She had meant only to knock. But Carmen startled at drops of what looked like blood, a trail from the center of the driveway to the door, a sprinkling of dark crimson she’d missed from the safety of her own driveway. She was so taken aback she crouched to the ground and looked closer, as if blood could speak its truth if only she leaned into it. But she gathered herself and stood, forced her wild thoughts to heel. This wasn’t a movie. She wasn’t a heroic amateur detective, much as she loved those shows.
Every window was curtained, and there were no cars in the driveway. She braced herself and knocked but nobody opened the door. She knew little about the occupant other than she was a single woman like herself, a woman with a grown child just like her, though this child was far more functional than Jeanette: a man who sometimes stopped by with kids and a wife in tow. The woman was like Carmen but far less put-together. And she talked too much. The woman let her gray roots sprawl, she wore pilled knit shirts and was often clacking about her garden in plastic flip-flops, waving to Carmen with garden shears in her hand, swiping her forehead with a rag. She’d talk about her son, about how her daughter-in-law was lazy and clearly taking advantage of him, about how menopause was killing her for God’s sake. It was like the woman had no filter, no sense that some thoughts belonged in the hidden parts of herself.
Carmen was about to turn back when she thought she heard footsteps. But no lights came on. The door remained shut. She put her ear to the wood and heard the slow hum of an empty house and then, almost imperceptibly, a long sigh, like a dog curling into sleep. No, not a dog. The footsteps rang heavy, the breathing not a pant but an audible purring. Like Linda’s purrs but through a stethoscope, magnified, huge. For a moment, she had the irrational idea that a house might have a living, breathing soul, a heart trapped among shine-polished appliances and old inherited furniture, bursting to be known. Perhaps bleeding into the street. She stumbled back from the door. Then crept forward again, put her ear to it again. Yes, purring.
A part of her liked the idea of a monster waiting to burst into Coral Gables, waiting to devour Carmen’s cousins and old aunts, their adult children, her fifteen guests. She couldn’t shake her fear at the strange confluence of blood and loud breathing, but she was too nervous about Thanksgiving dinner to give her imaginative leaps much real estate, to spend time or energy on anything but dinner. She forced herself to think of harmless explanations—Who hasn’t cut themselves on some sharp object or another and unknowingly left a trail of blood? Who is to say a cat can’t sound like a lion under the right conditions? Jeanette was fresh out of treatment, only two months living out of the facility. It had been her third stay. Carmen wanted everything perfect, though she had little hope for Jeanette’s continuing sobriety.
At home, Carmen chilled a second bottle of seltzer. She set out more chips, two appetizer stations at opposite sides of the living room. In an hour, her first guests would arrive. She had decided to invite Jeanette for their first Thanksgiving together in years, so many years.
Before this, she had banned Jeanette. Carmen had told her point-blank: she would no longer support her, she would no longer invite her to any family functions, she would no longer be her mother until Jeanette could prove that she was really, truly sober. Such a decision would likely have seemed, to any mother on the outside, cruel. But no mother on the outside could possibly know what it was to face a truth like the one she’d been presented with: that it was her own love killing her daughter, that she needed to become stone, marble, not a mother at all, to save her daughter. Now Carmen would see her daughter for the first time since driving her to detox and then rehab, again.
Jeanette arrived last, long after the steady stream of relatives, one after the other, carrying aluminum trays covered in foil and bottles of fruit juice, as if no one knew what to bring in place of wine. She had told her guests not to bring alcohol but she hadn’t said why. She hadn’t said recovery or drugs or even my daughter. She knew they knew why. That was her family, unwilling to name the truth as it danced like dander in the periphery.
Jeanette greeted Carmen as if the two had just seen each other: airy kiss on the cheek and airy chitchat—how hot is it out there?—between handfuls of chips. The noise in the house had grown to a level that would drown out any wild growls.
“By the way, Mom,” Jeanette said, smoothing an errant curl behind her ear and leaving a trail of crumbs beneath her, “Mario is coming but he couldn’t get ready in time. I gave him the address.”
“Are you kidding me?” Each syllable strained against the others unnaturally.
Jeanette waved a hand in front of her face as if to say It’s nothing, don’t worry. “He’s sober now too, Mom. It’s completely different. And we’re not, like, together. He’s being a really good friend.”
Jeanette looked away. Her eyes darted, seemed to take in the whole room, all the clusters of conversation.
“Anyways, it’s not like you can judge.”
That familiar sharp, stabbing pain. Carmen wanted to say something back. But she couldn’t.
Jeanette looked sober, though, Carmen thought. Her curls were neatly moussed and bouncy; she wore fresh, precise makeup. Carmen would’ve preferred she wear something a little more celebratory than jeans and a tight-fitting tank top but she couldn’t deny that, in her late twenties, Jeanette could pull off looking good in almost anything. Still, she seemed distracted, jumping from conversation to conversation, ducking each time talk turned toward her. Carmen stood on the margin, gripping a glass of fruit juice, afraid to approach her daughter as if she’d catch a whiff of some hidden sorrow if she got too close. Could this be all there was to it—Jeanette would get sober? Mario too? Life would continue as if the past five years had happened to someone else?
And there was the other fact keeping Carmen hyper-perceptive—she couldn’t shake the noise, the guttural growl; she couldn’t shake the blood. She found herself losing the thread of conversations and turning toward her living room window, her guests trailing off. And then she’d turn back to that person, an aunt or a cousin or their spouse: You were saying?
But then Rosalinda’s husband, Pepe, had pulled a flask out of his back pocket and poured its contents into a water glass. Carmen saw him do it. She had set the table without wine stems or highballs. She’d set the table with only water glasses. Carmen sidled up to Pepe, made a show of staring at the glass in his hand.
“You’re looking younger, Carmen,” he said. Pepe leaned a hand on her mahogany side table. “You’re looking more like Jeanette.” He took a sip. “Me, I just get older. I was never one to coddle my Vanessa, you know. That’s probably what keeps you young. When you don’t coddle them, it’s stressful. But it’s better not to coddle, it’s definitely better.”
Pepe’s slender wiry daughter appeared as if on cue, whisking the glass out of his hand and taking a sip herself. “I heard that,” she said.
“Now, Papi.” Vanessa smiled at Carmen. She’d left a dark-red lipstick ring on the glass. “Everyone knows you’re the world’s biggest coddler. Tía, come.” She took Carmen by the arm as if leading a child.
In the kitchen, Vanessa poured Pepe’s liquor into the sink, and it looked like dark brown blood circling into the drain. Vanessa started to ask after Jeanette but Carmen squeezed past her. She needed to keep tabs on her daughter.
But her daughter sat absorbed in conversation with her great-aunt Mercedes and Vanessa’s brother Tomás, who struggled to hold a hissing Linda in his arms as the cat’s eyes darted from face to face in fear.
“She clearly doesn’t like being held,” Aunt Mercy said to Tomás. Linda began to claw frantically.
“Fuck!” Tomás yelled. He let the cat go, and she darted into the hallway.
“Oh.” Jeanette placed her plate of hummus on a chair and examined the scratches blooming on Tomás’s arms. “Let me get you a bandage.”
“No!” Carmen yelled over the din. “I’ll get it!”
* * *
In the bath
room, Carmen closed her eyes. She visualized the cheerful, welcoming hostess she wanted her family to see. Martha Stewart, she told herself. Nitza Villapol. She opened her eyes. Carmen shuffled out with a bottle of rubbing alcohol in one hand and loose bandages in the other.
Mario stood in the middle of the living room with a bouquet of grocery-store carnations. He wore black pants and a thermal much too warm for Miami in November. Jeanette grabbed Mario’s hand and pulled him toward Carmen.
“Hasn’t it been forever since you saw Mario?” she called, her tone artificially cheerful, too nervous and fidgety.
Mario didn’t meet Carmen’s eyes, but he gave her a tepid hug. Carmen wanted to scream at him, blame him for something, anything, for everything, but she tried to remain composed, tried to remain Martha Stewart.
She looked after every detail. Appetizers restocked, toilet paper in the bathrooms, AC temperature right. She looked after every detail to avoid thinking about blood, to avoid looking at Jeanette, to avoid mixing the two.
* * *
The conversation, once everyone sat for dinner, was painstaking, fifteen people desperately waiting their turn to insert an opinion, nobody concerned with what anybody else thought about anything. Perhaps every conversation played out like this, and it was only now, aware of every move, every reaction, that Carmen realized it was a miracle human beings learned anything about each other at all.
“So what do you do, Mario?”
“Is there pork too? I always say it’s not a real feast without some puerco asado.”
“I’m in retail.”
“In Cuba, every party, there was pork. Every party, a pig killed.”
“That’s right! No pork, no party.”
“Retail?”
Jeanette barely spoke. As usual, she shriveled in Mario’s presence. Jeanette moved the food around her plate and looked from person to person and occasionally sighed and dabbed her lips with a corner of napkin. Carmen smiled politely when her second cousin Vivian’s husband complimented her truffled mashed potatoes. She laughed when her uncle, eighty-nine and still a chain smoker, told an unfunny political joke. She asked a question or two about her other second cousin Delia’s new job in real estate. But then Pepe got out of hand again.
“How is Dolores?” he said, turning to Carmen. He knew, like their entire family knew, that Carmen didn’t speak to her mother.
“You know, I spoke to Maydelis in Cuba, Jeanette,” he said, not even waiting for an answer. “She said Dolores won’t stop asking about you. She tells Maydelis constantly that you and her must work to reunite the family.”
“I love Maydelis,” Jeanette said. “We email all the time. I’d love to go to Cuba. Maydelis says—”
“Listen,” Carmen interrupted. “Dolores just means to make trouble—”
“You mean your mother—”
“I mean Dolores—”
“Hey, you know what I learned, Jeanette?” Pepe’s daughter said, staring him down and turning to Jeanette. “Our great-grandmother Cecilia worked at a tobacco factory that still makes cigars.” Jeanette looked uneasy, balling the napkin in her hand. “And our great-great-grandparents probably, our great-great-great-grandparents probably. Like, this whole legacy and you can just buy one of these cigars and like you feel like you’re holding all this history in your hand but you don’t really know what it means and—”
Mario stood, clearly sensing the tension, and said something like “Speaking of cigars, I need a cigarette break.”
Vanessa, always with her froufrou talk, always talking too much. Jeanette asked Mario if he wanted her to go with him. He told her to stay. Carmen excused herself a beat later.
Outside the street was empty, peaceful, her family’s cars packed in the driveway and spilling onto the curb, announcing that hers was a full home. She could hear the stream of conversation as she closed the door. Cuba this, Cuba that. Cuba Cuba Cuba. Why anyone left a place only to reminisce, to carry its streets into every conversation, to see every moment through the eyes of some imagined loss, was beyond her. Miami existed as such a hollow receptacle of memory, a shadow city, full of people who needed a place to put their past into perspective. Not her. She lived in the present.
Carmen was surprised to find that Mario had crossed the street, that he stood on the lawn of the neighbor’s house, the monster house. He faced away from her, so he couldn’t know that she was there, watching him. Mario shook a cigarette pack on the palm of his hand and pulled one out. He lit it with a hand cupped around the flame. Then he took something else out of his pocket, something orange, a small cylinder.
As if on cue, Carmen heard the growl from before, the shriek, as Mario flinched and dropped his cigarette.
“What was that?” she yelled, rushing to his side. “What was that?”
Mario turned to face her, his mouth agape. “I—don’t know,” he said. “It sounded like … a lion almost?”
“No!” Carmen yelled. “In your hand! What was that? A medicine bottle, wasn’t it? You’re trying to ruin her again, aren’t you?”
Mario’s mouth still hung open, and he looked at Carmen as if taking her in for the first time. She regretted the suit, felt ridiculous in her sensible heels, sweat rolling down her back. She wondered what Jeanette had told Mario. If she shared too much, if she talked too much. But Carmen felt triumphant. She felt like she was confronting someone for the first time in her life. A hunter. He was the lion seeping blood into the street. He was the lion dirtying her beautiful neighborhood.
Mario dug into his pocket again and pulled out a prescription bottle.
“I knew it!” Carmen screamed.
Mario handed the bottle to her and Carmen looked at the label. Prilosec. Her late husband had taken the same prescription antacid. He had suffered from terrible heartburn. When they walked back to the house, Mario didn’t mention the growl again. They didn’t speak at all.
* * *
Inside, Carmen began to clear plates loudly though Rosalinda still picked at the congrí. Her guests quieted in her presence. Diana’s eight-year-old daughter—or was she Susana’s daughter? there were too many children to keep track of—followed her into the kitchen. Carmen could hear laughter in the dining room.
“Hi,” the someone’s daughter said. “My mom said guests should bring their plates to the kitchen.”
“Oh,” Carmen said, annoyed. She didn’t want to speak to anyone. “That is very nice of you, Ana.”
“That’s not my name,” the girl whose name wasn’t Ana said.
Carmen snapped off her rubber gloves. She leaned against the counter and considered the child.
“My name is Lila,” Lila said.
Ana, Ana. It came to her, why she’d called her that.
Lila squinted up at her.
Nowadays, it was all over the Spanish-language news: the ICE raids, the young people in graduation caps handcuffed to congressional desks, saying this is my home, let me stay. Red-faced men on TV shows snarling alien, snarling jobs, snarling it’s about time we take back our country. Our country. Take back. She didn’t agree with some of the other Cubans her age who said things like we’re not like them, we belong here, we’re political refugees. Carmen had lost a parent, her father. And she knew that rip, that tear, that hollow feeling like a tooth pulled, forever something off, forever a space. Jeanette thought her so old-fashioned, so backward in her opinions. But no, she was fair. She wanted families together. Shouldn’t that count for something?
“I’m going to Cuba in three weeks,” Lila Not-Ana said.
“Oh, that’s nice,” Carmen said.
If she could go back in time, maybe she would have helped the girl, Ana, though she had no idea how. But police. She’d thought police. She wondered where that girl could be now. Hopefully, here. Hopefully, home. Some of those same Cubans said, these new Cubans, coming now, they get here and turn right back around and go back to Cuba, and they want the government to give them everything, they are not like us. They also said i
mmigrants from other countries weren’t like them. Like us. As if she were like anyone. She was more fair-minded, she thought, she didn’t even mind the New Cubans, Jeanette didn’t understand.
“My mom says you won’t go to Cuba. That you won’t even talk to your own mother because of politics,” Not-Ana said. “And she doesn’t think it’s very nice and she says family is what’s most important and she says thank God we know how important family is and how we all need to be together and she…”
Carmen stared, astounded. Had Jeanette blurted her business this way as a little girl? She couldn’t imagine it. Did she do that now?
“Well, tell your mom—”
“Lila!” Jeanette carried a pile of plates balanced on her forearm into the kitchen as if she were an actual waitress. “Pero how big you are.”
“You’re not big,” Lila said with a shrug. She fake-curtsied and walked off, giant bow on her red velvet dress bouncing up and down.
“I don’t like her,” Carmen said, taking the plates from Jeanette.
“She’s literally a child, Mom.”
“Some children talk too much. You never talked so much.”
“Oookay, Mom,” Jeanette said. “Anyways, I think me and Mario should go.” She held the dishwasher open.
“What? We haven’t even had dessert yet. Vivian made pumpkin pie, Mercedes brought a flan.”
“I feel like everyone is judging me, you most of all.” Jeanette ran a hand over the marble countertop. Carmen tried to decipher a code in her eyes—were they red? Was she just tired? Were everyone’s eyes always somewhat red? She wondered if her daughter was the kind of woman who would leave a trail of blood without even noticing.
“Honey, nobody even knows about your … problems.”
Jeanette leaned back. She let the dishwasher door dangle open. “That’s just the thing,” she said. “I feel like all you care about is how people see you. How they see me. I feel like I’m constantly pretending, constantly afraid to say the wrong thing.”
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