“They need their mother,” she said, exhausted. Had this been any other night, Ana might have had the energy to continue arguing, to challenge Betty’s authority on motherhood and marriage, on what Ana herself could or could not do with her own body. But she didn’t want to argue anymore. What she wanted, more than anything, was for her friend to stop talking, to shut up and give her permission to cry.
But without missing a beat, Betty asked, “What about Lucho? You’re going to tell him the same story you told Carla?”
The question made Ana shake away the silly need for a hug and a good cry. She cleared her throat. “No,” she replied. “He needs to know the truth.” She could get away with telling Carla and the rest of the world a redacted version of what happened that night, but not Lucho. “He’s going to want answers from Valeria too. She’ll tell her version. I have to make sure he hears mine.”
Betty placed her hand on top of Ana’s. “It might not be as bad as you think,” she said.
Ana put her other hand on top of Betty’s. She stroked it with her thumb, blinking to clear the tears that had made their way up. “You’re wrong,” she said. “It will be.” She could hear Pedro’s laugh, a sweet flitter, taking flight above the noise. “It’ll change everything.”
17
HOURS LATER, CARLA ONCE AGAIN OPENED HER FRONT DOOR. THIS time, it was Lucho who stood at her doormat. “Compadrito,” she whispered, “come in, come in.”
He entered the dark living room almost robotically. His seasons-old coat halted each step. His glasses fogged over from the heat in Carla’s living room. His loafers were caked in snow, and although he’d beaten them against the mat, he didn’t take them off when he entered the apartment. Like his wife and children earlier that night, he didn’t greet anyone, not even Ana.
She sat beside Betty on the couch, covered in a blanket. The late-night talk show with Don Mario Villanueva flickered on the television screen. Betty stood, taking a few steps toward him, but Ana didn’t budge from her seat.
“You should get out of those clothes,” said Carla. She made a gesture with her hand, beckoning him to turn over his coat. “Vamos, you don’t want to catch a cold.”
But he kept it on, his eyes set on Ana. “Where are the children?” he asked.
“Sleeping,” replied Carla. He continued to stand by the door, silent and unmovable. She looked over at Betty. “We’ll go make you some tea. Peppermint, with a little honey?” she suggested. She didn’t wait for a reply. She gave Betty a nod toward the kitchen, and the sisters hurried out of the room.
They were alone, but neither moved. No one bothered to turn on the light. Only the television screen illuminated the room, casting shadows that bounced off their faces and the walls. The windows rattled with the wind, louder than the television itself, but otherwise the apartment was hushed, so quiet they could have been the only two people in that building, on that block.
When he did move, it wasn’t to occupy the space beside his wife that Betty had left empty. Instead, he sat on a chair to the left of her. In the adjacent room, one of the slumbering Lazarte boys shifted in his bed. “Lower the volume,” he whispered to her, pointing to the remote control beside her on the couch. She did as he asked, and when the rustling had stopped, he said, “I just want to know one thing.” She braced herself for whatever question he was about to ask. He looked at the floor and said, “Are you pregnant?”
It was a question she expected. He didn’t call Carla’s until nearly an hour after she arrived. Yes, Carla assured him, Ana and the kids were there. They were fine. But when she asked Lucho if she should hand the phone over to Ana, she didn’t. Instead, she paused, hung up, then said he’d be there soon. That was all that Lucho had told her. It was then that Ana understood whom he’d called first. “I see you had time to talk to Valeria,” she said, “but you couldn’t even bother to talk to me.”
“Don’t try to change—”
“Did that drunk tell you that she called the cops on us? Did she tell you she tried to get us deported?”
He wrinkled his face. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the cops, Lucho.” She pounded a fist into the couch, then lowered her voice. “She called the police. They came to the apartment. She told them I stole her goddamn bracelet. The one she gave me on New Year’s Eve. She called me a thief, then she pointed at me, at Victoria, at Pedro.” Her voice broke. “She told them we didn’t have any papers. That we were illegals.”
Saying the word aloud struck an unexpected blow. She’d heard it said so many times; she’d said it herself before without giving it much thought. She was undocumented, and isn’t that what the word meant anyway? Illegally in the country because they didn’t have permission to be there in the first place. They didn’t have the paperwork; they didn’t really belong. But it was different this time. This time, it was like a stick aimed not at her thigh or face, but straight at her gut. It was the realization that she couldn’t protect her children, not even from a mere word. She couldn’t shield them from either its implications or its consequences. They were deportable, discardable. Lucho couldn’t shield the children from the word either, but she blamed herself for making them all susceptible to it. She was the reason they were in the country in the first place. She was the reason they were still at Lexar Tower. She said nothing, did nothing, even though she knew that Valeria was unstable. Worst of all, it was she, their mother, who had stood in that room, unable to move or speak, paralyzed by that single word as it infected the air.
A look of bewilderment settled on Lucho’s face. “Right,” she said. “She didn’t tell you. Why would she? She just gave you her version of what happened.”
“She didn’t say anything about the police,” he admitted.
“Well, she called them. And she wanted to get us deported. You would’ve known that if you’d called me first instead of calling her.”
“I called her home because that’s where I thought you were,” he said. “I didn’t think you’d put the kids on a train to Brooklyn at night and in this storm.”
“What did you expect me to do?” she said. “I couldn’t stay there after what she did. She was ready to put me in handcuffs, Lucho. And now our kids have to live with that memory. You should’ve seen how Pedrito was shaking. He was so scared. And Victoria’s terrified they’re going to separate us.” Her voice quivered. She expected some reaction from him, but all she saw on his face was confusion. She tried to be still, but her hand once again hit the couch with the force of a whip. “Dammit, Lucho, don’t you get it? She wanted to deport us. Your family. Your children!”
She couldn’t hold it in. Neither her friend nor her husband had given her permission to cry, but she did it anyway. She shook with each muffled sob. She needed to accept the reality of what could’ve happened that evening. She needed to let go of the guilt.
He moved from the chair to the couch and sat beside her. He didn’t console her, but his closeness was enough to give her comfort. When she finally grew still, he whispered, “She didn’t tell me any of that. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I wasn’t there. She wouldn’t have done it if I was there.”
She wiped her face with her sleeve. “I don’t think that’s true.”
“I would’ve protected you, Ana,” he said.
“No,” she said, shaking her head, the tears still coming down. “You couldn’t have, and that’s what scared me. We got lucky. We got lucky that she called the police and not immigration. If she’d called them, there’s nothing anyone could’ve done.”
He rubbed his fingers across his eyes and then his temples. “Why would she do that?”
“Because she can.”
He shifted on the couch. Then, as if he hadn’t quite grasped the magnitude of what Valeria had done, he said, “But you didn’t answer my question.” Her stomach contracted again. “Tell me. Are you pregnant?”
She let out a long, tired breath. “It wasn’t coming,” she admitted. “That’s what those pills
were for. I’m sure she told you about the pills.”
“What do you mean ‘wasn’t coming’? Since when?”
She looked up at the ceiling as if searching for the answer or some sort of relief from the heavens. “I didn’t get it last month,” she said, “or this month. So that’s two.”
He sunk into the sofa, befuddled. “I can’t believe this. I thought you were taking care of this,” he whispered.
“I was.”
“That’s what we agreed to, Ana,” he said. “It’s the one thing you have to take care of—”
“What do you mean ‘the one thing?’” she demanded.
“And you’re telling me you can’t do it?” There was another rumble in the room next door. He threw his hands up. “We can’t stay here. I’ll call Sully tomorrow. I’ll see how quickly we can move in. Maybe we can at least leave some of our things in the apartment.”
She was stuck on what he’d said only seconds ago. He blamed her for getting pregnant, and this wasn’t entirely unexpected—for all his progressiveness, sex was a domain she, as the woman, had to address. But it was his assertion that this is what they had agreed to that bothered her most. She knew that having another child was out of the question. But there was a bitterness in his tone that reminded her of the reaction he had when she told him she was pregnant with their first.
He kept mumbling, something about packing up whatever was still at Valeria’s, getting the furniture into the new apartment, who would watch the children while they sorted it all out. She finally interrupted. “Lucho,” she said, still in a daze. “Lucho,” she repeated. “Do you really think that? That all I have to worry about is not having any more children?”
He held his hands and leaned onto his knees, still avoiding her gaze. “I know it’s not,” he said. “But after everything we’ve been through . . .” He let his voice trail off. “I don’t know what you did or didn’t do to try to fix it. And you know something? I don’t want to know.” He shut his eyes, his hands in prayer under his chin. “Just fix it,” he said. “Just make sure it’s fixed.”
She blinked away her tears. “You mean how I didn’t with Victoria?”
He didn’t respond. She set the thought aside almost as quickly as the words slipped from her mouth. They said nothing for a long while, turning their attention to Don Mario, or to the sound of bedsheets rustling in the adjacent room. The tea eventually came, tepid and strong, and the sisters went to their rooms, unable and unwilling to linger. It wasn’t until Ernesto came home, still dressed in his blue janitor’s uniform and struck by the sight of the two on his couch, that they realized it was past midnight. “What are you doing here?” he asked as Lucho explained that there was a problem with Valeria, and that, if it wasn’t too much trouble, he’d appreciate it if his family could stay there for a few nights. “Claro, claro, Compadrito,” said Ernesto, the look of confusion still on his face. But there was no time to get into the details. There were several hours left before daybreak, and so Lucho zipped up his coat, threw on its hood, and left without making a sound to finish his shift.
* * *
THE NEXT MORNING, ANA HEADED BACK TO QUEENS. THE SNOW THAT had accumulated overnight had already turned into a gray-black mash at every corner. The trains ran slower than usual, even as she headed in the opposite direction as the rest of the world. She couldn’t recall when she last rode the 7 train into Queens during the morning rush instead of out of it. It was always toward Manhattan, and she’d catch the city’s skyline just before she made her transfer to the train that took her into Brooklyn. She didn’t particularly like Manhattan; there was something almost menacing in the somber, metallic spikes that rose across the river. But the city slumbered like a child under the morning’s veil, and there was an irrepressible sense of foreboding as the train moved farther and farther away from it that made her wish she was racing toward it instead of away from it. The shorter, stouter Queens buildings awoke reluctantly under the soft light of the still-dormant sun. Even the snow-topped warehouses and tombstones seemed to blister under the new day. She kept pressing the outside of her coat’s chest pocket, tracing the curves of the bracelet that was tucked inside it. Un poquito más, she kept telling herself as the train snaked eastward.
At every subway stop, the faces that boarded the train became more familiar. They were dark-skinned and sleepless, like her, dressed in clothes she swore she’d seen in the shop windows along Steinway Street. Some slept or rested their eyes as they slumped in their seats, while others clutched the morning paper or a cup of coffee or the hands of small children with one hand while pushing a stroller with the other. It was a contrast to the riders she’d grown accustomed to seeing on her morning commute, the slow influx of the young and well-groomed, unloved by the sun, suited up or layering the finishing touches on their faces, with their backpacks and headsets filling the westbound trains the farther away they got from Valeria’s.
The subway car itself was impeccably clean. A hint of lemon from whatever liquid was used to wipe the car’s black-speckled floor lingered in the air. Across the car, an advertisement for a technical school was clearly visible. There were no flyers for psychics tucked into its silver border, and so the man pictured on it, with a graduation cap and surrounded by his young family, smiled brightly at her for a long time. She was sitting in the last car of the train, number 4257. She took out her address book and wrote it down. She’d play Win 4 later with those numbers.
She listened closely whenever the conductor spoke, fearful she might miss her stop. Fearful, even, of the stop itself. The conductor’s voice, by turns sunny and harsh, kept Ana from dipping into doubt. Not over what she had to do; there was no turning back at this point. But doubt about whether she would have made the same choices in the first place. She’d convinced herself that if she had to do it all again, she’d do it exactly the same way. Ask Betty for the pills, make the blood come. She reminded herself of the goal. It was always to give herself and her family a fresh start. Change was a natural part of the journey, but she wasn’t going to lose her marriage or her children to the heat of it. Whatever she’d done to keep them together she’d done with them in mind. The hard times would pass, just like their homelessness, just like Lucho’s unemployment had passed. The days to come, as difficult as they might be, would also pass. That morning, as the black night turned amber, it became her mantra. Pasará, pasará.
Yet in those moments when neither the skyscrapers nor the tombstones nor the faces could distract her from her thoughts, there was a sense of doubt. Her choices might have indeed been different if she knew that it didn’t matter to Lucho how she fixed it, as he put it, as long as she fixed it. Did that apply to everything? she wondered. Did he not care what she did as long as it was just fixed? As long as he didn’t see or didn’t know how she did it?
There was a bitterness there, at once familiar and foreign, that lingered on her palate. So she clung to the conductor’s voice, telling the groggy commuters to stand clear of the closing doors, to help her turn away from the realization that perhaps she could have done so many things differently. She focused not on where she was now, at this moment, but rather on where she needed to be.
In the end, she didn’t need the conductor’s voice to tell her the stop. The image of the diamond on the awning was unmissable. It appeared before the train even pulled into the station. When she got down to the shop, the owner was in the middle of lifting its metal roll-down gates. Guitars, drums, and other musical instruments occupied one window, while the other was filled with necklaces and rings on red velvet displays. The bracelets were kept inside, at the end of a long glass counter.
She dug into the inside of her coat pocket and pulled out Valeria’s gold bracelet. Unlike the last time she was here, she didn’t haggle with the owner. He offered her a sum that more than covered whatever she needed to pay at the clinic. She placed the money in her inside pocket and made her way a few blocks east. The scent of fresh-baked buñuelos swam through the morning
air. She threw on her hood because she was cold, she told herself. This city was always so cold.
She wondered if this was it. If once it was done and over, she’d feel relief. If after this, she could really start again. If some wounds might finally start to heal, or even disappear, instead of marking her. Or would this be another one? Would she be punished for it? She asked God to forgive her, though at this point in her life, asking for forgiveness was almost a compulsion. What she was doing wasn’t wrong, she told herself. It couldn’t be. She had no choice but to believe that it was right.
Pasará, pasará, she kept telling herself, until she finally reached the dark blue awning, inhaled the thinning air, and took off her hood as she climbed the stairs to the second floor.
18
SHE STAYED AT THE CLINIC FOR SEVERAL HOURS. SHE FILLED OUT paperwork, paid upfront, then waited in a room filled with women, some alone, others with friends, less than a handful with their partners. Once inside the examination room, she was asked if she was sure. When it was time to confirm, her abdomen was covered in gel and the wand moved back and forth. To her relief, she wasn’t allowed to hear or see anything. She needed someone to pick her up, and so she called Betty, gave her the address, and asked if she could come meet her. She’d be done in a couple of hours. She waited some more, until it was her turn to go under. She woke up groggy and in some pain, sitting in a wheelchair inside a crowded recovery room. She sipped a cup of chicken broth, sucked on a lollipop, and was told that, once she was better, she could leave. Her husband was waiting outside.
Half an hour later, she found Lucho sitting in the waiting room. He said nothing as he walked her outside, hailed a cab, and headed to Carla’s.
Once they arrived, he left her with the sisters. He couldn’t stay, he told her. He didn’t want to be late picking up the car. There was nothing either had to say to the Sandoval sisters. Carla understood—her face had drained of color the moment she saw Ana. Betty hurried to make tea and brought over blankets to keep Ana warm. “Ya pasó,” was all Betty said to her. They never spoke of it again.
The Affairs of the Falcóns Page 22
