by Cyn Vargas
Blood seeped from my bottom lip as I bit down on it. I tasted it with the tears that collected at the corner of my lips. His breath was all over me. I wanted to scrub myself with a wire pad until I bled.
Laughter rattled from the television. I squinted and saw that chocolate milk commercial with happy children and that brown cartoon bunny with floppy ears.
“Mija, trust me.”
It all felt suffocating: his grunts and the dirty carpet and the dark room and the screech of the bed springs and the tires of the trucks on the highway and my tears and my blood—me—and his sour breath and Mom so far away.
Elena, Elena, my name in his mouth.
The next morning, Pop pretended nothing happened. He was up before I was, putting on his shoes as he sat in a chair.
“Go get ready. We have to hit the road. I’ll wait for you in the car.”
I cried in the shower. I got dressed in the bathroom with the door locked.
We didn’t speak in the car except for when we were waiting to order food at a drive-thru. “I don’t know what got into me,” he said and paused for a second. ”It was a mistake. We don’t need to tell Christina or your mom.” A voice crackled through the speaker outside the car window. “Want some eggs?” he asked. I shook my head.
When we got to Florida, Christina had a cheese sandwich waiting for me. She smiled and gave me a hug, and although I used to be angry at her for taking my father away, I cried in her arms.
“How was the trip?” she asked, wiping my eyes. “You must miss your mom.”
I slept most of the week there, on the couch of their cramped one bedroom apartment. My father barely said anything to me and instead took double shifts at the local hospital, where he worked as a security guard.
A week later, I flew home. Pop and Christina drove me to the airport. He patted me on the back and said goodbye. On the plane, I felt safe for the first time in days.
When Mom met me at the airport, her eyes were red and swollen. She hugged me tight in the middle of a crowd of people trying to step around us to get to their bags.
“Mom, I have to tell you something.”
She held me closer and whispered, “Your father called and told me what happened. Let’s talk about it in the car.”
We walked in silence, except for the hum of my suitcase rolling along the slick, polished floor. In the car on the way home, I stared out the window.
“I’m so sorry,” Mom said. I turned away from the window. Her knuckles were white on the steering wheel.
“I can’t believe he told you. He told me not to say anything,” I started to cry.
“He said he knew you would tell me and didn’t want things to get confused. That he was drunk, you guys were in the same bed, he thought you were Christina, but then stopped.”
Mom put her hand back on the wheel.
“That’s not true. He wasn’t drunk. He knew it was me.”
Mom exhaled, long and slow. “Look, he said he’s sorry. There’s no sense in exaggerating the story. He said you would try to do that because you’re angry he left us.” As she said this, Mom didn’t look at me.
“He did more. He knew what he was doing, Mom. We should tell someone.”
“Stop, Elena. We aren’t telling anyone. How am I supposed to support both of us without his help?” We drove past an outdoor ice-skating rink, brightly lit and crowded with people. “You’re never going to see or talk to him again, and no one is to ever know. And don’t go telling your grandparents. Imagine. It would destroy them.”
I stared at the headlights illuminating the dark street ahead of us.
“Let’s forget about it, OK?” she said.
I said nothing, and she fell silent, and that’s the way it was for a long time.
It took nearly fifteen years for her to mention it again.
“I know I haven’t been the best mom, but I want you to know I tried,” she said. Her fingers rubbed against the handle of her suitcase. Her boarding group number had just been called. The crowd at the gate dissipated as people boarded planes.
“You don’t want to miss your flight, Mom. Larry’s going to wonder why his new wife didn’t get off the plane,” I joked, but she didn’t laugh.
“Forgive me.”
“Mom, it’s not like you’re dying. You’re just moving across the country,” I said, but I didn’t look at her. ‘Forgive me’ were words she had never said before, and they seemed to peel back that moment I’d taken so long to bury.
“Please forgive me, Elena. I couldn’t raise you on just my factory check, but now...” She began to cry.
“You need to go, Mom. Don’t miss your flight.”
“Why won’t you talk about this?”
“You’re asking me why I don’t want to talk about this? In the middle of a damn airport?” Some people in line turned and peeked at us.
“Look,” I said, my voice lowered. “You go live your life, now. I’m grown. You’ve been the best mom you thought you could be, but don’t ask me to forgive you for that.”
“But, why?”
“Because I just can’t. Not right now, anyhow.”
“I love you. I’m sorry,” she said, and turned to board.
“Me too,” I muttered, but she didn’t hear me.
The funeral home seemed to shrink as more people arrived. The priest stood at the front of the room and began to speak.
I looked at my father. “I remember,” I said.
“I don’t know what…” he started, but he knew. His eyes darted around the room, but didn’t meet mine.
“You think I’d just forget?” My heart hammered. We weren’t in that funeral home anymore. We were back in that motel room. I could smell his breath and feel his hands on me again.
In that second, I saw my reflection in his eyes. I looked just like him. The same wide mouth, the same brown, thick hair. For years, I hated that I resembled the person I hated most in the world.
“Elena, your father’s moving in with me.” Grandpa hooked his arm with mine, breaking the silence. “I know you two don’t talk, but I love you both, so you got to at least respect each other for me. I want to be at peace with whatever time I have left. I ask you both to give me that.”
Grandpa was the father I never had, and I wanted to tell him what happened to me so he would hate his son as much as I hated him, but I couldn’t bring myself to say anything. The time to save me was long gone.
THE KEYS
I was thirteen the summer I went to El Salvador to visit my abuelos. They had just moved there from the States. They lived off the busiest street in Cojutepeque, not entirely the poorest in the city, but by no means the wealthiest. Near their house there was a six-corner intersection of three unpaved streets with no stop signs. I never saw an accident while I was there, but one time I found a dead dog in the ditch, and another time, a dead horse sprawled out on the edge of the road. The careless drivers were long gone.
After a week, I got to know my abuelos pretty well. Abuela went to church every morning at 8:00 a.m. and stayed there ’til 9:30, went to the cemetery to visit her mother, taught English for free in the park to whoever wanted to learn, stopped by the panadería to get pastries for her afternoon coffee, spoke with the street vendors who sold Levi’s jeans, and returned home around noon.
I went with her the first few days, but I was too tired to listen to the priest speak Spanish way too fast for me to comprehend. Afterward, Abuela introduced me to everyone, and they all asked me about Chicago and how much money my parents made. They thought because I was American, I had money. After that, Abuela said I could sleep in as long as I prayed the rosary with her at night.
Abuelo waited ’til I woke up around 10:00 a.m. to take me to the mercado so I could buy souvenirs I didn’t need: scrunchies that didn’t hold my hair, t-shirts with GUANACA spelled out across the front, and a real stuffed lizard smoking a cigarette in one claw and holding a miniature Salvadorean flag in t
he other. Sometimes we went for a stroll around the neighborhood, where people on the sidewalks with colorful cloth bags and sombreros moved slowly against the river of yellow and red scooters that zipped down the dirt roads.
Back in the States, Abuelo took me to the circus and took me to the movies. He told me stories about how, when he was a kid, no one thought he spoke Spanish because he was part British. Before they moved, he showed me how to punch someone in the stomach hard enough to knock the wind out them, just in case any boys tried to make a move.
After a week, our routine changed. We didn’t go for a walk or to the mercado. Instead, we went to a new neighborhood.
“Don’t tell Abuela, OK, Sara? She doesn’t like Fernando,” he said as we entered a small concrete house painted the color of pistachios. Inside, Abuelo drank tequila and played poker with Don Fernando, whose kids I taught to say “Hello, I need to pee,” in English.
I covered for him that night when Abuela asked him why he smelled like fried chicken, which he wasn’t supposed to eat because of his high cholesterol.
“I didn’t have any fried chicken. I know how bad it is for my heart,” Abuelo said.
“I ate the fried chicken, Abuela,” I blurted out, even though I hated fried chicken.
“Try to eat better, Sara, OK?” she said, and smiled at us both. When she looked away, Abuelo grinned at me.
A few days after that Abuelo started acting strange. From my bed, I’d hear him get up in the mornings right after Abuela left for church. I heard him turn on the shower in the bathroom. The floorboards creaked as he walked around in his room and made his way out the front door.
I didn’t think anything of it at first, but it kept happening. When I asked him where he went, Abuelo would only shake his head. I had to know. One morning, I didn’t go back to sleep after he left. Instead, I watched him through my bedroom window. Through the dust on the glass, I saw Abuelo go not in the direction of Don Fernando’s, or in the direction of the mercado, or even to the chicken joint. He took a street I had never seen him take before. I watched for as long as I could before he disappeared.
Later that day, he got home right before Abuela, breathing heavy and giving me a thumbs up, as though he'd won a race. He went straight to the bathroom and by the time he got out, Abuela had arrived, pouring coffee and putting the pasteles on the kitchen table. I began cutting queso fresco into little triangles so we could have them with the tortillas.
“You two stayed in this morning?” Abuela asked as she stirred the frijoles and warmed the tortillas right over the open flames on the stove. She never burned her hands, just flipped the tortillas without really even looking, until the ends curled and the center bore small dark spots.
“Sara and I took it easy,” he said, winking so only I could see.
“Yup,” I lied, and hoped that Abuela hadn’t heard me swallow hard.
It was 8:00 p.m. that night, the universal time that all old people in El Salvador fall asleep, including my abuelos. I said goodnight to them both. Abuela began snoring almost immediately. My plan was to stay up ’til Abuelo took his nightly trip to the fridge and then make him tell me where he had really been going. While I waited, I took a long, cool shower and then watched some reruns of Cops and the ending of The Terminator, which was on the only English-speaking channel their cable picked up. I understood Spanish completely, I just didn’t like Spanish television shows.
After two hours, the cable went out—again. I didn’t think Abuelo would mind if I woke him up to fix it. This American girl needed her TV! I tiptoed into their room. But Abuela was alone in the bed in her ivory nightgown.
I moved to tiptoe back out of the room and banged my knee into the steel frame of the bed. Abuela stirred awake.
“Everything OK?” she slurred.
“Yes, Abuela.”
She turned onto her back and felt the empty side beside her. “Where’s your abuelo?” she muttered.
Maybe he had gone back to Don Fernando’s for another game, or to the chicken joint, or to the mystery place he went in the mornings. Wherever he was, he’d gone without telling Abuela and I didn’t know if I should be the one to point out that he wasn’t in the house.
“The cable. It went out. I asked Abuelo to fix it, so that’s what he’s doing. Fixing it. Go back to sleep, Abuela,” I said, and kissed her forehead. She turned to her other side this time, and by the time I tiptoed out of the room, she was snoring again.
Abuelo must have gone out when I was in the shower and thought I wouldn’t come looking for him. He never went out at night though; Abuela was too paranoid that something would happen to him. “This neighborhood is very different after dark. That’s why we stay inside when night comes,” she had said.
I wanted to stay up so I could make Abuelo tell me where he had gone. But I ended up falling asleep on the couch. I woke up to Abuelo telling Abuela that he’d had a good night’s sleep.
“I know you went somewhere,” I whispered later, when Abuela was out of the room. “Sara, you must have been dreaming,” he replied, and then Abuela came back into the room and I didn’t say anything more.
That night, I pretended to go to sleep early. I faked a yawn loud enough for my abuelos to hear and then didn’t move. A little later, I heard Abuela snoring, and sometime after that, from the sound of the floors creaking. I knew Abuelo was up. When I heard the click of the front door closing, I went to the window. On the dark street below me, I saw Abuelo’s tall shadow hurrying down the same strange street.
I took the stairs up to the roof. I would have a clear view from there, so when he came back, I would be ready to stand in the hallway with my arms crossed and make him tell me what was going on.
The house had only two stories, but the air on the roof was cool. The wind blew my hair gently and I shivered. I could taste El Salvador on my lips. The roofs surrounding me were painted different colors. It made the neighborhood look like a game board in the moonlight.
Early on in my visit, my abuelos told me that security guards with machine guns marched along the roof of the bank next door at night. I didn’t know whether to believe them, since I was really only supposed to be on the roof during the day.
I settled on the ledge and took my eyes off of the sky long enough to glimpse a hulking silhouette on the roof next to me. Moonlight shined on the gun at his hip and on his bulletproof vest. I saw two other guards on the adjacent side of the building. They had guns, too. One nodded to me and the other never looked my way, but I was sure he knew I was there.
I heard the rumble of loud music and peered across the street. I was like one of those men next to me, silent in the shadows, minus the gun.
The front door of Rosita’s Casita across the street opened. The door bore a painting of a naked woman with a moon-shaped face and big breasts. Abuela told me to study hard so I wouldn’t grow up to be like the girls that worked there, selling their bodies by dancing for drunk men that had wives.
During the day it was closed. There were rusted metal bars over the windows and the old ladies who sold their mangos and tamales and tortillas camped in front of it. They had long silver braids on either side of their shoulders and dressed in yellows, blues and reds. The younger women had chubby babies wrapped to their bodies. The city felt different than it did during the day, when it was a chaos of horns, screeching brakes, and vendors shouting about what they were selling. “ Tortillas! Elotes! Pupusas!”
One of the times I did go to church with Abuela, another parishioner made a face like she smelled something bad and pointed to a woman sitting a few pews over.
The old parishioner said, “How can she show her face here?”
The woman she pointed to was maybe in her fifties. Her hair was pulled back in a tight bun, and a large pink birthmark spread across one of her cheeks like a country on a map. Her sweater was buttoned to the top, despite the stuffy heat inside the church. She clapped her hands when the priest said something that made everyo
ne roar.
When I asked about the woman later, Abuela only said, “Rosita should be ashamed of herself.” Not too long after that, I figured out that Rosita owned the club with the naked woman on the door.
As I stood on the roof, I glared down at Rosita’s. In the glow from the streetlamp, I could see an older man in khaki pants with a woman with a long ponytail that hit the middle of her back. I watched as the man slid his hand down into her short skirt.
On the roof of the bank, the security men were still patrolling, oblivious or just plain ignoring the couple across the street. The old man and the young woman didn’t look like bank robbers, so I guess they didn’t call for any special attention. The guards weren’t paying attention to me either, so even though I knew I should have turned away, I continued to watch the couple.
The man was touching her and hugging her. He leaned into her, saying something that I couldn’t hear. She cackled and hit him on his chest and said something back. This happened a few times until he shoved his hand further down her skirt. She rubbed her thumb and fingers together right in front of his face. He reached way down into the pockets of his pants and pulled out some bills and waved them in her face. That’s when I saw Abuelo come around the corner with a woman I had never seen before.
He walked down the street toward the house with his hands in the pockets of the clean, crisp pants Abuela ironed for him. The woman had long, bright red hair the color of ketchup. They didn’t touch as they strolled past the corner store that sold calling cards and Jarrito, past the panadería that sold bread filled with coconut and pudding and cheese.
When they reached Rosita’s, Abuelo opened the door. He and the woman and walked right in.
I looked around, wondering if someone else had seen it.
“Hey,” I said, trying to catch the attention of the guard nearest me. “Did you see that guy?” I don’t know what I expected the guard to say. He studied me for a few moments, and then I realized he didn’t speak English.