We Never Asked for Wings

by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

  “No,” Letty said. “He wasn’t angry.” Then, after a long pause, she added: “He wasn’t angry, because he didn’t know.”

  The girl sat in silence, considering this, and Letty was surprised at her own honesty. Only Sara knew the truth, but it was easy to tell the truth here, to this girl she would never see again.

  “How could he not know?”

  It was the question Letty had asked herself every day for the past fifteen years. She rocked back and forth, squeezing her knees to her chest. Finally, she spoke.

  “Because I never told him,” she said simply. “He had bigger things to do. He was on his way to college, and I didn’t want him to get stuck at home with a baby, hating me for it. I figured I’d tell him eventually.”

  The first Christmas after Wes left for New York had been the hardest. She was hugely pregnant and he’d wanted to see her, but Maria Elena had turned him away—believing (because Letty had told her so) that Wes had left her outright, caring more about college than about his own child. During summer vacation she’d refused to see him yet again, because she was still fat (and young and stupid and vain, she thought now), and then the second summer, when she’d promised herself and Sara she would tell him, he hadn’t come home. Then Alex had almost died and it was off the table that she’d tell Wes, and have to explain Alex’s broken teeth, and what she had done to him.

  She told the girl all of this, every excuse and rationalization.

  “But for some reason I still thought he’d come back someday,” she finished. “When I think about it now I’m always surprised how long it’s been—and that I’m still alone.”

  “You’re not alone,” the girl said. “You have your children. And they have you.”

  Letty sighed. She wanted it to be that simple. But they’d never had her, not really. Her absence had been equal parts genuine need—it wasn’t easy to support a family of five, and then there were the constant requests from relatives she’d never met on the other side of the border—and genuine irresponsibility. When she wasn’t working, she’d been asleep or hungover. What had she been thinking? There were so many moments she could have made a change. She remembered one vividly. It was just after Alex’s third birthday. She’d gone out drinking after work, returning home just before sunrise to find her son asleep in her double bed. She’d been surprised—Maria Elena must have decided he was too old for his crib; or maybe he’d finally succeeded in climbing out. Changing quickly, Letty had crawled into bed beside him, wrapping her arms tight around his protruding stomach—and for one blissful minute she’d held him against her heart, his eyes and lips sealed shut, all the guilt and remorse of the past years fading away.

  But just then, the morning sun shot through the window. Alex stirred awake, wide-eyed and beaming to find his mother there. Go get a book, Letty whispered, locking eyes with him and smiling conspiratorially. Alex wriggled off the bed and slipped into the living room, but when he reappeared a minute later, he was sitting high on his grandmother’s hip. Maria Elena walked over to the bed and pulled up Letty’s covers. Better get some rest, she whispered, glancing at the clock. It was five-thirty in the morning. In six hours, Letty would have to be back at work. The room started to spin, and she realized she was still drunk, and that she’d driven home drunk, and whispered to her son drunk, and that when she woke up to go back to work in six hours, she might still be drunk. She nodded silently and turned away from her mother and her toothless son, closing her eyes against the shame.

  You have your children. And they have you. In the quiet night, Letty made a mental list of all the things she would have to do in order to make these words ring true. No drinking and driving. No drugs. No going out after work. No sex with younger men—no sex, period. No sleeping late, no skipping meals, no leaving her children alone. No chasing her mother, no depending on her mother, no blaming her mother. The list went on and on and felt to Letty as if it included every single thing she’d ever done in her entire life.

  A breeze blew across the garden. Next to her, the girl shivered. Letty lifted one corner of the red blanket to make room, and the girl scooted into the space she created. In the darkness their eyes met, and Letty looked at this teenage stranger, this young woman, almost grown now and still missing her mother. Would it be Letty in ten years, middle-aged and still mourning the loss of Maria Elena? Probably.

  But she wouldn’t let it be Luna.

  Fifteen years after the birth of her first child, Letty was going home to be a mother.

  Migrating birds reorient themselves at sunset. The exact reason is unknown, but at twilight, just when the sun drops beyond the horizon line, birds flying in the wrong direction correct their flight paths all at once. Given this, it made sense to Alex that his grandfather, at this exact moment in his life, would look around and adjust direction. It didn’t make it easier, but it made it understandable, and the fact that his grandmother had stayed with him gave Alex a flicker of confidence in his mother, his leave-in-the-middle-of-the-night, car-crashing mother; a confidence she might not actually deserve. But Yesenia had agreed, when he’d called her early Saturday morning to tell her what had happened: his grandmother would never have left them if she didn’t believe Letty could do it alone.

  The real question was whether or not Letty wanted to do it, and it was a question Alex steadfastly ignored as they settled in with Sara, shopping for food and ibuprofen and waiting almost three hours at urgent care for a doctor to treat his burn. He was lucky—the infection hadn’t spread to his blood. But the pus had to be drained and the abscess packed, a process so interesting it almost made the entire thing worth it. Alex imagined the look on Marcus’s face when he told him, in detail, how he was saved from premature death by tube and scalpel and cotton.

  Sunday morning, for the first time in four days, Alex woke up without a fever. The sky outside Sara’s window was white with a strip of blue at the top. The Landing was out there somewhere, buried in the fog. It felt strange to wake up here, in the busy, blue-skied world. Below his window a man pushed a double stroller, managing a cup of coffee and a dog on a leash at the same time, while a troupe of women in fluorescent tank tops circled wide to avoid him. Alex closed the window against the unfamiliar chatter before changing his clothes and walking downstairs.

  In the kitchen he found Sara, studying the contents of the refrigerator. Luna tapped impatiently at the breakfast bar. His sister looked hungry; Sara looked tired. She was the kind of pale—paper white skin, brittle blond hair—that looked constantly tired, but it was even worse now; the rings under her eyes were almost the exact same color gray as her eye shadow, giving her the appearance of a raccoon. She’d given up her bed for them, and though her metal-and-glass loft in the heart of downtown Mission Hills had been carefully (and expensively, it seemed to Alex) furnished, there wasn’t anywhere else comfortable to sit, let alone sleep. The sofa in the living room was a hard, bench-like object, nearly the same color and texture as the granite countertops in the kitchen.

  “How are you feeling?” Sara asked. She set an unopened gallon of milk onto the counter and pressed her palm against Alex’s forehead.

  “Much better.”

  “I’m glad.”

  A bit of the exhaustion lifted, and she hummed as she pulled two bowls out of the cupboard. Maybe she’d been worried, Alex thought, not tired. Sara had known Alex all his life, even if they hadn’t seen her much. First she’d been away in college, and then in graduate school, but she always remembered his birthday with T-shirts and toys and books. When she moved back and became a professor at the community college, he thought they might see her more, but Letty had kept Sara mostly to herself.

  Luna finished her cereal and pushed her bowl away, looking at Sara expectantly. Alex shook his head, remembering Sara’s mistake. On the very first morning they’d been together, Sara had played Uno with Luna for three straight hours. Now, his sister expected to be entertained—every single second. Sara looked at the clock, and Alex knew exactly what
she was doing. She was calculating the hours until Luna’s bedtime, as he himself had done every day since his grandmother left.

  “What are we going to do today?” Luna asked.

  “I don’t know.” Sara poured two glasses of orange juice and looked at Alex, and then back at the clock. Letty’s flight wasn’t until Thursday—a full five days away.

  “I have an idea,” Luna said.

  “Oh, yeah?” Sara asked. “What’s your idea?”

  “We could go to the fair.”

  The county fair had been in town for a week. Every day after school, Luna had spent hours describing the rides and carnival games and chocolate-dipped bananas to Alex, all of which she had heard about but never seen. It had been the same the year before, and the year before that, but no amount of begging or bargaining had convinced Maria Elena to take her.

  Sara frowned, considering. “Alex?”

  “I don’t care.”

  It would take a half hour to get there, they would stay three or four hours, and then drive another half hour home. For ten dollars a ticket it was as close as they could get to a full day of entertainment.

  “Well, get dressed, then,” Sara said finally, ushering Luna up the stairs. “Let’s get there before everyone else does.”

  —

  They arrived just as the gates opened. Sara pulled them straight to the midway, hoping to beat the lines, but Luna tired of it almost immediately. She wasn’t tall enough for anything but the baby rides, and when she lost at a dart-balloon game she burst into tears.

  “But everyone loses!” Sara exclaimed. She pointed at the families walking away empty-handed from the other stalls, but it didn’t work. Luna kept crying until Sara found a game with a guaranteed winner, a squirt-gun-racehorse contraption that cost five dollars a play. Sara handed over fifteen dollars and they all sat down, Sara and Alex dutifully shooting anywhere but the target until Luna was declared the winner. The prize was a Hello Kitty key chain, and Luna clipped it gleefully onto Sara’s belt loop, pulling her toward the animals.

  A girl in her class had told Luna she’d once seen a cow being born at a fair, and though Alex knew for a fact that the girl had lived in Indiana before moving to Bayshore and said so, Luna wouldn’t listen. She dragged Sara from building to building, through a gardening exhibit with baskets of polished carrots and tomatoes and squash, past a row of jam jars labeled with flavors like strawberry-rhubarb and black-currant marmalade, and through a long, winding hall of amateur art: first-, second-, and third-place ribbons identifying winners but not, in Alex’s opinion, quality. If his grandfather had ever entered his work in the fair, he would have received Best in Show.

  “Your mom won a ribbon once, did she tell you?” Sara asked as they looked at the paintings.

  “Nope.”

  “It was a requirement at Mission Hills, for second-year painting. She was really good.”

  Alex knew the ribbon. It was in the box underneath her bed, with the letter she’d never mailed to Wes Riley. He’d read the back countless times: Leticia Espinosa, Grade 11, but he never knew where she’d gotten it.

  “Wait,” Alex said, pausing. “My mom went to Mission Hills?”

  “She didn’t tell you? Just for high school.”

  Of course Letty hadn’t told Alex. She had never told him anything. But when he thought about it, it made sense. It must have been where she’d met Sara, and then Wes. Alex remembered a story Sara had told him once, about an egg drop in their high school physics class. Just as everyone else dropped their eggs out the first-floor windows, Letty appeared on the third-floor fire escape, two floors above the rest of the class, having hopped a No Students sign to get there. Sara said Letty had whooped as she let go, and that no one was surprised when hers was one of the only eggs not to break, or when she earned the only A+ in the class. Everything about the story had baffled Alex. He couldn’t imagine his mother earning top grades or whooping at anything, ever, but it somehow seemed possible now, knowing she’d been at Mission Hills. She must have been someone else entirely, to go to school there. He wondered how she’d gotten in.

  Luna skipped back to grab Alex’s hand, pulling him forward. “This is boring,” she said. “Let’s look somewhere else.”

  —

  An hour later, Luna finally had to admit that Alex was right. There were no live births at the county fair. Most of the animals were on the auction block; Sara tried to pull her away before Luna could ask what would become of the perfect lambs and calves and swine, but she wasn’t fast enough. Learning the truth, Luna started to cry. Again. And it wasn’t even noon.

  “Cotton candy?” Sara asked, her voice full of false cheer. Luna wiped her nose with the back of her hand and followed Sara to a food truck. Fortunately, the sweet blue gauze did its job: Luna stood, silent with wonder, transferring handful after handful of the spun sugar from the stick to her tongue.

  When she was finished, Sara led her by one sticky hand to the final exhibition room: Rain Forest Wonderland.

  Luna squealed the second she walked inside and bolted to an enormous glass pen, where a giant tortoise lazed against the far wall.

  “You like turtles?” Sara asked. Alex cringed but didn’t say anything. It was a tortoise, not a turtle.

  Luna ignored her, hypnotized by the slow-moving creature. It blinked one wrinkled eye in her direction, and she kneeled. It took a step toward her, and she pressed her forehead against the glass.

  “It’s coming over!” Luna whispered fiercely.

  Five minutes later, it took another step.

  Alex sighed. They could be here awhile. He made a loop around the tent, reading the descriptions of spider monkeys and tarantulas and even holding a scorpion, and when he got back Luna and Sara were still watching. Luna sat on Sara’s lap, her head tucked underneath Sara’s chin as if she’d spent half her life that way. Watching her, Alex wondered if it was something particular to six-year-olds or particular to his sister, the ease with which she attached to anyone within arm’s distance: first Yesenia, and now Sara. The very first night in her home, Luna had fallen asleep with her arms around Sara’s neck, the tip of her blond ponytail in her mouth. It was the exact way she latched on to their grandmother every night when she put her to bed.

  “Is it any closer?” Alex asked.

  “Six steps,” Luna whispered, her gaze never leaving the tortoise. If only Luna could pull her mother home with the same display of telepathic will, Alex thought, Letty would be here by now.

  Sara wrestled a twenty-dollar bill out of her pocket and slid it across the floor to Alex.

  “Better go eat,” she said. “We’re not going anywhere soon.”

  When he returned the second time, full of nachos and ice cream, neither of them had moved. If the tortoise had moved, he couldn’t tell.

  “Progress?” Alex asked, sitting down beside them.

  “A little,” Sara said, at the same time Luna said: “Yes.”

  They watched the tortoise take another step, and then Sara gestured around the room. “Anything I should go see?”

  “Nah. Just some monkeys, and a bunch of kids screaming about how scorpions are evil. I tried to tell them that scorpion venom is being tested as a cure for MS, but they didn’t listen.”

  Sara’s eyes grew wide, and she looked like she was about to say something. But instead she pursed her lips, turning back to the tortoise.

  “What?” Alex asked.

  “Nothing.”

  He was about to ask again, but just then Luna squealed and clamped a hand over her mouth. Through parted fingers she whispered: “Alex! Look. Right now.”

  The tortoise had made it to the glass. He stood up and stretched his neck until he was as tall as Luna, then settled down onto his shell and stretched his front legs out. His hind legs lay flat behind him, his knees on the ground and the bottoms of his feet facing the ceiling. The pads of his feet were worn and white. Luna spread out on her stomach, only her head erect, mirroring his posture.

&
nbsp; “I think he likes me,” she said, laughing.

  “He must,” Sara said. “In turtle-steps I think he walked about a thousand miles to see you.”

  “Tortoise,” Alex corrected, not able to contain himself a second time. “Not turtle. It’s land-dwelling.”

  Sara looked at him with the expression he’d seen on her face just moments before, but again she just shook her head and looked at the ceiling.

  “What?” Alex asked. “Why do you keep looking at me like that?”

  “It’s nothing,” she said.

  “Yes, it is. It’s something.”

  “It’s just—you sound like someone I used to know. He was always correcting our biology teacher, and spewing random facts that no one cared about. Not that I don’t care what you’re saying,” she added, flustered.

  It took a moment for Alex to realize what she was saying—Sara knew his father. And looking at Alex now, she was reminded of him. Wasn’t that it? They all must have gone to school together in Mission Hills.

  There was so much Alex wanted to know, but Sara looked as if she already regretted what she’d said.

  “How else do I remind you of him?” he asked, careful not to use his name. But still, he hit a nerve. Sara hopped up.

  “Who?” she asked, feigning confusion, and before he could answer she’d scooped up Luna and set her down on her feet.

  “Come on,” she said. “The tortoise has to go eat his dinner, and so do you.”

  She dragged Luna toward the door while Alex followed behind, studying the straight-backed walk of his mother’s best friend, who somehow knew more about his life than he did. She wouldn’t tell him, though. Whether she felt it wasn’t her place or she’d made some kind of promise to Letty, one thing was certain: he’d learned everything he was going to learn from Sara.

  The rest, he’d have to find out himself.

  Letty was sober when her plane touched down in San Francisco. She’d spent the hours looking out the window, listening to the women next to her chatter about a business conference while consuming half a dozen glasses of red wine. Letty didn’t have the money to order her own drink, but it still felt like a tiny victory, walking off the plane clearheaded and ready.