B0061QB04W EBOK

by Reyna Grande

  Abuela Evila’s house finally came into view.

  “What should we tell him?” Mago said as we stood outside our grandmother’s gate. There was so much to tell him, but how much time would we have before Abuela Evila snatched the phone from us?

  “Let’s just tell him we miss him,” Carlos said. “I think he has something he wants to tell us, don’t you think? Or why would he be calling us, after all this time?”

  We knocked on the gate and waited. Then Élida came out and smirked. She glanced at us and shook her head. “You could have at least changed out of those rags,” she said. “Look at you, you look like beggars.”

  “So what?” Mago said. “It’s not like he’s going to see us like this.”

  Then my cousin Félix poked his head out the kitchen doorway and laughed. He whispered something to Élida, and then Élida laughed, too. We walked past them and went into the living room. I wondered what could be so funny.

  Nobody had to tell me who the man sitting on the couch was. I thought about the eight-by-ten-inch photo I had placed on my grandmother’s altar. He had put on weight. He wore glasses now. Instead of black-and-white, he was in color, and I could see that his skin was the color of rain-soaked earth. There he was, the Man Behind the Glass, in the flesh.

  “Go say hello to your father.” Tía Emperatriz came up from behind us and pushed us toward him. I didn’t want to go. All I wanted was to run away, run back to Abuelita Chinta’s house, far away from him. I didn’t want to see that look on his face. All those years staring at his photo, wishing that his eyes were not looking to the left but instead were looking at me. All those years wishing to be seen by him. And here he was, looking at me, but not really seeing me. He couldn’t see past the tangled hair, the dirt on my face, my tattered clothes. He couldn’t see the girl who had longed so much for this moment, to finally meet her father.

  Papi

  I knew he was ashamed by what he saw. What a cruel joke Félix played on us by not telling us the truth! If he had, we would have bathed and changed our clothes before going to my grandmother’s house. Instead, I had to stand before the father I hadn’t seen in almost eight years, looking like a beggar. I touched my hair, and I knew it was matted and oily. When was the last time I bathed? I wondered if he could see the lice that at that very moment were running around on my scalp. I had an overwhelming urge to scratch, and I bit my lips and tried not to move.

  Papi hugged Mago, Betty, and Carlos and then called me over. I had no choice but to go to him. He hugged me too briefly, too hesitantly, the way one would hug an acquaintance’s child, as if out of obligation. Looking back on it now, I understand how awkward it must have been for him as well. We were strangers to him, too.

  He introduced us to the woman standing by his side, whom I hadn’t noticed until then. My eyes were focused on him, only him.

  “This is Mila,” he said.

  I looked at the woman who had broken up my family. I wanted to yell at her, to say something mean, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. Instead, I compared her to my mother. She wore her wavy black hair in a stylish cut, whereas Mami, ever since she returned from El Otro Lado, had worn hers short, like a boy, but permed into tight curls, and dyed a rusty red. Mila was light-skinned and wore makeup in soft colors such as peaches and browns, unlike Mami’s dark blues, purples, and hot pinks that didn’t go well with her olive skin.

  The woman was wearing white pants and a pink blouse, and white sandals with straps. Mami was always wearing flowery dresses like the kind Abuelita Chinta wore. I suddenly wished to see Mami wearing a pretty pair of white pants. I wished that the woman before me didn’t look younger than my mother, even though she was five years older. I wished her skin wasn’t so light and smooth looking, so different from my mother’s sunburned face lined with wrinkles.

  I wanted to kick myself for thinking those thoughts. I was betraying my mother. I told myself I should hate that woman, not admire her clothes or makeup or pretty skin.

  “I’m starving,” Papi said. “Let’s eat.”

  He gave Tía Emperatriz money, and she went to buy a pot of menudo at the nearest food stand. Out of the suitcases, he took out three dolls, one for me, one for Mago, and one for Betty. They were life-size baby dolls with blue eyes that closed when they were laid down, and opened when stood up. I buried my face in my doll’s hair and smelled the scent of plastic, the smell of a new toy. He gave us girls a couple of dresses and Carlos got jeans and three shirts. This time, he had gotten our size right. He looked at our feet. I put one foot behind the other, ashamed of my old sandals. He said he hadn’t known what our shoe size was, so he hadn’t brought us any. He promised to buy us new shoes the next day.

  We played with our new dolls. Mago, who was going on fourteen and claimed to be too old for baby dolls, was more than happy to play with Betty and me, just to spite Élida. Papi didn’t give Élida anything, and part of me was glad. Now she knew how we had felt when her mother had visited from El Otro Lado and didn’t give us a single present. But part of me wanted Papi to be different than Tía María Félix. I wanted him to be kinder to his niece.

  Soon evening came and he still hadn’t told us why he was there. I waited for him to tell us that he missed us. I waited for him to say he was sorry for being gone for so long. I watched him sitting on the patio with his new woman, laughing at something she said. I felt the sting of jealousy burning sharp like a scorpion sting, and I thought of Mami. Just briefly, I understood how she had felt. For a moment, I understood her anger.

  We spent the night at Abuela Evila’s house. In the morning Papi shaved Carlos’s hair to get rid of the lice. He even gave him a bath, as if my brother were a little kid, but he said Carlos was in need of a good scrubbing. He took us girls to the hair salon and told the hairstylist to cut our hair short. I wanted to protest. I wanted to tell him no. But when I looked at him, I was afraid he would disappear if I angered him. I was afraid he might leave again and never come back. So I sat still and closed my eyes when I heard the hissing of the scissors. I cried silent tears about losing my hair once again.

  “Look at all the lice,” the hairstylist said to her coworkers. Papi picked up a copy of the newspaper on the seat next to him and hid behind it. Mago sat with Betty on her lap, waiting. When the hairstylist was done with me, it was Betty’s turn. She cried and kept moving her head and Mago had to hold her still. When the hairstylist was done with Betty and asked Mago to sit down, Papi said, “Not her.” I looked at Mago, and I was so angry I could spit at her. On our way home we stopped at the pharmacy, and Papi bought special lice shampoo and made us wash our hair with it as soon as we got home.

  “You didn’t have to cut my hair,” I said.

  “It’ll grow back, Chata. Don’t worry.” My anger disappeared immediately at hearing Papi call me by the special nickname he had given me when I was little.

  Later, he inspected the house he had built for us. We were surprised to see it almost finished; it just needed the windowpanes installed. As we walked from room to room, we told him how we’d helped to build this house by carrying the gravel and the mortar buckets and bricks. “Which is going to be your room?” Mago asked him. Papi didn’t say anything.

  Reyna and family in front of the dream house

  In the evening, when Papi reached into his suitcase to grab his pajamas, he found a big surprise. A dozen baby scorpions and their mother came tumbling out to the floor when he took out his pajama pants. I screamed and jumped onto the couch. He stepped on the scorpions and killed them.

  “You could’ve been stung,” Mila said, glancing around the floor to make sure he had killed all the scorpions, and then she added, “How soon do you think we can go home?”

  Go home? I wondered. But this is his home.

  As if reading my thoughts, Mago said, “Our house is finished now. He doesn’t need to leave again.” She turned to him and said, “Right, Papi? You’re staying now, aren’t you?”

  Papi looked at Mila a
nd then at us. “Let’s talk about it later. ¿Está bien?”

  “Why don’t you tell them now, Natalio? Tell them you aren’t staying,” Mila said.

  “All right,” he said. He sat us down on the couch and said, “Well, you see, kids, I’ve decided I can’t come back here. Even though the house is finished, there are no jobs here. If I come back, we’ll still live in this miserable poverty, ¿entienden?”

  “But the house is finished, Papi. We’ll be safe there,” I said.

  “We don’t eat much,” Carlos said. “You wouldn’t need to make a lot of money to feed us. Mago already has a job at the train station. I could get a job, too. I’m old enough.”

  “No!” Papi said. “You need to go to school. All of you need to stay in school, you hear? Negra, what is this about you working already?”

  Mago stayed quiet. He looked at her, waiting for her to say something. Finally, Mago stood up and said, “Abuela Evila was right all along. Excuses, that’s all you have to give us. Excuses as to why you can’t come back.” She ran out of the living room crying.

  The next day, Papi told us he would be leaving in a few days. Mila would be flying back because she was a naturalized U.S. citizen. Since he had no papers, he would hire a coyote to take him across the border.

  “I’m not coming back here,” he said to us. “I have a new life in El Otro Lado. I don’t want to give up that life, but I know it isn’t fair for you not to have a father. I thought your mother was taking care of you, but now I see that she isn’t. I don’t have enough money to take all of you with me. I can take only one of you.”

  Tears gathered in my eyes because I didn’t want to hear what he was going to say next. I knew who he had chosen.

  “I’m going to take Mago with me. She’s the oldest, and she won’t have as much trouble running across the border with me.”

  “You can’t take her,” I said. “You can’t take her.”

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “Because she’s all I have.”

  Mago put an arm around me. I held on tight. I had survived being left by my father. I had lived through my mother’s constant comings and goings. But if Mago left me, I didn’t think I could survive. I looked at him, and I wished he had not come back. I wished he had stayed where he was. I wished he were just a photograph hanging on the wall. I would’ve preferred that to losing my sister. Why did he have to come back, only to leave again, and not just that, but take away the only person who truly loved me?

  “And what about me, Papi?” Carlos said. “I can run really fast. Just ask my friends. They can never catch me when we play soccer. I’d leave la migra in the dust! Take me with you, Papi.”

  Papi put his hand on Carlos’s shoulder. “You’re right, Carnal. You could probably manage the crossing as well as Mago. I’ll take you with me. But you, Chata, I cannot.”

  “How could you split us up?” I asked Papi. “How could you take them away?”

  “I don’t want to separate you,” he said, bending down to look at me. “I will come back for you, Chata. I promise that as soon as I have some money I will come back for you.”

  I shook my head, unable to believe him. “The last time you left, you were gone eight years, Papi,” I said.

  Papi looked down and didn’t say anything.

  We returned to Abuelita Chinta’s house that evening because Papi didn’t want us to miss school.

  “You’ll still be here tomorrow, won’t you?” Mago asked. We were afraid that while we were gone, he would pack up and leave, never to return again.

  “Of course I will, Negra,” he said.

  At school my classmates wanted to know all about him. They asked painful questions I didn’t want to answer. “Is he finally moving back here?” they asked. “Or is he taking you with him?”

  I didn’t want to tell them the truth. I didn’t want to admit that Papi didn’t want me. He only wanted my sister and my brother. So I started to lie. “Yes, my papi is taking me to El Otro Lado with him. Goodbye, my friends. I will miss you.” I could see the look of envy in their eyes.

  “You’re so lucky, Reyna,” they said to me. By the end of the school day, I was starting to believe the lies myself. But then I was suddenly afraid. When my classmates found out I wasn’t going anywhere, they would make fun of me so much I knew I would die of shame because they would never let me forget that my father had not wanted me. Like my mother, I was afraid of people knowing that I had failed.

  After school, when we got to Abuela Evila’s house, Papi and Mila were sitting on the patio with my grandmother. He called us over, and I was the first to rush to his side.

  “Papi, you have to take me back to El Otro Lado with you,” I said.

  “Why is that?”

  “Because I told my friends you would, and I have said goodbye to all of them! I’ll die of shame if they know that I lied, Papi. Please take me with you.”

  He laughed. Mila didn’t laugh. She glared at me.

  “She’s a stubborn one, isn’t she?” Mila said.

  “You leave her here with me, Natalio, and I will teach her some manners,” Abuela Evila said. “This girl needs to learn that bad things come to women who don’t know their place.”

  Mila looked furiously at my grandmother. Abuela Evila had not liked the fact that in the days Papi and Mila had been there, not once had Mila offered to help with the cooking or to wash the dishes. After the meals were over, she usually stood up, along with Papi, and left the kitchen to go sit on the patio or watch TV.

  “It’s different for women in the U.S.,” Mila said. “Over there, women aren’t treated like servants.”

  “I won’t go with you if you don’t take Reyna,” Mago said. “I mean it.” I looked at my sister’s face, and on it I saw the conflict inside her. I knew she was dying to go. More than anyone, it had been she who had yearned for him all those years. But destiny had also made her become my little mother, and unlike my mother, Mago’s maternal instincts won over her need to save herself. “I’m serious, Papi,” she said.

  “M-me, too,” Carlos said, halfheartedly.

  Papi reached his hand out to me, and I took it. “You really want to go live with me?”

  “Sí, Papi. Please take me with you.”

  “All right, then in that case, I will take all my children back with me.”

  “But, but where in the world are you going to get the money?” Mila said.

  “We’ll borrow it,” he said. “Beg everyone we know.”

  Papi said he would need money to pay a smuggler for the four of us—me, Carlos, Mago, and him. Betty could fly back with Mila since she was a U.S. citizen. For a brief moment, I felt the familiar jealousy I’d felt when I had first heard of my American sister. Being born in the U.S. was a privilege I wished I had had. That way, I wouldn’t need to sneak across the border like a thief. I thought about the time Mago, Carlos, and I had tried to steal mangoes from El Cuervo’s grove, and how frightened I had been of his gun. I felt a shiver run through me.

  “Will they shoot at us?” I asked as we listened to Papi talk about the crossing, the people called la migra. I could hear the fear in his voice.

  “No, Chata, no. No one will shoot at us,” he said as he sat me on his lap. “Don’t be afraid.” But I saw the way he glanced at Mila before hiding his face in his beer.

  The next day, Mago and I went to give Mami the news. Papi didn’t want to talk to her himself, claiming that Mago might have a better chance of convincing her to let us go. He knew Mami had not forgiven him for what he’d done. At the sight of him, who knows what might have happened. As it was, Mago and I had a hard time convincing her to let us go. Fortunately, Tío Gary had come to Abuelita Chinta’s house just in time to talk some sense into my mother. He said, “You aren’t taking care of them, Juana, why deny them the chance to go to El Otro Lado? Besides, our mother is too old to be taking care of your kids. Let them go, Juana. It’s for the best. Don’t deny them the opportunity to have a better life.” />
  “Fine,” Mami said. “If they want to leave with him, so be it.” She turned to look at us and said, “Tell your father that he can’t have Betty.”

  My father was furious. “That’s why I couldn’t be with her anymore,” he had said when Mago had delivered Mami’s message. “She has never had a good vision of the future.” He turned around and looked at us. “I know I promised not to separate you, but if your mother won’t hand over Betty’s birth certificate, I won’t be able to take her. She’s too little to run across the border.”

  Mago was holding Betty’s hand. Papi reached his arms out and put Betty in his lap. “You hear that, mija? Your mother is keeping you from me.”

  Betty had just turned four in March. Like me, she had no memory of him and this was why, as he held her in his arms, she squirmed away and returned to our side. “I want my mami,” she said.

  “You see what your mother has done to me?” Papi said. “She has robbed me of my youngest child. There are laws in the U.S. I could have gone to court, filed for custody. I would have had rights. Instead, your mother took off like a thief and came back here, stealing her from me. And now look, my own daughter doesn’t even know me.”

  “You tried to shoot her, Papi,” Carlos said. “Mami was scared.”

  Papi laughed. “She overreacted. I wasn’t going to shoot her. And whatever happened to that man was an accident. An accident.”

  “If you had just listened to your mother, this wouldn’t have happened,” Abuela Evila chimed in. “I told you she was not good enough for you, Natalio. I told you she would be trouble. But you didn’t listen.”

  “I will go talk to her one more time,” Mago said, standing up. “If we’re going with you, we can’t leave our little sister behind.”

  Mago and I went to Mami’s work. We walked into the record shop and saw Mami dusting the counter while dancing to a cumbia. We stood there and watched her, and I knew that this was a different side to Mami she didn’t allow us to see. There she was smiling, dancing, singing, things I hadn’t seen her do ever since El Otro Lado had taken her away. I thought that part of Mami was gone. But then I knew that it was there, except not when she was with us.