I was surprising everyone, even myself: I was home for a holiday we didn’t really celebrate. Eating turkey on a Thursday seemed mostly arbitrary to my Cuban-born-and-raised parents, and so to my sister and me growing up. Still, my entire school career up to that point celebrated America and its founding—the proof: a half-dozen handprint turkeys stuffed under my mother’s mattress, now in a Little Havana apartment instead of our house—and I must’ve been feeling sentimental for stories of pilgrims and Indians all getting along around a feast the night I scoured the Internet for a ticket home. Also, the fact that everyone at Rawlings (in the dining hall, around the mailboxes, before class while waiting for a professor to arrive, even in the morning bathroom banter bouncing between girls in separate shower stalls—all conversations in which I had no place until I decided to fly home as a surprise) couldn’t stop talking about family and food only made me want the same thing even though I’d been fine without it my whole life. So as people talked around their toothbrushes about the aunts and uncles they dreaded seeing, I recast the holiday as equally important to some imaginary version of the Ramirez clan and booked the trip, then mentioned going home one October morning as I towel-dried my face. A girl from my floor who’d barely ever noticed me finally introduced herself—I’m Tracy, by the way, but people call me Trace—and told me, as she spat toothpaste foam into the sink, how jealous she was that home for me meant Miami Beach. I didn’t mention that I lived miles from the ocean, just like I didn’t mention—to anyone—that I’d drained my fall savings on this trip.
A day later than the Wednesday printed on my original ticket, and a good hour after most of East Coast America would’ve finished their turkey and potatoes and apple pie and all the other All-American things all Americans eat on Thanksgiving, I shuffled down the aisle of a plane, my bag catching on the armrests then slamming back into me the whole way out. I stepped through the squarish hole in the plane’s side—I still couldn’t believe this opening counted as a door—and the night’s humidity swooped over me like a wet sheet, plastering my already-greasy bangs to my forehead. An old white man behind me huffed, Dear Christ, this place! Part of me wanted to turn around and snap, What do you mean, this place, you stupid viejo? You want to freaking say something about it? But the part of me that had calmly worked with the gate agent in Pittsburgh to find an available hotel room once it was clear they’d sold more tickets than seats on my connecting flight—the part that a week earlier had borrowed my roommate Jillian’s blazer for my academic hearing without mentioning the hearing itself—knew exactly what he meant. My bangs, which I’d blown out to give the rest of my hair some semblance of neatness, curled and tangled in that oppressive, familiar dankness. When I reached up to finger-comb them back into place, a motion that had been a reflex throughout high school, my nails got caught in the new knots.
The Miami International Airport terminal smelled strongly of mildew. The odor seemed to come up from the carpet, each of my steps releasing it into the air. That terminal was one of the last to be renovated, so the only TVs in it back then had one of three jobs: to display a pixilated list of ARRIVALS, or of DEPARTURES, or to relay the weather, updated every fifteen minutes. There was no recap of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, no local news about a food kitchen blaring overhead—the TVs weren’t connected to the outside world that way. If they had been, my ignorance about Ariel Hernandez might’ve ended right then, before I’d even stepped through the airport’s automatic glass doors and into the Miami night. It would’ve been at least a warning.
After explaining my overbooked flight and how my original shuttle reservation had been for Wednesday evening, and after an absurd amount of clicking on a keyboard and many Mmm-hmms and almost no eye contact, the woman behind the shuttle service’s counter managed to squeeze me onto a ride-share leaving in ten minutes.
—But you getting off last, she told me, the clicking suddenly stopping as she held up a finger to my face. Her acrylic nails—pink-and-whites that needed refilling—had slashes of diamonds glued across their long, curved tips. I could see her real nails growing up under them, like echoes.
—I got you, I said, happy to recognize something I hadn’t seen in months.
I sat at the very back of the blue van after reluctantly handing over my bag to the driver: I didn’t have any cash for a tip and almost told him so as we wrestled over it, each of us wanting to make sure we got the credit for putting it away.