The Book of Unknown Americans: A novel

by Cristina Henriquez

  “Do you like it?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I picked out a red one so that it would match your sunglasses.”

  “It’s so soft.”

  “It’s alpaca,” I said again, like I was suddenly some kind of alpaca salesman or something.

  She wrapped the scarf around her neck.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t seen you,” I said. “My dad grounded me.”

  “What is that?” she asked.

  “It means he’s not letting me go anywhere besides school. Whatever. It’s not a big deal. I just wanted you to know why I haven’t been around.”

  She nodded.

  “I wanted you to know that it isn’t that I don’t want to see you.”

  “Okay.”

  Then, there in the shadows of the hallway, I kissed her. This strange electricity shot through my body. My first real kiss. Her skin was warm, and she smelled like laundry detergent and frost, as fresh as the winter air. She pulled away first, but she peeked at me and smiled. All I wanted was to do it again—to kiss her, to inhale her, to feel her mouth against mine. I was fuzzy with the thought of it, like I’d somehow slipped underwater. But then, from the living room, my dad started singing along in English: “I want to wish you a Merry Christmas from the bottom of my heart,” warbling like a yodeler on “heart,” and Maribel giggled and the moment passed.

  Adolfo “Fito” Angelino

  I came here in 1972 because I wanted to be a boxer like the great Juan Carlos Giménez, who was from Paraguay. Like me. There was a trainer in Washington, D.C., who was good, who was very good, legendary, and who specialized in flyweight fighters. Which is what I was. Skinny but strong. I wrote the trainer a letter. Sully Samuelson. What a name! And he wrote me back. A letter signed with his name. He told me he wasn’t taking on new fighters but that if I was ever in D.C. I should look him up. Maybe he assumed that because I was all the way over in Paraguay, the chances weren’t good I would ever be in D.C. Maybe it was just a bluff, is what I’m saying. But I thought if I could just get a meeting with him, if I could show him what I was capable of, that I was going to be the next Giménez, there was no way he wouldn’t want to work with me. So I went to his gym, and every day I bounced around, pow pow pow, light as air on my feet, and then, boom! a hook you never saw coming. I wore red satin shorts and the best pair of boxing shoes I could afford. I was waiting for Sully to take notice, to see me and recognize that I was a champion. But after a few days, nothing. And when I finally asked one of the other guys about him, I found out that Sully had moved to Vermont, which was a place I’d never heard of back then. Vermont? What is that?

  I thought I would go. ¡Vermont, jaha! But I only made it as far as Delaware. I ran out of money on the way, so I got off here and found a job laying blacktop for a few days, trying to earn enough for another bus ticket. It was supposed to be temporary, but I was sealcoating the parking lot of this building and the landlord, he used to stand out on the balcony, smoking a cigar while I worked. Name was Oscar. Turned out he was heading back to Montevideo, where he was from, and the guy who owned the building back then wanted him to find a replacement to manage the property. For some reason he thought I could do the job. “No way,” I told him. “I’m gonna be a boxer!” He took one look at me and laughed. “You?” he said. I challenged him to an arm wrestling match. I said if I beat him, he had to give me the money for the ticket to Vermont, but if he beat me, I’d take the building manager job instead.

  Well, here I am. No shame in it.

  Who comes to the United States and ends up in Delaware? I for one never thought I’d be here. But I’ve been surprised. It’s popular with the Latinos. And all because of the mushroom farms over in Pennsylvania. Half the mushrooms in the country are grown there. Back in the seventies, they used to hire Puerto Ricans to harvest everything, but now it’s the Mexicans. And they used to set up the workers with housing, too. Shitty housing with rats as big as rabbits, boarded-up windows, no hot water. After Reagan’s amnesty deal, the workers started bringing their families up from México. They didn’t put their wives and children up in that shitty housing, though. They found other places to live. Places like Delaware. It’s cheaper than Pennsylvania. And no sales tax. We have all the Spanish supermarkets now, and the school district started those English programs. I know some people here think we’re trying to take over, but we just want to be a part of it. We want to have our stake. This is our home, too.

  I like it here. I started off as the manager, but now I own this building. Bought it out almost ten years ago after working jobs on the side, saving up. I got a good deal. The area is changing, though. A clash of cultures. I try to make this building like an island for all of us washed-ashore refugees. A safe harbor. I don’t let anyone mess with me. If people want to tell me to go home, I just turn to them and smile politely and say, “I’m already there.”

  Alma

  I hadn’t uttered a word to anyone about finding the boy with Maribel, but ever since it happened, I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it, either. I was suffocating under the weight of it, and I was furious at myself for letting him get to her, for creating an opening just big enough for him to slip through and find her.

  So finally, just after the new year, I did what I should have done in the beginning—I went to the police. In México the police were corrupt and often powerless. No one trusted them. But maybe here, I thought, they would be different.

  The police station was a brick and glass building with an American flag cemented in the ground out front. Inside, it smelled of cleaning solvents. I strode up to a window behind a black counter where a woman in uniform sat, turning the pages of a magazine.

  “Me llamo Alma Rivera,” I said when I got to the counter, shouting so she could hear me through the glass.

  The woman held up one finger, got off her stool, and disappeared into another room. When she came back, a male officer with a chiseled face and a cleft in his chin accompanied her. He stood behind the glass and said in Spanish, “I’m Officer Mora. Can we help you with something?”

  “I’m Alma Rivera,” I shouted again in Spanish.

  “I can hear you fine. How can we help you?”

  I took a deep breath. “I’m here about a boy.”

  Officer Mora nodded. I waited for him to invite me behind the glass so we could talk in private, but he simply stood, waiting for me to continue. There was no one else in the lobby, so I went on. “I came home one day and a boy was with my daughter.”

  “How old is your daughter?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “And the boy?”

  “He’s her age, I think.”

  “So a teenage boy was with your teenage daughter?” Officer Mora said.

  “He had her against the wall of our building.”

  “Did he assault her?” Officer Mora asked.

  “He had her against the wall,” I said again.

  “Did you see him punch her or kick or physically harm her in any way?”

  “No. But the only reason he didn’t was because I got there.”

  “Did he say something that made you think that?”

  “No, but he came for my daughter,” I said again, frustration burning my throat.

  “Maybe she’s friends with him.”

  “No.”

  “In our experience parents don’t always know what their teenaged children are up to.”

  “You don’t understand …,” I started. I had the urge to tell him about her brain injury, but I didn’t want his pity. I only wanted his help.

  Officer Mora planted his hands on the counter behind the window. “What I’m hearing is that you came home and found your daughter with a boy her age. That’s all you know. Is she a pretty girl?”

  “He looked at us when we went to the gas station,” I said.

  “Who? The boy?”

  “He was staring at my daughter.”

  “Staring at her? Señora Rivera, that’s not criminal.”


  “He had her shirt up,” I said. Shame had kept me from revealing it sooner. I didn’t want anyone, not even the police, to envision Maribel that way.

  Officer Mora’s expression changed. “When?”

  “When I found them the other day.”

  “You saw him pull her shirt up?”

  “No, but—”

  “So she might have done that herself?”

  “She’s not like that!”

  Officer Mora rubbed the back of his neck, rolled his head around once, and took a deep breath. “Señora,” he said through the glass, “this is a police station. We don’t deal with teenage relationships here. Unless he assaulted her in some way, or unless he made some kind of verbal threat, there’s nothing we can do.”

  I stared at him in disbelief. “I thought you would help her.”

  Officer Mora sighed, as if it were a great exertion to have to deal with me any longer. He said, “We can’t protect her from a boy who, honestly, probably just has a crush on her. That’s your job.”

  In English, he said something to the woman officer, who shook her head before flipping another page of her magazine. I was a fool, I realized, to believe that they would care about any of this. I tightened my lips and straightened my purse strap on my shoulder with all the righteousness that I could muster. Neither Officer Mora nor the woman seemed to notice.

  “Gracias,” I said sarcastically.

  “De nada,” Officer Mora said in earnest, as if he believed he had done his job.

  I SHOULD HAVE gone home. But anger roiled in my belly, and after I boarded the bus back to the apartment that day I was seized by another idea. Fito had said the name of the neighborhood where the boy lived once. Capitol Oaks, wasn’t it? If the police weren’t going to help me, I thought, I would go over there myself.

  I walked up the aisle and tapped the bus driver on the shoulder. In my best English I said, “Capitol Oaks?” He nodded and said something I didn’t understand, but I waited behind him, hoping that when we got to the right stop, he would signal for me to get off.

  As the bus drove on, I pulled my dictionary from my purse to look up the words I wanted. I hadn’t learned them yet in my English class—I had been to a few more since the first time—so I would have to teach them to myself. I looked up dejar. Leave. Sola. Alone. Leave alone. Leave alone, I said in my head. I practiced the words, mouthing them silently, until the driver stopped the bus and fluttered his hand over his shoulder at me. “Capitol Oaks,” he said.

  As soon as I got off the bus and turned around, I saw it: a neighborhood that was probably only two kilometers from us, a place I must have passed a dozen times and never noticed. Capitol Oaks, with a sign screwed into a low brick wall at the entrance, half covered by weeds.

  I crossed myself and whispered, “Dios me lleve,” then clutched my purse and walked past the sign to the rows and rows of ranch-style houses. The yards were dry and overgrown, and lighted reindeer and inflated snow globes from Christmas still littered some of the front lawns. In México, Arturo had built our house before we married. He and some friends had dug a plot of earth with shovels and pickaxes. For weeks, they had poured cement and laid rebar. They had stood in a line that stretched from a pile of cinder blocks to the foundation, heaving each block from one man to the next until Arturo, who was nearest to the house, laid it. Until they had laid enough blocks that they rose high enough to call them walls. Into the hollows of one of the cinder blocks, the one centered just above the front door, Arturo placed a print of San Martín Caballero encased in a plastic bag, to bring us luck. Here, on the house fronts, the paint was peeling and the porches sagged. Pickup trucks and two-door cars were parked in the driveways. I could feel, like some sort of mist that hung in the air, that I was unwelcome.

  I walked for ten minutes, maybe more. There was no sign of the boy nor of anyone. Just a chill in the air, an arc of gray sky overhead. This wasn’t going to work. There was no one here but me. And how did I think I was going to find him anyway without an address? I was heading back toward the entrance when behind me I heard a sound.

  I turned. And there, walking down the driveway of a brown clapboard ranch-style house with rusted gutters and a storm door askew on its hinges, I saw him—the boy—dragging a trash can down the cracked driveway.

  He had seen me, I realized. He’d been watching me wander down the street. He came out here on purpose.

  The two of us stood maybe ten meters apart, fixed in place, for a long time. Finally the boy stood the trash can upright. He walked closer, and I felt the world constrict, my heart pulsing against my ribs. When we were only an arm’s length apart, he stopped.

  I squeezed my hands around the lining of my pockets and whispered, “Leave alone.”

  He stared at me from under the hood of his navy sweatshirt.

  From somewhere in my depths, somewhere beyond where I knew I could reach, I summoned enough courage to say it again, louder this time. “Leave alone.”

  The boy locked his eyes on me and said something I didn’t hear. He repeated it, and the second time I understood.

  “Go home,” he said.

  I knew those words, and I knew by the way he said them that he didn’t mean I should go back to the apartment.

  Then he lifted one hand and pointed at my face. He took a step forward and touched his fingertip to my cheek, to the bone that curved just under my left eye. He twisted his hand forty-five degrees and cocked it like a gun, three fingers drawn back, his thumb up in the air, and let a burst of air explode from his lips, his warm breath like a ball of fire against my face.

  “¿Comprende?” he said.

  I felt light-headed. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to leave. I wanted to run out of there and never see the boy again. But my feet were like dead weight. Move, I told myself in my head. Go, Alma.

  I turned around and forced myself to start walking, listening for the sound of his footsteps, bracing myself for him to run up and shove me from behind or knock me down or do whatever he was going to do. But there was only the swish of my jeans as my legs scissored past each other until I got to the main road.

  I WAS ON EDGE the rest of the day, the encounter with the boy sticking to me like burs pricking at my skin. I couldn’t shake it off. When Arturo and I sat together at the kitchen table that night, I was quiet and preoccupied, staring into my cup of tea, the only sound the knocking of the radiator. I could feel Arturo looking at me—I knew he could tell something was wrong—but unlike last time, he didn’t ask what it was.

  I ran my fingers around the rim of the mug. Arturo cleared his throat and took another sip of tea. I lifted my eyes enough to watch him raise it to his mouth, to see his hands around the lacquered clay—those rough hands, the onion-thin peels of skin around his thumbnails where he’d bitten them, the scrapes on his knuckles where they rubbed against the top of the crate when he pulled mushrooms out from the soil inside. I saw the drooping neckline of the Baltimore Orioles sweatshirt we had bought from the Goodwill store and that he wore around the house, the field of dark stubble along his jaw. I knew every inch of him, it seemed, and yet, in the last year, we’d had such trouble finding our way to each other. Before the accident, we had been the happiest people I knew. “No one else,” Arturo used to say to me, “has ever been in love like we are. No one else even understands what that word means.” We believed we were special. We believed we were indestructible. But after the accident, under the gathering clouds of fate, something changed. We still loved each other as much as we ever had, but it was as if neither of us knew what to do with that love anymore. It was as if our sorrow was so consuming that there was no room for anything else. When we did fall into bed together or into each other’s arms, pressing our bodies together skin to skin, it was out of desperation, a longing to somehow rediscover what was familiar and what was good. But what used to feel like a communion only emphasized our grief and eventually we had stopped trying altogether.

  Looking at him now, though, a
fire roared up inside me. I was tired suddenly of feeling so bereft, so unmoored by sadness. I wanted to smother that feeling, to clear it from our lives like cobwebs from a dusty corner. I wanted to erase the anguish and the distance, the remorse and the blame, and replace it with something new. I wanted to figure out how to grope our way back to each other. Even now, even after the day I’d had. Especially now.

  I lifted my foot under the table and rubbed it against Arturo’s leg.

  He looked at me, startled. “What?” he asked.

  I pushed back from the table and walked to him.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  I put my hand on the back of his neck and leaned down, kissing his skin, breathing in the scent of his hair.

  “Alma,” he said, curling away.

  I lifted his hand from the mug. “What is all this?” I asked, touching the frayed skin around his thumbnail. I raised his hand to my lips, closing my mouth around his thumb, waiting to see if he would protest. I sucked each of his fingers one by one while he watched.

  And then I climbed on top of him, straddled his lap. “I miss you,” I murmured.

  Arturo put his hands on my hips and pulled me toward him. “I’m here,” he said.

  “Closer,” I said.

  He shimmied me closer and buried his face in my neck. I spread my fingers through his hair, feeling the warmth of his scalp, the faint scratch of his mustache against my skin. And by the time he pushed himself inside me I believed that even after everything, even after the accident, and having traveled so far, leaving behind the landscape that we had woken up to every morning our whole lives—cedar mountains and citrus groves, a blue lake and mango trees—no matter what else happened, we would be fine as long as we had each other. Contigo la milpa es rancho y el atole champurrado. And then, the rush. It was as if the whole world sighed. As if every human and every creature and every gas and liquid and speck of dirt and granule of sand and gust of air settled all at once, and all was right in the universe. If only for that moment.