As we swerved around the parking garage looking for the way out, my mom’s left leg shook and jumped under the steering wheel. We made it to the bottom level of the garage and paid—a breathy Yes! from Mami when we came in under the hour—and then she asked a slew of questions: about the trip, the planes, who I’d sat next to on each and what they were like, whether or not I’d had a chance to sleep, how many degrees it was when I left—each question interrupting the answer to the one before it.
What Mami didn’t ask about was school. She spent the bulk of the car ride in conversation with the drivers of other cars, cursing them or begging them or ridiculing them, then saying to me, I’m right, right? She asked me if I was too hot or too cold, or hungry or tired, and I kept answering, No, I’m fine. I was exhausted and very near tears, actually. I was shocked to find that it did not feel good to be home, to have seen her standing there in the airport. The entire three hours of the last flight, though I’d been nervous about seeing her, I mostly felt very happy to be getting away from Rawlings and that first semester. But spotting her before she saw me in the terminal—in that fake gold outfit, her face oily, her hands fidgeting with the rings on her fingers—had made my stomach turn, and I just wanted to be alone somewhere to catch my breath, to have a minute to sync up my idea of home with reality. I’d seen my mother in that moment as not my mother; I saw her as a tacky-looking woman, as the Cuban lady the girls on my floor would’ve seen, alone in an airport. And I did not like that I suddenly had this ability to see her that way, isolated from our shared history. I didn’t know if she’d changed or if she’d always looked that way but now I could just see through my feelings somehow. I felt instantly cold, and then I panicked: if she looked that way to me, what did I look like to her, with my uncombed hair and my newly pale skin and the greenish, studying-induced bags under my eyes, with my horrid plane breath? By the time I’d spotted the sign for the restrooms, it was too late: she’d snagged me, thrown her arms around my neck, had said I looked smart.
As much as I was ashamed of my hearing results, by what that long letter stated the committee had decided—that I was the product of a poor environment—I willingly took it: I wanted to be at Rawlings, and I was grateful that they’d taken my background into consideration. I wanted to rise—I used exactly that word in the thank-you e-mail I wrote to the committee after printing out the resource list—to rise above what I’d come from. I’d felt sick as I typed it, felt like a traitor after I hit send, but now, at the clash of my mom’s bangles as she turned the steering wheel to cut off a car in retaliation for them cutting her off moments before—all the while lowering her window, her arm extending out, then her middle finger at the end of that arm, waving a fuck you as she yelled the same phrase in Spanish at the driver—I knew I’d meant it.
I eventually stopped paying attention to the street signs and turns and let myself feel lost in what still felt like my new neighborhood. Leidy was right: Little Havana did feel reffy, in a different way than Hialeah did—more like theme-park reffy, the reffiness as main attraction, on display. At a red light, we stopped a few cars back from a tour bus. A voice from its loudspeaker floated to us: And next up, on the left, you’ll see the eternal flame monument dedicated to those who died in the Bay of Pigs Invasion. The light turned green, we kept going, and then, as if they were getting paid to do it, some old Cuban guys were actually there by that flame, in sparkling white guayaberas, saluting at it and everything, and people from places like California and Spain snapped pictures of them, and the Cuban guys smiled for these pictures.
We eventually turned onto the street of my mother’s apartment building, something I registered only because she slowed down. What I saw there was another kind of spectacle: signs down the whole block, saying WELCOME and YOU ARE HOME. I blinked and breathed through the rush in my chest, then remembered who the signs were really for.
There were Cuban flags and American flags, signs with writing in too many fonts declaring: ?ARIEL NO SE VA! Blown up and hanging on almost every fence was a picture of Ariel—looking chubbier than he had a month earlier—hanging onto the neck of some girl maybe a year or two older than me. Above the photo, in bold print, were the words, NO DESTRUYAN ESTA FELICIDAD.
—Who’s that? I said.
When I pointed, I touched the glass of the window, something my dad spent years training me and Leidy never to do. I smashed my fingertip against the glass and left a greasy print. Mami’s leg was still shaking.
—Esa muchacha, she said, is Ariel’s cousin but is like a mother to him now. Her name is Caridaylis. Cari. They are never apart.
Mami now had both hands firmly on the steering wheel. She sat up too close to it. I imagined, in an accident, how it would ram her chest into her spine just before her head hit the windshield.
—She’s like an angel, Mami said. She is like a saint.
—I don’t remember her from the news.