The floor shook, the sound peeling back her eyelids. Ricky and Rocky were no longer attached.
Maria regained her faculties and ran. On the balcony, she turned her gaze down to the Summer Carnival hollyhock beds, where Rocky’s limp body reposed. Around her, the stately, tall flowers remained sturdy and standing, only inches out of reach from the balcony. It didn’t look as if Rocky had fallen at all—from the way her wrists fanned out to the side to the way her cheeks remained flushed with pink, what Maria looked down on looked perfectly arranged, like a scene in a play.
“Fuck!” Ricky yelled, breaking the trance, and when nobody answered, he started to heave. In moments, he had collapsed onto the floor, the noise escaping from his chest like the sound of an enormous fly fighting its way out of his throat.
As Charlie sped down the highway, Maria sat in the back beside Ricky. She was crying so much that Charlie had to tell her to stop. It was fine, he said. Relax. He’d be fine. Rocky, whom they had to pull up from the flower bed, who was barely responsive in the front seat, who was so disoriented she couldn’t remember where she was or where they were going, turned around and looked at Maria and said, “Stop.”
Ricky’s breathing had grown shallow, and now he was no longer speaking. Maria had never seen his asthma become so severe. As a child, he constantly developed bronchitis and would miss weeks of school at a time, but as an adult, he kept it under control with inhalers. Maria had never seen her brother have an asthma attack before, and each time he wheezed, Maria imagined a whistle blowing, a referee calling the end of a play.
At the hospital, she tried to lift him out of the car, but Charlie intervened. When she looked at her brother, she saw that his lips had grayed as if they were coated in ash. Maria now could no longer cry—she sat on the pavement and shrieked until Charlie pulled her up by the arm and hushed her and guided them all, like a solemn procession, silently inside.
Rocky was evaluated for short-term memory loss. The doctors said she suffered a mild concussion, but she was awake, recovered. It turned out that she had a fair amount of alcohol in her system, the doctor said, looking at Charlie sternly. Charlie’s face didn’t change, but when the doctor continued to frown, Charlie shook his head in consternation, and this gesture seemed to appease him. Aside from her being drunk, the doctor continued, nothing else appeared to be wrong with her. They would give Rocky some Tylenol and discharge her. Charlie had wanted to say something to Rocky, offer consolation, but the doctor was firm about letting her rest. He was glad—he never wanted to have to explain to his daughter what he’d been doing with Maria.
It was only one of the ways he knew he was getting off easy. He had been sure to wipe off any vestiges of blood that had run down his nose when Ricky first hit him, but still, he was panicked as he drove to the hospital. It wasn’t until they arrived at the intake room and nobody asked any questions other than to fill out a couple of forms, that Charlie realized how silly he’d been. Nobody had suspected that he had driven from the city with the girl alone, that he had undressed her and rolled her dress up past her belly button. Along with her full name and address, Charlie learned Maria’s birthday. She was definitely seventeen. Thank God. On the very first night that he’d baited Maria to his bedroom, he had consulted his phone before going to sleep. Seventeen was absolutely legal.
The doctor told Charlie that Ricky wasn’t in critical condition, but he would need to stay at the hospital longer. He was well enough to talk, but breathing with the aid of a mask. Charlie had never seen anyone have an asthma attack before and was bewildered that Ricky would need an IV. With trepidation, he entered the room. Maria hadn’t left Ricky’s room since they’d arrived, and now she sat, her head between her legs like a puppy, at the foot of Ricky’s bed.
“Maria, let me take you home.”
Ricky’s eyes flared. “You can’t take her.”
“You’re going to get in trouble,” Charlie said, ignoring him. He needed to persuade her not to tell anyone about what happened. The thought of her going to her parents, who inevitably would go to the school, who in turn would call Veronica—it was too terrifying to think about. She couldn’t say a single word.
“Are you out of your mind?” Ricky tried to sit up. He paused when he realized he didn’t have the strength, and was clearly embarrassed that Charlie had noticed. He sat back in defeat. “You’re the one who’s going to fucking get in trouble.”
“Listen. Let’s forget that this happened.”
“Oh yeah,” Ricky said. “That’d be convenient for you.”
Charlie looked at Maria, who was crumpled on the bed. She was gripping her cell phone in one hand, and her head was tucked into her knees. Her face was obscured by her nest of hair, gleaming in black, like the surface of an eight ball. He could see the bright-pink strap of her bra digging into her shoulder, and then he noticed the curling ink on her wrists, as if she’d used them as paper. Her legs were covered in faded zigzagging scars. The threads on her flats came apart at the toe. He suddenly became aware of his leisurely flip-flops, blackened from his bare feet. He could see how pathetic it was that he was standing in this dim hospital room bargaining with two teenagers. He was like a caricature of a grown man who still wears backward hats, who unbuttons his shirt at the beach because his potbelly sometimes has the appearance of definition when the sun casts a shadow.
“What can I offer you?” he said, turning to Ricky, who was still trying, even behind the respirator, to sit up straight in his bed. “I’ve been told your family isn’t in the best financial situation. I’ve been told they might have a mortgage to pay off.”
“What can you offer us? What the fuck are you talking about?” Ricky’s eyes were flickering. “My sister didn’t give you a great impression of our family, did she?”
“Ricky,” Maria said, still curled up at the foot of the bed. Her voice sounded tiny, wounded.
From across the curtain in the room, a woman hacked. Charlie hadn’t realized someone was there. Some machine was making a cringe-worthy sound, as if measuring life in a series of beeps. In silence, the three of them listened. Charlie wondered if this was what his life sounded like to anyone listening—a depressing and avoidable series of events drudging along to the same hopeless beat. He didn’t know if everyone hated hospitals as much as he did, but he knew that he couldn’t bear the thought of dying. He felt a sweat break out on his forehead. He needed to get out of this room.
“You’re a bastard,” Ricky continued. “We’re going to file a report as soon as we get back to Queens.”
Charlie glanced out the window and saw nothing but a static gray sky. A report—did he mean a police report? For what? He hadn’t kidnapped the girl! She had gotten into his car willingly! But here, this hotheaded boy and his family would try to take him to court. They would make allegations. Charlie almost laughed; would all of his interactions with the opposite sex need to end with papers, with fees, with more lawyers? Charlie brought his hand up to his nose and pinched. Something in him felt like it was loosening, a dotted thread unraveling, and now he couldn’t remember the highway exit he’d have to take home, and this was an unconscionable thing not to remember, since he’d taken it countless times before. Once, at a college dorm party, a friend started crying because she’d gotten a phone call that her horse died, and Charlie was the only one who burst into laughter. He’d always been a little inappropriate, he supposed—things that were awful were things he found delightful. From the window of the hospital room, he could see that the static gray sky was dimming into darkness, and now his lips pushed at his cheeks. He was smiling. He had waited for this, and now maybe it was coming. Was it finally time for his psychotic break?
“Do you hear me?” Ricky said, his voice on the precipice of breaking. “I didn’t kill you, but my father will!”
“You don’t want to tell him,” Charlie said, taking a step toward the bed. He put a hand on Maria’s shoulder. Maria lifted her head and stared at him with listening eyes. He grinned a
t her. “I know you don’t want to tell him. You told me what you wanted. And I’m prepared to oblige.”
“This can’t . . . are you . . . Stop fucking looking at her!” Ricky’s voice wailed. “You raped her!” he shouted. “You!”
The static gray of the window dissolved into black as Maria’s hair cut across his vision. Standing between Charlie and Ricky, she’d seemed to grow several inches, a cat with its back arched. She gripped the edge of her brother’s bed.
“It was consensual,” she hissed. “You don’t know anything!”
Charlie felt like he’d just woken up from a hangover—the whole room felt like it was spinning. The bleached wood, the sterile counters, the pewter curtain fringed at the floor, all of it swirled in a vomity beige.
“Ricky, you don’t get to decide,” she said. “We’ll accept the money. He can help us, don’t you see? It’ll be simple. He can write a letter and we’ll pretend it’s just a college scholarship. Our parents will never know the difference. You know they won’t. Okay?”
Charlie could hear the sound of breathing, but he couldn’t tell which body it came from, if the silence was really all his.
“I’ll write it,” Maria said, still looking at Ricky, her hands still clasped to the bed. “I’ll write it and he’ll sign it.” Charlie was surprised at how eager she was to help him. When Ricky didn’t object, simply turned his head away, Charlie tried not to fall over on his way out of the room by counting the specks on the tile floor.
That night, both Rosario siblings stayed as Charlie drove away with his daughter. The train back to the city wasn’t far from the hospital, and Maria insisted she’d be back by her curfew. When Charlie received an email from her early the next day, he agreed without so much as a single edit before he promptly deleted her message. Every comma was in place, every sentence straightforward, and every paragraph was necessary. Good, he had written her back, with no period. It was the only thing he’d ever send.
CHAPTER 23
The school year started, and the girls memorized each other’s schedules so that they could master a disappearing act. They vanished from rooms whenever they saw one another. When Maria saw the outline of Rocky slinking down the hallway, she tried not to think of Charlie. At Maria’s house, she and Ricky never spoke of Rocky again—it was understood between the two of them that whatever their involvement with the Albrecht family was, it had now come to an end.
Between the calamity of senior year at the preparatory high school and the anxiety it caused among the whole grade, the only person Maria still talked to on a regular basis was Karen, and Karen had long ago stopped asking about Charlie—ever since she broke her own news to Maria. They had walked over to Cranky’s café during a free period, and Maria saw the dread in her friend’s eyes. It was too early in the morning to look so upset. “What’s wrong?” Maria had asked, alarmed, thinking about Karen’s grandfather. Karen stared into her cup of coffee as she spoke. “You know how I take ceramics on the weekend? I met this girl there. Alyssa. You’re the first person I’ve told.” Maria breathed again, and then she couldn’t help but laugh a little. “That’s all?” she asked, watching Karen as she bit down so hard on her bottom lip that the skin around it turned red. When she released it, there were little teeth marks all over. “Congratulations,” Maria said. “Can I meet her someday?”
Maria was now often alone. On some days after school, she stayed late in the art studio by herself, plugged her iPod into the speaker, and set to work on painting. On other days, she went straight to the library to check out books of poetry, things she’d never read before. It’d been hard to get back into Emerson, and it wasn’t even just because of Charlie. When she’d started rereading an essay called “Self-Reliance,” after reading it for the first time earlier that summer, it was one sentence, early in the piece, that made her put the book down. I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me. Maria instantly thought of her father, who’d recently sat down with her to fill out the FAFSA, a document so confusing and arduous it left them both bewildered and dazed. She thought of her mother, who gave part of her tips to Maria so that she could order a yearbook. She even thought of Ricky, who’d started to invite her with him to get food whenever he saw her at home. A part of Maria’s heart was reserved just for Emerson and his words on art and beauty, but ever since she’d started reading from her anthology of Latina women writers, she’d taken an interest in other ideas, from poets she’d never heard of before. Poets like Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. There was the poem about hombres necios, or foolish men, that she’d remembered at Rocky’s country house. “Hombres necios who accuse / women without reason . . . ,” it started. Maria closed her eyes and smiled. Who was more to blame, even if both were in the wrong, la que peca por la paga / o el que paga por pecar?
The process of adjusting to her life without Charlie or Rocky wasn’t hard. It wasn’t just reverting to an old way of being, either. She couldn’t pinpoint when it started to happen, but suddenly, things started to feel different. Going home now became a sanctuary. The subway car was the one place where she was free to get lost without anyone coming around to look for her. Her teachers and parents had always chastised her for her dreaminess, what they deemed a ruinous quality, and even her peers sometimes taunted her when halfway through some conversation it would be Maria’s turn to speak. “Maria has no clue what we’re talking about,” they’d laugh. It made her feel so stupid that she’d stop trying to listen altogether. “What?” she said. “I was zoning out.” Her classmates would shrug and wouldn’t address her again.
But there was more to it than just being spacey. Conversations at Bell Seminary had always been difficult, even when Maria tried. “Haven’t you heard we’ve entered a golden age of television?” one girl had yelled at Maria in September, on a school trip to the Metropolitan Museum. Maria hadn’t recognized the long-limbed boy who had passed them on that great accordion of steps, but everyone else had. Maria smiled, patting her pleats down with long strokes of her hands. “They say that?” she answered, and even Karen, who knew that Maria didn’t have cable TV at home, couldn’t resist a laugh.
Where there was nostalgia for most, for Maria there was a deficit. Whole discographies. “Never heard of it.” Perennial films. “I think I’ve seen parts.” One time a classmate asked her: What do you do when you’re home? There was no good answer. She saw herself lying on her bedroom floor, scribbling down answers to homework or, more likely, scribbling poetry into her notebook, her mother’s ballads barreling through the walls. She saw herself lying on the couch, her eyes slowly closing in anticipation of dinner. She saw herself huddled over a warm plate of food, steam curled around her face like a scarf. What did she do? She didn’t know, but she knew that whatever it was they did was so different that it warranted its own lexicon, a language she’d never spoken before. Was squash really something other than a vegetable, and one she’d never tasted? Why was she the only one who’d never heard of sashimi, but nobody knew what a platano was? Who was Martha and where was her vineyard? There was music and TV and games and food and hobbies and places—and her classmates wanted to know—didn’t Maria hear and watch and know and eat and do and go to any of them? Or do you just sit there at home and float?
On the train home, nobody asked anything of Maria, if not just to take up a little less room. None of the strains, the choke holds on conversation. Maria’s favorite parts of the day were now spent on these trains, far from the school’s doors. She melted into the seats. She went from acute and sharp, a cat with its back perpetually arched, to a rounded edge of tranquility. This was where Maria daydreamed in peace. Sometimes she even took out a sketch pad and drew what came to her. Self-portraits, mostly, bordered in hearts. Maria liked them enough not to erase them. Her teacher’s encouragement was welcome, but she knew she was really getting better when Karen, whom she always considered a true artist, looked over her shoulder in class and said, Hey, that’s pretty good.
Recently,
Maria had been asking her parents a lot of questions, too. “Where are we from?” she said to her father, and when he told her Ponce, a city in Puerto Rico, Maria wasn’t at all satisfied. What’s the name of the street? What’s the house number? Her plan was to find it on Google Street View, but he told her it was impossible, so Maria confronted her mother instead.
“What about you, Ma?”
“My family’s from Quito.”
“Where?”
Her mother smiled and led Maria into her bedroom. From under the bed, she pulled out a plastic folder. Inside, there was a sheet of paper with scribbled numbers written in blue pen. “Carrera #14, Avenida Simón Bolivar, Quito, 170136.”
“This is where my cousin lives.”
Maria wrote the address down in her purple notebook, but it didn’t appear on Google Street View when she looked it up later. Her father was right. Maria was annoyed.
“How come Dad can’t give me an address like you?” Maria asked. “Doesn’t he know where he was born?”
“No,” her mother said. “He doesn’t remember. That’s why he can’t tell you.”
Maria tried to imagine forgetting where she was born. She imagined forgetting Queens, of having stood in awe of Queens Boulevard as if it were an ocean and taken in the sound of cars rushing past her as if it were the tide, unseeable noise as if it were the invisible force of God. She imagined forgetting, but couldn’t, and her heart now hurt for her father. There must be an important and essential part of him missing, and she realized she’d never thought about him this way before, as someone capable of weakness. She was reminded of the way Rocky always had misunderstood what Maria was feeling, how something on Maria’s exterior had fooled Rocky into seeing simply a shell.
“We should go to Puerto Rico,” Maria said. “And Ecuador, too.”
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