He looked directly at my face. “Cole, what happened to your tooth?”
“Excuse me?”
“Your tooth.” Tomi pointed to my mouth. “I saw it was gone when we were reading. I didn’t want to say anything. My mom says I should ignore things like that.”
The last person to say anything about my tooth was the dentist at La Vista, who told me he could replace it. Might as well take advantage of free dental, he had said. I felt inside my mouth, the black space of my long-gone molar. “I swallowed it. When I crashed a car.”
“That car you stole?”
I nodded.
“Why did you do that?”
“I don’t know. I used to drink a lot, but I’m not that way anymore.”
Tomi turned his face to the side, bowing his head like he suddenly understood something very important. He seemed worn down, old beyond his years. He almost looked like Manny.
“My mom told me you stole from me.”
“Yeah,” I heard myself say. “I did that, too.” I searched the bookshelf, everything an endless line of colorful spines. When I looked back at Tomi, his face had shifted, his dark brown eyes suddenly appearing far away. “Stay here,” I said. “I’ll ask a librarian.”
* * *
—
I waited in line for the reference librarian, an older Chicano with a heft of gold around his neck. He had porcupine hair the color of burnt firewood. When I finally reached his desk, he told me Azteca Starship was nowhere to be found. He then pushed up his shirtsleeves and waved a coverless book in my face. “You’ll like this one better. Have you read it?”
“I don’t know what that is,” I said.
“Probably because you’re too young. It’s a great one, jita.”
I walked away from him and peered down the aisle where Tomi had been. He was gone. I called back to the librarian. “I was with a little boy. My nephew. Have you seen him?”
The librarian shrugged. “Prunes.”
“What?”
“Maybe he needed to use the shitter?”
“No,” I said, nervously. “He was just here.”
The librarian laughed from his gut. “Back in a flash.”
After I watched him calmly walk to the front desk, I searched for Tomi in the kids’ books, the archival stacks, and the empty men’s bathroom. “Tomi,” I kept saying until my voice became a frantic yell. I checked outside around a brass statue of children holding hands and ran over to the picnic tables along the parking lot. But he was nowhere. Had he run away or been kidnapped? I pictured Tomi clumsily climbing into a stranger’s white van, an armful of Twizzlers as bait. Panic had set in, my heartbeat riding my veins. “Tomi,” I screamed. “Please come back.”
The librarian had come outside with a security guard and both men had the stiffened posture of those delivering bad news. I approached them, and the librarian placed his right hand on my shoulder. “Bad news, Rik here thinks he saw him leave.”
“Leave,” I said. “Leave where?”
“How did you lose him?” the security guard asked.
“Lose him? No, he was just here. His name’s Tomi and he’s eleven. Ten. I mean ten. He has dark brown hair and glasses, and these big shoes.” I felt something like hiccups in my chest. “He’s too little to be alone.”
The librarian and security guard shared a look. It wasn’t good.
“Can you think of anywhere he’d go? A friend’s house or a park?”
“It’s nighttime. He doesn’t know anything.”
“Ma’am,” the security guard said, “have you been drinking?”
“Are you serious?”
He said, “I’ve seen you before. I know how you Northside girls are.”
“Ay, come now,” said the librarian. “She doesn’t seem too messed up.”
People coming out of the library had turned to look at us. A slim woman in pink spandex, holding her toddler on her hip, spun around so that her daughter faced the brick wall. That’s when I knew where Tomi had gone.
“That wasn’t me,” I said. “You must have me confused with someone else.”
* * *
—
There was a night a long time ago when I didn’t drive myself home wasted from a party. I sat in a cab’s passenger seat, marveling at the ribbons of green and blue city lights. It could have been the haze of weed, the heaviness of liquor, but I felt submerged, as if I had finally gotten to the real city, the ground floor, the place where everything is born. I asked my driver what was the strangest place in Denver he’d seen, the worst area. I thought he’d say my neighborhood, before it changed, but he didn’t. He said, “Cherry Hills, all them mansions give me the creeps. It’s like the entire neighborhood, the whole city, died in its sleep.” That’s how I felt as I stood on Natalie’s new white porch, and equally ashamed and afraid at the sight of Manny’s truck out front. I knocked hard on the door.
A middle-aged white woman answered in hiking clothes. She kept the chain on as she spoke. “Can I help you?”
I told her that I was looking for Natalie. Natalie Morales.
“She said her name is something else. Durán?”
“It used to be that. Is she here?”
The woman unlatched the chain. She stepped out of the house with a flood of warmth. “Natalie’s in the back. She and Ron rent my guesthouse.” She directed me to a sandstone path where small lamps illuminated the way. “How nice she has visitors,” she said with disdain.
Manny and Natalie were in the backyard between the two houses, shouting in clipped tones above the dark grass. Tomi sat in a plastic chair on the guesthouse stoop, a gangly white guy beside him, watching over the altercation like some shitty owl.
Ronald, I thought. What a catch.
When Tomi saw me, he removed his glasses, setting them in his lap. Natalie sharked around, her long hair, lightened to a caramel color, waved across the yard. She stood before me, looking small and silly with her blondish hair. She’d lost weight, too, like she wore her skeleton over her skin.
“Her,” Natalie screamed at Manny, pointing in my direction. “You let some ex-con watch Tomi.” She turned to me then, her eyes glinting with rage. “You’re a worthless piece of shit, Nicole. Do not take my son anywhere again.”
I started laughing. “Where would I take him? To visit you?”
Behind us, the lights of the big house flipped on, and there were sounds like someone stumbling down a staircase. Ronald sipped a beer covered in a koozie. “Babe, babe, let’s be more respectful to Shauna,” he said.
I gazed at Natalie. “You left to live here with your ugly-ass boyfriend who smells like a ferret?”
Natalie reached up and popped me in the mouth. Blood spurted from my bottom lip. I wiped the red on my hands, searching for somewhere to spit the iron taste. I saw her herb garden, planted neatly beneath sheer umbrellas. I walked over, kicked aside the plastic cover, and coughed blood all over her dead rosemary.
“You hit her,” I heard Tomi shout.
I looked at him and saw how scared and sad and small he was. His glasses were back on his face, magnifying his brown eyes. In his lap, he roped his hands over his tummy. I immediately felt worse for being there. What kind of people were we? Tomi had watched his aunt fight his mother in the yard of a guesthouse she shared with some idiot who owned a koozie. His father was standing by, mortified, face-to-face with his wife’s new white boyfriend.
“If you touch me,” Natalie screamed, “I’ll call the police and you’ll be back where you belong.”
“We’re leaving,” Manny said, marching over and gripping Tomi’s forearm.
As we headed for the pickup, Manny turned back and asked, politely as possible, for the pillows. Natalie ignored him and slammed shut the guesthouse door. I felt sorry for her then. I knew she was embarrassed by herself, and had be
en her whole life. She’d always feel like that brown girl from the Northside with a baby at seventeen, living in her husband’s decrepit house. I thought of something my father used to say in Spanish, You cannot straighten the trunk of a crooked tree.
* * *
—
At home, Tomi ran to his bedroom while Manny went into the kitchen and filled a glass of water. He handed it to me and sat at the table, motioning for me to do the same.
“What happened?” I asked.
“He just walked over there,” Manny said. “He misses his mom, I guess.”
“Was he scared? Did he get lost?”
“He’s fine, but you can’t do something like that again. You need to watch him better.”
I told him that it was an accident, that Tomi took off on his own. But the more I spoke, the more painfully familiar my voice sounded, like a recording of myself from years ago.
I paused, listening to the house sounds instead. The refrigerator buzzed. The floorboards creaked. It was like our home was an old man with a damp cough.
“I think there’s something wrong with me,” I said.
“Your reflexes could use some help. Duck next time.”
“No, like as a person.” I couldn’t hold back from crying. Tears flowed down my nose, salting my split lip. “I always screw up. I always hurt my family.”
Manny looked around, searching for napkins, finding none. With quick fingers, he unbuttoned his flannel, placing it in my hands.
“Wipe off your face. There’s nothing wrong with you. And there never was.” He stood from his seat, starting up the stairs with an arched back, looking oddly thin in his white undershirt.
“Tomorrow I’m going to help you look for jobs. We’ll start early. Make sure you’re awake.” Manny quieted his voice. “I’m sorry that I didn’t visit you, Cole.”
“Thank you, Brother.”
“You’re a lot better than you used to be. A lot better.”
After he went upstairs to bed, the house was silent. I stayed at the table for a long while, thinking about many things, my mother and father, my brother and myself as children, how black Manny’s hair had once been, how little our home had changed. The ancient oak floors, the strange dusty quality to the air, the flutter of green curtains and the softness of night. This home was all we ever had.
After several minutes, I went to the basement, where I crawled onto my futon and quietly, with my face to my jacket, cried again. Not long after, someone opened the basement door. They walked quickly without switching on the lights, and I knew that it was Tomi.
He sat on the edge of the futon near my feet. He said nothing, and I didn’t need him to. It was a sensation I used to get as a child, the feeling of someone you love resting at the foot of your bed, after they’ve told a story, when there’s nothing left to say. I listened to Tomi breathe, small-lunged, stuffy-nosed. He built up air a few times like he wanted to say something but remained quiet. Then I felt his weight gradually leave the futon, but before heading upstairs, Tomi came back and set something beside my face. I squinted through the darkness. A pillow.
“You’ve had them the whole time?” I asked.
Tomi paused on the stairs. He looked over his shoulder, his glasses catching what little light was between us. “Why?” he asked. “Do you need another one?”
ANY FURTHER WEST
I grew up in an adobe home with my mother and grandmother in Saguarita, Colorado. It was only us girls. There had never been any men. My mother used to say that her father died at the hands of a madman over a gold watch, but once my grandmother told me the only hands that killed him were his own. As for my father, he took my mother on one date to a drive-in theater on Alonzo Lane. “And you, my baby,” my grandmother would say years later, “are the reason nice girls don’t sit in cars with boys.”
She was a small shadowy woman, my grandmother. She kept an herb garden in the backyard, hung her laundry on metal cords, and occasionally snapped the necks of chickens with an elegant flick of the wrist. Every morning of her life she woke up exhausted. “I’m too damn old to still be raising children,” she’d say. “And I don’t mean you, Neva.” She was talking about my mother, Desiree Leticia Cordova. Throughout her life she had struggled with booze and dope and all those good-for-nothing men. In her twenties, she danced in a strip club on the edge of town called Wishes. In her thirties, the small portion of them she got to live, she uprooted us to California during one of her ecstatic breaks from perpetual sadness. These breaks were infrequent but potent and gave my mother the strength of ten women who require no sleep and live for their whims.
I was twelve when my mother called me into her bedroom one evening before work. She stumbled around in search of a gold bikini, the radio on a doo-wop station, the air reeking of her curling iron. After pulling the bikini from a mound of wrinkled clothes on the floor, she lifted her tank top and applied makeup over her cesarean scar. The red slash eased away, and she peered at herself in the vanity’s dust-speckled mirror. “This town is a real dump,” she said. “It doesn’t offer us enough opportunities. I’m making some big plans. I’m thinking San Diego with all that sunshine.”
We left two months later. My mother convinced a white-haired cowboy who worked in oil and gas to give her a couple thousand dollars. She claimed the money meant nothing to him because he had more of it than God. My grandmother told me that was bullshit. “There are chains attached to cash,” she said. I pictured mustached men in Stetson hats rattling their linked steel arms. I didn’t want to leave home, but I knew if I stayed with my grandmother in Saguarita, my mother would have no one but those chains.
The day we left, I loaded the car as my mother handed me luggage and supplies—cookbooks, rain jackets, batteries, potato chips. Through the haze of early morning, I saw our home anchored to the earth, a short slant above sage grass, seated before the sapphire mountains. As the sun broke completely over the land, my grandmother stepped outside in a quilted apron and pink house shoes. She held a cup of tea, the waves of steam stopping just short of her jaw. She squinted at us. “It’s going to rain along the way. You pull off if it pours.”
“Of course I know that, Mama,” said my mother.
My grandmother glanced at me. “Take care of her, and for Christ’s sake, Desiree, take care of yourself.”
* * *
—
Eula Court curved like a shark’s fin from one green gully filled with trash to another. Rows of rainbow-colored houses flickered by until my mother parked the car outside a boxy home, sunshine yellow with white trim. She checked her reflection in the rearview mirror, blotting her wide forehead and deep cleavage with a napkin. She applied sparkly lip gloss. She adjusted her spaghetti straps.
“This,” I said, pointing with my index finger, “is where we’re going to live?”
“We’re number two,” she said. “The place in back, a carriage house.”
I followed my mother to the main house, where she rang the doorbell and gently knocked. From behind her, I could make out her shoulder bones, ridged, as if her skeleton had been shattered and glued hastily back together. When the door opened and we were ushered inside by a man’s high-pitched voice, my mother’s back disappeared, swallowed by indoor dimness. There was only a black leather sofa and a television in the front room. A youngish man in flip-flops and a puka shell necklace stood before us with sloppy brown hair, done in the style girls at my old school called the lazy freshness. He introduced himself as Casey, the landlord.
“Hope the drive was easy for you, ladies,” he said, his chin tilted upward. “You’re sure going to love this place.”
Casey helped us unload the car. He moved with uncoordinated enthusiasm. The carriage house, he explained, was a lot like his house only miniature. After pointing out the gas stove, the water heater, and the vibration we might feel when the garage door beneath us either opene
d or closed, he patted the pockets on his cargo shorts and produced two sets of keys. “Don’t lose them. I’ll have to charge you a million bucks.”
My mother laughed and swiped his shoulder. “Must have the toughest locks in all of California on these doors.”
“Yup. But I keep mine open for the most part.”
When he asked if we needed anything else, my mother said everything was fine and thanked him. She watched as he returned to the front house. Between the homes was a small grassy courtyard, his shadowed back windows facing our sunny front ones. “I like him,” my mother said after some time. “Seems dependable.”
* * *
—
The carriage house was nothing like our home in Saguarita. Palm trees and hibiscus butted against the front door, which opened to a small, elevated stoop where cement steps and a white iron handrail led the way into Casey’s courtyard. The stove, the counters, and the tiles were avocado green. My bedroom was a tiny eggshell space, while my mother’s was large and airy with her queen-size bed dead center beneath the ceiling fan. Her lacy thrift-store dresses hung in the closet and her plastic jewelry was looped over thumbtacks in the walls. Her perfumes—vanillas and spices, florals and orientals—were displayed atop her vanity. The windows were always open, allowing in stark sunlight and city smells—distant sea salt, car exhaust, In-N-Out burger. “Ah, for the love of God,” my grandmother would tell me over the phone. “What a phony paradise.”
Soon it was clear my mother needed a job—there was only enough cash to cover the cost of moving and the first couple months’ rent. Because my grandmother wasn’t there to stay with me at night, my mother gave up dancing. No matter, she claimed. She was ready for change. Most days before and after school, I’d find her in our kitchen, furiously circling job listings in the paper. She’d stand at the counter, a pen in hand and one leg kicked up behind her like a flamingo. “I think I could do this,” she’d say, pointing to an ad for a secret shopper or a dog walker. I saw commercials on TV advertising dental assistant school and massage therapy classes. When I suggested she do something like that, my mother always laughed. “We don’t have the money for school, jita. Plus, I’m not one for studying.”
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