Where We Come From Read online

  Orly found his mom’s theater at the very end of the multiplex. He planned to tell her that he had a stomachache and needed the car keys so he could lie down for a little while. At first the theater looked empty, as if he’d walked into the wrong movie. Then a moment later he spotted her in the back-right corner of the room. He wanted to wave to get her attention and make her come down to talk to him, but something told him not to, to just squat and wait, same as he had in the other theater. His mom hadn’t seen him below, in the corner, and neither had the person sitting next to her. He was leaning over, whispering in her ear, and she laughed at whatever it was he said, nudged him with her elbow. Then her hand went down into his lap but with their eyes still on the screen.

  She hadn’t mentioned meeting anyone, so maybe it was by accident. Someone she just ran into from work or her Spin class, what a coincidence and isn’t it a small world and why sit alone? He and Alex got to go to the movies together, why shouldn’t she have someone to go with? It was dark, though, and he was looking up and across the stadium seating, clear to the other side. That’s what he was basing this on, some sort of superhuman vision across a dark theater. Like he was an owl or wearing infrared binoculars. His mother sitting with some stranger.

  Some part of him felt as though he was still in the other theater hearing the screams and didn’t know which way to turn. His heart was racing as much as if he were being chased. Even if he could’ve stood up and walked to her, he didn’t know what he would’ve said, if he could open his mouth wide enough to get the words out, to release the scream coursing through his body.

  The man had his arm over the back of her seat, a hand resting on her shoulder as he whispered again in her ear. Like it couldn’t wait, whatever he was telling her that was so incredibly important. And her hand was still down there somewhere, lost in the stranger’s lap, but then when he turned toward her she reached up and put a piece of popcorn in his mouth.

  * * *

  —

  Sometimes when Orly finally drifts off to sleep, he dreams of his mom, but never about going to the movies or what might have been on her ceiling. Usually it’s just the two of them and sometimes Alex is there too, in a park or at the beach, though when he’s awake he has trouble remembering the last time they all went to the beach together. The dreams are happening less and less now, not like in the first couple of months after she died; then it was once or twice a week. He wonders if this is good or bad, keeping her alive this away. If waking up a little sad is worth the price of not letting her go completely.

  10

  In the morning Orly is standing at the kitchen sink pouring himself a bowl of cereal when the reflection off the window across the yard catches his eye, as it has the last two days. This time, though, the aluminum foil shimmers as if the window might open on its own. Then a few seconds later it happens again. He wonders if the wind is rattling the window and causing the foil to move. The rest of the yard looks as it has every day for the last week, the glistening grackles conferring in the grass, the swollen papayas dangling from way atop the spindly trunk, the dog tamping down the dirt before it curls around and lies down.

  The foil actually makes it seem as if there is no glass in the window. He imagines kicking the ball against the side of the house again and this time hitting the window but the glass not shattering and just a gash opening and then closing up on itself again. Weird. Like he’s watching a sci-fi movie about extraterrestrials that have taken over a small pink house and need to cover the windows with aluminum foil to keep the atmosphere inside the house habitable, free of ultraviolet radiation and whatever else might threaten their well-being and force them to unleash their wrath on mankind. The kind of movie his brother would sneak into. Now, with the sun high above and bright, the window’s aluminum surface looks like a hologram, quavering as the light sifts through the passing clouds.

  He eats a few spoonfuls of his cereal before he realizes he served himself too much—this was his second bowl—and he has to pour the rest of his Froot Loops down the drain. But a second later he remembers Nina doesn’t have a garbage disposal, which means he has to scoop all the bloated rings and hold them in the palm of his hand and then toss them in the trash can in the corner, next to the two-by-four she uses as a crossbar for the back door.

  He’s plucking out the last of the Froot Loops from the sink when his iPad chimes and it’s his dad on FaceTime from San Francisco. They’re finishing up the shoot today, and tomorrow he and Kayla head to Napa for the weekend. She leans into the frame wearing a fluffy robe and says, “Hi, Orly! Are you having an awesome summer?” then leaves the frame again before he can answer.

  His dad says he wanted to call yesterday but he spent most of his free time on the phone talking to Alex’s camp director after they caught him using his phone. It took most of the afternoon to talk the director into not sending Alex home and only putting him on probation for the next week.

  “So how’s it going so far with Nina and Mamá Meche?”

  “Fine,” Orly is quick to say, which means the same as last time you asked, which means boring, which means sure, like you really care. And to keep his dad from asking more questions, Orly starts telling him about the zoo and the beach and the mall, but right then is when his dad says to hold on, he needs to answer the door. The phone stays on its dock and Orly is left looking at rumpled sheets and comforters on the bed. His mom died last year, but it still seems too soon for his dad to have moved on, to be calling from his and his girlfriend’s room. Orly wonders how long it would’ve taken his mom, if his dad had been the one who died suddenly, and then he remembers she already had moved on.

  In the background he can hear his dad speaking in Spanish, asking the room service guy where he’s from and how long he’s been here and how he likes it. This goes on for a minute or two before the room service guy switches to English when he uncovers the trays to present their food. His dad ordered the Denver omelet with hash browns and bacon and a cup of coffee; Kayla ordered the yogurt parfait and a glass of cranberry juice.

  Orly can see the food now because Kayla grabbed the phone and tapped the camera icon to switch around to the back camera. His dad is signing the bill.

  “Hi!” Kayla says. The room service guy, whose name tag reads FELIPE, smiles. “You’re supposed to say Hi back.”

  “Hi,” Felipe says and waves to her.

  “No, I mean in Spanish. Like ‘hola,’ like you were earlier.”

  Orly’s dad explains to him that they’re speaking to his son, that he can see them from where he is in Texas.

  “¡Hola, Orly!”

  “Hola,” he says and is relieved when he doesn’t have to say any more.

  When his dad is back on the phone Orly begins telling him he’s caught up on his reading. He’s in the middle of telling him about the book his teacher gave him when his dad shakes his head and tries not to laugh at something Kayla is doing on the other side of his screen, and then a minute later says he has another call coming in and needs to go, they’ll talk again soon.

  After they hang up, Orly hopes his dad stops calling every few days to check on him, ask how he’s spending his time. The part about Orly being caught up on his reading is true if his reading only includes the book Mr. Domínguez loaned him at the end of the school year. It’s a book of poetry by Pablo Neruda. Orly doesn’t really like poetry, but he didn’t want to be rude and say no thanks, especially since it was pretty obvious that his teacher hadn’t asked anyone else to stay after class so he could give them a book to read over the summer. Orly doesn’t understand most of the references to ancient civilizations and pyramids and temples and conquistadors and liberators and dictators and revolutionaries and fugitives, but he reads it over and over again as if reading it enough times might make the words mean something they didn’t the first three times. Mr. Domínguez told him the book explains the story of the Americas, which means not just the U.S. In cl
ass, he’d talked at length about how the Americas were much larger and more diverse, with a longer history than most people stop to consider, something that got a major eye roll from Carson.

  * * *

  —

  Felipe, before working his way up from dishwasher to room service, had come from El Salvador sixteen years ago with his wife and kids and settled in San Francisco, near his cousin Amalia, who worked in housekeeping at the hotel and helped him get a job in the kitchen. Felipe eventually learned to speak English from listening to his son, Erick, now a freshman at Cornell, and his daughter, Mariah, a junior in high school. They started by teaching him to read the breakfast menu out loud. Granola, Smoothie, Denver Omelet, Bagel with Smoked Salmon but without saying the “l” because in this country it was there but not pronounced. The Yogurt Parfait was the hardest. His brain and his tongue weren’t cooperating and the “yo” kept coming out like “jo,” and no matter how friendly he was on the phone taking their orders—“Good morning” and “Thank you for calling room service, how may I serve you?”—or how much he smiled when delivering the order to their rooms, he still had to read their orders back to them on the phone and again when delivering the trays and the guests wanted Yogurt not Jogurt for breakfast. When they were all at home, Mariah and Erick would use their mother’s cell phone to call their father in the next room and pretend to order a full breakfast, which he then had to repeat back to them, starting over every time he stalled or stumbled over a word. It became a running joke in the Ramírez household. What’s for breakfast? Erick would say. What’s for lunch? Mariah would ask later that morning. What’s for dinner? she would ask again in the evening. And the answer was always the same. Yogurt! Yogurt! Yogurt! Por Dios, YO-gurt! Felipe and Imelda brought their children to the United States when they were so young that all their education has been in the U.S., and now they still understand Spanish but speak only English, which Felipe thinks is good because it will help them make a life for themselves here in the only country they know as home, but not so good if someday they get sent back to the country where they were born.

  * * *

  —

  Orly’s rinsing his bowl when he takes another look out the kitchen window. The humid breeze resuscitates the sheets Rumalda hung earlier to dry on the slackened clothesline, the ends of which are attached to two corroding poles between the houses. Closer in, around the shade of the ebony tree, the thick grass gives way to the packed dirt littered with woody pods from the tree. Two of the three legs of the rusted barbecue pit are chained to the trunk. At the back end of the lot, in the shadow of the pink house, the creviced dirt slopes awkwardly toward the canal.

  Yesterday afternoon he flung rocks into the water, which he reasoned wasn’t the same as playing in the canal, and then went looking for something lighter that wouldn’t just sink to the bottom. The dog had barked at him when he first walked outside but then quieted down when he curved around to the other side of the pink house, away from the front steps. Under the back end of the house, opposite from where the dog sleeps, he found some planks of wood like the ones nailed across the back door.

  The leftover scraps were only a few inches wide and rotting, so it was easy to smash them in half with the heel of his sneaker and then use these smaller pieces to smash the ants scurrying around on the underside of the boards. Before pulling out the last plank, he heard a sound that made him scramble backward on his chest and belly, away from the opening.

  Back in the sunlight and several feet away, he crouched and gazed into the murky underside of the little house, ready to sprint back to the blue house if he noticed any movement. At first he thought it might be a tlacuache, a word he had heard mentioned but it took him a few days to figure out it meant possum and only after his godmother pointed to one squashed dead in the middle of the street. The tip of its tiny tongue, no bigger than a pink candy heart, was sticking out just beyond the edge of its serrated teeth. The pallid tail lay curled like a pirate’s hook and two baby tlacuaches were still alive and clinging to their mother’s back.

  Nothing stirred under the pink house. For a moment he thought someone might have gotten inside, but then he remembered the back door was nailed shut and there was a padlock on the front door. Earlier, when he was trying to avoid the dog, he had walked all the way around the house and none of the windows were broken. Then he heard it again, a faint creak like when Alex was sneaking around on the roof outside their rooms. He jerked back and tumbled into the grass, at the same time glancing up at the roof and halfway expecting to see someone or something looking down at him over the edge of the shingles. And suddenly it was quiet again, until a minute later when the chicharras began screeching somewhere beyond the canal.

  11

  “You can’t be taking chances,” Beto says and glances over to make sure he’s paying attention. “They like to hide in exactly the places you would never think to look for them, old newspapers, paper bags, between the walls.”

  Orly sits on the front steps of the blue house and half listens to what his tío is saying and half listens to his squirts, counting them to see if there’s a pattern to how many times he squeezes the sprayer before he stops to say something else. Usually it’s four or five squirts. Other times he starts to talk and then stops suddenly to release another two or three good squirts.

  “La cosa es que las cucarachas know where we are, but we don’t know where they are.” Beto runs his silver wand along the threshold of the front door. He stopped by after his last appointment and still has on his Ro-Ru Pest Control work shirt, only now it’s untucked so he can get a little breeze. “Son bien sneaky. You have to train yourself to think like them, como una cucaracha. ‘A ver, where am I going to run and hide this afternoon because the mean man with the sprayer is here to get rid of me and my babies?’ ”

  The spray is hardly coming out now and Beto works the hand pump to make sure his squirts have enough force. “It’s only later when the little bodies start showing up, with their legs in the air.” He stops to pretend he’s a dying roach, leaning back with his eyes closed, his hands flailing above him.

  Orly scoots down to the last step. “But I thought they were nocturnal.”

  “Eh?” His tío stops in mid squirt, a drip of pesticide falling on his work boots.

  “No offense, but you said it like the cockroaches are awake and watching you right now.” “No offense” being a phrase his mom taught him to say whenever he feels like he has to make a comment and the comment might offend the other person, especially if the other person is a grown-up.

  “And how do you know they’re not watching?”

  “Because they’re nocturnal and wouldn’t be coming out right in the middle of the afternoon. I saw it on a website they let us use at school.”

  Beto narrows his eyes at him. This kid thinking he can tell him how to do his work, like he knows so much. Then he remembers this is Eduardo’s boy. Eduardo who moved away to college when he was seventeen, creyéndose, acting like he was hot shit, and then Tencha treating their nephew like he was a prince or something, except the prince never came back—the jobs here weren’t good enough for the prince. So now they only see him when he passes through to go vacation on the island or to dump off his kid so he can go on vacation somewhere else.

  “Who said anything about coming out? I said ‘watching.’ ” Beto swivels his head side to side to show him how, his hands above his eyebrows, fluttering, like a pair of antennae. “And anyway, here we just call them night animals or insects, the ones that come out at night. Not the way you said it. Or you going to be like your daddy, one of those scholarship boys? Then we don’t see you again except for when you pass through on your way to the beach.”

  “Déjalo,” Nina says from the front door. “He can say it how he wants in this house.”

  “And now you make the rules?”

  “For my guests.” She steps outside and Orly slinks
away to ride the tire swing for the first time since he arrived. Off to the side, closer to the fence, there’s a bald patch of grass where La Bronca used to lie.

  “Still doesn’t make it your house. This one thinks he knows so much, telling me what’s what, like he’s the one that went for the training and test.”

  “The one it took you four times to pass.”

  “Let’s see you pass it, remember all those names of the different insects, not just the roaches, and then the chemicals. Dangerous ones. They don’t give out those licenses just to anybody.”

  They stop arguing only because they hear their mother complaining about the bed rail being stuck again. Orly offers to go help her, but Nina tells him to stay where he is and goes herself to check on her mother.

  He stops the tire swing to see if his tío will be going back inside too, but his tío only stares at him until he pushes off again, spinning it in the opposite direction. By the time the tire circles back around, his tío is already headed to the backyard.

  La Bronca barks her head off before Beto has even made it past the gate, making enough commotion for Nina to hurry out the back door and intercept him.

  “What?” He still has the pump and sprayer in his hands.

  “What you?” she says and then turns to shout at the dog to stop its barking. “You didn’t spray in there last time.”

  “Because I was in a hurry.”

  “Because you don’t need to be spraying empty houses.”

  Beto looks over his shoulder at Orly, now standing at the back gate, and then turns to Nina. “Empty-empty?”

  “You didn’t hear me? Empty is empty.”

  “Doesn’t matter if it’s empty for them to lay eggs, then they come across to the other house. Just give me the key and I’ll show them to you. So you can see the eggs, what I’m talking about.” He steps to his left to get around her, but she blocks him.