by Wiltz, Jenni
“No takers?” Mr. Parker said, glancing from side to side. “The Mexican government had given land grants to Americans who settled in Texas. But their system worked a little too well, and in 1830, the Mexican president forbade any more American settlers to come into Texas. It didn’t work, though. The Americans ignored this law, and it really started frustrating the Mexican government.”
They know how it feels, she thought. They didn’t like it, either. Last night, in the closet, she heard the policemen reading parts of her father’s mumbled statement back to him for confirmation. “El Camino Rojo?” they’d said. “You’re sure that’s where you were?” Slowly, painfully, her dad told them about his assignment as a census worker.
“Eventually,” Mr. Parker continued, “the settlers saw no way to safeguard their religious and economic interests but to revolt. The most well-known battle of their fight for independence happened in San Antonio, Texas. Does anybody know what it’s called?”
“The Alamo,” she said, and Mr. Parker nodded.
All she knew about the Alamo was that it had to do with Davy Crockett and a massacre. She remembered a song her dad used to hum: “Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier.” She’d never heard the whole song, but guessed it didn’t mention the part where the hero died in a massacre.
Mr. Parker adjusted his glasses and turned back to the chalkboard. “The Mexican army besieged the Alamo, a church that had been converted into a fort. There were more than two hundred people inside, including women and children. After thirteen days, the Mexican army attacked. They had about 1,500 soldiers, so it wasn’t much of a fight. Of all the Alamo’s defenders, about two made it out alive.”
“Whoa,” Daniel Rocha said.
Via raised her hand. “What about the women and children?”
Mr. Parker crossed his arms over his chest. “Most survived, but they almost didn’t. See, the Texans tried to destroy all the cannons and gunpowder to keep the Mexican army from getting them. The guy whose job it was to blow the gunpowder got shot before he could do it. If he had, the whole place would have gone up in flames, women and children included. So, ironically, it was a Mexican sharpshooter who saved the women and children.”
“Whoa,” Daniel Rocha said again.
“When Texan settlers heard,” Mr. Parker continued, “they got angry. I mean, really angry. It brought a lot of new recruits to the Texan army.”
Emma thought of the Mexican flags painted on the courtyard windows and the blood that stained her father’s face. Of the Scottish after the English killed William Wallace. Of the French after the English burned Joan of Arc. Sometimes, she thought, anger makes you strong.
• • •
It happened between English and chemistry. On the way to class, she caught a glimpse of a man in a yellow windbreaker. The short silver hair, the weathered skin on the back of the neck—it was him. Even the stance was right, with thin legs clad in unfashionably pale denim. Her heart seized in her chest, stutter-stepping like a JV hurdler.
“Dad!” she cried, running toward him. “Dad!”
The man turned around. He held a walkie-talkie in his hand, with an assistant principal’s badge clipped to the pocket of his windbreaker. Dark hair sprouted from his bulbous nose.
He held the walkie-talkie at chest level, waiting to relay her problem or request. “You okay? You need something?”
As a little girl, if an adult asked what she needed, there was every expectation that the adult could help. Tell a fireman you were lost and he’d take you home. Tell a yard duty you fell off the monkey bars and she took you to the nurse’s office to get patched up. There wasn’t a single thing this man could do to help her.
“Do you need something?” he asked again.
“No,” she whispered. Then she turned and ran, pushing through the crowd. She rounded the corner, shoved past a girl in a blue sweatshirt, and flung herself through the bathroom door. Three more steps, one more push, and she was safe behind the metal walls of a toilet stall.
She dropped her backpack on the damp green tile and leaned her forehead against the metal. Rust-etched tracks of ancient graffiti bit into her skin as she rolled her head back and forth. She needed to see her dad, to talk to him, to hear his voice. Until she did, she’d keep imagining the worst.
She brought her cold palms to her temples and pressed as hard as she could, wondering how hard she’d have to squeeze before something shattered.
If she hurt herself, she wouldn’t have to go to class. She wouldn’t have to explain anything to Via and Rachel and Dan. She could go to the nurse’s office, and maybe even get sent home. In her backpack, she carried a pair of nail clippers. It would be so easy to pull them out and dig into her skin with those sharpened metal edges. It didn’t have to be a lot. Just enough to draw blood, to convince the school nurse to keep her out of class. Pain she could control had to be better than pain she couldn’t.
But it wouldn’t help her dad. Nothing she could do, not with nail clippers and not with a machete, would help him get better. And that was all she wanted.
“Goddamn it,” she said, grabbing a handful of one-ply toilet paper to blow her nose. She wadded up two more handfuls and put them in her backpack for later.
• • •
“What happened to your lip?” Elvira asked, pointing a stubby finger at her scab.
“I couldn’t sleep.”
They stood together outside the locker room, but Emma couldn’t bring herself to start moving toward the gym. She wondered who invented the game of badminton, and why that person had nothing more important in his life than the desire to hit a bunch of glued-together feathers over a net.
“So you tore off half your lip?”
Emma touched the scab with her fingertip. Ridged and crusty, it felt like the surface of an alien landscape. She wiggled her finger and felt it begin to detach. “I can’t go in there today. I’m sorry.”
“Wanna go sit behind the math portables? I have pictures of the soccer team on my phone. They’re not wearing shirts. That always cheers me up.”
Emma stretched her torn lip into a smile. She nodded and felt the first spark of life inside her since yesterday. They jogged past the tennis court like they were heading to the practice field, and then dashed left, taking cover behind the first in a strip of brown portables. Elvira tapped her barrel-roll bangs to make sure they were intact. “Your bangs are perfect,” Emma said. “Thanks for staying with me.”
Elvira nodded. “You stayed with me when I needed someone. I won’t forget that.”
“How is she? Your cousin?”
“My aunt threw her out, so she’s staying with us. Last night, she was yelling at my mom to bring her some tamales. I guess that means she’s all right.” Elvira sank to her knees and shifted sideways, leaning against the portable. “So tell me what happened, ‘cause you look like shit, chica.”
Emma sank to her knees and stayed there. “It’s my dad,” she said, reaching out to pull individual blades of grass from the earth. “He was in East Malo Verde for work and he didn’t come home last night. We were so scared we called the police.”
She wanted those hours to blur in her mind, the way chemistry formulas did after she studied too hard for too long, but they were still hyper-vivid, like the Lo-Fi filter on her old phone’s photo app. “We didn’t know where he was until he crawled home. Someone hurt him. Whoever it was almost beat him to death.”
Elvira gasped. “Oh my God, are you serious? Is he okay?”
“I don’t know. My mom made me come to school instead of staying with him. Why would she do that?”
“She doesn’t want you to worry.”
A flare of anger lit the darkness inside her. “How the fuck am I not going to worry?”
“I don’t know,” Elvira said softly. “I’d worry, too.”
“I called the police afterward. She di
dn’t want me to.”
“Why not?”
“It makes trouble.”
“Where in East Malo Verde was he?”
“El Camino Rojo.”
“Shit.” Elvira shook her head, velvet eyes gleaming with tears of her own. “I didn’t know your dad worked there. I’d have told you everything if I did.”
“What do you mean, everything?”
“Your mom was right not to call the police. Even they stay away from El Camino Rojo.”
“Why?”
“The Norteños have an agreement with them.”
“But they’re the police. It’s their job to help.”
“Chica, who do you think the police hire? And who do they send to the east side?” Elvira shook her head. “Mexicans who grew up there.”
Emma bent her head to her knees, feeling the granola bar her mom gave her in the car start to work its way up her throat. She knew her dad was walking into a war zone and she’d never said anything to warn him. She'd never said anything about what Elvira told her or what she’d seen between Monica and Rocio. She let her mom warn her away with a whispered hush.
“This is all my fault,” she said, leaning her head on Elvira’s shoulder. “I should have told him.”
“Would it have made a difference?”
Emma thought of the way he walked into cold, dark parking lots and brought the car to pick them up. If it was raining, he never took the umbrella. He always left it with them, even if they waited under an awning. Once, he’d gone alone to the Christmas tree lot during a rare sleet storm because Mattie was having a slumber party that night. None of her friends’ moms braved the sleet, and she and Emma spent the night alone, in sleeping bags, beneath the fragrant pine.
“No,” she said.
“Then it wasn’t your fault.” Elvira laced their fingers together in a fierce, protective grip. “It’ll be okay. You’ll see.”
Emma breathed in the sharp aerosol scent of Elvira’s hairspray. They sat together, unmoving, until the bell rang.
Chapter Sixteen
Friday, April 4
After she said goodbye to Elvira, she’d gone to the lunch table like usual. Via and Rachel were already there, backpacks open and binders flat against the table. Rachel wore an oversized sweatshirt with shorts that barely showed beneath the sweatshirt’s hem. Her legs were blue with cold. “You weren’t in chemistry,” she said.
Emma took a deep breath. “I need to tell you guys something.”
This time, she held her voice steady. She pretended she was telling a story, like Scheherazade. Like breathing or walking, storytelling was just about putting one action into motion over and over again: Noun, verb, adverb. Subject, object, predicate.
Via and Rachel listened to the story, put their arms around her, and asked if there was anything she needed. When she asked for a tissue, Rachel handed her one from her pocket. But when she asked to borrow money to buy a hamburger in the cafeteria, Rachel lowered her head and waited for Via to make the first offer. “Here,” Via said, shoving a five-dollar bill into Emma’s hand and giving Rachel a dirty look. “Buy anything you want.”
While she stood in line at the cafeteria express window, a student council member announced the winners of the window-painting contest. Ana’s group, the one that painted the Aztec head, took the top prize. Afterward, the DJ resumed the ranchero music and she carried her cardboard tray back to the table. Rachel checked her texts, holding the phone underneath the table top, as if that made it invisible.
Two hours later, Emma stood on the bottom step of the school’s entrance, waiting for her mom’s car to round the corner. A white mid-size sedan had turned off Carver Boulevard, but she couldn’t tell if it was the right one. She stood on her tiptoes and leaned forward to get a better look.
A tap on her shoulder shot her off the ground. She spun, hands balled at her sides. “Look at you,” Dan said, imitating her stance. “You look like you’re ready to fight someone.” Then the smile fell away and his green eyes darkened to the color of summer grass. “Are you going to fight someone?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Then why the shadowboxing? Bad day?”
Emma struggled to wrap the word “bad” around her day. It was too small. She blinked and scanned the school’s front lawn. Girls in sleeveless short-skirted cheerleader uniforms chattered about dates or movies or parties. The words she had to find were different. Father, missing, blood, beaten. They were magnets. When she tried to put them next to each other, they repelled.
Dan reached out for her arm and then stopped before his fingertips touched her, as if she might object. “This is serious, isn’t it? Is this why you weren’t in class today?”
Emma nodded. “Did someone else give you paper?”
He held up his hand. A chemical equation bled blue ink across his palm. “You know you’re the only one who gives me paper.”
“Something bad happened to my family.”
“Can you talk about it?”
Emma shook her head.
“Will I see you tomorrow? At the water polo match?”
“I want to,” she said. “But I can’t.”
He nodded and looked at the ground. She caught a glimpse of his part, soft and pink beneath his thick brown hair. “Em, you’ve never been like this before.”
“How do you know?”
“I sit down next to you in class every single day. I know what you look like when you’re happy, when you’re stressed, when you’re sad. But not this.”
She turned her head, not wanting to think about what might be revealed by a close scrutiny of her face right now: red eyes, dark circles, the scab on her torn lip, snot threatening to trickle out of her right nostril. “I have to go.”
“Em, I want to see you.”
She looked up at him, feeling tears pool in her eyes. Why? she wanted to say.
He grasped her hand and pulled it toward him. With his other hand, he pulled a blue pen from his pocket, bit off the cap, and licked the tip. He pressed it onto her skin, scrawling a series of numbers. “Call me. I’m here if you want someone to talk to.”
Emma’s face crumpled with a sob she couldn’t hold back.
“No crying!” he said, moving his hands to her shoulders. “If you wipe your eyes with your hand, you’ll erase my number. So you can’t cry. Okay?”
“Okay.” She bit her lip and the scab caught against her teeth.
“I’m serious. I don’t have a Sharpie, so that needs to last.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw her mom pull up at the curb. “I have to go,” she said, sliding away from him. “I’m sorry.” She walked to the door of her mom’s car and turned around.
Dan hadn’t moved. No tears, he mouthed.
She pursed her lips in a weak smile, then threw herself into the car. “I want to see Dad.”
• • •
The bedroom door squeaked when she pushed it open. A plastic nightlight sagged in the outlet on her dad’s side of the bed, its eggshell light flickering over an oval patch of carpet. She looked at the windows, covered by the expensive blinds her mom had ordered when things were still good. Thin and silky, they honeycombed into layers that blocked all light and sound.
“Dad? Are you awake?”
“Em?”
Her mom had propped him up on two enormous pillows, stripped of their shams to avoid accidental bloodstains. His left eye was swollen shut, the lid bulging and crinkling at the same time, like a plum rotting in the sun. Dozens of raisin-colored scabs speckled his cheeks.
“Do you need anything?”
“No,” he whispered. “Just you.”
Crusted blood traced brackish runes on the pink skin of his lips. Five butterfly bandages held the right side of his brow together. His nose looked like his eye, swollen and purple and custardy
. Near the neck of his white T-shirt, she saw streaks that looked like fog.
She pricked herself with words like angry and sad and revenge, but the needles didn’t pierce the skin of her soul. Instead, she felt only relief. He could have died, but he’d been saved because she and Mom and Mattie loved him so much. Something had taken their love into account and brought him home alive. Thank you, she prayed. I don’t know who you are, but thank you.
Her dad’s lips twitched in the beginnings of a smile. He lifted his right hand a few inches and patted the bed beside him. “I missed you,” she said, sitting down beside him.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
For what felt like the hundredth time that day, her eyes burned with tears. All he’d done was go to work and try to support them, try and help send her to college. She was the one to blame for everything. “You don’t have anything to be sorry for.”
He blinked his good eye several times. He was about to cry, too. “Mom gave us TV dinners,” she blurted. “Mine was still frozen in the middle. It was Salisbury steak.”
His lips twitched again, another smile, medium rare. “School.” The scabs on his lips kept him from enunciating, turning every word into a growl. His right eye, the good one, was red all the way around the iris.
“I forgot my lunch. I had to eat a hamburger from the cafeteria.”
“Good?”
“The bun was soggy. And they didn’t have pickle relish.”
“Not good.”
She smiled. Her dad was a hamburger aficionado. Every year, she asked him to make them for her birthday and every year, rain or shine, he fired up the grill.
“Homework?”
“Lots.”
“What kind?”
“Math, French, history, English, chemistry.” She paused. She didn’t want him to think she was complaining. “Mostly easy stuff.”
He nodded. Starting in first grade, he’d inspected each of her report cards. If it measured up, he took her to the bookstore and told her she could have any book she wanted. She took him to the cleaners, always selecting huge coffee-table editions: a picture book about dinosaurs, an encyclopedia of world events, a glossy animal taxonomy, a compendium of presidents or kings. He paid cash for her selection, then took her for an ice cream cone. When they got home, the first thing he did was inscribe her new book with the date and a note of congratulations:
