Where We Come From Page 19
“Esto también es Veracruz,” Daniel says. “Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz.”
And then Orly understands that Veracruz is the name of both a city and a state, and there’s probably a lot more that Mr. Domínguez hasn’t told them yet.
“Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz.”
Orly wants to repeat the name of Daniel’s city back to him—try anyway—but he’s afraid of mangling the word and sounding dumb, so instead he just nods. For a second Orly wonders if he should show him Houston, but he feels awkward, maybe even a little embarrassed, though he knows it’s not his fault that the streets are usually clean and they have so many malls and museums, and when the cops show up it’s usually only to direct traffic after the Thanksgiving parade or in Montrose or because it’s rodeo season. He was just born there. It wasn’t anything he chose.
But now Nina’s done with the dishes and it’s time for them to make some phone calls. Daniel goes to the kitchen cart where she keeps the microwave and from the top drawer pulls out the spiral notebook with the log of numbers they’ve already called. He has a new number he wants her to try tonight, just to see.
Orly sits next to his godmother, but she tells him she needs more room and waits until he scoots over to the end of the table before she starts. She and Daniel sit across from each other as he reads the first number to her and she dials. Daniel looks at her and she gazes at the ceiling, waiting for it to ring.
“Ocupado,” she says and shakes her head.
“Beezy.”
“Busy.”
“Beezy.”
“Busy.”
“Beezy.”
She raises her hand for him to stop. “Busy.”
She writes the word out phonetically, then scratches this out and writes it again, this time in Spanish, and points with the pen to the second syllable.
“Busy.”
“Busy,” he repeats. “Busy phone.”
“Eso.”
He jots down “busy” next to the number and gives her another to dial. She barely raises the phone when she hears it ring once and gently hangs up but still with the receiver to her ear.
“No contestan,” she says after about a minute
“Not home,” Daniel says.
“Nobody home,” she says back to him, worried that Orly might have seen her click the receiver too soon.
“Mijito, isn’t it time for your bath?”
“I took a shower this morning.”
“Bueno, entonces go brush your teeth.”
“Already?”
“Look at the hour.”
When Orly leaves, she asks Daniel for the next number, and it goes on like this for another twenty minutes. Busy, no answer, or no one by the name of Daniel Mendoza here. Toward the end they do reach someone with a similar name, but this one goes by Daniel Alberto Mendoza and he’s only six years old and his mother wants to know why this woman is asking so many questions about him.
Then he remembers his father used to work part-time in a Chinese restaurant, washing dishes, but he never told him the name of the place and Daniel doesn’t know if he still works there. Maybe they could call all of the Chinese restaurants around Chicago and ask for him. But she raises her hands and acts as though he’s trying to hand her a stack of phone books with numbers to call. He obviously doesn’t know how many chinos there are in the big cities and by extension how many restaurants for the people who like to eat their food.
“Muchísimos.”
“Too many peoples.”
She nods to this and he gives her the next number on the list. She smiles at him because smiling is better than letting him know that with every day that passes they seem further away from finding his father and a little closer to someone finding out she’s hiding a young boy inside the little house.
24
The next day, Orly waits until she’s down the street and past the car wash before setting the timer on his iPad for ten minutes, which he figures should be enough time to make sure she didn’t forget something and decide to suddenly come back. Nina was planning to leave earlier for the hospital, but she couldn’t find one of her mother’s knit caps and before she knew it, it was close to noontime. She made him an early lunch and left the house while he was still eating his quesadillas.
He answers a few e-mails but keeps his replies vague about what he does during the day at Nina’s house and instead talks more about what he wants to do when he’s back in Houston. Nothing about Daniel hiding in the house behind him, locked inside all day with the windows covered in aluminum foil, or all the other people who used to be in there with him or how he slipped away from the motel and the cops, and nothing about how he found a way to get out of the house, which is the detail he most wants to tell his brother about but he can’t really talk about it without saying the rest. A hole in the floor, which he likes to think of as more of a trapdoor, is the sort of thing you only see in movies. None of his friends’ houses have trapdoors, not that he knows of, anyway. It’s not one of those details people like to point out when showing off their houses. Here’s the media room, here’s the library, here’s the wine cellar, and oh, by the way, should you need it, here’s the trapdoor. Our smugglers are away this weekend, so feel free to come and go as you like.
Using the trapdoor is all he wants to do today. He thought he had done something different and exciting when he crossed the bridge, especially when he couldn’t cross back, but when Daniel told him how he got here, Orly’s life felt boring all over again. He’s still a little freaked out about what might be lurking underneath the pink house—and “lurking” really is the only way to describe it. The crawl space is less than two feet high and looks murkier around each foundation block. Cobwebs hanging from the crossbeams, rags that look like they were left behind by the last person who crawled under there and was never seen again, a den where a tlacuache could be waiting for him. It’s almost enough to make him stay inside and avoid it altogether.
* * *
—
He walks out the front door and then to the left side of the blue house, far enough so La Bronca won’t care that he’s in the backyard, and then follows the chain-link fence until he reaches the back side of the pink house. The place with the most clearance to get under the house is the same spot where he pulled out the boards that he smashed and tossed into the canal. He taps on his flashlight app and holds the face of the iPhone flat at the opening and the beam of light shines under the house practically through to the other end, where between the various blocks, he can make out the edge of the dog’s rump.
The problem is there’s no way for Orly to crawl on all fours, hold the phone upright to guide him, and at the same time avoid whatever might be down there, around this or that block, until he finds the trapdoor. What he needs is a headlamp, which, unless he tapes the iPhone to his forehead, there is no app for.
Daniel said the opening in the floor was on this side of the house, and so Orly drops onto his back and scoots forward until the top half of his body is under the house and he can shine the light on the underside, but he sees nothing that looks like an opening, just boards that make up the floor and other boards that hold up the floor and connect to the foundation blocks. For a second he imagines what would happen if he bumped one of the blocks and this made the house squash him flat and how it’d take them forever to raise the house again and find what was left of him. Then he feels a spider or a caterpillar, something hairy, crawling on his neck and he swats it away and scrambles in the opposite direction as fast as he can, which on his back is actually much harder and slower to do than going the other way.
Once he’s inside the other house, he checks in the bathroom mirror to see if whatever it was crawling on him left a mark, but his skin is clear except for some dirt on his neck. Maybe he imagined it. Maybe he just needs to wait until Daniel comes out and can show him how to get to the trapdoor.
Flat on his belly and pulling himself forward on his elbows and knees, Orly holds the iPhone in his mouth, folding his lips over his teeth so he isn’t biting the screen or leaving spit on it. The house is low enough that he has to crawl on his stomach, keeping his head low so he isn’t bumping it on the crossbeams. The light jiggles across the boards, never settling on any one spot, but he stops every foot or so to take the phone out of his mouth and shine it directly overhead, runs his hands over the boards, knocks to feel if there is a difference. On the opposite side from where he entered, La Bronca growls at the beam of light flitting about her domain. The chain keeps her from getting around the foundation block and doing anything more than poke her snout into the dark belly of the house. Once Orly is in a ways, the underside doesn’t seem as dark as it did when he was thinking about all the reasons this was a bad idea. He knocks on the next board and suddenly the floor above his head creaks. He knocks again, harder, and this time hears a knock come from above the floor. He crawls another foot and knocks again, and then a second later a shallow light filters down, followed by Daniel’s face hanging upside down through the trapdoor.
Orly isn’t sure what he was expecting once he made it inside—he only had the trapdoor on his mind. But the space is both larger and smaller than he imagined. Larger because there’s no furniture in the bedroom except a mattress on the floor and a small sofa in the living room. And smaller—tiny—when he imagines it crammed with people.
Daniel shows him the TV and tells him it has one hundred and thirty channels, he counted them, even shows him a few to prove it. He offers him some cold water from the pitcher in the refrigerator, but Orly tells him no, gracias. He pulls out his iPhone, but his inbox is empty and his battery has less than ten percent. He isn’t interested in his e-mails; he just doesn’t know what else to do. If they’re not watching TV or drinking water from the pitcher there’s not much to say, not much to ask about, not much of anything to do but stand around a dim room with someone he barely knows. Awkward moment, Orly thinks, which Daniel is probably also thinking, only in Spanish. But then a minute later Daniel says they should go outside, and he leads the way.
Once they get into the yard, they don’t have a clue what to do now, either. All they know is they have two or three hours to themselves, without any grown-ups watching over them.
Orly grabs the soccer ball off the back steps, but Daniel spends the first few minutes watching the clouds, feeling the pulse of the sun on his face. He promises Orly they can do whatever he wants, but for now he just wants to be outside after being shut in all night and most of the morning. Except for the other day, when he came to the back door, this is the first time he has been out during the day.
“No hay felicidad completa,” Daniel says, which is something la señora is always saying. That there is no complete happiness, that with each bit of happiness comes some sorrow. Last night she said it after mentioning how it was nice they could all eat together, but it was happening only because her mother had hurt herself and gone to the hospital. After he ran from the motel, he slept one night in the back of an old truck, lying flat under a tarp so no one would see him, and the second night in a ditch, where he worried that a snake or other animal might get him. All he wanted was to be inside somewhere, quiet and safe, and now that’s all he has, being inside, quiet and safe, all day and all night, nothing more.
“Vivo en una jaula rosada,” he says. He lives in a pink cage.
Orly’s not sure what he’s supposed to say to this, if there’s even anything to say, but then a few seconds later Daniel smiles his toothy grin and pops the soccer ball out of Orly’s hands and once it’s on the ground he dribbles it, barefoot, with a series of fleet kicks to the middle of the yard, blocking his defender from taking it back. They take turns trying to score on each other, a pair of trash cans standing in as goalposts, the broad side of the blue house as the backstop.
The score is only 4–2 in Daniel’s favor, but each time he scores he looks up to the sky and drops to his knees, his arms spread wide like he just made the winning goal in the World Cup. Then he stands up and bows to the imaginary crowd in each direction. So annoying.
Orly says he needs water, so they go inside the blue house. He serves them each a cup from the dispenser. He downs his in two gulps and serves himself another. Daniel takes a sip and stops to look at the water, which tastes nothing like what comes from the tap in the other house.
“Qué padre,” he says and sniffs the water before taking another sip.
“La agua es fresca,” Orly tells him.
Daniel nods. It’s actually supposed to be “el agua,” even with the feminine noun, but he lets it slide. He gets what Orly was trying to say.
* * *
—
After they finish off the leftover fideo, Orly says he wants to show Daniel something. Then he pulls out the family album and they sit on the sofa as he turns the pages. Instead of giving Daniel a long, involved story for each image, Orly keeps it simple, telling him who’s a tía, who’s an abuela, who’s a prima, and so on, even if some he doesn’t remember exactly how they’re related. When Orly turns to his parents’ wedding, Daniel points to the photo.
“Tu mamá,” he says, and now it’s clear that Nina showed him the album.
Orly nods.
“Qué triste,” Daniel says.
It is sad, Orly thinks, more than sad and more than he has words to explain, and even if he did have the words he probably wouldn’t be able to say them all without losing it, crying like some baby right in front of him. So he leaves it at “triste.”
Just then his phone dings and it’s a text and an attached pic of Carson at the Eiffel Tower.
[Guess where I’m@?]
“¿Un mensaje?” Daniel asks, but Orly says it’s nada and swipes the screen to clear it.
He’s putting the album back in the closet when he spots the corner of an oversized envelope sticking out from under two large quilts. It’s supposed to be stowed away, hidden far back where no one will find it, or if they do, not care what’s inside. But that plan didn’t take into account two young boys with nothing but time on their hands. The envelope is manila, with the address lines left blank and the inside bubble-wrapped to protect the images.
These are all from long before he was born and she became his Nina. Younger than she is in the few photos of her in the other album, a lot younger even than his mom or any of her bridesmaids. Her hair is dark, long, and straight, past the middle of her back, and in one of the photos she’s smiling like he’s never seen her smile. So much so that he finds himself smiling at the photo, the same way he can’t help but yawn when he sees someone else yawn. Daniel is smiling too. “Bonita,” he says. “Muy bonita,” Orly agrees. Here she’s at homecoming, a sash across her chest, her date in his football uniform, one hand holding his helmet, the other wrapped around her waist.
“¿El novio?”
Orly shrugs. It’s hard to imagine his godmother calling anyone her boyfriend. Over here she’s sitting at the edge of the pool wearing a black one-piece bathing suit, laughing and gesturing at whoever’s holding the camera to take the picture already. There she is riding on a float with her hair in a bun and wearing an embroidered dress, waving to the little boys and girls along the parade route. Here she’s with two teenage girls washing a car in someone’s driveway, jeans rolled up over meaty
calves, shirttails knotted at the midriff, one of the girls spraying the others with a bouquet of water. On the opposite page she’s in a graduation gown with three of her friends. And in another one she’s in front of a water fountain next to the same boy from the homecoming photo, only now a little older and in a sailor’s uniform. And then it ends. Not at the end of the album but a full six pages early, it just drops off. Thirty or forty photos in all, most in black and white, with only the last few images in color before the pages go blank. Like they ran out of film or she was called away before there was time for the rest of her life to happen.
* * *
—
They still have most of the afternoon left. Orly says they should go somewhere.
“Vamos.” He motions toward the driveway.
“¿Adónde?” Daniel says, but without moving.
“Para la raspas!” He has enough money for both of them. The little trailer is around the corner, just a little ways from the car wash. They can walk there in no time. “Cinco minutos.” He points in the general direction, makes his middle and forefinger into little walking legs to show him how easy.
“¿Tu madrina?”
“A las cinco,” Orly says and checks his phone. They have at least an hour until she comes home. He moves toward the gate.