Vida (2 page)

This made me uncomfortable. I pretended to be really busy retying my shoe when Lucho was telling me the details of making out with her behind the old colonial church. I reminded him she had a boyfriend, and he was like, “Who cares? It’s not like I wanna marry her.”

We were lying in the grass in my backyard. My mom was on the phone with Colombia, like usual, and my dad was at court, like usual.

“Hey, don’t you have a brother?” Lucho rolled over on his belly. He had a blade of grass between his teeth and the sun made his cheeks red and spotty.

“He’s at boarding school.”

“You never talk about him.”

“I forget he exists.”

“That’s fucked.”

“I know.”

“You want to make out?”

He was lying there, propped up on one elbow, squinting the sun out of his eyes. His hair was extra greasy today and he stunk a little. I wondered how often he showered. I showered twice a day because my mom had an insane sense of smell and was always telling me she could smell my dirty pits.

“My mom can totally see us from her bedroom window,” I said.

“So let’s go to my house. The doc took my mom to the city. No one’s home.”

I started shaking my head, but I was smiling.

“Come on, Sabina. You know you want to.”

You know how it is when you’re a teenager. Just when things start getting good, your mom calls you in for some urgent bullshit reason like your aunt is on the phone and wants to ask if you liked the crap she sent you for your birthday.

My mom loved her shopping trips. She gave up smoking when she had me, and she never drank. Clothes were her thing, and my role was to sit on the chair in the dressing room and tell her whether or not my father would like the outfit, because if Papi didn’t like something, she’d take it right back the next day. Lucho came along once, which was
sort of funny. While my mom searched the racks, Lucho and I wandered into the panties and bras section, and he held up a sexy bustier and told me I had stuff like that to look forward to when my boobs came in. He stayed for dinner at our house a lot, and that evening, as we ate, my mom started asking Lucho how his mom met the doctor, and he got all flustered, like he was in trouble or something.

“I’m not supposed to say, but they met through an ad in the paper.”

“What paper?” I swear, my mom is so nosy sometimes.

“Well, not really a paper. It was an agency kind of thing.”

I kicked my mom under the table so she’d stop asking questions, but she gave me this look like it was her house and her right to ask whatever she wanted.

I only knew that Lucho and his mom lived in California before coming to Jersey. She was living with another guy out there. A Mexican who sold horses and taught Lucho how to ride. Lucho said he wasn’t so bad, but that he threw them out one day and they had to find a new situation.

“Have you thought about college yet?” This was my mom’s favorite question to any kid over ten. All new-money immigrants have a thing about American colleges.

“Yeah, I’m not going. The doc says I gotta work. I think I’m going back to California to be an actor.”

“What does your mother say about that?”

“That I gotta leave when I’m eighteen.” He turned to me and then to my mom. “I’m taking Sabina with me.”

My mom laughed, but I knew she thought he was being fresh. Fresh enough to ban from our house from here on out.

“Oh no you’re not,” Mami hummed. “Sabina is staying right here with us.”

I hated school. Even the teachers were whispering about my family’s place in the news. How my grandparents had to beg the judge to spare my uncle’s life. How my uncle had a couple of illegitimate kids around the state. And then all the gruesome details of the murder itself, which my mom was careful to keep from me. She attended the trial on most days and alternated which side of the courtroom she sat on. She always came home sullen, and when I asked her what happened that day, she said it was better I didn’t know.

Lucho and I were sitting by the river, which was almost dried up and it wasn’t even summer yet. We sat side by side on this old tree that curves over the river, growing sideways like a cripple, our feet swinging in the air. Lucho was smoking. One day I asked him how he bought cigarettes without getting in trouble, and he said the doctor bought them for
him. I thought it was pretty cool of him to do that for Lucho, treat him like an adult like that.

He never tried to make out with me. We were just sitting there, listening to the crickets and flicking the ants off our thighs, when out of nowhere Lucho goes, “I heard your uncle raped that lady before he killed her.”

“My aunt, you mean.”

“Yeah.”

I shrugged because I had heard that before—I heard my mom tell it to her sister on the phone—but I didn’t understand how you could be raped by someone you were already married to.

“You ever been raped?” Lucho asked me.

“No.”

“Not even molested?”

“No.”

“Not even a little bit when you were a kid? Your brother never tried to feel your tits or anything?”

“Ew! No!” I was laughing. My brother was a total computer nerd till he got sent away because he fell into a bad crowd.

“Not even by someone else’s dad at the town pool or anything?”

“Lucho … you’re such a perv.”

“I’m just asking.”

He got quiet, and then I felt kind of bad for calling him a pervert. He threw his cigarette stub into the dry soil and lit a new one right away.

The way the court arranged it, my dad could buy my uncle out of his half of the company and make monthly payments that would go straight to the parents of his dead wife. My uncle got life in the slammer and Papi got thirty years of payments. And those people got a dead daughter. My mom said that on our end of it, it meant we had to watch our spending.

“Does this mean we can’t afford to send me to college?”

“No,” said Mami. “It means we’re being audited by the IRS.”

Summer vacation hadn’t even started, and I already thought I was going to kill myself from overexposure to my parents. One Saturday, I went over to Lucho’s and knocked on the door. His mom answered. She was a nice-looking lady with fake blonde hair and a tan that you know nobody is born with. She had some kind of accent. I asked Lucho where she was from, and he said she’s a Jew, which means she’s from everywhere. Bulgaria. Denmark. Turkey. Israel. A bunch of places.

Her name was Shula, and the thing I liked best about her was that she let me call her Shula, not Mrs. Whatever like all the other stiff moms in town. My mom was a first-name kind of lady, too, and it wigged out all my friends when she told them to just call her Maria. Shula waved me in and told me Lucho was out by the pool, so I trekked through the doctor’s fancy house and found him under an umbrella, shirt off, wearing cutoff jeans I’d never seen before. He was stringy and tan, and then I saw them. Scars all over his arms, long welts and bruises on his back, and a big bruise on his chest.

“Lucho, what happened to you?”

“The doc kicks the shit out of me.” He laughed.

My parents never laid a finger on us, even when my brother made my mom cry, which was often.

“What does your mom say about it?”

“She tells him not to but he doesn’t listen.”

Just then Shula came out and said she had to go to the mall and that she’d bring us back some Kentucky Fried if we wanted. We said okay and when it seemed like she was really gone, Lucho stood up, peeled off his shorts, and jumped in the pool. I caught a glimpse of his wiry behind, the shadows of his groin, and I swallowed hard. It was the first time I saw a boy naked in real life except for babies and once when my brother left the bathroom door unlocked.

“I don’t have my bathing suit, Lucho.”

“So take your clothes off.”

I don’t know what came over me but I started peeling off my clothes right there, dropping my shirt, then my shorts, onto the plastic lounge chair. I was down to my underwear, some pink cotton ones my mom bought with a matching pink bra. I was unhooking the bra when Shula reappeared, looking like she forgot something, setting her eyes on me and her naked son in the pool.

“Sabina, I think you’d better go.”

“I forgot my bathing suit …”

“Go now, please.”

I got dressed quick-style and flew down the block to my house, terrified that Shula was going to call my mom and tell her I was trying to get naked in her house, but then it occurred to me that if she did such a thing, I could just shoot back that her husband beat the crap out of Lucho and that would shut her up good.

That night I heard clanking on my window while I lay in bed thinking about Lucho’s stinky naked body and how badly I wanted to see it again. I went over and opened it and saw him in the shadows of our yard, flinging his sneaker up at my window.

“Hey, I got the doc’s car! Come on, I’ll take you for a ride!”

I probably would have jumped right out the window if it hadn’t been for the fact that two years earlier when my brother was fifteen, he tried to sneak out of his own bedroom window next to mine to go to a party and broke his collarbone in the process. Our neighbors heard him screaming before we did and called the police. I told Lucho to wait for me. I hadn’t taken three steps out of my room when I heard my mom call out to me, “Sabina? Are you going to the kitchen?”

Fuck. I told her yes, and she told me to bring her a glass of water. Lucho met me by the back door, and I told him I couldn’t go anywhere with him. I was standing there in my nightshirt, one that my dad got me on a business trip. It had a big fat cat on it and
HONG KONG
printed across the chest. The maid shrank it so it barely covered my butt.

“You look cute,” Lucho said. “Want to sneak me into your room?”

“My dad will kill me if we get caught.”

“Fuck it. Your dad doesn’t hit for shit.”

“I’ll be grounded.”

“So what? You never go anywhere anyway.”

“Lucho …”

“Okay, you give me no choice. I gotta go throw my sneakers at Courtney’s window now.”

This made me jealous. Courtney with her hot ballet body and country-club tan. The country club where they only let in Mayflower people. I told Lucho how they didn’t let Jews in there either and he laughed and said Courtney lets Jews in, no problem.

He left, and I got my mother her glass of water, crept across the creaky floors, and went to sleep with the window open.

My mother came into my room that morning and told me, just like that, you don’t have to go to school today if you don’t want to, Sabina. Something terrible happened last night.

Lucho drove into the highway divider. No car got in his way, nothing pushed him in that direction. It was just one of those things. The poor kid lost control of the car, is how my dad put it. The poor kid. That’s what everyone called him. Most people didn’t even know his name because he was still so new to the town. But everyone in school put on a sad face, went to see the guidance counselors, and took advantage of the school’s lenient attendance policy for poststudent deaths. I went to my classes.

Then there was the funeral. You’d never guess it but kids love a funeral when it’s for one of their own. They dress up in black, and the girls cluster together and cry, cry, cry like
preemies. All the parents came, too, showed support, and looked concerned, although nobody really gave a fuck. Lucho was the good-looking smelly kid, the one all the moms said needed a shower. The one who lived with the rich doctor who, with all his loot, wouldn’t buy his new stepson some new clothes. The doc looked really upset at the funeral, and Shula sat there crying her eyes out. The casket was closed, though I’m not sure if it’s a Jewish thing or because he was so mangled from the wreck.

My brother stole my dad’s car years earlier and went on the highway, got pulled over, arrested, and sentenced to a million hours of washing fire trucks with a sponge. That was reason enough to keep to the back roads. My Lucho never had a chance.

What’s worse is that at the funeral, people got distracted by the sight of my parents and the whispers started. Every detail of my dad’s payout to my uncle and the victim’s family had been offered up by the stupid local papers that always implied Papi was a trafficker. My mother was dressed to kill, as always, in some designer getup that was way too much for a town like this where all the mothers were doughier versions of their husbands.

I sat between my parents at the funeral. Mami cried, but she cries for anything nowadays. I think she felt bad because, just the week before, she told me Lucho looked like
a criminal waiting to happen. My father held my head close to his chest and kissed my hair. “He was a nice kid, Sabina. He knew you loved him.”

Papi surprised me. I didn’t even know I loved Lucho till that second. But I did. Because so what if he was a little smelly and weird. He came looking for me when I was invisible. And when he was with me, he acted like I was the only thing he could see.

Courtney didn’t come to the funeral because people said she was way too emotional, which I didn’t really buy. I thought she got more attention than if she actually showed up and had to sit in the rows of chairs with the rest of us. This rabbi came out and said some Hebrew prayer. I heard kids giggling behind me. I thought of Lucho and how he’d say that was fucked.

REFUGE

This morning the towers were hit and I was in bed—not at the office in Tower One—because I called in sick again. My brother phoned, said turn on the TV, and I watched it all, everything I don’t need to describe now. Before the phones went dead, I made contact. Parents, a few friends. Trying to decide how to handle this mess, but I’m in no position to make a decision, which is a good thing because Luscious Lou (his stage name), my guitar teacher of these past few months, showed up at my door, all seven feet of him in his usual black leather and suede, leaning on the frame, that sleeping crow of hair on his head, diagonal nose like a dragon’s tail, tiny gray eyes folded into hard wrinkles. Moist, bellowing voice: “Sabina, I knew you’d be home.”

He told me to go with him, that I live too close to the scene. I packed some clothes and followed him down to the street, his massive hand pulling mine. My neighbors, my party people, all out on the stoop with eyes like this day might last
forever. For a second I felt I finally belonged to this city—the broken-down horizon matched my bombed-out heart.