by Vanessa Hua
“Planes don’t crash every day.” Prophet Alex dug out the airsickness bag in the seatback pocket, and thrust it into Kingsway’s face. Kingsway rocked back and forth in his seat like a Muslim boy in a madrassa. The captain ordered the flight attendants to take their seats.
“We’re not going to crash,” Prophet Alex said. “Don’t think about it. That flight disappearing over the Indian Ocean—that never happens. Almost never.”
Groaning, Kingsway dipped his head low, his eyes blank as a drowning victim’s.
“Can you lift your arms? Lift your arms,” Prophet Alex said. Slowly, Kingsway raised his arms, his fingers limp, as if he were a zombie.
“Up and down. Up and down.”
Kingsway complied, though he was panting when told to draw out his breathes for two, four and finally six seconds. The plane eased off. Prophet Alex rubbed Kingsway’s damp back. A touch that he cherished, whether blessing a newly-baptized Christian emerging from the waves, or laying hands on a teenager in the throes of demonic possession. A touch that healed Prophet Alex as much as it healed those he ministered. “I see us on stage.” His voice booming, as if he’d never left the pulpit, as if confidence and volume would bring his vision to life. “People are cheering, sending you so much love. They love you, always have, love you even more after you share your story.”
He gripped Kingsway’s sticky hands. Eventually, Kingsway might believe. Conviction once would have mattered to Prophet Alex, but not now, maybe not ever again. The spotlight at the revival would be bright and blinding as an atomic blast, and the roar fit for Jay-Z. Smoke machines, giant video screens, and purple strobe lights, God blasting like a wall of speakers, he and Kingsway center stage where they belonged. The plane banked sharply and descended. Prophet Alex’s ears ached and sounds grew muffled until he could no longer hear himself, only a singsong drone that presumed the voice of God.
WHAT WE HAVE IS WHAT WE NEED
Papá could break into any house in the neighborhood. He would squirt grease and work on the lock, twisting the pins and springs. Although I heard the click indicating that he was in, he fiddled a few minutes longer, so the customers would think they were getting their money’s worth. If it were too easy, they looked annoyed and wondered aloud how much the short visit was really worth. Sixty dollars—for less than an hour’s work? Or they went into a spasm of fear about how easily burglars could get in.
“Don’t worry,” Papá would reply, looking at their dusty televisions, black velvet couches, and gilded portraits of La Virgencita. “I think the thieves have other places to go.”
The year I turned thirteen, I was learning the trade. I accompanied Papá on weekend house calls in the Mission District, learned the names of the tools, and in a few instances, gave him the right one before he asked for it. He taught me how to file key blanks—but not yet how to pick a lock. That happened only after my mother began to disappear. Up until then, I had been her son. Not my father’s.
After one of our house calls that autumn, I dreamed of a magic key that could open all doors. To our neighbor’s apartment, to every car parked on the block, and to the doors of a bank vault. No one would be safe before me. Papá laughed when I told him. “Lalo, there’s no need for such a key.” He could open any lock with his skills, force his way into anywhere. He kissed my mother on the cheek. She put down her wooden spoon and he embraced her, his hand reaching to cop a feel. The leftover refried beans smoked on the stove. My parents broke apart, and Mamá laughed, swatting at him and pulling the pan off the stove.
Neither of them looked at me. His grin was smug, possessive, that of a man polishing his gleaming car just to run his hands over the curves. He cupped her butt once more and she leaned into him.
I wanted such powers for myself someday, to win someone like Mamá, but I could not imagine talking to women with such confidence. Even girls my age seemed years ahead of me, with their thick eyeliner, dark red lips, and curves packed into their jeans.
A week later, Mamá and I were walking back from a market when she showed me the flyer for classes in English, math, and computers at a community center, La Gloria Abierta. An unexpected reminder of home, and a phrase my abuelita, my mother’s mother, used to say when the money from my parents was long gone, when she conjured another meal from an almost empty sack of beans. La Gloria Abierta, or “what we have is what we need.” Not the usual meaning of the words, but something deep and old and mysterious.
I should have crumpled the flyer and tossed it into the trash, told my mother that she had no time, that she worked hard enough already and that I needed her more. Mamá cleaned rooms at a big hotel in downtown San Francisco. Before I arrived, she had worked at restaurants and sewing factories, whatever she could find, but the jobs all paid the same: enough for food and rent, and not much to send home, or to save for an immigration lawyer.
The training at the community center might help her get an office job and higher pay, she said. Maybe at an insurance or accounting agency along Mission Street. The plan, like all her plans, was to earn enough money to bring my two younger brothers from Morelia. Jose, dark and compact, with high cheekbones like me and my father, a daredevil who could walk on his hands. Ernesto, the youngest, with a mop of fat curls like my mother’s, quiet and shy, my abuelita’s favorite. I missed them, but I didn’t want them to come here. Not yet. In America, I was an only child, and I liked having all the attention.
My mother and I did our homework assignments together after dinner in the kitchen. The window looked onto the roof of the building next door, covered in gravel and patches of tar, desolate as the moon. A moist, oily smell of grease permeated our apartment, a hint of all the people who ever lived here. Over her books, my mother often paused to rub her eyes and massage her rough hands. We checked each other’s homework, but if there was a question of who was right, she deferred to me. She rewarded me with glasses of milk and cinnamon cookies. “Que listo.”
~~~
As a teenager, my father left Mexico with his cousin. They crept over the border and walked through the desert before piling into a truck that brought them to San Francisco. When he was twenty, he came home and married my mother, the prettiest girl in their neighborhood of narrow streets, concrete houses, tin roofs, and no fathers. After that, he returned to his family at Christmas every other year, back when it was easier to cross la frontera. He saw each of his three boys in diapers, and the next time walking and talking. He told my mother to work on the house, to make it nice for when he earned enough money and retired in Mexico in a few years. She added a second floor but ran out of money. The concrete stairs led nowhere. In the evenings, she and I watched telenovelas on a tiny black-and-white set. She sighed over the clothes and houses, but scoffed at the women. “That’s no maid,” she said. “Look at her hands. Too soft.” She made fun of the leading men, who were tricked every time by evil women. “Que tonto. Can’t he see what’s happening?”
When I was six, my mother followed my father to San Francisco. She told me that she was going away to help Papá, but would be back. My father had stopped coming home at Christmas. His money wasn’t enough anymore, for the electricity, for my abuelita’s medication, for our school supplies. Three of my tíos lost their jobs after the factory closed. Neighbors and relatives came by whenever they had an emergency, and how could my mother turn them away? Even if she had so little, they had nothing, she said. Everybody, it seemed, depended on my father’s pay.
The afternoon that Mamá left, she asked me to watch over my brothers, who were four and two years old. We were sitting together outside on the steps. I could feel a trickle of snot starting in my nose and knew if I spoke, I would start crying. She was no different than Papá. Worse, because she was supposed to stay with us until his return. She kissed me good-bye on the top of my head. Wait. I wanted to wrap myself around her legs to prevent her from leaving. Joselito, he ran so fast. I could still scoop him up, but I imagined the trouble he would get into: darting in front of a bus, in
to the path of neighborhood bullies. And Ernesto followed our mother everywhere, underfoot and insisting on her lap. What would he do without her?
I tried to run down the street after Mamá, but my abuelita held me back, her arms tight across my chest. I watched as the blue flag of my mother’s dress grew smaller and smaller, until it disappeared as she turned the corner. When my abuelita kissed the top of my head, I squirmed away. You’ll see her soon, she promised.
Lies, I knew even then.
When I was eleven, my parents finally picked me to go to San Francisco. I was old enough to make the journey on my own, and my parents wanted me to start attending school in America.
My abuelita put me on a 36-hour bus ride. Although I’d been hoping that the coyote wouldn’t show up at the station, he was there, in a white cowboy hat, searching the face of each passenger coming off the bus. I was the only boy traveling by myself, and if strangers asked, I was supposed to say that I was going to visit my aunt. We didn’t talk much, which I preferred, but was thankful that he asked what I wanted at meals instead of just ordering for me.
At the border checkpoint, the coyote told the officer I was his nephew. His accent must have been convincing, from time he spent in the U.S., or from the movies, I didn’t know. He’d put away the cowboy hat, shaved off his stubble, and changed into a button-down shirt and khaki pants, a disguise like the Dodgers cap and blue jeans he’d given me to wear. He presented our passports. I looked straight at the officer, like I was told, and forced myself to breathe easy and kept my sweaty hands folded in my lap. And in a moment, the officer nodded and the roads turned from bumpy and pitted, swarming with vendors, to fast, smooth freeways along which no one walked. How lonely.
Across the border, he handed me off to a lady with stiff dyed-blond curls, whose car reeked of cigarettes. She chain-smoked, one hand on the wheel, the other ashing out the window. We stayed on the freeway, which seemed a sign she wasn’t going to kidnap me, lock me in a room and ask for more money from my parents. I was asleep when she pulled in front of the apartment in San Francisco. She shook me awake. The car was warm and comfortable, the seats soft as flan, and I did not want to get out. It was late. The sky hazy black, the stars faint, and the moon a watery crescent. She rang the buzzer. The front door was set back in an alcove covered by a metal gate. Black gaps interrupted the white tiles arranged in the circular design on the ground, a broken smile. I fidgeted, looking at the pink menus hanging off the doorknob, at the wrinkled newspaper on the ground, at the building’s flaky gray paint peeling like the bark of an ancient tree. I read the building directory and found our name, Lopez. My abuelita would no longer make me lunch when I returned for the siesta. No longer would she tell me stories about her childhood in a mountain village, where the lacy butterflies descended each fall. No longer would my brothers and I climb to the top of our house to spy on neighbors, at the young wife who hung her lacy panties and bras to dry in the window, and la vieja who smoked a pipe while cooking.
Someone pushed through the front door. I went dizzy, breathless, as though I’d been spinning in circles. What would Mamá look like? I couldn’t picture her clearly anymore. Would she recognize me? I hadn’t seen her in five years, Papá in seven. I jumped to hug the woman, and then stopped short. A chinita, with chubby cheeks and frizzy hair, squinted at me, clutched her purse and brushed past us. The driver tugged on my arm. Quit it, she said. We waited another minute, and she buzzed again.
And then my mother rushed to the door, patting her hair and smoothing her dress. She looked like my aunt, but curvier, her long curls tinted red-brown, and her features blurred somehow, like a copy of an original left in Morelia. My father followed. He was short, thick and muscled, with a buzz-cut, sparkplug head. I took a step back. We were supposed to know each other.
“Mamá?” I asked.
“Mijo, you’re home.” She knelt down and hugged me. I saw her two moles, one above her upper lip, on the right side, and one just beneath her eye. Back home, I had loved to rub the chocolate spots, raised dots in her velvet skin. At last, something I remembered.
~~~
That November, on my thirteenth birthday, Mamá set the kitchen table for five. For the three of us in San Francisco, and for my brothers back home. She did that on their birthdays and on Christmas, too. Mamá skipped class, maybe the only time she missed a session for me. But Papá had insisted.
She served me first, with a bowl of sopa tarasca and a plate of pollo placero. My favorites, she had learned. Then she served my brothers, my father, and herself. When she said grace, she prayed that the family would be reunited soon. She never had any other wish. Her voice grew hoarse as she held back her tears. She squeezed my hand, grinding my fingers together. Papá bowed his head. He let her speak, or maybe he had nothing to say, his jokes, his stories, his flirtation silenced. Though I hoarded the affections of my parents, I could not bear to see them so broken. I pictured my brothers bumping elbows while trying to eat. Jose would be greedy, picking off Ernesto’s plate. Ernesto saved the bits of tortilla in the soup for last, letting the strips soak until soggy and soft. They were probably sitting with my abuelita, laughing in a life that no longer belonged to me. I had no friends here, and kept to myself at school. I took a few bites and pushed the enchiladas around my plate. My throat was tight, as if I had swallowed an ice cube, a radiating numbness. I could not go back to Morelia, not until we had our papers. The border was tightening, and it was impossible to travel in a group of three. My father ate from my brothers’ plates, after the cheese cooled and congealed on the enchiladas, and the crema sank to the bottom of the bowl. Did he have to choke down their food, grown cold? Or was he merely hungry, eating whatever was before him? Did he miss them? He’d left us behind so many times.
We dialed my brothers after dinner. By then, calls home were only on special occasions, two or three times a year. It was hard on my parents to promise to send for them each time. Mamá asked if they had received the clothes and soccer ball that she sent, if they liked them, how she’d been thinking of them, and promised to send more soon. The arrival of the boxes —big enough to climb into—caused much excitement: my aunts, uncles and cousins hurrying over for their share, and the neighbors marveling over the contents. Staring at the empty bottom had left me hollow, dried-out, reminding me that my mother wasn’t there, and I wondered if my brothers now felt the same.
“Comportate bien,” my father commanded, then handed the phone to me.
“Orale, qué pasó?” Ernesto’s voice sounded weird, disconnected, still a high-pitched kid.
“No más aqui.”
That night, unable to fall asleep, I would have many questions. Does abuelita still cough at night, those gasps that shook the house? Do you wish I was there, or that we could change places? But right now there were only faint clicks and echoes on the line. More silence, we said goodbye, and I hung up.
~~~
A few weeks after my birthday, Papá looked over Mamá’s shoulder as she wrote a five-paragraph essay about why she had come to America. She puckered her lips in concentration, studying the page smeared grey with erasures. Beside her, I struggled with my algebra, bad at math in any language. I kept my head down, watching them sidelong. It bugged him, I could tell, that Mamá could be so wrapped up in something that she ignored him, that she was transported to a place where she did not need him.
“Want anything? Something to drink?” he asked.
“Not right now.” She didn’t look up.
Papá stared at her bent head and sucked in a long breath. “Maybe you could get another job, in the afternoon. You said you were too tired, but now you’re doing this.”
Mamá clenched her pen. “I quit because I wanted to be home with Lalo after school.”
“Don’t you want to bring all your sons here?”
“They’ll get here faster this way.”
“Lalo needs his brothers.”
“I need my sons, too,” she said. “You’re the one who le
ft us.”
Their quiet, tense voices exploded into shouts, and I shrank in my chair, falling into the pit opening inside me.
“It was the only way!”
“The only way you could think of!”
Papá jabbed a finger at her, inches from her face. “You think I liked being apart from you?”
She stalked out of the kitchen and slammed the bedroom door.
Yes. She and I could go back to Morelia, to live with Ernesto and Joselito and my abuelita, and leave Papá and his yelling behind. But maybe she didn’t mean that. Did she want to start over? Without Papá? Without us? Other fathers started new families in America, and stopped sending money to their wives and children. At least Papá had stayed with us.
~~~
Six months after Mamá began taking classes, La Gloria hired her to be a community liaison. When we shopped in the neighborhood that spring, people stopped her to ask questions about La Gloria, which offered job training and ESL classes for adults. I stood forgotten off to the side.
“There’s a computer class that would be perfect for you,” she said to a leathery man in paint-spattered jeans and work-boots. “It’s free. Just once a week.”
I tugged at her arm.
“In a minute, Lalo.”
She worked at the hotel five days a week, and two evenings at the center after cooking us dinner. She asked if I wanted to come along, to check out the center’s books or get on the computer, but I told her no. I didn’t want to leave Papá too. When he could not find the paper napkins, or discovered something else we were out of, he shook his head in irritation. With her gone, we did not have much to talk about, and finished eating within ten minutes. It was then that Papá taught me how to pick locks.
“That’s it!” He clapped me on the back when I succeeded in cracking the mechanisms spread out on the kitchen table.
I liked knowing that someday, I could get by with my hands. Like him. When we walked through the neighborhood after dinner, Papá pointed out different houses and apartments where he had picked the locks. Sometimes as we passed strangers, he whispered that woman kept a messy house that reeked of cats, and this man draped laundry across his studio on a clothesline. That shy woman turned crazy, screaming and tearing at her hair, kicking over a chair, when he cracked the lock to find her boyfriend in bed with another woman. Papá knew their secrets, the ones they could not hide before he broke in.
