—This is fine, she said. Thank you for being clear. Perhaps just keep thinking about it? About the offer? Perhaps that’s all for now, she said.
I thanked her for understanding even though she obviously didn’t, but her confusion about how I’d be helping my mom and sister opened up a place for all the disloyal parts, all the parts that were jealous of Caridaylis. Still, in declining the internship, I was keeping my promise to my sister and making up for other failures. Of course Professor Kaufmann didn’t understand. She was destined for a bigger life than I was—was already living it. I’d been stupid to see myself following in her footsteps and having a life like hers, and the severity and intensity of the protests and counterprotests in Miami over my last weeks at school proved me right. And so did Ethan, with his silence; I didn’t see or hear from him again until the onset of study week, when he sent me an e-mail. The subject line read only Hi, and all he wrote was, You OK, OK? As if our first joke were a magic spell that could conjure the swagger I’d wielded at that party months earlier, back when something as silly as wielding swagger could even count as a priority. So I didn’t write back. And anyway, there was no point: we were leaving campus in a matter of days, him for good, and I didn’t deserve whatever goodbye he imagined. I was proud of myself for giving him that, for releasing him from the obligation I might’ve let myself become. I felt in those weeks that school was a job: finish my courses with the highest grades possible and get back home. It brought me a sense of calm, to recognize my place, to admit I could only rise so far above where I’d come from and only for so long. It was even a relief—to have removed the pressure of long-term success by accepting that it was just beyond me—one that led me to have the second-best semester I’d ever have at Rawlings.
35
ARIEL HERNANDEZ LEFT THE UNITED STATES for good on a Wednesday in June of that year. I’d been living under the cold war of our apartment for just over three weeks on that day, back in time to witness the worst of a different set of protests, the ones aimed at letting Cubans know that Other Miami had suffered enough of our antics.
Leidy was behaving in what I now think of as a civil manner. She’d started dating this guy named David, a cop she met while trying to track down our mom the day I flew back to school. They were the ones to pick me up from the airport—in David’s patrol car, Dante’s car seat in the back with me—when I came home for the summer. I was the first one to be nasty: You don’t mind that my sister has a kid? I said through the air holes in the Plexiglas separating him and Leidy from where Dante and I sat. I was cranky, dismayed at how much summer loomed ahead of me, embarrassed to be in the back of a cop car like a suspect.
—No way, he said. He had a buzzed head and wide, clean fingernails, the tips of his fingers the only thing steering the wheel, and he did that with such ease that I was jealous of him, of Leidy for having him.
—Dante being around is how I knew right away that your sister puts out, he said.
Leidy smacked his arm but laughed with her whole body. I liked him from that moment on.
We were careful with and around each other: it was the only way to deal with our mom, who vacillated between distraught and enraged. She’d been fired from her job, and though Leidy had corralled her into applying for unemployment, the money wouldn’t last long, and it wasn’t enough anyway. They’d scaled back on Dante’s daycare since Mami was around to watch him more, but twice Leidy had come home from the salon to find a note on the fridge from Mami saying she’d stepped out to go lie down in the street in a protest on Calle Ocho, or to speak on camera with a news crew she’d seen pass by on their way to Ariel’s old house. Both times, Dante was still in his crib, playing alone, or, the second time, sleeping in a wet diaper, but this was Definitely not okay, as Leidy had put it, and I agreed with her.