IN PITTSBURGH, THE AIRLINE HAD sent me to a hotel that was only a short “courtesy” ride away from the airport, and like the hotels we now passed—scummy buildings on the fringes of Miami International, on the fringes of the definition of hotel—the rooms could be rented either for the night or by the hour. There was a time when hotels like this terrified me, but I’d spent enough hours in them with my boyfriend Omar during my senior year of high school that I was no longer shocked to see a prostitute hanging out by a vending machine or waiting in a car and sniffing her own armpits, thinking nobody’s looking. Still, I’d never spent the night in a place like that, and I was alone, and the room—which just as recently as that summer had seemed so fun and illicit and beautiful in this murky, hope-filled way—just felt gross, the sheets and towels, to the touch, all one step shy of dry.
We rolled through the city, our route apparently not needing the expressway. Around us, the noise of rumbling sound systems and way-too-much bass faded in and out depending on the stoplights. We eventually pulled up to a sprawling ranch house in a nice part of the Gables I’d never seen, and the old people left the van without saying goodbye to anyone, and I was relieved, now that I was back in Miami, that there was no need to be polite. Even this far inland, I could smell the salt in the air every time the door slid open. I hadn’t been this close to the ocean in months, and out of nowhere, the air made my mouth water. My eyes welled with tears—more water rushing to meet the ocean that I didn’t even know I’d missed.
My imaginary profesora and I were apparently the driver’s last two stops. She’d scooted in from the edge of her row after the old people left and was now directly in front of me. The mass of her hair was corralled into this thick bun, shiny and hard from the gel keeping it under control. The dark center of the thing, like an entrance to a tunnel, seemed to stare right at me. I had the urge to stick my finger in it, see how far it would go, but then she let out this big sigh and her shoulders drooped forward and shook. She brought her hands to her face, sucked in a wet breath through her fingers. The driver’s eyes swerved to the rearview mirror, and he lifted his eyebrows at whatever he saw there. He looked away to the road, but then his eyes met mine in the mirror and he shifted in his seat, cleared his throat when he looked away again like she was my problem. So I grabbed onto her bench and scooted forward, saying with mostly air so she wouldn’t really hear me, Uh, hey.
She leaned back on the bench—I moved my hand out of the way just in time—and, still through her fingers, said, God. Then she wiped her cheeks with her whole palm, pushing with the same fierceness that Leidy’s son, my baby nephew Dante, used when smashing his own hands into his face as he cried. She bent down and snatched something from off the floor—her huge purse. It hit her lap with a sound like steps creaking, the leather stretching as she rooted around in it. She pulled out a compact and flipped it open. In the mirror she used to inspect her face, I could only see a tiny circle of her at a time: her weak, ruddy chin; her bare, wide lips, the almost-straight teeth they revealed then hid; her flared nostrils as she used her pinkie nail to swipe something from the right one. Then, a flash of her full, dark eyebrow—and below it, her right eye, still ringed in perfect black eyeliner, the lashes still well-shellacked with mascara. None of it smudged by tears at all. I sat back against my bench, confused as to whether or not what she’d just been doing, not five seconds before, was crying. She tugged at the corner of her eye, lifting it, and I’d been staring for exactly too long when I realized what she watched in her mirror was me.
She snapped the compact shut, slid her purse off her lap and onto the bench, and turned to face me. She smiled—a square, forced grin that even showed the crooked bottom teeth I’d missed before—then dropped her head back to her purse. She said, Sorry, I’m being weird.
Her voice didn’t sound like I thought it would, and I was surprised I’d expected something specific. It was deeper and quieter than I thought it should be, and there was no Miami accent in it, no sharpness to her I. And what she said made her sound like my roommate Jillian, who was constantly describing the things she did as weird or random, even when they were neither weird nor random. Her face still turned to her purse, she asked, Are you headed to Hialeah, too?
—Yeah, I lied.
—Wait though, she said. Where did you go to high school?
She hopped in her seat and twisted her whole body my way, her hand now on the seatback between us. In seeing her get so excited about such a stupid, irrelevant question, I wanted to take away all the distinction I’d given her by thinking of her as a professor. But I didn’t know yet that this question—when you’re from Miami and talking to someone else from Miami after you’ve both left it—was the shortcut to finding out which version of the city had raised me. Out the window, the sun disappeared along with the clean, empty streets of Coral Gables, and that neighborhood started to melt away into the run-down strip malls—with their bakeries and liquor stores and Navarro Pharmacies and neon-signed cash-only restaurants—that looked more familiar.