Where We Come From Page 13
Orly almost couldn’t believe it when Alex told him about the slap. Before then they never would’ve thought Maribel had it in her to hit one of her kids. During the ten years she had worked for the family, the boys had done enough to frustrate her, but she never seemed bothered by their antics—the mad-science experiments in the kitchen, the underwear stuck to the ceiling fan, or one of them hiding her cell phone in the clothes hamper or inside a cereal box so it took most of the day for her to locate it. And then there were the fights she had to break up between them, the accusations about who started it and who did what to whom and who was making it up to get the other one in trouble when their parents got home. She’d sigh, shake her head, say something like “Son tremendos,” and continue working. Sometimes she’d take her Virgen de Guadalupe pendant and rub it between her thumb and forefinger. No matter what they did, though, she never got as annoyed as their parents did. They figured Maribel for one of those parents who didn’t believe in spanking and not just the kids of the family she worked for. But a slap across the face was definitely hitting, way more than just a spanking, and a lot more than raising her voice.
After a while Maribel went outside to talk to Daniela, who by then had locked the car doors. Alex cracked open the bedroom window so they could hear Maribel begging Daniela to open up, telling her she was sorry, she overreacted, it wouldn’t happen again, she promised, even saying it in English. Across the street, Dr. Murphy, who was retired and generally asleep at this hour, New Year’s or no New Year’s, flicked on his porch light and stood by his picture window when he saw it was the Latin girl who worked across the street. He had his cordless tucked into the pocket of his robe, ready for the first sign that things might be getting out of hand. Alex said it was like watching a reality show.
“The Real Nannies of Houston,” Orly said.
“La Súper Nanny,” Alex said.
“Don’t Mess with Our Nanny.”
“Nanny No-no’s.”
“Nanny Bloopers.”
“Who’s the Boss in This Casa?”
“The Slapping Nanny.”
Which got a fist bump from Alex. “Nice one, little bro.”
The list went on for another twenty minutes, until Maribel came back inside and the boys headed off to their bedrooms. Their parents came home close to one in the morning.
* * *
—
Maribel and Daniela drove back to their apartment without saying a word the whole thirty minutes it took to get there. Four months later, Daniela gave birth to a healthy baby girl. After a short stay in the hospital, she returned for her final weeks of ninth grade and the end-of-year parties her friends were having before the start of the summer. Maribel and her husband raised the baby as their own.
14
The next night Orly hears them in the kitchen. The sounds haven’t gone away and only become more obvious because now he knows it’s not just Nina. He tries to sleep, runs his fingers up and across the grooves on the wall, imagines what hotel his father might be in tonight, what Alex is doing at camp, if he’s done anything else to make the counselors call their dad, if this is the week Carson’s dad is taking him to Paris, who his teachers will be in seventh grade, but none of it works.
There’s another universe on that side of the paneling, close enough for him to smell the fideo they had for dinner being reheated in the microwave, the bubbling broth and noodles, the wafting cumin finding him, the ding when it’s ready. When Orly asked for another serving at dinner Nina told him there wasn’t any more, offered to make him a taco, with butter or refried beans, something to fill his belly. But that was just another lie because he knew there was more, knew why she was saying there wasn’t any left, which was the only reason he’d asked for another bowl, to make her have to choose between him and the other boy. She only makes fideo once a week and it’s his favorite of the foods she prepares for him. He’s her family, her only godson. The other boy isn’t even from here or supposed to be inside the house. Feed the tortilla with beans to him, not to her family.
Orly kicks the wall, pounds it with the outside of his fist, and waits to see if Nina responds, if one of the doors, the one directly to the kitchen or the one to the hall, opens. But nothing.
She thinks just because she made up the rules he has to stay in his room at night, in the house during the day, or maybe in the yard but only in the front and not anywhere near the pink house, which basically means not anywhere in the whole backyard. Nina and his dad think he couldn’t leave if he really wanted to, that he always has to do what they say because they’re the grown-ups and are always supposed to know the right thing for him to do. They think he would never open the front gate and just start walking. They think he’d be too scared and not street-smart because he hasn’t grown up here, hasn’t done the same things his dad did back when he was this age and younger.
He’s the only one with rules. Not her and not the boy. They’re the ones who need the rules. All he did was get up in the middle of the night that wasn’t really the middle of the night and only to get himself a glass of water that didn’t have anything floating around in it. For that he ended up with more rules—no going in the backyard, no staring out the window, no telling what he saw, no more getting up at night—when he should be making the rules for them.
No more lies. Because it’s not like he believed her when she said the boy is the son of a friend. Who sends their son to hide in a little pink house?
No more saying the boy will be leaving any day now. Which might be true or might be another lie to make it sound like hiding someone behind your house for another night or two in the middle of the summer isn’t such a big deal. Because that’s what this is, just somebody else lying to him. Somebody telling him where he has to go but not why. Somebody doing something he isn’t supposed to talk about. When none of it was anything he started or was looking for.
Eat in the pink house and only the pink house. If you don’t want anyone in the house to see the boy, then don’t let him come inside the house. She says he’s only staying for a few more days. But she won’t say how long he’s already been here, how long she’s been hiding him, how long she’s been lying about the whole thing. If he’s really about to leave, take the food to him so he can eat over there or stay with him while he eats so he’s not alone.
Don’t always be speaking in Spanish. Not because Orly doesn’t understand, because he does, most of it, enough of it, but it makes it that much harder to hear through the paneling what they’re saying, if they’re saying something about him, about how he’s too young to understand and that his easy life back home in Houston has nothing to do with what is happening here in this world, that soon enough he will be going home and put this out of his mind, that he’ll forget about seeing a boy standing in his godmother’s kitchen, washing dishes.
A little more than a month ago, before he knew what he was actually doing for the summer, he and Carson were in the backseat when his father put in his earbuds to take a call a from Nina. The radio was still on NPR, but Carson kept leaning forward to listen. Why’s he talking in Spanish? He’s speaking to his aunt, Orly told him, but left out the part about her being his godmother, the one Carson had thought was their maid. For the last twenty minutes they’d been stuck in traffic on the Southwest Freeway. They could hear the police sirens and ambulance but they were still too far away to see what the holdup was and how long it might last. Is she like in Mexico or something? Carson wanted to know. Guatemala? No, Orly answered, not exactly. What’s he saying? I don’t know. You don’t know or don’t want to say? Both. Which was sort of true because he couldn’t exactly hear over the radio and Carson’s questions, though less than a minute earlier he’d thought he heard his dad say something about wanting him, Orly, to have a real summer. Wait, seriously, Carson said, I thought all of you knew Spanish, like it was your native tongue or something. Not really, Orly replied. It wasn’t clear if
by “all of you” Carson meant “all your family” or if he meant everyone who happens to have a Spanish-sounding last name. Orly would’ve thought about it more, but he was still trying to figure out what sort of “real summer” his dad had in mind for him and how it involved his godmother. That, and how much longer he was going to be stuck in the backseat with Carson asking him questions.
He kicks the wall again and again until he feels the jolt rising from the ball of his foot. He wonders if Nina can hear him, if she’s ignoring him, if he should just go to sleep so he can wake up in the morning and see what’s on the other side of the gate.
15
Nina calls him, for the second time now, to come have his lunch. The chicken nuggets, tus favoritos, are getting cold. Orly didn’t want to go with her to run her errands, he wanted to keep reading his book on the bed. Bueno, she didn’t argue with him and left him in his room. She’s trying to make him happy, so he won’t be walking around so sad as if she took something from him. After her errands, she drove halfway across town to the Chick-fil-A because he doesn’t like the chicken they sell other places. And when she was back on the highway she remembered he had asked her for the special sauce and so there she went back again. The least he can do now is come to the table when she calls him. “Orly, mijito,” she says as she cracks open his door. “Ya, the lunch is ready.” It takes her a second to realize no one’s there. The bed is made, the comforter spread flat across the mattress like it hasn’t been used in days. His backpack is gone from its usual place next to the night table.
* * *
—
The bus drops him off in downtown Brownsville in front of what looked like a movie theater when they were a block away, the green signage and marquee extending over the sidewalk, but up close four of the panels on the marquee are either cracked, chipped, or have fallen off altogether and instead of a movie theater he finds a mini-mall called Mercado Juárez, with Cookie Monster, Elmo, and My Little Pony piñatas hanging in the window. He passes a jewelry store where a neon-yellow poster announces they have precios bajos y garantizados. He understands most of the signs and the cumbia pulsing out of one of the stores but not the norteño music booming from a passing truck. Between the shuttered storefronts there’s Casa Kevin and Tienda Del Dollar and Uno Plus and Minky and Para Telas and Los Chinitos and Lupita’s Perfumes & Wireless and Eva Shoes, in the old Kress store, where today the high heels are on sale, from $7.99 to $9.99.
He steps in and out of the stores to look at the caps and soccer jerseys, but not to buy because he only has nine dollars and change left in his pocket, having spent a dollar on water and then another dollar on the bus, a quarter on a transfer ticket, and then almost two dollars on a Fanta and a bag of Sabritas at Mercado Juárez. This was just after he heard his stomach growling and knew it was past lunchtime.
He’d thought about leaving a note but wasn’t sure what to write or if it mattered or why he had to explain himself to her. Let her figure it out. She didn’t explain herself to him. And anyway there wasn’t anything to explain since he hadn’t really planned anything out besides getting to the bus stop. He didn’t plan on boarding three different buses or sitting behind the driver or walking in and out of stores for no reason but to look around or even how all this wandering would lead to the very end of downtown and then to the bridge.
* * *
—
Nina checks in the carport and the backyard, even out by the canal behind the pink house, where she told him not to go. La Bronca follows her as far as the chain will allow and then crouches to look under the house and maybe catch a glimpse of Nina walking away. Standing at the edge of the canal, she calls out to him as loud as she can, the panic carrying her voice clear beyond the other side. Her mother thinks she heard him in the bathroom about an hour earlier. Rumalda remembers asking him if he had clothes for her to wash and he said no and then stayed in his room. Maybe he’s hiding? She works for another family and the little boy likes to play like that, making the poor mother look everywhere until she finds him under the bed or in the bathtub, behind the curtain. Nina can’t imagine her godson, already twelve, doing something so childish, but she checks under the bed and in the closet before heading outside again, this time to the front. She stands in the middle of the street as if expecting him to suddenly materialize in the waves of heat rising off the asphalt. Where could he be? What does he know that is close by? He would have to take this street to get out to the main road, and then what? At the far end of the street she finds la señora De la Garza sitting in her driveway, where like most days she is selling little girls’ dresses, each hanging from a clothesline she strung up from her mailbox to the driveway gate. She saw the boy walking this way, but he was too much in a hurry to even say good afternoon. One of the women working in the raspa trailer says a boy like that stopped to buy a bottled water and then got on the bus. But which bus? What number? Nina has trouble even asking, getting out the words she feels have lodged themselves in her throat. But those questions the girl can’t answer, nobody told her to be writing the numbers of every bus. All she knows is it was heading that way, rumbo al centro, toward downtown.
* * *
—
After passing the shuttered Payless Shoes shop on the corner, Orly crosses a mini plaza where two old men are smoking on the concrete benches. To cross the bridge on foot he first needs quarters for the set of turnstiles at the far end of the plaza, next to the kiosk where people get change. To the left of the kiosk one lane of traffic is inching toward the tollbooth, which leads to the bridge. Opposite the tollbooth are the northbound lanes and pedestrian walkway for those coming from Matamoros and approaching one of several stations manned by U.S. Customs officers, whose job it is to ask for proof of their nationality.
The uniformed woman behind the Plexiglas takes Orly’s crumpled dollar bill and gives him quarters. At the turnstile he has to wait behind a group of tourists, a pair of husbands and wives, somebody’s grandma and grandpa from Wisconsin, who are also walking across to Matamoros. The men are dressed in cargo shorts, matching red polo shirts, and white walking shoes fastened with Velcro straps. Their modest paunches appear more pronounced with their fanny packs tucked under their shirts. The wives are wearing blouses, loose-fitting jeans, lace-up sneakers, and sun hats. One of the old men, the jokester of the bunch, walks through the turnstile first, pretending he doesn’t hear his wife calling him to come back with her four quarters.
Orly pushes through the turnstile but worries that the guard’s going to run up and grab him by the collar, ask what he thinks he’s doing crossing into Mexico by himself, if his mother and father know where he is. While Orly was getting his quarters, the guard kept an eye on the five school-age boys who were passing through, just in case they tried to jump the turnstile. Now he’s more interested in chatting it up with the young mother putting her baby back in the stroller.
The plastic awning and chain-link fence span the seven hundred feet that separate one country from the other. This covering is the only thing shielding the people from the sun, though there’s still the heat radiating off the pavement beyond the safety rail. Traffic is heavier on the pedestrian walkway than it is in the driving lanes; most of those walking across are eager to get past the puttering tourists and the young boy trailing them. They have work and families and errands and clinics and pharmacies and orthodontists to get to and have no interest in looking at the lazy green river down below them. These are men and women, boys and girls, who cross back and forth every day. What do they care about the eighteen-foot-high wall and its rust-colored steel bars rising up from the levee and extending out from the bridge? It’ll be there when they come back tomorrow and if not it, then another one, higher and uglier. Who hasn’t seen the Border Patrol agents cruising back and forth along the levee in their SUVs, waiting for some pobre desperate enough to swim across in the middle of the day or later in the glare of the portable searchlights? Those cu
rious sights are for the tourists who come to see something different, something to photograph and later show their families and friends and tell them about how interesting it was to travel across the border into old Mexico.
* * *
—
Back at the house she dials the transit station, but the dispatcher tells her he needs more information before he starts calling all his drivers. The boy might have gotten off the bus anyway. If he bought a transfer, he could be anywhere. Besides, he isn’t the first twelve-year-old to ride the bus alone. Is he a runaway? Because runaways don’t usually take city buses. Maybe she needs to hang up and call the police. She does hang up, but only because the thought of his having run away has been lingering along the outskirts of her mind and she doesn’t need any help inviting it any closer.