“I have to go get my sister now.” I step into the street, stuff my hands in my pockets, and nod my head toward the primary school at the end of the block. Those cojudos are out of sight, so she doesn’t have any reason to walk with me anymore.
But she steps into the street, too, and waits with me while I wait.
When the bell rings and the doors to the primary school fly open, a herd of noisy children stumble out. Soledad shifts a quarter turn in my direction. “San Sebastián is a shit place for you to live, I know. But for your sister? It’s dangerous. If you have anywhere else you can go, you should leave, as soon as you can. If I had anywhere else—anywhere else to go, I would never set foot in that prison again.”
I don’t have time to explain, and anyway I don’t want to talk about Mamá leaving, or about everything I can’t do for Papá, and risk shedding more of whatever sinew is still holding me upright. I’m not ready for this girl to see me like that. So I just shift a quarter turn in her direction. And that’s all the answer I can give, for now.
I don’t know what Pilar reads into any of it, but after she’s crossed the street, my sister moves into the space between Soledad and me. She takes my hand and pauses for a second, then reaches up to take Soledad’s, too.
October 26
I’m in history class working on the rough draft of my essay, and every question just seems to lead to another question to another unsatisfying answer. The only thing I really know is that us poor kids—we’re set up to fail. From the start.
It’s people with university degrees who make all the decisions—lawyers, judges, politicians. If you don’t graduate from secondary school, no way are you going to university. If you live in a poor town, you don’t even have a secondary school to go to. So what, then? Your chance of making it in the world is over before you even begin?
I stand, and my chair makes this loud scraping noise. Everyone is staring at me. I crumple all the stuttering starts of my essay into a ball and throw them into the trash can on my way out. Profesor Perez lets me go, even though there are still ten minutes left in class.
• • •
I wait for Soledad after school, and we walk together to get Pilar. I wish I knew how Soledad ended up like this. I mean, we’ve gone to the same school all our lives, but we’re basically strangers.
I have algebra homework and a geography test to study for, but I don’t really want to work on either. While we walk, I look over my notes from writing class. “I didn’t get what Profesora Ortiz was saying about iambs and dactyls. Did you?”
“No, I wasn’t paying attention.”
“You’re not going to do the poems?”
“I’m doing the assignment, I’m just not writing poems.”
“What? How did you swing that?”
“I’m writing down the songs my abuela used to sing to me.”
“Lucky.”
Soledad rolls her eyes. “Well, I have to piece together the songs from memories that are mostly gone. I was just a kid when she died. And then I have to translate them from the original Aymara. And somehow, in the translation, I have to make the new words sound like they’ve always belonged together.”
Okay, so maybe her way isn’t so easy either.
We stop in front of the primary school and lean into the shade of a flowering tree. Soledad scuffs her heel against the brick wall we’re leaning against and turns to face me. “What are you writing about that you need to know all about those dactyls or whatever?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Nothing good. Just life, I guess.”
“Who gets to say what’s good and what’s not? If it’s real, and if it’s true, that sounds like poetry to me.”
After we pick up Pilar, we head to the cancha, but I stop short of the tarp awnings. There’s a policeman there, scanning the area. I may not understand the 1008, or anything really about the system that put Papá in prison, but it’s the police who make the arrests, and the police who guard the prison. The least I can do is keep away from them when I can.
“Let’s just walk a bit,” I say.
“Sure—whatever.” Soledad plays it off like it’s no big deal, but her eyes track the officer as we veer around the corner.
In the middle of a run-down side street, Pilar stops walking, and I stop with her to see what she’s looking at. It’s the same broken little city through the archway that we passed a couple of weeks ago. Street kids are everywhere. It looks just as filthy as the prison.
“We should keep going,” Soledad whispers.
“Why—what’s wrong?” I ask.
“These places are bad. We need to leave.” She’s nervous. Her claws are ready, her tail lashing.
Pilar grips my hand and ducks behind my arm.
“But those kids are just like us, right? With nowhere else to go?”
She turns on me then. “I told you. If there was anywhere better than San Sebastián, I would go there.”
I’m an idiot. It’s one thing to be reckless with my words and my fists and myself. But not with her. And especially not with Pilar. “Okay, you’re right. Let’s go.”
Footsteps scuff against the concrete behind me, and Soledad’s eyes slide to the space just over my left shoulder. She tightens her hold on Pilar’s hand.
“What are you doing here?”
I know that voice.
“Reynaldo?” I spin around. He’s flanked by a pair of guys. Thick, tough guys.
“Who else?”
“Where have you been? Profesor Perez keeps asking why you’re not in school.”
He motions to the crumbling arch and the courtyard beyond. “Why would I bother with school when I have all this?”
“You live here now?”
“Mamá kicked me out. Where else was I supposed to go?” His arms drop back to his sides. And a little of the bravado drops off too.
“Your má kicked you out? Why?”
He leans in, whispering, “She found a stash of drugs in my room.”
I knew he was dealing. But still, this catches me off guard. “So you live here, with these street kids?”
He lifts one shoulder in a shrug. “I almost have enough saved to get a place of my own. You could join us, Francisco. We can still open our shop. We can have it all.”
For the first time, I don’t have anything to say to Reynaldo. He told me it was temporary, that he was just doing what he had to so we could get our shop off the ground. There are hundreds of people stuck in San Sebastián because of drugs, and that’s what Reynaldo wants with his life? Really?
I back away, pulling Pilar and Soledad with me. “I can’t. Papá needs me. Pilar needs me.”
“Yeah?” Reynaldo calls after me. “And what about you, Francisco? Who is looking out for you?”
Reynaldo’s words hang over me the whole walk home, and through dinner, and while I toss and turn, trying to sleep.
Who is looking out for you?
He only asked what I would have asked before. What about you, Rey? You’ve got to look out for you.
The thing is, Papá was always looking out for me, and, as much as I hated it, pushing me to reach for more than the world offered. He’s still looking out for me, in the little ways he can.
And, yeah, it’s awful in here. But I can get out when I need to, when I need a breath, when I need to throw my head back and just let the sky swallow me.
Papá can’t do that. And I don’t know how to say to my friend who used to think like I thought and want what I wanted out of life, that everything is different now. He’s different, and I’m different, and I don’t know if I can go where he’s headed.
• • •
I wake in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. I sit up, run my fingers through my hair, and rest my elbows against my knees, waiting for my breath to settle, for the panic to work its way out of my pores.
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I close my eyes and the dream is right there, hovering at the edge of sleep. I see Reynaldo—not like he is now, but as a kid. As a six-year-old kid like the day we first met.
He’s trying to hold his father’s charango in his hands and play at the same time, but the round bowl keeps slipping against his stomach. He’s singing a serenata for his mother, and the light is on inside the house, but she won’t open the shutters. Reynaldo is singing as loud as he can, but rivers and rivers of tears slide down his cheeks and fill his mouth to overflowing until he’s choking and he can’t sing anymore.
I blink myself awake, blink back the dream, all the time gasping for breath like it’s me who’s drowning.
October 27
Waking up from a bad dream is like waking up with a head cold. It feels like there are cotton balls packed around all the empty spaces in my brain.
I look for Soledad between classes. She’s by the wall, alone.
“Hey,” I say as I lean against the bricks a ways down from her. The street is empty. The school is quiet, for once. Even the wind is still. “How come I never see you doing homework?”
Soledad shrugs.
“You’re not going to do the history essay?”
“No—I am,” she says. “That one matters. I just don’t need to spend hours in the library to write a paper on educational inequity and the movement for indigenous rights.”
“Is that even a thing?”
She cuts her eyes sideways at me. “Funny.”
“I’m sort of serious.”
She looks at me like I’ve lost it. “Yeah, it’s a thing. Have you ever seen an indigenous person in a government position? Or haven’t you noticed that they don’t teach the Quechua or Aymara languages in public schools? Think about it, Francisco—who is filling the prisons? Not the light-skinned professional class. Us. We are. Don’t tell me you’ve never been called a stupid indio.”
“I mean, people are jerks, but I didn’t think anybody was doing anything about it. I didn’t think there was anything we could do about it.”
Soledad rolls her eyes, “Well, if you think like that, then there definitely won’t be.”
When the school day ends, I don’t make up some stupid excuse, and I definitely don’t try to start a conversation, I just stand to leave when Soledad does and fall in beside her.
She never said don’t touch me. She didn’t have to. I understood from the beginning that even if she’s falling, even if I’m only trying to stop her from stepping in front of a speeding car, even if it’s just to cushion her fall—if I touch her, it will break whatever not-quite-trust thing we have going.
We collect Pilar, and Soledad takes us to a food cart for lunch, then to a small biblioteca run by volunteers from the local police station. There are only a few dozen books on a single metal shelf, and you can’t take any of them home with you. Can you really call it a library if it hardly has any books?
There are kids everywhere—huddled around the tables and sprawled on the floor. I don’t recognize any of them from the prison, so maybe they’re street kids? Or maybe they have families, and they’re just waiting for their parents to get off work. I bet they don’t have any idea how lucky they are.
I wish we could take a book back to the prison with us—it would give Pilar something to do after she finishes her homework besides playing with rocks and insect carcasses and her doll that’s become as filthy as everything else in the prison. But for now at least, my sister is curled up in a mound of pillows by the window. All afternoon, she’s like a regular kid—napping, flipping through a book, and staring out the window.
When I was in primary school, I spent every afternoon with Reynaldo, running all over the neighborhood. Lots of kids my age had to work after school, but Mamá had a good job. And she was proud. She came from an elite family where kids could be kids. Papá had worked from the time he was a little boy, and he didn’t want that for us. Both of my parents wanted us to have a real childhood.
So what changed, Mamá?
You just gave up. Why?
It got too hard? You lost hope? What?
I pull out a pen and paper, and I hunch over the table so Soledad can’t see. This time, I don’t even think, I don’t try to shape the lines or the ideas. I just let it go.
When I see my mother in my dreams
she is the oldest woman in the world
wrinkles like arroyos gouge her face.
Her eyes are white as clouds.
I am afraid of this anciana,
this vision of my mother.
Was she always so worn
and I just couldn’t see it?
Was she always so tired?
Every time, in the dream,
the white drains out of her eyes,
a flash flood that washes down her cheeks
mud sloughing off
until her face is smooth and young and bright
her cheekbones high,
her eyes uplifted.
Is this what she was
before she was a mother?
Did I do this to her?
The officer behind the desk gives Pilar candies. And he holds his hands behind his back when he speaks to Soledad. But when he looks at me, his smile falters.
Papá wouldn’t be in prison if it weren’t for the police. We wouldn’t be motherless if Papá wasn’t in prison. I don’t say what I’m thinking, but I also don’t lower my gaze. I let my eyes say what my voice doesn’t, and I see in the way the edges of the officer’s mouth fall downward when he looks at me that he hears it.
• • •
When we get back to the prison, the three of us walk up the stairs together, and Soledad stops at her cell door. She tugs on the chain around her neck, pulls out a key, and turns it in the lock.
“Do you want to come over after dinner?” Pilar asks.
Soledad shakes her head. She slips through the open door and closes it behind her before I can sort the shadows inside into shapes. The bolt scrapes, steel on steel, as the door locks again from the inside.
The prisoners have been counted for the night, the gates are shut, and Pilar and I are in our cell. Papá’s in the shower washing himself and our laundry. I’m reading through my notes on the 1008 again, but it’s not helping.
With the last of the light coming in from the small window, Pilar is drawing on the back of one of her school assignments. I should be doing my homework, but I can’t bring myself to care.
What does any of it matter if I can’t get Papá a lawyer?
If we were home, Mamá would be cooking over the stove and Papá would be at the table with Pilar and me, checking our work and asking us a million questions. I think he did that as much for himself as anything. He was the one who wanted to learn, not me.
I would always put up with it for a while—just long enough to keep him off my back. Then, as soon as I could after dinner, I’d get out of there and go to Reynaldo’s while Mamá and Papá and Pilar spent the rest of the evening together.
Maybe Pilar did this sort of thing then, too? Maybe she drew pictures for Papá in answer to his poems or to remind Mamá of us while she was at work all day, and I was just never around to notice?
I can see it now—Pilar lying on her belly on the carpet, kicking her heels together in the air as the heavy curtains over the window let in a muted light. Papá and Mamá sitting together on the couch, not at opposite ends like normal adults, but squeezed together on the same cushion and talking in soft tones.
Why was I in such a hurry to get away from that?
Here there’s no soft carpet for Pilar to lie on. She’s sitting on the far corner of the mattress, turned away from me.
“What are you drawing?”
Pilar’s head lifts away from the wall, and she turns to look at me. A small line forms between her eyebrows. “A feathe
r.”
I scoot over and look at the pencil drawing on the gravel-pocked paper. “It’s nice.”
The line disappears, and Pilar tilts her head to the side. “I think it looks like a smile, don’t you?”
“I guess I could see that.”
“It’s for Soledad. I think she might be lonely at night.”
Pilar’s hand is steady, but the ground the paper rests on isn’t anything close to smooth, so the plumes come out all crooked. The thing looks bent and wiggly at the edges, but it’s kind of perfect that way.
I thought it was a good thing that I was tough, that I wouldn’t back down from a fight. I thought it would help us survive in this place. But I’m beginning to wonder if Pilar’s way is better. Just a solid grip on the good things—any good things you can find.
• • •
When Papá comes back, his hair wet but clean and our damp clothes hanging over his arms, I walk with Pilar to Soledad’s cell. My sister bends down and scoots the paper under the gap at the bottom of the door until just a sliver of white is visible. We hear a shuffling sound from inside and the paper is whisked away, out of sight.
We walk back to our cell, lock ourselves inside, and help Papá hang up the clothes so they’ll dry by morning. Pilar smiles only once, just a little, to herself. But somehow it fills the place up all night.
October 28
Papá is not writing.
He hasn’t written a single poem since he came to San Sebastián. I wonder what his mind is like with all those thoughts churning around, stuck in there.
His poems were how we always talked about things. I mean—we argued about school, and we chatted about fútbol matches. But real things? Like the kind of man he wanted me to be? Like how much he loved me? That was harder to say face-to-face. We talked about those things through his poems.
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