As that high chair crashed to the ground, as Dante turned and turned his face where I held it because he couldn’t really breathe, here’s what I thought: It’s over, he’s gone. I thought: I’m one of those 800,000. I thought: Fuck you, we fucking made this city. I thought: Who fucking wants to be here anyway. Dante finally pushed my hand with his head hard enough for me to let go: Why couldn’t I be the one? I couldn’t admit this to anyone, but I wanted to be the one to go. Get me out of here, I thought. Get me the fuck out of here.
Dante started to cry and scream, and the group of people who’d left the restaurant regrouped in a parking lot a block down. Their running left them in front of a car wash, where they met other angry spectators, and they bent over and leaned on their own knees, heaving air while cursing and crying. Then one of them stood up and put his hand to his forehead in a salute, looking down the road in the direction the trucks had come from. He pointed there with his other hand, and the people around him watched as a group of women—all of them in black, each of them silent—moved toward us with arms linked.
And as the women came—just a couple thin lines of black stretching across the four lanes of the street, cops on motorcycles zigzagging ahead of and behind them, lights flashing silently—my mother, somewhere near the end closest to me, did not turn to us at the sound of Dante’s shrieking, which I tried and failed to control. She kept her head tilted down, as if her steps were the most important thing in the world, the only thing she had any power over. She watched herself walk and either couldn’t hear Dante or refused to look up if she recognized the crying as his. She kept moving forward. Nothing would distract her. Dante gulped in a huge swallow of air and came back twice as loud, shrill as a siren, and my mother’s eyes slammed shut, stayed shut, her legs still moving her forward.
I bent over and grabbed the wooden high chair, righted it as best I could with Dante on my hip. Then I put him in it, buckled the flimsy plastic seatbelt around his hips. He reached his arms up to the sky, his face a red fist of insistence, and when I backed away, he tore himself open with wet roars. But I moved a little more, just to the other side of the table, to see what it felt like. I turned from him and watched my mom focus, watched her keep moving in silence.
—You’ll be fine, I whispered, the words lost under Dante’s agony.
I ignored the glares from the people around us, angry at the broken silence, at me for not being able to do anything about anything.
—You’ll be fine, I said again and took one more step away.
You’ll be fine, you’ll be more than fine.
*
Before the next morning’s news could pick up where it left off and replay every image ever of Ariel during his time in the United States, I snuck out while everyone slept to run to the library and be there when it opened. I called the emergency number in the e-mail from a pay phone in the library’s lobby. The program coordinator, sounding somehow not at all groggy despite the time difference, explained that no, I hadn’t been replaced exactly: Professor Kaufmann had understood too late that I’d declined my spot, and she’d opted not to invite another Rawlings student, as the grant could be spent in other ways. This woman took down the pay phone’s number and eventually had me call Professor Kaufmann myself, who just seemed happy I’d be on board—That’s super!—and didn’t ask for any of the explanations I was more than prepared to give her should I be forced to beg. All she asked about, again, were the forms and if I could just bring them with me then. Yes, I still had them. Yes, I’ll bring my social security card. Yes, I’m happy this worked out, too. She hung up with me to call the program coordinator, who called me back at the pay phone within minutes and who seemed too happy to tell me that the cost of the flight, initially covered, would now fall on me—the funding for that had already been reallocated. I’ll figure it out, I told her. I gave her my social over the phone; she gave me the airport to fly into and the name of the car service that would pick me up there: I was to e-mail her my itinerary the second I purchased the flight so she could book my shuttle.
The cheapest ticket that got me to Santa Barbara by the day they wanted us there cost just over six hundred dollars. My hands shook as I typed in my name, the numbers on my credit card. The confirmation screen came up with that large number behind the dollar sign—an amount so close to the one in my bank account, one just shy of the figure scrawled on our rent check each month—and I choked down the word No. I tried to find a way to forward my itinerary without that shameful price showing, to cover it up or delete it somehow, but there was none. I retyped my arrival information—the flight number, the airline, the time—at the top of the e-mail and hoped the woman wouldn’t scroll down.
*
I told Leidy first, but I hadn’t planned that. She was coming out of the shower, her hair wrapped in one towel and her body in another, when I got back.
She startled when she saw me, the towel around her chest slipping a bit, and said, Shit! Where were you at so early? I thought you ran away or something.
I did not laugh or answer—I only winced from the thought of the money I’d just spent and doubled over like she’d already hit me.