Where We Come From Page 17

  The boy says he didn’t know where else to go, where it was safe. After he ran away from the police, it took two nights to find the house again. Now la señora is trying to help him find his father. She tells him that he should not lose faith. The other night she said he could stay as long as he needs to. Aquí tienes tu casa, she told him.

  It’s not the boy’s words but how fast he speaks that makes it difficult for Orly to understand everything he’s saying. This is how he speaks normally, but to Orly it sounds like someone is still chasing him and he’s running out of breath and time to say everything.

  “¿Pero cómo, la puerta?” Orly manages to ask, by which he means, “But what about the padlock on the door, bro? How do you get out of a house if it’s locked from the outside? Explain that one.”

  Fácil. La señora told him to keep the little house clean, that he could stay and she would feed him but she was not his maid. Especially the bathroom, to keep it clean and always flush the paper. She brought him trash bags, sprays for the kitchen and bathroom, paper towels and a broom. He used to clean the house for his mother after school and here he has nothing else to do. No homework, no soccer to play outside with friends. To make the work last, he cleans every corner of every room, the floors and the walls, the closet and the cabinets, el refri y la tina. Even the foil covering the windows he wipes it clean every morning. He pretends like the house is a hotel that needs to be spotless. One afternoon he was sweeping in the bedroom and saw a piece of plywood lying inside the closet. Already he had been here two weeks and seen it many times but not thought to move it. There was no lightbulb to see what was inside. But when he finally moved the board he found a hole in the floor. The opening was wide enough for a man to drop down under the house and from there get to the canal. He never saw them open it, but it must have been made by the ones who brought him here, the bald one and his partner, the one always laughing for no reason, for the two of them to escape if somebody came trying to knock down the front door. La señora is still mad about the doorknobs they took. He doesn’t think she would like knowing they also made a hole in her floor. Or that he used the hole for the first time today.

  * * *

  —

  Twenty minutes have gone by when they hear the driveway gate scrape against the concrete. No need to go to the window or wonder what comes next or tell each other they need to pretend this didn’t happen, that they never met without her here, they never talked. The boy is out the door and across the yard, veering wide from the sleeping dog, his bare feet barely touching the grass.

  21

  From the back gate, Nina heads straight to the little pink house. This is the longest the boy has been locked inside without her seeing him or letting him out to get fresh air, and though he has everything he needs, she hates having to lock him up. She has to keep reminding herself she is trying to help him, keep him safe. She fiddles with her keys before she can get the right one into the padlock.

  Nina is turning the knob when he cracks open the door and waves to her. In the other house people hug, here they wave.

  “Por fin,” she says, her way of acknowledging how long it took her to return. He nods to let her know he understands she was busy.

  He only has on a pair of shorts. His soccer shirt, smeared with dirt from his scurrying under the house, is in a tight ball next to the dresser in the other room. He crosses his arms across his bony chest. After weeks inside, the coppery shade of his face and arms has dulled to the color of wet sand.

  “I was changing my clothes when I heard the door.”

  “So late in the day?”

  “I took a shower, so I wouldn’t have to do it later.”

  “Without washing your hair?”

  “I washed it last night.”

  She stays looking at him. Something about the way he has a quick answer for every question makes her think there is more he is not telling her.

  He finishes putting on the T-shirt he has in his hand. The crumpled shirt on the floor is one of the three Nina bought him when she got tired of seeing him in the same soiled blue jeans and gray T-shirt. She also bought him a pair of jeans, some underwear, and socks. He had nothing when he arrived, what was she supposed to do? She bought the small television to keep him entertained during those long stretches when he’s alone. Other than to feed the crossers she hadn’t spent any of the money El Kobe gave her. If she could get rid of it, at least use it for something good, then maybe her first mistake wasn’t as big a mistake.

  “A man came and was looking in the windows.”

  “My brother.”

  “He had an angry face.”

  “He saw you?”

  “No, I got down, on the floor, before he came and began knocking to the window.”

  “He thinks I am hiding something from him.”

  “He knows?”

  “Only what I tell him, what I think he needs to know.”

  “And if he comes again?”

  “Maybe we find your father before then.”

  “And if not?” he asks, but gets no response.

  She checks the seal on the aluminum foil. The tape along the edge of the front window is curling back on itself where the boy must have been looking outside. Later she’ll bring more tape to make sure the foil stays in place.

  The fan blows a gust of muggy air in one direction and then the other. He uses the large pedestal fan during the day, dragging it with him room to room. After dark, when there are unlikely to be any visitors next door, he has permission to turn on the air conditioner.

  “Your mother, her side is feeling better?” he asks. “She will be coming home?”

  “Not until she gets better. The doctor says maybe two or three weeks,” Nina tells him. “And how did you know it was her side?”

  “Her side?”

  “My mother’s side, how did you know it was her hip?”

  “You told me through the door, before you left to the hospital.”

  “I told you she had fallen, but not on her side.”

  “My grandmother, when she fell it was to her right side.”

  He’s never mentioned a grandmother. She stares at him to see if he looks away the same as her godson does when she catches him saying something more false than true. The small television is playing in the other room. Whatever he has on sounds dramatic and maybe violent. She called for them to connect the cable so he wouldn’t be so bored. More than a hundred channels to choose from, lots of them in Spanish, and he likes to watch the ones about the dead coming back to life and chasing living people. Things that would keep her up at night.

  She opens the refrigerator.

  “You didn’t eat the rest of the arroz con pollo from yesterday?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Already you need more milk,” she says. “The cereal is for the breakfast, not for whenever.”

  He nods, looks down at the floor.

  “Later, after I rest, I will make the dinner and bring you a plate.”

  She opens the front door and he squints in the sunlight. With his free hand he reaches down to cover a mud stain on his shorts.

  “Put the dirty clothes in a bag and when I come back I will take them to wash,” she says. “And from now on you need to eat over your plate. That way your clothes don’t get so dirty.”

  * * *

  —

  After she’s taken a nap and showered she makes tuna patties for dinner, one of Orly’s favorites. She serves him three patties, one for herself, and wraps the last three in foil to keep them warm and later take to the other boy. Same meal, the only difference being where they eat and that Orly puts ketchup on his patties and the other boy takes his with mayonnaise.

  Orly has been quiet since she came home. He asked about her mother and for how long she would be staying in the hospital and later the rehab center, but after that he
had little to say. Nothing about going again to buy raspas like she had said they would last night before bed. He eats with his head down, using his fork to make swirly patterns in the ketchup.

  “Do you want more?” she asks when he finishes his three patties before she’s halfway through hers.

  “I thought you only made enough for one serving?”

  “I made extra.” She walks to the counter to show him.

  “Aren’t you saving those?”

  She pretends not to hear him and goes about rinsing a frying pan, but afterward says, “For him I can make something else, warm up the picadillo from the other day.”

  “Daniel,” he says.

  “Yes, for him,” she says. “Daniel,” only hers is in Spanish, as she said the night she came to Orly’s room to explain to him who the boy was.

  “That’s okay,” he says and takes his plate to the sink. “I’m not that hungry.”

  “Are you sure? I have to be there for when my mother wakes up, so she isn’t confused. It might be late before I get back.”

  “If I get hungry I can have some cereal.”

  “For dinner?”

  “For a snack.”

  “If I let you that’s all you would eat, snacks.”

  She runs water over the ketchup he left on his plate, watches the red smear wind its way down the drain. The rest she leaves for later. She has to hurry if she’s going to be there when they come around with her mother’s tray of food.

  “How come he eats alone?”

  “Who eats alone, mijito?”

  “Daniel,” he says, trying to say it the same way she does, the el sound humming against the back of his front teeth. “In the other house, he eats alone every night.”

  She dries her hands and looks at him. “There are worse things than being alone. Nobody dies from being alone.”

  She grabs a raspberry popsicle from the freezer, removes the wrapper, and sets it on a small plate for him.

  “And not every night,” she says, walking into the next room. “Today because I have to leave to the hospital. When things are back to normal, then he can eat here again.”

  “But only late at night, after we’ve already eaten and I go to bed.”

  She walks back into the kitchen carrying her purse and with the other hand holding one of her mother’s quilts to take to the hospital.

  “Ya, I gave to you the reasons. Over there is where he lives, over here is where we live,” she says. “So you are not part of it and know nothing of what happens.”

  “How long does he have to be there?”

  “Until we find his father. Every night I try the numbers he gives me to call.”

  “What if you don’t find him?”

  “Then maybe he stays. It would still be better, safer, than the place he came from. He could go to school here, make new friends.”

  She pauses, waiting for him to react in some way. He looks confused and she doesn’t know why she had to go open her mouth.

  “If you want, we can do a search on my iPad and try to find his dad. It’s easy,” he says, his face more alive now. “Just give me his last name and the city and I can see if anyone with that name comes up. We could maybe even find him or another relative on Facebook. All you need to do is give me a name.” Now she’s the one confused, something that happens anytime he wants to show her something on his computer, a world he’s built, one of his class projects, or just a funny pet video he found online. She smiles and tells him how nice it all looks or how funny animals can be, but on the inside, a part of her brain dims so she doesn’t have to be reminded of the distance between her world and his.

  “I told you that I didn’t want you to be involved. Nobody needs your help. Your computer cannot control everything in the world, it cannot make time go back so things turn out a different way. He ended up here for a reason. Whatever happens, how long he stays or where he goes, you don’t know any of it. You never saw him, remember?”

  “But how is it a secret if I already know? How can I know and not know at the same time?”

  “Because you don’t tell anybody, and you and me stop talking about it and you do what I tell you and stay out of the backyard, asina, that’s how it stays a secret.” She grabs the plate with the extra tuna patties to take to the other boy.

  “Even if we never talk about it again, he’s still in there alone most of the day.”

  “And you, why do you care so much if a stranger is alone, a boy you never met, from somewhere you will never go?” she says. “That’s not for you to worry about. You can feel sorry for him, but his problems are not your problems.”

  “I thought Tío Beto was going to find a way to get inside. He was looking in all the windows.”

  “You let me worry about him.”

  “But it’s just weird, someone locked up and eating alone.”

  She pulls out a chair and sits close enough to touch him.

  “Don’t be saying weird this and weird that. You saw him one time and only a little bit until he left again. Who is he?”

  “What do you mean?”

  He knows she wants an answer but he doesn’t altogether understand the question.

  “What is he to you? Is he your brother? Is he your primo or your tío? What is he to you that you care so much?”

  He looks shaken, like she might have slapped him without raising a hand. “Nothing.”

  She leans back in her chair, tilts her head to make eye contact. She wants him to think about his answer.

  “Are you sure?”

  He looks up at her and nods.

  “Tell me again.”

  “What?”

  “What you just said, say it again. What he is to you.”

  “He’s nothing to me.”

  “Nothing,” she says. “Then you can keep a secret about nothing.”

  IV

  Chivito

  22

  Later that night, even in bed with the air conditioner turned to the number 4 setting, Daniel can hear when she returns from the hospital, the gate scraping the concrete of the driveway, the hiss and rattle of the motor turning off, the second gate opening and closing, the wooden steps creaking, her tugging on the padlock one last time.

  He wishes he had seen the rest of the blue house. She must have a much larger television than the one he uses. Since he arrived, he has been over many times but only with permission to be in the back of the house because her mother is not supposed to see him. At first it didn’t make sense why he would have to hide from la señora’s mother, but that was before her brother tried to look in the windows.

  One night, when she brought him to the other house for his dinner, the old woman woke up and then he had to remain still for several minutes, barely breathing, so she wouldn’t hear him. It was almost as bad as when they crossed him to this side and the driver made him get inside the trunk of a car with two men, one a few years younger than his father and the other one much older. There he didn’t want to breathe because he could smell some of the smoke from the exhaust, and moving was impossible with the three of them crammed up against the spare tire. He barely saw their faces when they were crossing and then it was so dark inside he could only see them when the brake lights showed the red glow of their faces. They must have been in the car for only five minutes when one of the two men let out a muffled fart, which smelled worse than the car fumes, and less than a minute later he released a second one, but again without saying anything. “No mames, güey,” said the younger one, and then he knew it had been the older one.

  He also wants to look at the other boy’s phone and tablet that are supposed to be like computers. He has seen people with the phones on the streets and on television but never held one himself. La señora told him her godson spends too much time playing games on the tablet, hours and hours, but he knows that sometim
es la señora likes to exaggerate. The other night she told him there could be more than a thousand men in Chicago with his father’s same name. She says these things so he’ll have patience and won’t be disappointed every time they sit down to call and don’t locate his father. But by now he knows everything takes time and nothing happens from one day to the next.

  When his father left Veracruz it was only supposed to be until he could send for him and Gaby, his baby sister, and his mother. But a few months turned into three years and by then his parents were barely speaking and his father only wanted to bring his boy to live with him in Chicago. His mother said no, that she wanted him to stay with her. His father said she was just doing it because she was mad. She said it didn’t matter why she was doing it, she wasn’t letting a ten-year-old boy travel all the way to Chicago by himself. It didn’t matter how many others his age and younger were traveling alone from as far as Honduras and El Salvador. ¡Qué no! she told him. This way, month after month, year after year. ¡Qué no! Until last Christmas his father came down to bring him back himself, but still his mother said no, that thirteen was still a boy and not old enough to be crossing, even with him, and anyway, his home was here with his mother. Because he was sending her money didn’t give him the right to take her son. She even sent him and Gaby to stay with her parents, out in the country, so his father wouldn’t be tempted to run off with either one of them. Daniel was allowed to see his father the last day before he had to leave again, but only in front of the house with a couple of his tíos nearby, watching them from the wooden gate. It was there that his father gave him the black backpack he had bought him for the journey but that he could now use for the rest of the school year. His father placed his hands on Daniel’s shoulders, whispering most of what else he had to say to him so los tíos wouldn’t hear. There was something hidden inside the backpack, another Christmas present. He wanted to open it, but his father made him promise to wait until he was home and alone. It was a cell phone, prepaid and already programmed with his father’s number on the speed dial. The only thing was, he couldn’t let anyone else see the phone, not even his little sister, or his mother might take it from him.