“I’m not done,” Omar said. He pressed his mouth to hers and gave her his breath. He doubted he was even doing it right, but he kept on.
“Omar . . .” This time, it was Elda’s voice begging him to stop, though she only kept repeating his name.
He couldn’t make himself let go. He tried six, seven more times. Pumping, breathing. Her body shook a little less each time he pushed against her, as if she, too, were tired. He wanted to shake her, wanted to slap her, wanted to scream: How dare she leave when they had only just arrived?
“Mar. I. Sol!” With each syllable, he punched her chest.
There was a gasp. Beneath him, the mattress shifted. He was still sitting on Marisol’s body, and he felt it now, expanding and shrinking like the sea as the wind rushed back in.
CHAPTER 17
They had agreed not to make a big deal out of Eduardo’s birthday (just a simple get-together with family and friends), but two weeks before the barbecue Isabel tossed a set of invitations into her cart.
They were the fill-in-the-blank type. Who, What, When, Where. Each envelope had To and From lines, and it occurred to her that she hardly knew anything about Eduardo’s friends.
“Here, in case you want to invite anyone,” she said when she got home. “They’re cute, right?” There were ten cards in the pack, with a design simple enough not to embarrass a teenager. He glanced at the front and back, then placed the packet on the coffee table.
“Thanks. But I can just text them,” he said.
It turned out Martin had bought him a cell phone as an early birthday present. An impulse purchase, he had called it, though it had technically been free with a new plan.
“It’s for safety purposes,” he said as he flipped through the user manual. A long black cable stretched over the back of the couch, charging the phone while Eduardo watched the battery-indicator light blink on and off.
“That’s what I told my mom to get her to buy me a pager,” she said. Senior year, Isabel’s hot-pink pager had been all the rage. Her mother insisted it was for emergencies only, and for the first few months she had felt a knot in her gut whenever her mother paged.
“Remember one, four, three? I love you?” she said to Martin.
“One, two, three: I miss you,” he said without skipping a beat. He turned to Eduardo. “We were the original texters. Except we used codes. And we’d each choose a number so the person could know who was beeping them. Mine was twenty-four.”
“Mine was twenty-three,” Isabel said. “We were meant to be together.”
“Were you a cheesy couple back then, too?”
She gave him a push as she sat next to them on the couch. “Martin and I weren’t really friends in high school. Besides, I transferred to another school freshman year.”
“Oh, right. I keep forgetting you and Claudia knew each other first.”
“Senior year, I had a boyfriend who also had a pager,” Isabel said. “When it was too late for him to call the house, I’d page him and call Moviefone to tie up the line. Then I’d click over when the call-waiting beeped through.”
“Sweetie, you’re confusing him with ancient words like “call-waiting,” Martin said. He started to program his own number into Eduardo’s phone.
“I know what call-waiting is. What the hell’s Moviefone?”
As she explained, she thought of the smell of popcorn and the carpet patterns in the darkened theaters. There’d been nothing else to do back then. Nothing else they would rather have done.
“What about you? What’d you and your friends do for fun back home?” Immediately, she regretted her choice of words. They implied home was not here, but there, that it was gone and past.
Eduardo didn’t seem to notice. No one ever did but her.
“Random stuff. Hanging around the neighborhood. It was always hot. Sometimes we’d swim in the lake.”
“The great outdoors,” Martin said.
“What?”
“It’s just an expression. You know, when you go camping or hiking, surviving off the land. You rough it.”
“Like, for fun?” Eduardo said, and when Martin nodded, Eduardo shook his head. “Why would anyone want to do that?”
Isabel rested her head on Martin’s shoulder. He dialed her number and created a new contact in Eduardo’s phone: ICE Isabel.
“What’s that?”
“‘In Case of Emergency.’ You’ve never seen it at the hospital?”
Once, maybe three years ago, she had contacted a girl’s parents this way before the girl bled out from a car accident. “I’d forgotten,” she said. “Here.” She took the phone and changed both numbers: A_Home Martin. A_Home Isabel. “So it’s alphabetical.”
That evening she began filling out the invitations. On the “What” line, she wrote Eduardo’s Turning 17! She set it aside and wrote another: Eduardo’s 17th Birthday Party, and another: Join us for a Springtime BBQ.
It really was a stupid idea. To Isabel and Martin’s friends who had never met him or barely heard of him, it’d look like a seventeen-year-belated birth announcement. Saying anything now felt awkward, like telling someone they had been saying your name wrong after years of letting it slip by. A phone call would be better, she decided. She would make it sound like a casual, but special, occasion. Isabel tossed the cards and kept the envelopes.
CHAPTER 18
MARCH 1981
Almost dying brought Marisol more peace than she had ever felt in her life. It wasn’t that she was happy about it; the experience had frightened her daughter so much that several times every night, she felt Josselyn’s finger below her nostrils, checking for air. Marisol made a point to breathe harder so there was no doubt she was alive. She even pretended to stir, wrapping her arms around her daughter’s body. She would let the low undulations of her breath lull her back to sleep.
Except now, when morning came, there was no hangover to look out for. No bruises to disguise as they blossomed on her skin. Even her soreness was unfamiliar: for once her throbbing muscles felt like an accomplishment, not a punishment. Now, when she thought of her husband, she liked to think he was in a jail cell somewhere; that in her absence, he finally started a fight he couldn’t finish.
She imagined him cursing everything in her name. Though he couldn’t hurt her anymore, Marisol knew it’d been him in that trunk, strangling her one last time. She unwrapped a pack of peanut butter crackers and handed a few to Josselyn. The men had come back last night with a plastic bag full of food and water, mostly prepackaged snacks like potato chips and tubes of dried meat. These were new indulgences for her daughter, who ate them happily.
A man none of them recognized had said, “Be ready tomorrow morning.” Though it had taken nothing more than putting on their shoes and gathering their belongings, the group had gotten ready. Morning had come and gone, and they were still waiting.
“Be ready tomorrow morning,” Elda said now, dropping her voice to imitate the young man. “He doesn’t know what’s going on any more than we do.”
It was true. Marisol guessed he was no older than eighteen; he had a nervous air of confusion about him.
“Just stay inside and keep quiet,” he had said the first time Omar asked how much longer they would be waiting. He’d turned the volume down on the small black-and-white television that flickered from the corner of the room. It sat sandwiched against the wall between two mattresses; a third mattress, the one she and Josselyn now slept in, had been arranged horizontally to form a U with the other pair.
The television got one channel, and barely, but Josselyn and Omar hadn’t stopped watching since they had arrived. They watched cooking show after cooking show in silence. No one could understand what the hosts were saying.
The chef on today’s show was preparing a noodle dish in a giant pan. Instead of stirring the vegetables and meat, he was shaking the pan so the food flew into the air.
“What happens if he doesn’t catch them?” Josselyn whispered to Omar.
He
mumbled something about cooks having pets for a reason. Marisol laughed, careful to not let on that she could hear them.
Elda paced the room, tracing the thin trail the mattresses created along the carpet. Every once in a while, she scooped her belly. It was a small bump—maybe four or five months. Marisol wouldn’t have even known she was pregnant if not for Elda’s habit of massaging it.
It occurred to Marisol that the young woman was lucky to be pregnant on this journey. Years from now, when Elda would look back, she’d remember the growing weight of a life sharing her body. All other sensations would be secondary.
“How are you doing, mija?” This was all Marisol would allow herself to ask; acknowledging the pregnancy seemed cruel.
Elda swept her hair off her face. Thin, loose tendrils stuck from the sweat. “Maybe if it weren’t so hot . . . but then again, I doubt it’d make any difference.”
There was a shower in the house, but they had been instructed not to use it. Even the toilet flushes cost money, they’d been told, right before being instructed to use it in pairs. Last night, while everyone slept, the toilet had clogged when Marisol tried to flush. It was like the damn thing knew she was breaking the rules. Afraid another attempt would cause it to overflow, she had left it alone. She had been too mortified to use the bathroom all morning.
Marisol went through what little belongings she had left: an extra pair of shoes for Josselyn, a couple of toothbrushes, and a Bible. From between its pages she pulled out a pamphlet the nuns had given her.
“Here.” She fanned herself a couple of times to demonstrate, then handed it to Elda.
The young woman thanked her. She tilted her head back as the tiny gusts of air hit her face and neck. After a few moments, she took a quick glance at the paper. “The Lord’s Prayer,” Elda said.
Marisol only knew which prayer was written on the paper because the nuns had told her. “It’s brought us all this way.” Of course she knew it by heart.
“What about the rest of the way?” said Miguel from one of the beds. None of them had noticed Miguel was even wake. “Got another prayer that’ll get us out of this place, or is hot air all they’re good for?”
“Don’t start, güey,” Omar said, his eyes still on the television.
Miguel propped himself up with his elbows. His son, such an energetic boy until they got here, pulled the T-shirt he had been using as a blanket over his shoulders. Marisol had considered pretending to sleep, too. Anything to make time go faster.
“You might be comfortable as cows here, but I’m tired of being treated this way. At least cattle get their shit cleaned out once in a while,” Miguel said, looking right at her.
An unbearable heat rushed across her face. She hoped her skin was too burned for anyone to notice. A crack in the wood-paneled wall curled, river-like, halfway to the ceiling, and she followed it with her eyes.
“You poor thing,” Elda said, shaking her head as she looked down at him. “Couldn’t figure out how to use the plunger? Or are you just too delicate?”
“It’s okay, mija.” Marisol tried to coax her away. If there was one thing she had learned from her husband, it was how to read a man’s silence. Men like Miguel didn’t let things go; they collected their anger as if it were fuel.
Perhaps Omar sensed this, too, because he got up and rubbed his wife’s arms. “She’s right. We’re all tired and cramped, that’s all.” In a lower voice meant for just the two of them, he added, “How are you feeling, my love?”
At this small tenderness, Elda brought her hand back to her belly and mumbled she was fine. Marisol wished she could give the couple some privacy, but all she could do was turn her attention to her daughter, still glued to the television. “What is he making?” she asked.
Her daughter shrugged and turned onto her side. “I don’t know. I’m tired of being here, too. You said things would be better. Why can’t we just go back home?”
CHAPTER 19
Eduardo invited, of all people, a girl. Her name was Diana, and she arrived driving her own truck (a blue pickup that looked twice her age) and carrying a gift bag with rainbow-colored tissue. “They’re headphones. I couldn’t find a smaller bag,” she said, as if worried he might get too excited by the presentation.
Eduardo thanked her, reaching for the gift just as she stepped in to hug him. Isabel excused herself to help Martin in the kitchen.
“They’re cute together,” he said, filling a bowl with salsa.
She agreed, but she couldn’t help wondering if Eduardo’s armpit hair tickled against Diana’s shoulder. He had cut the sleeves off a T-shirt Isabel had given him last week, and though she had said he looked fine, the truth was it annoyed her. It was obvious he wanted to show off his arms; his daily workouts were molding him into a brawny guy. He was more confident now, and somehow, less innocent.
As the guests dispersed into small groups, Isabel fluttered from one group to the next. Mixing family and friends made her anxious; it wasn’t so much the mingling, but the transition of leaving one conversation for another that always felt rude.
Isabel slid onto the picnic-table bench, where Elda sat across from Claudia and Damian. The couple had the whole bench to themselves, and they huddled close, their fingers intertwined as if one of them might fly away.
They were telling a story Isabel hadn’t caught the start of, but from the way they took turns with lines and details she assumed it was how they had met.
“So la loca grabbed a bottle of club soda off the shelf and opened it, just like that,” Damian said, much to Elda’s amusement. The wind picked up just as they began to laugh, and Isabel caught Martin’s eye from across the yard, where he was sharing a beer with a few coworkers. The balloons they had tied to the fence danced around like restless children.
But there was no sign of Eduardo and Diana.
She went looking for them, with her beer bottle still cold in her hand. The hot dogs and burgers were already on the grill, which seemed a good-enough excuse to interrupt the two hormonal, but hungry, teenagers on her couch.
“Plates are there. Burger toppings and condiments, here,” she said as she escorted them out to the yard. They held their empty paper plates by the table. Eduardo stared at the tomatoes and pickles and mayo with the intense focus of someone making a very important decision.
Diana poked at his biceps with one finger. “Ding-dong. You there?”
He rubbed his hand over the spot she had touched. There was a bump Isabel recognized: the small piece of smooth, puckered skin left behind by a tuberculosis shot. At work, this mark told her nearly as much about a patient as a birth certificate; babies born in the United States weren’t vaccinated for TB, but most born south of the United States were. She often wondered if the skin was still tender, or if, like any other scar, it’d gone numb.
“Yeah. So maybe we can go next weekend?” Eduardo said.
Diana nodded and scanned the food on the table. “I’m starving. Everything looks delicious.”
With her empty plate held before her, Isabel felt like a beggar, her pleading eyes hoping for more detail. She wanted to ask what they were talking about, but they had already moved on, quite purposely, to another subject. Maybe later, she thought. Maybe after midnight, when it was no longer Eduardo’s birthday, but there were still slices of cake left, they could pick at it with two forks as he told her how much fun he had had.
Instead, the party stretched past midnight, past the birthday song and the few gifts that friends had brought. Most of them were gift cards in envelopes that should have taken barely seconds to open. But Eduardo took his time, thanking and hugging each person after unwrapping their gifts. He seemed particularly excited to receive Claudia’s, an armband for his phone, but she waved off his gratitude and joked that Damian had picked it out. He saved Diana’s gift for last, and the pair sat outside next to the recycling bin full of beer bottles, listening to songs on his cell phone with one earbud each. They leaned their heads close together, as if they
might hear the music better this way.
Elda moved away from the window to give them privacy. “See? You were worried he’d never get comfortable, and now you have to worry about him getting too comfortable.” She sank into the loveseat by the television and added quite loudly, “I noticed Costco has a box of fifty condoms.”
“Damn, you must be going through them fast, Mom.” Claudia laughed and Isabel began picking up the last of the paper plates around the living room. The sound of polite giggles and tired sighs rose and then fell into quiet.
Martin sat on the arm of the loveseat, tilted toward his mother’s frame. His eyes had turned red from a mixture of exhaustion and alcohol.
“Sit, mija. I’ll take care of the plates,” Elda said to Isabel, but Martin placed his hands on Elda’s shoulders and pulled her back into an embrace before she could get up.
“How about everyone just sit and relax? When’s the last time we were all in the same room?” Martin said.
“We had Sunday dinner when we first bought the house,” Isabel said. “And before then, we had the wedding. So give or take two years.” It seemed much longer. Perhaps time hadn’t just crept forward, but also back as they all moved along. How else to explain the gaps, the moments they seemed to have skipped just to find themselves in a life that didn’t entirely feel like their own?
“That was a magical night,” Elda said.
“You think so?” Isabel took the last big sip of the wine she had been nursing since they had cut the cake. The couch was piled high with oversized pillows and the few purses and coats that still remained, so she sat at the very edge closest to her mother-in-law. “In what way?”
She could feel Martin’s eyes on her, and then he hiccuped, just a little louder than usual.
“There’s just something special about that many people you love coming together. It rarely happens. Or if it does, it’s for your funeral. Not nearly as fun,” Elda said.
A warm languor spread over Isabel, clouding the space between her thoughts and speech. “What was your wedding like?”
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