Everyone Knows You Go Home

by Natalia Sylvester

  Omar nodded, as if he could already see where she was going.

  “That morning, I could see he was this whole other person. I don’t know his thoughts or feelings. Not really. I’m essentially living my life with a stranger I trust more than anyone in the world.”

  “It’s a beautiful trust.”

  “It is.”

  She stopped there. No sense in telling Omar how fleeting the moment was. Later that morning, she had stood in the empty apartment and painted the walls back to white. She had watched their home become a blank canvas, and she had cried alone within it.

  “But it makes you sad. Why?”

  “It’s nothing. Just the ups and downs. Not every moment can be precious.”

  “Oh, mija. Even the shittiest ones are. One day you’ll look back and mourn the pain of it, how alive you were.”

  She grasped her drink, feeling her neck sink deeper into her shoulders. “You’d rather have the pain than nothing.”

  “I’d rather have the pain than forget. Or be forgotten.” Quickly, he added, “What’s the second one? You said there were one or two.”

  She smiled, wrapped in a new memory. “It’s just the first time we had everyone over for Sunday dinner.”

  Omar looked surprised. “Here? Not at Elda’s?”

  “I couldn’t believe it either.” It was a weekly tradition that stretched back years; Isabel was only nine the first time Elda welcomed her to the family table. Her mother had been running late to pick her up, and Isabel feared she might be drinking again. Elda only smiled and asked her to help set the table, handing her an extra place mat and set of silverware.

  “It was her idea, after we bought the house. I asked her if she was sure, and she said, ‘How else do you make a house a home?’ So we had the whole family over. It was like something out of a grocery store commercial.” Everything had felt so natural that Isabel thought she and Claudia might become close again.

  She led Omar by the hand to the dining table, thinking how nice it would have been to have him there. The feel of his skin warmed her palm, but then Omar let go.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. I just realized I haven’t wished you and my son a happy anniversary. What’s the first year? The gift?”

  “It’s supposed to be paper.”

  “Ah, right.”

  “I wrote him a love letter. Thought it’d be romantic.”

  He grinned, but she could tell by the way his eyes looked through her that he wasn’t listening. Isabel felt her heart sink. She couldn’t help wanting Omar’s attention and approval, even if no one else cared for it.

  He stepped back and rubbed his forehead. “I’m sorry. You’re upset. You have every right to be.”

  She began to feel unsettled. “I know you were hoping to see Martin. I’m sorry you missed him.”

  “That’s not the problem.” He placed his hands behind his back and began walking the length of the table, his eyes fixating on the grooves of the wood. “The problem is, he doesn’t miss me, so he won’t see me.”

  “I’m sure there’s a part of him that misses his father.”

  “You don’t understand. Do you know what keeps the dead from really dying, Isabel? It’s just memory. Longing. Being held in the hearts of our loved ones. Last year, I didn’t get it. It was a miracle Martin saw me at all. Now he’s moved on. Now he really doesn’t want anything to do with me, and I can’t blame him. But as long as he feels that way, I don’t exist to him. Or to Elda or Claudita. It’s why I wasn’t able to speak with them.”

  “You said they turned you away.”

  “I said they didn’t see me. There’s a difference. I can’t go where I’m not wanted. I’m starting to think the only thing bringing me here is you.” He placed a hand on her shoulder, stopping short of rubbing it, and she felt a jolt in her gut.

  “It can’t be just me,” she said, half-laughing.

  “Why else would I show up only after Martin’s gone?”

  “That’s not fair,” she said, but just then the air conditioning clicked on, its hum harsh and intrusive, and she wondered if he’d heard her at all. “I can’t be the only reason you’re here.”

  “Of course not. But you are how I’m here. I’m very grateful for that.”

  “And the why?” At the very least, she deserved to know this.

  “Why else but redemption? A second chance. Isn’t it always?” Omar smiled and shrugged, surrendering to the ordinariness of it all.

  They stood around aimlessly, wondering what to do next. She thought of the summer she turned fifteen and her mother signed her up for the Boys & Girls Club because she had nowhere else to put her. In the pool, between rounds of Marco Polo and races to the deep end and back, she and the kids would catch their breath. They would tread water, wondering if they should keep playing or dry off. Isabel always agreed with whatever the other kids decided. It was odd to keep her face so unaffected, her breath so even, while below the pool’s surface her arms and legs paddled, grasping at any bit of mass that would help keep her afloat.

  “What are you going to do now?” Omar asked, the way a neighbor might say as he meandered out the door. She reassured him she had no plans, that Martin wouldn’t be home until the evening. He seemed in less of a hurry then, like a tired man finally admitting he needed to rest.

  They spent hours together. It was a gray fall day, and the sun felt stagnant, stuck behind so many clouds that it became hard to tell time. She asked him if he would like to rest.

  “No, I don’t need any more of that.”

  When he laughed, he sounded just like Martin. She told him as much, and he seemed pleased. “I have an idea,” she said. “Wait here.”

  Just because his family wouldn’t see him didn’t mean he couldn’t see his family. She went looking for old photos and shoeboxes full of mementos, trying to piece them together into a cohesive narrative. Some of them she had seen: Martin at prom, Martin dancing as part of the court for a friend’s quinceañera. There were collages she and Claudia had made in junior high out of pictures of them at the mall or on the cheerleading squad.

  Others she saw as if they were new. In photos from Claudia’s birthday parties, she caught glimpses of a younger Martin in the background. He had been an awkward specimen to her back then, with his budding mustache and khaki pants, when everyone else was wearing faded jeans. Though he was three years older than she, Isabel thought him a bit of a nerd, but she never had the heart to make fun of him.

  “He was like a little grown-up,” she told Omar. “Always trying so hard to be mature for his age.”

  Omar smiled but remained quiet. When they got to the ones of her and Martin, she was stunned to realize how young they looked not even three years ago. Their faces were fuller, but somehow smaller; their features held more tightly in place.

  She was on her laptop now, clicking through her Facebook albums, when Omar asked her to stop at a picture of Elda. All this time, she had been on the other side of the camera, snapping their childhood pictures. But last Mother’s Day, they had taken Elda to lunch to celebrate. Their waiter took several pictures, each milliseconds apart, so now when Isabel clicked between them they seemed to move: an elbow shifting, a turn of the head, a strand of hair blown out of place. In the center sat Elda, smiling and then laughing, eyes squinted shut as her mouth widened, her head tilted toward the sky.

  “She looks as beautiful as I imagined when I thought of us growing old together.” They were sitting at the kitchen table with their elbows resting against the wood. Twice already, Isabel had caught Omar mimicking her movements.

  “She has a grace about her that’s strong and soothing.” It was the first time she’d said this out loud, though she had noticed it years ago, shocked to know mothers could be this way.

  He nodded slowly, his eyes on the still image of Elda, as his hands curled into a soft grip.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “You keep asking why I’m here. Isn’t it obvious?”r />
  They stared into Elda’s eyes. It seemed she was looking right back at them.

  “Will you help me?” Omar said.

  “Help you what?”

  “Help me get her back. Help her see me next year.”

  She busied herself brushing dust off the tracking pad.

  “I know it’s a lot to ask.”

  “It’s just that, I don’t know that anything I could say would make a difference. And I promised Martin . . .”

  “You’re right. Forget I mentioned it,” he said. “Tell me. What are your plans for next year? Travels? Kids?”

  Grateful for the change in subject, she gave the same answer she always did, which applied sadly to one question and happily to the other. “It’s not in our plans for a while.”

  Omar crinkled his nose and smiled. “Plans are just silly attempts to control the tricks of time.”

  That evening, after Omar left and Martin arrived and they began dressing for their night out, she looked for ways to tell him his father had stopped by. She preferred to think of it as something she could mention casually, something that’d be received in kind. “You just missed each other,” she wanted to say, as if he were a neighbor Martin would normally avoid. Or, “We chatted and caught up,” as if she were recounting lunch with an old friend.

  She studied Martin’s reflection as he combed his hair, tilting his head toward the mirror. Though he was not the type to brood over his looks openly, he was particular about his hair. At least once a month Isabel caught him aligning the mirrors in the bathroom so he could check the back of his head. When he was a child, Elda had told him stories about his grandfather, a man so bitter he had refused to speak with her after she had come to the US against his wishes, and who had gone bald by the time he was in his thirties. The prospect of early hair loss had haunted Martin ever since.

  “You’re looking very handsome,” she said.

  He looked down at the sink, embarrassed that she had caught him. She’d once told him it was silly, that she would love him even if he went bald as a cactus, but he hadn’t thought it very funny.

  “Sweetie, you worry too much.” She sat on the edge of the bathtub, fidgeting with a bobby pin she had left on the counter. “Did you notice that head of hair on your father? And he must’ve been what, at least sixty?”

  “Sixty-two.” He set down his comb and kissed her on the cheek. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe that’s the only good thing the bastard left me.” He laughed, but it did little to hide his anger. “I’m sorry. I told myself I wouldn’t think about him tonight.” He took a deep breath and put his hands on her shoulders, smiling like he was about to give her something. “Tonight’s just about you and me. I promise.”

  CHAPTER 4

  MARCH 1981

  It is not so bad, Miguel thought. Not yet as grueling as they said it would be. The climate was stiff and breezeless, but at this hour nothing more than uncomfortable. His brothers and sisters were just spoiled from living across the border so long. They had forgotten, after years of air conditioning, how brutal the heat can be back home, how it multiplied with so many bodies in one room.

  That was why they had warned him away, he decided as the group crossed the highway. They were being selfish, not wanting one or two more. Miguel had seen their living room—a room in which no one sleeps!—in pictures they had sent along with boxes of new shoes, new clothes, soaps and shampoos, all with the price tags still on them. These were not gifts, he had thought, this was charity. When the items arrived, his own children looked at him like it was Christmas. They did not bother thanking him because they knew their father could never give them such things.

  Everything he had provided was taken for granted: a roof over their heads, two meals a day. Even he thought it was never enough, and on days when the rain slipped through the ceiling, soaking the mattress his family slept in no matter which corner of the house they moved it to, he knew it was not enough. They would not survive on mold-filled beds and rice and eggs and sugar-water. His wife and children got hungry not even two hours after they ate. Despite taking the kids out of school to help her sell postcards and sewing kits, when they added up the day’s earnings with his own from the factory, it was gone as quickly as it came. The cost of living had started to feel like a debt he could never repay. It grew with each breath they took. Not even the air was free.

  “¡Apúrense!” The coyote yelled them off the side of the road, and they picked up the pace as a truck’s headlights approached.

  It’s not la migra, he thought. La migra would slow down. This one sped past and tossed a warm gust of air in their direction.

  He looked at his boy, already dragging his feet on the perfectly paved road. “Don’t start now. We’re almost there.”

  “Almost where?” Tomás asked. “You said the same thing five days ago.”

  “That’s because we hadn’t reached Tamaulipas yet. We’ve crossed four states already. Just this one more.”

  “And then what?”

  “Enough. You don’t talk back to me.” If Miguel had done the same as a young boy, his father would have whipped him for days. “Don’t make me regret bringing you.” It hadn’t even been his idea. When he had lost his job and decided to go north, his wife insisted he take their son along.

  “Two of us can stay at my mom’s house, and then we don’t have to worry about rent,” she had said, referring to herself and their seven-year-old daughter. “But three of us, and when Tomás can already work . . . we all have to do what we can.”

  His son had been more excited about the trip than he cared for. To Tomás, el Norte was mythical, a land where everything was brand new and even the dogs got clean water to bathe in.

  “That’s not why we’re going,” he had said, explaining that the toys and clothes his aunt and uncles sent were luxuries. If they had really wanted to help, they would have sent cash, cans of food.

  All those pretty gifts they could do without, and they had done without, ever since his sister wrote that things had gotten harder because she had lost one of her jobs.

  One of her jobs. Even the women get them like they’re handouts, he thought.

  They turned right at a narrow, dusty road ahead and eventually came upon a barbed-wire fence that said “PROPIEDAD PRIVADA.” Someone had clipped a hole wide enough for a dog or a small child to slip through.

  “Quickly,” the coyote said. “Over or through.”

  Miguel went first—climbed to the top, then jumped to the other side. He turned and extended his arm for his son to follow, but instead the others made their way, first the little girl, then the women, and only when the other man in the group insisted that Tomás go ahead of him did his son crawl through the dirt like a possum.

  “You stay by my side next time,” Miguel said. These people, with their desperate eyes and fear-filled whispers, were not people he would trust.

  CHAPTER 5

  JUNE 2014

  There were clouds that hung in the sky unnoticed, and clouds whose shadows crawled over the earth’s surface, blocking out the sun. Isabel watched the ocean turn gray as she stood chest deep in it. The salt twinged her cracked lips, and she had to blink each time a wave kissed her face.

  She let herself sway along with the current and climbed onto Martin’s back. Monkey, she liked to call it. On days the ocean didn’t pull their bodies apart, she would attach herself—legs wrapped around his waist, arms over his shoulders, cheek pressed against his upper back—and they would stand together in the water, weightless.

  The moment passed as quickly as the clouds, stretched apart in the sky like a spiderweb. They had driven an hour and a half from McAllen to South Padre cloaked in the last bits of dawn, giddy as teenagers. Last night, Martin’s office had flooded from a busted pipe, and with Isabel working 4–10 shifts at the hospital, they had found themselves with a wide-open Friday. “Freeee-day,” Martin had sung, sweetly into her ear. He had packed everything—towels, chairs, cans of soda in a chest full of ice, w
ith ham-and-cheese tortas at the top, a bag of chips, and a soccer ball she was sure they had never used. All Isabel had to do was put on her bathing suit.

  The island was nothing new to her. It’d been her family’s weekend-RV spot before the divorce, the place where she learned to swim. It’d been her college friends’ spring break mecca, the place where, at twenty-one, she had first bungee jumped from a crane two-hundred feet in the air, making the giant-shark entrance to the souvenir shop look tiny.

  Still, when her feet touched the sand this morning, she marveled at the surprise of it.

  “This is the last thing I expected to do today,” she said.

  Martin kissed her elbow, which was just below his chin. “I told you we’d have more days like this. A promise is a promise.”

  To their left, in the distance, was the pier where Martin had proposed. It hadn’t been as empty as it was now, but the few tourists and fishermen present had been kind enough to pretend not to notice, and so the moment had remained private instead of slipping into spectacle. She remembered how, when Martin got down on one knee and even before she saw the ring, she worried it would fall through the planks of wood. She had gotten down on her knees, too, because she had wanted to see him eye to eye, and she’d cupped her hands beneath his, as if water might slip through his fingers.

  “I never took that literally,” she said now.

  “I know. But if we made time before we can make time again.”

  He made it sound like something they could replicate, something not at all finite.

  They walked back to their towels. It was so hot that in the time it took for them to eat their sandwiches, the moisture evaporated from their skin. The sand was firm, packed so densely that Isabel’s foot cramped as she tried drawing her name in it with her toe. Birds loitered just a car’s length away from them, each keeping watch with one eye for stray crumbs. By early afternoon, they were surrounded by island kids still in their school clothes, middle-aged tailgaters celebrating early happy hours, and leather-skinned retirees who had left their condos with nothing more than a mat to lie on.