Everyone Knows You Go Home

by Natalia Sylvester

  “Are you just . . .” She forgot which words came next. Martin fell to the floor, rolling with laughter.

  “Martin, ya! Enough picking on your sister.” Elda handed three sets of forks and knives to her son, along with a cluster of napkins. “Turn off the Nintendo and set the table.”

  “Ha!” Claudita said.

  “Tú también. Fold the napkins.”

  The children scattered. They had learned this routine long ago, always at their most well-behaved on nights when their father was at work. They had heard her say, “Wait until your father gets home,” so many times, his absence had become more of a threat to them than his presence.

  “It’s a miracle. They fell asleep after I read them just one book,” she said to Yessica when she called her to come over after dinner.

  Minutes later, she was setting the percolator on the stove, when Elda heard her friend’s light tap at the door.

  “Well?” Yessica gripped the back of a chair in the kitchen, looking like she might jump over it.

  “Well what?”

  “Don’t tell me you didn’t hear the news.”

  “Oh. That.”

  “That?! Not just that, Elda. That could change everything. That means I can finally visit my baby boy and bring him home.”

  Elda sighed, embarrassed this hadn’t occurred to her sooner. “Of course it does.” Yessica’s baby boy was a teenager now, but she still spoke of him as if he were a child waiting for his mother to pick him up from the last place she had left him.

  He’d been waiting so long now, Elda worried Agustín’s desire to reunite with his mother was waning. Sometimes she would visit Yessica’s apartment and catch them on the phone, and she couldn’t help noticing the brief pauses, the way Yessica asked him question after question to fill the silence. The conversation was like a rope Yessica couldn’t stop pulling, hoping she would find her son connected to the other end.

  “Have you told him yet? Or do you think you’ll wait until after you’ve applied?” Elda asked.

  “Why would I wait to share such good news? After all this time! I’m calling him first thing tomorrow night.” Friday nights had special discounted phone rates. Yessica reached across the table to Elda’s wrist and gave her a gentle shake. “Anda, amiga. Don’t make me celebrate alone.”

  “I’m happy! Really. I just don’t want to get too excited until it’s official.”

  “And when will that be? When you apply, or when you become a resident alien months after that? Or five years later, when you can finally apply for citizenship, and they hand you the papers during the fancy ceremony?”

  “My point exactly. You can wait forever.”

  “No, mija. You can wait forever. I’m getting a bottle of tequila on my way home from work tomorrow. Promise you’ll share a drink with me.”

  So they did. The next night, even Omar was home to celebrate. They poured shots of tequila into three ceramic mugs Elda had collected from the previous years’ community health fairs. The mugs clanged together clumsily as they gave a toast.

  “To good friends,” Elda said.

  “New beginnings,” added Omar.

  Yessica’s eyes shimmered, their edges pinching together as she smiled. “To fucking finally!”

  CHAPTER 39

  NOVEMBER 1987

  Josselyn hadn’t stopped crying since Marisol had picked her up from school and they had gotten on I-2, watching their lives and their home shrink away in the rearview mirror. Marisol couldn’t argue with her daughter when she said, between sobs and gasps, that it wasn’t fair to have to move. Not in the middle of the school year. Not on the day before Thanksgiving break. It’d all been so last-minute, Josselyn didn’t even get to say goodbye to her best friend.

  Marisol had found out about the job late the night before. She had woken at dawn to collect boxes from back alleys behind grocery stores, before the workers had them destroyed. When she got home, her daughter was still in her nightgown, brushing her teeth as she paced the apartment, looking for a scrunchie to tie her hair together. Those little elastic bunches were everywhere except in their place. When Josselyn saw her mother walk in with an armload of flattened cardboard boxes, she pointed at them with her toothbrush and mumbled three syllables: “What are those?”

  Marisol knew she had handled it poorly, but she was in such a hurry. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise, because she had been telling her daughter for months about the job opportunities in Orlando. All the tourism there, all the commerce. And of course the high season would be during the holidays. Of course they would have to leave on short notice.

  “Opportunities like this don’t wait for people like us,” Marisol said, scooping the contents of her closet, clothes hangers and all, into her arms. She squeezed through the narrow hallway toward the living room, where she had assembled several large boxes. “It’s a twenty-hour drive, so we’ll have to leave as soon as possible. Here, this box is for your shoes.”

  But instead of taking the box, instead of obeying her mother like she always had, Josselyn ran into the bathroom and slammed the door shut. It sounded like a car backfiring. It was like something out of those horrible teen dramas her daughter watched in the evenings, the ones Marisol warned her were full of kids who disrespected their parents. “See?” she would say when one inevitably ended up pregnant or addicted to drugs. “That’s the problem with parents in this country. They let their kids talk back to them, and then they’re afraid to even lift a finger in their direction. And they wonder why they can’t control their children.”

  Marisol had hit her only once, when Josselyn was seven, because she’d refused to pick up a book an older neighbor had dropped in the elevator. She almost sprained her wrist from the force of it, and she was glad they’d never had to repeat the episode again.

  But she began to reconsider as she shook the locked doorknob. That she had to resort to yelling—“We have to go! We have no time!”—so loudly that Marisol was sure her voice traveled through the walls, ceilings, and floors was unforgivable. Was this what they meant by troubled teenagers?

  “I’m not helping you pack a damn thing!” Josselyn opened the door and pushed past her mother to her room. “If you don’t take me to school so I can say bye to my friends, I swear I’ll sit here all day screaming till the neighbors think you’re killing me.”

  That was the first and, Marisol resolved, the last time she ever let her daughter disrespect her.

  Now that they were on the road with a trailer full of all their belongings attached to the back of her minivan, Marisol found she no longer had the energy to be cross. “Why don’t you lay in the back and sleep?” she said to Josselyn. “I’ll pull over so we can get the pillows and blankets out of the trunk.”

  They were on a long, two-lane road that cut through land that had been cordoned off by fences made of dried wooden logs and metal wires. For miles the mesquite bushes crept over the fences, nearly obscuring the “Private Property” signs. Truck after truck made the earth feel like it was shaking as they passed.

  If she couldn’t get Josselyn to stop crying, she might as well get her to fall asleep. One naturally follows the other, she thought, remembering how heavy the tears used to make her eyes on nights when she would stay up praying that her husband would come home one moment, fearing that he might, the next.

  “You don’t have to try to make me feel better,” Josselyn said as she fluffed out her pillow. “Nothing you do would help anyway.”

  The hours stretched longer than the miles. It was nearly midnight when Marisol stopped for gas and coffee at a station just off the highway. She took a cassette single from the front display and asked the attendant to ring it up as well.

  “How long you been driving now?” he asked.

  “Almost ten hours. And we’re still not out of Texas.”

  He flashed her a smile brighter than the fluorescent lights overhead. “Hardest part is getting out of here. All the other states, you can cross them in a couple of hours. Bu
t Texas . . . makes you feel like you’re never gonna leave.”

  With the dead hours of the night still ahead of her, she had a hard time believing she would ever make it. Every fifteen or twenty minutes, a car came out of nowhere and passed her. Even here, on this empty, potholed road, the world seemed to have a head start.

  She called out to Josselyn, who lay curled in the back seat, pretending to be asleep. She had listened to the changes in her daughter’s breathing too many nights in her lifetime to be fooled otherwise.

  “What do you want?” Josselyn whined.

  “I was just wondering if you want to listen to this tape I bought.”

  This sent her sitting upright. “You bought me Tiffany?”

  “Yeah. But talk back to me like that one more time, and I’ll toss it out the window.” She raised her eyebrows at Josselyn’s reflection in the rearview mirror and caught her nodding as she climbed into the passenger’s seat. Her daughter wore an oversized white shirt she had decorated with glitter and swirls of paint so thick, they reminded Marisol of dried-out spaghetti. They listened to the song five or six times, until Josselyn no longer bothered rewinding it to the beginning. She tucked her knees close to her chest and pulled the shirt over her legs.

  “¿Tienes frío?” Marisol asked.

  Josselyn nodded. “I thought Florida was supposed to be warm.”

  “It is. But we still have to make it through Mississippi and Louisiana and Alabama, where it’s cold.” She leaned into the steering wheel, hugging it as she tried to stretch her lower back.

  “You okay, Mom?”

  “Just tired. And I don’t know how much further we have until the next rest stop.”

  “So just pull over and rest. There’s no one on the road anyways.”

  “It really feels that way.” She sighed. “We walked along roads like this once. It was just as dark, and the cars were going too fast to see us.” She didn’t know why she said it. Perhaps she was feeling nostalgic. Guilty. How difficult it had been back then to arrive. How easy now to leave.

  “I remember,” Josselyn said. “When we left the hotel, I remember thinking we were going to look for treasure. Like it was some big adventure.”

  Marisol hadn’t expected this. Their trip across the border was certainly not a secret, but they had always spoken about it as something that simply happened, one day to the next, with no specifics or recollections worth dwelling on.

  “What else do you remember?”

  Josselyn shrugged as if she didn’t even have to think about it. “Random stuff. The plastic bag with our toothbrushes and clothes. The nuns. How they made us that really yummy cinnamon oatmeal? And that room we slept in a few nights, with the TV that was always playing cooking shows. That’s why I always put milk in my eggs.”

  Marisol had forgotten about the nuns. She wondered what else Josselyn had held on to, but when she took her eyes off the road to look at her, she was staring into the darkness out the window.

  “I always thought you’d learned to make eggs like that from Tricia’s mom.”

  Josselyn laughed. “When did I ever have breakfast at Tricia’s?”

  Marisol had allowed her daughter practically everything except for sleepovers at friends’ houses. It didn’t make sense to sleep on the floor of a stranger’s home when she had a perfectly comfortable bed under her own roof. For years, Josselyn had begged not just her mom for permission, but her grandmother, presenting her case each time they spoke long-distance on the weekends, hoping she would in turn convince Marisol.

  “Is it true she probably has just a few weeks left?” Josselyn said.

  It always shocked her how their minds traveled to the same places when they shared silence. As if whatever they had been talking about before were a door that swung only one way.

  “That’s what your uncle said. The doctors are just keeping her comfortable now. Your abuela has even made her own arrangements for the funeral. She knew exactly where she wanted to be buried. Típica. It’s just like her, really.”

  “Maybe we’ll go someday. To visit.”

  “Sure.” But Marisol couldn’t stand the thought of her daughter returning to her birthland, only to step on the graves of their dead. She watched their headlights, how they swallowed the white, crooked stripes on the road. Up ahead they beamed onto a sign that welcomed them to Louisiana. Josselyn reclined the passenger’s seat and began to fall back asleep.

  “Mom?” she said, her eyes still closed. “Do you think that’s what it’s like for the little boy who crossed with us? He can’t ever visit his father’s grave either, can he?”

  “I guess not, mija.” It pained her to admit it out loud. She had tried tracking Tomás down once or twice, back when they still lived in the corner bedroom of the first house she had cleaned. Elda, la pobre, had called out of the blue, saying she had found the slip of paper with Marisol’s phone number, and she wanted to say hi. But it seemed the poor girl had much more on her mind. When Elda asked if she had kept in touch with anyone from the group, she sounded disappointed that Marisol hadn’t. She called Elda a few weeks later to tell her about her failed attempts at locating the boy.

  “But who asked you to do that?” Elda had said. “He’d probably rather forget us all. Déjalo en paz.”

  That was the last time Marisol and Elda spoke.

  She stole glances at her daughter as she drove, wishing she could let her gaze linger. The lights from the dashboard illuminated the smallest grooves of Josselyn’s face, and Marisol wished, more than anything, that she could trace her softness with the ridges of her fingertips in circles and figure eights and mindless swirls that would make them both forget.

  CHAPTER 40

  Nothing would ever be normal again.

  When Elda told them the tumor was back, she begged them not to lose faith. She made them swear they wouldn’t treat her differently.

  But you can never look at a person the same way once you fear they’ll be gone. Every moment became a special occasion, sandwiched between alerts for Elda’s countless medications. The doctors couldn’t risk surgery, because the tumor was too close to a major blood vessel. They suggested a more aggressive round of chemo than the last, but after two weeks spent either paralyzed from the pain or vomiting, Elda told them she was done. She said the only one being attacked was her, not the disease.

  “I’d rather stop while there are still pieces of me left intact.”

  Privately, they couldn’t help mourning her. She was different now, more irritable than not. Elda would snap when Claudia noticed she had lost her train of thought midsentence. If she repeated a question she had asked not twenty minutes ago, she would say no one had given her a good-enough answer.

  The only person she was always happy to see was Eduardo. He had registered for community college and was looking for apartments with Diana, and hearing about his plans excited her.

  “You live your life,” Elda would tell him, squeezing his hands in hers. Her skin had grown thin and transparent; each day she disappeared small bits at a time. When Isabel saw her and Eduardo side by side, she’d think of how they’d soon both leave her, and she would feel a motion sickness, teetering between relief and sorrow.

  Her thoughts seesawed between the memory of Omar and the promise she had made, now empty, as she failed to find the right time to say anything. It was all lopsided. He wasn’t supposed to still be here. He was the piece that made everything wobble.

  That Sunday afternoon, Isabel suggested they take Elda and Eduardo to the livestock show. They walked the grounds without hurry, which only served to make Isabel feel like she was forgetting something. The summer heat had begun winding down, and even the cattle seemed tired of swatting away flies with their tails.

  Isabel rested her arm on a metal bar that separated her from an old longhorn, just as the animal buried its head in a back corner. So much for a good picture. She waved Eduardo and Elda over anyway.

  “Look at its coat,” she said. The longhorn was a light
baby brown covered in shimmering white, as if draped in fresh snow. Isabel watched its sides fill with air, slow and limitless, then recede.

  “Five feet, eleven inches,” Eduardo said, reading the handwritten placard hanging from the gate. “Tip to tip, that’s how long her horns are. Her name’s Margaret.”

  “That’s taller than any of us,” Elda said. “Imagine walking with those things on your head.”

  “What else does it say?”

  Martin, who, despite the animal’s positioning, had snapped a few candid shots, placed his hand on Isabel’s waist and pulled her toward him. He puckered his lips at a sign she hadn’t noticed she’d been covering.

  “Descendants of the first cattle brought over to the New World by Christopher Columbus on his second voyage in 1493,” Martin read. “Early Texas settlers mixed Mexican cattle from the Nueces Strip, the borderland between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande, with their own cattle to arrive at the longhorn we know today.”

  Eduardo came closer to reread the sign. “Río Bravo,” he corrected.

  “Órale,” Elda said.

  Across the border, the river was not called the Rio Grande but the Río Bravo. Not grand or large, but harsh and unforgiving. The Río Bravo was ill-tempered and fierce; the brave ones were those who crossed it.

  Sometimes, when Isabel remembered the day Eduardo arrived, it felt less like a memory and more like a story she shouldn’t forget. To think she had been soaked in sea water, sitting on a towel, while he was completely dry, having waited for them for hours. To think they had all just been swimming.

  She looked at him, and he smiled.

  “What? Bravo’s a better name,” he said.

  Of course. Because it was theirs. But unlike Eduardo or Martin, she hadn’t grown up sharing a name with something so much bigger than she.

  “I bet no one ever picked on you with a name like that,” she said.

  “It didn’t make any difference.” Eduardo moved on to the next pen, where a calf the size of a Great Dane nursed on its mother. He placed one foot on the lowest bar of the fence, tapping it back and forth so the bar jiggled against the lock.