The Book of Unknown Americans: A novel

by Cristina Henriquez

  “What’s going on?” Maribel asked, louder now.

  I saw my mom form her hands into fists and then let them go again. She looked at my dad in agony, which was the same way he was looking back at her. They seemed to be questioning each other, and from the expression on both of their faces I doubted either had the answers the other was searching for.

  Finally my mom locked her gaze on Maribel. She reached her hand out, but Maribel didn’t take it. “It’s your father,” my mom said. “We don’t know the details yet, but they brought him here. He had surgery and now we’re just waiting. Your mother is with him.”

  “My father?” Maribel repeated.

  “What happened to him?” I asked.

  “We tried to call you,” my mom said, “but your phone was off. We called you a hundred times.”

  “I didn’t know …”

  “We called the police, too.”

  “The police—why?”

  “Why?” my dad said. “Because when I came home, the car—my car—was missing. I thought someone had stolen it.”

  “I’m surprised they didn’t find you,” my mom said.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  Again, the agony on her face. Her mouth tightened into a lock.

  “We don’t know anything yet,” my dad said. “Just sit down.”

  “Ven, hija,” my mom said, reaching her arm out to draw Maribel in. Maribel took a step away and lowered herself into a chair. When I didn’t move, my mom said, “Please, Mayor. Just sit down. There’s nothing you can do. There’s nothing else to know yet.”

  WE STAYED IN those seats for hours. A nurse took Maribel back to the surgical waiting area, where Sra. Rivera was, while my mom and dad and I stayed put, waiting for word.

  A television mounted in the corner was playing ESPN, and I stared at it until I couldn’t anymore. I kept pulling out my phone, checking the time. My dad walked out through the automatic doors at the entrance to smoke, and each time he did, I looked out at the sky, which lightened little by little with the coming dawn. My mom kept filling paper cups with coffee from the vending machine and then she’d sit down and drink it, staring at the floor, and stand up and get another.

  Finally, by the time my dad was down to his last cigarette and my mom was out of money for more coffee and my ass was numb from sitting in one spot for so long, a doctor—a tubby, middle-aged guy in green scrubs and a pair of glasses hanging by a strap around his neck—came out and told us that Sr. Rivera was in recovery but that he hadn’t woken up yet.

  “What happens now?” my mom asked.

  “We wait,” the doctor said.

  “Is he going to be okay?”

  “We’ve done everything we can.”

  We headed home after that, trudging through the parking lot in the white early-morning sunlight, the air as thin as paper, while my mom said, “Shouldn’t he be able to tell us more? ‘Everything we can.’ What does that mean?” But my dad didn’t have an answer, and neither did I.

  I still didn’t know what had happened—every time I asked, my dad cut me off with some variation on “Let’s just wait. There’s no use worrying before we know anything”—except that I knew it was bad enough to land Sr. Rivera in surgery and bad enough that my parents didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t need to know much more than that to feel sick to my stomach. Whatever was happening was all my fault. I knew it. I’d taken Maribel away because why? Because I’d wanted to see her? Because I was trying to be romantic? Because I was trying to free her from the confines of her life? Because I’d wanted to show her the snow on the ocean, the thing that had made my mom fall in love with this country, and I had wanted to make Maribel fall in love, too? With me?

  My parents wouldn’t tell me anything, so all Saturday morning I waited for news. My mom wanted me to try to sleep, so I went to my room for a while, but all I managed to do was sit up in bed—awake and fully dressed—waiting for the phone to ring so that maybe my mom would answer it and I could overhear what was going on. As soon as my dad came home from his newspaper shift, he asked if my mom had heard anything, but she told him no. By then my mom was sitting at the kitchen table with the telephone next to her elbow. Her eyes were red. Her hair was flattened at the back.

  “Can’t you just tell me?” I said.

  My mom started crying.

  “What? Did something go wrong?” I asked.

  “Everything went wrong,” she said.

  “Did he have a heart attack or something? Or did he fall on the ice and crack his head? Just tell me. Please, Mami.”

  She cried for a while longer, then wiped her cheeks with the heel of her hand. “He was trying to find Maribel,” she said. She looked at me, her eyes wet, her cheeks broken out the way they always got when she cried. “They shot him.”

  “What?”

  “They shot him.”

  “Who shot him?”

  “I don’t know, Mayor. I wasn’t there.”

  “Like with a gun?”

  “Oh my God,” she said, and threw her hand over her mouth, like hearing me actually say it out loud was too much for her. She pushed away from the table and ran to the bathroom where, even after she closed the door behind her, I heard her heaving and coughing. I stood there like an idiot, blinking. I felt—what? Nothing. The blankness of incomprehension. They shot him, I kept repeating to myself. They shot him.

  THE PHONE STAYED QUIET most of the day, even though the doorbell kept ringing. Quisqueya and Nelia came over to see if my mom knew anything, and when she told them she didn’t, the two of them chattered on about what they’d heard. Micho stopped by and told us a story about a buddy of his who got shot in Afghanistan and survived. “Lucky bastard,” he said. “God gives out a few free passes like that every year. Saves them for the best people. But listen, Arturo will be fine. He’s one of the best people.” Sr. Mercado dropped in, and then Benny, and I hung around enough that little by little the story emerged: Sr. Rivera had gone to Capitol Oaks. There had been a confrontation, and at some point a man walked out with a shotgun in his hand. He fired, and that was that.

  I couldn’t stop myself from imagining it, like some sort of television show. I saw Sr. Rivera in his jeans and cowboy boots, his hair wet from the snow, combed to the side like he always wore it, wandering down Kirkwood Highway, peeking behind the Steak ’n Shake and the bowling alley and the Panera Bread, looking for Maribel. I felt his breath in the air as he walked. I heard the hard soles of his boots on the pavement. I saw him approach Capitol Oaks and walk past the entrance, shouting Maribel’s name into the cold. I saw people in their houses, pulling back their blinds, peeking out their windows at the noise. And I saw someone come outside—Garrett Miller, I thought, because I had the feeling that somehow all of this had to do with him. In my mind, I heard Sr. Rivera ask him about Maribel, and I saw Garrett screw up his face because he didn’t understand what Sr. Rivera was saying. But Benny had said it was a man—a man—who came out with a shotgun. So what had happened then? Maybe Garrett’s dad saw Sr. Rivera on his front lawn. Maybe he was drunk or high or maybe he was just pissed off. He came outside, carrying the gun, pointing it toward Sr. Rivera.

  Sr. Rivera stepped back, raising his hands in the air to show he meant no harm. “I’m looking for my daughter,” he said in Spanish.

  Garrett’s dad didn’t understand. “We speak English here,” he said. He came closer, holding the barrel of the gun in line with the tip of Sr. Rivera’s nose.

  “Where is she?” Sr. Rivera managed to say.

  What could Garrett’s dad have said in return? “Get off my property.” “Shut up.” “You fuckhead.” “This is what you get.” What could he have been thinking?

  “Please,” Sr. Rivera said, in English this time, one of the few words he knew.

  And then Garrett’s dad pulled the trigger.

  THE HOURS WERE like mountains we had to climb, enormous and exhausting. One after the other, and still no word from the hospital.

 
My mom foraged through her closet for clothes she could give the Riveras when they got home, even though my dad looked at her like she was crazy and asked, “What do they need with clothes?” My mom said, “I don’t know. I just want to do something!”

  She devoted herself to the kitchen after that, preparing meals that she spooned into plastic containers and the tins usually reserved for Christmas cookies. She taped notes to the top that detailed what was inside and how to reheat it, and saved it all in our freezer to be delivered when the Riveras returned home.

  My dad paced around the house with a drink permanently in his hand and a cigarette permanently in his mouth. He didn’t even bother to smoke outside, and my mom didn’t bother to make him. He would wander to the couch, sit for a while, stand up, then check the phone again to make sure it still had a dial tone. When he heard it, he would put the receiver back down and stare at it, like he was trying to exert some kind of mind control over it to make it ring.

  And me? I was mired in a feeling that was heavy and sick. Once, I walked out onto the balcony and looked up at the Riveras’ door, where bouquets of flowers wrapped in cellophane were piled at the threshold. I ran over and started kicking the shit out of those flowers until my dad came out and asked me what I was doing.

  I didn’t have an answer, at least not one that I could articulate.

  My dad said, “He’s going to be fine.”

  I tried to slow my breathing.

  “He has to be,” he said.

  BUT HE WASN’T. Close to eight o’clock that night, the phone finally rang and when my dad, who answered it at my mom’s terrified urging, hung up, he shook his head.

  “No!” my mom wailed. “Rafa, no!”

  “He died,” my dad said.

  “Who was on the phone?” my mom managed to ask.

  “A nurse.”

  My head was pounding.

  “He died,” my dad repeated in disbelief.

  “No,” my mom said again. “No, no, no, no, no!” She dropped her head into her hands.

  I couldn’t swallow. It had to be wrong. We had to be able to rewind. It couldn’t be real. It felt so weightless. It felt like an idea, a particle of dust floating around in the air that hadn’t landed yet. There was still time to catch it. There was still time to stop it, right? It had to be a mistake. I tried to swallow again, but my throat was huge.

  IT WAS MY DAD who drove Maribel and Sra. Rivera from the hospital back to the apartment.

  When he returned, my mom asked, “Where are they?”

  “What do you mean? I drove them back.”

  “But I thought you would bring them here.”

  “They’re going to bed.”

  “They can’t stay in that apartment tonight. They can’t be alone at a time like this.”

  “They’re tired, Celia. You should have seen them. They need to sleep.”

  “But in that apartment?”

  “They have each other.”

  “That’s not good enough.”

  “You’re right. It’s not. But what can we do? Listen to me. They were calm in the car on the way home. Neither of them said anything except to thank me for coming to get them. You can go over there first thing in the morning. Just let them get some sleep.”

  “They’re our friends!”

  “Alma is a strong woman. They’re going to be okay.”

  My mom let out a shaky sigh.

  “Tomorrow. You can go see them tomorrow.”

  AS SOON AS the sun came up, my mom and I went over. Sra. Rivera answered the door and my mom fell onto her in a crushing hug. “¡Qué horror!” my mom cried into Sra. Rivera’s neck. I crept past the two of them to the bedroom where, through the open doorway, I saw Maribel sitting on the floor, her legs extended in a narrow V. I hesitated for a second, waiting to see if she would look up. I thought I might be able to tell from her expression whether it was okay for me to go in. But she was just moving her feet from side to side, staring absently at her toes. I went and sat down next to her, straightening my legs in the same way, and tapped the side of my sneaker against her foot. I didn’t say anything because there wasn’t anything to say. I just sat, listening to the muffled sounds of our moms from the other room—low voices and sniffling and even, once or twice, what I could have sworn was laughter.

  After a long time, Maribel said, “Do you think it was my fault?”

  “What happened to your dad?”

  She nodded.

  I looked at her face. I could see that she was going to live with that question for a long time. I’d been living with it for less than a day myself and it was tearing me up. But I said the only thing I could. “No. It was just what happened. That’s all.”

  “But we left México because—”

  “No, Maribel. It was just what happened. It had nothing to do with you.”

  “Then was it our fault?”

  I shook my head.

  “But the only reason—”

  “Listen to me. You can’t do that. You can’t think like that.”

  I was trying to comfort her, but both of us were trying to make sense of it. And sitting there, I started thinking, Who can say whose fault it is? Who can say who set this whole thing in motion? Maybe it was Maribel. Maybe it was me. Maybe if I hadn’t left school that day, or if I had answered my stupid phone when it rang, or if I hadn’t fallen asleep in the car on the way home, none of this would have happened. But maybe if our parents hadn’t forbidden us from seeing each other, I wouldn’t have needed to steal her away like I did in the first place. Maybe if my dad had never bought that car, I wouldn’t have had a way to get to the beach. Maybe it was my tía Gloria’s fault for giving my dad the money that allowed him to buy it. Maybe it was my tío Esteban’s fault for being a jerk who she would need to divorce to get that money. You could trace it back infinitely. All these different veins, but who knew which one led to the heart? And then again, maybe it had nothing to do with any of us. Maybe God had a plan and He knew from the second the Riveras set foot here that He was putting them on a path toward this. Or maybe it really was completely random, just something that happened.

  I DIDN’T KNOW IT THEN, how close to the end I was with her. I mean, I should’ve been able to figure out that they’d go back to México. I just didn’t know how soon. I didn’t know that the last time I’d see Maribel would be just a week later, when I’d find her sitting on the curb outside our building next to a full-size mattress.

  I went outside and sat next to her, the cement cold through my pants, the ground mostly clear by then except for a few patches of dirty snow.

  “What are you doing out here?” I asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “I thought you weren’t allowed outside by yourself.”

  “My mom is sleeping.”

  I peeked at the mattress. “On the floor?”

  “She doesn’t want to sleep in the bed anymore.”

  “Oh.”

  “We’re leaving tomorrow,” Maribel said.

  “Tomorrow?” I said, looking at her.

  “My mom wants to go back.”

  “So that’s it?”

  “She says we have to.”

  The melting snow trickled into the street grate next to us. I didn’t know how to comprehend it, really, the fact that she was leaving. I mean, all my life people had been coming and going—neighbors came and left, kids at school showed up and were gone again the next year, but the difference was that none of them had been her.

  The green notebook I had gotten so used to seeing her carry around was on top of the mattress. Maribel picked it up and thrust it toward me. “Here,” she said.

  “What? Did you write me a letter or something?” I asked. I was only half joking, hoping that maybe she had.

  But when I took the notebook and flipped through it, there was nothing but the lists she kept and her notes to herself. I closed the cover and fingered one of the rounded corners, feathered and frayed from overuse. I tried to hand it back to her, bu
t she shook her head.

  “You don’t want it?” I asked.

  “Not anymore,” she said.

  It seemed like a measure of something, evidence of how far she’d come. She hadn’t even talked that first time I’d seen her in the Dollar Tree, hadn’t even made eye contact.

  “You could come back one day,” I said. “Or I could come there.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I could find you.”

  Maribel shook her head. “Finding is for things that are lost. You don’t need to find me, Mayor.”

  She had her hands on her knees and I touched my fingers to her knuckles, tracing the peaks and valleys, staring at her skin. The only girl who had ever liked me. It wasn’t fair, I kept thinking, even though I had no right to complain. There were worse things, way worse, that happened in the world. If I hadn’t known that before, I knew it now.

  They were gone by the time I got up the next morning. I didn’t want to wake up early just to see them leave. I thought it would come pretty close to wrecking me to stand at the front window and watch them—two of them this time—walk out with their things in their arms. Besides, I could imagine it well enough. Maribel and her mom climbing into a truck similar to the one they had climbed out of seven months earlier. Maribel with sleepy eyes and uncombed hair, sitting cross-legged on the seat, turning around and looking back for me. But it would be okay, I told myself, that she wouldn’t find me. It was like she had said—finding is for things that are lost. We would be thousands of miles apart from now on and we would go on with our lives and get older and change and grow, but we would never have to look for each other. Inside each of us, I was pretty sure, was a place for the other. Nothing that had happened and nothing that would ever happen would make that less true.

  Alma

  I detached from myself. I saw my life as a spectator would, from outside, from a distance so remote that I couldn’t feel any of it. “Señora Rivera,” they said, “we’re sorry. The surgery was more complicated than we anticipated. There was nothing we could do.” The translator at the hospital, a woman about my age with a wide, round face, cried as she delivered the news. I stared at her hands trembling against her chest as she spoke. “Mi más sentido pésame,” she added, on behalf of herself. I reached out and gave her a hug. I saw myself doing this, but I didn’t feel her shaking in my arms. I went to Maribel. I saw myself walking, but I didn’t feel my feet upon the thin carpet. “It’s time to go,” I told her. I saw myself talking, but I didn’t feel the words crawling up through my throat.