Make Your Home Among Strangers

by Jennine Capó Crucet

  —No, she’s right, Leidy. This is all about her. Her whole life is gonna be all about her from now on, right, Lizet? I say go for it.

  Mami watched my face, her mouth twitching, and I didn’t know what to do.

  —But we’re not going anywhere, she said. You go.

  Her eyes flicked back and forth, not even the threat of tears in them. I waited for Leidy to jump in and say something, to make it easy for me to spit more rage at either of them, but her head turned from me to Mami, trying to decide who she hated more.

  Then Mami shrugged. She said, When do you leave?

  —In two days, I whispered.

  —Mom! Are you for real just gonna let her –

  Mami raised a hand and silenced Leidy, and in the calmest voice I’d heard out of her in months, she said, You know what? I say you go now.

  She turned and walked down the hallway.

  Leidy said, Get back here, we’re not done talking about this!

  Our mom passed through the doorway into her bedroom, and Leidy screamed at her closing door, Mom! This is for real! This is not Ariel!

  We heard the lock click shut. Leidy stood in front of me, breathing through her teeth. She yelled, You know I can’t leave Dante with her. You know you’re supposed to help her find a job. You know we’re next to broke.

  She grabbed my shoulders and shook me, saying, You can’t do this. You can’t leave me here with her again. Please don’t leave me here like this.

  If I let her shake me for a second longer it would work, so I stopped trying to fight her grip and decided instead to go through her—I could tell she thought for an instant I was collapsing into a hug—and into our room. I ripped my clothes from the hangers on my side of the closet, wiped tears and snot from my face with a T-shirt before tossing it in my suitcase, which was still propped open on the floor even three weeks into being back. It was already half filled with the dirty clothes I’d planned on dragging down to the laundry room—like the suitcase knew before I did that I’d be out of there so soon.

  And my dad knew before I did, too, but only because from her room, from behind that door, my mother called him. Even Leidy stopped screaming when she heard it.

  —Come get your daughter, we heard Mami say.

  All that time, our mom knew his number and never let on that she did. All that time, she’d maybe even known it by heart.

  —I don’t care, she said. I want her gone. I want her gone now.

  The first time they’d spoken to each other in months.

  * * *

  I waited for Papi downstairs. Before he even hoisted my suitcase into his van, he said, What the hell did you do to your mother?

  —I got a job in California, I said.

  —You’re quitting school?

  —No, it’s just for the summer. It’s an internship.

  —Then why didn’t you say internship? he said.

  He tapped the side of his own head and held his hand out afterward, like offering me something. He looked up at the building, searching the windows for anyone he recognized.

  That night, over some yellow rice and chicken that Rafael had bought for us at a food-by-the-pound place near the Villas, I told my dad and his roommate everything about the internship, about my lab class, about Professor Kaufmann and how weird she was, about how much better my spring term at school had gone than my fall.

  —Even with all this shit going on back here? Papi said, his mouth crammed with rice.

  I’d never told him about how close I came to being asked to leave. I don’t think he even knew my roommate’s name. I filled my own mouth with food.

  —Even with all that, yeah, I said. My work helped me not think about it.

  —Thank god for work, Rafael said to his plate.

  The three of us nodded, chewed and chewed.

  Papi took me to the airport two days after that night, the lines through security extra long because this time around, Ariel had already been through and upped the chaos; unlike our arrivals, our departures wouldn’t have the date in common. My dad parked at the airport without me asking him to, and he made the security line with me, and I was careful to act like this was normal for him, to not show him how happy it made me that he’d be seeing me off at the gate, something he’d never had the chance to do. This would be the last time, too: September 2001 was fourteen months away, and in that time, before the rules changed, he wouldn’t need to take me to the airport again.

  We sat at my gate in a part of the airport I’d never seen, one of the renovated terminals that catered to the airlines dominating the sky in that direction—Southwest, Northwest, Frontier—airlines someone like Ethan flew to get to Rawlings. My dad asked me questions about the technicalities of air travel: Do your ears keep popping the whole time or just at the beginning and end? Will they feed you on this flight since it’s longer? When you land over there, what time will it be at the airport?

  —You don’t remember your flight? I said.

  He shook his head, snickered and said, That was so many years ago, the whole thing was over before I knew what was going on.

  I tried to imagine my dad on his one and only plane trip, at fourteen—more than twice Ariel’s age—crossing the Florida Straits. I wished he was the kind of man I could ask about that day, but that would make him more like my mom.

  —When the plane takes off, he said, is it really rough, or does that turbulence stuff only happen once you’re in the air?

  I could still count on my fingers the number of flights I’d ever been on, and none of them had ever taken me out of the only time zone I’d ever known, but now I was the closest thing my dad had to an expert. I answered everything as best I could, let my nervousness about flying show so he could see I wasn’t used to traveling this way, not yet.

  When they called the section to board that included my row, he stood up faster than I did and said, Go, go, before they shut the door.

  —They won’t shut the door. Getting everyone on the plane takes forever.

  I hooked my thumbs under the shoulder straps of my book bag, my real suitcase—the big one, stuffed with the clothes my dad and I had washed at a Hialeah Laundromat I’d passed hundreds of times but never entered—already somewhere inside the plane’s belly. My dad looked up from his work boots.

  —Listen, he said. Call your mother when you land over there.

  —Are you serious?

  His eyes went up to my forehead. Don’t make that face, he said. Just do what I tell you, okay?

  —She won’t talk to me if I call. Neither will Leidy.

  He looked at the jetway, at the line of people trickling down it.

  —Just do it, trust me, he said. Call me too.

  He swallowed, still looking down the tunnel that would take me to the plane. I watched the skin of his throat move up and down. I said, I will.

  —It’s good you’re going, he said.

  The agent at the counter scanned in ticket after ticket. She took one from someone’s hand and had to turn it around before holding it up to the scanner. My dad elbowed me and said, Here, then slipped a folded bill under the strap of my book bag up by my thumb, into the curled grip of my other fingers.

  —It’s what I owe you, he said.

  I put my other hand over my eyes so he couldn’t see that I was about to cry.

  —Stop, he said. It’s gonna be fine.

  I felt his hand grab my shoulder, too rough at first, but then the fingers relaxed some. The money felt wet in my fist. I kept my eyes covered. I squeezed the bill tighter.

  —Come on, Lizet. I don’t know what you want me to tell you. You could’ve stayed here for school. Are you doing the harder thing? Yeah. Maybe you can think that’s better even if we don’t.

  I pulled my hand away from my face. He shrugged and said, You’re learning something, we’ll see what it is. We’ll see where it takes you, right? It’ll take you somewhere. Look, you’re going somewhere already, right?

  He turned his face from the jetway t
o the ceiling. He shoved his hands in his pockets, jangled the keys and coins in them, his face examining something above him. Then his arm shot up, and I jumped away, but he pointed to the ceiling, his hand bouncing as if he wanted to be called on in class.

  —There’s a leak up there, see? Right where that fixture is.

  He scooted in closer to me, aimed his finger at a ceiling tile, at a light ringed by metal. I looked hard, turning my face at different angles, but I didn’t see the leak; I don’t think one was there. I’d bet money on it.

  —Yeah maybe, I said. Right there?

  I lifted my arm parallel to his, our shoulders touching.

  —Right there, yeah. He whistled through his teeth. He said, And they just remodeled this whole fucking place.

  His arm dropped, the hand back in his pocket but his shoulder still pressed against mine. He said, I can’t fucking believe that.

  We stared up at that spot until I made myself say it: I better go, Dad.

  —Okay, he said.

  He hugged my book bag more than he hugged me, his hands touching somewhere near the bag’s zipper. He put his lips on the top of my head and held them there. He breathed into my hair. Then he pushed off from me and clapped me twice on the shoulder.

  —Don’t lose the money, he said. Be good. Be safe. Keep warm.

  —Dad, it’s hot in California, just like here.

  —Some parts are cold, he said. Where you’ll be it’s cold at night. Look it up.

  I stood on my toes and kissed him on the cheek, the rough starts of his beard poking my lips like barbs. He wiped the back of his hand over it and said, Go already, go.

  He flapped his hand at me, shooed me toward the gate, looked up at the ceiling tile again, squinting at it now.

  I took my place in the line, and just before I made the turn onto the jetway—a move that would take us out of each other’s sight until at least Christmas—I spun around to wave at him one last time. He stood there, arms crossed over his white V-neck shirt, his feet shoulder-width apart, his jeans tucked into laced-up work boots, the soles of them so thick he looked rooted to that cheap carpeting, his face still turned to the fixture, his neck, with its shadow-beard, the color of a tree trunk. I kept craning my own neck around the line that trailed me, waiting for him to look away from the ceiling, for his gaze to meet mine, until the person behind me said, Miss, you can go now, and made me keep moving.

  I found him again after I sat down, my bag tucked under the seat in front of me, the safety card—something I never, ever look at anymore—unfolded on my lap. My dad still stood there, his face turning between that imaginary leak in the ceiling and the dotted line of windows on the plane as he scanned them for me. I waved and waved, willing him to see me, to wave back, and we both kept at what we were doing, our attempts at saying something never understood, until the distance between us made it impossible to know when the other gave up.

  36

  SKIRTING THE EDGES OF THE ISLAND on which my parents were born—the island both even now still think of as home—are some of the most pristine and healthy coral reef systems in existence today. The industrialization of farming that’s likely contributing to the death of reefs elsewhere in the world (with its runoff of pesticides and fertilizers, the things that make canals everywhere such nasty places) just never happened in Cuba, and so that country, inadvertently and thanks to unrelated measures outside of its control, has managed to preserve the very thing I’ve spent my adult life studying and working to understand.

  My PI is careful around me when he brings up these facts—or I should say, he is careful to stick to facts, which I very much appreciate. Over the last few months, it’s become clear that a research trip to Cuba will be necessary: we both know that the data we’d collect from Cuba’s reefs would be invaluable to our current research project. If those reefs were anywhere else in the world—if they didn’t surround the island at the root of my family’s biggest heartaches—I would’ve jumped in their waters years ago. I’ve seen the abstracts float across my PI’s desk with the phrase Pending State Department approval leading them off. Our group has submitted the grant proposals; I’ve seen my name on them; I know what will happen should they be funded, should America choose to send me back to a place I’ve only visited via stories, photos, and dreams.

  Don’t be worried that I’ll do something ridiculous like go looking for Ariel. For the most part, the world knows where he is, what he’s doing. The Cuban government is good at giving us updates, at releasing photos, year after year, of Ariel in crisp school uniforms, of Ariel speaking before groups of students, of Ariel in his army uniform. And I stopped most of my searching a couple years ago anyway, after a trip back to Miami as the ten-year anniversary of the raid approached, when I went to that house-turned-museum in Little Havana and saw so many of the photos and artifacts I’d already seen from three thousand miles away on my computer screen; I saw many of them again last year, when my mom moved into the other half of Leidy and David’s duplex. I’d come back to help pack up her old place, cleaning out the drawers and closets stuffed with all those useless relics.

  —Who’s this kid? asked my niece Angelica, named after David’s mom, who died the year before he married Leidy.

  —Oh god, I said. She kept all this?

  I took the stack of pictures and flyers from her hands, flipped through the mess of them. Mold framed the edges of most of the papers, and my scientist brain wondered, since Angelica was then only seven, if I should find her a mask to wear while we cleaned up.

  —These are from before you were born, I told her.

  —Oh. She frowned down at them. Who cares then?

  She took the stack back, her hands dirty and her fingertips gray from the long day of sorting through my mother’s memories, and shoved it all in the latest trash bag.

  —Keep moving, Tía, she’d said. No time to get reminiscing!

  She’s a smart girl; out of all of them, she’s the one who uses the computer to call me out in California, and she does it often enough that I feel like I know her. Leidy brags during our phone call each week about how well Angelica and Dante are doing in school. She knows me enough to give me that kind of update, to keep me from worrying about them too much. Leidy says she’s not worried either, even though Dante and Angelica (and their other two boys, once they master potty training and fine motor skills) will eventually go to Hialeah Lakes, which is supposedly better now (Leidy’s word) than it was when we went there. She and David moved to Hialeah—right back to within a few blocks of the old house, a handful of streets away from Omar and his wife (a girl we both knew from middle school whom he re-met at some evangelical church)—after they got married. A six-year-old Dante was the ring bearer at his mother’s wedding, Angelica their barely walking (and therefore largely ineffective) flower girl, who I ended up holding for most of the ceremony.

  I would’ve been Leidy’s maid of honor had she asked me, but she didn’t. She claimed I was too busy with grad school—your extra college—for the role. She only asked that I read some poem during the ceremony, and then I went back to my seat in the crowd, to one of the hundred or so metal folding chairs lined up in rows on the banquet hall’s dance floor—chairs that, once the dancing started, would disappear.

  The maid of honor was my mom. My dad didn’t come—I’m not sure if Leidy even invited him, and I knew better than to ask her or Mami—but he sent, through me, the ludicrous set of copper pots they’d listed on their registry (the registry itself a sign that Leidy was more American than she wanted to admit—at least as American as I was). Those copper pots were the most expensive item on that list: I know this because I’d also wanted to prove something to my sister, but my dad beat me to it and bought the pots for her himself.

  The wedding took place the summer before my third year at Berkeley; I’d inadvertently followed Ethan to grad school, but he was gone by the time I made it there. When I found out I’d been admitted, I wrote to him with that news, hoping only that he�
��d remember me and not think I was crazy for looking up his Berkeley-issued e-mail address. But that e-mail bounced back, and once I moved out there and looked him up, I learned he’d left before finishing to take a position as a regional union organizer in the Midwest. The hint of a receding hairline blinked at me from his photo on the union’s Web page; he was still young, and so I thought it seemed unfair—that backward-creeping edge—and it shocked me almost as much as the fact that I was one of only a handful of minority students in my department’s entering class.

  That Ethan was no longer at Berkeley—not hiding on campus somewhere finishing his dissertation, maybe in a carrel near what would be my lab—really was for the best: the person I’d started (and still am) seeing, another Rawlings senior who swore along with me that whatever happened between us couldn’t turn serious, decided on UCLA for law school partly so we could be within driving distance of each other. We ended up living even closer once I quit my program; I might’ve beaten the odds at Rawlings, but I figured out quickly that I’d never be the imaginary profesora I met on that airport shuttle years ago. I have a better idea now as to how much she might’ve been suffering the day she corrected my grammar on our way home. And while I hope she survived her postdoc, I’m glad I learned early on that I was only happy in the field or at a lab bench, far away from anything having to do with The Department, from the advisor who told me my dissertation proposal (about the effects of toxins from coal-to-gas plants—found almost always in poor communities of color—on aquifers) would never find more general interest, that sticking with such a project could limit my options when it came to funding sources. Lizet, there’s not a lot of money in … those kinds of … questions, he said when I pressed him for what he meant. Sorry, that came out wrong, he said, but … you know what I mean—I’m interested in developing you as a scientist, not as an activist.

  I pictured Ethan hitting this same kind of roadblock—What am I even doing here? Who decides what counts as general interest? Why does no one else’s research make them an activist?—and realizing the same thing about what he needed to do. A few months after Leidy’s wedding, I found and applied for the lab manager position here at the Institute, knowing I was perfect for it, though maybe a little young for such a role. But I knew (or knew of) many of the researchers affiliated with the lab—including Professor Kaufmann, who served as one of my references—and after driving hours and hours (and missing many meetings with my advisor) for the various rounds of interviews down in San Diego, I successfully convinced them of what I’d known all along. The day after I signed the contract, I quit the grad program, channeling some imaginary combination of Ethan and Leidy as I picked up the one box all my things fit into and left, my middle finger the only part of me waving goodbye to my advisor’s empty lab.