After Us

by Amber Hart

  Fear slithers up my spine. Uncertainty pinches the back of my throat.

  Diego is alive.

  I’m walking through an airport terminal. Suitcase in my hand. Our row is called over a loudspeaker. Our turn to board a plane back to the States. Now that I’ve told Diego about Javier, he wants to see him. He has to stop Javier from doing something stupid. Diego never wanted to endanger Javier; that’s what he’s explained. It’s too late; that’s what I’ve told him.

  Because Javier has already joined the gang. Because danger greets him daily.

  “Sorry ’bout earlier,” Diego says, taking a seat next to me.

  The plane is a tiny capsule that makes me feel claustrophobic. We’ve already flown hundreds of miles in a plane even smaller to carry us out of Nicaragua and into Miami. This trip will take us home.

  One hour.

  Sixty minutes.

  Three thousand six hundred seconds until we touch down.

  Even longer until I see Javier.

  “Didn’t mean to be rude,” Diego continues. “Just didn’t expect Faith to tell you ’bout me.”

  I’ve learned that Faith didn’t always know that Diego was alive. That revelation came months after she left, explaining why Faith didn’t answer many of my calls. She worried that I’d know something was up with her. She didn’t want to lie about Diego. She’d never helped someone fake a death before. I don’t blame Faith anymore.

  I’ve also learned that Diego was working with the government. He didn’t elaborate, other than to say that he told the government things they needed to know. They gave him freedom as a thank-you.

  It’s a pretty big gift.

  That I’m now endangering.

  It took several phone calls to the government, two flights, and one promise from me that I’d never tell a soul about Diego being alive to make this trip happen.

  Diego will visit Javier today. Let loose secrets that will change his world.

  “It’s okay,” I tell Diego.

  Nervousness settles deep in my gut. Makes a home and refuses to leave.

  “So,” Diego says. “This thing with you and Javier . . .”

  He’s looking for an explanation. It’s not only my story to tell.

  “Yeah?” I ask, waiting for something more specific.

  Diego grins. “I’ve never seen him with a gringa.”

  “Because of his mom?” I ask, curious.

  Diego looks surprised. “You know ’bout that?”

  The party. The uninvited stares. Not getting her approval.

  “Yeah,” I reply. “He brought me to his house. Refused to let me leave when his mom told me to go.”

  Diego smiles wider. “So it’s like that?”

  I shrug. “Like what?”

  “Never mind,” he says. “Never known Javier to bring a girl home.”

  This makes me smile.

  Diego’s phone rings just as the flight attendant asks everyone to buckle their seat belts. Faith exits the bathroom. Diego scoots over to let Faith sit next to me for the flight. One finger to his ear. Phone against the other. His face falls.

  “No,” he whispers.

  Something’s not right. Something is horribly, horribly wrong. It’s the pain in Diego’s expression that gets to me. It’s the look Diego gives me.

  “Okay,” he says and slips the phone back in his pocket.

  The fact that Diego is looking at me, and not Faith says it all.

  “Don’t tell me,” I say.

  I could fill the ocean with the amount of sadness in Diego’s eyes.

  “That was the government,” Diego says. “Javier’s in the hospital.”

  A knife to my heart.

  No.

  “We don’t know the details,” he says.

  But I’m not listening anymore. He can’t, he can’t, Javier can’t be there. Not there. No.

  “Is he—” I can’t finish. I need to finish. “Is he gone?”

  “I don’t know,” Diego says.

  And my world stills. The oceans stop and the sun freezes and my heart . . .

  breaks.

  I am floating, crashing, unraveling inside. I am pain and agony and so much more.

  I am devastated.

  “Is there a chance,” I whisper, “that he will be okay?”

  Please, please, please.

  “Yes.”

  It is the only hope I have.

  Four letters. One word. The smallest percentage of a chance.

  Coma.

  Javier is in a coma. Shot. Not breathing on his own. So many moments of uncertainty.

  They don’t know, they don’t know, how can they not know if Javier will live?

  I reach over. Bite my lip to keep it from trembling. Touch Javier’s still hand with one finger. He’s cold, so cold.

  A tear slips. Lands soundlessly on his blanket. Tubes keep him alive. He’s going to wake up, I tell myself. I have to believe that he will.

  Javier’s eyes are closed. His body’s unmoving, save the rise and fall of his chest.

  I know this isn’t the best time, but I have to tell him how I feel. I just have to.

  “Javier,” I whisper. Hope for a response. Don’t get one. “I love you.”

  One, two, three, four beats of his heart that I imagine say:

  I.

  Love.

  You.

  Too.

  48

  javier

  I catch patched sentences. Distorted words that find me. I want to break each noise in half. I want to throw it far away and tell the sounds to just be quiet because this sleep is so peaceful. More peaceful than anything I’ve ever known.

  Something squeezes me. A sharp pain lacerating my skin.

  What is that?

  I wince.

  Beep, beep, beep.

  Pressure, so much pressure.

  I push at the spot that hurts. Hear a voice in my head.

  “Just a blood pressure cuff,” it says. “I need to take your vitals.”

  And I need sleep. I push harder.

  “All done,” the voice says, and the pressure leaves me.

  I let my hand drop back to my side. The effort is painful beyond measure.

  “Do you know where you are?” it asks.

  I take a chance and crack open my eyes. Regret it almost instantly. Light fills my vision. Sleep ebbs away.

  Do I know where I am?

  A prick of pain in my left arm. I look down. A needle is piercing my skin. A lady—no, a nurse—is administering it. She’s the voice I’ve been hearing.

  “Yes,” I answer. Because I do know where I am now. “Hospital,” I rasp.

  I think about how the sea goes out with the tide, exposing the ocean floor. All rocky and dry. That’s how my throat feels now.

  The sea creatures are left there, watching their home disappear farther and farther into the horizon. Their bodies exposed to the merciless sun. Dying slowly. That’s how I feel now.

  “That’s right,” the nurse says. “You’ve been here two days.”

  Which means that I’m alive. Which also means that I didn’t imagine the conversation I had with Monkey when I was bleeding out. Or did I?

  “You need to take it very slowly,” the nurse says as I try to lift my head. “You were shot through the lung.”

  She pauses. Lets that sink in.

  “And you lived,” are her next words.

  “Happen often?” I ask, swallowing to try and wet my throat. I have nothing to ease the ache.

  “Not so much,” she admits.

  The nurse’s dark skin matches the brown of her scrubs. She writes something on paper. Picks up a small Styrofoam cup.

  “You can have ice chips only,” she says. It sounds like an order. “You were also shot in the hip but the bullet didn’t hit bone. That one was fixed easily. Your lung will need longer to heal.”

  I think about where I am. In a hospital. Hearing the fate of my life from a woman I don’t even know. It makes me think of mi fam
ilia. I wonder where they are. No, on second thought, I don’t want to know. I am in no hurry to see mi mamá. Her angry face. There’s no rush to tell tío Adolfo that I failed to bring justice to Diego’s name.

  Unless I didn’t fail. Unless Wink was caught.

  Suddenly, I need to see Monkey.

  “Is anyone here?” I ask the nurse, as she tilts the cup of ice chips toward my mouth. I relish how it cools my tongue. “Family? Friends?”

  My chest feels like it’s wrapped no less than one hundred times. Breathing is almost as painful as the moment MS-13 shot me.

  She nods. “People have stopped by. A few are still here, in the family waiting room.”

  “I need you to find out if someone named Monkey is there. Can you bring him here if he is?” I request.

  The nurse presses a series of buttons on a machine to my right. I think about who else might be in the waiting room.

  “But don’t let my family back yet, if they’re out there,” I amend.

  Her eyes narrow. Suspicion in her stare. “One guy said you might ask for him. He’s the cop, right?”

  God, Monkey is a cop, then.

  “Yep.”

  “Be right back,” she says.

  I think back to the moments right after I was shot. Monkey turned against his own gang. It was his gang as much as it was mine, it seems. Meaning that it was never either of ours.

  I’m lost in thought. Until the door opens.

  Monkey fills the room. Reminding me of the lie I swallowed too easily. He stops a couple feet from my bed. He looks the same.

  How deceiving.

  I never would have imagined that Monkey was anything but an MS-13 member, tatted up, marked by them, quick on his toes. He waits for me to speak.

  “You’re a cop,” I say.

  Unbelievable.

  “And you’re a liar,” he fires back.

  Truth.

  “So how long you been workin’ against MS-13?” I wonder aloud.

  He answers my question, but not with his usual easiness. “Since Diego died.”

  His words tell me that I did imagine the last part of our conversation. The part where Monkey told me that Diego hadn’t died. The weight of that realization is stifling.

  “I don’t understand,” I admit. “Have you always known who I am? And how did you know my cousin?”

  “That,” says Monkey, “is a long story.”

  “I’ve got time,” I say, glancing around at my hospital room, the sheets that cover me. The place that will be my home until my lung heals.

  “Diego knew the interworking of the cartel he used to belong to,” Monkey explains. “We needed inside info. Where the cartel meets, who leads what, when the shipments go out, who they supply to, what they expect of members, and so much more.”

  This version of Monkey doesn’t sound like the MS-13 member I thought he was. Face serious. Talking business. No more laziness in his posture. And then I catch the slight bounce of his leg. I almost smile. Some things don’t change, after all.

  “Explain better,” I say because it still doesn’t make sense.

  “We also wanted to see what kind of connections MS-13 had to the cartel,” Monkey continues. “To see MS-13 and a Cuban cartel working together to find one member seemed strange. Unless they already had a connection to each other.”

  Never thought about it like that. I wonder if the connection started because of Diego.

  “Diego, one escaped member, doesn’t seem like enough to bring leaders of a cartel all the way from Cuba. Unless,” Monkey says, “they were already planning on coming to the US and decided to take out Diego while they were here.”

  Pieces click.

  “They were working together,” I say.

  Maybe the cartel helps supply MS-13. With who knows what. Drugs? Weapons? Buyers? It all seems possible. Highly likely. I wonder why I didn’t connect the two earlier.

  “Sí,” Monkey confirms.

  “And what happened after I got shot?” I ask. I remember Monkey killing two gang members, but what about the others? “Did you bust the rest of the gang?”

  “We got some of them,” he says. “We couldn’t get them all, though.”

  Moment of truth.

  “What about Wink? Was he one of the ones you got?”

  Monkey stares at me, holding the answer I need the most.

  Was it worth it, every second spent hunting Wink?

  “Yes.”

  I sigh, wincing at the pain in my lung. It’s done. It’s finally done. Wink has been caught.

  And this time revenge is replaced with justice.

  I still have so many questions. Like:

  Did you know who I was when I joined? Did MS-13 know from the start that Diego belonged to the cartel? Did they care? Why didn’t MS-13 turn him right over? Why offer him a position in their gang?

  Monkey answers with things like:

  No, I didn’t realize who you were until it was too late. Yeah, they knew about Diego. They offered him the position because they knew he’d be good for it. If he chose MS-13, they wouldn’t have turned him over, but they would have had something to hold over Diego’s head to make him do their bidding, their dirty work. They would have kept him out of the cartel negotiations. Made him do work in MS-13. But Diego didn’t join, so they handed him over. Retribution.

  “You’re going to have more questions,” Monkey says.

  Of course I do. I have enough questions to fill the space between us.

  “I’m not the one who can answer,” he says.

  He’s the perfect person to answer.

  “But,” Monkey says, checking his phone. “Someone else can.”

  The door opens. In walks a guy. I think. I can’t see a face. Only a huge black sweatshirt, hood up over the head and falling down over the eyes. Baggy jeans.

  But somehow I know.

  I know who it is, even though I have to be wrong.

  It’s only once the door shuts that he finally looks at me.

  From.

  The.

  Dead.

  I’ve never known anyone to come back from the dead.

  When I was younger, my older brothers used to tell me stories about monsters and legends to scare me before bedtime. The undead walking. The bruja who stole children from forests. People who turned into mythical creatures. I never told my brothers, but I liked the stories. They helped me forget about the scary things happening all around me in Cuba. The stories were never real.

  But this?

  This is real, even though it can’t be.

  “Hola, primo,” he says.

  Diego.

  Same as before. Same face as in the pictures at his wake, which consisted of familia meeting in our yard to say a few words about him. Tío Adolfo didn’t want to watch his son get lowered into the ground. It was enough to know he was buried; he didn’t want to watch it happen. I couldn’t have agreed more. Now I wonder if he lied. Maybe tío Adolfo knows that Diego is alive. But how could he sit through us saying words about how much we missed Diego, and know the whole time that he wasn’t gone?

  Maybe he didn’t know.

  Maybe Diego hid from everyone who used to matter to him.

  “You fucking asshole!” I finally say, wincing at the pain yelling causes. My lungs work to bring oxygen in.

  I took a bullet for him.

  Three, actually.

  Diego let me think that he was gone. No, not gone. Dead.

  If I could get up from this bed, I would. This whole time—every minute of grief, every drop of vengeance—all for nothing.

  “I swear on la vida de mi mamá—”

  “I know,” Diego says. “Got a lot to tell you.”

  “Start,” I say, angry, happy. Both at once. “With why you let me think you were dead. Actually, no. Start with how you came back from the dead.”

  Hands in his pockets, face half hidden, he explains everything. How they resuscitated him in the ambulance. How he worked with the US government.
How Monkey was assigned to infiltrate the gang and find Wink. Diego suspected that the cartel and MS-13 were working together, he says. He told the government everything he knew about the cartel, he admits. And yeah, that makes him a nark, he says. But it’s worth it to have Faith again, to turn over the people who stabbed him in the back, and murdered his mamá.

  “They would’ve killed you, primo. If they suspected that you knew anything ’bout me, if they suspected that I was alive, they would’ve taken out the whole familia.” His voice cracks then. “I couldn’t risk it. I didn’t call ’cause I wanted to protect you,” Diego says. “Lot of good that did. You found trouble anyway.”

  The hood drops from his face and I see remorse in his stare.

  “I just wanted to protect you,” he repeats.

  You would have done the same thing, I mentally admit. You would have done whatever it took to protect family.

  “I’m not gonna pretend that I’m not pissed at how this all went down,” I say. “But I’m glad you’re back.”

  Like the tide, I think.

  Coming home to cover the broken pieces it left behind.

  49

  melissa

  I hate that I can’t go straight to the hospital to see Javier. Especially since I know that he’s woken up. He’s going to make it. I haven’t wanted to admit to myself that there was a good chance he wouldn’t. I take one look at life and know that this time, with Javier, it has been good to me.

  I should be with him, but instead I’m here. White walls and endless turmoil. I’m waiting to see the doctor. I’m closed in a room with no windows. I need to see something besides these plain walls that have no character. I wonder what will happen to my character if the doctor delivers bad news.

  I twist a ring on my pinky finger. Think back to when I got it.

  “Wait for me!” Faith shouts, running up the boardwalk.

  I’m yards ahead of her, weaving through the crowd.

  “Hurry up, slowpoke!” I’m not sure if she’s heard me over the constant boardwalk noise, the whooshing of waves, the chattering of people drifting everywhere on the beach.

  Our parents have given us twenty bucks each, and one hour of free time before we have to meet them for dinner at a restaurant down the strip.

  There are signs restricting kids my age from being alone.

  DO NOT LEAVE CHILDREN UNDER 14 UNATTENDED.