Where We Come From Read online

  Orly remembers seeing Nina maybe once or twice a year, not including the first year when she drove up a couple of weeks after he was born and then a few months later for his baptism, which he doesn’t count because he was still in diapers and knows it happened only because there are pictures to prove it and a cross she gave him hanging over his bedroom door.

  When Nina comes to visit his family in Houston, she mainly sits on the couch and asks him about his school day or his piano lesson or tennis practice and each time he says it went “okay” and then not much else, because, really, what’s there to say? Ms. Engleton wants him to work on a new song for the holiday concert? Kevin called Truman a bitch, like a million times, and Truman finally called him one back, but Mr. Domínguez only heard Truman say it, so he’s the one that got sent to the principal’s office? Coach wants him to switch from a one-handed backhand and go with a two-handed backhand? Zack, the new kid, puked on the field trip before they got to the museum, and then, even if he was better and all, nobody wanted to sit by him since he might do it again on the way back?

  Because Nina hates driving in Houston, his father always drops her off and picks her up outside the same door at Macy’s. After that, she waits around the house for the boys to get home. She was visiting a couple of years ago when Carson called the house and left a message for Orly to call him back, which she relayed to him when they were out at dinner.

  “That took long enough,” Carson said when Orly called him back later that night. “I thought we were going to talk about our booth at Culture Fest.”

  “I had to go out to eat with my family.”

  “Whatever, dude. I was just worried your maid had totally forgotten to give you the message. She said she would write it down, but I could hear the TV going, so who knows if she was even paying attention.”

  Before then, Orly hadn’t thought their real maid, Maribel, who was more like a nanny, sounded anything like his godmother. Sure, Nina had a little bit of an accent, but that didn’t mean she spoke like a maid. And besides, a lot of people had accents but still spoke perfect English. Maybe he never paid attention to Maribel’s accent because she had been with them so long and they considered her part of the family, enough so that they didn’t have to say hi or bye when they arrived or left the house because she was always there, like Pepe, who did actually require you to stop and pet him or he wouldn’t stop with his yapping. Then again, maybe Orly hadn’t compared his godmother’s accent to his nanny’s because Nina and Maribel only ever spoke in Spanish to each other.

  Your maid? He didn’t know what to say back in the moment or the moment after the moment days and weeks later. Was there even something to say? He let the comment slide, like he did with most things Carson said about other people, which weren’t exactly slurs but weren’t exactly not slurs either and floated somewhere in between irreverent and offensive, depending on how closely you were willing to listen and then, if you did happen to say something, how willing you were to listen to Carson ask why you had to be so sensitive, so PC. Either way, from then on, Orly told him and the rest of his friends if they wanted to talk to him it was better to text or just call his cell phone.

  * * *

  —

  “Nina” looks like “niña,” but it’s a different word, sounds different, too. The second way is how you say “little girl” in Spanish, which his godmother is definitely not and wouldn’t like being called. Orly knows this without her saying so or making any rules to remind him. In world history class, Mr. Domínguez told them that La Niña was the name of one of the three ships Columbus used when he set out for the East Indies, or what he assumed was going to be the East Indies but later was known as the New World—at least that’s what it was to the great explorer and everyone back home. Mr. Domínguez, who sometimes adds stuff that isn’t in the book, also said La Niña was the ship Columbus used when he sailed back to Spain to show Queen Isabella some of the “Indians” he had found on his voyage. That’s how he said it, with his fingers curled in the air like quotation marks, the way he does when somebody in the back of the room might not get the joke.

  When Orly was in third grade he sat next to a girl named Nina, but she was named after her grandmother who had grown up on an apple farm in Minnesota and now lived in a nursing home and didn’t remember she had a granddaughter, so in a way each of them was the only Nina in the family. Her mother sometimes came on field trips and they had the same platinum blond hair and probably her grandmother did too, since she was her mom’s mom and the girl was named after her, and it’d be weird if she didn’t look something like her granddaughter. Back when she still had a clear mind, the grandmother had given Nina a gold charm bracelet that she wore every day to school and refused to take off, even during P.E. or the end-of-the-school-year bouncy house party, which is where one of the charms came undone, either on one of the inflatable slides or in the foam pit, and she lost the first N.

  The only other Nina he knew of was a singer his mom used to listen to at night. One night, back when he was still in fourth grade and couldn’t sleep, he stretched out on the carpet outside his room and watched her from between the stair posts. His dad was out of town for work and she wasn’t doing anything but looking out the window at the patio light lapping off the pool. She looked sad, the way she did when she told the boys she needed to go lie down and then closed the door to the bedroom for most of the afternoon. She was sitting at the far edge of the sofa and had the music turned down low, playing as softly as the lullabies she used to sing to him every night at bedtime and sometimes still did, even if he was older now and knew this was kind of babyish. After she sang the song he would keep humming the melody under the covers long after she kissed him on the cheek and said her last good night. The recessed lights were on their lowest setting and Pepe, who wasn’t supposed to be on the furniture but refused to sleep in his kennel in the mudroom or on the pillow by the picture window in the sunroom, was on the ottoman, curled into a tiny ball next to her feet. She liked to say Chihuahuas were very particular about what they wanted and weren’t shy about letting you know it. She had taken a quick shower and changed out of the T-shirt and black leggings she was wearing when she picked him up from school, half an hour after all the other after-care kids had already gone home and the teacher had started calling her cell phone, which she didn’t answer until she was leaving her Pilates class.

  Now his mom was wearing lounge pants and a T-shirt from their trip to Colorado. She was leaning back on the sofa, holding a glass of white wine from the bottle she’d opened after dinner. She sipped from the glass like she was trying to make it last the whole night. Sometimes she would swirl it around and notice there was hardly any left and then go to the kitchen to get more. Each time she came back she had to readjust herself and Pepe in their original positions, then place the glass on the end table so he didn’t knock it over with his tail. It was sort of boring, just watching someone else who looked bored. More than an hour had gone by, and he wondered if she would be rushing them in the morning. Sometimes if they were running late and missed the car line drop-off she had to walk him to his classroom. He wanted to go back to his bedroom to check the time, but he was afraid Pepe would hear him and start barking. After a while he realized that all the songs sounded familiar, because the music on her iPhone was on repeat. He didn’t know what he was expecting to see her do, but he kept watching, thinking something was about to happen in the next moment, maybe before the song ended. But the only thing that happened was he dozed off and when he opened his eyes a little later she was gone except for the wineglass with her lipstick mark on it. He could still hear the music playing softly in the background, but he couldn’t tell if it was real or just inside his head.

  * * *

  —

  Later, after his parents announced they were separating, Orly thought his mom might change her mind and not move out. Sometimes she said one thing and the next day changed her mind
. She did it at least twice when they were all planning to drive to Brownsville to visit family and then that morning she said something had come up with a case at work, though when the boys and their dad were pulling out of the driveway it didn’t look like she was headed to the office that day.

  At their first parent check-in after the news, Dr. Nancy told his mom that he was upset about the impending separation, obviously, but that it was better to wait until he was ready to talk more about it at home, since pressuring him to open up might just cause him to shut down and make things worse. Which was true, because then he wouldn’t be able to tell his parents or anyone else how part of him felt sad because things were changing even while he was doing everything he could so they wouldn’t change. His thoughts were jumbled up inside him in a way that he couldn’t figure out how to say what he was feeling or if he was feeling anything other than crushed. He wouldn’t be the first of his friends whose mom and dad didn’t live together, but he wasn’t sure if this was good or bad or if it just made him like a lot of other kids.

  Orly hadn’t wanted to go to Dr. Nancy’s office and sit on the floor to talk or draw or play games or whatever they did for the fifty minutes he was there every week, but he did it anyway because his mom wanted him to and he thought it might make her happier and if he could make her happier it’d be easier for her to change her mind about moving. Maybe if he and Alex didn’t fight as much or if he did his chores without her asking so many times or if he wasn’t always losing his coat or water bottle. He wondered if it was his fault they were separating and probably divorcing—he hadn’t heard of anyone separating and then not divorcing. Dr. Nancy explained to him that his parents loved him and his older brother, but they also had their own relationship, one they’d had before he and Alex were born, just like he had his own relationships with his school friends, which he understood on some level, though until recently he hadn’t had a reason to really think about what his parents felt when they were away, with just each other or with other people.

  * * *

  —

  Alex had a different reaction to his parents separating, or taking a “time-out,” as their dad called it. Two nights after they broke the news to him and Orly, their mom caught Alex trying to climb out his window and told him he didn’t have permission to be climbing onto the roof, even if it was only to go out to the tree house. So later that same night he deactivated the security system and set the alarm on his phone with enough time to be back inside the next morning before his mom started calling him for breakfast.

  Orly knew he was sneaking out because he could hear his brother’s moccasins padding around on the part of the roof that connected their rooms to the pergola Alex used to climb down. Before the news of his parents separating and his mom moving out, Orly would have definitely told on him; now it felt like saying anything was only going to make things worse. Alex wasn’t hurting anyone by sneaking out, he wasn’t drinking or smoking in the tree house, not that Orly knew of, so why say anything? Their parents might have been none the wiser about the nightly escapades if one night Alex hadn’t found it reasonable to take a dump on the roof, all of which rolled down into the rain gutter, and because of the lack of rain it stayed stuck there, nestled between a thatch of pine leaves and cones, where Carlos discovered it a few days later when he was clearing leaves off the roof with his blower.

  “Sorry,” Alex said, dragging out the word like he couldn’t understand why his dad was making such big deal out of the whole thing. “It was an accident. Can we just stop talking about it now? You’re embarrassing me.”

  “I’m embarrassing you? And what do you think I was when Carlos told me he had something to show me but wouldn’t say what it was and so I had to climb the ladder to see it for myself? We can stop talking when you tell me how that was an accident.”

  “Why do you even make him clean the roof? You have the poor guy risking his life up there. Like anyone walking by really cares if there’s leaves on the roof.”

  “We care, and we ask Carlos to tidy up because we want our home to look nice. Anyway, I’m not the one who needs to be explaining things.”

  “That’s only because Mom doesn’t want anyone to see you mowing the grass after that woman pulled over to ask how much you charged.”

  “She stopped to ask for directions. And don’t worry about what your mom thinks and doesn’t think.”

  It was midmorning on a Sunday, and Alex and his father were standing outside, near the pergola but still far enough away from the curious flies hovering near the rain gutter. Orly was across the yard, lying flat on the trampoline, staring up at the hazy sky through the pine trees. He could hear bits and pieces of what they were saying, mainly when his dad raised his voice, and he wondered if he should have threatened to tell their parents, if that wouldn’t have stopped Alex from sneaking out, but then a second later remembered his brother never paid attention to him anyway.

  Carlos was back on the ground plucking leaves off the mulch since he couldn’t restart his blower until the man had time to speak to his son, help him recognize right from wrong, though it didn’t seem like a father would need to explain that making cacas on the roof was no good. He couldn’t say now why he’d told the man. What child hasn’t caused extra work? There was the morning he took Carlitos, only ten at the time, to help him around the ranch he worked at just outside of Téguz. They were about to feed the horse when the boy suddenly poured the oats into the basin where the hay was supposed to go, where he’d been shown over and over. Without thinking, Carlos backhanded him across the face, leaving the mark of his knuckles seared on the boy’s temple and cheek. So he’ll learn, he told himself as he cleaned out the oats, a task that took him less than a minute to complete. But how many times had he told him how? How many times had Carlitos seen him feed the animal? The boy wasn’t paying attention, wasn’t using the mind God had given him. But as the boy’s father, Carlos also knew his hand had gotten away from him and once it did there was no way of pulling it back.

  “What was I supposed to do if I had to go but was already outside?”

  “But you weren’t supposed to be outside in the first place.”

  “Sure, and if you want to give me a consequence for that, fine, go ahead and give me a consequence. I shouldn’t have been outside and I broke Mom’s rule. But the other part wasn’t anything I planned. It just happened. And you can’t punish someone because they have to go and can’t get to the bathroom.”

  “She isn’t the only one who makes rules around here. And being outside with or without permission still doesn’t make it okay to undo your pajamas and squat down on our roof.”

  “I was afraid to wake everybody up if I opened the window and came inside.”

  “So you’re telling me you were being considerate?”

  When there was nothing left to say, his dad made Alex help Carlos dislodge the mess with a trowel and the pressure washer, and then made him pay Carlos, from his allowance, for his day of work, even if only a tiny part of it included cleaning out the rain gutter.

  Years later, Carlos paid for Carlitos to be brought from Honduras and across the border and then to Houston, paying extra to hide him in the back of a refrigerated trailer that on this particular night was not cooling and so the refrigerated section turned out to be more like an oven. Seventy bodies trapped inside for five hours with temperatures over a hundred degrees until the driver abandoned the trailer before getting to Houston. Nineteen had died, including a five-year-old boy, before they could be rescued. Carlitos was treated in the hospital for severe heatstroke and later dispatched back to his mother in Honduras, where he remained, the brain damage having affected his short-term memory and making it difficult for him to hold down a steady job, much less attempt another trip north. Carlos thought of him often. Wondered what, if anything, his son remembered of him and if what he remembered was the father he was at first or the father he tried to be l
ater.

  7

  Orly’s dad packed the Suburban on a Saturday morning. Alex had left for camp the day before, the bus departing from the Methodist church parking lot down the street. For Orly’s dad this would be only an overnight trip, 725 miles down and back, because after he drove back to Houston he had to fly out to San Francisco two days later. He considered putting Orly on a direct flight to Brownsville, but thought they could use some father-son time, especially with Orly still wondering why he couldn’t just stay in Houston. When they were done bringing all their bags out to the car, his dad told him to ride up front with him.

  “But Mom said I had to wait until I was a teenager.”

  “It doesn’t look like there’s any room in the back, buddy.” His dad had tossed the bags in the backseat instead of in the cargo space in the very back of the Suburban, where they usually stored the luggage. “Plus it’s a long ride. I could use the company.”

  “She always said it was against the law for me to sit in the front and we might get in trouble.”

  “Not really,” he said, “and you already look thirteen to me.” He mussed Orly’s hair in that way he did when he meant to say it was a private joke, some caper between the two of them.

  * * *

  —

  Until that grayish Tuesday afternoon when he learned she died from one, Orly had never heard of an aneurysm. It was already weird, their dad picking him up after school two hours late when it should’ve been Maribel picking him up on time. Alex was in the car and still sweaty from his basketball practice.

  This was the day their mom was supposed to be moving into her townhouse.