She looked back at Caridaylis, probably hoping for another wave, but my hands balled into fists. My mom knew I was the first student from Hialeah Lakes to go to Rawlings even though she never acknowledged it. In the grand scheme of human achievement, I recognize this is not a big deal, but still, when I eventually showed Mami the acceptance letter and pointed out the handwritten note near the bottom stating I was the first, she’d said, Maybe you’re just the first one who ever applied? And I wrote it off as exhaustion because she was, at that point, the new grandmother of a sleepless two-month-old baby, a woman whose husband had just left her.
—Mom, I said. It’s not the first time someone’s taken care of a kid. I mean, I get it, but it’s not like what she’s doing is actually that hard. She’s – she’s a glorified babysitter.
She released my arm, almost threw it back at me. Her now-shut mouth, the way she rolled her shoulders to push out her chest, the ugly flash of a tendon in her neck: I knew then this was the wrong thing to say. I didn’t even really believe it, but I needed to say it to her. I was trying hard. What I was doing was fucking hard. My mom stared at me so long that her eyes seemed to shake in her head.
—What? I said. It’s the truth.
—I’m waiting for you, she said, to take that back.
What Caridaylis was doing was hard, too, of course it was, but I couldn’t understand that. What woman who I knew from home wasn’t taking care of a kid?
—Why does that girl even know who you are? I said.
—Because I’ve been here from the beginning, Mami said. She’s my friend.
—No she’s not, I said. She’s not your friend.
She grabbed my face, hard, squeezing her nails into my cheeks.
—You know what? she said. I look at you now and I don’t even recognize you.
She let go of my face, said, You’re a bad person.
I took a step away, knocked into the side of Myra. Mami dropped her arms and turned her face up again, back to the house, to Caridaylis.
—No I’m not.
I shook my head and snorted out half a laugh to show how little I cared, but it stung to breathe. If there’d been a way out, I would’ve charged down it away from her, but people blocked me in on all sides. I’m not a bad person, I said again.
For a few seconds I thought she hadn’t heard me. But then she faced me finally, her face tight like she was going to cry.
—Only a bad person could say that about her.
—I don’t really think – I just –
But I couldn’t speak. I wanted her to give me the kind of attention she gave so easily to Caridaylis, someone she barely knew, a girl she wanted so much to count as her friend. I wanted us home, not at that rally. I wanted Ariel gone.
The closest I could get to that was to say, I’m sorry. I just wish none of this were happening.
I let myself cry. She watched me. Mami, I said, I just –
—I know, she said. She let her tears crest and glide down her face. She wiped mine with her thumb and said, Ay, Lizet, none of this should be happening.
I hiccupped more tears, and she stepped closer and put her head on my shoulder, the way she had the night before, when I’d left with Omar for the club.
—We shouldn’t have to be fighting for this, she said. It shouldn’t be so hard. I don’t know, I don’t know.
I put my hand on her back but regretted it right away. I didn’t know if I should move it or hold it there. Myra came over and encircled us with her arms, shushing and saying, It’s okay, it’s fine. We don’t know anything yet. Save it for Tuesday, huh? Everything’s gonna be fine. Just look.
She tucked her hand under my mom’s chin and pointed her face toward Ariel, now off the girl’s back and scampering around the front yard, the Santa hat—abandoned on the grass by his uncle’s feet—replaced by a teal Florida Marlins batting helmet. When he reached the porch steps, he crawled over the door of some four-wheeled contraption: a Christmas present, the uncle said, from a local congressional representative. It looked like a beach buggy, complete with a fake roll cage and fake lights and everything, but was powered by him—by his feet, which stuck out of the thing’s plastic shell at the bottom. He steered it around the yard, growling out driving noises as he trampled every single blade of grass.
* * *
The camera crews and reporters hovering at the fringes of Leidy’s and Omar’s warnings eventually materialized when Ariel’s uncle stood on the highest porch step and gave a formal statement concerning the motion for Ariel’s asylum made before Christmas. He said they had every reason to be very optimistic, that they looked forward to Tuesday. The reporters asked a few questions. Cameras clicked with each calm, measured answer. Mami waved, yelled Amen when other people did, but I witnessed none of the craziness Omar and Leidy had described, though Mami did seem sensitive, and people did step on my feet. I read my mom’s admiration of Caridaylis—or as I saw it, her admiration of the attention people paid Caridaylis because of Ariel—as displaced jealousy. She’d never put it that way, but that’s what I felt—jealous—at how lovingly she looked at that girl. Mostly I was disappointed in Leidy and Omar for not recognizing what was really going on with Mami: she was becoming her own person finally, trying to learn who that even was via a newfound passion. So maybe she’d retrofitted the circumstances of her life to fit in to her new surroundings. So what? I of all people couldn’t fault my mom for having the wherewithal to adapt her behavior, for being a creature thrust into a new environment and doing perhaps exactly what it took to survive there. I admit this was a flimsy conclusion given the small sample size, given my now-obvious observation bias. But it’s easy to stand on the fringes and mistake your distance for authority.
24
OF COURSE THERE WAS ANOTHER RALLY on Tuesday in anticipation of the court’s decision, and of course I went, convinced that going was really just a form of supporting my mom. We were up front, having gotten there early to meet Myra and the others near Ariel’s fence. A crowd hundreds wide and ringed with camera crews formed around us, and at the promised time late that afternoon, Ariel’s uncle came out, Caridaylis at his side. Ariel was nowhere to be seen—not in the shadow of the house’s screen door, not in any window. Caridaylis looked as if she’d been up all night, her eyes puffy and strained underneath new makeup. The lines around the uncle’s mouth seemed more pronounced. He had his arm around her shoulders, Caridaylis small enough to be a child herself, fitting snug against his side like a purse.
From their posture and somewhat bloated faces, the people nearest them—us—intuited that the news was bad. A few feet away along the fence, a woman let out a moan. There was a collective holding of breath as the uncle made his way, while guiding Caridaylis, to the spot from which Ariel had wished us a happy new year. People around me muttered preemptive Ay dios míos, and even my mom—so calm on the two-block walk there, so eager to greet her friends after work and to again not feel the need to introduce me to any of them—held her breath longer than was, to me, safe.
The uncle’s exact words are hazy to me, partly because I knew as he spoke them that his statement would end up outlasting that moment, recorded by dozens of camera crews, reported by dozens of writers. There’d be a transcript, and someday, if I ever needed to look it up, I’d be able to find it. So I could lift those words from a document now, put them here as what I heard him say, but even though that’s the fact of it, that wouldn’t be the honest way to tell it, because all I remember hearing—his voice isolated from all other noise like Ariel’s laughter on the first day of the year—was this: Our worst fear is here. Everything he said after this is lost to me because as he spoke, I looked over at my mother, who appeared to be melting. Her chin went toward the sky as she sank. I remember, more than anything, her scream. A long No with a softness to the vowel that told me she meant it in Spanish, though of course it means the same thing no matter which accent surrounds it. The wail ripped through her body, then the crowd surrounding her, then m
e: a scream fit for TV, and I felt them rush in—the cameras—their zooms finding and catching her.
She struggled against the arms of Myra and her other friends—it looked like they were trying to hug her. I reached out to grab her shirt and pull her to me, my hand squeezing between the shoulders of the women surrounding her, but she pushed herself forward, her upper body hanging over Ariel’s fence.
—So his mother died in vain, she screamed. She died for nothing! Nothing!
Someone yelled, ¡Señora, por favor! But from elsewhere came a barked, No! Then more pushing, and Myra and the rest of my mom’s group began yelling, a ridge of sound rushing at Ariel’s house.
The uncle had stopped speaking and was also crying—or as close to crying as he would allow, his face suddenly red and blustery, hands rubbing against his eyes in wide passes. He walked to the fence, began grabbing the hands of the people there suffering with him, sputtering and nodding at us. This move made my mom worse. She fell to her knees, her hands still grasping the fence. When the uncle got to her, she pushed herself up again and squeezed his hand, said, No please, no.
The uncle nodded, wrapped his other hand around their joined fists, then released her to keep moving along the line of people. She reached after him, touching his back, her fingers trailing down it as he eased away.
—He can’t! Mami screamed. He can’t go back! Don’t let them take him!
Nothing she was yelling made any sense to me; I turned to Myra.
—Go back? I said.
I hadn’t had any more contact with her since meeting her three days earlier, but she slapped the side of my head the way my dad did whenever I talked back to him or said something he found especially funny or stupid.
—Are you deaf? she said. INS says his father has custody. They have two weeks until Ariel is deported.
This didn’t seem at all connected to the news we’d come to hear: the family had filed for political asylum on Ariel’s behalf—custody wasn’t part of any conversation I’d heard or seen on TV, not yet.
—Wait what? I yelled at Myra.
—They don’t have the right! she said.
I thought she meant INS, which if they’d weighed in meant they probably did have the right, but what I learned later was that Myra was trying—in the whirlpool of crying and the new chant of ¡No se va!—to explain a legal technicality to me: Ariel’s U.S. family didn’t have the right to apply for asylum on his behalf in the first place. Only his legal guardian could do that, and so only his father, in Cuba and apparently staying in the capital as a guest of Fidel Castro, had the right to file the motion that his son be granted asylum. The paperwork everyone had spent the last few weeks talking about, which Tía Zoila had called bulletproof at Noche Buena, was all a waste of time.
Caridaylis stood alone, frozen to the spot where the uncle had left her. She was not looking at anyone, not even at the reporters snapping photos and spearing her with questions. She stared at the ground a few feet ahead of her. One reporter—sunglasses atop a perfect helmet of hair—yelled, Cari, what will you do now? What are you going to do now? I pushed closer to him, the crowd having turned more liquid in everyone’s rush to find a neighbor and spread the horrible news, and as soon as my arm could reach it, I raised my palm and covered the lens of his station’s camera, blocking his shot of Caridaylis. The cameraman was used to this, though, and quickly pressed something that raised the machine out of my reach. I looked back at Caridaylis just as she covered her face with her hands. She must’ve watched the concrete path leading back to the house through the spaces between her fingers, because she ran the length of it with her hands still shielding her.
At Cari’s sudden exit, my mom a few feet behind me yelled, No no no no! I turned around but couldn’t see her. She yelled, This can’t happen! We’re her voice! You hear me? We are her voice!
A few seconds later, Myra was at the fence diving after someone who’d just collapsed, yelling, Lourdes! Lourdes!
I yelled, Mom, and lowered my shoulder, used it as a wedge to move sideways through the mass of people flooding against the fence to chase Caridaylis with their words of support, throwing them at the house like rocks. I ducked down, making myself as small as I could, and through the spaces between torsos, I caught flashes of my mother near the ground, limbs trampling limbs, her arms flopping around Myra and another woman’s neck as they struggled to lift her.
Myra fanned my mother’s face, yelled, Help! Somebody help!
The other woman said, Lourdes, stand up, please! These people are gonna crush you!
She was maybe seven or eight feet away. From my ducked-down place, I pressed against stomachs, squeezed my shoulders past the butt pockets of people’s pants. An elbow flew back and crashed into my ear, sending a blast of pain so bright and loud that, as spots tracked across my vision, I thought I’d been punched on purpose, thought I’d never hear again. I fell from the searing of it, almost all the way to the ground, lurching forward, my hands stopping my fall when they landed on and clutched someone’s sneakers—my mom’s shoes, her ankles turned and rubbery at the ends of her legs.
—Mom! I yelled, but her head lolled forward like she’d decided right then to take a nap. I climbed her, used her knee and then her hip to pull myself upright, and I scrambled to my feet, pressing a hand to the new pulse at my ear the whole time. The pain was so bad that when I looked at my fingers, I was shocked not to see blood.
I grabbed my mom’s face the way she’d grabbed mine the last time we found ourselves in front of this house with these people. I shook her whole head and yelled, Mami! Mami! Wake up! Say something!
Myra grabbed my wrist and flung it away.
—Stop that! she hissed. Her name is Lourdes.
I blinked at her, the whole side of my head burning hot; blood had to be pooling somewhere in my ear. Myra didn’t know who I was, had no idea, and so I couldn’t ignore it anymore: my mother had never talked about a version of her daughter that could be me.
—You’re making it worse, she said. You’re not helping, just get out of the way.
Myra and the other woman began pulling my mom’s body in the direction of the street, leaving the fence behind and yelling, Get away get away, as they charged against people whose faces glowed as red as some of their shirts. They pushed past people clasped in hugs, people still turned toward the house and vowing, in the form of various slogans, to fight this, to stop this from happening, to do whatever it took to keep their new family together.
—I’m her daughter, I said to my mother’s back as the others dragged her away. Protestors filled in their wake. ¡Soy su hija! I’m her daughter!
But they didn’t hear me. They didn’t know who I was, and as I tried and failed to push through to them, they never even turned around.
25
IN THE HANDFUL OF DAYS BEFORE I flew north for the spring semester, Ariel’s uncle, at the urging of a team of Cuban-American lawyers working pro bono in response to the INS mandate that Ariel return to Cuba within two weeks of the day my mother collapsed in front of his house, sued for temporary custody. So he was not Ariel’s legal guardian—then he would pursue becoming just that, his daughter Caridaylis dutifully at his side. While I was on the plane back to school (somewhere over Georgia would be my guess), this custodial status was approved as an emergency measure by a Miami court as legalities got sorted out. I imagined poor Omar—who’d driven me to the airport because, when he came over that morning to say goodbye, I’d shown him the note my mom left saying that she couldn’t take me; she’d gone to the courthouse before I’d woken up—stuck in the Ariel-related traffic that no doubt plagued his drive home.
That court’s decision, according to some experts, nullified the order that Ariel be deported by mid-January. According to other experts, this decision meant nothing because a federal agency had already implicitly decided otherwise. I heard these news bites secondhand from the bank of TVs near the school store’s cash registers while in line to buy my spring books, or
from the sets I passed on my way in or out of the student union—and not from our apartment’s window or my mom’s mouth. Although at some point I’d likely be required to take a government or history course like the one Jaquelin took in the fall that would explain the origins of these legal complications, I was far from anything close to that kind of understanding, and the truth was I didn’t want it; this was going to be some long, legal nightmare, and I planned to stay as ignorant about it as possible in order to avoid becoming the Representative Cuban at Rawlings College. But escaping that fate became almost as big a challenge as getting Ariel’s status in the United States settled.
That first week back on campus, many of the people in my dorm asked me my opinion—while I brushed my teeth, in line at the dining hall—and they thought something was wrong with me when I’d shrug and answer, I don’t know. They said, How can you not know? I wanted to hate them for asking—to prop the ever-gracious and ever-accommodating Jaquelin in front of them as the better Rawlings Latino Ambassador—but it was hard to do that because they were right: I did live two blocks from Ariel, even if they didn’t know that. Two days after we returned, my RA knocked on our door, and right in front of Jillian, said she’d gotten an e-mail from a woman in the Dean of Students office asking her to check in with me, to remind me of all the people willing and able to support me. Support me through what, I said. And Jillian answered for her: Through everything going on back home. Nothing’s going on! I laughed. He’s not my freaking brother, sorry to disappoint you. This outpouring had nothing to do with my mom’s participation in the rallies: I was careful to keep those facts from everyone but especially from Jillian, who thought she was hearing some nonexistent code in Leidy’s messages. But I might as well have been Caridaylis herself, the way people kept asking me what I thought. I feigned disinterest because I didn’t want their assumptions proven right. It was only a coincidence that I knew and cared about the protests, not a consequence of being Cuban, and so I denied caring at all. I just want to study, I told the RA, told Jillian again and again. I just wanted to lose myself in the spectacular classes on my schedule—spectacular to me mostly because they were courses I’d chosen rather than those I would’ve been forced to take had my fall grades been lower. I was enrolled in the next round of biology, the next round of calc, and the Spanish II class I’d placed into during orientation week but which I’d left off my fall schedule, thinking I knew enough Spanish and not realizing I’d need to prove proficiency in a foreign language in a Rawlings-certified way. I sat out chemistry just so I could tell my advisor, who now sent me a perfunctory e-mail every couple weeks, that I’d learned something about balance the semester before. In its place, I signed up for the Monday morning section of a weekly lab course called Investigative Biology Laboratory: Best Practices, a sort of boot camp for people hoping to do laboratory research someday. I figured it would help me, in some vague way, build the equally vague community clinic I’d written about in my admissions essay. I still worried that someone would hold me to the claims I’d made in that document, and I wanted to show I was already on my way to making good on those promises.
Make Your Home Among Strangers Page 24