by Ruthie Knox
Though sometimes he surprised her by blending perfectly well. In the trailer, he’d surprised her, and then he’d cut her down at the knees, and then he’d surprised her all over again.
She’d kept thinking he was going to say it.
She didn’t love you.
Nobody loves you.
But he hadn’t. He’d pulled the punch, and afterward he’d looked punch-drunk himself, and full of shame.
Ashley had lost her resistance to him. The boxes, her disappointment, her tears, their argument—all of it had emptied her out, left her feeling as though she’d been scoured with sand and water and now she was just a clean shell, receptive.
She looked at Roman, and she wanted to draw him inside.
They crossed over a torn-up section of road and reached the outskirts of Centralia. Here, too, there was life—not in abandoned houses, because the houses had all been cleared away, but in the intersections of roads like veins, the bones of a body that had lost its flesh but not its spirit.
“What happened?” he asked.
“The government decided it was too dangerous for people to keep living here, and it would be more practical to get rid of the town than to get rid of the fire. They started paying people to move away and knocking down their houses. When some people still wouldn’t move, the state evicted them. It took a long time, but it’s nearly empty now.”
“It doesn’t look dangerous.”
“Right? Some people think it’s a conspiracy,” Ashley said. “They think the state government wants to kill the town to get the mineral rights.”
“Please.”
“This is one of the richest coal seams in the country. Sometimes the ground is worth more than the people who live on it.”
Roman stopped asking questions. She hadn’t meant to make the comparison to Sunnyvale, but there it was.
She didn’t want to think about Sunnyvale.
“You want to go see the church? There’s one that still holds services.”
“For who?”
“A lot of people who used to live here moved close by. They come back.”
“Okay.”
She led him uphill, toward the spire. “Stanley was born here,” she told him.
“In Centralia?”
“Here on this street. There were row houses. Michael told me. Stanley was supposed to be born in Bloomsburg, at the hospital, but his dad ran off and left his mom without any money, so she was afraid to go and then it was too late.”
“Did he move away because of the fire?”
“No, a long time before that. His mom remarried, and they went to some other town. Michael was born there. They didn’t buy the campground until later. Michael says Stanley wanted to come back because Centralia is hard to leave. I asked Stanley once if he thought it was because the place was special or if it was more that what had happened to the town haunted him.”
“What did he say?”
“He kind of grunted.”
They followed a road uphill, past power lines, and then ascended a steep set of stone steps that belonged to the church. Halfway up, Ashley turned around and sat down. Roman found a seat beside her, one step above.
They looked downhill, over the carpet of trees to the rise of the valley beyond. Everything green and quiet.
“My parents were refugees,” he said.
That was all. Just those four words. But it was the first thing he’d ever told her about himself voluntarily, and the words pinged against the pain she carried inside her, setting it resonating.
This was why she’d brought him here. If there was any place that felt to her the way Roman did, it was this one. Every time she visited, Centralia dredged up all these unstable emotions in her. Anguished empathy for the people who’d lived here and had to leave, and a sense of the earth itself, the loneliness of it, the confusion. She thought of hidden heat, of faith that kept burning, and it filled her with fierceness and longing.
And now, bound up with all that, she thought of Roman.
Behind her, he shifted and exhaled.
“You know the Mariel boatlift?” he asked.
“Sort of. A lot of Cubans came to Florida then, right? In the eighties?”
“Nineteen eighty. Castro opened the Mariel port and said ‘Anybody who wants to go, go.’ More than a hundred thousand Cubans came over, mostly in private boats. President Carter said the United States would welcome them with open arms, but he didn’t think there would be so many.”
Roman made a sound that was supposed to be a laugh, but it had no humor in it. “Maybe half of the people had family who met them in Miami or Key West, but that still left a lot of people with no one. The government stuck them in refugee camps. They sent a whole bunch to Fort McCoy in Wisconsin.”
Wisconsin. There was the link.
“My parents hooked up at the camp. They were young, both of them alone. My mom was only fifteen. I was the first baby born to Mariel refugees on American soil.”
Born in 1981. That made him thirty-two.
“There was a picture in the paper. Patrick said my mom wanted to name me America, or George Washington. Libertad Roman Ojito Díaz was a compromise, so I guess I should be grateful.”
“Who’s Patrick?”
“He was my foster father.”
“Oh. Your parents …”
“Kind of a story there.”
She sat very still, because she felt its presence. This skittish narrative creature, drawn out by the quiet, the view. Drawn by the smell of her tears, the trauma of what had happened in the trailer.
When he didn’t speak, she reached out and insinuated her hand beneath the cuff of his pants. She found the skin above his sock—hot, slightly damp—and slid her hand up to wrap around his calf.
He went so still, his body a held breath. She situated her hand against his muscle, snugging in, and left it there.
Tell me.
Tell me.
His inhale broke the silence, and the story came. “That was a weird summer in my hometown, Heraly. It’s really small, less than ten thousand people, about four of whom spoke Spanish, and they found out one day that the government was going to send fifteen thousand Cubans to the fort. Like, tomorrow. The fort isn’t even a real fort. It’s just some barracks and a fence. There aren’t soldiers stationed there or anything. So they weren’t ready at all, but it was kind of exciting, too, right? And Wisconsin people are all about being helpful, so …”
He trailed off. She wasn’t sure if she was supposed to respond, or what to say. But then he started again.
“The government was dithering around trying to figure out what the immigration status of all these people should be. Because here they were, some of them psyched to be in the land of freedom, some of them just shoved out the door without being given any choice, and they’ve got no paperwork to tell you who’s who. Murderers and petty criminals, enemies of the revolution, rapists, little kids with no parents, guys who’d been thrown in jail for being gay, schizophrenics, mechanics, food cart owners—here they are, mixed up together in Fort McCoy, Wisconsin, and the government’s telling these nice Midwestern folks, ‘Just deal with it, okay?’ ”
Another long pause.
“That’s so screwy,” she said.
He glanced at her, amusement on his mouth but not in his eyes. “So every Spanish speaker within a hundred miles gets hired on. And social workers, Catholic charities people, anyone who thinks they can help. Patrick was a social worker for the diocese. His wife, Laurel, was a high school teacher who spoke Spanish. They signed up right away.”
He widened his legs on the step, leaned forward so he could gesture with his hands in the air between his knees. She felt his energy beneath her palm, his calf muscle bunched, twitching.
He seemed so much younger when he wasn’t wearing his costume or playing his role. Just a guy. A guy telling her a story, letting her touch him.
If he’d talked for hours, she would have listened.
“All these Cuba
ns in the barracks needed sponsors to get out from behind the barbed wire. Patrick helped connect people up with local families who were willing to sponsor them out and let them have a spare bed until they found somewhere to go, some job to do, whatever. Laurel translated for him. They had a baby, Samantha, who Laurel carried all around the camp, and here was this teenage girl who was pregnant, with no people. No mom around. Laurel connected with that, I guess. She and Patrick sponsored my mom out, and she came to live with them. After I was born, we both lived there.”
“What was your mother’s name?”
“Silvia. Silvia Ojito. And he was Roman, of course. My dad. I think I told you that.”
“Did they sponsor him, too?”
“No. Patrick was part of this team of social workers that was doing assessments of all the unaccompanied minors in the camp—trying to establish who needed more care, who was mentally ill, who might need foster parents, that kind of thing—and he assessed my dad. Disturbed was the word he used in the report. I saw a copy once in his file cabinet.”
Ashley had a vision of Roman, kneeling in an office, rifling through drawers for clues to who he was.
Roman cleared his throat. “I should probably warn you this story doesn’t end well.”
“I’d guessed that.”
He ran his fingers down from his knee around to the back and pushed at the lump her hand made inside his jeans. “Get that out of there.”
Chagrined, she did, pushing her fist into her lap.
She didn’t expect him to find her wrist. To take her hand and hold it at his hip.
She didn’t know that his palm would feel clammy, betraying his nerves. His need for reassurance.
A hawk swooped into view. It dropped down over a clearing where there must once have been a house—feet extended, sharp talons out—then rose into the air, something wiggling in its grip.
Roman didn’t seem to know how to keep going.
“I want to know all about you,” she said. “Don’t you get that?” Ashley squeezed his fingers, and he looked at them. Looked at her. He leaned close and bumped her shoulder with his, and it was the strangest thing. This ordinary, casual scrap of affection.
She’d had men between her legs, panting and saying her name, and still not been sure if they liked her. But when Roman bumped her shoulder she was sure.
He liked her. Just as much as she liked him. Even though he didn’t want to.
This story was more than a story. It was his trust, placed in her hands. It frightened him. The knowledge filled Ashley with so much feeling—so much sticky-sweet empathetic tenderness for the kid Roman had been and the man he’d turned into—she wanted to wrap her arms around him and hold on tight.
But she contented herself with squeezing his hand, since that was what he could deal with. That was what he’d asked for. The first thing he’d ever asked her for.
“By the time I was born, the camp was mostly empty. My dad was still there. I think he must have seen the writing on the wall—all that was left was riffraff, and they were going to send him somewhere else, some kind of INS detention that would have been a prison. He’d already been in prison in Cuba. So one night he escapes, and he finds Patrick and Laurel’s house. Patrick wasn’t home. Nobody really knows what happened—what he wanted.”
Roman paused, scuffing at the step with the toe of his shoe. “He knows. But he’s not saying. When Patrick came home, Samantha was out on the road, all alone. She was barely old enough to walk, so this was bad. He scoops her up and goes to the house and finds the door open, and there’s my mom, strangled to death in the living room. Laurel’s in the kitchen, blood everywhere, still breathing. She died in the ambulance.”
He exerted pressure where they were linked, pulling her closer so he could clasp her fingers between both of his own hands. He took his eyes and his mind far away, but he compressed her hand as though all of his feelings, all of his need and fear, could be concentrated into her finger bones. Packed in at the knuckles.
She let herself absorb it, because it was easy for her to do this. So much easier for her than for him. “Where were you?”
“I was asleep in a crib. My dad got picked up by the police inside of an hour. The trial took about seven minutes. Life without parole.”
“But he never said what happened, or why he did it?”
“He says he didn’t do it. Has a blog, if you can believe that. It’s bullshit, though. The evidence was cut and dried. He’s a sociopath.”
“Have you met him?”
“Once.”
“What happened?”
A long pause. “I’m not sure I want to talk about that.”
She put her cheek against his shoulder and, when he didn’t object, left it there. “And you stayed with Patrick?”
“He asked to keep me, and they let him. There wasn’t anybody else to give me to unless they sent me to Cuba, which wasn’t happening. I guess it helped that I already lived at his house.”
This whole time, she’d kept her gaze modestly turned away, afraid Roman wouldn’t keep talking to her if she could see his face. If he showed pain, disappointment—he’d want to keep it from her. But now she looked right up into his eyes and said, “I’m glad you had someone to love you.”
He stiffened. Everywhere. Rigor against her hand, sternness at his mouth.
Oh.
“He didn’t love you.”
“He tried.”
In those two words, she found the shape of his childhood.
Oh, Roman.
“What about Samantha?”
She asked only because she hoped for him—hoped that if not Patrick, then Samantha had loved him. If not Samantha, then someone else. A neighbor. A teacher. A librarian.
But she could see it in his jaw. Feel it in his hand. That tightness that said No. Not anyone.
“When we were little,” he said. “When we were really little.”
“What happened?” And then, immediately, “You don’t have to tell me. If it’s too—”
“No. It’s—it just is. When I was six, there were these big prison riots in the South. A bunch of Marielitos were still locked up—people who’d never been let out of the refugee camps, or else they’d been released and then gotten picked up by the INS for one thing or another. They weren’t charged or sentenced, but they’d been in jail for six or seven years, treated like garbage. They took over this prison in Atlanta, took hostages, set things on fire, the whole deal. So all of a sudden the Marielitos are getting tons of media attention, and everybody’s talking about all this scum Castro had sent over, how he’d made America just bend over and take it in the ass, you know?”
She nodded. The ferocity in his voice should have scared her, but it didn’t. It only fed her need to know him.
This upset him. Had scarred him.
“Whenever that happens—which it does, every five years or so, my whole life—reporters start looking up other bad shit Mariel immigrants have done, and they’d start calling the house and Patrick’s office at the diocese. That time, one of them knocked on the door. Samantha and I were home. I guess Patrick … he must have thought it was time for us to know, because he gave an interview right in front of us, and that was how we found out my dad was the reason neither one of us had a mommy. That’s when I understood why Patrick had never adopted me like the nice lady from the Department of Children and Families sometimes hinted he might, and why he never would.”
He paused. Exhaled.
“Samantha and I were never quite the same after that,” he said. “She couldn’t forgive me, I think.”
“That’s terrible.”
“It wasn’t her fault. We were just little kids. And even if that hadn’t happened the way it did, it would have happened somehow, sooner or later. Patrick knew that. In my town, most people never forgot what my dad did, or got over it. They took these refugees into their homes—a lot of them, into a lot of homes—and they felt violated by the murders. They hate Castro in that town. Some of
them, some of their kids—they weren’t too fond of me, either. I look like my father, a little bit. I mean, I do look like him, but even if I didn’t, I’m black. They’re not. There was just me, with this skin, in that town.”
“They should have sent you to live somewhere else. Somewhere where you could have a fresh start.”
“No, I think … I think some people just don’t have a place.”
“That’s not true.”
She said it automatically, and he kind of smiled at her. She was half draped over his lap, her hand between his, her face against his shoulder, and he gave her this uncertain smile that hooked into her heart and tore when it tightened.
She thought, If I could, I would give you back everything you never got to have.
All she could say was “It’s so unfair.”
“It is what it is.”
For the first time since they’d met, his eyes were naked, and he looked so young, so yearning, that without thinking she reached up with her free hand and touched his face.
He closed his eyes.
“My grandma told me once that I had a spark of starlight in me.” Ashley paused, then plunged ahead. “That probably sounds stupid to you, but it helped me.” She grazed her fingers over his temple, her palm over his hair. It felt softer than she’d expected.
She thought, touching it, of how it would look if it were longer, curling against his head. Of how it would be if people could see this soft part of him on the outside.
More than he could bear.
She traced the outline of his ear. Found the strength in his neck, his hard shoulder. She turned her hand and rested the backs of her fingers against his throat, where his pulse beat.
“You do, too, you know.”
Roman put his hands at her waist, pulling her closer and leaning back until she had to straddle his lap. She felt the exhalation of his breath on her lips, and there was no room left for her to doubt this.
They were lost, both of them. Cast out. But his palms came up to cover her ears, and she heard the quiet whoosh of blood moving through his body, her heart beating between his hands, all the life in them and around them, and she didn’t mind being lost, so long as she could have him with her.
