Code Red

by Janie Chodosh

“Do you look like him?” I ask.

  “Same nose,” she says, rolling her eyes and sinking back against the cushions. “That’s what everyone always says, but that’s just stupid. They might as well say we have the same toenails.”

  She laughs, then starts shooting off questions, rapid-fire, one after the other, hardly giving me a chance to answer. I squeeze in a few superficial questions of my own, like what bands she likes, but she’s all about the asking and doesn’t respond. What do I like to do? Where do I go to school? Do I have a boyfriend? Who do I live with? When the questions transcend the mundane and delve into the personal (why do I live with my aunt and not my mother?), Alma intervenes and calls Mari into the kitchen.

  “Give Faith some space, Mija,” she says. “Come help your sister with dinner. We have all evening to ask questions.” To me, Alma says, “Make yourself at home. Dinner will be ready in ten minutes. Hope you like chile.”

  Mari slides off the couch with a sigh and tromps into the kitchen where she and Amelia work side-by-side at a cornflower blue counter, two heads dipped over a stainless steel bowl. Alma stands at the center island in front of a cutting board, her hands a work of art as they manage a knife in quick movements. She slices through an onion and a potato, throws everything into a frying pan and adds some seasoning.

  “Needs more cayenne,” Amelia says, dipping a finger into the bowl.

  Mari nods, adds the spice, and goes back to mixing.

  “I can’t believe Marcus got booted off ‘Teen Chef’ last night,” Mari complains, as she carries a stack of dishes to the table.

  “Totally,” Amelia agrees, following Mari with silverware and glasses. “The judges completely got it wrong. They should’ve chopped that chica from Atlanta who used tofu as her main course. Tofu! Does that even count as food?”

  “Mia is going to make it onto the show,” Mari explains to me. “Can you imagine if she gets on and wins? Five thousand dollars! She totally beat out that nerd-butt from Flagstaff at the audition.”

  “Mari,” Alma scolds.

  “Sorry, but he was. Did you see his pants? Talk about a wedgie!”

  Both girls laugh as they finish setting the table.

  I feel like I should participate in the action, but I stay parked on the couch, looking around the room at the photos on the walls that belong to someone else’s life, the dogs that belong to someone else’s family. A mix of resentment and longing rises in me. What would my life have been like if I grew up here? What if Mom hadn’t confiscated those letters and I had two half sisters and a grandma all along? How would it feel to be part of that kitchen tribe?

  Amelia is back at the stove now, working the skillet. Alma’s moved to the oven, and Mari’s tossing salad. Unless you count boiling water for mac and cheese, I have no idea how to cook, which means I have no idea how to break into the conversation or activity and join the hive. An outside bee doesn’t just show up at a foreign hive and ask for a job. A guard bee would assassinate it at the entrance. Maybe that’s Amelia’s role. She’s the guard bee of the family, keeping the queen safe from marauders. Maybe that’s why she’s so pissed at me. I’m the marauder. The interloper. The one who’s come to invade the hive.

  “Dinner’s ready,” Alma calls out, waving me to the table and pointing me to a seat.

  “Looks good,” I say, admiring the spread: gluten and dairy to die for!

  “Amelia’s our chef.” Alma smiles and lifts a tortilla smothered with melted cheese and green and red chile sauce from a glass dish and slides it onto my plate.

  I dig in, scarfing too big a forkful for decent table manners. Instantly my eyes start to water and my mouth is on fire. “Water,” I gasp.

  Amelia laughs and hands me the milk carton.

  I think she’s being a jerk and I reach for the water pitcher, but she intercepts and says, “No, Guera. Not water. Milk. It cuts the heat.”

  “What’s a guera?” I ask, guessing from the tone it’s not a compliment.

  “White girl,” Amelia shoots back at me.

  “She’s hardly a guera,” Mari interjects. “She isn’t a blonde and she’s not exactly white.”

  “Well, she isn’t one of us either,” Amelia snaps, giving Mari a look.

  “Uh, I’m sitting right here and, like it or not, Amelia, we’re fruit of the same loins. Same sperm. Different birth canal.”

  I glance at Alma to see whether using the words loin and sperm and birth canal at the dinner table is acceptable, but she doesn’t appear to have heard. Her face has crumbled into a horrified expression and she’s giving Amelia a talking to in Spanish—apparently Amelia can’t speak it, but sure as flies on shit, she can understand it.

  “I’m sorry, Mija,” Alma says to me when she’s done with the lecture, but she’s still glaring at Amelia.

  Amelia shrugs off her—our—grandmother and narrows her eyes at me. “I hear you have some hot-shot internship,” she says, which coming from another person could be taken as nice. Coming from her, it’s anything but.

  I could verbally nail Amelia’s ass into submission. Verbal ass-nailing is one of my special talents, but out of respect for Alma, and because Mari looks so upset, I keep my more colorful comments to myself. “Yep,” I say, playing it cool. “It’s pretty great.”

  “So that’s what happens when you grow up Back East? You go to some fancy guera private school and get the best internships? What, is your white mom loaded?”

  “I see you’ve never been to North Philly,” I say over Mari and Alma’s protests.

  The question catches Amelia off guard. For a second she looks confused, but she quickly recovers. “Why’d I want to go there?”

  “You wouldn’t. That’s my point. It’s the ghetto. That’s where I grew up. Not with mountains and open space and bikes to ride around on. With rundown bars and abandoned buildings and nightly drug deals outside my window. My public schools—I went to five because my mom was a drug addict and we moved so much—were so overcrowded that most of the time nobody cared or noticed if I showed up. Oh, and my mom? She’s dead. Murdered.” I smile sweetly at Amelia and help myself to some potatoes.

  A mountainous moment of silence in which forks clatter on plates and ice clinks in glasses follows my little speech. And then Amelia’s instincts kick in.

  “I don’t even know what you’re doing here or why you showed up!” she fires at me, fiercely twisting one of her eyebrow rings. “You can’t just walk into our lives and act like you’re family!”

  “Amelia!” Alma snaps, sliding a hand onto Amelia’s wrist. “That is enough.”

  Amelia jerks away her hand and turns her huge, anger-filled eyes on me. “Well, it’s true!” Then she pushes away her plate and storms out of the room.

  The second she’s gone, Mari whirls around to Alma. “You have to do something about her! She’s so flipping mean all the time. All she ever does is hang around her jerkazoid boyfriend and act like everyone’s her enemy! I’m sick of it! Can’t she just be nice for a change?”

  “You just need to let her be,” Alma says in a tired voice. She reaches across the table and brushes a curl from Mari’s eyes.

  “Let her be?” Mari huffs. “Why? So she can ruin my life?”

  “No, Mija, so she can figure out how not to ruin hers.”

  I can tell Alma’s furious at Amelia, but instead of chasing after her, she turns to me, smiles sadly, and says, “Welcome to the family.”

  Nine

  “Your mother was murdered?” Mari says when dinner’s over, Alma’s gone to the top of the driveway to check mail, and we’re clearing dishes. “Jeesh. I thought our story was sad. What happened?”

  When I use the M-word most people get all weird and tongue-tied and don’t say anything—a highly awkward response situation that makes me feel like I’ve turned green and sprouted horns. Mari’s lack of shyness on the topic is refre
shing. As I carry plates from the table I tell her about the clinical trial that killed my mom. It’s weird how not-weird it’s become to talk about it. Distance plus time equals not quite detachment, but almost like I’m telling a detective story about some other people.

  “What about your mom?” I ask when I finish my story. “What happened to her?”

  “Nothing like that.” She stops clearing the table and stands at the sink, staring into the soapy water. “I mean total suckville, but it was natural at least. Cancer. Four years ago.”

  “What kind of cancer?” I ask, determined to match her in frankness.

  “Ovarian,” she mumbles.

  “Sorry. That must’ve been terrible.”

  She nods without speaking, and another mountainous silence follows in which the natural extension to the dead mom question is the dead dad question. Nobody’s said a word on the subject, but it lingers, waiting to be asked.

  I clear my throat and squeeze the lighter. “And what about your…our…” I can’t bring myself to call him our father and go instead with Alvaro. “What about Alvaro? How’d he die?” The question sparks all the smoldering feelings I’ve had since meeting Alma last Friday—how my world was one thing and how suddenly it’s become something else entirely—a world in which I’m a sister and a granddaughter and part of a family.

  “He drowned,” Mari says in a flat voice. “He was a good swimmer, so he was probably drunk.” She stops talking and goes stiff and small and silent. I can practically see her disappearing—there goes the hair, the nose, the eyes—until all that’s left is shadow. I don’t know what she’s feeling exactly, but I know what she’s doing. I, too, have mastered the disappearing act. I ask a few more questions, but it’s a lost cause.

  Mari mutters something about having things to do and goes outside. I watch her through the kitchen window as she sits beneath a tree, hunched over a sketchbook, pencil furiously scribbling across a page.

  Amelia’s nowhere to be found and Alma hasn’t yet come back. I’m solo in the kitchen, feeling unanchored and out of place, unsure how to occupy this unfamiliar space on my own, so I follow Mari outside. I know she’s trying to be alone and I’m bordering on creepy lurking, but screw it. I sit down next to her without saying anything. She keeps drawing and doesn’t look up, but she doesn’t move or ask me to leave either. We sit in side-by-side silence, each lost in our own world, until Mari turns the open page of her sketchbook to me.

  “Wow,” I say, studying the drawing she’s done of a hummingbird. “You’re really good.”

  She shrugs off the compliment and shows me the rest of the sketchbook, more drawings of birds, followed by pages and pages of cartoon sketches—big-eyed Anime girls, cartoon animals of every sort, fantastical creatures. “I’m trying to get into the charter art school for fall,” she says. “I have to do a portfolio. I’m focusing on hummingbirds.” Her voice brightens as she tells me about her art and her portfolio and the birds she’s drawing. “My favorite hummer is the Calliope. They’re hard to see, though. I’ve been trying to get a picture of one. Did you know it’s the smallest bird in North America north of Mexico? The males have these amazing magenta stripes on their chest and…” She stops talking and blushes, as if her love of birds is something to be embarrassed about.

  “My mom was really into birds,” I say quickly, wanting to assure her that in my book, digging birds is nothing to be embarrassed about. “Are you any good at identification?”

  She shrugs and looks at her sketch with a critical gaze, erasing some of the lines. “I can tell the hummingbirds apart, and I can tell a sparrow from a pigeon.” She blows eraser dust from her paper. “You?”

  “A little. My mom had a thing about identifying birds. She said knowing their names made her feel less lonely, so she was always teaching me what they were.” When she was sober I think, but I don’t want to get into that. I stop talking and stare at my hands, picking at my fingernails that I allowed Dahlia to paint lime-green the other day. Sitting in the shade of the tree, the sun winking through the branches, flecks of green polish settling on my lap like Martian dust, my thoughts drift back to Alvaro. I get this uneasy feeling, this sense of being an alien invader dropped onto Planet Family Flores. I don’t even know the basics about my father, The Jerk, and here I am supposed to just be part of this family? “So, I have kind of a weird question,” I say.

  “Okay. Weird’s cool.”

  I crack my knuckles and spend a minute chewing the hell out of my lip. “Well, I don’t really know anything about Alvaro and you guys speak Spanish, so…” This is as far as I get because as soon as I speak I feel green in my gut, like I’m about to skydive and I’m unsure if my parachute will work.

  “You mean you don’t know where you’re from? Your mom never told you?” I shake my head and she lets out a soft whistle. “Jeez. That’s crazy. So you never knew you were half Mexican?”

  I feel my eyes widen. “Mexican?”

  “Yep. Gran and Pops—he’s dead now— came from Morelia, but Dad was born here.” She pauses and now she’s the one to chew her lip. I notice her hand tightening around a pencil. “A lot of people around here are jerks about Mexicans. They think anyone who speaks Spanish is illegal. As if a person can even be illegal.”

  We go quiet after this statement. My thoughts converge on this new information about my ethnicity. Mexican. Mexico. A word. A place. A country. A geographical statement. A geopolitical thing in a world of geopolitical things. What does that mean for me? Do I have to speak Spanish? Do I just become Mexican because that’s what someone before me was? I’m too overwhelmed to speak, and fortunately I don’t have to. Any further conversation is interrupted by the sound of a door slamming and Amelia shouting. Mari jumps to her feet and races into the house. I’m a step behind.

  Amelia and Alma are standing in front of the door, Alma’s arms out, blocking Amelia. Amelia’s laughing, but the laugh is off-kilter, like a scale that hasn’t been calibrated. It’s too loud, too aggressive, and there’s nothing in it that sounds funny.

  “You’re high, aren’t you?” Alma says in a forceful whisper that carries far more weight than a shout.

  “What if I am?” Amelia counters, all hands-on-hips attitude.

  “Damn it, Amelia!” The whisper has increased in volume now. “You will not be doing marijuana under my roof.”

  Amelia rolls her eyes. “I didn’t ‘do’ it under your roof. I ‘did’ it outside. And for your information, you don’t ‘do’ marijuana. You smoke it.” A horn honks. I look out the window to see a boy in a truck waiting in the driveway. Amelia tries to brush past Alma, but Alma grabs her arm.

  “Okay, Mija. We can deal with this later, but please, I don’t want you going out with Rudy. He’s a bad influence.” She speaks gently, changing tactics, going for a reverse psychology, kindness approach.

  Amelia doesn’t take to the kindness or to the statement about Rudy, who’s apparently the one honking. “You’re not my parent,” she hisses, a cut that even I can feel. “You can’t tell me what to do.” And with that, she jerks free of Alma’s grasp and shoves past her. She lunges through the door and climbs into Rudy’s truck. He peels out of the driveway, a puff of black smoke as a parting gift.

  I turn to glance at Mari, but I’m surprised to find she’s gone. It’s just Alma and me, standing by the front door in the icy aftermath of Amelia’s departure.

  “This must be very overwhelming for you,” Alma says, turning to me. “But you’re family now. There’s no use hiding anything. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable, but you should know about us. We’re not without troubles. I’m very sorry about Mia’s behavior. Come.” She gestures me to the sink and together we start washing dishes. There isn’t a dishwasher, so Alma washes and I dry. “These girls—you girls—are mi vida, my life, but I worry so much,” she says as I dry a frying pan. “Amelia’s such a talented chef, but she dropped o
ut of her cooking class at school this spring, God knows why, then she started failing all her subjects. And that Rudy.” She brings a soapy hand to her forehead and holds it there for a second. “He got arrested for selling marijuana. After everything that’s happened with Alvaro, I don’t want her around that stuff.”

  I’m not sure if “everything” refers to the newspaper article about my father’s drug arrest or his dying or both, but even though I’m curious about my deceased father, I’m more curious about my living sisters. “What about Mari?” I ask.

  Alma leans her hands wearily on the counter and shakes her head. “Mari used to tell me things. We were close after her mother died, but lately she’s been so distant. She doesn’t tell me anything.” She pauses and looks out the window. “Last month she snuck out of the house. I was sleeping and didn’t hear her leave. The police brought her home drunk. She’d found out about a party some high school kids were having. And this spring at school she started cutting classes.” I hear both the pain and the strength in Alma’s voice, how hard all of this is for her, how she’s not giving up. “She’s a follower and she wants so bad to fit in, but she’s gotten in with the wrong crowd. I just pray she gets into that art school for ninth grade. I don’t know what will happen to her if she stays in the public school….” Her voice trails off. She stares out the window, hands lingering in the water as if I’m not there, but then she straightens and dries her hands on a dishtowel. “And you, Mija, we have a lot to catch up on,” she says, turning to me with a warm, tired smile. “But it’s getting late, and I have to get up early tomorrow for work, and you, too, no? I’ll get my purse and keys and take you back to the dorm. We’ll talk more very soon.” She squeezes my hand and leaves the kitchen to gather her things.

  Mari comes in as Alma departs, earbuds dangling around her neck. She opens the fridge and pours herself a glass of lemonade. “Did my jerk sister scare you off?” she says without meeting my eye, as if I’ve done something to piss her off and now she doesn’t give a crap if I stay or go. I’m wavering between being offended and being mad when something occurs to me. She’s acting like she doesn’t care, in case I don’t come back. I know because I’ve acted this way plenty of times.