Someone grabbed my elbow and tugged me toward the door. When my feet didn’t budge, the pull came again, harder, then a clamp of fingers into the crook and these hot words from a stranger in my ear: Un poco respeto. No kiss followed it, no reassuring hand to guide me from pain, no sweetness or memory of sweetness. Just the lesson: Have some respect. Have some respect for the dead, grieving mothers.
Another pull, now at my hand, and a shot of pain seared up to my elbow. I brought my hand to my face. The chunk of skin the nail in the hallway wall had torn from the meat of my palm dangled in a strip, still attached to my hand’s heel at the very edge of the tear. Blood smudged all the way down my wrist, and the cut was still bleeding. I put the gash in my mouth, thinking I could flip the strip back over it, press it into place with my tongue, set it up to heal that way. But at the taste of iron and salt, my teeth clenched down—an unknown reflex—and bit the sliver at the spot where it clung, the top teeth and the bottom teeth finally meeting as they severed it completely.
*
In the years since that night, I’ve reimagined what I did next every which way. In some daydreams, I ignore the people tugging my arm and tell them to get the fuck away from me, that that woman holding Caridaylis is my mother and I will not be leaving without her this time. In others I stand against the wall long enough that she sees me again, then she opens her arms and we all cry there, on that ridiculous racecar bed, her real daughter and her adopted one merging into one girl she could admire for a whole host of reasons. (In no version does Leidy show up, which reflects the real truth of that early morning.) My leaving had allowed for someone new to come in, and I’d been wrong all that time in thinking it was Ariel. The real replacement was right there in my mom’s arms: someone she could be proud of, someone whose decisions she understood and would’ve made herself had it been her life, a daughter who’d taken on more than anyone thought possible but who’d done it through no fault of her own, who was blameless. My hand stopped bleeding, and there was nothing left for me to do except for what I did: I walked away, back to where I’d come from, grabbed my bag, then left that house and eventually that city, kept leaving, year after year, until where I was from became, each time, the last place I left, until home meant an address, until home meant only as much as my memory of that morning would betray.
*
Leidy never forgave me for leaving my mother there. She told me much later that she’d spent most of the night driving around, debating whether or not to take Dante to Roly’s house for one of those surprise visits Roly hated before remembering that her last attempt (on Dante’s first birthday, weeks earlier) had resulted in Roly’s mother threatening to call the police. Eventually, the smell of shit worked its magic again, making its way to the front seat, and the thought of changing Dante’s diaper in the backseat of the car rather than in the small comfort of the apartment made her turn around and head home. She’d slept through the raid, through almost all of its aftermath, only waking up when I got home hours later, after walking in the opposite direction everyone else headed until the sun was high enough that I wasn’t afraid to turn back.
Mami didn’t come home that day or that night, and Leidy almost murdered me when it occurred to her that our mom might’ve been arrested.
—You had the chance to save her! she yelled as she flipped through the phone book, looking for the numbers to the police stations in the area.
—No I didn’t, I said, facedown on the sofa bed and shaking with exhaustion.
I was incredibly thirsty but also felt that drinking water would make me throw up. I was trying, above all else, to just hold very still, to calm my torn hand’s pulse. I explained the following things to her and into my pillow: that I had a flight to catch the next morning, that I could not afford to get arrested myself, that they don’t let people out of jail because they have to go back to school, that I was not about to wrestle Mom away from the group of people throwing things at the vans.