—Mom, I screamed. Mami! Where are you!
The hallway walls were empty, but on the floor were picture frames: gold rectangles in all different sizes, the pictures in them curling at the corners and covered by fresh shards of glass. I put my hands on the walls to keep from slipping on the orange-slicked floor as I leapt over the piles. Something tore into the heel of my hand—a nail that minutes earlier had held up a frame. I wiped the blood on my jeans and kept moving. I stuck my head into what I saw was the bathroom, pink tiles gleaming, the shower curtain in a heap in the tub, a towel rack busted on one side, hanging straight down and useless.
—Mom, I yelled, the word cracking against the tile.
The next door down: the door itself was in the room, resting in a nest of stuffed animals against the room’s back wall and blocking the window, the side with the hinges broken into splays of wood jutting from it like palm fronds. Inside, people cried to each other as they stood around what looked like a car—a racecar bed, red and low to the ground, though I could barely see it through everyone’s legs. The crowd was two or three deep in some spots, and from its center—from the bed itself—came howls so raw I thought someone must’ve been shot, that the sirens—much closer now—were an ambulance coming to take this person to a hospital to be sewn up and saved. I stepped over a muddied Donald Duck—thought for a second that someone had ripped off his pants before remembering he didn’t wear pants—and pushed into the crowd where the bed met the room’s back wall.
My mother was on that racecar bed with her arms wrapped around Caridaylis—who now bolted her screams directly into my mom’s shoulder. Caridaylis was pounding on my mother’s chest and arms. She punched my mother in the sides, struggled to get free. My mother whispered Shhhh and No no no and dragged her hand up to Cari’s head, her fingers wide apart and tangling in her hair and holding the girl’s face in place.
—Ya, ya, she said into her ear. My mother kissed Caridaylis there, on the ear, then on her hair, then her temple, three or four more times at least, rocking her slowly until the girl’s fists fell and she pulled them into herself.
—Go away, my mother begged us. Give us a minute. Please, give her one minute.
No one moved. No one even backed away. The chaos outside grew louder, pressing up against the window: glass shattering, every dog for miles barking and howling. Caridaylis hiccupped into my mother’s shoulder, the soft sound unmuffled only when she turned her face to the side, to the back wall of the room, away from everyone. Only I could see it—her face—from where I stood on the circle’s edge up against that wall. A face puffy with sleep and tears, a young face—no makeup at this hour of the morning, no lipstick to make her seem older—her eyes closed, the lids hiding them thin enough to rip. A face smashed up with grief I’d never known. It looked like my mother’s face, which hovered close to Cari’s in that moment, streaming its own tears over cheeks tinged the orange of pepper spray, over skin rushed old by the weeks of lost sleep. Both of them with their eyes closed like that, their mouths distorted and wet and swollen and open in breathy crying—they could’ve been related. Cari could’ve been her daughter.
My mom opened her eyes and I stepped back, feeling caught.
—Jesus I said leave her alone, she hissed.
She clutched Caridaylis to her chest, and her eyes passed over every one of us in that ring of people. They passed right over me. They kept moving until she shook her head no and then looked back down at the top of Cari’s head and kissed it. She began rocking her again, cradling her tighter than before, and that squeeze pushed more of Cari’s sobs out of her. She flung her arms around my mom’s neck and wailed into my mom’s collarbone, pulling herself up and leaving behind a patch of wet—saliva, tears, snot—on my mom’s chest. My mom closed her eyes and ran her fingers through the length of Cari’s hair. Her hand trailed down to the small of Cari’s back, rubbed a wide, warm circle there, a comfort she’d given Leidy and me hundreds of times.
—Mami, I whispered.
—Ya, ya, she said to Caridaylis, as if she’d been the one to call for her.
I watched my mom’s hand circle, press and circle, my own back cold against the wall.