“Just, get in the back and stay there, okay?” She sensed his smile without looking at him, even as she lowered the window and signaled for the car behind her to pass. It sprayed a mist of rainwater as it sped by, and when she turned back to look at him, Omar had already switched seats. She sighed. He was always moving without her noticing.
She caught sight of a curtain swaying, just barely, in the front window of the house. No sooner had she put the car into park than Claudia stepped out wearing a simple blue jersey dress and gray flip-flops that slapped against her heels in quick succession. She was always power walking, always seemed to have other places to be. Isabel thought it made her look like she was racing to the nearest bathroom.
“You’re a lifesaver,” Claudia said. She plopped into the car and turned to the back seat. “I didn’t realize you’d have company. I’m Claudia,” she said, busying her hands with the seat belt. Isabel tapped the brake, and the car jolted in the driveway, as if barely missing a cat or a child crossing behind it. Claudia gave Omar a quick, cordial smile, and he stared at her, dumbstruck, perhaps a bit too long.
“I’m so sorry,” Isabel said. “I just, I didn’t think . . . this is—”
“Mario,” Omar said. “We know each other from the hospital. Crazy luck, I ran out of gas this morning, and Isabel happened to drive by. Gotta get that gauge fixed. It sticks at a quarter tank when it’s empty.”
“Well, it’s a good thing you ran into each other,” Claudia said. She laughed in the way people do when they’re trying to be polite.
“So I guess we’ll get your car first,” Isabel said.
“There’s a gas station right around the corner.”
“Oh no, no. You first. I don’t want to keep you any longer,” Omar said, craning his neck to look at her as he spoke. In quiet moments at traffic lights or when she slowed before a turn, Isabel could see him in the rearview mirror, glancing at his daughter. It was like watching a teenager with a crush: no glimpse or chance to say something wasted.
He asked them both general questions, but Isabel knew better than to answer most of them.
“How was your Halloween?” When he meant, Tell me about any of your days.
“Have you lived in this neighborhood long?” When he meant, How has your life been, all this time I’ve been gone?
For her part, Claudia didn’t seem to mind. She was in such a hurry to get her car and get back to her wedding-planning that she barely looked at Omar as they spoke. When he asked, she told him that she had been working on Halloween, and that the neighborhood was nice because it was mostly full of young professionals. “No loud kids on the street, but lots of baby-making noises next door. So I guess we’ll wait a few years and see.”
“Do you have kids?” Now he was posing questions he knew the answers to, just to keep her talking.
“It’s just me, my fiancé, and our dog.”
Isabel saw him smile at her in the mirror, even though it was lost on Claudia, because by now they had pulled into the garage, and she was looking for her car. They went in circles from one level to another, and she wondered aloud whether it had been towed. “That’s the last thing I need today.” She scanned the lot while Isabel’s and Omar’s eyes remained fixated on her messy brown bun. It’d been maybe ten minutes since she had gotten in the car, and Claudia hadn’t recognized him. She hadn’t paused to ask if they had met before, hadn’t mentioned that something about him felt familiar.
Was it time or absence that disguised him? Perhaps she simply had no memory to match him to.
“There it is!”
Isabel had driven right past the blue sedan.
“Thank God.” She leaned in to Isabel for a half-seated hug and grabbed her purse. “It was nice meeting you, Mario. Get that gas gauge checked soon, all right?” As she walked the few steps to her car, she gave them both a small wave. They idled, and Omar mimicked her gesture, wiggling his fingers while his palm stayed still.
“See her left foot? How it tilts out a little?” he whispered.
Isabel nodded.
“She’s always done that. It was worse when she was three . . .” He paused to wave again as his daughter drove away.
“I know. She went to physical therapy for it, and when that didn’t work, the doctors had her try Rollerblading. It straightened both feet out, for the most part.” She hadn’t realized she was interrupting until it was too late. They were both so eager to claim a part of her, they had forgotten this was not a casual conversation.
“Thank you for this.”
“I’m sorry—”
“I mean it. You didn’t have to let me stay.”
“I didn’t think she’d see you. Or at least, you know.”
“Elda really never talks about me, huh? Not that it’d help. I imagine to Claudita I’m barely a faceless memory.”
“But she saw you this time.”
“That’s true. Maybe barely is enough.”
Cars were starting to circle into the lot. Isabel backed into a spot and parked. “What’s so different about this time?”
Omar shook his head in wonder.
“Come on, enough already. Why come all this way if you won’t tell me anything?”
“It’s funny you think that. I always feel like I’ve told you too much. There are so many things you shouldn’t know, and it’s nearly impossible to pick apart what I can’t tell you from what I must.”
“Must?”
“The first time I came, I was just so happy to see you and Martin. I didn’t think much about why. And I thought I had so much time. I thought she would, anyways.”
“Who?”
He laughed like it’d always been obvious. “Elda.” For a moment he said nothing else, just let her name stand on its own. But when he spoke again, there was a desperation in his voice she had never heard. “I have next year. Maybe the one after. Maybe.”
Isabel couldn’t tell if he was talking to himself or to her. Suddenly he was all mumbles and pauses, torn over what to say and what not to say.
“Slow down. You’re not making any sense.”
“I can’t.” He brought his hands over his mouth. He looked small to her then, like someone she would probably never notice in a crowded room. “You know how they say that one person’s paradise is another person’s hell? The idea of this unflawed eternity . . . unflawed for who? It’s not perfect. It has gaps and holes and spaces we can get lost in. Everyone there, we’re just memories. All we know is what we remember, what we choose to hold on to.”
The warmth of the morning’s bath came over her, rushing into every small part of her, then turned piercing and cold. She remembered as a child drawing heaven, a simple blue line between earth and sky. Aside from a few clouds and birds, it was blank, a vast nothingness she could never picture. When her father died, she imagined him painting it for her, adding color and texture and sound. She closed her eyes and tried to think of it, but everything was littered with dark splotches, places where her sight and memory failed.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I never wanted to.”
“Then why?”
“You haven’t noticed? Sometimes, even when I can’t see her, I can tell she feels lost. She doesn’t remember, or she remembers the wrong things at the wrong time.”
Isabel’s mind was still hazy from last night. She could feel her heartbeat climbing her chest to her throat. “Elda?”
“Who else?”
And she understood. Who else had ever mattered? “I hadn’t noticed.”
“She’s always been good at keeping her secrets.”
“What are you getting at?”
“If she goes without knowing the truth, then she never will. It’d just be her without me. Always. Two sides of the same coin.”
“If she goes? You don’t mean that she’s—”
“I’m not saying it’s soon. I don’t know, actually. I can’t see the future, just what’s in front of me. I never wanted to have to tell you.”
>
Beyond the cement enclosures of the parking garage, the horizon was nearly black from a far-off rain that was fast approaching. It was time to head home, but she couldn’t will herself to move.
“Is this about the man you . . . went to prison for?”
He crossed his arms and nodded. The AC was set just above low, but he shuddered as if he were cold. “Martin thinks I did it?”
“You confessed,” she said, as gently as she could muster.
He looked down at his hands, wrinkled and pale as school paper. She could tell he was picking his words, tossing some, keeping others. “Tell her I did it to protect her. I can explain the rest, if she’ll let me.”
“Omar, I can’t . . . I promised Martin I wouldn’t say anything.”
“Then tell Martin to tell her. Tell them anything.”
“And even if I did, why would they believe me?” She thought, Why should I believe you?
“Maybe she won’t. But maybe it’ll be enough.”
They headed home, the rain, mixed with hail the size of raisins and marbles, rattling against the car. Pedestrians ran across the intersection, carrying bags and coats over their heads, and on the highway cars sped home, as if nature were chasing them away. Isabel kept her hands tight on the steering wheel. The car kept slipping past her grip, sliding over layers of rain and pavement. She couldn’t see more than ten feet in front of her, just road and yellow lines dashing beneath them. She could hear nothing but the rain engulfing them. It was so loud, Omar had to shout when he next spoke.
“I have to go. Please don’t let her forget me.”
She was too worried about the car swerving out of control to turn away. She tried to tell him to stay a few minutes, that they would be home soon and under cover. As she got off the highway and stopped at an intersection minutes from her neighborhood, she felt her hand turn hot and balmy against the car’s interior.
Looking down, she noticed Omar’s hand on hers. It was covered in veins and freckles that seemed to be fading. She couldn’t take her eyes off them; it was like his skin was reversing time, growing smoother and lighter until it blended with her own and was gone. She looked up to find the seat empty, and when she placed her hand on it, the leather was still warm.
CHAPTER 30
APRIL 1983
No one ever seemed to stand still in the United States. People in lines glanced over the shoulders of those in front of them. Mothers sitting in buses bounced children on their laps, as if the roads weren’t bumpy enough already.
Elda had observed the rhythms of her new home silently when they first arrived, not wanting to complain despite the exhausting noise. The contrast was striking: back home, the big cities had been all car horns and police whistles, and even the smaller towns carried the voices of food vendors and gossiping neighbors from one end of the village to the other. But in between there were always moments of nothingness. Beggars napped. Housewives cooked batches of tortillas over the comal. Children, resigned to boredom, kicked rocks down hills of dirt.
Here there was time for none of that. The roads were eerily quiet and controlled, but the drivers were like ticking bombs; swerve a few inches into someone’s lane, and they would honk you off the road.
Elda tried not to let it get to her, but she could sense their new life taking its toll. She often thought of the walks she and Omar took along the edge of their village. On their first date, they had followed the railroad tracks up a hill to where a group of Omar’s friends were gathered around a campfire. They had a few beers, played songs on the guitar, and when they walked home three or four hours later, with nothing but moonlight to guide their way, it seemed like no time had passed at all. Everything was familiar, and everything felt theirs. Elda had never recognized that feeling until it was gone.
Here, she was an uninvited guest in a home she didn’t want to disturb. In public she said only what she needed to; she learned the cuts of meat she liked at the grocery store deli, the stops along her usual bus route, the forms she had to fill out every two weeks when they got paid and wired money to Mamá.
Her newfound timidity became habit. She spoke to herself and the baby more often than she spoke to Omar, keeping her thoughts to herself in his presence. With this new job he had at the restaurant, he was suddenly the one with stories to tell, so as the three of them rode the bus to their night job at the office building, Elda only listened.
There was always one about his boss, Jimmy. How it turned out he’d had a stroke four years ago, and that was why he spoke slowly. Or the hostess, Karen, who was so distracted that she often seated too many customers in one waiter’s section, and once handed a menu to a blind man. There were the regulars, the ones who ordered the same thing every Thursday, the ones who tipped big, and those who didn’t. Sometimes Omar would repeat a joke the cook had told him, and when Elda didn’t get it, he said it was funnier in English, or that she just had to have been there.
“Maybe the baby and I can visit sometime for lunch,” she said one Saturday evening. Elda leaned against the bathroom threshold while Omar covered his face in shaving cream.
“Yeah. Or maybe we can go for dinner one night when I’m off. That way things are calmer.” He let his razor run under the hot water until the steam fogged the glass.
“It’d be nice to put faces to all the names.”
“Mm-hmm.” He pressed his lips shut to get his chin.
Elda’s heart beat loudly in her chest, and it felt like her world against Omar’s, constricting as his expanded, one desperate to catch up with the other. As much as she loved him, it wasn’t enough. She was shrinking in on herself, each day full of less life than the last.
Omar had surprised her when he took the job at the restaurant; he claimed it would help them bring family over, and they wouldn’t have to feel so alone. But Elda knew better than to place her loneliness in the hands of others, hoping it would dissipate when she wasn’t looking. She needed to do it herself.
She began defying her instincts. They were small choices at first—a fuchsia-colored shirt instead of her usual gray or white, the radio turned up a notch louder as she cooked with the windows open. Her accent be damned, she started practicing her English with store clerks and bank tellers. Most spoke to her in Spanish as soon as they sensed her struggling, but she persisted. She found that with strangers, she could be anyone.
One afternoon, she ran into someone she thought she knew at the grocery store. At first she couldn’t place the woman with the baby boy at the end of the aisle, but she was smitten by the possibility that they might lock eyes and not look through one another. That they might lock eyes and not look away.
Elda pretended to read a box of cereal as she watched her—and then she remembered: Elda had lent this woman a quarter a couple of weeks ago when she had spilled her change all over the laundry facility’s floor. Satisfied with her realization, she made her way down the aisle. She was surprised that the woman had a child—she wouldn’t have guessed as much from the clothes in her hamper.
“Hi. I think we live in the same building.”
The woman looked at her as if she were about to squint, and then her eyes widened, and her lips parted into a smile. “Yes! You saved my clothes. I owe you a quarter, at the very least.”
“It was nothing.”
“Créeme, mija. The viejitas in our building are the patrollers of laundry. The one time I left my washing machine unattended and came back just five minutes after the cycle ended, I found Señora Lucia tossing out my clothes like it was yesterday’s trash. She kept shouting, ‘Time’s up, time’s up,’ as if I was the one that’s hard of hearing. La pobre está loca. But she’s going to drive me crazy, too, one of these days.”
“I’ll remember that for next time,” Elda said, already intoxicated by her energy.
The baby squirmed in the woman’s shopping cart, which she had lined with a teddy bear-patterned blanket for him to sit in. He couldn’t have been more than four months older than Martin, his legs just
a few inches longer.
“You’re new, though, right?”
“Yes. Well, we’ve been here almost two years. But we moved to the building a few months ago.”
“You and the baby . . .”
“And my husband.”
The woman nodded. “Well, it’s not paradise, but it’s a start. Of what, is the tricky part, no?” She laughed and her thick, red nails glistened under the fluorescent lights.
“It’s taking some getting used to. I mean, look at all these boxes,” Elda said, turning to the cereals that towered over them. “Who knew we needed so many flavors? What is a tiny rainbow supposed to taste like? Or a dinosaur pebble? It’s too much sometimes.” She wasn’t sure why she was suddenly so talkative. Elda was often overwhelmed by choices when it came to things that didn’t matter, and left without a choice when it came to things that did.
“Sugar. Pure sugar is what it tastes like. Here, try this one,” the woman said, handing her a yellow box that looked like it was filled with cardboard O’s. “All the moms insist it’s the healthiest, and the kids like it, too.” She looked at her little boy. His hair was fine and light, completely unlike his mother’s, who wore her black hair in a ponytail three times the size of Elda’s. “God, I sound like a commercial.”
Elda took the box, thanked her, and asked for her name.
“Yessica. Or you can call me Jessica. Everybody does.”
“Yessica. I’m Elda, and this is my son, Martin.” She pulled him out of the cart and held him against her hip. Martin shouted sounds he seemed to think were words. “He does that a lot lately. Maybe he’s trying to introduce himself to your beautiful little boy.”
“Oh. No, Sam isn’t my son. I take care of him during the day while his parents work. I take care of him and the house, actually.” In her hand she held a sheet of paper with purple and yellow borders, filled front and back with a list written in cursive. “Today’s grocery day,” she said, raising her eyebrows.
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