Alma
I detached from myself. I saw my life as a spectator would, from outside, from a distance so remote that I couldn’t feel any of it. “Se?ora Rivera,” they said, “we’re sorry. The surgery was more complicated than we anticipated. There was nothing we could do.” The translator at the hospital, a woman about my age with a wide, round face, cried as she delivered the news. I stared at her hands trembling against her chest as she spoke. “Mi más sentido pésame,” she added, on behalf of herself. I reached out and gave her a hug. I saw myself doing this, but I didn’t feel her shaking in my arms. I went to Maribel. I saw myself walking, but I didn’t feel my feet upon the thin carpet. “It’s time to go,” I told her. I saw myself talking, but I didn’t feel the words crawling up through my throat.
“Is the surgery over?” Maribel asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Get your things.”
“Are we going to see him?”
She looked so hopeful, so nervous. She stared, waiting for me to say more. Are we going to see him? Are we going to see him? Had she really asked that? Are we going to see him? My God! I blinked and came back to myself. Are we going to see him? What a simple question to break my heart.
“No,” I said, the word as fragile as an egg.
“Why not?”
My breath rose up through my lungs and emptied out again. Blood swept through my veins. My lips were dry.
“Is he … resting?” she asked.
He was, in a manner of speaking. So I said, “Yes.” Then, “No. No. Maribel, come here.” I pulled her to my hip, feeling her wiry, warm body against mine. “The surgery didn’t go well,” I said.
“Why?”
“He …” I took another breath. “He didn’t make it.”
Maribel closed her eyes, and I tightened my hold on her. “What does that mean?” she asked.
“He—” I started. But I couldn’t go on. There weren’t enough words in Spanish, not enough words in English no matter how many classes I might have gone to, not enough words in any language on earth, not the right words, nothing to match the depths of what I felt. My tongue fumbled against the back of my teeth, trying to give shape and sound to what had happened, struggling to explain, when Maribel opened her eyes and said, “He died?”
When I nodded, she let out a sound like a baby seal. I felt tears gathering at the edges of my eyes. And then, as quickly as a gasp, the world shrank, and I felt the ground open up beneath me.
IF I SLEPT AT ALL, I slept on the floor. Of course, that first night home I didn’t sleep. I lay on the floor next to the mattress and shivered under a blanket. I stood up in the middle of the night and looked at the bed to see if it had all been a dream. Maribel was tucked into her sleeping bag against the wall, but Arturo wasn’t where he was supposed to be. He wasn’t breathing long, rhythmic breaths, lying on his back. He wasn’t in his undershirt and briefs, the comforter pulled to his chin. He wasn’t there.
I wrapped the blanket around me and stood at the window, my hair loose over my shoulders. If I turned my head enough, I could see the street and the traffic lights and an occasional semi-truck driving through town. I stood at the window for hours that first night. There was no comfort in it. Cold air slipped through the window sash and cut across my skin like razor blades. The caulk Arturo had tried to apply lay splintered in the seams. I stood there and thought about what must have happened, about what it must have been like, although I tried very hard not to imagine what he must have felt. At the hospital, Officer Mora, the same officer I had spoken with at the station months earlier, tried to console me. He had knocked on our apartment door only minutes after Arturo had left. He had told me he was there about Maribel. He had asked, “Do you think it had something to do with that boy, the one you told me about?” I explained that Arturo had gone to find him. “He lives in Capitol Oaks,” I said, and Officer Mora pulled the radio off the belt of his pants. He spoke into it in English, then clipped it back on and said, “I’ll head over there now.” Which is what he and another officer did. Only by the time they arrived, it was too late. They found Arturo on the ground. They called for an ambulance. They found the boy and his father standing outside, a gun still in the father’s hands. All of this Officer Mora told me later, at the hospital. He said that the boy’s father—his name was Leon Miller—was in custody and would be charged. The boy—his name was Garrett—had witnessed the whole thing.
“What happens now?” I asked.
“Mr. Miller will probably be locked up for a long time. We’re trying to determine if the kid was involved, but so far it doesn’t seem like it. We haven’t been able to track down his mother yet, either.” Officer Mora looked me in the eye. “I’m sorry about before,” he said, “when you came to the station.” His face was grave. “We’re going to get justice for you now, though, I’ll make sure of it.”
But it was only a word—justice. It was only a concept, and it wasn’t enough.
As I stood at the window, I thought, If I saw the boy or his father now, I would take a gun and kill them myself. But of course I didn’t have a gun. I would throw my heavy winter boots at them. I would tear at their flesh with my teeth if I knew it would make a difference. But of course, it wouldn’t make a difference.
I leaned against the glass until daybreak, until the sky began to lighten over the earth. When it did, I thought, Maybe it’s over now. I turned back toward the bed to see if maybe, just maybe, he was stirring, stretching his arms overhead and rubbing his eyes. To see if he would swing his legs over the side of the mattress and stand up and wander to the bathroom and shave his face, the smell of soap wafting out to the hallway. But when I turned, there was only the sheet thrown back, the mattress still depressed from where he had last lain.
CELIA CAME OVER the morning after—everything to me now was either before or after, the way that previously my life had been divided by the accident—and sobbed into my shoulder. She apologized over and over, and though at first I mistook her apologies for condolences, I realized soon enough that she believed she had a role in what had happened—or maybe that Mayor did—and I had to tell her, “No. Stop. Please.” Because while it was true that Mayor had taken Maribel away, he hadn’t done this.
Still, Celia kept coming every day, sometimes twice a day. She stayed for hours at a time. She brought empanadas and sugared breads wrapped in tinfoil, arroz con pollo and chicken soup packaged in plastic containers. She brought brown paper bags filled with clothes we didn’t need and could barely use. She brought the prayer notes from Mass where Arturo had been listed that first Sunday in the bulletin.
“Father Finnegan did a beautiful service,” Celia reported. “He asked if there was anything he could do. He wanted me to remind you that his door is open. If you want to talk.”
“I know.”
Celia put her hand on mine and left the prayer notes on the counter.
On Monday, a woman from the hospital called to ask what I wanted to do with the body. The question was so absurd it made me laugh.
“What do I want to do with it?” I said. “I want to bring it back to life.”
When I told this to Celia, she laughed, too. “Of course! What else would you want to do with it?”
“Exactly!”
“What did she say then?”
“She said she was sorry and that what she meant was whether I knew where I would like to bury him. So I said, ‘I would not like to bury him!’ ”
“Oh, Alma.”
“What questions!” I said, shaking my head.
Celia twisted the coffee mug in her hands. “But you’ll have to make a decision, won’t you?”
“I want him buried in México,” I said. I didn’t tell her that I wanted him in the Panteón Municipal, where we could celebrate him on el Día de Muertos. I wanted to bake pan de muerto and prepare calabaza en tacha for him. I wanted to make an ofrenda with the cempasúchil flowers that grew in our yard. I wanted to put candles on his tomb. I wanted to honor him. I wanted him near me.
Celia said, “Of course he should be buried in México.”
“But the woman from the hospital said it would cost five thousand dollars to send his body there.”
“Five thousand dollars! Qué escándalo. What are they going to do? Build a house around him?”
“I told the woman, ‘Thank you, but I’ll carry him to México myself if I have to.’ ”
Celia nodded.
“He has to go back with me. I need him—” The inside of my nose, the whole inside of my face, burned. I clenched my teeth until I could go on. “I need him with me.”
Celia looked at me sadly. “So you’re going back?”
“I don’t know what else to do. We’re not even in status. The police know that now. They’re going to send us back anyway if we don’t leave ourselves.”
“Where will you go?”
“We still have our house. My parents have been checking on it since we left. They’re waiting for us.”
“And then?”
“I don’t know. I can barely even believe that the days will go on. It seems like it should all stop somehow.”
“But it doesn’t,” Celia said.
“No,” I said. “For us it doesn’t.”