“Here,” Omar soaked a paper towel in alcohol and told him to keep his shirt on while he wiped himself down. It felt rude not to turn away, so he stared at the door. “So what does it mean? Blood in? Or were they kicking you out?”
In the reflection he saw Tomás shake his head. “Man, you think you know everything.”
“I’m just trying to understand. Maybe they’re just a bunch of kids picking on you for no reason.” This assumption seemed to offend Tomás the most. “I don’t know unless you tell me.”
“Then I guess you don’t know.”
It was too late to drop off the kid at home, and he couldn’t stay in the car any longer and still arrive on time for work. Jimmy had always liked this about him. Said he was as dependable as a sixty-degree cold front in December.
“I’ll call Jimmy and tell him you’re not coming in. He was worried about you. Maybe you should take a few days off.”
“Maybe I’ll just quit.”
There was no point in arguing with Tomás; he was just trying to get a rise out of him. He unzipped his work bag and handed him a canteen full of water and the sandwich Elda made him every night in case he got hungry. A light breeze entered the car as he cracked the windows and took the keys out of the engine. “You should rest. Sleep. You’ll feel better if you do.”
“You’re just gonna leave me here like some pet dog?”
It seemed cruel when he put it like that. “Fine.” He got out of the car and Tomás followed. To Omar’s relief, nobody asked about the beat-up teenager shadowing him, though plenty paused to stare. After an hour of watching Omar check off inventory lists on each floor, Tomás grew bored. He lay across a set of plush chairs in one of the office’s waiting rooms, just like Omar had first asked him to, and fell asleep.
The next afternoon, Omar woke with a sore neck. When Elda asked, he shrugged it off and said he had slept in an odd position, but every time he moved, it was a reminder of Tomás’s limp body hanging from his neck.
Elda rubbed it with both hands, then made like she was about to strangle him. “Don’t pretend to be tired just to get out of helping with the groceries,” she said.
He had completely forgotten he’d promised to go with her. She gathered her purse and keys. When they got into the car, Elda fell back into the seat with a gasp. It was still reclined and she was startled to find it out of its usual position.
“Was someone in the car?” she asked, like it was nothing, meaning it could be everything.
“One of the workers. His car was in the shop.” He hated lying to her, but it was less painful than telling her the truth.
CHAPTER 44
They rarely left her alone for long. Eduardo set up a text group among the five of them, so they could know when one was coming and another was going. Claudia spent most of her afternoons between flights at Elda’s, making her enough meals to last for days, while Eduardo always checked on her in the evenings. Martin had arranged to work from home a couple of days a week, and this newfound flexibility meant that he tagged along whenever Isabel had a chance to visit Elda, though she would have preferred a few more attempts at speaking to her alone.
“She seems in much better spirits,” Martin said. They had just rushed to the pharmacy, catching it minutes before it closed, and were heading to Elda’s to drop off her medication. “Don’t you think?”
He did this all the time now. Without saying anything specific, he would comment on some change in his mother’s condition and look to Isabel to confirm or deny it. Usually, it wasn’t even real, but she didn’t see the harm in playing along with his vague observations. “That’s good. It’s good to see her happy.”
He didn’t seem particularly pleased with this response. They both knew it didn’t mean anything. She was glad they were close enough to Elda’s house that he wouldn’t push the topic any further. As they pulled into the driveway, they caught Eduardo running out the door. Martin’s headlights beamed on him, and he stood frozen in their path, his eyes red and swollen and wet. Too late, he tried to lower his face and cover it as he rushed into Diana’s truck, waving at them casually as if to say, “See you at the house,” but Martin had already pulled in next to him. Isabel saw the truck’s back-up lights come on, then jolt back to just the red taillights as he resigned himself to park.
Martin got out of the car and leaned into Eduardo’s open window, scanning the interior like a police officer pulling over a reckless driver. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Then why do you look like your dog just died?”
“Martin . . .” Isabel put her hand out the window, reaching for him.
“It’s nothing. We just argued, that’s all.”
“And you just left her there?” Martin rushed into the house. His shadow scampered across the garage door as he crossed the bright path of light cast by their cars, both of which were still running.
The engine rattled and cracked under the hood after Isabel turned off their car. For a moment she sat in its silence, trying to think of what to do with Eduardo. She had never seen him like this, shaking, holding back sobs, as he tried to sink behind the wheel of Diana’s truck. She got out and stood by his window.
“So Diana lent you her truck?”
He nodded.
“How come?”
“I just thought it’d be better if Elda and I talked alone.”
“About what?”
He shook his head several times. “I only did what I was asked.”
“What who asked?”
“Omar. I thought it might be time.”
“Time? Oh my God. What did you—”
“Never mind. Forget I said anything.”
“Eduardo—”
“I gotta go.”
He rolled up the window and pulled out, leaving her standing in the dark.
Inside, she found Martin bringing his mother a glass of water and a set of pills. Elda sat at the dining room table, her eyes dry and piercing through the glass surface. Black-and-white pictures lay scattered on the floor all around her feet. Some were face up, but most were face down, their yellowing backs blank except for a perfect line of cursive scribbled in fading pencil lead.
She sat still, but stiff, as if she were bracing herself for a blow.
“Here, just relax.” Isabel placed her fingers over Elda’s wrist. Her pulse raced through her veins. “Martin, get me my blood pressure monitor from the back seat.”
“Oh, stop it. Stop it. I’m fine.” Elda pushed her away.
“Then what happened with you and Eduardo?” Martin was so upset his voice kept getting away from him. Isabel rubbed his arm and, wanting to make herself useful, began picking the fallen pictures off the floor.
“Don’t,” Elda said. “Leave them.”
“They’re beautiful.” In her hand, she held a picture of a little girl, no more than four or five, standing next to a water spout and holding a doll, soaked, by the ends of her hair. On the back it said: “Sabrina, cinco años. 1976.”
“They’re all lies,” Elda said.
Martin knelt on the floor next to her and began picking up the photographs. There was Claudita blowing out a candle shaped like a “3” on a cake covered in strawberries. A small version of Martin, with fuller cheeks and fewer teeth, stood frozen on the center of a stage, dressed as a tree.
“That’s adorable,” Isabel said. “How old were you?”
“Almost eight. It was stupid. The whole play was a disaster.”
Ignoring him, she turned her attention back to Elda. “It’s nice of you to share these with Eduardo. I wish I’d had a chance to meet her.”
“Sabrina?” She chuckled at the mere mention of her name. “She was a stubborn girl, but I loved her. Even after everything that happened, I treated her like family. I never thought she wouldn’t do the same.”
“Mom, what are you talking about?”
She gathered the pictures and stacked them into a small deck that she placed in a shoebox in the cent
er of the table. “Did you know about this?” She brought out a folded set of papers and handed them to Martin. Even just seeing the back page, with its few lines hand-scribbled in black ink, Isabel recognized the police report. It trembled in Martin’s hands.
“Where did you get this?”
“Eduardo brought it. He said I deserved to know the whole story.”
He folded the pages back up and held them in the air, pointed at Isabel. “Did you give this to him?”
“Of course not. Why would I do that?”
“No one knew except you and I.”
“What are you saying?”
“Never mind. Nothing.” He turned back to his mom and knelt by her chair to see her eye to eye. “Are you okay?”
“I’ll be fine. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“What did Eduardo mean, ‘the whole story?’” Isabel said. “Is there more, something that’s not in the report?”
Elda’s eyes narrowed as she turned away from Isabel and lifted herself out of the chair. She looked down at Martin, tapping his shoulder on her way out of the room.
“You’re right about her. She asks too many questions.”
“He said that? When?”
“See? Two more.” Elda held two fingers in the air and waved them like a stoned concertgoer. Her left leg dragged with every other step, as if her foot had gone numb, but Isabel was too angry to pay it much attention.
“How could you say that?” she asked Martin.
“It was just a joke. A long time ago.”
“It’s not funny. I’m your wife. I have a right to ask questions.”
“You sure you didn’t give the report to Eduardo? Or tell him about it?”
Isabel felt her stomach contract, so hard it made her spine crack as she tried to stand up straight. Her throat turned dry and sticky. “You think I’m lying.”
“I didn’t say that. But maybe you left it out someplace and he found it.”
“So this is my fault now?” Her body kept wanting to move, pace, but her feet felt stuck in place.
Martin wouldn’t look at her. He kept running his fingers over the crease of the police report. It sounded like a knife being sharpened. “You promised you would keep it a secret.”
“And I did. But that doesn’t matter anymore, does it?” When he didn’t answer, she fell back into her chair. “This isn’t going to work.”
“What is?”
She lowered her voice, barely managing a word. “Us.”
That’s when they heard Elda tumble.
CHAPTER 45
FEBRUARY 1989
It was a good idea and a horrible idea. That was how Elda described it the night Omar came home from work and found her sitting on the living-room floor next to a pile of textbooks and scattered brochures. When she stood up to explain, he could feel the energy pulsing through her, a foreign thing, like first kisses that are exhilarating in their intimidation.
“I’m going back to school.”
“Back?” Omar said.
“Okay fine, not back. But Yessica told me about this test. They were handing out brochures at the library. If you pass it, it’s like you went to high school here, and they give you a diploma so you can go to college.”
He looked down at the carpet. Two books lay open facedown next to her pink toenails, and Omar imagined the pages and words as living things, suffocating. One was on the basics of geometry and the other one, with its stars and stripes waving in the wind, US history. He turned his head to read the title, wondering if this was really about the diploma or preparing for their eventual citizenship test. Only Elda would worry about an exam years before she had to take it.
“The high school’s offering courses.” She bent down to pick up a brochure. “You know, to prepare? Which is good, because I don’t remember half of this stuff. Maybe we just didn’t get to it in my school.”
“Which high school?”
“Guerra. The one by where you used to work?” She kept looking around the floor for something, peeking under notebooks and pillows.
Omar felt his breath catch. “With all the kids?”
She laughed as if the question were ridiculous. “Yes, Omar, there are kids there. But the classes are at night. Did I leave a pen on the table?”
Behind him, she had. He clicked the tip as he handed it to her.
“They’re three nights a week, starting Tuesday.”
“This coming Tuesday?”
“Here, look.” She gestured for him to sit on the floor next to her. On a tiny calendar, she had circled all the nights she would have classes. “You work all but one of these days each week. So of course I thought, it’s a horrible idea. There’s no way, with the kids. But Yessica says she can take care of them Tuesdays and Thursdays. And class is only two hours, so on Fridays you’d only have to watch them for a little bit.”
“I can handle our kids longer than that, mi amor.” It seemed she had taken everything, including his presumed incompetence with their kids, into account, but had really thought of nothing at all.
“And how would you get there?”
“You can drop me off on your way to work.”
“And how would you get home? If class is only two hours . . .”
“I can take the bus.” She shrugged.
“But that’ll take forever. And you at night, waiting at those stops?”
“We used to do it all the time.”
“We. But not you alone.”
“You’re right. I had our baby with us to protect me, remember?” She stood and walked away from him, pacing in the kitchen while she looked for something to do with her hands. “I don’t understand you sometimes.”
The lights framed the crevices of her features in dark emptiness. She was breathing heavily, each exhale shorter and slower to come than the last, and Omar could see her deflate. This was not an exhaustion you recover from, but the slow seeping away of a person so gently, it avoids detection until there’s nothing left to take.
“It’s not a horrible idea, mi amor. It’s a great idea, just like you said.” He crossed the living room and held her. The world felt very small and so full of things she would soon learn. He tried to imagine if she would ever embrace him like this again.
The first night he dropped her off at the school, he circled it three times in his car before he had to rush to work. Aside from late-working teachers and a few student athletes waiting to be picked up, the grounds and parking lots were empty. Green plastic cups had been squeezed into the fence that bordered the football field. They were meant to spell out “GREEN JAYS 1,” but someone had poked out the “J.”
The next time, Omar left Elda at the school five minutes early to give himself time to wander. The sky was gray but still illuminated by the last rays of sun stretching past the horizon. It made the school feel hidden, like no one was meant to be here.
Each week he grew a little bolder. He would walk the halls, unsure what he would do if he actually ran into Tomás running into Elda. Sometimes he would be struck by the minuscule chances of it happening, and Omar would leave right away, laughing at his ridiculous paranoia. But soon enough it’d feel real again. In the back of his mind he was always rehearsing what he would say to Elda if the time ever came. Something about knowing she prayed for the boy, and that he loved her so much that he’d wanted to look out for him, in case God had simply forgotten to do it himself.
He began to have trouble focusing at work. He would rush home to ask Elda how class went and could tell just by seeing her smile all he really needed to know. Everything she told him after felt far away, as if he were listening from underwater.
From her enthusiasm he gathered that classes were going well. She made a game of it with the kids: for every A all three of them brought home, she toasted them a Pop-Tart before bed. One night it occurred to him that his family had never been happier. Their lives were like a movie he was watching on repeat.
On the night of a big history quiz Elda had been studying
for, Omar skipped his drive around the school and headed straight for Tomás’s home. He found him sitting on the black-barred gate that encircled the pool, swinging lazily back and forth as he opened and closed the gate with his foot. Omar hadn’t expected it to be this simple. He had planned to knock on the door and tell his aunt that he was an old coworker from the restaurant, and he had found comfort in this half-truth.
But the boy was just there, as if he had always been there. He didn’t look surprised to see him. His hands gripped the gate on either side of him, and his shoulders were nearly level with his ears, as if they had swallowed his neck.
“It’s a little late to go swimming, don’t you think?”
Tomás curled his gaze up at him, silent and expressionless. Omar wondered if speaking to Martin once he became a teenager would be this hard, or if it’d be more natural thanks to the bonds of fatherhood. He tried again and said, “I’ve been looking for you.”
Tomás smiled, then seemed to change his mind and twisted his lips into a pout. “Since when? Not like I’m hiding or anything.”
“What’s it been? Maybe a few weeks?”
“Try months.” Tomás lowered his eyes in embarrassment. For the first time Omar noticed how long the boy’s lashes were, how they almost made him look elegant. He hadn’t realized it’d been so long since they had seen each other.
“I looked for you by the school. I guess I thought you had sports or clubs or something like that in the evenings.”
Tomás pushed himself off the gate, landing like a child jumping off a swing. “Must’ve gotten me confused with some other kid.”
Before he left, Omar asked if he could come by again.
“Do whatever you want. It’s a free country.”
Omar heard kids toss this expression around all the time, as if it were nothing. “I’ll see you next week, then.”
They weren’t long visits, just a few minutes in between Omar dropping Elda off at school and clocking in to work. But he never knew what to expect from them.
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