A Dream Called Home

by Reyna Grande

  40

  Mago and Reyna with their children

  NOT LONG AFTER my mother’s yard sales came to an end, Mago showed up at my house with her belongings in black trash bags. She had called me that morning to ask if she could come stay with me.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “I left him,” she said. “I can’t stand it anymore. I can’t continue to make a home with a man who makes me feel so miserable. I’ve nothing in common with him except our three kids.”

  It wasn’t the first time she had left her common-law husband, but it was the first time she had asked if she could stay with me. “I’ll stay here until I find a full-time job and can afford a place of my own.”

  She brought the kids with her three days a week, and the other days they stayed with their father. I felt bad seeing her drive forty-five miles to Chino to drop off the kids at school, wait for them until they got out, and then drive the forty-five miles back to my house.

  Luckily, Mago quickly found a job as an insurance agent but was now faced with the difficult choice to leave the kids with Victor. I did not like the idea.

  “Just remember that our stepmother did the same, and it didn’t turn out well for her,” I reminded her. When she met my father, Mila was married and had three children, and she left her husband for my father and, just like Mago, left her children with her husband until she and my father found a bigger place. But by the time that happened, Mila had already lost legal custody of the children and there was nothing she could do about it. On top of that, she had to pay child support.

  “I am not abandoning my children, Nena,” Mago replied defensively. “I need to find a place for us to live, and I can’t do it without this job. I have to spend more time at work right now since I’m in training, so my time is limited. It’s a sacrifice I’m making for them. Soon I’ll have an apartment and get my kids back.”

  I remembered how not long ago I had also made the decision to pursue my goals over sacrificing time to be with my child. Now Mago was doing the same, and I needed to support her in every way I could. “I’m sure everything will turn out okay,” I said. “Stay here for as long as you need to.”

  “Thanks. I’ll find a place soon,” she said.

  Just like my father, she had chosen to stay in the garage. Despite feeling bad about Mago’s failed relationship, and the fact that she had temporarily left her children, I was happy to have my sister with me. I never saw enough of her. Thankfully, she wasn’t like my father in that she didn’t avoid me. When we came home from work, we would hang out together in the dining room and sometimes talk late into the night just like we had when we shared a room in our father’s house.

  But our conversations were different now. We talked about the demands of being adults, our relationships with our partners, the trials and tribulations of motherhood, our desire to be better mothers. It almost felt like the old days. Some nights Mago just wanted to vent about her conflict with her common-law husband, Victor, and I would listen. When she told him she had made the decision to end their relationship for good, he had refused to move out of the house and had told her that since she wanted to break up the family, then she should be the one to leave. He threw her belongings out of the house, and she had scrambled to put things in trash bags and load whatever she could fit in her car. The rest she had left behind. “I can’t believe he treated me like that,” she said in tears.

  I didn’t know Victor well. He wasn’t very talkative, and the times I had gone to their house, he had locked himself up in his room and not come out.

  Mago would shake her head and say, “I don’t know what his problem is. I don’t do that to his family.”

  Before she met Victor, Mago had been very social. She loved dancing and would go out to clubs on the weekend. She was addicted to beautiful clothes and could expertly do her makeup and style her hair. Unlike me and my shy ways, Mago had a great sense of humor and liked making people laugh. Victor was the main reason she had moved out of my father’s house. She had wanted to be free to date without my father’s curfews getting in the way. She was so in love that she had left our father’s house—and me in it—and rented an apartment with her best friend. A few months after she moved out, my father’s prophecy came true. She got pregnant at twenty-one years old and moved in with Victor.

  But the biggest irony of her life was realizing that she had made a home with a man exactly like my father. Victor was serious, introverted, private. He didn’t like to go out, especially to clubs. He kept to himself and, like my father, if he wasn’t at work, he was at home. Once they were in a relationship, he didn’t want Mago to go out, and he resented her friends. He wanted her home taking care of the kids.

  Through their many years together, Mago had struggled with focusing on being a good mother and a wife and had tried to suppress her desire to have friends and a social life. She felt she had lost herself in the relationship. Sometimes, it got to be too much and she would run away, like now.

  Mago didn’t stay long. One Saturday night she brought her two daughters over to visit; her son didn’t want to come. He was very loyal to his father, and my sister could not convince him to come with her. Cory had gone out, so Mago and I were in the dining room talking while Nathan and my nieces played with their toys in the living room. It was 9:00 p.m. and the street was quiet when suddenly someone started banging on the door. The children got scared. I rushed to the door and looked through the peephole but saw nothing. Then the window started to rattle. Whoever was out there was now banging on the glass.

  “I’m calling the police!” I yelled.

  Suddenly, there was an explosion of glass as the picture window shattered. The children cried out as I pulled them with me back to the dining room away from the shards. Mago called the police.

  We huddled in the dining room, terrified. There was no more noise, but it was too dark to see outside. We were afraid to move, to see who was out there. As we waited, Mago and I held on to our kids, trying to remain calm so as to not scare them even more. Miraculously, the police showed up within five minutes. They found a homeless man lying in the front yard, his hand bleeding. They told me the man was high on drugs and probably hadn’t realized what he was doing. Cory showed up just as the police and the ambulance were leaving, taking the man away.

  “What happened?” he asked as he came in. “Are you okay?”

  “Nena, you gotta move,” Mago said. “How can you stand living here?”

  Her daughters clung to her, asking to go home. “We don’t want to be here anymore. We want to go home with Daddy,” they said. Mago grabbed her purse and drove them back to their two-story home in the suburbs instead of having them sleep over as planned.

  I was used to this neighborhood. I had never thought I would live in South Central, but I’d ended up here and it wasn’t easy to get out. Buying a home in a better area would require a lot of money, plus the Teacher Next Door Program required that I live in the house for three full years. Besides, even if I could move, I didn’t want to move to the suburbs and spend my life stuck in traffic driving to and from work.

  Mago left with her daughters and didn’t return until well past midnight. She didn’t come into the house even though I had stayed up waiting for her. She entered through the patio door and went straight to the garage without coming in to say good night. I knew something had changed between us.

  “Nena, I can’t live here anymore,” Mago said a few days later. “Now my kids don’t want to visit me. Not here, they said. I think I might have to go back.”

  I didn’t want to be in Mago’s shoes. I didn’t know what choice I would make. Would I leave or would I stay?

  “How could she do it?” Mago asked, referring to our mother. “How did she have the guts to walk away from us, her own children? I want to know how she did it, because right now I wish I had the courage to continue walking and not come back.”

  It was interesting for me to hear the question we had often asked ourselves put in
a different way. Before, we had thought our mother had been selfish to leave us and put her own needs first. Now Mago was wondering how our mother had found the strength to do so. Like me, my sister had spent her whole life yearning for a home and had even given up on college to create one. But what happens when your home no longer gives you joy? How do you destroy the home you worked so hard to build when it no longer feels like home?

  For the third time, she returned to Victor to try to keep her family together. “I can’t do this to my children,” she said.

  “Take care of yourself,” I told her. It was a tough spot to be in, to want to stay and go at the same time. I wanted to tell her that she needed to think of her own happiness, her own dreams. The problem was doing those things without neglecting her children and their needs. I thought of my mother, of how she had pursued her own desires and left us to fend for ourselves. When we were little, all we wanted was to have a mother and a father. We wanted a family. As adults, Mago and I were seeing things from the other side—as parents. For years we had criticized our father and mother for prioritizing their own needs above their children’s. I was finally beginning to understand that it takes as much courage to leave as it does to stay, and that being a parent was way more complicated than I had ever imagined.

  41

  WHEN WINTER BREAK arrived, Cory took Nathan and me to his hometown, Racine, a mid-sized city in Wisconsin an hour and a half north of Chicago. I wasn’t prepared for Racine. It was such a contrast to where I had grown up.

  His mother, Carol, lived a couple of blocks from Lake Michigan. I had never seen the lake, and when I first saw it, I thought it was an ocean. “That can’t be a lake,” I said to Cory as we drove by it. There was no end in sight, the blue went on and on until you couldn’t tell where water and sky met. And it had waves, too, like the Pacific Ocean on a gentle day.

  We turned onto College Avenue and I was blown away—this time by the beautiful street paved with red brick and lined with tall sycamore trees. Victorian houses built in the 1800s stood majestically on either side, and candles glowed from every window of each house.

  “Here we are,” Carol said as she pulled into the driveway of a two-story Victorian painted a blue-gray and trimmed with purple. We got out of the car, and I shivered as the cold air hit me like a thousand needles. Cory had warned me, and yet I wasn’t prepared for twenty-degree weather. I felt as if I had stepped into a freezer!

  Carol lit the fireplace and soon the house was deliciously warm. This wasn’t my first time meeting Cory’s mom—she had come out to visit him for a few days in the spring—but still I felt nervous and tongue-tied. I didn’t want to say or do the wrong thing. When he had told his mom he had broken up with his ex-girlfriend, she cried. She had liked her, and although this had happened in February and it was now December, I wondered if she still missed that other girl whom I had displaced. She had spent many Christmases here with them. I couldn’t help but wonder if Carol would compare me to Cory’s ex the whole time I was here. Would she disapprove of her son having hooked up with a Mexican immigrant and single mother? Would she think less of me that I only had a BA degree whereas his ex had been working on her PhD? I also worried about Nathan. How would Carol and everyone else treat my little boy since he wasn’t Cory’s child and they didn’t “owe” him affection?

  I soon learned that my fears were unfounded. Carol turned out to be a very generous woman, not just with me but also with Nathan. She took on the role of “grandma” right away and spoiled my son in every way possible. Prior to our arrival, she had bought his favorite snacks, fleece winter pajamas, books for bedtime stories, toys for playtime—even for the bathtub—and his own bath towel in the shape of a lion. She bought him a snowsuit and Buzz Lightyear snow boots. She had child-proofed her home to make sure he didn’t get hurt, and the minute we arrived, she was vigilant of her pets to make sure my little boy was always safe around them. At seeing that Nathan was a big animal lover, Carol spent hours with him, supervising playtime with her two golden retrievers and her three cats. We didn’t have pets at home and Nathan was having a fantastic time with Carol’s, feeding them, giving them snacks, walking them, tossing balls to them, and even riding those two enormous but docile dogs.

  The next day it snowed. At twenty-nine years old, I was watching my very first snowfall. I sat on the couch mesmerized by the dance outside, the flakes fluttering down, twisting and turning like ballerinas. Carol came up to me with a thick blanket and said, “Are you cold?” She put the blanket over me, tucking it around my legs and hips with motherly familiarity, and then went back to the kitchen, where Nathan was watching cartoons with her while she prepared dinner. I sat there on the couch, suddenly overwhelmed with emotion. I tried to remember if my own mother had ever done that for me—tucked a blanket around me, making sure I was warm enough. She must have done it when I was a baby, when I was too young to remember, but I had no memory of her doing that and it saddened me to not be sure. Carol’s motherly gesture touched me deeply. When Cory came to sit next to me to watch the snow, I felt my love for him increase a thousandfold because of his mother.

  “Want to go get a Christmas tree?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I said.

  Carol lent me her winter gear and I bundled up from head to toe. I went outside and looked up and felt the snow fall on my face. I cringed at the extreme cold, yet was in awe of how beautiful the landscape was.

  “Maybe we can make a snowman later,” I said. I thought of the movies I had watched. How I had always wanted to make a snowman.

  “It’s not the right kind of snow,” Cory said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “This is cold, dry snow,” he said. He picked up a handful and showed me what he meant. It didn’t hold its shape. “We need packing snow. You know, wetter, the kind for snowballs.”

  I had no idea what he meant, so I just nodded. He, Nathan, and I drove for forty minutes, and I kept looking for Christmas tree vendors but didn’t see any. In L.A., vendors would rent out vacant lots where they would set up their cut Christmas trees for sale, but we hadn’t passed any.

  I was in for a surprise. We pulled into a farm that had acres of pine and fir trees. Cory took out a saw from the trunk of the car and said, “You ready?”

  “You serious?” I asked. “We have to cut down our own tree?”

  “Yep.”

  We walked around, looking at trees of all sizes, some even smaller than Nathan, until we found an eight-foot-tall Douglas fir that Cory and I liked. He positioned the saw and began cutting. I held Nathan in my arms, taking in the image of Cory with a saw cutting down our Christmas tree while it snowed all around us. It was a beautiful sight, and my heart felt ready to burst with the love I had for this man. There was nowhere on earth I would have rather been at that moment.

  Carol was a high school English teacher. Cory’s stepfather, Andrew, was a retired Shakespeare professor, used bookstore owner, and a rare book collector. Carol introduced me to the work of her favorite author, Barbara Kingsolver, and had me read The Bean Trees and The Poisonwood Bible. Learning that Kahlil Gibran was one of my favorite authors, Andrew gave me an old edition of The Prophet. They both loved that I was a writer, and I soon found myself talking about books and literature every day that I was there. Carol and Andrew wanted to know everything about me and my writing. While I waited for the long months ahead as Across a Hundred Mountains journeyed through the publication process, I had made progress on my new novel, Dancing with Butterflies, and was excited to tell Carol and Andrew about my project, about all the folklórico shows I had been attending in L.A. as part of my research, and the dozens of dancers I had interviewed. They listened attentively and even offered to proofread anything I wrote and give me their feedback.

  “I hope you know how lucky you are,” I said as I snuggled next to Cory in bed.

  “I do know,” he said. “But you’re lucky, too. Because of your experiences you have perseverance, drive, an unyielding desire
to succeed. Those are valuable traits to have.”

  I wondered if growing up in comfort had some disadvantages. You don’t learn how to struggle, to do without, to suffer. If I hadn’t gone through what I went through, I wondered what kind of person I would have been.

  Cory’s sister, Morgan, arrived from Washington, DC, where she was working for Amnesty International. When she arrived, the games came out. Cory and Morgan taught me to play Apples to Apples, Monopoly, Cribbage, Clue, Charades, and more. Morgan was enamored of Nathan, and soon, he with her. She gave him baths, read him stories, scattered toys all over the floor and played with him for hours. Between Morgan and Carol, I really didn’t have a lot of time with Nathan. I was grateful for the free time, a luxury I never had in L.A., and I spent my days reading, writing, and playing Scrabble with Cory.

  The pile of presents under the tree grew bigger and bigger, and when Christmas arrived we spent hours opening presents. For me, it was both exciting and overwhelming. Because I had grown up in a house where you were lucky to get one gift for Christmas, this abundance made me uncomfortable, and yet I felt as excited as Nathan every time someone put a present in my lap.

  The day after Christmas, Cory took me to visit his grandmothers. One of them lived near Madison, in a beautiful two-story lakefront house that had once been the family’s summer home, when they lived in Chicago years ago. His grandmother had attended UW, Madison, and as she entertained us with stories of her time at the university, I tried to imagine my own grandmothers in college, but couldn’t. Cory’s paternal grandmother lived in the Northwoods of Wisconsin, in a little town called Manitowish Waters, where the infamous Dillinger gang had hidden before having a shoot-out with the FBI.