I saw it happen. I wish I hadn’t, because it only brought me trouble. And I really wish I hadn’t told Marisela about it. That night, I was riding my bicycle on the 62, heading home after work, when the chain fell off my back gear. We used to have a car when we lived in Arizona, a Toyota Corolla we bought for $875 from one of the ushers at our church, but it broke down after we moved here and we couldn’t afford to repair it or buy another one. We lost $875, just like that. Sometimes, Marisela complains that people come to this country to get ahead, and all we’re doing is getting behind. I’m doing the best I can, I tell her, I can’t do more than that. What I don’t tell her is that we’d get ahead if we didn’t have her two sisters in Torreón to support. And the bicycle isn’t so bad—I got it for free from Enrique, and I can ride it almost anywhere. The only problem is the chain.
That’s what happened that night. I had to stop when the chain fell off. I pulled up to the sidewalk, not far from where the 62 meets Chemehuevi Way, and turned the bicycle upside down. Getting a chain back on its gear is easy enough, but it was dark and I’m farsighted, so I couldn’t see what I was doing. I don’t usually carry my glasses with me because I don’t need them, not for the carpet-cleaning service I work for during the day, or for washing linens at the motel in the evening. I got down on my knees and started draping the chain by feel, getting it back on the gear one link at a time. It took a while, and when I finally got it done, my hands were dirty. I raised myself up carefully, trying not to get any grease on my pants, holding my arms away from me, as if I were groping for something in the dark. That’s when I heard a car speeding toward the intersection and then a dull sound. Bump. Like that. I looked up, and the car was already making a turn onto the side street. The old man rolled off the hood and landed facedown in the gutter. And the car didn’t even stop. It went on as if it had only hit a can or a plastic bottle.
“You should call the police,” Marisela said.
I walked past her to the kitchen sink and squeezed dish soap on my hands, trying to work the grease off. “Did you forget what happened to Araceli?” I said. Araceli lived down the street from us in Tucson. A plump woman with big hair and a cackling laugh. She called the police to report a neighbor who was beating his wife, and when they came to take her statement, they found out she didn’t have her papers. Before she knew what was happening to her, Immigration was at her door. California is different from Arizona, at least that’s what people say, the laws are different here. But how could I take a chance like that?
“So you just left?” Marisela said, her hand on her cheek. In the bright light of our kitchen, the freckles across the bridge of her nose looked darker. Twelve years we’ve been married, and those freckles still get me. I couldn’t lie to her. I looked away, kept scrubbing my hands. She came closer, and when she spoke again her voice rose with astonishment. “You left him there?”
Well, no. Not exactly. I pulled out my phone from my pocket, getting grease all over the keypad before I realized that the call could be traced. So I looked at the buildings on that stretch of the 62, trying to decide where I could go for help. There was a diner with a bright sign, but all the lights inside were off, except for the one that flashed CLOSED in red and blue. The bowling arcade next door was open late, though, and I started down the pavement, until I noticed a jogger coming up to the intersection. A woman in running shorts, her blond hair in a ponytail, her ears covered by headphones. She couldn’t have heard anything, but she was about to cross the highway at Chemehuevi. She would find the old man on the other side and she would call the police. I got on my bike and went home. “So you didn’t help him?” Marisela asked.
“There wasn’t anything I could do,” I said, wiping my hands with a paper towel. Traces of grease still stuck underneath my fingernails. I walked past her to the bedroom, where I took off my uniform. The children were asleep in the bed under the window, and I moved quietly so that I wouldn’t rouse them. Elena was eight at the time, and Daniel was six. Both citizens, I want to be clear about that. Everything I did was for them. Or didn’t do, you might say.
I picked up a fresh towel from the pile on the bed, and stepped into the bathroom for a shower. The water was warm and I closed my eyes, but the first image that came to me was of the old man, his face sunken against the gutter, one of his knees twisted beneath the other at a peculiar angle, an arm tucked under his chest as if to support his weight. I saw new details, now that my eyes were closed, things I hadn’t noticed in the shock of the moment. On the electric pole behind the man was an advertisement, printed on yellow paper and pinned at eye level. Five feet below that notice, the old man’s hair was a shock of white, and the bright green of his shirt stood out against the gray asphalt.
I opened my eyes under the water. No, I told myself, I hadn’t witnessed the accident. What I had really seen was a man falling to the ground and a white car speeding away in the night, and I wasn’t even sure about the color. It could be white, or maybe it was silver. But I really didn’t know what make or model it was, and I didn’t catch the license plate number. So you see, there wasn’t anything I could do. All I saw was a man falling to the ground.
Nora
I took a shower, wiped the steam from the mirror, and in the damp glass I saw that I looked different. Expectant. I couldn’t quite believe that life would go on now without my father, that by the next morning the sun would rise, my mother would sit at the kitchen table, the cat would nibble at its food, the neighbor would lean on her walker as she made her way down the street. The last time I had been home was for Thanksgiving. Only five months had passed and yet I couldn’t remember much about that visit. There had been a board game or two after the big meal, a movie at Cinema 6, a hike with my father at the national park in Joshua Tree, but I couldn’t recall anything particular about those four days. They were just four ordinary days.
It took me a long while to get dressed. I put on a dress, a belt, my watch, but with each item my thoughts would wander before I remembered to button, strap, or clasp, so that by the time I came out of my bedroom, my hair was almost dry. I was crossing the entryway toward the kitchen when the front door flew open. Salma, Tareq, and their twins walked in, the adults carrying grocery bags and the eight-year-olds clutching their tablets. “Aunt Nora,” Zaid called, and ran to hug me, while Aida quietly put her arms around my waist and squeezed.
I held them, surprised, as I still am sometimes, by how much they had grown since I had last seen them. And there were other small changes, too. The psoriasis spots on Aida’s elbows had gotten bigger, I noticed, and Zaid had a temporary Captain America tattoo on the back of his hand. Once, my father and I were watching the kids splash around in the inflatable pool on a warm spring day and he asked me, What is dearer to the heart than a child? I thought about it for a minute, then gave up. What? I asked. A grandchild, he said. Now he would never see his grandchildren again, never build a Lego spaceship with Zaid or teach Aida how to do crossword puzzles.
“When did you get here?” my sister asked, dropping the grocery bags to the floor.
“Early this morning,” I said.
Salma looked startlingly pale, and her polka-dot shirt and black pants were so big on her that I wondered if she was ill, but the thought drifted from me as she came closer. The minute we embraced, she began to cry. I found myself comforting her, just as I had comforted my mother earlier that day. Salma’s husband stood beside us, waiting, but as the moment stretched he asked the twins to go to the living room and brought a box of Kleenex from the guest bathroom.
“I’m sorry I had to tell you by text,” Salma said. “You weren’t picking up your cell phone.”
“I was eating dinner,” I said. “I didn’t hear it ring and I didn’t see your text. It was Mom who told me.” The memory still stunned me: while my father lay on the pavement, his life slipping out of him, I’d been out celebrating with Margo.
“Did you get the coffee?” my mother asked. She was standing in the doorway. Her eyes were small and her cheeks webbed with pink veins.