I take in that word. Unfit. We were never starved or locked in a closet or anything. Is Mami unfit? Was she unfit? I don’t know. She’s just Mami.
“So, you know, your dad was still in love with her, I think, despite all of it,” Deirdre continues. “I think he still had hopes they could work it out. He would call down there and your mom wouldn’t pick up. He sent the letters, obviously. Weird that she kept them, don’t you think?”
“Yeah,” I say. But was it? I just want to agree so Deirdre will keep talking.
“He was feeling really down about it. Not sure what to do, I guess. Depressed. One night I was asleep in my bedroom upstairs,” she says. “I didn’t even know he’d gone out. Anyway, I heard this screaming. I ran downstairs and the police were here.” She motions her chin toward the front door. “Right there in the entryway, the police were telling my parents what had happened. My mom flipped out, of course.” She pauses, looks over at her father. “Your dad was the oldest of all us kids and I was the youngest, so we were never really, you know … close or anything.” She chews on her thumbnail, shifts her gaze to the front door again. “But he was still my big brother.”
Outside I can hear a neighbor’s dog barking. We don’t speak for a moment or two.
“I’m sorry,” I manage, finally.
“Oh, he was your dad,” Deirdre says, coming out of her thoughts. “I really should say I’m sorry to you. Especially since you never really got to know him.”
“Thanks,” I say. It feels strange to say it, but how else do I respond?
“There’s more, though,” she says. “He was drunk. He was coming back from Caroline’s Pub downtown and the guys at the bar said he’d had more than his share.” There’s a long pause. “He ran into a tree.”
I don’t know why she’s pausing. Like there’s something I’m supposed to understand but don’t.
And then suddenly I see what she wants me to know but can’t say herself.
“You think he … drove into the tree on purpose?”
Deirdre exhales long and loud. “Maybe,” she says. “Of course we’ll never know. My mother would never let anybody even bring up the possibility. But I believe some of my siblings think he did, yeah. Not sure what my dad thought. We never discussed it. But afterward … everyone was so broken over it. My parents were so crushed. And I think …I’m sorry, but I think they blamed your mom. And I think … I guess … they were happy with just letting her disappear.”
“And us along with her,” I add.
Deirdre nods and looks down at her hands. “Now I can see maybe that was wrong. You and your sister were their grandchildren. We could have fought for you. But …” she sighs.
“Hey, it’s okay,” I say. I look down at the open photo album. At the picture of Elena and me in the sandbox. I imagine what our voices would have sounded like bouncing off these walls. I picture us playing tag in the front yard or spraying ourselves with a garden hose. I quickly construct a parallel universe where Deirdre feels more like an older sister than a long-lost aunt.
“You want another beer?” Deirdre asks, raising an eyebrow. “I mean, what I need to know is, did you earn your Irish genes?”
“Por supuesto,” I tell her. “And the Cuban ones, too.”
She cracks up and so do I, and then I say yes to the beer.
“Well come on back to the kitchen with me,” she says. “You can see your mom’s old room. I mean, if you want to.”
Deirdre leads me into a tidy kitchen with white cabinets and a refrigerator covered with kooky magnets, and she opens up a door to a small but serviceable room with a view of the backyard. There are big cardboard boxes stacked up along the perimeter, one of them labeled XMAS DECORATIONS. An old sewing machine sits on a small table in the corner, facing out one of the windows.
“It obviously didn’t look like this when your mom lived here,” she says. “No matter what she told you, I promise. My mom and dad gave her a bed and a dresser and everything.” She says it like she’s half joking, but I can tell she wants to be sure I don’t leave here thinking bad about her family. Which I guess is my family, too. Sort of.
“I’m sure they were good to her,” I say, taking in the rest of the room. The walls are a cheerful yellow even though they’re in desperate need of repainting. I touch the doorframe. Take in a little of the musty smell. When my mother was my age, she slept in this very room. Stared out these very windows. If she knew I was here right now, what would she do? What would she say? Nothing nice, I’m pretty sure. I can hear her voice in my head, sharp and biting.
“Look how they made me sleep off the kitchen like a maid. And I had a maid myself back in Cuba! My mother and father would have never let me go had they known I would be living like this.”
Behind me I hear the sound of a can popping open.
“Here, nephew, drink up,” Deirdre says, grinning, and I take the can in hand, grateful. I push my mother’s voice out of my head. She hated this place like she hates all places that aren’t Cuba. That’s just how she is.
But there is nothing wrong with this place. No matter what she told us when we were little, I know that now. As I follow Deirdre back into the living room, I just keep thinking that this house would have been a really nice place to grow up.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE HOUSE IS DARK AND QUIET AS I CREEP IN, MY Converse in hand so I avoid any extra noise. It’s after ten o’clock. Carlos’s Chevette is parked down the street where Mami won’t see it. I’ll return it tomorrow.
I stand in the middle of the living room, listening to the hum of the refrigerator. The ticktock of the clock. My own breathing.
I can’t wait until tomorrow morning to tell Elena the truth. She has to know right now. I tiptoe to her bedroom door, rap on it lightly.
“Yeah? Joaquin, is that you?”
When I enter, Elena is already sitting up in bed, all lit up from the streetlight that’s streaming in through her bedroom window. As a kid this was my bedroom, but the light kept me up. Elena likes it. So we switched.
“Where were you?” she asks, indignant, but her face has relief written on it.
“I’m sorry,” I say, my voice just above a whisper.
“Mami thought you were working,” she says, curling her knees up under her chin, giving me a look that says she’s not sure if she’s forgiven me yet. “I didn’t tell her any different. But where were you?”
I kick some clothes and magazines out of the way and clear a path to her bed before I sit at the foot. Elena scoots back, resting herself against the wall under that ridiculous Madonna poster.
“I have to tell you something. And it’s pretty intense.”
Elena frowns. Raises an eyebrow.
“Let me guess,” she says. “Amy’s pregnant. I’m going to be Tía Elena.”
“Jesus,” I say, rolling my eyes. “No. Now come on. I need you to be serious.”
Elena sits up straighter and crosses her legs. She’s wearing that old LBJ High track T-shirt of mine again. “Okay,” she says. “What is it?”
In whispers punctuated by Elena’s questions—which come out steady, sure of themselves, not at all hysterical like I imagined they’d be—I unfold the story of the weirdest day of my life, ending with Deirdre walking me out to my car and slipping me her phone number on a piece of paper.
“She told us to be in touch if we want to be,” I say. “And if we want to meet the rest of our family.”
Elena frowns. Her features twist up just a bit. “I don’t know, are they really our family?”
I pull back, confused. “Well … yeah, aren’t they?”
Elena shrugs. “They didn’t want anything to do with us, did they? I mean, when they had the chance?”
My eyes widen. In the car on my way home from Healy, I imagined spilling everything to Elena as she shrieked in anger, paced under the glow of the streetlight, and cursed Mami for lying to us all our lives. But Elena seems calm about all of it.
“Yeah, I mean, I
guess they could have fought harder to keep a relationship with us,” I say. “But you have to admit that it doesn’t sound like Mami made it very easy for them.”
Elena absorbs that for a moment, then says, “Well, we’re really only getting their side of the story.”
“Seriously?” I ask my little sister. “Elena, she lied to us. She told us our father abandoned us. But our father is dead. He’s been dead since you were a baby. This doesn’t bother you?” I’m spitting out every word. My whispers are building up to full volume.
“Stop,” Elena says, waving her hand in front of me. “You’ll wake her up.”
“Maybe she deserves to get woken up.”
Elena sighs and leans over to the packed purse sitting by the side of her bed. She digs inside of it until she retrieves what she’s looking for, a pack of Marlboro Lights. After cracking the window, she lights one up.
“Are you fucking serious?” I ask. “When did this start?”
Elena exhales a stream of smoke through the battered screen and ignores the question.
“Let me guess. J.C.”
“No,” Elena fires back. “I smoked sometimes before him.”
“Well, you weren’t buying packs.”
Elena dumps the ashes into a glass with an inch or two of water that’s sitting on her cluttered nightstand. I wonder if she keeps it for this very purpose.
“You’d better hope Mami doesn’t smell it.”
“I’ll sleep with the windows open and take a shower first thing. And anyway, what do you even care what she thinks? Aren’t you about to charge into her room and attack her for lying to us all our lives?”
She takes another puff. Elena probably thinks smoking makes her look older, but the reverse is true. She looks like a little girl faking it. It’s dumb. Still, her question gnaws at me. What am I going to say to Mami? The whole drive I never thought about that part. Only about telling Elena.
“Just tell me if you’re planning on waking her up, so I can put this out,” Elena says, waving her cigarette in the air. Her voice has turned from neutral to hostile.
“What’s going on with you?” I ask. “Why are you mad at me?”
“I’m not,” she says.
“Liar.”
“I’m not mad!”
Silence except for the puff and sizzle of Elena’s smoke. I know if I wait her out long enough, she’ll start talking. Finally, it works.
“Look, Joaquin, you come in here with your big news, expecting me to flip out,” Elena starts, her big eyes staring me down. She shifts a bit and finally stabs her cigarette out on the inside rim of the glass before letting it drop into the water. “But the truth is, I don’t really feel much one way or the other. From what you’re telling me, our father kind of did abandon us. He went up to Healy and left us here.”
“But he wanted us back,” I argue, thinking of the big, two-story home where Deirdre and my grandfather are most likely fast asleep right now. I picture the family photo album. The rambling porch. The wide backyard.
“Maybe, but he still left us,” Elena says. “Whether he went to California or back home, what does it matter?”
“But she lied to us,” I insist. As usual when it comes to Mami, I’m the angry one. Elena is calm and collected. It pisses me off.
“Maybe she lied because she thought it would be easier than knowing he died,” Elena says. And then she yawns. She actually fucking yawns.
“How are you tired?”
“Joaquin, I can’t do this right now.” She rubs the scar on her chin, her old, nervous habit. Deirdre’s words run through my head. They were going to say our mother was unfit.
“How’d you get that scar on your chin?” I ask, going right for the jugular.
Elena lowers her hand slowly into her lap. “I got it hiking to Machu Picchu,” she says, her voice soft and even, her gaze steady. “I got it skydiving in the Himalayas.”
“Not now, Elena.”
“You know how I got it,” she says, her voice an accusation. “So why bother asking?”
“I just wish,” I start, standing up, getting ready to storm out so she knows how mad I am, “that for once in your life you could stop making excuses for the situation we find ourselves in. That you could grasp the fact that she’s going to control you for the rest of your life if you let her.”
“Oh, enough!” Elena says, her voice louder than it’s been all night. “You act like we live these super-fucking-horrible lives. If you hate it here so much, just leave.”
I shake my head. I walk out of her bedroom and leave her sitting on her bed, staring at me. I shut the door before I can hear her start crying.
This is how Elena got her scar.
The summer she was twelve years old, she left the house to go to the Stop-N-Go while Mami was at work. I was out somewhere, riding bikes with Kevin Anderson. Heading down to the beach to see which girls in our class had started wearing bikinis. Some dumb shit. I was never subjected to Mami’s check-in phone calls.
Mami called once, so Elena thought she was safe for a while after that. But Mami must have been suspicious that day because I guess she called not long after. Only it was too late. At the moment the phone was ringing, Elena was making her way down to Mr. O’Rourke’s store to buy a Coke and a magazine with some Christmas money she still had saved. As she walked, she was oblivious to the fact that Mami was calling and calling, and that the phone was ringing and ringing, and there was no one left to hear it but the walls.
By the time Mami got home from work that evening, I was back from wherever I’d been, and Elena and I were slumped on the couch watching the local news, bored out of our skulls.
“Shit, we should start dinner,” I said, jumping up at the sound of the car door slamming in the driveway. I had just started cursing that summer, trying it out to see how tough it made me sound.
“Shit, shit, shit,” Elena agreed, turning off the television and heading toward the kitchen.
We were pulling a pot out to fill with water so we could boil spaghetti when Mami stalked in, and immediately I knew that Elena and I were—to use a word I’d started using only recently—totally fucked.
“Where were you this afternoon, Elena?” Mami said, staring at us. Before Elena could answer, Mami marched over to the refrigerator and started making herself a drink. The ice cubes rattled a cold warning.
“I was here, Mami,” Elena said, her hands still holding the pot.
“Mentirosa. I called and you didn’t pick up.”
Elena’s face grew red. I stood between the two of them, my eyes jumping back and forth, anticipating the next move.
“Mami, I was here! Maybe I was just in the bathroom?”
Later on, Elena would get better at lying. But back then she was just an amateur. Mami stared her down, cocktail in hand. She took a sip from her drink and eyed us, her body blocking the front door. Waiting. She had already won and she knew it. It was just a matter of Elena officially declaring her surrender.
“Well,” Elena started, her voice cracking, “I just went to the store down the street. I just wanted a Coke. I just … wanted to get out of the house.” Elena could barely speak she was so anxious. Her voice trembled. Tears welled in her eyes. My heart was hammering hard inside my chest. She was my baby sister. I had to protect her somehow.
“Mami,” I said, “calm down. It wasn’t a big deal.” Like swearing, standing up to our mother was something else that I’d recently started trying on for size.
Mami’s face snapped toward me when she heard my voice. I sensed Elena shrinking back against the wall, the pot for spaghetti clutched in her hands, her knuckles white.
“What did you say to me?” Mami fired. The words were thick with fury.
“I said,” I started in, enjoying the sound of my voice, newly deep and powerful, “that it wasn’t a big deal. Let her leave the house every once in a while. It’s ridiculous that you don’t.” Then, to punctuate my statement, I offered up a loud “Jesus Christ!” in the same
tired, world-weary way Kevin Anderson did whenever something pissed him off.
In one swift, explosive movement Mami was across our tiny kitchen with her hands out, coming for me. Reflexively, I ducked and she missed. In a microsecond she decided Elena would do, and as the pot clattered to the floor and I yelled for her to stop, Mami slammed Elena’s face into the edge of the kitchen counter, leaving a dark red slice on Elena’s chin as neat and straight as a ruler. A smear of Elena’s blood marked the place where her face had hit, an angry explosion.
I shouldn’t have moved, hermanita. I should have taken the hit for you.
But I didn’t. I backed out like a coward.
Wordless, Mami stormed out of the house, dropping her drink on the porch where it shattered into pieces. The car engine started up. She didn’t come back until very late that night, long after I had helped Elena clean out the cut and pick up the broken glass on the porch and hours after I’d worried she needed stitches. (She probably did.) By the time our mother returned, Elena was asleep in her bed, her pillow still damp from crying. I lay on a pile of blankets on the carpet next to her bed, a sheet over me, and every so often I sat up to check on her, my heart heavy with guilt.
Mami never spoke of the incident again.
For some time afterward, I tried to be more like Elena. Comply more with Mami’s requests. Push her buttons less. I did it for my sister. The next summer Elena told me about her plan. I went along with it immediately. After all, I owed her. I helped her make the flyer that she allegedly found at Belden’s. I picked out the names for the kids. I covered for her in every way possible. Together we invented the Callahans, and in doing so, Elena created a world where she could escape. A world where Mami no longer held such an influence. A world based on lies.
The Liars Page 20