I put the phone down and decided I wouldn’t call Papi, that there was no reason to do so. And it was fine if I didn’t do the internship, because I didn’t deserve it anyway. My grades weren’t high enough, and Professor Kaufmann knew that as soon as I admitted it but had wanted to spare my feelings. I sat at Jillian’s desk, and while I could barely make out my face in the bright computer screen, I recognized what I was: Professor Kaufmann’s pity case. Still applying for the internship meant that I didn’t get whatever subtle clue she was either too weird or too smart to emit. I wasn’t who she thought I was, and I’d tried to blame a boy and let her believe that lie—and I’d just done it again with my mom’s help, had tricked a whole new group of people into thinking I deserved to be outraged about the wrong thing. I didn’t deserve the spot. I knew it, and I couldn’t face Professor Kaufmann in the lab, much less show up in California and work by her side. I knew, too, that I’d never take a morning shower in the main bathroom on our floor and risk seeing Caroline or Tracy in a towel again—I’d go back to showering at night, like I did when I lived in Miami. As I typed MIA into the destination field of the travel Web site whose link I’d clicked so hastily that I’d brought up five of the same window, I wanted more than anything to disappear, to fix everything by disappearing and reappearing somewhere else, to not be the person who’d lied and lied and caused a scene and who now only deserved to go back to where she came from.
I scrolled through the prices of the flights: spring break, being just a little over a week away, was out of the question, with every ticket available costing more than the meager limit on the credit card I rarely used. But the prices dotting the calendar later in the month said I could swing Easter, the final day that my mom would be—what? Sprawled on the floor in prayer? I had no idea. I’d never seen her pray in earnest, had never really been taught how to do it, but there was, on the screen, a flight listed that I could afford, that got me there to see that spectacle, to pull her off the ground myself if I had to, this time before any cameras caught her and added importance to her name. I stood and rolled the chair away from Jillian’s desk, just crouching in front of it with my credit card in one hand, my head down and bent over the keyboard, saying the numbers on the card out loud as I typed them, wondering if this was a kind of prayer.
29
MADRES PARA JUSTICIA BECAME A FAST favorite of the news media thanks to one of their favorite pastimes: pressing their backs against asphalt while acting as human speed bumps on the road in front of Ariel’s house. Equally camera-worthy was the way they stood in a circle, hands linked and bound together by rosaries, praying in front of his house, always in head-to-toe black because they were in mourning, they said, for Ariel’s mother. When I saw a photo on CNN’s Web site of my mom on the ground with these other women, I called home that night—it wasn’t our regular day to talk, so Leidy should’ve known I was upset about something. But when I asked, So how’s Mom, Leidy just said: Mom? She’s fine. She’s not here or else she’d talk to you. But she’s good. She’s doing real good.
In the days leading up to spring break, Jillian wasn’t ignoring me exactly, but since hearing from Tracy about my outburst (I guessed it was Tracy, though more likely it was all of them, probably sitting on my bed after shuffling into our room while I was at work or in lab, somberly debriefing Jillian on what had happened in the TV lounge, their voices measured and serious like in an intervention), she’d practically moved in with her All-Nighter, saying only Hey and Sorry and Excuse me when we happened to be in the room at the same time. Aside from her, no one but me and Professor Kaufmann knew about the internship, and though I’d been looking forward to bragging to Ethan about it at Happy Hours that week, I didn’t want to tell him now that I felt I should turn it down.
In theory, Ethan was someone I could talk to about the problems back home. At the very least, his RA training would kick in—he’d listen and say I hear you in all the right places—but he’d be better than that: he’d actually understand the very real impact the cost of the Easter flight had on my budget; if anything even remotely urgent had called him home over the last four years, he could tell me what he’d done about it. But I didn’t want to make Ethan work for me that way. I’d kept everything about my mom and Ariel from him because, unlike everyone else who knew I was Cuban and from Miami, he’d (purposefully, I thought) never asked. He was the only thing at Rawlings that home hadn’t contaminated, and I’d wanted to keep him like that. No one but him consistently called me Lizet—not Liz, and never El—and though neither of us said this outright, I took it as some agreement between us to keep each other intact.
There were some Thursdays or Sundays, before or after the study silence began, where he’d seem more stressed than usual to me, and if I asked if he was okay, he’d say simply My mom or Money stuff. He’d say, You know, the usual, and having the same shorthand for our worries made me feel close to him despite the abstractions. I’d come to think of him as a version of a grown-up Dante, and I think it was this—that I’d found a way to metaphorically insert him into some hopeful version of my family—that made me realize I now wanted to confess everything to Ethan, to admit that I needed him.