Yours to Keep (23 page)

“I want to talk to the lawyer myself.”

“Of course. I’ll set up a meeting.”

“My family and I—we’ve never rocked the boat. We’ve flown under the radar. We’ve been so careful. What if instead of my status getting changed something goes wrong and they deport me?”

“Harry Abrams has handled hundreds of cases, and he considers you an easy, straightforward case. He said the law is very clear—if you marry and you came legally, you can apply to waive the requirement that you return to your country of origin to apply for the status change. He said the only tricky part, at all, is the interview where we have to convince USCIS that the marriage is real. He said they ask questions like ‘What side of the bed is the alarm clock on?’ Or ‘What does he wear to sleep in?’ Questions that only people who are intimate would know.”

There was heat in his gaze now, and it made her smile. “Left,” she said. “Facing the headboard, that is. And—nothing.”

“Usually boxers and a T-shirt. I might have made a slight exception. But I promise I will acquaint you with all of my habits along those lines soon enough.” Another dark, meaningful glance.

Desire tightened in her chest and between her legs.

“Ana. The risk is so small, and isn’t it better than going on like this indefinitely?”

Someday she could have a bank account, deposit checks. Get financial aid, finish her degree in a couple of years instead of over the next ten to twenty. She could have a credit card. A driver’s license. Own a car. Drive it. Own a house. Pay a mortgage. Have that very American privilege, home equity.

She could teach high school.

And she’d be married to Ethan.

She’d belong to someone and she’d belong to her country, the country that would always be hers, even if so far it hadn’t owned her.

Tears brimmed in her eyes. One rolled down her cheek.

He put his hands on her waist, leaned in, and kissed the tear away. His lips slid down her cheek, and she turned her head so that his mouth found hers. It felt as if it had been a long, long time. He nibbled her lower lip, then eased his tongue into her mouth and explored her, setting off a clamor of sensations. His hands began to wander over the flat of her belly and up her sides. He unzipped her fleece jacket, lifted her sweater, and slid his hands underneath.
Then, his mouth never leaving hers, he yanked her top out of the waistband of her jeans and slid his hands up the back of her shirt, reaching for the clasp of her bra.

He had her breasts in both hands, his thumbs skimming lightly over her nipples, when they heard the thunder of a teenager pounding down the steps and flew back to their respective sides of the couch.

She drew her jacket around her, and they smiled at each other.

“What did she say?” demanded Theo, appearing in the doorway.

“She hasn’t said yet. She wants to talk to the lawyer first.”

“I have to make sure nothing bad will happen to me or my brother or sister.”

“I asked him about them.”

She felt a pang of gratitude. “What did he say?”

“He said there was almost no risk to them.”

Would they see it that way? She very much doubted that they’d be able to see past the phrase “
almost
no risk.” They had done everything they could to avoid that risk for twenty years. Some of their friends regularly used fake IDs, fake Social Security numbers. Many drove without licenses. Ricky scorned those people, the ones who risked everything for a little extra freedom, the illusion of a little more control.

For the first time, she thought of the way Ricky had looked and sounded yesterday on the front steps. A shudder went through her. He wasn’t going to like this. He wasn’t going to like it at all.

But she’d decided yesterday, when she refused to promise Ricky not to date non-Dominicans, that she had to live her own life now. There was no doubt in her mind that this was what she wanted. If she walked away from this, her life would go on in the same way it always had. Her responsibilities unrelenting, her limitations hard as stone. She’d put her money in a veggie-burger box and take public transportation until she was too old to care for herself, and then they’d deport her bony body and she’d die alone in D.R.

Marriage to Ethan, on the other hand, offered her everything. The possibility of love. She hoped he’d come to love her someday. And if he couldn’t—well, she thought she could accept that. She knew that he needed her. And Theo already loved her; she knew that.

Then there were all those other things, the things that for years she’d tried to convince herself didn’t matter. The papers and the trappings and the tiny bits and pieces of what it
meant to be, officially, a part of the grand American experiment.

Whatever Ricky could do or say to her, she doubted that it would be enough to dissuade her.

“Be patient with me,” she told Theo. “Let me talk to the lawyer. Let me think.”

He had the look on his face that she’d come to think of as his wise old man expression. He nodded. “Take your time.”

She stole a glance at Ethan, who appeared to be working as hard as she was not to laugh.

Ethan heated up leftover cream-of-broccoli soup from the night before. He cast a glance at Ana, saw that she had one hand clasped in the other, both shaking uncontrollably. He put down the soupspoon and grabbed her hands in both of his. Held them firmly. Stroked his hands over hers, over her wrists, over her arms, rubbing to warm her with friction. He held her until she stopped shaking and lay against him, limp.

“Is this normal?” she asked.

“Of course. You’re supposed to feel nervous when life-altering things happen to you.” Apart from the anxiety that must always surround the immigration issues for her, a marriage proposal was a big thing. He thought about what James had said.
“It’s two different things, a business arrangement and a love match.”

Screw James. What did he know? You couldn’t take counsel from a guy who belonged to the girl-of-the-month club.

He tried to remember what it had been like to propose to Trish, but it was a blank in his memory. He remembered buying the ring. He remembered kneeling in front of her. He remembered her face, alight, as she said yes. But then there was nothing until the day they addressed wedding invitations at her mother’s dining-room table. Shouldn’t he remember more?

“I don’t know,” he amended, and she giggled, her laugh a little hum against his chest. “But I’ve got you. It’s okay.”

He made her eat some soup, even though she said she wasn’t hungry. She took a spoonful, murmuring her approval. He watched her, pleased when she ate a whole bowl. He liked taking care of her.

He drove her to work. “I’ll be here when you finish,” he told her.

He went back to the house while she taught her classes. Theo was already in bed. Ethan sat down next to him.

Theo wanted to know all about what the wedding would be like—when, where, how fancy. “The lawyer said that the more convincing the wedding is the better, right?” He wanted to invite Leah and Mrs. Abrams and both sets of his grandparents.

“Don’t forget she hasn’t said yes yet.”

“But she will!”

Looking at his son’s bright eyes, Ethan thought,
She’d better.

“Would she adopt me?” Theo asked.

At fifteen, lying with the covers up to his neck, he wasn’t so very different from the boy he’d been at four. His face was bigger, its edges harsher, but his hair was just as soft, his eyes the same shade of green. And the questions weren’t that different from the ones he’d asked then, the endless whys and hows. Maybe, though, he understood better now how unlikely it was that he’d get a straight answer out of his dad.

“No. You’ll have to make do with me.”

Theo sighed deeply. That, too, reminded Ethan of the four-year-old boy he’d been.

“Good night.” Ethan reached out and stroked his son’s hair off his forehead. For once Theo didn’t flinch or lash out or complain. He sighed again, a little deeper. “Night, Dad.”

Ethan stood for a long time outside Theo’s closed door. It was strange how you could miss the child when the child was still there, somewhere. Buried inside. It was one of the things that mystified Ethan most about parenting, how it felt as if your life had been occupied by a series of children, had been occupied and vacated again, so that the child of any particular moment would never return to you, except in memories and dreams—and, if you were lucky, glimpses like the one he’d had tonight.

Chapter 21

Ana got into the car an hour later at Duarte. “I’m freaking out.” She slammed the door.

Ethan’s heart pinched with fear, but he reached out to hug her. “It’s a lot to absorb.”

She pulled away. “There’s so much you don’t know about me.”

The fear gained traction, rose in his throat. “So tell me.” He tried to keep his voice steady. If he was steady, he’d calm her. He pulled away from the curb at Duarte and pointed the car toward his house without asking her. He was keeping them on track, he thought.

Something had worked, because she said, “It’s better now. A little better. Just being with you. Because I don’t know you so well, while I was teaching I told myself I’d be making a terrible mistake if I agreed to marry you. I made up things about you while I was teaching. Bad things. I told myself I’d been imagining all the good things.”

“It’s like when you buy a house.”

She made a startled movement.

He swung the car out onto Anderson Avenue, into the world of neon crisscrossing shadows. “You see a house you love, and you put in the offer, and all of a sudden you’re stuck buying it. And even though you loved the house, you only spent, like, thirty minutes inside it, and you convince yourself that, really, you were an idiot to think you liked it. Because it’s actually really dark and grim inside. And the kitchen is really small. And the bathrooms are totally unfixable. And the furnace and the roof are going to go at any moment. But then you go back to see it, walk through it again, and it’s the house you fell in love with. It’s okay, it really is.”

She seemed to consider that a moment, then asked, “Do you think you’ve spent thirty minutes inside me?”

It caught him off guard, and he groaned.

She giggled.

“You know how to mess with me. We should definitely get married.”

She was quiet, and he worried that he’d said exactly the wrong thing. Then she said, “I want to.”

Relief washed over him, so strong it nearly overwhelmed desire. “Good.” He knew it wasn’t a yes—not yet—but it was something.

They were on the long stretch between Hawthorne and Beacon now. There was no traffic at this time of night. The double-deckers of Hawthorne began to give way to small one-families and, as they got closer to Beacon, bigger homes. More trees. Fewer streetlights. Larger stretches of yard dividing road from family life.

Her voice was low and quiet now. Worried, but calmer. “I keep thinking of things you don’t know about me.”

“You should start telling me. Then I’ll know them.”

For a moment, she stared straight ahead. Then she said, “My brother and sister are black. I mean, I am, too, by virtue of having a black mother, but you wouldn’t know it to look at me, right? I could be white Dominican. But they
look
African-American. Kinky hair. Dark skin. If you saw my sister and me together, you might not guess she was my sister. She’s jealous that I got white-girl hair. She relaxes hers and straightens it and gets extensions, but it’s not the same.”

She’d startled him, not with the revelation that her siblings were blacker than she was (though he admitted to himself that he’d pictured them all a uniform pale caramel) but with the phrase “white-girl hair.” She didn’t, he realized for the first time, quite think of herself as a “white girl.”

“Genes are weird,” he said.

“Genes
are
weird. Ricky and Cara look alike, but I look almost nothing like them. I remember when I was a kid reading Madeleine L’Engle’s
A Wrinkle in Time,
and there’s this part where Calvin O’Keefe is explaining to Meg that he considers himself a biological ‘sport,’ and I started to cry.”

Her eyes gleamed in the dark, a hint of fresh tears, and he reached for her hand. It was an innocent touch, but nothing with her felt completely innocent; everything was a prelude.

“On top of that, I learned English so easily, and they didn’t. And all the differences got exacerbated.”

He laughed. “As illustrated by the fact that you use words like ‘exacerbated.’ ”

She laughed, too. “Exactly.”

“What else do I need to know?” He turned the car into his neighborhood. He wanted
her to keep talking. As long as she was talking, he knew she was with him, knew where he stood.

“Ricky’s going to hate this whole thing so much—that you’re white. There’s a stereotype that Dominicans are racist, and Ricky isn’t helping to break it.”

“I got that feeling, from things you’ve said.”

“Yeah. There’s a lot of racial tension in D.R., partly because some Dominicans are incredibly suspicious of Haitians, who are black. I mean, there’s no excusing it, but that’s how it is. Anyway, Ricky’s stuff is more personal, too. My dad was white and my mom was black, and after my dad abandoned us he married a white woman. Nothing will convince Ricky that race didn’t play a role in that.”

“Did it?”

“I don’t know. We’ve never spoken to my dad, so obviously we’ve never asked him. It might have. Or it might have been that he didn’t love my mom anymore. Or he never really wanted to come to this country.”

“Will you be able to convince Ricky that I’m an okay guy?”

“I’ll have to.”

She didn’t sound too certain, though. For a moment, his own nervousness overrode his excitement; then he turned to catch her eye and she smiled at him, and he was okay again.

“Have I scared you yet?”

“No,” he said, eyes back on the road. Almost the truth. “Keep going.”

“I don’t have a credit card or a checking account. I have twelve hundred dollars saved. Do you know where I keep it?”

“Where?”

“In a cardboard box in my freezer. A vegetarian-burger box.”