There was the night he found Tomás not at the pool, but in the weight room. It was a sticky-smelling place with rusted dumbbells and poor air circulation. Tomás would lift one weight as if he had lost something underneath it, then move on absentmindedly to the next.
Another night, over sodas from the vending machine, Omar asked about school. Tomás was turning eighteen two months before graduating, and he tried dancing around the topic of whether or not he would finish.
“I guess, if I don’t have anything better to do,” Tomás finally said.
Omar didn’t know how to take this, but he chose not to push it.
The next time, Tomás nearly ran into Omar’s car as he was turning into the building’s entrance. Tomás had been running down the sidewalk, looking over his shoulder. The boy’s hands landed on the hood, popping the metal in and out. He got into the car and somehow Omar knew he should keep driving. They ended up at the parking lot of Omar’s work. It felt too familiar to ignore.
“Those guys, the ones that beat you up? Whatever happened to them?”
“They’re around.”
“They still hurting you?”
“Sometimes,” Tomás said, as if he were stating a preference for how often he liked eating tortas.
“I’m serious. You should’ve told me.”
“It’s not as bad as it looks. It’s just my cousin and his pendejo friends. They think they own some shitty-ass corner of the hood.”
“That was your cousin? That last time?”
“One of them, yeah.”
“And you weren’t joining them or getting initiated or anything?”
“The fuck would I want to do anything with his pussy-ass friends? The last time? They were pissed because I found my cousin’s weed. A shit-ton of it, too. And of course my aunt sees it and flushes it, and my cousin lets me take the blame because she’d never believe that her ‘all-star track champion’ is a dealer. His friends were mad pissed. Said I owed them like five hundred bucks. It took me three months to pay it.” He crossed his arms and rubbed his shoulder, as if it still hurt to think about.
“What do they want with you now, then?”
“What do you think? I had to quit my fucking job just so they’d stop stealing all my money. Didn’t make no difference.”
“What do you mean?”
Tomás’s jaw tensed, and he shook his head. “It’s nothing.”
Omar placed his hand on the wheel and turned toward the center console, like he always did when he was driving in reverse, to get a good look at him. He wanted to tell Tomás they wouldn’t move from this place until he told him what was going on. Instead he said, “You know you can tell me, right?”
“There’s nothing to tell.” His voice turned light and sugar-coated, like the end of a long-winded joke. “I took care of it, viejo.” He reclined the car seat and lay back, and Omar knew the conversation was over.
When he returned to his car after work, Tomás was gone. He had popped the seat back up—it was pushed too close to the dash now—and Omar knew he had walked home.
He got the sense Tomás was avoiding him after that. He was always in a hurry, always on his way somewhere else. Omar worried about him so much that he thought the distance growing between them could be a good thing. He wasn’t sleeping right anymore. He would wake up exhausted, feeling like he’d barely skimmed the surface of dreams. On nights Elda talked in her sleep, he began to wonder if he ever did the same.
He tried to distract himself by focusing on the children. On their Friday nights alone he cooked them mac ’n’ cheese and pretended to die easily when Claudita challenged him to a video game. When she inevitably fell asleep on the couch, he helped Martin rehearse for the upcoming school play.
“There’s no reason to be nervous,” he told his son. “Ignore the audience and imagine it’s just you and me in the room.”
Martin stood tall, his arms stretched like a Y over his head, and recited his lines. “I am a mighty tree. My roots make me strong. My leaves swing back and forth with the wind. I give us oxygen to breathe and branches to climb.”
When the kids finally went to bed, he would stay up waiting for Elda, watching The Tonight Show and laughing at jokes he didn’t understand just to unravel the knot deep in his stomach.
On the night of the second-to-last class before she took her test, Omar carried her books down the hall. All the lights in the school were on, and it felt almost selfish that two people were the only ones seeing how the lockers and the laminated posters outside each classroom glistened. He tried to imagine this being the world they grew up in. He thought, We might’ve stayed young longer.
“This is sweet,” Elda said, and he wondered if she could see it, too. “I’m almost nervous like I was the first time you walked me home.” The floors turned to crunchy orange dirt underneath them, and he looked up as the ceiling turned to sky. Memory made their love feel like an open, boundless thing, and he wondered if this were true or just a trick of life’s contrasts—a room darkened by a flash of too much light.
“I’m proud of you,” he said.
“For what? I haven’t done anything yet.”
“You’ve done everything. You are everything.”
A hint of pink flooded her cheeks; he hadn’t known they could still do this to each other. She stopped and pointed at her door, taking her books from his arms. Her lips were still touching his when she said I love you and goodbye.
He thought, as she stepped inside the room, about lingering. There were still twenty minutes before he needed to be at work. Instead he left and took the back roads toward downtown.
He avoided passing the old diner and Tomás’s neighborhood, because he wanted everything to feel as new and clean as that school. It made him smile to picture Martin and Claudita there someday. It made him feel certain, for the first time, that all was worth this.
Soon his car seemed like the only one on the road. All the houses stood with their backs to the street, and at the end of the block there was a quick mart with one gas pump and a marquee with no numbers for prices.
In the shadow of a phone booth, two figures huddled close together, and Omar’s first instinct was to turn away.
But as he approached it became clear. The recognition was glaring. He pulled in and rolled down his window. The air smelled like bitter earth, like a meal no one wants to finish because it has gone bad.
“Tomás?”
The boy seemed irritated to hear his name, but when he saw where it came from a look of terror washed over his face. He pushed the young man next to him away, but the man leaned back in, reaching for something in Tomás’s hands.
“Not now,” Tomás said. “Get out of here.”
Omar couldn’t tell which of them he was talking to.
The young man had something crumpled in his hands, and only as he began to struggle with Tomás did Omar notice it was cash. The young man kept saying, “Don’t be like that. Don’t be like that, man.”
Omar got out of the car. As soon as he closed the door he knew it’d been the wrong thing to do. The sound of metal against metal set something off in the man. Tomás pushed him hard enough to make him lose his balance, but not enough to keep him from bouncing back. He stood with his legs spread apart and lunged forward, his arm jutting right into Tomás’s side, folding him in half. Like a knife.
It happened impossibly fast. Omar had broken into a run, but he felt miles away. For a moment, as Tomás slipped to the ground, the man seemed to be supporting him, but he only wrapped his arms inside Tomás’s jacket before breaking away. Omar ran after him foolishly. Old man is what Tomás had started to call him, and he had never felt that way until now. He was out of breath by the time he got back to the boy’s side, and he hated himself that any time had passed at all.
In his arms, Tomás felt as tense as the first time Omar had tried to hug him. His body began to tremble.
“It’s going to be fine,” Omar said. “Everything’s fine.” But the knife wa
s still inside him, and Omar didn’t know if this was good or bad. The warmth of Tomás’s blood was washing over him and leaving the boy cold, and Omar squeezed him and looked at him, into those eyes that always seemed to wish they were seeing someone else’s, and he thought he might as well go, too, because he had never felt anything more unbearable than this.
“Everything’s fine,” he said again, but he knew Tomás could no longer hear him. Everything’s fine, he said to himself. From nowhere, the lights came on and a pair of arms pulled him away and somewhere dark and small a voice told Omar that he had the right to remain silent.
CHAPTER 46
In the hospital they stared at her sleeping as if she were a sculpture they couldn’t quite understand. When she stirred, it felt like a miracle.
Martin took her hand and said, “I’m here.”
Claudia ran her fingers through her mother’s hair. She rubbed her fingertips together, oily from the sweat of her mother’s scalp. “Can we get the air turned down in here?”
Isabel stood and said she would take care of it. This was not her unit—hers was two floors below—but she could guess from the duplicated layouts where the thermostat was. Still, she asked another nurse, and the young woman looked at her for just a second too long, probably trying to place her. They had likely seen each other before, but without her uniform, Isabel bordered on unrecognizable. It had that effect on people. It was like the superhero costumes in comic books: just clothes, but they changed how others saw them and how they didn’t.
She had never walked these halls in these shoes. The rubber soles of her wedges pierced the silence, their whiny cadence vulgar among the sounds of hearts and lungs being monitored.
When they’d heard Elda collapse down the stairs, it had struck them with the terror of an earthquake. They had only thought to hold still, that there was safety in no one moving. It was an instinct that lasted only a fraction of a second, and upon seeing her curled against the tile, Isabel had wasted no time. They carried her into the car and Martin ran all the red lights to the hospital, while Isabel tried to keep Elda calm in the back seat. She asked if she was in pain as she took her blood pressure. Elda had watched Isabel’s fingers wrap around her arm, as if her hand were a marvelous thing. “I can’t feel that,” she’d said. “Not even a little bit.”
Now, Isabel thought about visiting her coworkers downstairs before heading back to Elda’s room. She was not used to this kind of idleness between test results and MRIs, and she longed for even the smallest semblance of control. They had been waiting for three and a half hours. In five, she would have to be back at work.
On her way to the elevators, she found a small waiting area that she had never paid much attention to. It had an L-shaped brown couch and a circular peony-patterned rug in the center. A flat-screen television hung halfway up the wall, much lower than the ones she was used to seeing, purposely out of reach. Instead of small tables stacked with magazines, there was a bookshelf that lined the wall.
It could’ve been somebody’s living room.
It didn’t look like it belonged in a hospital.
She took all her breaks with Elda, and some extra ones, thanks to a few understanding nurses who had already heard that her mother-in-law had been admitted the previous evening. Each time she came back she found Claudia had taken another quick trip to Elda’s house. She had brought her pajamas first, then leftovers from last night’s dinner. In the afternoon Isabel noticed a bottle of nail polish remover and a set of rose-colored bottles lining the window. Martin was sprawled on the recliner, asleep, and Claudia had left yet again. Yessica paced the room, pausing for long stretches of time to stare out the window or gaze at Elda while she slept.
Isabel took a few cotton balls from inside the cabinets and began dabbing at Elda’s nails. The cold scent of nail polish remover filled the room. Hoping to disperse it, she blew on her fingertips.
“You do plan on repainting them, right?”
Isabel jumped at the sound of Elda’s voice. It had become Velcro, the words scratching in protest as she pulled them apart from her throat.
“Any color you want,” she said, trying her best to sound normal.
They spent the next ten minutes holding their breath, neither wanting to acknowledge how difficult such a simple task had become. With Elda’s hands shaking, Isabel struggled to place the tiny, dripping brush on her nail bed with precision. She was a child who could no longer color between the lines.
“Rabbit flesh,” Elda said when she was done.
“What?” Yessica looked on the verge of tears.
“Raaabitflesh,” she said again, gazing at her hands with a smile as she stretched her fingers toward the ceiling.
Isabel nodded. “They are beautiful.”
Sometimes it happened this way. Words misplaced their meanings, mixed them up with others on the path to the mouth from the brain.
“Shiny and red. Like strawberries,” Elda said.
Yessica sat by her side and took her hand, careful not to touch her drying nails. She shot Isabel a worried glance across the bed, but Isabel shook her head and pretended not to notice.
It was just one word, Isabel thought. A fluke. She kissed Elda on the forehead and told her she would be back in a couple of hours.
The hallway felt longer on her way back to the elevator. Through the tinted glass of the waiting room, she made out a figure rocking back and forth on the couch. She cupped the window with her hands and almost instantly, Claudia turned to her, sensing she was being watched. She stepped out into the hall to meet her.
“Sorry,” she said, looking embarrassed. “I just needed a minute. Is someone with her now?”
“Martin and Yessica.”
“Okay, good.”
He hadn’t woken the entire time Isabel had been in the room, though his eyelids had fluttered as she gathered her purse. Isabel tried to ignore her suspicion that he was only pretending to be asleep.
The sting of his accusations last night had been completely eclipsed by Elda’s fall, but had returned in the fresh glare of morning. Now they avoided each other’s eyes, even as Isabel squeezed Martin’s hands and rubbed his back when she knew he needed a reassuring touch. For now it was all she could give him.
“Be honest with me,” Claudia said, pulling her yellow cardigan over her chest. “This is—is this it for her?”
Isabel stared at the buttons on Claudia’s sweater, how she kept picking at the top one with her nail.
Not even minutes ago, she had pushed down on Elda’s naked thumb, and she had watched it turn white under the pressure, watched the blood take its time coming back, and she had known that this was the body shutting down.
Isabel tried not to be medical about it. More than anything, she wanted to be proven wrong. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we haven’t even seen a fraction of your mother’s strength.”
Claudia cupped her face with her hands and took a deep breath. Isabel reached out to rub her shoulder, and with that small opening of her arms, Claudia stepped into them. Her shaking body was a clenched fist, small and rigid against Isabel’s chest. She had never seen Claudia cry like this. She had never held her this tight.
“It’s going to be okay,” Isabel said.
“How can you know?”
She could feel Claudia’s tiny sobs receding. They grew quiet, pulling away from one another. Claudia adjusted her sweater and looked at Isabel expectantly, her eyes still asking the question that had gone unanswered.
“Life changes, but it doesn’t end. Not for the rest of us. That’s how your mom would want it.”
Her eyes welled up all over again. This time, Claudia didn’t try to hide it. “God. I can’t believe you’ve been with her all this time. It’s so good of you. And to think I was such an ass when your father . . .” But she couldn’t finish the sentence.
“It’s fine, Clau. That was a long time ago.”
The elevator slid open, and they stepped back in opposite directions to make r
oom for the people coming out of it. “I’m just really glad you’re here, that’s all.” Claudia wiped her tears with both palms pulling at her cheeks. “Go. Don’t let me keep you. I’ll be fine.”
Isabel squeezed her arm and stepped inside. “Call me if you need anything, okay?”
“Wait! Have you talked to Eduardo?”
Isabel felt the ground rattle as people crowded into the elevator. Everything had happened so fast, she’d forgotten him.
CHAPTER 47
APRIL 1989
They said too much that he understood, and too much that he didn’t. That he was in serious trouble, that everything he said or did would affect not only him, but his wife and children, that he should think very carefully about the choices he made, because these next moments, just minutes and seconds, could change everything.
Their lives would be compressed to just this.
Omar had understood this reality for years, so now it came as no surprise, but rather as a small comfort. You cannot scare me with fears I’ve tortured myself with for so long, he thought, but didn’t say.
He said nothing while the men in thick brown suits spoke to him slowly and loudly, like parents scolding a child. The tall one had a mouth that always sounded wet; his lips would part before words came out, and Omar could hear his saliva stick to his teeth. He paced the room while his partner sat cross armed in the corner with a disappointed expression locked on Omar. Sometimes he would interject with a few words, things like You don’t want this or Don’t make this worse than it has to be, as if he imagined himself an extension of Omar’s conscience.
He said nothing while the detectives, twenty minutes into their questioning, wondered aloud whether he had understood a word of what they’d said. He tried to keep his breathing steady when the tall one leaned in, narrowed his eyes, and asked, It was just an accident, wasn’t it? No man in his right mind actually plans to kill his own drug dealer. Right? He egged Omar on with his slippery voice.
The night’s events were only now taking shape for him, and Omar could finally see Tomás through the detectives’ eyes. He wished he could tell them all the facts they were missing, all the things only he knew—Tomás’s cousins and his friends, how they never stopped, even after he quit the job at the diner, even after they had him working for them on the streets. Tomás and his father, who he couldn’t help thinking about, knowing he had been stabbed on the same side.
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