“I know what you did. Don’t steal from me, you’re only stealing from yourself,” he said later that day as he winked at me, took a large bite from his Whopper, and held out his hand, demanding the money back.
17.
I stood by myself in a Manhattan ballroom on Park Avenue, and the purple ambient lighting from the large chandeliers rested in midair. The light felt heavy and thick, like I was breathing it, like I was wading through water when I made my way from one end of the room to the other, waving slowly at friends. It had been exactly a month since Amá left.
It was my and Rubi’s first time in New York. I had been invited for a literary event. There was an open bar, attendants walking around with trays of small food, and people clustered in groups with drinks in their hands, laughing almost too hard at little things that might not have been funny anywhere else.
I was supposed to walk up to the stage, say some words, and walk back down. Nothing more, nothing less. Everyone was expected to clap. Those were the rules we were expected to follow.
I ordered a whisky, neat, even though I didn’t like whisky, but it was free. I chased it with a Corona. I shook people’s hands and smiled and thanked them profusely when they remembered my name. Someone grabbed me by the arm and whispered in my ear the names of powerful people. I quickly lost track of Rubi in the crowd.
I was slightly drunk already, but I smiled anyway. If it wasn’t for someone leading me by the arm, I would have probably stood there the entire evening, looking up at the crystal chandelier in awe, snatching little trinkets off platters. Everyone was smiling. Indeed, it was a joyous occasion. Everyone’s teeth were out in the open, on display, touched by that dazzling light refracted against the crystals.
I tried to be polite and followed the movement of people’s heads as they talked to me. I nodded along, smiled again, sometimes demurely, and adjusted my scarf, which had rhinestones and golden threads that sparkled on my chest. I felt glamorous but empty, like a pretty vase with nothing inside. I tossed the tassels of my scarf to the side and let them flutter when I turned.
*
After tossing more hors d’oeuvres in my mouth and washing them down with another whisky, I lost the energy to keep up with everyone else’s chuckles and jokes. I couldn’t do it anymore. I was tempted to throw away my speech and just scream into the microphone until someone dragged me offstage. Wouldn’t that be fun? Or, as I had done at a reading the night before, just say Amá’s name until it lost its meaning. I asked everyone in the audience to repeat my mother’s name, and they did, which made them uncomfortable.
I was drowning in the purple haze, but no one noticed. It seemed like everyone knew how to swim except me. They all had troubles, but they were better at hiding them than me. I stopped nodding along and just stared blankly at people, which made them cough and turn slightly away to another group. I slipped away from one small circle and wandered into another one before heading to the bar for another drink. The bartender asked what brought me to the party and I pointed to my name on the program. Delighted, he gave me another drink of some top-shelf stuff and raised a glass of water.
“Salud,” he said and stared at me with a hint of worry in his eyes.
“Salud,” I said and cocked my head back to pour the dark liquor down.
He saw what everyone else was seeing in me, except that he had the courage to tell me, but I couldn’t tell him why.
I felt comfortable talking to him. It felt like home, even though our homes were in different places. His home in the Dominican Republic sounded familiar. Since Amá left, I didn’t really know what home meant. I had practiced the word for so long that I took for granted its efficiency, its compactness, its ability to fit so much into so little. Most of the waitstaff were people of color, and I could hear some of them talking softly amongst themselves in Spanish. It was like a lullaby coming in and out of earshot—a word here, a phrase there. The lights above signaled for us that the program would be starting soon, so we all looked for our seats with our names on them. Rubi had already found her way to the table but I was too drunk to notice.
*
The host began with some light banter, and people chuckled. Again with the chuckling. I got up and stumbled to the restroom to vomit. It wasn’t the alcohol, it was nerves. I didn’t vomit, but I also didn’t make it all the way to the restroom without weeping. It was slow at first, then it picked up. I didn’t recognize myself, or the tears, or the muscles twisting my stomach in all directions, as if I was laughing.
I wondered what my mother was doing at that precise moment. I was one hour ahead. When I was little, and Apá was two hours ahead of West Coast time in Mexico, I actually thought he was talking to us from the future. “What’s it like there in the future?,” I would ask him, and he would simply laugh.
Maybe she was massaging her arm; maybe she was boiling water for tea in her bright kettle.
All of it was happening at the same time. The host in the ballroom was making another joke, and more liquor was being served, and the waitstaff was hurrying through the double doors with plates in their hands, and my dad was perhaps somewhere up in the Sierra, away from Amá, herding some cows, and my family was back in California, trying to move on.
I washed my face in the bathroom sink and splashed water in my eyes. Nothing in that entire building could bring my mother back—not the recognition I was receiving, not the applause, and certainly not their bright teeth popping out of their mouths when they smiled. There were a thousand powerful people in the audience, and none of them could do anything about it. Worse yet was that they didn’t know, and I didn’t have the courage to tell them. What good would it be to tell them, what could possibly have come out of that other than pity? “I’m so sorry, I wish there was something I could do.” Or, “That sounds terrible, is she okay? Will she be okay?” It surprised me how little people knew about the realities of families like ours, how easy it was for them to move through the world as if everything was fine. And my personal favorite, “She’s lived here for more than three decades on and off, why doesn’t she just get a green card?”
I walked out, cleaned my eyes, and called Amá.
“Hi, mijo, how are you?”
“I’m okay, Amá, they’re about to call my name. I can’t talk for long, but I’m having a great time. The food is great, the people are great, and it’s all very fancy. I wish you could be here. Can you believe I’m in New York?”
“I’m so proud of you, mijo. I’m doing well, I’m doing really well. Go on and do what you gotta do. I love you, mijo.”
“I love you, Ma.”
I promise I will tell you everything.
There was nothing else in her voice but sincere joy at the fact that I was calling her from New York. She would have been just as enchanted by the purple light as I was.
Back at my table, I noticed that the entrées had already been served. Lamb with garnish on a large white plate. Everyone at the table looked at me for a moment but quickly looked away and continued with their conversation, except for Rubi, who looked upset that I had ignored her all evening. I was glad to be seated next to a good friend; she smiled, and I knew that she understood. She didn’t know, but she understood, and nodded to reassure me that things would be okay. I nodded back and slowly chewed the soft meat off the bone, and swallowed.
*
Up on the stage, together with the others to be recognized, I waited for the room to get quiet and began to read off the paper that we wrote together, which was folded in my pocket. My voice was low; I followed each word carefully, trying to make it sound as deliberate as I could, trying to weigh each word down so that each one sat somewhere deep in everyone’s bellies. I said, “Thank you, thank you,” but what I really meant to say was, “Please, please.” I said, “We’re grateful,” and I hoped that somehow the words came out as, “Help.” But they didn’t. I said exactly what was on the paper. I finished and waited for their applause. They applauded.
I wished they could
all be silent, that I could have stayed up on the stage to tell them the secret, whisper it into the mic real slow and make them promise not to tell anyone. “Do you think you can do that?” I would say. They would nod their heads, “Yes, I promise,” and I would put my mouth real close to the mic and say what I had been carrying inside all evening. But I had been carrying it much longer than that. I had been carrying that secret around for years.
I walked off the stage and could hear everyone around me whispering “Great job” in hushed voices before the program moved on. I finished my drink. The program ended, and everyone went back to the lobby to mingle over more drinks. I would have rather they turned off the lights and left us all reaching around for the exit.
There was a town car waiting outside for us, courtesy of the hosts, and I stumbled away through the large polished bronze doors. There was nothing left there for me.
“Bye, great beam of purple light. Bye, dazzling chandelier. Bye, bright teeth!” I screamed as I slid into the evening.
“That one,” I said and pointed to the car, one eye already starting to close.
I was yelling into the street but Rubi quickly pushed me into the car. I didn’t know what else it was that I was yelling, but I could feel the reverberations inside my head. Back at my friend Lauren’s place on the Lower East Side, where we were staying, the three of us sat quietly in a dimly lit partitioned room. There was a silence between us that didn’t feel like silence.
“Thank you,” I said to Lauren after what seemed like an eternity in the dark, and went to sleep.
I dreamed that I was blind again, like I was when we crossed the border. I was running away from a lion. I always seemed to be running in my dreams. I could see a little, out of the corner of my eye, some opaque light. It was nothing like my mother’s dreams. She always dreamed that she was missing a shoe. That there was a large pile of them, but none of them were hers. I woke up in the middle of the night. I was an hour ahead of Amá. I was in the future. Maybe I could call her in the past and tell her to stay.
[Fourth Movement as the Day Selena Died]
I learned how to ride a bike on the exact day that Selena Quintanilla died, which is to say I learned how to balance myself when the queen of cumbia left this earth. I don’t think it means anything. That day, the ground was wet from spring rain and oil that lapped on the surface of small dirty puddles where cars were fixed on my street. Things never really stayed fixed for long. Our life was dedicated to the unbreaking of things, and things kept wanting to stay broken.
I always thought the prettiest people died in spring, like Selena.
Fifth Movement: Asylum
1.
I called Amá every evening as she went on her daily walks around the neighborhood, carrying a big stick to scare away the dogs. She’d left in February, and it was now April; things would have started to look normal by now—unremarkable. Just as I suspected, it was difficult to get her to video message, so we just talked on the phone. She didn’t tell me, but she told my sister that Apá had stopped driving her around, so she had to walk to the market and to church. She said he was in a bad mood all the time for some reason, and generally avoided her. I didn’t mention to Amá that I knew this.
“How are you, Amá?” I said in a low voice.
“I’m great, mijo, just getting my exercise running some errands,” she said.
“That’s good, Amá. That’s good. Have you been walking a lot?”
“The fresh air is so good for me.”
It didn’t take long for Apá to dig up a part of him we hoped he had long since buried.
I promise, mijo, I’ll tell you everything.
*
It was noon, and Apá was home for his midafternoon nap. Amá was in another room reading near the window, the same window I’d spent weeks trying to seal with caulking unsuccessfully, when there was a knock at the door to the courtyard. Anytime anyone knocked it was usually for Apá, so Amá never bothered to answer. She didn’t know what she had done to upset him, but she was trying to avoid him until he simmered down, so she let the knocking go on and didn’t answer. The knocking turned to banging, and Apá yelled to Amá to answer the door, but she pretended not to hear. According to him, anything she did, she did wrong. After a minute or so, he woke up from his nap, put on his hat, and walked to answer the door, muttering things at Amá.
The door had a little window on top about the size of a notebook, which you could open to see who was knocking without having to open the entire door, but Apá never bothered to use it. He opened the door, and two men armed with assault rifles asked, “Are you Marcelo Hernandez?” Calmly, Apá said, “Yes, that’s me,” and asked them what was their business.
“You need to come with us. Is anyone else in the house?”
And without changing the tone of his voice, without raising his arms, without changing anything about him, Apá calmly and casually said “No” and walked out the door without looking back.
Panicked, Amá called us—Apá had been kidnapped. You hear about it on TV, but you never think it could happen to you. Amá grabbed her purse and nothing else, without bothering to check what was inside, and called a cab. She didn’t have time to think—the only thing on her mind was to flee, because she didn’t know if they would return. In a matter of minutes she left behind the house that had called to her for over a decade—what had consumed us for so many years. She left behind the four suitcases that made up the entirety of her belongings we decided she would take with her to Mexico. In that house, brought over in Amá’s suitcases, were all of our family albums, some of the pictures half a century old—all of our family’s memories, gone. She left the dog on the roof, her only companion, and she left Apá, the one who saved her, unsure of his fate or where he might be. In the end, Apá’s maniacal insistence that she return, her eventual agonizing return, and the pain of saying goodbye was all for nothing because we would lose it all—the windows I obsessed over, the endless shaking at the tips of my fingers from laughter when there shouldn’t have been laughter, the weeping.
She told the cabdriver, “Just drive west, keep driving, keep driving, somebody will pay you at the other end.” She had no money.
*
I had prayed for her to one day return, but not like this.
I didn’t sleep for two days, and I could hardly eat. If it was up to me, I would have boarded the first plane as soon as I got the call, but we had to work together as a family. I was working with a class of kindergartners when I found out. Amá had managed to escape and was safely tucked away somewhere in a large city. All of the family, her sisters, were calling us, asking where she was, but as much as it pained us, we couldn’t tell them. We were paranoid. We didn’t know who was watching, if they were tapping our phones, if she had been followed. We couldn’t trust anyone. All we could say was “Please, trust us.” We didn’t know how far the kidnapper’s reach was—if they might be outside our houses in the U.S. We didn’t know who was involved, so we assumed everyone was. Never in my life had I ever considered owning a gun until then. Besides, I already knew how to use one, thanks to Apá.
We spoke to men who shouted on the phone, who made promises and demanded a lot of money we didn’t have. I heard Apá’s voice; it still sounded calm and collected, but tinged with an undercurrent of fear. I knew they were telling Apá what to say because I knew those weren’t his words. I booked a flight to Mexico to meet Amá where she was hiding, and the rest of the family stayed behind to handle the calls. I made promises to God. I didn’t buy a gun.
*
By chance, Amá’s Mexican passport was in her purse, which allowed us to buy a plane ticket for her to Tijuana. We met her in an airport. Her eyes were red and sunk deep into her head, like faraway lights floating in water. She too hadn’t slept. She had a small borrowed blanket wrapped around her. In her purse were her blood pressure medicine and monitor, cell phone, and a few mints. We held each other for a long, long time, longer still than most people held each
other at airports. “Tell me everything that happened,” I said.
It seemed like the more I engaged with the border and immigration, the more it ground us into a pulp, as if we were deathly allergic to it. Amá had only been in Tepechitlán for two months. Since we hadn’t told anyone that she was returning to Mexico, and she just suddenly appeared one day, if a kidnapping was already planned, Amá’s arrival would not have changed its course. It might have been merely an inconvenience, a slight variation of plans. But I feared the worst: that the kidnapping had occurred because she returned—that we played a part in it by not being subtle in making her comfortable. Two months was enough time to plan anything. Tepechitlán was not what it used to be; the entire state was being fought for by warring cartels for its convenient central location.
Rubi stepped in and hugged Amá while I continued to make more calls.
*
A chance for Amá’s return had been inconceivable before, but now, though under unfortunate circumstances, one was possible. We knew she wasn’t safe anywhere in Mexico; we knew that from that point on, Mexico was a thing of the past for our entire family. We would never be able to return. It didn’t matter that I had a green card—that was beside the point; there would now be different reasons that I could not cross back. We were afraid for our lives. We knew their eyes were everywhere. In reality there was nowhere you could hide. Even in the airport, sitting on a hard bench, I looked at people walking by and wondered if any of them were involved. I tried to see if anyone was staring at us.
Our only hope was to fly Amá to Tijuana so she could surrender herself to border patrol and ask for asylum. It was a long shot because at the time, we didn’t have a lot of information about who the kidnappers were or their motives and Mexican citizens didn’t usually qualify for asylum. In April of 2016, the race for the U.S. presidency was picking up steam. More and more, it seemed like the country was making it harder for cases like my mother’s to be processed.
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