—But he is home. That’s the end of it. His mother made the ultimate sacrifice to get him here. That must be honored. That must be the end of it, Mami said.
Her eyes suddenly filled and she swiped at the bottoms of them with her middle fingers, like she was flipping off the cameraman.
—Ah-Bee! Dante screamed. He clapped wildly.
—Mom’s fucking famous! Leidy said. She spun around to face me. Let’s go down there. We can get on TV! Where are my earrings?
I couldn’t find the words to say, You’re wearing them. She tossed the remote on the couch and ran off to our room, whispering in baby talk, We gotta get your shoes!
Our mom kept talking. Her voice was too deep—it sounded like a stranger’s. I lowered the volume, lowered it all the way to nothing. The camera zoomed in on her now-silent face—the new, heavy lines framing her mouth—then zoomed out to show her arms flailing down the street. I live right on this block, she was probably saying. Never mind that she didn’t want to be here, that she was from Hialeah, not Little Havana. There was a pause in her talking, then a nod, then her mouth moved again as she held up a peace sign. Peace for what? And then I realized it was not peace, it was two. I have two daughters, she was telling the world. This is personal; we live right on this block; I have two little girls.
I stood up from the couch and shot at the TV with the remote, afraid of what she’d do next. My mother’s wet face disappeared.
—Leidy! I yelled into the next room. Forget his shoes, we need to hurry.
Only when the ghost of my mother’s image—her metallic outline—faded away into the now-dead screen did I let go of the remote, its thud against the carpet the last sound I heard as I ran out the front door.
7
LEIDY DIDN’T SEEM TO HEAR my almost-confession about Rawlings, never asked, What were you saying? Not even when she caught up with me on the sprint to Ariel’s house, me wearing a broken pair of my mom’s flip-flops that she left by the mailboxes downstairs, her in a red tube top and cutoffs and strappy sandals, earrings still in, her nameplate now dangling from her neck—camera ready, she called the look. Dante spent the run trying to rip the nameplate free from the gold chain.
The cameras had moved on to someone else by the time we got there, though Leidy did manage to stand—as seductively as is possible when one is holding an eight-month-old—behind the man they were then interviewing. My mom was on the sidewalk, watching the new interview, and when I asked her what the hell was going on, she shushed me hard and crossed her arms over her chest, then rose up on her toes to see better.
That night, as we sat to eat dinner in the area we called the dining room but which was really just a table and three chairs set off by a square of linoleum a few feet from the couch, my mom was too frantic—too happy—talking about being interviewed, about the people she’d met, and I didn’t want to spoil that for her with news of my Rawlings hearing, not after what Leidy had told me that morning. Mami was in such good spirits that she’d cooked bistec palomilla—my favorite, with tons of extra onions, the meat pounded so thin that before she’d fried it you could see light through the sinewy slab—and I knew from the meal that she’d forgiven me for my stupid plan to come home without telling her. I lowered my face over my plate and let the steam and the smell of almost-burnt onions fill my whole head and displace the foreign college-world terms—plagiarism, academic integrity, student code of conduct—as well as the word those would boil down to were I to try and explain things to them: cheating. For most of dinner, I was grateful for the distraction of the Ariel conversation. My mom smiled at how slowly I chewed, not knowing that I was just trying to keep my mouth busy.
—What everybody’s saying is that he made it here, right? Mami said. So that’s it, he can stay, that’s the law. If you’re Cuban and you make it to dry land, when you ask for asylum, you get it. Done. Everybody knows that.
She worked a chunk of the thin steak between her molars. I didn’t want to say that what she thought of as the law was probably very much open for debate; he hadn’t made it to the U.S. unassisted—he’d been picked up at sea and brought in—so the wet foot/dry foot element, which already seemed like a tricky way to distinguish which Cubans got sent back and which got to stay and eventually apply for political asylum, was more complicated than my mom wanted to admit. Plus, Ariel Hernandez wasn’t just a minor; he was a little kid. How could my mom—who was friends with so many people who’d been brought by their parents from Cuba—think that someone so young would get to decide in which country he’d grow up? I cut another sliver of meat, speared a perfect loop of onion for the same bite, chewed and chewed.