On These Magic Shores

by Yamile Saied Méndez

  “I didn’t kick him out, Avi,” I said, my cheeks burning. “We can’t let people in. Not yet.”

  My sisters were lost in their thoughts. It wasn’t fair that a six-year-old and a toddler had to worry so much. That was my job. I could take the worries. I was strong enough.

  But my determination to make things right for my sisters was crowded with question marks, all following images of our mother, the play, our next meal, rent that was due in two weeks.

  And then Kota exclaimed, “It’s out! My tooth just fell out!” She put her hand in her mouth and took out the freshly fallen tooth. She held it up for the sun to kiss.

  “Oh,” I said, and in a move I didn’t completely understand, I held up my hand, my palm facing up. A tendril of blood still connected the tooth to Kota’s mouth.

  Kota’s face crumpled as she struggled not to cry, and she handed me the bloody tooth.

  Around us the world moved like nothing had happened. Kids greeted their mothers. Birds flew and sang. The mountain breeze tangled my already messy hair. I stood there with a tooth in my hand and two little sisters waiting for me to be their mom.

  Usually the sight of blood made me sick. This time, the nausea I was expecting never came. I kissed the top of Kota’s head. Her hair smelled of sunshine. She sobbed against my arm, angling her body so the other kids on the sidewalk wouldn’t see her cry.

  “It’s okay,” I shushed her. “It’s okay, Dakota.”

  She sniffled. “A part of me wanted it to fall out when Mamá came back,” she said, her voice choky, “but in a way, I’m so happy it fell out now!”

  “Why?”

  She covered her face, but I still heard her words. “I don’t want the Mouse to come.”

  I almost laughed, but I bit my lip instead.

  “The Mouse only comes in Argentina.”

  “In Spain, too,” she exclaimed, the fury in her still hot in spite of the tears. “It was in that book. . . . He goes to Puerto Rico, too. Besides, you said . . .”

  I had said she’d get the Mouse. I had been mean. She needed me now. “We moved houses, remember? The Tooth Fairy has jurisdiction here, you see?” I said, in a voice that didn’t sound like me really. It was too soft.

  Kota — gentle, forgiving Kota — played along. She nodded, brushing her tears from her cheeks, like she’d known all along and only needed my ­reassurance. “What about the Peques? If they’re ­fairies from Argentina, how come they gave us cupcakes here in America?”

  “The Peques actually came from Europe and Asia and all over the world. Remember Mamá said they traveled in people’s suitcases when they crossed the ocean?”

  Kota grabbed my elbow, and we started walking again. “They came in Mamá’s suitcases when she came to the States?”

  I took a long breath. Someone was barbecuing, and the smell made my mouth water. “They came in Papá’s, I think. Mamá grew up here.”

  “Not here,” Kota corrected. “She grew up in Miami.”

  “I meant this country. The Peques followed Papá.”

  “Is that why they’re taking care of us now that he and Mami are gone?”

  We walked on the sidewalk at three-year-old-mesmerized-by-fall-leaves speed, which is no speed at all. I picked up Avi. We still needed to stop by the community garden if we wanted to eat tonight. Besides, I didn’t know how to answer Kota’s questions. Between her and Maverick and the quiz in English class, my mind was about to explode.

  “We’re stopping by the garden first,” I said to distract her from questions.

  “Okay,” they both replied.

  “Jinx!” I exclaimed, and they laughed.

  My stomach rumbled again. Even if their tiny stomachs were quiet, they had to be hungry too. I had to do something. How do you explain to a hungry three-year-old that there’s no food in the house?

  The community garden gate was locked with a chain, and I tried to open it, but it didn’t budge.

  “¿Volvemos después?” Kota asked.

  When I looked up, I saw why she wanted to keep our plan of coming back later a secret. The lady in charge of the garden watched us like we were ­criminals. We’d come to pick up produce with Mamá in the past, and the lady hadn’t been nice. Once, she’d been talking to another woman, and in a voice loud enough for me to hear, she said that it was unfair that people who never contributed got to reap the fruits of her labor. Her actual words.

  I didn’t understand. Wasn’t a community garden supposed to be for the community?

  Avi waved at her, but instead of smiling or at least opening the gate, the woman turned her back to us. Who does that? I wished for super powers so all of her plump and ripe vegetables would go to waste before she could taste them, for caterpillars and crickets to swarm down on her bounty and eat it all. She looked healthy enough; she had plenty to eat. Why wouldn’t she share?

  “Yes, let’s come back later,” I said, knowing that there was no way we’d come back later, or ever.

  My sisters knew it too, by the looks on their faces.

  With a fist in the air, Kota called out against the injustice. “You meanie! You’re the meanest!”

  “It’s okay, Kota,” I said. “We want to behave so the Tooth Fairy can visit you tonight.”

  That’s all I needed to say. In a blink, her angry expression switched to an angelical one.

  We finally made it home without questions about pesky Peques or mean people who didn’t really care about anyone but themselves. “I hungry, Minnie,” Avi said, tugging at my shirt.

  I made peanut butter toast and gave her a handful of gummy bears. She clapped and hopped in place.

  After she ate, she tugged at my shirt again. “Pee, pee, Sissy.” Kota, who was polishing her tooth on the kitchen countertop, sent me a pleading look.

  “Oh, well,” I said, and took Avi’s hand and headed to the bathroom.

  “Good luck, Minerva! Better you than me.”

  “Kota, watch it, or the fairy won’t bring you anything!” I couldn’t think of a worse threat. I knew how it hurt when the Tooth Fairy didn’t show up.

  “You nice like fairy, Minnie. She my friend, too, Minnie,” Avi said.

  I imagined she must have been thinking about my conversation with Kota. She was smarter than I gave her credit for. Still, when Mamá came back, I’d have a talk with her about the girls’ obsessions with fairies. This wasn’t healthy.

  * * *

  After the bathroom break, which was horrible as always, I sat my sister down with a pile of books.

  “I have to do homework now, Avi, okay? And then I have to get our clothes ready for school tomorrow.”

  Avi’s face went from utter bliss to total panic when I mentioned the word school. “No Mirta, Minnie. She mean. No Mirta, pleath. . . .”

  That evil witch! Avi couldn’t go back to that horrible woman, but I couldn’t miss school. Maybe if Kota and I switched days? If we took turns going to school? But no, after a couple of absences the school would call, both hers and mine. Besides, Kota was too young to stay home alone with Avi.

  What to do with the baby? Why couldn’t she come to school with me? She was so well-behaved; she wouldn’t bother anyone at all.

  “Let me think about it, okay? I still need to wash your underwear and see what Kota and I are going to eat for dinner.”

  “I’m going to get a flower for my fairy,” Kota said, just when I was about to ask her for ideas.

  Alarms went off in my head. “Where?”

  She pointed out the window. I couldn’t see a thing from here.

  “Just outside. I need my alone time,” she said. “I don’t wanna fight, Minerva Soledad. Be nice. I just lost a tooth. I’m emotional, okay?”

  If she had another tantrum, I wouldn’t have the patience to deal with it. The day was still nice outside. A change of air would do her
good.

  “Okay, you can go get a flower, but come back inside straight away in case someone sees you by yourself and wonders where Mamá is.”

  Kota’s eyes went wide. “Or Mamá could come back, and then she’ll see I’ve been disobedient and walk out on us again. You’re right. I’ll be out and in.”

  She went out before I could correct her. I don’t know how, but I had a suspicion Mamá wouldn’t come back today, either. And even if she came back, I’m sure telling Kota off for being outside wasn’t even right after being gone for so long. And no, she hadn’t walked out on us. I knew that just as certainly as I knew the sun would shine tomorrow.

  I sat to do my homework because I knew that after today’s English quiz, Mr. Beck would want to catch me unprepared again. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. Avi was busy playing with her blocks while I worked.

  The door creaked behind me. A cold presence stood there, and when I heard the heavy footsteps on the carpet, my heart went loud like conga drums.

  I turned around, ready to forgive, ready to pretend these two days hadn’t happened. “Mamá!” I exclaimed.

  But when my eyes adjusted to the semi-darkness of the room, I saw it was just Kota standing in the doorway, her arms full of vegetables and fruits. She looked like a harvest fairy.

  “Oh, it’s you,” I said, hating the fact that she’d seen me get excited. She’d probably also seen the look of disappointment I wasn’t quick enough to push back into my soul.

  Avi left her blocks and hugged me. The darker my thoughts, the quieter my sister had become.

  How I wished Mamá would walk into the apartment and see how we needed her. How I wanted to tell her about the stupid play and ask her about the dress that had been Bailey’s.

  “Where did you get that?” I asked my sister, because I couldn’t tell Kota what I was really thinking about.

  “Mr. Chang gave it to me.” Kota placed the fruit in the largest bowl we owned. She arranged the apples, the carrots with the tops attached, the bright orange squash carefully, like they were jewels. They were beautiful. No produce at the store looked anything like this.

  I closed my books, took an apple, and smelled it. The sweet tartness of it made my tongue tingle. “Why would he give this to you?”

  She blushed again. This girl couldn’t lie. “He saw me picking apples from the ground.”

  “Kota!” I protested, putting the apple away fast as if it could burn. “You shouldn’t have done that!”

  “They were on the ground.” She stomped her foot for emphasis. “No one would’ve missed them. Besides, he said it was totally fine for us to take whatever we wanted.”

  “Ay, Kota!” I sighed, plopping down on the couch. The weight on my shoulders was too heavy for my puny legs. “We can’t let anyone know that Mamá isn’t here. They’ll call Social Services. What if they take you away?”

  “And you?”

  “They’d never catch me. I’d run away and then come rescue you. You poopy-head, what do you think?” I hid my face behind my hands so she couldn’t see how upset I was in spite of my words. Because honestly, what could I really do if someone took us away?

  Kota took my hands and knelt in front of me so I could see her face, or she could see mine. “Minerva, maybe we need someone to look for her. What if she’s in danger? What if she never comes back?”

  The fact that I’d been thinking about this all day didn’t make me feel any better. “What if Mr. Chang’s a bad man? What if he hurts you?”

  “He’s okay,” she said waving her hand in the air. “He let me alone in the garden to get whatever I wanted. He said he never had such beautiful produce until we moved in. That we brought him the good harvest spirits. That when the cold weather starts everything will go to waste. That there’s no way he could eat it all. And now that I think about it, how lonely he must be. Maybe he wants to adopt us. Like your friend Maverick’s adopted.”

  I’d never given our neighbor a thought. Harvest spirits? He and Mamá would get along if she ever came back. I didn’t know anything about our landlord, and with what I’d heard, I preferred that he didn’t know anything about us either.

  “Let’s tell him,” Kota said. “About Mamá.”

  Part of me wanted to say yes. To hand over my burden to an adult. To let someone else fix this problem. But I couldn’t fail Mamá. Our problems were our problems.

  “Give me until Friday. I promise that if she isn’t back by Friday, then we’ll tell someone. And Kota? No one’s ever going to adopt us, okay? We already have a mom.”

  We shook hands to seal the deal. Avi wanted to shake too, but first she spat on her palm before shaking with Kota and me. Where had she learned that from?

  “Deal!” she exclaimed in her bell-like voice.

  After our deal making, we ate apples and cheese. I poured cheerios in a bowl for the three of us to share. For dessert, we ate carrots. They were so sweet and tasted nothing like the grocery store kind.

  Finally, Avi went to asleep. Kota lingered in the kitchen like she wanted to ask something but she didn’t dare.

  “Go to bed, Kota. And don’t forget to leave your tooth underneath your pillow.”

  “Do you think — ?”

  “Of course she’ll come. Leave her a note, but remember she might not answer with words.”

  “I know,” she said. “I left her some milk, too.” She kissed me on the cheek, and I gave her a little hug.

  We always kissed Mamá at night. Now that our mother was missing, kissing duty was mine.

  I waited until the girls were asleep to go rummage in Mamá’s chifforobe for some clues. Maybe I’d missed something before. The faint scent of her sweet peach perfume, the one that she only wore to the doctor or a parent/teacher conference, still lingered.

  I hugged her coat, her shirts. I touched the pages of her journal. She wouldn’t want me to read it, but maybe in there I’d find something. Maybe she’d written, I’m sick and tired of these girls. I’m leaving them for good. But even as I thought it, I knew she’d never write that down. There was a power in written words. Once out in the open, they were real.

  I opened a wooden box. Her wedding ring sat there in the middle, hanging from the ballerina that didn’t dance anymore. Three envelopes with little clippings of hair were tucked at the bottom. They all looked the same, all the little pieces of curl. If it weren’t for Mamá’s writing — Minerva, Dakota, Avalon — I couldn’t tell which was whose. It seemed like a lie that Kota’s and mine had looked like our angel sister’s. Avi’s was so blonde it looked like yellow cotton candy.

  I thought about the Ziploc bags full of teeth I’d found the other day, and the pang in my chest returned. I’d known for a while about the Tooth Fairy, but the discovering of the baggie brought all of my childhood to dust, and not the fairy kind. Now I knew for sure.

  “It’s okay,” I said aloud, although there was no one to hear me. “I’m a big girl.”

  Quietly, I put everything away. I closed the box and hid it under a pile of blankets so my sisters wouldn’t find it.

  I opened Mamá’s address book at a random spot. Fátima Grant, Mamá in bright red pulsed from the page. A phone number with too many digits to be a Utah number and an address in Rosario, Argentina, told me what I needed to know. This Fátima Grant, my grandma, was too far from us to be of any help.

  Still I copied down the information on a piece of paper. Maybe she knew where my father was. Maybe she’d tell him we needed him, and he’d rescue us from this loneliness. I couldn’t call her from our house, but maybe tomorrow I could go to the computer lab and look her up.

  I was tucking the paper carefully in my binder when I remembered about Kota’s tooth.

  If Kota woke up the next day and the tooth was still there, it would be a catastrophe. I couldn’t fail her!

  I checked the windowsill to dum
p the milk and pretend the fairy had drank all of it, but the milk was already gone. Maybe Kota had forgotten after all her preparations? But no. A slimy film of recently poured milk covered the bottom of the bowl. It was like it had evaporated. Or like someone had drunk from it.

  A sparkling of glitter trailed next to the window, all the way to the front door. The same glitter color as the one on Mamá’s wallet.

  I checked behind my sister’s pillow, which wasn’t hard at all, since she was sleeping across the bed. The tooth wasn’t there. I searched frantically but instead of a tooth, I found a golden coin that sparkled, gleaming with magic and impossibility.

  Or was it possibility?

  “Isn’t this the bestest thing you ever saw?” Kota said for like the millionth time. She petted that coin like it was her precious. “You never got anything like this, right?”

  She hadn’t aimed for it, but the arrow found my heart anyway. “No, Kota,” I said. “The Mouse came for me once when Papá still lived here and left me a dollar. Maybe the Tooth Fairy got offended, because when she took my teeth, she only left me quarters.”

  Avi came up to me, patted my hand, and said, “Fairy nice, Minnie. She so nice!” She sucked on a lollipop. I had no idea where she’d gotten it.

  Kota must have guessed the question in my eyes because she said, “It was under her pillow. Maybe the Tooth Fairy brought it to her.”

  Maybe it was true. But if it was, why hadn’t the blasted fairy left me anything, then? Wasn’t I still a kid? Most likely the lollipop had been wedged between the bed and the wall and Avi found it by coincidence. Again, I wouldn’t say it aloud, but there were no such things as fairies or magic or miracles. Not for me anyway.

  “Why aren’t you ready for school?” Kota asked as she put her backpack on.

  I looked at myself in the mirror. “What do you mean? I’m wearing the same stuff I wear every day.”

  It was true. Faded jeans and T-shirt with a hoodie on top. I hated to admit that I wore it because I didn’t have a bra and I had grown, and not because I was cold. I had wanted to tell Mamá that I needed one, and now there was no one to tell. How did one go around buying that kind of thing? The gas station didn’t sell training bras, that’s for sure.