We Never Asked for Wings

by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

  “Of course he will,” Alex said.

  But he wasn’t sure.

  Just before his grandfather left, Alex had complained that they didn’t have even one piece of Enrique’s work. He’d been sitting beside him at his workbench, as he did every day after school, separating the striped from the solid feathers of a marsh wren. Enrique had nodded solemnly but hadn’t said anything, and now he was gone.

  Perhaps he’d left the mosaic for them on purpose, Alex thought: a silent apology for his sudden flight.

  —

  It was late when they finally left the apartment. The sun was higher than it should have been, and Mrs. Starks was already sitting in her lawn chair in front of Building B, halfway through her second cigarette. She had the whole building to herself. The apartment on the top floor (the penthouse, she called it) was hers, as well as a boarded-up apartment on the first level that she referred to as her “shop”—full of old furniture she’d acquired as the buildings slowly emptied out. She was fixing it up, she’d told Alex once—the nice stuff, the antiques, the things people never should have left behind—and then she would sell it all and move away. She was going to be rich, she told him. It was her ticket out. But that was years ago, and still she sat there, day after day, smoking her cigarettes.

  “There’s my dirty girl,” Mrs. Starks called when she saw Luna streaking across the empty parking lot. They were supposed to stay on the paths, but Luna never did. Stepping straight off the concrete into the marsh, she watched the mud creep up around the edges of her rain boot until it enveloped the rubber foot completely. Leaning over, she held on to the handles with both hands and pulled, releasing the boot with a loud sucking sound.

  “Again!” Mrs. Starks barked, tapping her cigarette on the plastic arm of her lawn chair while Luna balanced on the other boot and then on both at the same time, sinking as if on a particularly slow escalator, halfway to her knees. Just before the mud could roll over the lips of her boots and soak her ankles, she jumped back onto the pavement.

  “One more inch and it would have got you!”

  It was like this every morning, until Maria Elena leaned out the window and put a stop to it. Sometimes Mrs. Puente from Building A joined in, and occasionally the Ramirez brothers too, though when they appeared, Alex didn’t wait for their grandmother’s scolding but pulled Luna straight down the path himself, no matter how she kicked or screamed.

  “Good morning, Mrs. S,” Alex said. Mrs. Starks looked at him curiously, surprised at the greeting, and then blew smoke out the side of her mouth.

  “Well, good morning to you,” she said, looking up at the window and then back to Alex. “You late?”

  “We’ll walk fast.”

  “Better get on with it, then,” she said. She looked at the window a second time, nervous. Maria Elena didn’t like them to talk to her and she knew it, but sometimes she stood out in the marsh after school, just past the point their grandmother could see, a sun hat pulled low over her long scraggly hair and her bare legs sagging out of short shorts, and held up a peppermint or a butterscotch she’d snagged from a waiting room. It was a little creepy, but Alex and Luna always took what she offered and ate it quickly, the hard sugar cracking against their teeth as they walked the last hundred yards home.

  “Alex!”

  Luna had waited too long; her right boot was filling. She reached up, waiting for him to help her out of the water. It was why he’d packed extra socks. Trying to hide his frustration, he grabbed her hand and pulled her forward, but she wriggled away, water sloshing from the top of her boot as she raced toward the shoreline.

  Alex took off after her, following the well-worn web of trails that connected the Landing to the rest of Bayshore. He had trouble imagining it, but the Landing hadn’t always been so empty. When the buildings were new, the apartments had swarmed with children. Someone was always lost; names being called echoed off the bay, the responses heard from unexpected windows or from somewhere within the marsh. The women didn’t even mind the mud back then, his grandmother said, just chipped in for a dozen pairs of fisherman’s boots, their dresses tied up in knots as they cut paths to the nearest strip mall. The entire salty peninsula had smelled like something frying. Alex had heard the stories so many times he almost missed it, this world he’d never even seen.

  Luna made it to the water and climbed up the rock jetty that separated the wetlands from the bay. On soggy feet she jumped from one rock to the next, her arms spread like wings. Alex followed close behind, almost knocking her over when she stopped suddenly, crouching down and pulling something from a dark crevice between two rocks. She held it up.

  A tail feather: eight to nine inches long, thick horizontal stripes alternating from medium to light gray. The very tip of the feather was bright white.

  “What’s it from?” she asked.

  “A sharp-shinned hawk.”

  He took the feather from his sister’s hand. Once, standing on the porch, Alex had asked his grandmother why they had stayed, when the buildings began to fall apart and all the other families moved out, when his mother was still young and the Landing had become dangerous, before it had become empty. She said nothing, just looked up into the sky, where a flock of western sandpipers appeared as if to answer his question. They had stayed for the birds. Unless it was to return to Mexico, his grandfather had refused to leave his perch beneath the Pacific Flyway, where directly outside his window millions of birds stopped each fall and spring to rest on their long migrations.

  Alex tucked the feather into Luna’s hair and jumped down off the rocks.

  “Come on,” he said, holding out his arms for her to jump. “I smell sugar.”

  The reunion hadn’t gone as planned. When Letty finally intercepted her mother at a Greyhound station in North Hollywood, Maria Elena had been so surprised, and then angry, that she wouldn’t get off the bus, wouldn’t speak—wouldn’t even look at her daughter. Desperate and exhausted—and just drunk enough not to understand the consequences—Letty heard herself lie to her mother. She hadn’t left her children alone, she told her. She’d left them with Sara, her best friend from high school and one of the most responsible people either of them knew.

  At this, Maria Elena dragged her suitcase from the bus to Letty’s car and climbed into the passenger seat.

  “Well, let’s go, then,” she said, adjusting her short hair and buckling the seat belt tightly across her stiff jacket. “It’ll be faster this way.”

  Maria Elena wanted Letty to drive her to Oro de Hidalgo.

  Stunned, Letty stood in the dark parking lot, trying to figure out what to do. If her children really were with Sara, there was no reason she couldn’t drive her mother into Mexico to find her father—and if she told Maria Elena the truth, that she’d left them sleeping in their beds alone, her mother would send her home in a fury and disappear onto the bus and then across the border, maybe forever.

  It was an impossible decision.

  But Maria Elena had opened a map and was spewing directions from the front seat and Letty—willing to do anything to keep from turning around to face her children alone—got back in the car, flipped on the ignition, and started to drive.

  —

  Four hours later, they approached the U.S./Mexico border together. They were going the wrong direction for anyone to care, but still, Letty held her breath as they neared the heavy cement overpass. She had no idea what to expect on the other side. Letty had never been to Mexico. She had been born in the United States, which made her a legal citizen—but both Maria Elena and Enrique were undocumented. It wouldn’t be easy to get them back into California, and this was assuming they could even find her father. Pushing these thoughts from her mind, Letty followed the slow line of cars through the immigration checkpoint and crossed to the other side.

  The change was instant. South of San Diego, California felt wide open, great blue sky and speckled hills and planned communities cut into the empty space; but Tijuana was crowded: lines of cars and
people and buildings with their second stories stacked not quite on top of their firsts, tufts of rebar sticking out the top like thick black hairs. Letty drove straight through the city, weaving in and out of traffic, until the buildings thinned to desert and they were alone on the narrow highway.

  “Are you sure this is the right road?” Letty asked her mother.

  “It’s right,” Maria Elena said, looking down at the map. She measured the distance with her thumb. “Straight ahead for a hundred miles.”

  Letty looked out the window, across the flat desert. It was almost morning. Any minute and miles away, Alex and Luna would wake up alone in an empty apartment and stumble out of bed to find Letty’s signature scribbled across the bottom of Maria Elena’s letter. The sky swirled electric pink, and all at once Letty was nauseous. What was she doing? She had to turn around and go home. But what good would that do? Alex and Luna didn’t need her, they needed their grandmother. For nearly fifteen years Maria Elena had raised her grandchildren, rocking them through long, fussy nights, feeding them from glass bottles while Letty’s breasts drained into the shower, teaching them to sit and stand and walk and talk. If Letty came home alone, her children would be devastated—if not terrified—and it was this thought that kept her fingers clutching the steering wheel, her foot heavy on the gas.

  Beside her, Maria Elena startled. Letty followed her mother’s gaze to a long, brightly painted fence, keeping nothing from nowhere on the side of the road. Casket-shaped boxes had been attached at intervals, numbers stenciled on the fronts in cheery colors—2002: 371, 2003: 390, all the way to the year 2012.

  Border-crossing deaths.

  “Don’t look,” Letty said quickly. Her stomach turning, she pulled her passport out of the glove compartment and jammed it down the front of her jeans, the corners poking sharp and comfortingly into her stomach. “Daddy’s okay.”

  “He’s not okay, or he would have come home,” Maria Elena said. And then, after a long silence, she asked: “Why hasn’t he even called?”

  Letty had wondered the same thing. There hadn’t been a phone line to their apartment building since a storm took down the pole five years before, but he could have called her cell, or her work, or left a message with the secretary at the kids’ school.

  “Maybe he forgot my number,” she said. “Or ran out of money.”

  “Well, if he’s alive I’ll kill him. Making me leave my babies.”

  My babies. Letty felt the words hit her, a tiny jolt of validation. Alex and Luna really were her mother’s babies, and she was the one who’d left them.

  As she drove, Letty’s mind wandered back to the beginning, when it had made sense for Maria Elena to claim them—or to claim Alex, at least. Letty had been a teenage mother, despondent and suffering from a heartbreak she’d tried hard to drink away. Bayshore was full of girls like her, and every night they went out, leaving their newborns at home and dancing their bodies back into shape. Maria Elena didn’t complain. She’d wanted a big family but had only been able to have Letty, so it was a full year before she stopped her—hid her favorite high-heeled boots and broke her lipstick off at the base. Watching her mother’s square frame block the only exit, Letty had expected a lecture on parenthood, but instead Maria Elena handed her an ironed shirt and a pressed skirt and told her to get a job. Enrique had hurt his back. They were a family of four now, with a grandmother and endless aunts, uncles, and cousins to support back in Mexico. Someone had to replace the income her father could no longer provide.

  Listening, Letty felt a flicker of disappointment—Alex was her son, after all—but before she could even register the feeling it was replaced immediately by relief. She knew nothing about children; just being in the same room with her impossibly small, helpless son made her nervous. So she went out and got a job, and then another, and then a third, while Maria Elena stayed home. For fifteen years that had been their arrangement, and it would be their arrangement still, if Enrique hadn’t gone home to see his dying mother and not come back.

  Why couldn’t he just have come home? Letty silently moaned. Maria Elena had taken care of everything before he left, buying his bus ticket to Morelia and handing over their entire life savings to a coyote named Benny to ensure Enrique’s illicit passage back into the United States. She’d told Enrique exactly where and when to meet Benny—so many times that even Luna could repeat the information.

  But something must have gone wrong. The day before, Benny had come back without her father. And he’d refused to return the money.

  Letty slammed on the brakes.

  Choked by the stiff seat belt, Maria Elena gasped. “What’re you doing?”

  What was she doing? Her father could be anywhere, and her kids were home alone. “Exactly,” Letty said, suddenly furious. “What are we doing? Why are we here?”

  “I’m here because my husband needs me,” Maria Elena snapped. “I don’t know why you’re here.”

  Letty sunk low behind the wheel. I’m here because I don’t know how to take care of my children, she thought, and because it’s unfair of you to expect me to, when you’ve expected nothing of me for fifteen years.

  But Letty held her tongue. After a long silence, she nodded slowly out the window, to the place the fence had been, but wasn’t anymore. “I’m here because I’m not going to let you become a number on that fence.”

  Outside the window, abandoned railroad tracks ended in a field of crooked cactus and Maria Elena sighed, surrendering to the long drive and to her daughter, fuming beside her.

  —

  They drove, and drove, and drove. When Letty couldn’t drive anymore she pulled into a field of wheat and slept, suffering through a slide show of dreams in which she witnessed everything that could happen to two children left alone in an empty apartment: the slip of a bread knife, an electric shock, a three-story fall from a screenless window, or—horribly—the sharp knock of Child Protective Services on the door. Don’t open it, she murmured, imagining suited-up social workers, imagining kidnappers. Overhead a second sunrise broke, but even awake the images kept coming: headfirst tumbles down the stairs, toes caught in the spokes of borrowed bicycles, and the worst: the bay, the beckoning blue water that lapped at their ankles turning suddenly deep, one going out after the other, two small bodies washed out to sea. Did they even know how to swim? She had no idea.

  How had it happened, that one day she’d been an honor student, being told she could go to college, and the next she was lying on the ground a thousand miles from her children, a community college dropout with two DUIs, a mother who didn’t even know if her own children could swim? The change had been gradual, but it felt like it had happened all at once, a tectonic shift, a free fall. The sky above her tilted back and forth and then back again, and she imagined the oxygen running off the edge of the earth like water until she was left, dizzy and panicking, to drown in a field of dry grass.

  Maria Elena’s face appeared suddenly against the blue sky. She looked older than Letty remembered. Her usually sprayed-to-perfection hair was pressed flat on one side, and age spots Letty had never noticed dotted her skin like fingerprints in the morning light.

  “Ready to go?”

  She couldn’t go. She couldn’t even stand up.

  “I think we should turn around,” Letty said. There was no way to rationalize it anymore. While her mother slept in the car, she’d finally tried to call Sara, only to find that her cell phone didn’t work in Mexico.

  “You’re just tired.” It was clear Maria Elena meant hungover, but she didn’t say it. From inside a paper bag her mother withdrew a custard roll, the kind she made when anyone in the family had a fever. It was just like her, to have carried it all this way in her pocket, ready.

  “Here,” Maria Elena said, handing Letty the roll and pulling her to standing. “We’re almost there. We’ll find him, and we’ll all turn around and go home together.”

  Letty tucked a loose hair behind her ear and tried to imagine what it would be lik
e to find her father, at his childhood home or in the little town square, anxiously arranging his trip back north. Picturing his relief at seeing they had come for him, she felt a flicker of strength return.

  They had to keep going. They were almost there.

  But almost there, it turned out, meant another eight hours. Maria Elena sank deeper and deeper into the passenger seat, her body relaxing as they began to pass the landmarks of her youth—avocado orchards and lemon groves, cupola-topped churches and town squares. Every once in a while she would say something: I wonder if Tia Juanita had her eyes fixed or I guess I’ll finally meet Cristina’s twins, although they must be all grown up by now. Letty said nothing, just followed her mother’s directions wordlessly, Highway 15 to 15D to 5, through Guadalajara and Ocotlán and La Barca, passing signs for Zamora and Zacapu and Morelia. And just as she was beginning to feel she couldn’t drive a single mile farther, she saw it: a dusty road sign, tilting in the sandy earth.

  ORO DE HIDALGO, it read, EXIT 19C.

  —

  The Espinosa family home was even bigger than her childhood imagination had allowed: three stories and stucco, with vines growing up the side walls and flowering around the attic windows. It had been magnificent once, but as she followed her mother up the path, she could see that it had fallen far from its original splendor. The yard was a tangle of overgrown grasses; a six-foot pile of garbage and broken furniture held up what was left of the rotting fence. Around the side of the house, the infamous swimming pool was nothing but a giant empty shell—the interior walls cracked and faded gray.

  Maria Elena pushed open the heavy front door. Inside was just as Letty’s father had described it: the wide marble staircase imported from Italy in the 1940s, framed on either side by gold railings leading up to the second-story landing. As a child, Letty hadn’t been able to comprehend the elegance or the emptiness, and now here it was, spreading out all around her. She crossed the cement floor that had once been covered with plush carpet, fingered the powdery plaster encasing the fireplace, where a marble mantel had once hung. Through the dining room window she saw the lemon groves that had been sold off acre by acre, and she remembered her father’s stories about the years the pool was filled, when boys would walk for hours from the neighboring villages to swim all day and sleep in the orchards at night, just to swim again in the morning. All this was before the war ended, before Letty’s grandfather’s unsold feather mosaics filled the attic rooms, long before the family had been forced to hawk everything in the house that wasn’t bolted to the foundation. It was fickle, the art world, had been Enrique’s only explanation: feathers had fallen out of fashion. And so he’d had no choice but to leave, the only child of a once prominent artist going north with his young bride, following friends who fought for work as day laborers in San Francisco. Enrique found a job on a landscape crew and made enough to support his family and still send money home—until his back gave out and Letty had to step up in his place. She had sent money back to Mexico for years, but not nearly enough, it seemed, to maintain such a grand estate.