Make Your Home Among Strangers

by Jennine Capó Crucet

  —I’m here now, I said the night I got home, when she filled me in on all this as her way of apologizing for how we’d left things the last trip. I told her I didn’t need to get a job right away; I’d earned good work-study money from all the extra spring break hours, had almost seven hundred dollars saved up even after buying that April flight home, plus I had my credit card. We’ll be okay, I told her. We’ll be good. I wished I had footage of that conversation—evidence for Professor Kaufmann. I could’ve shown her that tape, could’ve paused it and said, Now do you understand?

  It became my summer job, then, to watch Dante, and to watch Mom. To pack up Dante’s diaper bag if Mom wanted to head out to a march, where I’d stand on the sidelines like a chaperone. To make her sit down and read the classifieds and look for another customer service job that didn’t ask for references. To take her and Dante with me to the library every day when I checked my e-mail while my mom read a book to Dante in the kids’ section. On that June morning, I got an e-mail from Jillian, who was two weeks into her internship in New York City. I could barely read the whole thing: she was subletting an apartment in the city itself, splitting the place with the girl she’d be rooming with off campus next year. The internship sounded boring despite the ways she tried to fancy it up (A file crossed my desk that had Marisa Tomei’s name on the label!), but I couldn’t help being jealous. The last weeks in our room were a lot like the first in the way we were careful around each other, but she almost always slept over at her All-Nighter’s apartment now that they were serious. There was one night when she was around, on the eve of some campus-wide debauchery, a year’s-end tradition called the Hill Spill that involved not much more than drinking outside all day on campus property. A friend of Jillian’s stopped by to pick her up for a midnight party that was a nocturnal pregame for the Hill Spill, and the friend—a girl I didn’t know and who didn’t live in our building and so wasn’t aware of my history there—said to me, You want to come? I surprised us all by saying, Yeah sure, changing out of my pajamas in just a couple minutes. Several hours and too many cups of sticky vodka-laced punch later, Jillian and I had our arms around each other’s necks, singing along to the same rap songs at the party. We were the only two who knew all the words to anything the laptop—set to random and plugged into high-quality speakers—could throw our way. Hours after that, Jillian was vomiting into our recycling bin, my hands holding her hair back from her face, and she marveled at my ability to keep it together, and we confessed how we each thought the other was so gorgeous, each of us taking compliments where we could’ve just as easily found insults: she said I was exotic before clamping her hands on the sides of the bin and retching more vomit over our aluminum cans, while I stroked her unbelievably slick ponytail and slurred, I’d kill you for this white-girl hair. I spent the next morning—the day of Hill Spill itself—recovering from the punch I’d kept down as she’d puked hers up, while she stumbled back out to keep the celebration going. She considered us friends again thanks to that night, had promised to e-mail me over the summer, and in the absence of anything from Ethan—my I’m okay, OK? response lingering unsent in my head—I’d been looking forward to hearing from her until the e-mail actually appeared and hinted at everything I was missing by being home.

  There was also, that day, an e-mail sent on behalf of Professor Kaufmann to all the students participating in the internship, which started soon and which would run through most of August, ending right before classes began again. The e-mail detailed how to check in once we arrived at the facility, where to pick up our keys and meal cards, driving directions for those coming to Santa Barbara by car, important phone numbers to call if we had any difficulties or changes in our travel plans. I’d clearly been added to the recipient list by accident (there was a reference to separate, prior e-mails I hadn’t received), but it killed me to see it. I read it over and over again, inspected the list of names—only nine other people, from schools all over the country, some I’d never heard of: Reed, Pomona, Grinnell—and I opened another browser window and looked up all these places, these schools like Rawlings that didn’t exist before that moment. I sat there reading and rereading that e-mail and the Web pages about the colleges until my mom snuck up behind me with Dante on her hip. She dipped him over my head and put his hand in my hair, and he took the bait and pulled.

  I’d promised my mom we’d leave the library in time to drive to what she assured me was a tame protest, a silent march Madres Para Justicia had organized in response to the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court was, at that very moment, deciding whether to hear the case that argued Ariel himself had legal standing to file for asylum despite being a minor. Even though she guaranteed its subdued nature—We have a permit, there’ll be police escorting us and everything—I would not be marching with her. Dante and I would wait down the street at the Cuban restaurant that was sponsoring the march, meaning, I thought, that it would be empty and quiet once the protest got under way. I checked out a book about the world’s oceans for the pictures—something to keep Dante entertained—and we drove down there, me dropping off my mom a few blocks from where we would wait for her.

  At the restaurant, we had to sit outside: the inside was home to a meeting run by another, separate group of organizers glued to a radio and also watching a live broadcast of the courthouse in Miami, despite the fact that the deliberations were happening in Washington (and isn’t that perfect, the way so much of Miami thought itself the center of everything, even that late in the fight?). I ordered a café con leche for myself and a plate of French fries for Dante, to function more as toys than food. He grabbed fries by the fistful and dropped them on the patio while saying bye-bye. I pushed the plate away when he wouldn’t stop doing this, then I busted out the ocean book and read to him about calcium carbonate shells and anemones and a whole host of organisms and structures. The pictures—glossy and full-color—promised us that places even farther away than California really existed, promised that the world was so much bigger than our block and the disappointment of that summer, that there was something much more vast than the despair sitting there with Dante brought me. The pictures did their job, occupying his attention for a few seconds at a time. I wiped off his hands with a paper napkin and let him flip through the pages himself, watching to make sure he didn’t rip any of them.

  After about twenty minutes, something came toward us from down the street, louder than the traffic already passing, than the voices suddenly rising inside the restaurant, though this new sound was way too loud to be my mom and her group’s silent protest. It rang like a celebration, cars honking and people cheering, like the party in the streets after the Marlins had won their first-ever World Series. Within a few seconds I saw them coming: a brigade of pickup trucks and SUVs, some with oversized wheels, big banners flying behind them, American flags, Confederate flags. Car horns blaring, white men hanging out of the windows, banging hard on the roofs of their own trucks like they didn’t care about dents. As they approached, some people on the street just stopped and stared. Some dropped the grocery bags they held. But others waved back, pumped fists in the air. When the first of the trucks passed me, I read the banner twice before understanding everything it meant. The letters and numbers on it, spray-painted in wide, black script on what I now saw was a king-sized white sheet, read: 1 DOWN, 800,000 TO GO!!!

  Something in me said to pull Dante out of his high chair and, though of course he couldn’t read, turn his face away and in to my chest. Within seconds that high chair was on the ground, knocked over by one of the screaming men who’d jostled to be the first out the door of the restaurant to throw whatever he could at the passing trucks. Other men followed, and the only thing that kept it from being a full-blown riot was the fact that the trucks sped up when they saw the rush of red-faced Cubans sprinting toward them. They kept going but turned off Calle Ocho a few blocks later, when it became clear that each man would chase them for as long as his body could handle.

  As that high ch
air crashed to the ground, as Dante turned and turned his face where I held it because he couldn’t really breathe, here’s what I thought: It’s over, he’s gone. I thought: I’m one of those 800,000. I thought: Fuck you, we fucking made this city. I thought: Who fucking wants to be here anyway. Dante finally pushed my hand with his head hard enough for me to let go: Why couldn’t I be the one? I couldn’t admit this to anyone, but I wanted to be the one to go. Get me out of here, I thought. Get me the fuck out of here.

  Dante started to cry and scream, and the group of people who’d left the restaurant regrouped in a parking lot a block down. Their running left them in front of a car wash, where they met other angry spectators, and they bent over and leaned on their own knees, heaving air while cursing and crying. Then one of them stood up and put his hand to his forehead in a salute, looking down the road in the direction the trucks had come from. He pointed there with his other hand, and the people around him watched as a group of women—all of them in black, each of them silent—moved toward us with arms linked.

  And as the women came—just a couple thin lines of black stretching across the four lanes of the street, cops on motorcycles zigzagging ahead of and behind them, lights flashing silently—my mother, somewhere near the end closest to me, did not turn to us at the sound of Dante’s shrieking, which I tried and failed to control. She kept her head tilted down, as if her steps were the most important thing in the world, the only thing she had any power over. She watched herself walk and either couldn’t hear Dante or refused to look up if she recognized the crying as his. She kept moving forward. Nothing would distract her. Dante gulped in a huge swallow of air and came back twice as loud, shrill as a siren, and my mother’s eyes slammed shut, stayed shut, her legs still moving her forward.

  I bent over and grabbed the wooden high chair, righted it as best I could with Dante on my hip. Then I put him in it, buckled the flimsy plastic seatbelt around his hips. He reached his arms up to the sky, his face a red fist of insistence, and when I backed away, he tore himself open with wet roars. But I moved a little more, just to the other side of the table, to see what it felt like. I turned from him and watched my mom focus, watched her keep moving in silence.

  —You’ll be fine, I whispered, the words lost under Dante’s agony.

  I ignored the glares from the people around us, angry at the broken silence, at me for not being able to do anything about anything.

  —You’ll be fine, I said again and took one more step away.

  You’ll be fine, you’ll be more than fine.

  * * *

  Before the next morning’s news could pick up where it left off and replay every image ever of Ariel during his time in the United States, I snuck out while everyone slept to run to the library and be there when it opened. I called the emergency number in the e-mail from a pay phone in the library’s lobby. The program coordinator, sounding somehow not at all groggy despite the time difference, explained that no, I hadn’t been replaced exactly: Professor Kaufmann had understood too late that I’d declined my spot, and she’d opted not to invite another Rawlings student, as the grant could be spent in other ways. This woman took down the pay phone’s number and eventually had me call Professor Kaufmann myself, who just seemed happy I’d be on board—That’s super!—and didn’t ask for any of the explanations I was more than prepared to give her should I be forced to beg. All she asked about, again, were the forms and if I could just bring them with me then. Yes, I still had them. Yes, I’ll bring my social security card. Yes, I’m happy this worked out, too. She hung up with me to call the program coordinator, who called me back at the pay phone within minutes and who seemed too happy to tell me that the cost of the flight, initially covered, would now fall on me—the funding for that had already been reallocated. I’ll figure it out, I told her. I gave her my social over the phone; she gave me the airport to fly into and the name of the car service that would pick me up there: I was to e-mail her my itinerary the second I purchased the flight so she could book my shuttle.

  The cheapest ticket that got me to Santa Barbara by the day they wanted us there cost just over six hundred dollars. My hands shook as I typed in my name, the numbers on my credit card. The confirmation screen came up with that large number behind the dollar sign—an amount so close to the one in my bank account, one just shy of the figure scrawled on our rent check each month—and I choked down the word No. I tried to find a way to forward my itinerary without that shameful price showing, to cover it up or delete it somehow, but there was none. I retyped my arrival information—the flight number, the airline, the time—at the top of the e-mail and hoped the woman wouldn’t scroll down.

  * * *

  I told Leidy first, but I hadn’t planned that. She was coming out of the shower, her hair wrapped in one towel and her body in another, when I got back.

  She startled when she saw me, the towel around her chest slipping a bit, and said, Shit! Where were you at so early? I thought you ran away or something.

  I did not laugh or answer—I only winced from the thought of the money I’d just spent and doubled over like she’d already hit me.

  She said, Oh god what?

  Mami woke up along with Dante when Leidy screamed You fucking traitor at me. Mami’s hair was plastered down on one side, her arms still weak in that sleepy way when she wrapped them around Leidy from behind, pulling one daughter off the other. Once Leidy’s arms were pinned, I let my hand fly to smack her in retaliation, but Mami spun her around in time so that all I caught was air.

  —You’re no better than Dad, Leidy spit at me.

  —Leidy! my mom yelled.

  Evoking my father was still the ultimate insult, the power of it tripled by all the hatred focused on Ariel’s father in the weeks between the raid and their final departure a day earlier from Washington, where he’d been waiting for his son. But Leidy shrugged off our mom and got back in my face, squared up to me like I was someone she’d never met but was ready to rip apart. She shoved her hand in my face.

  —No, you know what? You’re worse than Dad. At least he has the balls to go away and stay away.

  The long nail on her pointer finger glanced my nose, her elbow jutting up high in the air, her chest pressing into mine, her next strike so imminent, so close, that I almost looked for the balding bouncer from the talk show she must’ve been channeling, willed him to jump out from the kitchen and stop her.

  —You’re worse, she said. You came back and talked all this shit, you fucking promised me, and now you’re fucking bailing on us again.

  —What is she talking about! my mom cried at me.

  —She didn’t tell you either? Leidy said, raising her arms in the air. Of course she didn’t! She took a fucking job in California, Mami.

  —California? my mom said. California? Lizet, how can that be?

  —It’s not a job, it’s an internship!

  But why was I trying to explain it? What did that distinction mean to anyone but me? Still, I tried to get it across; I wanted Mami to understand that I wasn’t leaving just for a job, that this chance was much more than that. And I wanted to confess that I didn’t even understand how much it might mean, that I was acting on a promise that wasn’t clear to me yet, but only acting on it would make it clear. That making this choice was terrifying.

  I pushed Leidy out of my face and said, Mami, listen, it’s this amazing chance to work in a real lab with one of my professors who thinks I’m really good and I said no at first, but I can’t, I can’t say no to it.

  —A lab? she said.

  And I said, Yeah, like a real laboratory, like a scientist’s laboratory. The professor only asked one person in the whole school and it was me.

  —Why you? How do you know this man?

  —It’s a woman.

  —A woman?

  —Yeah right, Leidy said from behind me now. She’s obviously lying.

  —No she’s not! She really has her own lab.

  —No, you fucking idiot, you. You
are lying.

  —Why would I lie about this?

  —Because you obviously think you’re too good to watch a kid all summer!

  I’d fed Dante and put him to bed the night before, the only one of us who could walk away from the footage of Miami’s varied responses to Ariel landing back in Cuba late that afternoon. Caridaylis had refused to comment: she hadn’t been allowed to see him since the raid.

  I said, So what if I do? What if one of us is?

  —Lizet, my mom said. That is enough.

  —So you’re too good to deal with this shit but I’m not? Leidy yelled. Must be nice to not give a shit about anybody but yourself!

  I thought Mami yelled, Leidy, let it go. But Mami was staring at me.

  —Let her go, Mami said again.

  —What? Leidy said.

  —You got your problems and she’s got hers. She wants to go spend her summer with some woman professor she doesn’t even know, let her go.

  —That’s not what –

  —Mami, are you serious? Leidy said.

  —Yes I’m serious! She thinks that’s what she’s gotta do, fine. You think I’m gonna get in her way?

  —Yeah, that’s your fucking job, Mom. It’s your job to get in her way.

  —Not anymore it’s not.

  —You guys, I yelled.

  Mami turned to me and said, You know where the door is. You know where we live.

  —This has nothing to do with either of you, I said.

  —Bullshit it doesn’t, Leidy said.