I was grateful that I had our room to myself over spring break, with no chance of Jillian walking in with only a Hey and stuffing a change of clothes in her bag before leaving again. Ethan was away—he’d gone to New York City with friends at the last minute as part of his celebrating—and since Jillian had put a password on her computer, I spent the days at the library, studying and writing then deleting e-mails to Ethan and also racking up work hours by picking up all the shifts abandoned by people who’d headed somewhere warm, money I needed to pay off the plane ticket. By the middle of the week I’d gotten lonely enough to e-mail Jaquelin—she had to be around—but she wrote back saying she was spending break on a service trip with some organization in Honduras, and I hated her so much for being this ideal Rawlings minority student that I deleted the e-mail without looking at the pictures she’d attached to it. Sending sunshine your way, she’d written; frustrated as I was, I believed she was really trying to do that.
During each library shift, I worried I’d run into Professor Kaufmann. Right before break, she asked if I was leaving town (she’d scheduled the lab work so that we wouldn’t kill or damage anything because of a week’s worth of inattention), and I lied and said I was headed home to Miami. She said she wanted to check in about the internship when I got back, about some forms I should be receiving in the mail. Any and every tall woman who came through the library’s entrance that week was greeted by a half-hidden version of me cowering behind the library’s security desk; I only emerged once I saw that it wasn’t Professor Kaufmann pushing a coat’s hood back from her face or stomping snow from her boots. And once classes started again, she didn’t ask me to stay behind to talk, didn’t e-mail me a reminder to linger after lab. The forms she’d mentioned never arrived in my campus mailbox, and I figured she must’ve realized I wasn’t applying for the internship and was silently upset. In the days before my Easter flight, I kept waiting for her to make me admit I’d misled her, and the dread of that moment followed me around campus, sat with me during lab or at work, and was only eventually crowded out by fear—of flying, yes, but of so much more—the instant I heard the click of my seatbelt on the airplane.
30
THOUGH I NEVER TOLD OMAR I’d seen my mom on the news and that I knew about the weeks-long vigil, I did tell him a few days out from my arrival that I’d found some mythical last-minute deal on an Easter flight. When he asked me why Easter—his voice rising, sounding more than a little panicked—I said, I just feel like I should be home for the day Jesus resurrected himself. He didn’t say anything except, Yeah I guess, and I worried I’d gotten it wrong and given myself away, that Easter celebrated something else: I hadn’t been to church since my first communion, and even there I had no solid memories—only that I forgot to take off my lace gloves in the bathroom before I went to wipe. I asked Omar to pick me up from the airport, then gave him a chance to confess everything he’d been keeping from me. I asked him, Is there a reason why I shouldn’t come home for Easter, Omar? No, he said. I even asked, Is something going on I don’t know about? I really do think I gave him enough with that, that this test was almost too easy. Still, he failed it. No no, he said. He coughed for a few seconds then said, We’ll go to the beach while you’re here. So I knew he’d keep my trip a secret, since he was already keeping so many secrets from me.
Omar paid to park and met me at the gate instead of driving around until spotting me, which is what we’d agreed on over the phone. Under other circumstances I would’ve found the gesture sweet, but this was another Thursday night with me in Miami for a holiday my family didn’t celebrate. This was me trying to—what? What the hell was I doing there? That’s what I thought when I saw him waiting near a bank of chairs, because that’s what his face said: El, what are you doing here?
The first thing he actually said after I pulled away from his stiff hug was, Where’s your ring?
I told him I left it at school, that I didn’t want to lose it on the plane, and I pretended to struggle with my bag to avoid looking at his face. I’d taken it off for good the night I booked the flight, had dropped it in the mug on my desk that held my pens and pencils right after clicking Purchase. He said, Really?—his voice so tight and uncomfortable that I knew he didn’t believe me as much as he wanted to when he said, Right, that makes sense.
The ride home felt just as awkward, but he bought my I’m tireds as I leaned against the car door, the street rumbling too close under me. When I first sat in the Integra, my butt dropped into its bucket seat hard: I’d forgotten how low his car was, and as we zoomed through the concrete layer cake of the parking garage, I imagined my ass scraping against each speed bump that the car tipped its way over.
Once he’d navigated away from the airport to the expressway, he veered in what felt like the wrong direction, the sign for Hialeah three lanes away on the other side of the road, indicating a different on-ramp than the one we were hurtling toward. I said the first of many things neither of us expected over that trip.
—I’m not going to my mom’s.
—What are you talking about? You can’t stay at my place, my mom would –
—I know, I said. Drop me off at my dad’s.