I didn’t think I could feel more nervous. I was wrong. I pick it up, open the flap, and take a deep breath as a wave of nausea hits me. I’ve never been this nervous in my life, not even for Regionals. That day, I couldn’t wait to compete. Today, well, if Emery forgot to pick me up, I wouldn’t be devastated.
From the envelope, I tug out a sheaf of paper. At the exact same moment, a text message arrives.
Marcos: Hey Savannah, hope this doesn’t wake you up. I’m sorry about how we left things yesterday and I know you’re probably still mad. I wrote you this letter to show you where I’m coming from. Well, it was supposed to be a letter, but…you’ll see.
A second text. Good luck today! I’m proud of you.
I set down the phone without answering. If I can’t handle eating breakfast for fear of throwing up, I don’t know that I’m ready for whatever these pages contain. A glance at the time, though, shows that I have least fifteen minutes until Emery arrives.
I take a chance. I unfold the first page and start reading.
IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL we had to write our autobiographies. I had a good time inventing my fictitious history, so much so that I was moved from the bilingual class to the fully English class mid-year. In it, my father was a chef at Niagara Falls, my mother a world-famous diver whom he met one night on a smoke break (really, my teachers ate this up), my imaginary little sister toddling around Dad’s restaurant and charming the stingiest tippers into leaving a few more bills. Andreas says he’s been to Niagara Falls and the food sucks, so what do I know?
In reality, I was born in a town in Texas too small to be mapped. Right after I arrived, Dad went back to our apartment because two-year-old Victor had croup. Victor was born in Guadalajara. It was as if he was warning my parents then: there is nothing to rejoice.
There was always music in Texas, and not that twangy acoustic; I mean rumba and merengue and chumba. Dad washed dishes and Mom waitressed at a restaurant where afterwards there was dancing. I remember clinging to Dad’s leg and watching the high heels and slick black dress shoes spin and stomp throughout the dining room, strobe lights casting irregular dazzles over the floor. I always wanted to run in and join. “Too dangerous, m’ijo,” he said. I took this very seriously, but now I think he meant the stilettos. In the summer, I’d play in the back parking lot with Victor. He’d make up all sorts of stories: “If you climb up that tree, you can see all the way to Russia.”
I turned four the summer of the immigration raids. The whispers ran all through our building. Factories. Bars. Farms. They could happen at any moment.
Dad quizzed Victor before we left for the restaurant and when we arrived home at midnight, one in the morning, Dad was carrying both of us because we were half asleep. “You were born at Austin Memorial Hospital. Can you remember that? Say it with me. You can’t have an accent. You have to say it naturally. Like you never knew Spanish.”
Later: “Where is your birth certificate?”
“Burned,” Victor said.
“With what else?”
“The whole house.”
“Very good,” Dad said.
The night they sat us down, Mom couldn’t stop crying quiet tears that turned her already-running makeup into a stream.
“You’re going to live with Uncle Patrick,” Dad said finally.
“What do you mean?” Victor said.
Dad took Mom’s hand. She shook her head. “It’s not safe for Mom and me,” Dad said. “We have to go home.”
“We are home,” I said, but already I could see my life in boxes crammed in the back of a car, the room and apartment and restaurant falling away.
I asked questions. I don’t remember what they were, but I thought that if I asked enough, maybe there would be one Dad couldn’t answer. Maybe he’d realize that they had to stay. Victor said nothing. He already knew these answers. He started to cry, and my mom put her arms around him. Soon the water over my eyes blurred the room into round shapes, and Mom pulled me into an embrace.
I don’t know where I got the image of my life in boxes. I owned almost nothing. Some clothes. The obligatory soccer ball. Mom always asked if I wanted toys, but I said no. I had music and the trees behind the restaurant and Victor. What did I need toys for?
Uncle Patrick’s real name is Jesus, but he took his middle name, Patricio, and made it English. Most often he’s asked if he’s Irish, or at most, Spanish. The elite class of Spanish, with faces that burn in the sun.
Like my father, Uncle Patrick embraced public rejection of his heritage. He spoke only English at home. He named his children Michael and Madison.
He was naturalized before I was born, a process that took fifteen years. He treated us generously: new clothes, karate lessons, an English tutor for me in the early elementary school years because both languages jumbled together in my brain. But I wondered what he would do if anyone questioned him about Victor. Would he give up my brother? The older I grew, the more I believed he might.
Victor sensed it, too. At seventeen, he shook hands with Uncle Patrick and moved into the apartment. Last year, I joined him. We’re lucky to have this place to ourselves. At any moment, it seems as though someone’s house will burst and people will spill out–relatives, friends, strangers.
My first night at Victor’s reminded me of the restaurant in Texas–music, all the time. Conversations, TVs, arguments, laughter. Police sirens. “Bastards ruining it for the rest of us,” Victor says. Early in the morning, trucks with groups of men drove over the broken asphalt. Kids played in the street despite the garbage that built up until the weekly pick-up. One of them had a plastic lightsaber and the others joined the battle with ladles.
At first all I could do was sit outside and stare. Then Victor said, “Let’s go, pendejo. You want to waste your life sitting around like those guys?” Down the road, I could see two men drinking on the curb.