The van was really honking now, if you can still call it honking when there’s just one long blast of the horn. Bobby shook his head and put his hands on his hips. The only word he said was, “Damn,” which, to me, sounded almost like an apology. Then he minced back over to the van. He was in a hurry, but he still managed to drag his heels a little.
Although I was glad he didn’t actually do it—trust me!—I appreciated the fact that Bobby at least considered coming into the house after me, which is more than I can say for his wife. As the van pulled away, I tried to get one last look at her face, but she was hiding it with a magazine. Then the van turned the corner.
I lowered myself down to the carpet. It was hard to believe that they were really gone. I could still smell gas, but the outside air was coming in so it didn’t smell very dangerous. I knew I should have been happy that my plan had worked, but I just sat there picking at bits of fused carpet and thinking that as low as my expectations were about some people, sometimes they weren’t anywhere near low enough.
Chapter Eleven
Theoretically, I was dead. But that didn’t mean I was safe.
The fire trucks were coming. There was no question about that. I didn’t doubt that the firemen would be very nice when they arrived. A big gallant fireman with a mustache would probably offer me his heavy yellow jacket. I would have accepted it gladly, too, along with any snacks or juice he happened to foist on me.
The problem wasn’t the fire department. It was the TV trucks. TV news people loved a good fire, particularly if there’d been an explosion. I knew for a fact that Mom and Bobby would be watching the news that night—Mom, to see close up what had happened; and Bobby, to prove to Mom how much danger he’d been in. They’d also be looking for pictures of me, their little thief, dead or alive.
I couldn’t just ask the TV people not to show me. They’d do it anyway, no matter how good a reason I gave them. They love showing people who don’t want to be seen, especially grieving families and victims of gunshots and fire. The less you want to be seen, the more the TV people want to show you. It’s perverse, but true.
I would have loved to stay for the nice firemen, and then, in the morning, when my grandparents got back from visiting my father’s grave, to apologize in person about destroying the house. But the TV people made that impossible. If Mom and Bobby saw me alive, they’d come get me. It was as simple as that.
I stood in the front hallway for a minute, even though I knew I had to go. I tried to force myself to think about the next step, but I kept getting distracted. It was strange to see what the explosion had blown up, and what it hadn’t. For instance, I wouldn’t have expected the curtains to drip the way they did, or the carpet to melt and pool in places like glass. I was just as surprised to see that the hundred dollars of Intruder money hadn’t burned up, or even been ruffled. It was bizarre! A picture on the wall nearby was totally scorched, but the five twenties were still fanned out on the table in the hallway, just the way my grandmother had left them. So I took them. I figured that my grandparents would understand. They were always telling me not to leave the house without money.
I was too scared to scavenge any food or clean clothes. The gas was still on, and who knew how long it would be before the place blew up again?
It was time for phase two of my plan: the getaway. I ran down the basement stairs. The iron hand rail was still warm from the explosion, but everything else in the basement seemed normal. The door to the maid’s apartment—Silvia’s old room—was closed, as usual. My grandfather had a habit of closing it whenever he saw it open. The pingpong table was stacked high with laundry. The bookcase shelves bowed under the weight of my grandparents’ dusty encyclopedia. The car keys were in their usual place, a miniature fishbowl on one of the shelves. My grandparents had taken the fancy car, which meant I’d have the Dodge.
I took a long look back. The upstairs was crackling quietly and giving off a nasty smell. I know I should have felt sorry about blowing up the house—and I did—but I was still a little proud of myself. I thought, Oh, well. Then I opened the door to the garage.
The garage was pitch black, which was fine by me. I didn’t want to turn on the light or open the garage door until the last second, in case there were any gawkers outside. The familiar smells of fertilizer and lawnmower and clean rubber tires made me feel oddly safe. I guided myself by touch, running my fingers along the garden hose that my grandfather had nailed to the garage wall to protect the car doors. Feeling my way along the wall, I had to smile. There was a time when the garage used to creep me out, when the sound of the motor and the grinding of the rusty wheels of the electric garage door opener would frighten me. That’s how skittish I was when I first came to live with my grandparents.
I was fiddling with the car lock when I heard sobbing coming from the basement. I thought I’d been alone in the house the whole time. I hadn’t counted on my grandparents getting another maid so soon.
It’s embarrassing to say, but I almost didn’t go back in the house. Call it my mother’s stellar influence. I was scared. My body was beginning to hurt, my wrist in particular. I knew I had to get out of there. But the sobbing just went on and on. I wanted to scream, “Shut up!” but screaming was out of the question. Nobody in their right mind stays in a burning building and sobs—not even an ignorant Mexican.
Thinking of Silvia was what finally convinced me to go back in. I wasn’t about to be responsible for someone’s death. Honestly, if I hadn’t thought of her, I might have just hit the road.
I knew I could walk right in to Silvia’s old apartment. The door didn’t lock. It was held shut by a magnet at the top. The knob didn’t even turn. You just pulled it straight open, like a closet door. That had gotten me in trouble once or twice with Silvia and Roberto. I suppose there wasn’t a real security reason to have a lock on it, but now, in light of what I knew about my grandparents, it made sense that they wouldn’t want the maid to be able to lock her door.
Even before I opened the door and turned on the light, I knew who was inside. I could smell her.
It was Silvia. She wore a distinctive ultra sweet kiddie perfume, some berry or other—but she also used my grandfather’s brand of deodorant. She said it reminded her of her father. So she gave off a confused smell, half man and half woman, which generally annoyed me. But for once, that mixed signal of hers was making me incredibly happy.
Silvia’s sobbing was so scary and intense, for a moment I thought she might be having her baby. I turned on the light. There she was, sitting on the floor with her skinny little legs splayed out in front of her, her round belly resting like a basketball on her lap. She aimed a hammered tin cross at me and started screaming in Spanish. She seemed to think I was some kind of demon.
It took a minute or two to calm her down enough to talk. I kept saying, “It’s just Chlo, it’s Chlo.” She waved her finger at me each time I said it, as if saying my own name was a no-no. “If you’re who you say you are,” she said, “then stand over there.” Meaning, in front of the mirror, to prove I had a reflection. She was being absurd, but I understood a little better when I saw myself in the mirror. My chin was smudged black from the windowsill. That plus the missing eyebrows and eyelashes did make me look pretty ghoulish, not to mention the fact that the left side of my hair was all curled up from the heat, which made it look like I had gotten a lunatic perm, or at least half of one.
Silvia made me take a test to prove that I was really me. She asked a bunch of questions, things that only I would have known, such as, What was her favorite kind of pizza? I answered, “Ham and pineapple.” What was her favorite movie? “Gone with the Wind.”
“See?” I said. Silvia grimaced.
“That doesn’t prove anything!” she said.
I told her it wasn’t my fault if she asked bad questions.
“You confused me,” she said. “It wasn’t fair.”
“How?” I said. “How?”
“You’ve got ways.”
/> “All right,” I said. “One more question.”
Silvia had already thought up the ultimate puzzler. “What was the name of the first teddy bear Roberto gave me?”
“That’s a trick question!” I said. “He gave you about ten, all at the same time.”
“Then the first big one.”
“Fuzzy or hairy?”
“Fuzzy.”
“Tito P.,” I said. “After some dumb musician.”
Silvia started sobbing again. “Oh, Chica,” she said. “It is you. Thank God.” She reached up and pinched my cheeks, which stung like they were sunburnt. Then she pulled me down next to her and kissed my lips and said, “Sweetie, we thought you were dead!”
From what I could gather between blubbery hugs—which were still punctuated now and then by sudden piercing looks, just in case I really was a demon—Silvia was overdue to have her baby. “The baby won’t come and the doctors tell me nothing, but then I figured it out—God is unhappy with me. I’m so unfortunate! I left my saints.” She opened a paper bag and showed me what was inside: two picture frames made out of flattened coffee cans, with tacky religious scenes in them; some fat candles with printed hocus pocus that’s supposed to come true as the candle burns; some bits of metal in the shapes of human body parts, that she said were for praying. And of course the tin cross, which she still wouldn’t let me touch and which she kept more or less pointed in my direction. For insurance, I suppose.
Silvia had somehow gotten it into her head that God was punishing her for leaving all that stuff behind. That’s the kind of thing I hate most about religion, that it takes perfectly good people with real problems and gives them the worst kind of nonsense to worry about.
I personally didn’t agree with her convictions, but I didn’t argue with her—she was still very freaked. She thought that the explosion upstairs was the Devil come to destroy her. “And you, Chica, are my angel, sent from God as a sign that coming back here was the right thing.” I thanked her for that, because thinking someone is an angel is pretty nice, even if it is a load of baloney.
I told her we had to get out of the house because it was still on fire. “Whatever you say, anything. Really,” Silvia said, brushing my shoulders. I was a mess, there’s no denying it, but she was treating me like a Hollywood celebrity or something, so I told her to please cut it out.
Silvia objected to taking the Dodge. She never called it “stealing,” exactly, but that was clearly what she was thinking. I told her we had to take it. I asked her if she wanted me to be kidnapped again. It was a low blow, but we had wasted too much time already playing twenty questions. “Oh, no,” she said. “In that case, the car is necessary.”
This was my escape, my plan, and I wasn’t about to let Silvia drive, but I banged my wrist against the steering wheel as I was climbing into the Dodge. The pain was so harsh I had to twist my legs out of the car and put my head down between them to keep from throwing up. I had never seen a bruise like the one that was coming in—it was all yellow-green and nasty. Now there was no question about my driving. Even I knew better than to try it one-handed.
I wasn’t sure Silvia could fit behind the wheel, on account of her enormous belly, but together we managed to push the seat back. Just as we figured out how to tilt the steering wheel up and out of the way, we heard the first fire truck pulling up around front. Its idling engine made the hanging garden tools rattle against the wall of the garage.
The Dodge started up fine, but instead of getting going, Silvia sat there with her head bowed. “Can we please just go?” I said. Silvia said she wasn’t going anywhere without saying a prayer first, and that I had to say it with her. She could be extremely stubborn. I helped her say her stupid prayer. At least I let her glom onto my good hand while she said something very fervent in Spanish. She looked up at me with her big gooey eyes when she finished and squeezed my hand until I said “Amen.” I was annoyed with her for holding me hostage to a prayer like that. People shouldn’t do that to one another. It’s bad manners.
Then there was nothing holding us back. I got the garage door going. Silvia wasn’t quite used to the new distance to the pedals. When she released the emergency brake, the Dodge gunned forward. We shot out of the garage and down the driveway, narrowly missing a fireman who had made his way around the house. I waved to him as we lurched around the corner. I meant it as an apology. The fireman waved back with his yellow-handled ax. He didn’t seem too angry, but then, I might have been reading into it. He mouthed the words, “Take it easy,” like a teacher whose students are crazy for recess.
Chapter Twelve
Go! Go! Go! was all I could think as we left the house behind. My stomach muscles were all tensed up from wanting to go faster. It didn’t feel much like freedom, at least not at first. I ducked down at the first sign of anything remotely resembling a van. After a while, though, Silvia’s constant chatter about Roberto, and the familiar insides of the Dodge—the creaky vinyl, the smell of cherry cough drops—all went to work on me and I began to relax. I stared out the window while Silvia drove. She took us up on the freeway. The road hummed reassuringly. The highway lights smiled down on us. Everything started to fall away: the explosion, my mother, the whole sleeping city, with its empty factories and broken down houses.
I was feeling a strange mix of lightness and heaviness, as if I had just hauled myself up onto a sun-baked raft after a long night treading water. It was a while before I even asked Silvia where we were going. She said “California,” as if crossing the country was the easiest thing in the world. In my frazzled mind, California seemed as good as any place. I had a hundred dollars in my pocket. We had a full tank of gas. I asked Silvia if she knew how to get there. She said something about God pointing the way. At the time, even that kind of thinking didn’t annoy me too much.
I dozed with my head rattling against the window, but it was the worst kind of sleep, where something really hurts and you wake up every two minutes because of the pain. I had seen a teething baby cry in its sleep. I suppose that’s what I was like. When the pain in my wrist wasn’t jarring me, it was Silvia, gently shaking my thigh and saying, “It’s just a nightmare. There’s no need to cry, Chica.”
Then I must have finally fallen into a deeper sleep, because I opened my eyes to the morning sun in the side view mirror. Silvia’s window was half open, which made it very loud inside the car, but I didn’t mind. The wind chafed my face, but I loved all that air anyway. I asked if we were in California yet. I meant it as a joke, because California is days and days away by car, but Silvia apologized for the trip taking so long. She said she thought we might be getting close.
At that point, I started to pay attention to the road. There was something familiar about it, but then there’s always something familiar about highways. They’re all pretty much the same, at least the big ones, except for the signs. We were in a stretch where the signs weren’t particularly helpful, but occasionally we spotted one that told us we were going west. I figured we couldn’t be doing all that badly. California was nothing if not west.
But then, after about twenty minutes, the sign changed and told us we were going south, which was strange because we hadn’t taken any exits. The traffic started to get heavy, which was also suspicious. After crawling along for ages, we came to another sign. This one said we were going east. Then I recognized one of the exits from when my grandparents used to take me over to see one of their friends who lived on the other side of town. “We’re on the Beltway!” I shouted.
The needle on the gas gauge said, “Empty.” Silvia had been circling the city all night. I tried to explain what had happened, but Silvia refused to understand. In her mind, we were halfway to California. “I didn’t make a turn,” she said, shaking her head confidently, “never once.” She at least agreed that we needed gas, so we pulled off at the next exit.
I was sure Silvia was hungry, even if she was too sheepish to admit it just then, so I suggested that we stop at a Taco Palace. I felt gui
lty about getting so mad at her. It wasn’t her fault that she didn’t know how to navigate. The roads are more complicated in America than in Mexico. That’s why we use maps here.
Silvia pooh-poohed the Taco Palace. She said that the food there wasn’t what Mexicans really ate, but what Americans thought Mexicans ate, which, in her mind, painted an ugly picture of Americans. I didn’t want to get into a fight with her, although I liked the food at Taco Palace. I thought it was pretty ungrateful of her to reject it as not Mexican enough.
We finally stopped at a hamburger place, but Silvia didn’t approve of that, either. When it came to ordering, she just got some orange juice and toast. She threw most of it out. I told her she had to eat, for the baby, but she claimed she wasn’t very hungry and that she’d eat tons when we got to California. She said that Roberto was a great cook. As for me, I wished that it was lunchtime, because what I really wanted was a hamburger, or maybe even two, but it was still early in the morning, and all they were serving was breakfast. It’s funny how you can be hungry for the wrong meal. My appetite clock had gotten pretty messed up at my mother’s house.
After breakfast, we gassed up the car. Silvia spent a lot of time in the Mini-Mart at the gas station. She came out with some surprisingly nice fruit, some cookies, and a bottle of lemon-lime fizzy water, which is my favorite. She also had a carton of milk, which she opened before we got back in the car. She asked me to hold it and give her sips as we drove.
When we were back on the Beltway, Silvia said that the sooner we got to California, the better, so we should keep driving as long as we could, not even stopping to pee, if we could help it. I knew that not stopping to pee would be a big personal sacrifice for her, because her bladder was so tiny on account of the baby.
I was making a big sacrifice, too, but I didn’t mention it. My wrist was so swollen I could barely move it. I had borrowed some scotch tape from the gas station attendant to wrap my fingers together and keep them still. Moving them—even the slightest jiggle—caused the worst pain, even worse than the time my jaw was broken and nobody found out about it for almost a week.
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