“You weren’t an accident.”
“You know what I mean. I don’t think my dad thinks about it that way anymore.”
I was finally tucked into the spot and was so relieved to turn off the car. “What sucks, though, is that even after they got married—after they did everything they wanted them to do—my mother’s family sort of shunned us. I don’t know why. I’m sure it was screwed up. Stuff I don’t know about. Then she left. And it was like they blamed my dad for that, too. My uncle Benny and aunt Letty—they’re in town and they might come over tonight—they’re the only ones we keep in touch with, really. Everyone else was sort of like, Smell ya later.”
Nick was looking out the windshield, up at the sky. He didn’t seem to want to go anywhere. “I think my parents are going to get a divorce,” he said plainly.
“What?” I shot back. “Really?”
“I don’t know. My dad’s applying for jobs all over the country. But this time my mom hasn’t said anything. In fact, she made a big deal about how she just signed a lease on a new office with another psychologist and she’s going to take on more patients. It’s this weird show. But I don’t know what it means.”
“You can’t ask? Your mom?”
“It’s not really the kind of thing we do. You know? Like, talk like that.”
“What does Jason think?”
“Same thing. That it’s weird.”
I put a hand on his knee. “That really sucks.”
“I don’t know,” he said, cocking his head a little. “Does it suck?” He looked shocked to hear himself say it. “My mom is, like, normal—normal age, normal mom. You know? My dad’s old. There’s nothing about that situation that’s going to change. Sometimes I just think my parents—my mom—would be better—apart. Is that the worst thing to say about your own parents?”
“No,” I said. “Not really.”
“My dad is—” He shook his head and put both hands through his hair.
I didn’t know what to say. So I didn’t say anything.
“Anyway.” He shook it off. “Sorry.” He held up my gift. “It’s a book. Open it.”
It was a book called The Beauty Beneath Numbers.
“It’s a math book.” I couldn’t help but start laughing.
“No. It’s about theoretical math—for laypeople. You seemed interested. Is it a terrible gift? My mom thought it was a bad gift.”
“It’s perfect,” I said. And it was. “I’m as lay a person as you will ever find.”
I reached into my purse and took out his gift. He opened it and looked up at me, confused.
“It’s a necklace.” He was trying so hard to be polite, to make it sound like a necklace was exactly what he’d always wanted.
“No, it’s a saint.” I turned over the little dime-sized silver medallion, and there he was, Saint George, rearing up on his horse, the dragon slayed at his feet.
“Oh.” He was still perplexed. “Cool.”
“Saint George is the patron saint of Boy Scouts—and Eagle Scouts.”
“Ah.” He rolled his eyes and gave me one of his adorable, shy smiles. “I love it.”
“You don’t have to wear it.”
“I love it.” He took it out of the box and slung it over his head.
“Here.” I leaned over and slipped it inside his T-shirt. “You don’t have to wear it on the outside. It’s not a necklace.”
He leaned in and kissed me. “I love it,” he said again.
The orphans were eating dessert when we came in. I recognized a few faces from Christmases past, but most of the orphans were new, as usual. I found my father in the living room, glowing with happiness and maybe a little too much wine. He whooped when he saw us. “There’s my girl!”
The house smelled like piñon from the fire, and little white Christmas lights hung from the vigas. Every seat in the house was taken. Nick and I took our pecan pie and sat in the corner of the living room, near the kiva stove, on the tile floor. It was warm by the fire and the house was alive with people.
While we ate our pie, I watched my dad make his rounds, filling wineglasses and taking dessert plates. As he did every Christmas Eve, last night he’d dismantled the small Christmas tree we put up each year. He needed more space in the living room. For people. He was just so damn happy. After a while he made his way over to us and plopped down onto the floor and produced from his pocket a small poorly wrapped gift, which he handed to Nick. Nick stared at it for a moment, then looked at me.
“What’s that?” I asked. I had no idea my dad had gotten Nick a gift.
“Open it,” my dad said to Nick. He smiled and shoved me. “None of your business.”
I glared at my dad and watched Nick unwrap his present. It was a Swiss Army knife. With Nick’s name etched into it.
“Whoa.” Nick lit up at the sight of it. “Thank you so much, Mr. Black.”
“It’s just Peter, Nick. You just call me Peter. Now, this bad boy here has thirty-three features. But look, I have to show you this. My favorite.” My dad took the knife and extracted from one side a ridiculously tiny serrated blade. He held it up triumphantly. “It’s a little saw!”
“That is so cool.” When my dad handed the knife back, Nick went about pulling out every single tool, and, like two children, he and my father named each one and its multitude of potential uses.
“When would you ever need a little tiny saw?” I peered over to look at it.
“When I need to cut down a little tiny tree.” Nick made a sawing motion with the blade. My dad laughed and slapped Nick on the back, then looked at me apologetically.
“Saint George slayed a dragon.” I leaned back again. “I’m not sweating it.”
“Oh, she gave you the necklace?” my dad asked brightly.
Nick turned to me, eyes wide. I shook my head and palmed my face and tried to look totally affronted, though in the end I couldn’t help cracking up.
“He gave me a damn math book,” I said.
“Good man!” my dad said, squeezing Nick’s shoulder and hopping up. “Merry Christmas, my love.” He kissed the top of my head and then stood up again to attend to the crowd.
“I do love it.” Nick brought his hand up to his chest and felt for the little medal disk under his shirt. He looked at me, sincere. “I love it.” I leaned in and gave him a stealthy kiss. He went back to fiddling with the knife, completely absorbed.
I leaned back against the wall and watched him for a long time, understanding, probably for the first time, what was happening between us—or maybe what had already happened while I wasn’t looking.
I wasn’t crushing on Nick anymore. Not at all.
I was falling in love with him.
I never would’ve guessed the two states would feel so different. Crushing was so easy. It was a mild form of torture, an ache that never went away. But falling in love was big and sharp and unpredictable. It didn’t ache; it hurt. Because it was real, and it was actually happening. The feeling was so sharp, it felt like it could kill me, like it could slice right through to my very center and I could die from whatever I found there, from whatever my love for Nick revealed.
Just then, Nick looked up and brandished the knife with every single one of its thirty-three ridiculous tools pulled out. “Excuse me.” He cocked his head. “Do you by chance have any fish that need to be scaled or wires that need to be stripped?” The goofy look on his face was everything. It was him, Nick, unadulterated, and he was giving it to me, all of it, all of him, and it was better than any book or necklace in the world.
* * *
Later, after most of the orphans had gone and it was only the small group of close friends that came every year, my dad brought out Trivial Pursuit and we gathered around the dining table, dividing up into two teams.
“This is a very serious tradition in our house,” my dad said to Nick. He was definitely tipsy. If my dad had been drunk, it wouldn’t have been funny—I’d never once seen my dad drunk—but because he was jus
t a little buzzed it was kind of hilarious.
Just as we were setting up the board, we heard a knock at the door and Letty came in, followed by Benny, who was holding my cousin Luciana, awake but zonked. Christmas-ed out, my dad called it.
“Uh-oh,” Benny said in his big voice as soon as he laid eyes on my father. “Pedro’s been drinking.” He put Luciana down. She just stood there, dazed.
“Touché, Benicio.” My dad ambled over and scooped up Luciana and she gave him a kiss. He gave Letty a hug, then Benny. My father and Benny were both tall. But where my father was thin, Benny was a giant. He wasn’t fat, just huge, alarmingly so, and his hugeness was made even more dramatic by the relative size of Letty. Next to him, she looked miniature. “Where are the boys?” my dad asked, peering out the door before closing it against the cold. Letty shot a look at Benny and Benny looked at my dad. “They’re staying down in Deming. With their grandparents,” he said.
Letty turned to me sympathetically. She’d always hated the way my mother’s family had treated my dad and me. Those were, after all, my grandparents, too. When my dad turned to me, I could see his lip stiffen. I shrugged at all three of their concerned faces. I wasn’t hurt. The truth was, I didn’t know my grandparents well enough to be hurt by them.
I grabbed Nick and dragged him over to meet Letty and Benny. He was super-polite and adorable, especially considering Letty was being particularly hard-nosed and meticulous in her appraisal. “Miranda speaks highly of you,” she said in her best unimpressed-social-worker voice.
“Um.” Nick looked at me, completely tongue-tied. Letty frowned, skeptical.
“Come on. Give him a break,” I said.
Benny grabbed Nick’s hand and what started as a handshake quickly became a bear hug. Luciana raised her arms to me in a silent demand, and I picked her up and she put her head on my shoulder.
“You ready to lose, my brother?” my dad asked Benny.
“I was born ready to lose,” Benny answered, slapping him on the back.
We walked to the dining table and joined the others. I sat down with Luciana still wrapped around me. She fell asleep almost immediately.
“Hey, wait, where’s your friend?” My dad’s lab-mate, Jerry, turned to me. He was famously over-competitive. I could see a vein already forming in his forehead. He was upset not to find Syd among us. “She was our secret weapon last year.”
My dad gave me a quick look. “She couldn’t make it this year,” I said. “But this guy’s pretty smart.” I pushed Nick over to the other team.
Jerry sized Nick up. “You’re going to have to prove that, son,” he said, only half joking. He grabbed Nick by the shoulder and pushed him down into a chair. Jerry had met his wife, Bonnie, at Orphan Christmas a few years ago. They weren’t orphans anymore, technically, but they still came every year. It was tradition. Bonnie rose from her seat next to Jerry and came to our side of the table. “Too much testosterone,” she announced as she sat down next to me.
Before we began, I carried Luciana into my room and put her in my bed and closed the door. I returned to my seat beside my father, and as we played, he slung his arm around my shoulders. He teased me about my answers to sports questions (“Derek Jeter didn’t play football! God, I’ve raised an idiot!”), and the two of us screamed out the answer to one question at the same time. (The Sea of Tranquility was, of course, where Apollo 11 touched down in 1969.)
I kept looking over to catch Nick watching us, and when I did, he’d smile and look away. I wondered if he was thinking what I was thinking while he fiddled with his knife, but I thought it was more likely he was thinking about his own dad. Somehow I couldn’t imagine his dad putting his arm around him.
Nick’s team landed on sports and leisure.
My dad drew the card from the deck dramatically. Silence fell upon the room. “How many squares are on a chessboard?” He squinted at the other team.
Jerry’s forehead vein bulged and Bonnie shook her head in amusement beside me. Letty tapped me on the shoulder. She knew the answer. I was glad she wasn’t on the other team.
“Anyone?” Jerry said, looking at his teammates, beginning to panic. “Guesses?”
Nick raised his hand sheepishly. “I know.”
“Say it, boy!” Jerry roared. “Say it!”
“Sixty-four,” Nick said quietly.
“We’re gonna lose.” My father shoved the card back into the box and the other team roared in celebration. Benny nearly picked Nick up out of his seat.
“Nerd!” I yelled at Nick through the commotion.
He gave me a sheepish smile. Then he reached under his collar and pulled out Saint George and let him dangle there, over his T-shirt. “We slay.” He sat back and cocked his head. “All day.”
He wasn’t very good at gloating, but he was giving it everything he had.
And while I sat there looking across the table at Nick, I felt it again, the razor-sharp edge of that huge, scary feeling, the real pain of real love.
Is this actually happening? I asked myself.
This is actually happening.
II
11
In April I marked the four-month anniversary of Syd’s disappearance by driving on I-10 until I came to the place where I could see the graveyard from the highway. It was still there. I didn’t know if Ray and Tonya had moved away and left the graveyard for the next tenant to deal with, or if they just hadn’t left town yet. Tonya could’ve been using the mere idea of moving as an excuse to throw away Syd’s stuff.
I pulled off the highway and sat in my car looking down at the graveyard. I could still make out the divot in the earth my butt had made in front of Manny and the one Syd’s had made in front of Isadora. If I wasn’t so scared of Tonya and her gun, I’d have pulled over and put on my hazards and climbed down the perilous embankment and sat there and wept.
I didn’t know why I thought it was a good idea to drive by. It wasn’t. I hadn’t seen the graveyard in four months, and though I still thought about Syd all the time, the definition of our relationship—the specific texture of it, the deep familiarity—had begun to fade. Looking out my car window and seeing the graveyard down there made everything fresh again, the sadness and the anger and the giant stomach cramp of not knowing where she was and if she was okay. And it made me miss her more than ever. I noticed, sitting there with my hazards on as the traffic whizzed by, that when I thought of Syd now, I felt a pure kind of grief. It was uncomplicated, uncorrupted. And, for whatever reason, whenever that grief for Syd surfaced, it always brought up with it the ancient grief for my mother.
What I’d learned from the two of them was that grief wasn’t about someone being gone. It wasn’t final like that. In fact, it was the exact opposite. It was about wanting them so bad and knowing that your want had no end—there was no one there to receive it, to stop it. It just kept going and going, seeking endlessly.
* * *
I would’ve characterized the four months after Syd left as the worst time of my life, if it didn’t happen to also be the best time in my life. Everything was as perfect as it was terrible. If someone had told me that night at Ten Thousand Poles that in four months Syd would be gone and Nick Allison would be my boyfriend, I’d have laughed. It was ludicrous. Absurd. But then it happened. It actually happened. And now the idea of being separated from Nick began to hurt as much as the reality of being separated from Syd already did. College loomed, a distant galaxy we were hurling toward at light speed.
After hours of negotiations with my dad and a few thousand pros-and-cons lists, I decided I’d apply to Brown, Vassar, Reed, and Smith. If I didn’t get into any of these schools, we’d revisit state colleges and other options, including my taking a gap year and applying again the following fall. The process was exhausting. I let my dad’s enthusiasm carry me to the finish line. But then, after the applications were sent and the pressure was off, I actually began to hope I might get into one of those schools. I’d find myself walking across the dusty
campus of LCHS and realize that in my imagination, I was walking along a path on some beautiful leafy campus, and, as my father said to my million eye rolls, “achieving my potential for self-actualization.”
But then, one night after an epic make-out session with Nick, I came home and scrambled together my application to UNM. I found a scholarship to apply for from the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. It required an essay and two years’ experience working on a school paper. It was perfect. When I asked my dad the next morning to cover the application fee, he sighed. “Just to see,” I said. “What if I don’t get into any of your fancy schools?”
“They’re not my schools,” he said.
“It’s just a safety,” I said. “I’m not actually going to go there.”
But, in my mind, I was totally going to go there. Nick would stand up to his dad and go to UNM and study forestry, and I’d go too. We’d be together. It was that simple. And it remained that simple right up until the impossible happened and I got into Brown. It’d been my pie-in-the-sky-no-way-in-hell-am-I-ever-getting-into-that-school school. I’d even argued for skipping the application. It was the Ivy League, for god’s sake. There was no way.
I was floored. I kept rereading the email, sure there was a catch.
My father died when I called him at work to tell him. He died. After screaming “Shut up!” for a full three minutes, he started going through the halls, yanking people aside to share the news.
“Please stop it,” I said.
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