We Never Asked for Wings

by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

  Yesenia sat on a rock beside him.

  “Are you okay? You looked like you were going to pass out.”

  “It’s just a little burn.”

  He pulled up his sleeve; she grimaced and turned away.

  “What happened?”

  Cooking dinner, the eggs, the fire: all of it led to the fact that they were alone. He picked up a rock with his good arm and threw it as far as he could manage.

  “I was trying to make eggs,” he said finally.

  “Is your grandfather still missing?”

  “How’d you know?”

  “Everybody knows. In my building they say Benny never even planned to bring him back. Mrs. Avalos says she wouldn’t trust him to transport a dead rat across the border.”

  Yesenia lived in the Courtyard Terrace apartments. They were well known as a drop-off point for newcomers, men and women and children smuggled into the United States from Mexico and Central America, so she knew Benny and every other coyote who worked Bayshore.

  Alex had been to her apartment building only once, when a bus driver dropped her off after a field trip and asked Alex to walk her to the door. They’d gone through the parking lot and around the back of the building, and inside windows and open doors he’d seen mattresses lining living room floors, sleeping bags on couches, eight, nine, ten people sitting around tiny kitchen tables. Behind a partly open garage door he’d seen a mother and too many little kids to count, all lying on a bare mattress on the ground.

  Yesenia’s apartment was different. From outside he could see carpet as clean as Maria Elena’s, and a vase of silk flowers on a coffee table. When she opened the door he was met by a particular smell: lime and bleach maybe, and something fried, and even though he’d never been there, it had reminded him of Mexico.

  “Everyone thinks Benny just left him there?”

  She nodded.

  Alex shivered, suddenly cold, but sweating too. It was probably true. The question was whether or not Enrique wanted to be left behind. “What else do they say?”

  “They say he’s the best in the world.”

  “I thought you said they wouldn’t trust him with a dead rat.”

  “Not Benny. Your grandfather.”

  Everyone knew about his grandfather’s art. It had been the same in Mexico. If a bird died anywhere in the state of Michoacán—and later, in the Bay Area—it found its way to the Espinosa family’s front stoop. It was why Enrique had never given up hope. There must be a market for his work, he said, if God had gathered all of North America to support it.

  “He might be.”

  “Is it true you shoot birds for the feathers? Maritza says that’s why you’re always in such a hurry to leave after school.”

  Alex laughed. He should say yes; it was so much better a reputation than having to run home just because his grandmother demanded it. “No. People bring him the birds, or we find them. They’re already dead, most of the time, or hurt and dying. My grandfather leaves a basket for them outside our door.”

  “And he plucks the feathers?”

  “Yeah. And files them. He sorts everything by species and color and date.”

  “Sounds cool.”

  “It is.”

  She looked at him directly, and he was surprised by her confidence. “Can I see them?”

  “Now?” Alex checked his watch and felt a moment of panic—they’d been gone too long already, and he hadn’t even thought of what he would say when they returned empty-handed, Alex with a soaking wet sleeve.

  Yesenia stood up and dusted off the back of her pants.

  “No, not now,” she said. “Friday?”

  “Sure, Friday.”

  There was a chance his mother would be back on Friday. But knowing Letty, they would probably still be waiting, and alone.

  She retraced her steps, 5 to 15D to 15, a map open on the passenger seat, where Maria Elena had been. As Letty drove she tried to imagine her children’s faces when she walked through the door, but she’d spent so many years trying not to look at them that she couldn’t picture them clearly. The fear in Alex’s eyes she remembered, and the feeling of Luna’s fingertips on the back of her neck when she crawled, late at night, into the bed they shared; but the features themselves were blurry. She couldn’t quite imagine them. Instead, she tallied other details: Alex’s straight-A report cards taped onto the ceiling above his bed, his white button-down shirts, Luna’s long braids and the way she ate an ice cream cone, only the top half, while the bottom dripped in streaks down her arms.

  She loved her children. It was there, under the fear, under the avoidance: a love lit with awe, so bright it hurt to look. They were perfect, in their own ways, and they looked perfect too. How was it possible—with the mud and dust of the Landing—that they were always so clean? It was something she should have asked her mother, the details of their bed and bath and school routines, but Maria Elena was hundreds of miles away already, probably cooking something for Letty’s father in that big empty cave of a house. The thought of her parents there, speaking Spanish like newlyweds, made her angry all over again. They wouldn’t even have had a home to go back to if she hadn’t bankrolled it for so many years. And this was how they thanked her: abandoning her outright, without even a warning.

  All night and all day she drove, staring out the window as cities stretched into deserts, deserts climbed into mountains. Light carved dusty villages out of the landscape, shacks made of corrugated metal and flapping tarps and walls of crushed cans, dark blue like the Jumex juice of her childhood. Hungry children and chickens scoured piles of garbage, and she thought about what the dishwashers at work told her: en México ni hay nada que robar. Nothing even to steal, they’d told her, and she’d thought she understood. But she hadn’t. She’d understood poverty, seen violence and despair. But she hadn’t known hunger. Even at her most desperate, most afraid—all the years the taxis and pizza boys and even the cops wouldn’t answer a call from the Landing—she’d always known that just across the freeway there was another world, so close she could smell it, warm like spun sugar at the county fair, so close it seemed the wind could shift just an inch and it would be hers.

  Which was worse? she wondered, as four, five, seven, twelve hours passed. Here, there was nothing even to steal. There, she had known, every moment, everything that could have been hers, and wasn’t.

  The sky grayed and then darkened. Shivering, she reached for her coffee, cold now, and checked her speed. The gasoline light flicked on. Letty startled. She’d filled up in Guadalajara (where she’d tried and failed, again, to reach Sara), and then stopped at a shabby taco stand by a small puddle of a lake, but the service station there had been out of gas. So she’d started up the mountain with half a tank. It had been a bad decision; a terrible decision, she realized now, as she scanned the vistas frantically for light. She had no idea where she was, and she had no more than forty miles before she’d be stranded alone on the side of a Mexican freeway in the middle of the night.

  After ten minutes, her panic growing with every mile, she spotted a power line, and then a billboard, and not long after that, a gas station came up fast on the right. She pulled off the twisted highway into the dirt lot. The light over the single pump glowed orange and was speckled with the black carcasses of dead bugs. Underneath it a man sat alone in a folding chair. She saw the lit end of his cigarette first, and then the tattoo creeping out from underneath his white tank top and up the side of his neck. He looked her age, or maybe a few years older, his half-closed eyes evaluating her in a way that would have made her pull right back onto the road if she hadn’t been so desperate. In neutral, she idled. Maybe two hundred yards farther, she could make out a small gathering of houses, a closed store. But there wasn’t another gas station. She needed to fill up, and she needed to try Sara again. She had no choice but to stop.

  The man stood up when she got out of the car and stamped out his cigarette. “Cuánto?”

  She dug into her pockets. At the last g
as station she’d exchanged money, but she was almost out again. Setting her remaining pesos on the hood of her car, she opened the gas cap.

  “As much as it will take.”

  He stepped forward to take the money. The air that accompanied him smelled of gasoline and smoke, a lethal combination, and she was aware all at once of her black pants, too tight, and the low tank top she wore for the specific purpose of attracting attention behind the bar. He took her money and reached for the pump without ever taking his eyes off her.

  She backed away. With her hand she made a sign like holding a phone to her ear. “I need to make a call.”

  Gas ticked into the tank. He set the nozzle to automatic and pointed to a pay phone, glassless and graffitied, in front of a bathroom.

  “Can you make change?” She held a twenty-dollar bill into the space between them. Snatching it out of her hand, he pushed it into his jeans before withdrawing a handful of coins from the same dirty pocket. He held them out to her.

  It wasn’t an even exchange, not even close. “More.”

  He lifted one corner of his mouth in a half smile, his eyes on her face, her neck, and the thin strap of her tank top.

  “Quieres más?”

  The hand not holding the coins moved back to his jeans, closer to the button than the pocket this time. He was cheating her, but she was a woman alone in a foreign country in too-tight clothes and needed to call Sara, so she grabbed the coins out of his dirty hand and ran to the phone. Her heart racing, she fed the pesos into the machine so quickly they spit back out the bottom.

  “Necesitas ayuda?” His voice was far away, but coming closer.

  She pushed the coins in faster, acutely aware of her position inside the three metal walls of the phone booth. If he got near enough, he could block her exit, and she had no idea what she would do then. She doubted there was anyone close enough to hear her scream.

  He was only coming to help, she told herself, but there was something about his swagger, the way he looked at her chest instead of her eyes, that told her he could just as easily be coming to hurt her. Without waiting to see which it was, she bolted out of the phone booth, sprinting in a wide arch around the light and jerking the pump out of her car with one hard yank. Gas spewed everywhere. The handle limp and leaking, she dropped it on the ground, jumped into the driver’s seat, and peeled away.

  She’d been right to run.

  His sharp whistle, as he watched her struggle with the pump, was enough to let her know. She’d been stupid, and she’d been lucky, and not for the first time in her life. Her jeans were wet in a line where the gasoline had struck her, and as the car filled with fumes she was transported back to the Landing, to the very last time she’d ever been left alone with either of her children.

  She drove faster, trying not to remember, but there it was: Maria Elena and Enrique walking out the door, Alex almost two years old, crying as he woke up from his nap. It was a Sunday. Maria Elena had asked Letty to babysit, so she and Enrique could go to a church meeting, and Letty had pulled him out of his crib and taken him immediately outside, where he was always happiest. They climbed rocks and tracked footprints. They waded with nets and buckets, and then they wandered back to the parking lot, where Tony Morales was working on his car. She’d never liked Tony, and she might have gone straight upstairs if she hadn’t, just the night before, had an epic fight with Wes on the phone. He’d called to tell her he wouldn’t be coming home from college for the summer, that his father had gotten him an internship. Why don’t you come to New York? he’d asked, which was impossible, of course, but when she’d told him that, he’d accused her of not caring about him anymore and being too afraid to tell him. Which was ridiculous.

  That wasn’t at all what she was afraid to tell him.

  So there she’d stayed, lingering on the stoop, leaning over the open hood, half-flirting with Tony and half-watching Alex. He was down to his diaper, a heavy, sodden thing, and she kept trying to coax him to her with a shaker full of puffed cereal, but he wouldn’t come, just continued through the maze of wrenches and tubes and rags littering the lot. He picked up something that looked like a giant pair of toenail clippers, then set it down and reached for a two-liter jug of orange soda.

  Put that down, Letty said, but he didn’t, and Letty didn’t make him. He started to drink. It was only after Alex fell, and Tony had begun to scream, that Letty saw the iridescent puddle, leaking from the soda jug and pooling by Alex’s diaper.

  It wasn’t soda; it was gasoline.

  By the time she reached him he’d gone rigid. She searched for a pulse but found only salt water, dried in rings around his pudgy wrists and ankles, and she pictured him as he’d been just an hour before, hands and feet in the mud, yellow hair lit up in the sun as if it had been electrified. Behind her, Tony pounded 911 on his cell phone while Letty watched Alex’s cheeks turn white, then purple. He needed oxygen. He needed oxygen, or he would die, but when she peeled back his lips she found his jaw locked shut, tiny rows of baby teeth blocking his windpipe. She didn’t remember deciding to do it, remembered only reaching for the screwdriver, and the sound of Alex’s teeth, breaking, and then the infinite minutes she spent breathing through the toothless gap and waiting for the ambulance to arrive. He’d lived, and recovered, and even forgotten, but it was the last day Maria Elena had ever left her to be a mother alone.

  —

  The clock on the dash read 2:00 A.M. It felt like she’d been driving forever. I’m coming, she wanted to scream, but she also wanted to give up, to curl up, to go to sleep. Why was she trying? It had been too long already, and suddenly she wasn’t sure she was even moving. She checked the weight of her foot on the gas and looked for progress out the window, but the mountains were all the same, one after the next. Had she driven over this many mountains with her mother? She couldn’t remember. It felt like an eternity since Maria Elena had been in the car beside her, not a single night. Up ahead a yellow sign warned of curving roads, and she moved one hand to her stomach, aching with hunger or fear—she’d never been able to tell the difference. If it was fear, good, it would keep her awake, and if it was hunger, too bad. She didn’t deserve to eat and there was nowhere to buy food anyway. The children and the chickens crossed her mind, and she turned the radio on loud to drown out the desperate image.

  Static blasted from the speakers.

  She took her eyes off the road to adjust the dial.

  Later, she would remember feeling a brief, powerful moment of peace just then, before she looked up and saw the sharp curve in the road and the headlights directly in her path, lighting the way forward.

  Pus oozed from a wrinkled patch of scalded skin. Two days had passed, but if anything it looked worse: crusty and swollen and transitioning from white to a dull green around the edges. All the bandages in his grandmother’s first aid kit were too small, so Alex left the burn uncovered beneath his shirts, patting it down with a tissue every few minutes, so the broken blister wouldn’t soak through his sleeve. No one had noticed, but this morning it was starting to smell bad, and he worried one of his classmates might say something. Plus, he hurt all over, not only the arm with the burn but his head, and the back of his neck. Walking to school he’d started to shiver, though it was late May and sunny.

  He might not have gone to school at all if it wasn’t for Yesenia. They hadn’t talked about it again, but today was Friday—the day she’d asked to come over to see the feathers. He couldn’t risk skipping school for the first time all year and having Yesenia think he’d done it to avoid her, so he’d woken his sister up and, ignoring the pain, gotten them both ready and out the door as usual.

  They had been shy in class all day, Yesenia’s eyes meeting Alex’s and then darting away, and when the final bell rang they both took their time packing up their things.

  “Ready?” Alex asked when the classroom was empty.

  They walked to the Landing in a line—first Luna, then Yesenia, and then Alex. Alex offered Yesenia his r
ain boots, but she refused, walking barefoot instead. Her heavy orthopedic shoes swung one in each hand, and he saw now just how thick the soles were, and uneven—a one-inch platform on the right shoe, a three-inch platform on the left. Her hips dipped with each step, her shorter leg straining to find the ground. But bare, her tiny feet were perfect. She’d painted her toenails purple, and the mud rising between her toes made Alex’s heart pound.

  The tide was way out; the exposed sludge had cracked. When he was a boy, whenever the water receded past the tip of the dock, he would point out the window and Enrique would grab a bucket, and together they would peer into the rivulets that formed at the bottoms of the cracks, catching the tiny crabs and fish and water striders swimming in circles, looking for a way out. Now a snowy egret had taken their place. It stood tall on its long legs, bright white and grand, its head bowed.

  Yesenia slowed.

  “Walk in front of me,” she said. “I don’t like people walking behind me, especially when I’m barefoot.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just don’t.”

  They switched places, walking in silence until they reached the empty parking lot. Luna ran up first, and Alex told Yesenia to wait while he went to get a towel to clean her feet. He caught his breath while she wiped away the mud. He felt even worse than he did when he’d woken that morning, his body aching all over, but he didn’t want her to know. Smiling too widely in an attempt to disguise his pain, he led her up to the apartment.

  “Where is everyone?” she asked.

  He’d meant to come up with a story—his mom was at work, his grandma was at a church meeting, something—but he was suddenly so exhausted, and so relieved to not be alone anymore, that he had neither the strength nor the desire to lie. He let his sister answer truthfully.

  “They went to get my grandpa.”

  “In Mexico?”

  Alex nodded.

  “When are they coming back?”

  “My mom said today, but—” He paused, trying to think of a way to explain his mother that did not sound criminal: “She’s usually late. It’s better with them gone, though. My grandpa’s protective of his feathers.”