Sal and Gabi Break the Universe (A Sal and Gabi Novel)

by Carlos Hernandez

  I sighed. And nodded. And I handed him the note.

  He put the note back in the locker with his not-holding-a-mop hand. He didn’t seem to notice the rip in the fabric of the cosmos (no one ever had before, so that didn’t surprise me). He just shut the locker door and squeezed the lock shut.

  “¿Bueno?” he said, smiling, eyebrows flat.

  I took that as a none-too-subtle cue and left for home.

  WALKING HOME FROM school, I replayed the day in my head.

  It had not been a good one.

  1. I’d gotten sent to the principal’s office for almost being in a fight.

  2. I’d been accused of being a brujo.

  3. The red zone had defeated me. Granted, it was a strategic loss, since I didn’t want to get labeled as a brujo. But a loss is a loss. I wanted payback.

  4. I’d been publicly cross-examined by Gabi Reál and her lie detector.

  On the other hand, I’d gotten sweet revenge by nailing my bit in Mrs. Waked’s class. Gabi didn’t know what hit her!

  And she’d called me a good person in her note to Yasmany….

  But, because of that, I’d had to leave school so quickly that not only had I forgotten to eat something, I hadn’t even locked my own locker! And that was after I’d made fun of Yasmany in my head for doing the same thing.

  Hopefully Mr. Milagros had noticed my open lock and shut it.

  Good thing he hadn’t sent me to Principal Torres for snooping. I’d gotten lucky. But sooner or later, luck runs out.

  I needed to do better, be more in control. As I crossed the street, I swore to myself that I wouldn’t do anything to get me sent to the principal’s office for the rest of the year.

  And then a car almost hit me.

  Even though I was still pretty new to the area, I was quickly figuring out that Miami drivers like to spice up their boring car trips with tire-squealing blastoffs from red lights, Tetris-like lane changes, and exciting games of See How Close You Can Come to Running Over Pedestrians without Actually Hitting Them. Apparently, drivers get bonus points if the pedestrians die of heart attacks, so the sapingo who almost hit me did his best to scare me to death: a screeching stop, a blasting horn, tons of bilingual cursing.

  I never even flinched. Not because I am very badass or anything. I was paralyzed. Classic deer-in-headlights syndrome.

  When I turned slowly to look at the driver—like scarecrow-come-to-life slowly—he shut his trap and stopped honking. I think he saw how zombie I’d turned, how dead I looked. He quietly idled as I took a second in the middle of the road to compose myself. Then I finished crossing the street, and he cautiously drove off.

  I was shaking and sweating even more than usual. The stupid Florida heat made near-fatal accidents feel even worse. I stumbled forward a little but quickly figured out I needed a sec. I leaned against a friendly neighborhood palm tree, took deep breaths, and dreamed of all the Skittles I was going to eat when I got home.

  But the Skittles fantasy only lasted a few seconds. Pretty soon my brain went on autopilot. Without asking me if I wanted to remember—because no way did I want to—I watched the movie playing in my mind of the car accident I was in with Mami Muerta, back in Connecticut five years ago.

  I started calling my mami Mami Muerta after she died. My psychologist told me that was a defense mechanism. She’d said it like it was a bad thing.

  But, dude, my mami died. It’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. I think finding ways to defend against how terrible I feel when I remember she’s gone is, like, pretty basic survival. And anyway, it’s not like I had a choice. She just became Mami Muerta in my head like she’d been born with that name.

  But it hadn’t always been her name. Back when the accident happened, she was still Mami Viva.

  Like any good Cuban, Mami Viva hated it when the temperature dipped below sixty-seven degrees. But freezing? She could not understand that at all. Who would want to live anywhere where water turned as hard as rock and staying outside too long could kill you? Not her, no way, no, señor!

  But back then, Papi worked as a math dude for banks and a physics dude for universities on the East Coast, from Boston to New York to Washington, DC. We had to live somewhere along that route, so Papi, who was always easygoing (he spent all day breaking his brain against math formulas and didn’t have much fight left in him by the time he got home), let Mami Viva pick where she wanted to live.

  Since she didn’t like big cities, we settled in a small town in Connecticut, and Mami Viva, accepting her fate, added mittens to her wardrobe and hundreds of dollars to our heating bill, and learned to drive in the snow.

  Kind of. She drove so slowly between November and March that, like the migration of birds and the shorter days, I came to associate winter with the nonstop blasting of car horns. For five months out of the year, we became the leaders of a noisy, grumpy traffic parade wherever we went. Mami would hunch so close to the steering wheel that her ojo turco would bounce against it every time she braked. And she braked a lot.

  One day, Mami Viva picked me up from school so we could run some errands together. I vividly remember the merienda she brought me. “Merienda” means “snack time” in Spanish, and it is so important to Cubans it’s almost religion. That day, she’d brought me cubes of guava paste and salty white cheese in a Ziploc bag, with a green plastic cocktail sword for stabbing them so my fingers wouldn’t get sticky.

  It was my favorite after-school snack. I am a maniac for cheese, and guava paste is probably the best kind of paste in the world. And I have always, always, always loved cocktail swords. Mami and I must have had a thousand cocktail-sword fights. She always let me kill her hand and win.

  Mami Viva and I went to the bank, supermarket, post office, and somewhere else I can’t remember right now. She always waited to run errands until I could go with her. Her English wasn’t the best, so she counted on me to translate for her when she filled out forms, or wanted to understand food labels, or bargained with store managers. I learned how to sweet-talk grown-ups at the ripe old age of eight.

  I got really good at it. My mami was counting on me, after all, and when you are in second grade and your Cuban mami’s darling, you think your job in life is to be her hero. Also, adults encouraged me, laughing at my jokes and applauding my magic tricks, even though they sucked back then. They liked me, so I liked them.

  The best part of being Mami Viva’s hero was being rewarded like a hero. After our last errand—post office, I think—we headed back to the car in the early darkness of Connecticut in December. Before she opened the back door for me, she gave me one of her patented besuqueros. I guess the best way to translate that is “kissapalooza.” She took my face in her hands and said, using pretty much all the English she knew, “Ay, jou’re sush a goo’ helper, ¡mi niño!” And then she rained down a storm of smackers all over my cheeks and forehead. She knew she could always crack me up that way. I was still giggling when she buckled me into my car seat. (I was such a small kid for my age I still had to ride in a car seat.)

  She pulled out of the post office lot carefully, carefully, and inched onto the street. Pretty soon we were coasting along on a wooded two-lane road, the light snowfall making the darkness feel magical, quiet. No traffic behind us. We could ride easy.

  Mami Viva had given me her phone to play with. But let’s be honest: It was my phone more than hers, since she almost never used it. Whenever she did use it, she made a face like she was holding someone else’s urine sample. I, on the other hand, loved her phone and took it from her every chance I got. I loaded it with games.

  So there I was, playing Poocha Lucha Libre 3, the wrestling game featuring masked dogs that I still play today, when gravity went in four directions at the same time.

  The phone launched itself out of my hands and flew sideways, breaking through the backseat window on the other side of the car. I must have watched it, rapt and in shock, even as I was violently thrown forward. While I was twisting left
and up, I reached after the phone with all my might. Mami Viva had told me a million times how much trouble I would be in if I broke it.

  Then my head snapped back like a tetherball. My body tried to fly apart, each limb in a different direction. My car seat’s belts turned into iron bars that crushed my chest and waist and forced all the air out of my body. For a few seconds, I understood what life would be like as a boulder, never having oxygen inside you, never having to breathe.

  It was peaceful. Interesting. Until I realized I was dying.

  When I finally did suck in air, my lungs burned and grew heavy with pain. Inhaling felt like my ribs were stabbing my lungs.

  I didn’t realize we’d been spinning out of control until we stopped. We hit a guardrail hard enough to leave a car-shaped dent in it. It kept us from plunging off the road.

  My eyes felt like they were floating outside of my head, hovering just in front of my face. I could still kind of see out of them, but they kept not cooperating, looking off in different directions like a gecko’s. I could see, but I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing.

  I heard Mami Viva yelling in raging-river Spanish, too fast to follow. A car door opened and slammed. A few seconds later—it must have been, but it felt a lot longer—my door opened, and Mami Viva unbuckled me, swept me up in her arms, and whispered in my ear, “I’s okay, Sal. I’s okay. Jou’re safe now. Estop escreaming, my boy, my brave boy. Estop crying. I’s okay. Mami’s here. Jou’re okay.”

  I remember her talking to me in English. But that’s impossible. Her English wasn’t that good back then. It never got that good before she died. I must have autotranslated her soothing words as she held me close.

  And then…Then she started laughing.

  It surprised me so much, I finally stopped howling.

  “Why are you laughing?” I asked.

  She had been crying, too, but now her wet face had become a mask of joy. “Because look!”

  She held up her ojo turco to me. Half of it was still on the chain. Only half. The other half had broken off.

  I couldn’t understand why she was happy about her good luck charm breaking. But I couldn’t speak. My brain still felt like lukewarm tapioca pudding.

  “Don’ jou see, my brave boy? It protected us! It save’ us! Wha’ever brujería try to curse us, it didn’ work! We’re alive!” And, laughing, she lifted me up by the armpits and spun me around.

  Looking back, that was a terrible idea. I could have had all sorts of broken bones, whiplash, a concussion—a million things wrong with me that spinning would have only made worse.

  Luckily, I just had a few bruises striping my torso and waist. So her laughing and spinning did no harm. It fact, it fixed everything: It took the fear right out of me. I even tried smiling. Then giggling. Then she put me down and knelt on the ground, and we laughed in each other’s faces because we were alive. And that moment seemed to last forever.

  Forever ended a year later, when, thanks to something called diabetic ketoacidosis, Mami Viva became Mami Muerta.

  I blinked. I was still leaning against the palm tree. I wasn’t sure how much time had passed. My nails were digging into the tree’s bark and I was sucking air like this was my first breath in the world.

  Not good.

  I stepped off the neighbor’s grass and back onto the sidewalk. I needed to eat something, pronto. I ran wee-wee-wee all the way home.

  PAPI AND AMERICAN STEPMOM had nicknamed our house the Coral Castle because it’s this huge two-story rectangle that takes up half the block. The roof has these things called “crenellations,” which, American Stepmom had informed me, is the word for the spaces between stones at the top of castle walls. Where archers shot arrows at invading enemies. “That’s cool, right?” she’d asked.

  Back when we were house-hunting over the summer, she’d tried to sell me on it harder than the real estate agent had, making it sound like our life here would be all kings and swords and dragons. “This will be our castle,” she’d told me as we stood staring at it from the sidewalk, her arm on my shoulder.

  “Our Coral Castle,” Papi had added, coming up from behind to capture both of us in a gorilla-octopus-bear hug.

  Coral. Yeah, right. The house was as pink as conjunctivitis. Weird, huge, ugly thing, that house.

  I kind of liked it. Not because of any similarities to castles (because, hello, the thing looked more like the kind of nightmare fun house a serial killer would use as his secret hideout). I liked it because I like weird things. Weird is the opposite of boring.

  On the other hand, weird’s also the opposite of home. The Coral Castle was interesting, but it wasn’t comfortable. It wasn’t family.

  But it was where the Vidón refrigerator lived, and that’s all I cared about at the moment. I turned my key in the lock, pressed the thumb latch on the door handle. The second I did, my whole body slumped. I had to catch myself to keep from crumpling right there on the welcome mat. I forced my knees and spine to be solid again.

  Another rush of dizziness. But it wasn’t low blood sugar this time. This felt like the same magnetic buzz I got when I relaxed.

  The back of my neck felt hot. My skin cringed. I could just back away, call Papi or American Stepmom, wait for help…

  But then I heard a woman’s voice coming from behind the door. I knew that voice. It was singing.

  In Spanish.

  I didn’t think. I just ran inside.

  At about 7:30 p.m., I watched American Stepmom pull into the driveway in her tiny electric car. Kneeling on the couch, I studied her through the living room window as the last of the day’s light foamed above the horizon like bubbles in a glass of soda. The night bugs sang with their whole bodies.

  American Stepmom turned off her car. She had on the face of someone who had just spent ten hours herding hundreds of K–5 students since, as an assistant principal, that’s exactly what she’d done all day. She took off her huge glasses, rubbed her eyes, and looked at her reflection in the rearview mirror. She blew a curl off of her face—she had big, wild hair that Papi said looked like the smoke trails fireworks leave behind—and said “Phew!”

  I couldn’t hear her, but I could read her lips. American Stepmom’s favorite word is Phew! It can mean a hundred different things, but here it meant “The hard part’s over. I’m home.”

  American Stepmom had just gotten the driver-side door cracked open when Papi pulled up next to her. Their cars looked like twins on the outside—two little eggs with wheels and headlights—but on the inside, they couldn’t be more different. For instance, Papi’s car didn’t have a steering wheel. He just got in, told the car’s computer where he wanted to go, and the vehicle would take him there. He spent every morning commute with the seat reclined, reading science papers that had more math in them than words. He spent the evening commute on his phone playing Poocha Lucha Libre 5: Perro Sarnoso Edition, the latest and greatest version of the game. We played against each other online a lot, but I hadn’t gone on today after school; I’d been too busy cooking.

  Only when Papi’s car braked in the driveway and turned off its headlights and engine did Papi realize he had made it home. He looked up from his phone, blinking. He turned his head left and saw American Stepmom smiling at him from her car.

  They got out of their cars at the same time. American Stepmom reached out her hand, and Papi wordlessly took it in his until, in the spreading darkness, their hands blended together, each of their fingers a current of dark water that swirled and intermingled with the others. The diamond in American Stepmom’s engagement ring shone against their shadowy hands like a wishing star.

  They walked up the short pathway to the front door with Papi’s head on American Stepmom’s shoulder. Still attached to each other, one of them unlocked the door; it didn’t matter which, since tomorrow the other one would unlock it.

  They had to separate to fit through the doorway, but they didn’t really want to. Each invited the other to go first. This took a while; they w
ere having fun. Eventually, Papi went first and American Stepmom wrapped her arms around his waist—barely, he’s black-bear big—and they trained inside like a choo-choo of love.

  Their love train screeched to a halt when they saw me standing in the middle of the living room. Just. Standing. There.

  “Sal,” said Papi, blinking. “What is it?”

  American Stepmom lifted her head off Papi’s back, nose twitching like a rabbit’s. “Do you smell yucca, Gustavo?”

  “And ropa vieja?” he ask-answered.

  “And plantains?”

  “And frijoles negros?”

  They fell quiet. One of their phones buzzed, but neither of them reacted.

  “Is she back, Sal?” asked American Stepmom.

  I nodded.

  Papi bit his fist.

  American Stepmom, all business now, moved out from behind him and asked, “Sal, what did you do?”

  I replied the way kids all over the world respond when their moms ask them that question. I shrugged.

  On cue, Mami Muerta came into the living room, wearing a huge smile and one of American Stepmom’s aprons. She announced, in Spanish, her arms open like a singer, that dinner was on the table. We needed to hurry up and go eat, but no! Go wash your hands first, you pigs. But before you go anywhere (this was to Papi), come give your beautiful wife a kiss. Or don’t you love her anymore?

  You can see how this put Papi in a difficult position. He looked from his wife to his other wife and finally, wildly, at me.

  FACT: MAMI VIVA became Mami Muerta when I was eight.

  Fact: Papi married American Stepmom when I was nine.

  Fact: I figured out how to relax when I was ten.

  Fact: I had relaxed Mami Muerta back from the dead five times since then. Six, including this one.

  Fact: Mami Muerta went away every time. She and Papi and American Stepmom always ended up fighting. A couple times, it got ugly, and I almost didn’t relax her away fast enough. Someone could have gotten hurt.