—They don’t ever put the food away, she said.
After a lap of picking up abandoned plates and tossing them out, she set me up on the couch, pulling a flat throw pillow off another chair and setting it where my head would go. I tucked my bag beneath that spot, leaned it against the couch, and decided not to change into the sweatpants I’d brought since it didn’t seem like anyone else was making themselves more comfortable. I pulled my legs up on the seat and out of nowhere my mom bent down and kissed me on the forehead. And so I ignored how the sheet she’d found for me smelled like cigarettes, how the couch was covered in material so coarse it paved a pattern on my skin. Her lips left a cold spot for minutes afterward, and I wanted to grab her, pull her to the couch, not let her go outside. I wanted to call Leidy and say, I did it, though I didn’t do anything. All I can say is that her touch made me feel close to her in a way we’d never been, despite the fact that she would spend the night outside with strangers praying for a child that wasn’t hers. She pushed my hair off my forehead and said, Tomorrow will be a beautiful day, and I closed my eyes and nodded.
*
I fell asleep that night trying to rewrite the conversation with Victor into something else, something where he was flirting with me and not trying to fuck with my head, not trying to tell me where I stood in the neighborhood now—an echo of Omar’s last words to me. I remade his smile into a sweeter one, took the squint out of his eyes and reshaped them into something more open, something impressed with what he saw. And I put even more of Ethan’s red in his beard, under his chin, which made him kinder, more familiar. I revised the memory so that his laughs were better timed, in sync with what I said the way Ethan’s always were. I turned my face into the dank throw pillow I’d folded in half. When I still couldn’t fall asleep, I told myself Victor’s venom came from his knowing I was too good for him, out of his league. What did I want with him anyway? Why did I care what some loser thought? But a year earlier I would’ve given that loser my phone number. A year earlier I would’ve found a way to press my arm against his, would’ve laughed at his jokes in a voice higher than my real one. For years after that night, the real memory of that conversation made me wince—and it does, still, much too often, whenever I catch a decent-looking man watching me from a nearby table during the breakfast remarks at a research symposium, or at the beach bar my colleagues and I sometimes visit during happy hour on Thursdays to drink a beer and watch the sunset. I still perceive some intensity from someone and instead of recognizing it as attraction, I immediately assume it’s disgust. I want to blame Victor for that reflex, but it was there already, had shown itself for the first time the day I saw my mother in the airport, waiting for me at winter break; all he did was verify for me that I would always use that double vision against myself. All he showed me was that I couldn’t go back to not having it.
And then there’s the bigger reason that Victor has stuck in my memory like a splinter. I didn’t know it then, replaying and revising our conversation while falling asleep on that couch, but he was the last person to talk to me before this double vision became the only way through which I saw anything. My mind defaults to that small conversation with Victor because it’s easier than thinking about what happened to Ariel hours later, about the different waves of betrayal that surged in and around me that night and since. I’ve focused first on someone I never saw again because he’s an easier specimen to dissect, an easier result to write up—one where I’m only a small variable, one that my mother isn’t part of at all.
33
I WISH I COULD SAY I woke up with the screams, with the sound of breaking glass, or even before all that—with the rumbling engines of the vans as they pulled up, with the boot stomps charging up and down the block and kicking in doors. But it was a stranger who woke me, a woman dressed in black who was not my mother. I had no idea what time it was, only that I’d been dreaming, I think, because I’d heard someone snoring and thought it was Omar, that I’d slept over at his house and I hadn’t yet seen my dad or Leidy or my mom or anyone—that Omar was on the floor next to me and I wanted to pull him to the couch but couldn’t move. Then a woman’s hands were digging into my shoulders and she was shaking me and yelling in Spanish, They’re coming! Get up! Get outside now!