The apartment was so musty, Martin could smell it on his and Claudia’s clothes when they got on the school bus in the mornings. It was like a cave, and every time he went inside, he felt they were hiding from something.
Martin was too embarrassed to invite friends over for his birthday, but his mother insisted that nothing had to change just because they had moved. She planned a party anyway, and she used it as an excuse to clean every crevice of her in-laws’ apartment.
“It was like a bomb exploded,” Martin said. Every drawer and cabinet, emptied. Every shelf in all the closets wiped clean. Clothes and shoes and photo albums and cassette tapes all piled in the center of the living room like debris. His grandmother came home and told Elda she had gone mad, and the women argued past midnight, past yelling at the kids to go to bed.
Martin stayed up and listened to them through the door, and though they shouted things he couldn’t understand, it was the low, menacing whispers that scared him most.
“I can’t raise them here,” his mother had said, and Martin pictured her pointing at a dead cockroach behind the television.
“Look all you want. There’s nothing to find,” and he imagined his grandmother overturning couch cushions, offended by the notion that their house was full of filth.
They moved out soon after, but every once in a while, Martin and Claudia would wake to find a sock drawer or a bin of toys ransacked, its contents tossed onto the floor—a message that it was time to reorganize. Even Isabel could recall a few instances, years later when she had slept over at their house, of being stirred from sleep by the sounds of Elda cleaning.
“My mom keeps house like her life depends on it. She’s not happy until it’s perfect,” Martin said.
Now, as Elda’s eyes darted from one space to another, Isabel wasn’t convinced it was that simple. “You know, I never would’ve noticed the chandelier was dusty if you hadn’t pointed it out,” she said. “You could’ve gotten away with it another few months.”
“But I would’ve known it was there,” Elda said. She stood up and took off her shoes, placing them in the hallway closet before making her way back to the mop.
“I just don’t want you exerting yourself. The floor looks fine. Yessica and Claudia will be here soon, and we just want to spend time with you.”
She dipped the mop in the bucket. “That’s very sweet. But I’ll be done in just a minute.”
“You don’t have to do this, Elda.”
Her strokes got faster and wider. “Maybe you don’t have to in your house. But I enjoy it. It soothes me.”
Isabel watched as Elda moved from the kitchen to the small square of tiles in the foyer, talking at the floor as if she were alone.
“When the house isn’t clean, it makes me feel like the world knows all my secrets. And when it is, I can breathe again.”
It was strange to hear Elda go from being passive-aggressive to vulnerable in just a couple of sentences. She was usually so guarded that this small bit of honesty seemed vulgar, a slimy thing that had slipped past her fingers. Lately, Isabel feared any small change in Elda’s personality was actually the illness—tiny seismic shifts in the brain, evident only when they broke the surface. Sitting on the couch with her torso twisted toward her mother-in-law, she turned away and pretended not to notice.
The silence grew cruel. Elda paused by the door again in her socks. Isabel crossed her arms over the back of the couch, resting her chin on them.
“I used to help my father clean his store on Sundays. He had this tiny furniture shop. At first he sold his own pieces, and then it got bigger, so he’d take his truck across the border and come back with artisanal headboards and dining sets, painted ceramics, that kind of thing. He hired a janitor, a young guy. I think his name was Nelson. But my father insisted the store was too big for one person to clean alone, so on the weekends he and I would help. I actually kind of liked it. But one weekend I had a party, and my dad promised to take me when we were done. Nelson had sprained his shoulder somehow, and everything was taking longer than it should have, and I threw a fit. I couldn’t understand why this was our job, or why my father didn’t just hire someone else while Nelson recovered. He dragged me across the store by the arm and had me wait in the car. I cried the whole time. Half an hour later my father told me I owed Nelson an apology. He said, ‘Some people have holes in their hearts not even time can fill, but that doesn’t mean they’re broken.’”
Elda sat next to her. She looked at Isabel with the same sad expression Isabel had grown used to seeing whenever she spoke about her father. It never felt right: her father had lived to tell jokes and make people smile.
“I would’ve liked to know him better,” Elda said.
“He could make you laugh so hard you’d cry. I know you never spent much time together, but he was grateful for you. The whole family. Sometimes it’s weird to me that Martin doesn’t remember him. It’s like he’s a language only I can speak.”
Elda sighed. On the coffee table, there was a stack of bridal magazines, five or six in a perfect pile. “I doubt Martin feels the same about his father,” she said, her voice so low it felt like a confession.
Isabel held her breath, afraid to move or say anything that would startle her. A thousand questions flooded her mind, but none seemed appropriate.
“He never really talks about him.”
“He wouldn’t, would he?” Elda leaned toward the coffee table and began rearranging the magazines. “He used to, when he was little. He’d ask when he was coming back, and he’d call me a liar when I said he wasn’t. He was angry with me, for months, and then one day, it was like he flipped a switch. He stopped.”
“He was angry with Omar, not you,” Isabel said. “I think he still is. He doesn’t talk about it, but I know it makes him uncomfortable that Omar and Eduardo were so close. It hasn’t been easy.” It was the first time she had spoken to Elda about her marriage in anything but a positive light. Her mother-in-law’s eyebrows gave a jolt, and she smacked her lips together in a sudden scoff.
“Pinche. All these years later, and Omar’s still causing trouble.” She shook her head, as if baffled, and announced she was going to change before Claudia and Yessica arrived. When she left the room, Isabel slid her body down the couch. She felt like she had just seen a poor impersonation of the woman she knew, a version of Elda that cursed and complained and was loose with her feelings.
With her head on the pillow, Isabel slipped her hand underneath the coffee table and ran one finger across. It was spotless.
CHAPTER 34
APRIL 1986
Omar had begun to suspect that Tomás was skipping school. He couldn’t pinpoint why, nor could he imagine a conversation in which he actually confronted him. During the last several months, Tomás had grown sensitive, unpredictable.
“Where’s your boy these days?” Jimmy asked. He wished his boss wouldn’t call Tomás that. He had met Elda and Martin years ago, when they started coming by for dinner on Sunday nights, and when Elda was pregnant with Claudita, Jimmy went out of his way to seat them himself. He asked after the family constantly, always by name, but when Omar’s coworkers overheard him calling Tomás “your boy,” they misunderstood. The new hostess was convinced Omar had a fourteen-year-old kid who came to the restaurant every Wednesday for a sandwich and a milkshake.
Except not lately.
Lately, Omar had eaten the soggy sandwich and melted milkshake after it sat at the counter for forty-five minutes.
Lately, he had begun to find the boy waiting for him in the parking lot, leaning against his car at the end of his shift. “You can come inside, you know.”
“I can’t stay long,” Tomás said, and Omar wondered how long he’d been waiting for him.
He told him to get inside the car so he could take him home. It was a five-minute drive that the boy usually walked, but Omar hated the idea of him wandering the streets after dark. Three blocks west and one block south, the neighborhood changed. The car
dealerships along the streets went from new to used, from displaying shiny trucks on pedestals to waving plastic-triangle flags along their perimeters. It was hard to tell which houses were businesses and which ones were homes. Tomás lived just beyond the main road.
“I haven’t seen you in a while. School keeping you busy?”
Tomás nodded and pulled his sleeves over his hands, rolling them into covered fists. Omar turned the air conditioning down a notch. “Yeah. I mean, kinda.”
“Kinda?”
“They gave me detention for drawing in my history book. It wasn’t a big deal. Just some doodles in those blank pages in the back.”
“I see.” They’d arrived at his apartment building now, parked right outside the leasing office.
“Don’t tell my aunt, okay?”
“I won’t.” Omar had never even met Tomás’s aunt. Countless times, he had thought about introducing himself, but when he imagined walking up to the corner apartment with the overgrown plants and Dallas Cowboy-themed welcome mat, he always came up short on what he would say. That he’d crossed the border with Tomás five years ago, and had been keeping tabs on him since? That he’s the husband of the woman who had killed his father in self-defense?
“Good. Cuz she’ll use any excuse to ground me this weekend. Not like I want to go to Chris’s stupid track meets anyways. They spend hours following the school bus around just to see him run in circles.”
Moments like these, Omar remembered what it was like to be a teenager, how he had always been convinced the world was out to get him. Everything he did revolved around planning and plotting otherwise. Even now, he could tell by the way Tomás stared intensely at the dashboard that he was thinking one thing and getting ready to say another.
“But yeah. Now they want me to pay for the damn thing. Like I have twenty bucks for a book. Hello, I go to public school.”
In the half-lit interior of the Chevy sedan, it felt like there was a version of the truth that Omar was missing. He thought of what Elda would say if she found out he had given the boy twenty dollars. How livid she would be to learn he had spent time with the boy at all.
Omar had never meant to keep Tomás a secret; he’d just been waiting for the right moment to tell her, never realizing it didn’t exist. Now it was too late. Four years ago, running into Tomás could’ve been a coincidence, a couple of chats over lunch. He told himself he was just making sure to stay in the boy’s good graces. He’d been afraid to turn him away for fear that he would blackmail his family. He knew now that Tomás didn’t have that kind of malice in him, and so their encounters, however brief, had accumulated into something Omar could never explain. He couldn’t say what he wanted from the boy, or what he got out of following his progress. He felt better about Tomás’s future, but knew it could never change the past. And if Elda ever found out, the first thing she would ask would be, “How long? How many minutes, how many days?” As if he had taken a lover. As if there were room in his heart for another.
“You don’t get an allowance? Anything like that?” Omar asked.
“From my aunt? Bitch is cheap as hell.”
“Oye. Since when do you call women bitches? Where’d you pick that up?”
“Sorry, sorry. My aunt. She gives me the change when she shops for groceries, but only if I put ’em in the car. She says she feeds me and keeps a roof over my head, so what more can I ask for?” His voice got high and melodic, steeped in sarcasm, before lowering into a quiet sadness. “Like I’m only good enough for the bare minimum.”
“A lot of people don’t get even that, you know. Back home—”
“I know. You told me.”
“Here.” Omar pulled four five-dollar bills out of his wallet, folded in half, and held them across the center console. It was the first time he had ever offered him money; half-priced burgers and milkshakes didn’t seem to carry the same weight as four green crinkled bills. The boy just stared at the money with his hands in his lap, until Omar tapped him on the shoulder. “Take it. Just this once so you don’t get in trouble, okay?”
He hadn’t expected Tomás to hesitate. Did he not trust him? Did he fear being indebted to him? After all this time he still found himself wondering what Tomás really thought of him. Did he ever look at him and see his dead father, or was it just Omar’s guilt that tainted everything?
“You wouldn’t owe me anything. Got it?”
“You said it. Not me.” He gave Omar a quick, tight-lipped smile.
“Just promise me it’ll go where it’s supposed to. For the book.”
“I promise.”
“What subject is it again?”
“Texas History.”
“You mean Mexican history?”
They laughed. “Something like that.”
CHAPTER 35
It was June sixth, exactly two years since Eduardo had arrived at their home. Isabel had not expected to know this. She had not marked the date on the calendar. She had not made a mental note of the previous year’s June sixth.
They’d just finished a long breakfast. Martin had prepared ham-and-cheese omelets, Eduardo’s favorite, and now they were rushing to get ready for his graduation. As she brushed her teeth, the significance of today’s date floated gently to the surface of her mind, like it’d always been there, waiting for the right time.
When she told Martin, he stopped midshave to think about it. “Are you sure? I remember it being cooler, like maybe spring.”
She understood the trick of memory: a scorching sun, replaced by the welcome warmth of sunlight. A merciless drought, washed away by April showers. “I’m positive,” she said.
“Did Eduardo tell you?”
“No.” But she wondered if he knew. “Do you think that day is a happy memory for him?”
“I don’t know. He looked like he’d been through hell.”
It was like the patients in the ICU. When they left, as they said goodbye, they always smiled. They thanked the doctors and nurses and staff. But the gratitude for surviving was not the same as the gratitude for living. No relief could erase what they had been through.
In the living room, Martin set up his camera on a tripod and corralled the three of them into a group shot. They stood with Eduardo in the middle, like a bar graph of descending units, and before the shutter went off, Isabel sneaked a look at him—remembering how his eyes had been level with hers the day he came—struck by the close view she now had of his chin.
It was a darling picture, the kind you frame and display near the front of the house, the kind that Isabel could imagine sending to Eduardo’s mother if she had ever had the chance. It was a picture Sabrina should have been in. A familiar weariness spread over her limbs, and she had to sit down, leaving the image displayed on the camera. Lately, it felt like everyone she thought of was either dead or dying. Every celebration was accompanied by a sense of mourning.
The doorbell rang, and Diana arrived with Elda, whom she had picked up on the way. Elda wore a sea-blue sweater and matching silk pants, with a floral scarf that looped just once around her long neck. Its ends draped like waterfalls over the front and back of her shoulder.
Isabel thought Elda’s new look was regal. The defiance hadn’t escaped her—despite her short hair and the scar on the side of her head, Elda made no attempts to cover up. Instead, after her wound healed, and the doctors began chemo, she bought a new scarf for each week of treatment. There were now six scarves, and she wore them around her neck almost daily: bright, bold prints that made Elda’s eyes shimmer and her skin look dewy and warm.
Elda crossed the living room toward Eduardo, who was still standing in front of the tripod in his robe and cap.
“We match,” he said. They laughed like this had been the plan all along. Isabel got the sense she was missing something, as if she were only hearing the end of a story. Ever since the surgery, Elda and Eduardo had grown close. Several times a week, they went for a walk inside the mall. Elda said it helped her clear her head, and with th
e brutal summer heat, the mall’s air conditioning made the exercise more tolerable.
Once, Isabel asked Eduardo what they spoke about for such long stretches of time.
He’d only shrugged and said, “Just life, stuff. We have a lot of different things in common.”
Elda embraced him now, keeping her hands on both his shoulders as she took him in. With her hair cut short, it was hard not to notice how the scar across her skull stretched when she smiled.
“Let’s get one with you and Abuela,” Diana said, fumbling with the lens of Martin’s camera. The term seemed to disturb no one, least of all Elda, who only laughed and straightened her blouse for the photo.
Isabel wondered if wanting to be happy for someone counted as being happy for them. She was about to suggest taking a picture with just herself and Eduardo when Martin said they should get going. Traffic and parking were bound to be a nightmare. They squeezed into the car, Elda in the front, while Eduardo sat sandwiched between Diana and Isabel in the back. His gown stretched over part of Isabel’s leg, and she straightened it out with the warmth of her palm, thinking it would have been better if he’d waited until they arrived at the convention center to wear it.
“Thanks for ironing it this morning,” he said.
“Oh. It’s nothing.” She turned to look out the window and felt his shoulder press against hers.
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