The Secret Side of Empty

by Maria E. Andreu

  At the bottom of the hill, where the road curves, I take a right and head down past the commercial district, where a few halfway decent restaurants and weird stores keep opening and closing—“Get Thee to a Sunnery,” the tanning place, and “Yoga for You.”

  At the end of the stores, I hang a left into what little “affordable housing” there is in this town, a small apartment building with a tired-looking gray façade and a dead bush by the front door.

  I lock up my bike in the little courtyard in the back and run up the three flights of stairs to our two-bedroom. I open the door. My mother never locks it. When you live a quarter of a mile away from houses with Hummers and Jaguars in the driveways, it’s pretty logical to think your two-bedroom is not going to be the first place hit.

  My mother is in the kitchen, looking all drained, as usual. Maybe once, like in the wedding picture in the hall, she was pretty, with bright pink cheeks and shiny, long, straight brown hair. But now she looks like a dishrag washed too many times with stuff that’s other colors. As soon as I spot her, she makes me mad. I don’t know why.

  Slam! My little brother runs into me full speed, nearly knocking me down. I know it’s coming, but he always catches me off guard. Although he’s a skinny kid who eats only once in a while, he packs a lot of force.

  “You’re going to knock me down!”

  “What took you so long?” he says, bear-hugging me.

  “Joey, I wasn’t gone that long.”

  “It’s Ho-say,” he says. He says “Jose” like a gringo. Mentally, I curse my parents for the ten-thousandth time for naming him Jose instead of Joseph. Or Connor. Or Duke. Or something else that would fit around here. When he was born, I gave them the “We’re in America now” speech, but they didn’t listen. Joey doesn’t seem to mind.

  “Anyway, Ho-say, what have you been doing while I was out?”

  “Watch cartoons with me!”

  “No, seriously.” But I know resistance is futile. He always wins at getting me to watch SpongeBob with him, so I know I might as well just give in. “Okay, but just one episode.”

  “Two. The new one where Patrick and SpongeBob have a fight is coming. New episode!”

  I follow him into our living room and sit on the couch. There are holes in the wicker on the sides of the couch, where first my little fingers and now his have poked through absently while watching TV. I spy a hole I created during one particularly long winter of watching Johnny Bravo. The cushions are a yucky pea-green soup color, worn through near where the back of your knees go.

  He puts his hand in mine, and it gets sweaty in sixty seconds flat, but he is zombie-fied. He stays that way during the two episodes of SpongeBob—jaw slack, hand in mine, saying every three minutes or so, “That was funny, right?” He leans his head on my shoulder, as if doing that will convince me it was. It works. I laugh.

  “I have a book I want to go read, little J man.”

  “But it’s summer.”

  “School’s about to start, and I want to finish the reading list.”

  “I thought you said you read all the ones you were supposed to read.”

  “I did, but I want to read the whole list.”

  “Why?”

  “I just do.”

  “Okay,” he says. “You read here with me and I’ll watch cartoons.”

  The kid is going to make a hell of a negotiator someday.

  I hear the front door slam and I tense up. He’s early. Not good. Usually I can count on him coming home when it’s time for me to go to sleep, so I can retreat to the room my brother and I share and stay out of his way. But now it’s dinnertime and he’s already here. So many things can go wrong in three hours. So many things usually do.

  He walks into the living room, and you can almost see the cartoon dark squiggly lines over his head. He carries his mood around him like an angry cloud. I stare at the floor to avoid eye contact.

  “So, you don’t say hello to your father?”

  “Hello,” I mumble at the brown linoleum. Eye contact is bad. But not talking is bad, too.

  Jose runs off the couch and wraps himself around our father’s legs, creasing his black pants. “The robot, the robot! Let’s play the robot!” Jose jumps up and down while still holding on.

  My father takes off his red waiter’s jacket, messes up Jose’s gold, curly hair, and pries him off, saying, “In a little while,” and walks a few steps to our kitchen/dining/everything room.

  “What’s for dinner?” my father asks.

  My mother looks a little more wrung out than five minutes ago. “Lentils,” she says.

  “Lentils again?” he groans. I have to give it to him on this one. Damn lentils. Another meal brought to you courtesy of a ninety-nine-cent bag of beans. Maybe if I just don’t eat until school starts I’ll look skinny and I can wear those black jeans to our first dance. Lentils are the best motivation for a starvation diet when they are the only things in the house to eat.

  CHAPTER THREE

  On the first day of school, I breeze into homeroom, where my all-time favorite teacher, Ms. North, is finally my homeroom teacher. Geek alert: it’s kind of a thing I’ve been looking forward to for years. I can’t exactly explain it, but I want to be around Ms. North as much as possible, like she’s got some secret code I need to crack. Bonus: she’s also my first period class. So I don’t have to navigate much of anywhere until well past 9:00 a.m.

  As first period starts, Ms. North stands up. No one has been saying much of anything because her reputation precedes her.

  “So, here you are. The few, the brave. The ones who signed up for two English classes in one school year. Your fellow students no doubt said you were crazy for doing it. And they are probably right, if sane means doing what’s easy and what everyone else does. But I would like to think that is not what you are.”

  She starts passing out the syllabus. I start to hear soft groans—no one dares groan too loud. There is a book a week most weeks. I notice she’s made what I hope is a joke next to Dante’s Inferno (“extra points if you read it in the original Italian!”), and I see a bunch of books whose titles and authors I don’t recognize—Lucifer’s Hammer?—peppered in with a few of the old standards.

  “Life, death, meaning, why we’re here, whether society helps or absolutely corrodes the human experience, that’s the topic of this class. If you just came for the college credits, ring out now.” She points to the big brass bell hanging next to her blackboard.

  A few people look around, but most everyone sits absolutely still. There are only us hard-core NHS girls in here, ten in total. And we’ve all had her before, so we know what we’re in for.

  “Okay, good. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  THE WAY GORETTI CAME INTO MY LIFE WAS THIS:

  Two months before I was supposed to start kindergarten, a giant screaming match broke out between the Parentals. I listened behind the wicker couch on the cold floor of the basement apartment that we lived in at the time. The dual screaming in itself was weird, since my father was by far the louder screamer, so my mother rarely tried to match him.

  It went something like, “No, Jorge, we can’t just keep her home! That’s crazy! You’re crazy!”

  “I’m not crazy! You’re crazy! You want us all to get deported? Go, then! You go to the school! Tell them you have a kid with no papers that you want to enroll! I’ll pack your suitcase and have it ready! Because I’m not going, do you understand me? They’re government schools. They check your immigration status with the government. You want to get us deported? You can go by yourself!” screamed my father.

  Because . . . yeah. We’re illegal.

  “But what is she going to do home all day? Someone is going to see her! Know that she’s not in school when she’s supposed to be!” countered my mother.

  “We’ll teach her ourselves! We won’t let her go outside during school hours!”

  “No, Jorge! No! I won’t allow that! She needs friends! A normal life!”

>   “We’re moving to Argentina soon anyway! Who cares? She’ll have friends over there! She has better than friends! She has family!”

  “We’ve been moving to Argentina for five years now! And nothing! What if it’s another five years? Should she just rot in this basement until then?”

  There was crying, and thumping, and something got thrown at some point. All I know is that the next day, when my father was at one of his two waitering jobs, my mother grabbed my hand and took me to a big office where it was very cold. My mother had put on a skirt and blouse. Outside the office, she leaned down and said something she said to me a lot.

  “Now, Monserrat Thalia, when grown-ups talk, children listen. You don’t say anything, do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you don’t repeat anything we ever talk about, ever. You know we could get into a lot of trouble for being illegals, right?”

  I had no idea what we had done to be fugitives from the law, but I nodded. Quiet. Check.

  Inside the office, after what seemed like a forever wait, we were taken further in to a room with a man behind the most giant desk I’d ever seen. It was dark brown and carved with figures—a big building, a woman with a blindfold on. I wondered if her arms got tired from holding up those plates on a string that way.

  “How can I help you, ma’am?” He was bald and a little blond and his Spanish sounded really funny, like he was trying to pretend he was someone else or something, making up a silly accent. He said his words all wrong, almost like he had a cramp in his tongue.

  “Your sign says you do immigration work.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Well, my husband and my daughter and I are illegals, and I want to know if there is anything to do to get our papers.”

  “Yes, that’s the million-dollar question,” he said, shaking his head slowly a little, his eyes down. He asked her a bunch of questions I didn’t understand, about my father’s work, entries, exits. Who our family was and where they lived. Big, grown-up words.

  All I know is that after about ten minutes, my mother started to cry and the guy behind the giant desk started to look really uncomfortable.

  “But how can that be?” she asked him. “How can there be nothing we can do?”

  “The laws are not very helpful, I’m afraid. Even for people with special skills or family in the country, the rules are difficult and contradictory. Those are all the deportation cases I’m fighting right now,” he said, pointing at a wall full of papers. “It’s a losing battle. Until they fix the law, I’m afraid there’s not much you can do.”

  “Thank you for your time,” she said, wiping her nose with a tissue he handed her. She pushed a handful of bills at him, but he put his hand up and shook his head no. Maybe because they were snot-filled he didn’t want them.

  “Thank you for letting me practice my Spanish,” he said, which seemed to me like a really weird thing to say to a crying woman. But as my mother had asked me to, I said nothing except “Thank you” when he handed me a lollipop.

  Our next stop was to a square little building with a giant cross in front of it. I waited, coloring quietly at a small coffee table, while my mother sat inside with a lady in a weird hat and a long dress.

  And it’s been Goretti ever since, the unpublic school.

  SATURDAY MORNING, CHELSEA OFFERS TO COME PICK ME UP, but I want to bike and I like heading toward her much better than her heading toward me.

  You can see Chelsea’s house from far away, the highest part of a hill that makes it overlook the others like it’s the oldest, biggest, baddest sibling on the block. I once heard Chelsea’s mom call Willow Falls “the last great bastion against McMansions,” supposedly because there are a lot of rules about what you can build and how it can look. Chelsea’s mom and grandmother grew up in Willow Falls, and her dad grew up not too far from it. I’ve always wondered what it must feel like to have a sturdy string of history tethering you to a place, giving you the right to be there.

  Chelsea’s car is on the circular drive, a little crooked, next to her mother’s hot red European two-seater, the car Chelsea calls “Mom’s Midlife Mobile.”

  “Hi, Mrs. O’Hara,” I say.

  “M.T.,” she says, smiling.

  “How are you today?” I am the Parent Whisperer. Parents love me. I think the trick is actually talking to them, something their own kids usually don’t do. If Mrs. O’Hara was my mom, I would talk to her all the time.

  Mrs. O’Hara’s kneeling down on a little foamy-looking thing, which matches her rubber boots, her gardening gloves, and the little garbage pail next to her, all an understated plaid. She’s wearing a golf shirt with their country club’s logo on it and khakis that I would have already gotten way muddy if I’d been putting stuff in the dirt.

  “I’m good, I guess,” she says, putting down her little digging thingy and raising her hand to the crown of her gardening hat, looking at me.

  “I decided I’m going to plant an obscene amount of iris.”

  “How many?”

  She points to some boxes I hadn’t noticed behind her car. “Six hundred and fifty-seven.”

  “Plants?” I ask.

  “Yep. Crazy, right? I had the gardener prepare the bed. But there is just something about putting them in the dirt that I want to do myself. I read the instructions on the Internet. I can do this.” She looks down the driveway for a second. Then, “You know what I like about iris?” she asks.

  “What?”

  “You have to plant them in the fall. If you plant them earlier, they don’t bloom. But you put them in the ground in the fall and then they get snowed on and they just look like dead little stumpy things for months, roots half exposed, and you’re sure nothing good could ever come of them. Then the spring comes and they fan out and grow the most amazing flowers you’ve ever seen—seven, eight inches big, every color combination you can imagine—yellow, red, blues, orange, bicolors.”

  “Wow.”

  She stares off a little again. “I’m sure Chelsea has mentioned something about what happened here over the summer. But of course it goes without saying that I love Chelsea very much and that I’m glad she’s got you.”

  “Ummm . . . yeah.” I have no idea what she’s talking about. Chelsea hasn’t mentioned anything.

  “I want you to know that I’m still the same person and my house is still always your house and that things are complicated, but they don’t affect you and hopefully not Chelsea too much either.”

  “Yeah, of course.” I don’t know what else to say now. “Well, good luck with your six hundred and fifty-seven iris,” I say, and smile.

  “You have fun. Chelsea’s inside.”

  I go in the house by the side door, the one everyone uses to avoid the palatial wooden double doors that weigh a ton and are carved with leaves and columns and hold giant matching iron door knockers. Up a curving staircase, down a hall, and to the right is Chelsea’s room. I knock and don’t wait for an answer before going inside.

  “So . . . your mom was in the mood to chat this morning.”

  “Please, don’t get me started on her. She’s out there defacing the lawn.”

  “She said something about something that happened this summer? What’s up with that?”

  “Whatever. Anyway, far more important topic of discussion: Jonathan—to call or not to call?”

  “Not to call.”

  “Yes, yes, I know the answer. It’s a trick question to see if you’re holding to our pact of forcibly restraining me if I even think about going back to him. On to other things. I already have reading to do for Monday. What about you? What does your schedule look like?”

  “I have North first for Drama and Novel, then physics, Italian Four, calculus, English Four, American History . . .”

  “Stop right there, you’re giving me a headache. What the heck, Thalia-nator? We’re supposed to hang out and have fun this year. We have devastatingly fabulous looks to orchestrate for prom and senior year boyf
riends to catch and then discard. Do you really need to take two North classes plus physics and calc?”

  I want to say that this could be the last year I get a formal education. Instead I say, “Don’t worry about me and these classes. We’ll have plenty of fun.”

  I can pass most tests without a lot of effort. I sit in class when it’s taught and then I just kind of know it for the test. I read fast. And I know what teachers want. I’ve signed up for a lot, but I can handle it.

  “School’s so easy for you. You’re so lucky,” she says.

  I’m lucky, she thinks. I want to laugh but it would come across as mean. So all I say is, “Yeah.”

  “So what do you want to do?” asks Chelsea.

  “Let’s go into the city.”

  “Only if we can lie and say we’re going to the library.” She used to get along so well with her mother. I don’t understand why she seems so angry with her recently, wanting to lie instead of just asking permission, which her mother would probably give.

  “You choose your own cover stories. My mom won’t even know,” I say.

  “Awesome. Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  New York City is about a half an hour away by train. Washington Square Park is a ten-minute subway ride from Penn Station. It’s our favorite place to go. We sit on the grass, facing the arch, watching the people walk by, making up stories about them.

  “Okay, you do that one,” Chelsea says, pointing with her chin.

  “The one with the blue hair?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She’s . . . she’s a physics whiz.”

  “Ha!”

  “But she tries to be real cool about it, you know? Like, doesn’t get wrapped up in the geekiness of it. That’s why the blue hair and the attitude. But she’s really brilliant. But she’s got a secret.”

  “You’re so much better at this game than I am.”