us. To him we could have been anyone. We weren’t people who were grieving, or who needed to be taken care of, or who were to be pitied. We were simply people who needed to get from one place to another. In a way, it was a relief to have the privacy of our mourning.

It was early when we pulled out of the parking lot. The air was hazy. Feeble sunlight pressed through the filter of clouds. We drove past the pancake restaurant and the Red Lobster, the Dunkin’ Donuts and the Rita’s Italian Ice, the bowling alley and the Sears, the David’s Bridal with its white gowns in the windows and the Walmart next to the highway. Within minutes we were on I-95, heading south.

All morning, I stared out the window as the world rushed by. We drove over the Susquehanna River, where the water was a ribbon, wide and flat. We passed red barns and stone mills, small white houses with black shutters and houses with wooden
fences around their sprawling land, everything silent and still. We passed roadside restaurants advertising breakfast specials and movie theaters with the show times listed on towering signs near the edge of the highway. We drove through the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel and then along the outskirts of Washington, D.C., where we passed a temple with gold spires striking up into the air.

I tried not to think, but of course that was impossible. Why hadn’t I simply told Arturo about the boy in the beginning? Would it have made a difference? There was no way to know the answer, and yet I remembered what Arturo had said, one of the last things he had told me, as if somehow he had known to offer me absolution in advance: Forgive yourself. Was that possible? Was it possible now, in this, too?

By noon, the sun was high in the blue sky. It shone like honey. It lay upon slender blades of grass, and draped over the hood of the truck. I leaned my head against the warm window and looked at the road stretched out before us and at the land rolling away endlessly on either side. I looked at the billboards and at the trees between them, remembering how when we had come, seven months ago, the trees had been full of green leaves and small berries, their branches so delicate and thin, bobbing in the breeze like something joyful. I stared at them now, leafless at the end of winter, and saw the same thing. To my surprise. I saw trees that looked happy, trees that looked hopeful, their naked branches suspended in reach toward the sky. Spring would come soon, I thought, and fill them up again.

We were six hours into a nearly fifty-hour trip. At the end of it we would be home, and Arturo would be there to meet us. I had canceled the arrangements with the funeral parlor and told
them instead to prepare the casket for transport. I had called the consulate, filled out the papers, gotten them notarized and translated into Spanish. I had paid everyone their money. I had done it all urgently, as if my life depended on it. Which, in a way, it did. But it was worth it. Arturo was going with us to the wide, silent lake and the butterfly fishermen who glided over its surface. To the red tile roofs and the rough adobe walls of both his childhood and mine. To the cobblestone streets and the brilliant sunshine and the arched doorways and the flowers spilling over people’s roofs. To the market in La Boca and the bench in Plaza Grande where the two of us ate ice cream on our first date while the late-day sun quavered above us, sliding down slowly against the curve of the sky. To the basilica and the cathedral and the painted store names in red and black. To the dirt and the wandering dogs. To our friends and generations of our families. To that stupid glass bowl that he missed so much. To home. Our home.

Somewhere in the mountains of Virginia, where the road grew narrower and hillier, Maribel complained that her stomach hurt. Without a word, the man pulled the truck over.

“Come on out, hija,” I told her, opening the back door.

She threw up in the pebbles and the dirt along the shoulder while I held her hair and rubbed slow circles on her back.

“A napkin,” the man said in Spanish, holding a crumpled tissue across the seat to me.

I wiped Maribel’s mouth. “Are you okay?” I asked.

“Do I have any in my hair?”

I opened my palm and looked at the strands, long and dark and tangled. “No,” I said.

“I want to get it cut when we get home.”

“Your hair?”

“It looks bad.”

I cupped my hand against the back of her head. “You look beautiful.”

“And I want to dye it purple.”

Suddenly, out of nowhere, there she was. My Maribel. The one who once upon a time had painted her nails black and now wanted to dye her hair purple. The one determined to assert her independence and throw her arms around life. There she was again. The person Arturo and I had been waiting for, the reason for all of this.

And as I looked at her I saw that maybe she had been here all along. Not exactly the girl she used to be before the accident, which was the girl I thought I had been searching for, but my Maribel, brave and impetuous and kind. All this time I had been buried too far under my guilt to see her. I had been preoccupied with getting us to the United States because I wanted it to make her whole again. I believed that I had lost my daughter and that if I did the right things and brought us to the right place, I could recover the girl she used to be. What I didn’t understand—what I suddenly realized now—was that if I stopped moving backwards, trying to recapture the past, there might be a future waiting for me, waiting for us, a future that would reveal itself if only I turned around and looked, and that once I did, I could start to move toward it.

“We can call Angelina when we get back,” I said. “You remember Angelina?”

“From the salon?” Maribel said.

And I nodded, marveling that she knew. Only a few months earlier, that might not have been the case.

I said, “It feels like a long time, doesn’t it, that we’ve been gone?”

“Yes,” Maribel said.

“It will be good to see it all again.”

The sky was dark by the time we got to Tennessee. I stared at the tall overhead highway lights as we drove beneath them. Loud semi-trucks passed us in the right lane, and each time I looked at the driver perched up high, wondering where he was going. After we’d eaten some of the crackers and drunk the bottled water that Celia had thrust into my arms when she and Rafael had said good-bye, Maribel fell asleep again, lulled by the sound of the road, and I closed my eyes, too.

When I woke in the morning, we were in Arkansas. I asked the man and that’s what he told me. I thought we would have been farther by then, but perhaps the driver had pulled over the truck for a time to sleep himself. The land in Arkansas was lime green and lush, flat and boundless. Tiny buds stood on the heads of blades of grass all over the fields. They swayed whenever there was a breeze or a gust of wind. I remembered that I had said to Arturo many months ago, as we came through in the opposite direction, that it was all so beautiful.

“Every place is beautiful,” he had said, “if you give it a chance.”

“You sound like a priest,” I told him.

“I could be a priest,” he said.

“And then what would happen to me?” I had teased him. We had been happy at certain moments during the drive, buoyed with optimism. “A priest can’t be married, you know.”

Arturo looked very solemn. He put his hand on my knee. He said, “Then I could not be a priest.”

I remember I had laughed.

After Arkansas, I knew, we would drive down through Texas, past the hundreds of strip malls and armadillos baking on the side of the road. We would cross the border into México and take a series of buses back to Pátzcuaro. Out of one world and into the next. Just like that. Like Arturo. Our journey would continue, and Arturo’s would, too, even though for now he was headed to one destination and Maribel and I to another. Later, much later, I would find my way to him. We would be in the same place again. That much I knew was true.

I looked at Maribel next to me, staring absently out the window, the blanket balled on the seat between us.

“How’s your stomach?” I asked.

She turned and gave me a small smile. “I’m fine,” she said.

It was what I had been waiting to hear the whole time.

I was born in Pátzcuaro, Michoacán, México. I lived there all my life until I came here. Other people from our town had gone north. Most of them left because they wanted a better life. That’s what they said. A better life. But it wasn’t like that for us. We had a good life, a beautiful life. We lived in a house that I built. We married in the town square when Alma and I were young, when people told us we didn’t know anything yet about the world. But we knew. Because the world to us was each other. And then we had Maribel. And our world grew larger.

We came here for her.

I think about God sometimes, whether He’s watching us. Was this what He wanted? Was it all for some greater reason that I don’t understand? Were we supposed to come here, to the United States? Is there something better waiting for us here that God in His infinite vision can see? Is there something ahead of us that will help all of this make sense finally? I don’t know. I don’t know the answers.

I don’t want to sound ungrateful. We are happy here in many ways. We’ve met good people. We haven’t been here long, but the people in the building where we live have become like a family to us. The teachers at Maribel’s school have helped her tremendously. She’s getting better, they say. And Alma and I can tell. Maribel has a light in her eyes now. We see that, and nothing—not a single thing—brings us more joy.

Maybe it’s the instinct of every immigrant, born of necessity or of longing: Someplace else will be better than here. And the condition: if only I can get to that place.

It took us a long time to be able to come. We applied and waited to be approved. We traveled for days. We left a lot of things behind—not only physical objects, but our friends and of course our families, pieces of ourselves—all for the chance to see that light in Maribel’s eyes. It’s been difficult, yes, but I would do it all again. People do what they have to in this life. We try to get from one end of it to the other with dignity and with honor. We do the best we can.