—Awesome, she said. Cool. OK, well.
She scooted her purse along the bench, pushing it ahead of her like a boulder. As she slid open the door, the humidity outside flooded the van again, and it hit me from behind too, as the driver opened the back doors to get her suitcase. I felt my bangs curl, but her hair stayed perfect, the gel doing its job. She hopped down, hauled her purse to her hip, then straightened out her pants and blazer, tugging at the wrinkles as she stood just outside the van. She leaned a little away from the purse, struggling to keep it balanced on her shoulder and looking crooked as a result. The wheels of her suitcase dragged against the asphalt outside. The grating sound they made moved away from me, ended when the driver placed the bag by her side.
—Gracias, she said to the driver, who’d already left her there and was on his way back to the van. She watched me for a little too long, her eyes zipping around my face like she was trying to memorize me sitting on that vinyl bench before sliding the door between us closed. She inhaled then, so hard that her shoulders rose, the purse slipping.
—Please e-mail me, she said. Do it, OK?
She shifted the purse to her other shoulder, said, Good luck with everything.
I got the feeling she really meant it, like she was saying this to some old version of herself, but when she shut the door—not hard enough; she had to open it again and then slam it—I took the card in my other hand and ripped it in half, then ripped it in half again, then again and again, until the feathery edges of the paper wouldn’t let me pull them apart any more. I let this bland confetti, dampened by the sweat on my palms, slip piece by piece down to the van’s floor, where they nestled in with the mint wrappers left by someone before me, someone who’d done a better job of planning for this last leg of their trip. I wished for a piece of gum, for something to bring the saliva back to my mouth. I knew I had nothing, but I tugged my backpack closer to me and looked anyway, hoping some other version of myself had thought ahead.
The driver—after shouting, ?La Peque?a Habana! over his shoulder to me, his final passenger—left me alone in the back. I eventually found a stub of an eyeliner pencil at the bottom of my bag’s front pocket, and I used my reflection in the now-dark window to line my eyes as best I could, the blocks of my old neighborhood blurring by. I also found an unwrapped cough drop, and after smudging the lint off with my thumb and blowing on it a few times, I decided to pretend I knew how it got there in the first place and tossed it in my mouth. It was so old that it didn’t taste like anything, and little traces of the paper wrapper once protecting it somehow materialized and scratched around in my mouth like bits of sand. I swirled this almost-something for a long while, tricked myself into believing the cough drop hadn’t yet totally disappeared.
4
I DIDN’T RECOGNIZE MY MOM’S new building in the dark, couldn’t remember right away which window on the second floor was hers: I’d lived there only three days before leaving for Rawlings. The complex was a brighter peach than my memory had made it over to be, an orangey hue that too closely matched the Spanish tiles curving their way across the flat roof. A reggaetón remix blasted from the open windows on the building’s first floor, the noise giving me permission to ignore the male neighbors leaning against the chain-link fence that separated a block’s worth of sidewalk-hugging grass into lawns. On my last day there, Mami, Leidy, Omar, and I had each pulled a stuffed suitcase down the stairs; now I replayed each turn we’d taken in reverse, decided on a window, and tugged my bag up the too-tall front steps of the building’s entrance.
My knock on the apartment door was answered only by the suddenly-gone sound of the television as someone on the other side muted the volume, pretending no one was home. I heard Dante’s baby-quack, then a sharp Shh. I’d planned to yell Surprise! from outside the door just as it opened, but instead, after knocking two more times, I had to say, You know I can hear you guys. It’s me.
Then, a few seconds later, Me as in Lizet?
I heard the chain slide back, then hands moving down to the other locks. My sister opened the door, Dante on the floor behind her.
—What the fuck are you doing here? she said.
Her emphasis should’ve been on the word fuck, or maybe on here, but not on you. She’d been expecting someone else? But seeing how much she looked exactly like herself—her smooth cheeks with only the left one dimpled, her almost-black eyes and their long lashes, her dark and falsely blond-streaked hair pulled up in the same loose, messy bun she always wore around the house to avoid denting her blowout—made me so happy that I didn’t think to ask what she meant.