The Book of Unknown Americans: A novel

by Cristina Henriquez

  “Nothing to worry about,” he said again. “Yes?”

  “Nothing to worry about,” I said, testing the words on my tongue to see if they felt true.

  Mayor

  I expected to run into the Rivera girl at school. Not right away, obviously. But sooner or later all the kids who moved into our part of town showed up at school. When Fernando Ramos walked into homeroom the first day of freshman year, he told the teacher to call him Adiós because that’s what she’d be saying to him soon anyway. “We never stay anywhere for long,” he explained. When Lucia Castillo got here, she spent the whole year as a mute, shuffling from class to class and eating the food her mom made her—pinto beans and rice and tamales—by herself in the corner of the cafeteria. And when Eddie Pabón arrived, he was so excited to be in the United States and out of Guatemala that he took the concept of educational opportunity to another level—another planet—and joined every single one of the fourteen clubs at our school, started playing the trumpet in the band, lettered in three sports, volunteered as a hall monitor during his free period, and cozied up to the teachers so much that by the end of the first marking period, he was having bagels with them in the morning in the lounge. People started calling him Lambón Pabón, a nickname he accepted like it was an honor to be called a suck-up.

  “You have anyone new in your classes?” I asked my friend William one day.

  We were sitting in chemistry lab, waiting to see what happened when we mixed silver nitrate and salt. Everyone had on goggles, and the girls had spent the beginning of class complaining that the elastic straps were messing up their hair. Mine didn’t even have a strap, so I had to hold them against my face with my hand.

  “There’s always someone new,” William said. “Can’t keep track of them.”

  “A girl.”

  “Way to narrow it down.”

  “Her last name is Rivera,” I said. “I think she’s Mexican.”

  “No shit? ‘Rivera’ sounded Chinese to me.” William grinned, and his braces glinted under the fluorescent lights. He was skinny, like me, but he was pale and his brown hair flopped down over his forehead.

  “She moved into my building last week—”

  “So?”

  “—but I haven’t seen her at school yet. So, I was wondering if you’d seen her.”

  William snickered. “Oh, I get it now. She must be hot.”

  “I hardly even saw her.”

  “Is she a hot taquito?”

  “You’re a jackass.”

  “A hot little taquito for little Mayorito.” He cracked up at himself. “All warm and soft inside.”

  I crossed my arms. My goggles fell onto the table. “Forget I even asked,” I muttered.

  I HAD STOPPED going to soccer practice after the day I crashed and burned in the star drill. I just didn’t have it in me to show my face there again. I also didn’t have it in me to break the news to my dad, who’d been especially tense and moody lately because he was worried about losing his job at the diner where he worked as a line cook, so for now I was pretending like I was still on the team. Every morning I packed my gym bag and every night over dinner I told my parents about the drills Coach had us doing to gear up for our big games or about Jamal Blair’s crazy bicycle kick near the end of a scrimmage or about whatever else I imagined was happening on the field without me. I probably didn’t need to try so hard. My parents were so wrapped up in their own problems that they barely even registered me. My mom had decided that she should get a job, just in case my dad really did lose his, an idea that my dad found unacceptable. “I am the provider,” he said over and over. “That’s all there is to it.”

  My mom kept having phone conversations with my tía Gloria in Panamá, the two of them brainstorming about positions my mom might qualify for. I’d overhear my mom saying things like “I’m a very capable woman” and “Is it a crime that I should want to help my family?” and “Claro. My life is not only about fulfilling his life. But try getting him to see it that way.” Once, after my dad caught an earful of their conversation, he rushed over to the phone base and stabbed the button down with his finger to disconnect the call. I was sitting at the kitchen table. My mom looked at him in shock. “Those phone calls cost a lot of money,” he said. To which my mom, the receiver still in her hand, the coiled cord stretched across the room, said, “We could afford them if you would let me get a job.” To which my dad thundered, “Ya. ¡Basta, Celia! I don’t want to hear about it anymore!” Which sent my mom wailing, and him bellowing in return.

  The day I finally met the Rivera girl, I’d broken free of my parents’ latest argument to sit outside on the curb and play Tetris on my phone, when my mom stormed out.

  “Ven,” she said when she saw me.

  “Where?”

  “I can’t be in that apartment anymore.”

  “But where are we going?”

  “Anywhere,” she said.

  We ended up at the Dollar Tree, mostly because the day before, someone had stolen our entire load of laundry from the washing machine at the Laundromat. Along with a pair of my mom’s pajama pants and a few pairs of my boxers, my dad’s dingy white briefs and white undershirts had been in the load, too, but my mom, in her simmering anger toward him, told me on the bus on the way to the store that he could buy his own underwear if he wanted it. “He’s so good at doing everything for himself, let him do that, too,” she said.

  We were walking through the aisles, me with an econo-pack of boxers under my arm like a pillow, when I caught sight of her. She was skinny and petite. Big, full lips and a long, thin Indian nose. Black hair that reached down her back in waves. Long-as-hell eyelashes.

  I stopped and stared. She was standing in the aisle with all the cheap dinnerware, looking bored while her mom turned over a package of plastic silverware.

  “What?” my mom said, glancing at me.

  “Nothing,” I mumbled, and made a move to keep walking.

  But my mom backtracked to see what had snagged my attention. “Who is that?”

  I tried to distance myself further. I would just talk to her another time, I thought, preferably one when my mom wasn’t around.

  “Are those our new neighbors?” my mom asked. And before I knew it, she was marching toward them, her pocketbook bouncing against her thigh.

  “Buenas,” she said when she reached them.

  The mother turned, surprised.

  “I’m Celia Toro and this is my son Mayor,” my mom said in Spanish. “You live in our apartment building, no? The Redwood Apartments?”

  Sra. Rivera smiled. She was small and plump. Her wavy black hair was slicked back in a ponytail. “Ah! Sí. Redwood. I’m Alma Rivera. And this is Maribel.”

  Maribel, I said to myself. Forget about how she was dressed—white canvas sneakers straight out of another decade and a huge yellow sweater over leggings—and forget about the fact that her black hair was mussed like she’d just woken up and the fact that she wasn’t wearing any makeup or jewelry or anything else that most of the girls in my school liked to pile on. Forget about all of that. She was fucking gorgeous.

  My heart was jackhammering so hard I thought people from the next aisle were going to start complaining about the noise. Then I remembered the package of underwear I was carrying. In case there was any question, across the front of the plastic in big, black letters, it was labeled “Boxer Shorts. Size X-Small.” I shuttled the package behind my back.

  “I hope you’re not looking for food,” my mom said. “You won’t find much of it in this store. There’s a Mexican market nearby, though. Gigante. It probably has everything you’re looking for.”

  “We bought food at the gas station,” Sra. Rivera said.

  “The gas station! Ay, no. And what have you been eating for dinner? Gasoline?”

  This was my mom’s attempt at a joke, and thankfully Sra. Rivera laughed. “Almost as bad,” she said. “Canned beans and hot dogs and something the Americans call salsa.”

 
; “Wait until you try the American tortillas,” my mom said. “Horrible.”

  I was trying not to look at Maribel, or at least to pretend like I wasn’t looking, but my gaze kept brushing over her, watching as she stood still, her hands folded in front of her. I thought I should probably say something to her, you know, just to be neighborly, but she was clearly so far out of my league that I was having trouble remembering how to work my mouth.

  I put one hand in my pants pocket, trying to seem cool. She didn’t even look at me. Whatever I said, it had to be good, something that would make her think I had game. Finally, I blurted out, “You just moved in.”

  Sra. Rivera glanced at me. Maribel barely looked up.

  Great. I was an asshole. “You just moved in”? That’s what I’d come up with?

  “To our building,” I went on. Jesus.

  She stared at me, her face as blank as a wall.

  “Yeah,” I said, and looked at my feet in humiliation. What was wrong with me? I should just keep my mouth shut from now on. Which is exactly what I did after that. Our moms talked while I stared at my shoes—my brother’s old black-and-white Adidas that I always thought looked cool and retro but at the moment just seemed stupid and old—and counted the minutes until we could get out of there. Then, through my fog of embarrassment, I heard her mom say something about the Evers School.

  I looked up and saw my mom raise her eyebrows. “Did you say Evers?”

  “Yes,” Sra. Rivera said.

  I looked at the girl again. Evers? That was the school for retards. We all called it the Turtle School.

  My mom said, “Of course. Yes. That’s a great school. She’ll be very happy there,” and smiled a little too big.

  The girl pulled her arms all the way into the body of her yellow sweater so that the empty sleeves hung like banana peels, and I saw it was true. There was something wrong with her. I never would have guessed it. I mean, to look at her … it didn’t seem possible.

  My mom changed the subject after that, telling Sra. Rivera where to find the cheapest hair salon and the best Goodwill and how to get to the nearest Western Union. She told her to steer clear of the sandwich shop at the end of Main Street because Ynez Mercado, who lived in our building, had found a hair in the hoagie she’d bought there, and of course she told her about the horrors we’d just experienced with the Laundromat. Sra. Rivera repeated “Thank you” anytime my mom gave her an opening, and finally my mom wrapped up by telling her our unit number and encouraging them to stop by anytime. “I’m almost always home,” she said. I guess she couldn’t help herself, because she added pointedly, “My husband likes it that way.”

  Benny Quinto

  My name is Benny Quinto. I came from Nicaragua, baby. The Land of Lakes and Volcanoes. Been here eight years almost to the day.

  Back in Nicaragua I was studying to be in the priesthood. I thought I heard God calling my name from up in the clouds somewhere, man, and I thought he was telling me I was the chosen one. This deep, booming voice. I wasn’t even high. Drugs hadn’t come into my life yet. But I think I must have been hallucinating or something, because I’ve had conversations with God since then and He’s like, Nope, don’t know what you’re talking about, Benny. Never said all that about you being the one. Sorry to disappoint.

  A few buddies of mine left Nicaragua to come make some real bones over here. Wasn’t no money for pinoleros like us back home. Politically, you know, it wasn’t so bad anymore. Somoza was long gone, the contras were nothing but a memory. But leaving the poverty of Nicaragua to go to the richest country in the world didn’t take much convincing.

  I left when I was twenty. Told a dude I would pay him two thousand dollars to bring me over, three hundred up front. Took me a while to scrape it together. Three hundred dollars! In Nicaragua you could live off that for a while. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I stole some of it from the church. Stuffed the offering envelopes up under my shirt one week when I was supposed to be doing my Eucharistic Minister duties and walked out with it. I was gonna do what I had to. I’m like that. Get something in my head and it’s like some kind of block. No way to get around it. I just have to bulldoze through.

  I got shunted into this house in Arizona until I could pay the rest of the money. I mean, they told us we were in Arizona. It was me and twelve other guys. But we coulda been in Russia for all we knew. We coulda still been in México, which is where we had to come up through to get over. It’s like a funnel. Woulda been nice if Nicaragua bordered with the U.S. but it doesn’t, so up through México I went.

  That house in Arizona, that place was intense. I didn’t see the sun for, like, weeks, and Arizona is one of those places that might as well be on the sun, that’s how sunny it is, so it’s nuts that we never saw it. The blinds were shut and there were heavy bedspreads over all the windows. And me and those guys, we were like cockroaches, crawling over each other at all hours of the day. There was no room to move. Just sit tight, keep the faith. I don’t even know why we had to pay so much money. I mean, it wasn’t no Ritz-Carlton. Wasn’t even no Ritz cracker box. But that’s the thing. It’s just extortion. Top to bottom.

  I wanted to get the hell out of there, so I called an uncle I used to be close with—I mean he used to come to my birthday parties when I was a kid and he would take me to the beach sometimes and let me play in the water while he smoked and hit on girls—but he didn’t have the funds. I didn’t even bother to ask my mom and pop. Those two never had nothing. You know how the gringos say it? No dee-nair-oh moo-chah-choh. If that weren’t the truth, I never would have left Nicaragua to begin with.

  One of the guys in the house started dealing for the smugglers. He earned out his fee in two weeks. I didn’t know how else I was gonna get out of there, so I signed up, too. Figured I’d burn through it, you know, just get it done, until I had enough to leave, and then I’d be on to bigger and better things. Problem is, you get a taste for that kind of money and it’s hard to go back to anything else.

  I was out on the streets in Phoenix. We had certain places we always hit up. White kids who wanted to score. Came with their parents’ money rolled up in their fists, acting all sly as they handed it over, thinking they were so street, but the truth was you could name your price with those kids and whatever you told them, they would pay. They didn’t know any better, most of them. There were some real junkies who came by, too. Some pretty hard dudes. I got tangled up with a few of them once—just a stupid fight—and the next thing I knew, I woke up one morning busted out of my mind, bleeding out my side. I’d been stabbed and didn’t even know it. That’s when I decided it had to end.

  I hitched a ride out of Arizona with a guy who was driving to Baltimore. But the drug scene there was wicked. Ten times worse than in Arizona. I was trying so hard to be on the straight and narrow. I was talking to God about it all the time. I was like, Where’s your deep voice now, God, when I really need help? And then I swear I heard it. He told me to split. To where? I asked Him. Funny thing about God, though. He doesn’t always give you the answers, not right when you ask for them anyway. ’Cause I didn’t hear nothing. But I knew. I gotta leave. So I went down to the Greyhound station and said, Here’s how much money I have. Give me a ticket. And the bus brought me to Delaware. It’s not paradise, but at least here I can be at peace. It was never like that for me in Nicaragua. And not at my first few stops here neither. I flip burgers now at the King. Used to be at Wendy’s but they gave me, oh, man, the worst shifts, so I switched it up. A person needs regular sleep, you know! I ain’t getting any younger! But I feel settled here. I took a couple nasty turns, but I ended up all right.

  Alma

  Maribel took achievement tests and cognitive tests. She went through evaluations with both a psychologist and an educational diagnostician. They gave her written exams in Spanish to see whether she could write a sentence, whether she could write a paragraph, whether she could do certain math problems. We had a meeting where the psychologist asked if there had be
en any complications while I was pregnant with Maribel. She asked if Maribel had met her developmental milestones as a child. When did she start to talk? When did she start to walk? Phyllis sat next to me, translating everything. Frustrated, I replied, “She wasn’t born like this. It’s all just because of the accident. Don’t you see it in the reports?” And the psychologist said yes, yes, she saw it, but these were standard questions that she was required to ask.

  And then, after everything, the district told us what we already knew: Maribel had a traumatic brain injury that was classified as mild, but it was severe enough that she was eligible for special education services. She would be transferred to Evers.

  I nearly wept with joy when I heard the news. Now, I thought—finally!—we would move forward.

  They sent a different bus to get her, one that was stumpy and brown. I saw her off the first day and was waiting for her when she came home that afternoon.

  “How was it?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “How was school?”

  “Fine.”

  “Is there anything else you want to tell me?”

  “I’m tired,” she said, and I nodded, deflated because I had expected more. I had expected her to come home full of energy, gushing about the other students and her teacher and how much she had learned. I had wanted the school to act like a switch, something that would turn her on again from the second she walked through the door.

  “Give it time,” Arturo told me later that night when he detected the disappointment in my voice. “You’re always so impatient. It was only the first day.”

  Every afternoon Maribel brought home reports from the school that Phyllis translated into Spanish. They were formal and brief and said things like “Maribel is unresponsive and unengaged, even when she is directly addressed in Spanish.” “She is withdrawn and rarely interacts with other students, even in activities that require no verbal communication.” “Maribel has a limited attention span and often fiddles with her pencil or other desk supplies during class time.”