We Never Asked for Wings

by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

  Now, she stood with Luna, staring into an empty refrigerator. She wished Alex had a cell phone so she could tell him to stop at the store. Once Luna was home, it was impossible to convince her to get back on the bus, not for any amount of bribery.

  Letty closed the refrigerator door and tried the freezer. Something sand-colored caught her eye, buried in ice in the back corner. She chipped at the snow pack with a knife until a tamale popped loose. If she was lucky, there might be another, or even two more, and she wouldn’t have to worry about dinner for Alex either.

  Plopping the tamale onto a plate, she walked to the microwave, but Luna grabbed it out of her hands. “I like them like that.”

  “There is no possible way you like them like that.”

  “I do.”

  Luna pulled it off the plate, peeled back the corn husks, and started sucking the hard masa. Letty watched, appalled, as her daughter wrapped the tamale in a paper towel and wandered to the sofa. She was filthy. They’d taken a shortcut home from the bus stop, and Luna had gotten carried away, splashing muddy water up and down the backs of her legs, all the way into her hair. Letty should have made her shower, or at least change her pants, but all the furniture in the room had aged ten years in just the few months since Maria Elena left; a little more mud wouldn’t matter now. Luna curled up on the white cushions, and Letty turned on the television, searching for something that would buy her a half hour of peace.

  She’d just found a show and returned to her task of excavating the tamales when Luna called out from the living room: “Mom? Someone’s here.”

  Wiping her fingers on her apron, she closed the freezer and walked to the door. A row of dead bolts separated her from whatever stood on the other side, one for every decade they’d lived at the Landing. Letty’s frozen fingers were slow and slippery, and when she finally succeeded in opening the door, she almost shut it right back again.

  Wes stood on the other side.

  All at once, there was no air. She reached for the doorframe and steadied herself against it, trying to look casual while praying her legs wouldn’t buckle.

  “Hey.”

  She could barely hear her own voice over the sound of her beating heart. Behind her, Luna pressed the TV volume up until the entire room was filled with the sound.

  “Luna!” Letty spun around. “What are you doing? Way too loud.”

  Luna pressed MUTE, and in the silence that followed, Letty saw her life through Wes’s eyes: Letty in a bar apron, still in her parents’ apartment, yelling at a dirty girl on a dirty couch eating a frozen tamale like a Popsicle. All the times she’d fantasized about Wes’s return, it had never been like this. In her imagination she was graduating from college or wearing a business suit, and her children were clean and polite and smiling. Only Wes had lived up to his part of the fantasy, which made it even worse. He stood before her looking better than she’d let herself remember, or perhaps more handsome than he’d ever been. His blond hair was darker but still sun-streaked, his shoulders broad underneath the thin cotton of hospital scrubs. He was a man now, with a hint of stubble and creases around his eyes.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “What do you mean what am I doing here? I live here.”

  “You never left?”

  “So you just dropped by to make me feel like a loser?” Letty raised one hand in exasperation. With the other she held on to the door, as if she might shut it again at any moment.

  “Sorry. No. I—” He paused, looking past her to Luna and then into the kitchen, before lowering his voice and continuing. “There’s this boy—he’s been hanging around my house for weeks, and yesterday I followed him home, and he came here, to your old apartment. And the more I thought about it— Well, I had to come see.”

  “See what?”

  “Do I really have to ask?” When Letty said nothing, Wes leaned into her ear and whispered. “Do I have a child?”

  Letty glanced back to where Luna sat watching, all eyes.

  “She’s not yours.” Pushing past him, she stepped out onto the landing and walked to the end of the open-air hallway, where not even a month before she and Alex had gotten drunk, and almost sixteen years before that, Wes had snuck up three flights of stairs with a bottle of wine and they’d toasted and cried over his 6:00 A.M. flight to New York City, where he would be starting his freshman year at Columbia. She hadn’t known she was pregnant, then or for a good three months after, and when she’d finally realized, she’d spent the rest of her pregnancy worrying about the effects of that drunken night on the baby.

  Wes joined her, and for a long, quiet moment she thought that was the end of it, that he had asked and she had answered, and while she hadn’t lied she hadn’t told the truth either.

  “She’s not mine,” Wes said finally. “That’s not a no.”

  Letty swallowed hard. She couldn’t look at him. A jet rumbled into the silence, turning in a wide arc and pointing north. Wes’s hands clutched the iron rail, his fingers hairy where they’d once been smooth. She thought of all the places those fingers had touched her and, heat in her face, turned away. “It’s not a no.”

  “How could you not tell me?”

  “I was going to tell you. But I got scared, and then you didn’t come home that summer—”

  “And then fourteen years passed?” Wes put his hand on her shoulder, forcing her to look him in the eye.

  “It wasn’t exactly like that.” She turned away.

  “It was exactly like that.”

  “You have no idea what it was like,” Letty snapped. “I did the best I could.”

  “I’m not saying you didn’t. I’m just saying you should have told me.”

  “Well, I didn’t.”

  Wes sighed. He wasn’t a fighter. He could argue and debate for hours, but the second Letty got angry he would back off and let her win. In high school she’d found it infuriating but was grateful for it at the same time, and she felt the same way now.

  “I wonder how he found you,” she said.

  “I don’t know. But he did. One day last spring—or maybe it was summer, I don’t remember—I got home from work, and there was this kid looking in my front window.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing. I asked him if I could help him, and he ran. I didn’t think anything of it, until I noticed him following me to the store a few weeks later. He looked strangely familiar, even though I was sure I’d never seen him before, and then I suddenly remembered what you said, the last time I called.”

  It had been just a week after Alex’s release from the hospital. A social worker had been assigned to investigate possible neglect, and Letty’s panic attacks had come like contractions, every one more intense than the one before. Maria Elena had answered his call and held the phone up to Letty’s ear. She had no recollection of why he’d called or what he’d said, but she remembered what she’d said: You have to leave us alone. She’d tried to self-correct, following quickly with Please don’t call me again. And he hadn’t, but all these years later, he remembered her slip. Leave us alone, she’d said, and what she’d meant was Save us. But over the phone line he’d heard only her words, not their meaning, and he had done as she’d asked.

  She sighed. “He looks so much like you.”

  “Of course he does,” Wes said, and for a second Letty thought he was going to detour into a genetics lesson, but instead he just shook his head and said: “I can’t believe you let me just go off to college.”

  It was terrible, what she’d done. But she could still feel the terror she’d felt then, and the shame. All those years at Mission Hills, the things they’d said about the girls from Bayshore. How hard she’d worked not to be like them. And then she’d gotten pregnant.

  “What was I supposed to do? You know what everyone would have said if you’d stayed.”

  They would have said she’d come to Mission Hills just to trap him with a bab
y. Wes had been warned about this when they’d started dating: by his friends, by his teachers, even by his own parents. Then, he’d defended her. But now, looking at her through disappointed eyes, Letty suspected he thought maybe he shouldn’t have.

  Finally he spoke, shaking his head slowly. “But I wouldn’t have said that. You know I wouldn’t have.” It was right there, the love she’d felt all those years ago, her heart stuffed full. She turned away from it, but he moved closer, so she could feel his breath on her forehead when he spoke next. “I would have stayed.”

  “I know you would have,” she whispered. “You would have given up everything, and stayed because you had to stay. And I didn’t want that for you. Or for me.”

  She hadn’t wanted people to say she’d trapped him, but she hadn’t wanted him to feel trapped either. She’d wanted him to go away and come back of his own free will, and she’d wanted him to find her happy, and successful. In her fantasies she’d imagined transferring to UC Berkeley and putting Alex in preschool, and when Wes came back, a college graduate, she’d imagined him loving her fiercely for everything she’d done and for everything she’d allowed him to do. But instead of going to class she’d gone out every night, and then she’d had to get a job, and then another, and nothing had turned out the way she’d planned.

  Wes took a step back toward the door, and Letty watched him look around. It hadn’t changed much in all the years he’d been gone. The same couch, shabby now, the same square TV. The only difference was that her parents were gone.

  “What did you tell your mom?”

  Letty’s eyes flitted to the bookshelf on the other side of the room, where she’d stuffed the last ten letters Maria Elena had sent, unopened. She wanted to read them, but it was too much, the endless advice and reminders, proof of everything she was doing wrong. So instead they piled up, unread, and she sent back short notes with as much money as she could spare.

  Wes was still waiting for her to respond. Looking back to him, she answered his question honestly: “That you broke up with me when you found out.”

  “Are you serious?” The whispered moment of connection was gone as quickly as it had come, replaced by anger. Wes had loved Maria Elena, and Maria Elena had loved Wes. It had broken her mother’s heart when Letty told her Wes had left her pregnant. “Where is she?”

  He paced in front of the door as if he wanted to go find her, right then, and set the record straight.

  “She moved back to Mexico. I’ll write to her. I’ll tell her the truth.”

  “No,” he said. “I will.”

  Just then, Letty saw a flash of light on curly hair, and they both turned, watching a gangly, backpacked boy race through the parking lot below them.

  “That’s him,” Wes said, half question, half statement.

  Letty nodded. “Yep. That’s Alex.”

  Alex wasn’t sure what he’d imagined. Tears maybe, or excuses, or long-winded explanations, but throughout the days and weeks and months he’d secretly tracked his father, he’d never once pictured a stiff introduction, a silent drive, and now this: sitting across from his father at a tiny table at Zen Sushi, a bamboo-and-white-light-wrapped restaurant in downtown Mission Hills.

  Alex stole glances at his father as he studied the menu, words like unagi and udon and yuzu ponzu, all mysterious to him. Up close Wes’s blond hair was gray at the temples, his blue eyes flecked with hazel.

  “Do you know what you want?” Wes asked him.

  Alex returned his attention to the menu, then gave up and shook his head no. “You can order for me. I don’t really know sushi.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He nodded, and when the server came Wes rattled off a list of rolls so long Alex thought it would take them until closing to finish eating. The ordering done, they looked around the restaurant, and then reached for the water pitcher in the center of the table at the same time.

  “Sorry.”

  “No, I’m sorry.”

  Wes poured two glasses, and they each drank in silence. Wes set his down. “So, how are you?”

  “I’m fine. How are you?”

  “I’m fine.”

  Wes took another sip of water. Alex did the same. A clock on the wall ticked off the seconds.

  “It’s strange to finally meet you,” Wes said. “I guess I don’t really know where to start.”

  There was a long silence, while Alex waited for his father to say something, anything else. But he didn’t. Alex tried to help: “You could just ask me about my day or something.”

  “How was your day?”

  Alex laughed, a nervous release, and thought about his day. It had been fine until he’d popped his head into Mr. Everett’s class after school, to thank him for a book on bird migration, and been rewarded with an office chair and a class list. His teacher hadn’t taken roll in a month, and had just been chastised by the school secretary. “It was okay. I had to stay late to help Mr. Everett with attendance.”

  “Mr. E!” Wes smiled at the memory. “I loved him. Although I’m not sure he loved me. I think I might have been the reason he outlawed competition in his honors class.”

  Alex smiled, remembering Mr. Everett’s lecture on the first day of school. “I think he likes everyone.”

  They were quiet again. Alex studied the fish tank at the back of the restaurant. A thin film of algae clung to the glass walls. He wondered if the fish were for eating or for decoration; the thought made him feel slightly ill.

  Wes waited until Alex looked back at him, and then he asked: “Did your mom tell you why I left?”

  Alex shook his head no.

  “Didn’t you ask her?”

  “We don’t exactly have that kind of relationship,” Alex said and then instantly regretted it. He didn’t want Wes to think his mom hadn’t done a good job. “I mean—I didn’t want to make her feel bad. I asked my grandpa once, though.”

  Alex remembered the conversation vividly, sitting in his grandfather’s lap at the window, watching the hummingbirds hover at their feeders below.

  “What did he say?”

  “He didn’t answer, exactly. But he taught me about reverse migration.” Alex waited to see if Wes knew what he was talking about, and when he shook his head no, he explained. “It’s when little birds—not the big ones, who learn migration routes from their parents, but the little ones, who have the routes genetically programmed right into them—it’s when something goes wrong, and the routes are programmed a hundred and eighty degrees in the opposite direction. So, for example, birds that are supposed to winter in Southeast Asia end up in western Europe.”

  “What happens to them?”

  “Most of the time they die, but sometimes they survive, and reorient the next winter.” Alex paused, waiting for Wes to refill his glass. “I think it was his way of saying you might come back, someday.”

  “If I didn’t turn up dead in Finland first.”

  “Exactly.”

  They smiled, eyes locking for just a moment before Wes looked away. “I’m sorry it took me so long.”

  “It’s okay. I’m sorry I stalked you.”

  “I’m glad you did. But I hope you aren’t aiming for a career in the CIA. You aren’t exactly the picture of stealth.”

  There was another long pause. Alex picked up his chopsticks and pulled them from the paper packaging, but he didn’t know how to hold them, so he slipped them back in the wrapper.

  “So where are my grandparents?” he asked, and Wes lowered his eyes.

  “They died in a car accident a year ago.”

  Alex knew he should say something, that the tragedy was much worse for Wes than it was for him, but all he could think was that he was a year too late. He would never meet them.

  “It was the reason I came back,” Wes continued. “I was working in Uganda at the time. I only meant to stick around here for a few weeks, to take care of everything. But then I met someone at the Stanford Center for Global Health, and I ended up joining their team.”<
br />
  “And now you’re here to stay?”

  Wes shifted in his seat uncomfortably, and Alex knew that, whatever he said, the answer was no. “We’ve applied for a research grant through the World Health Organization, which would require some work in the field. But we probably won’t get it.”

  Alex didn’t believe him—from everything he knew about his father, he didn’t seem like the kind of person who would be denied a grant. The server set their food on the table, a dozen varieties of rolls on a long platter, but Alex had lost his appetite. He wanted to leave right then, to tell Yesenia. He’d found his father, and now he might lose him again.

  And then, all at once, he remembered. Yesenia. He’d been going to see her when he had noticed his father’s car in the lot, and detoured home, and then forgotten Yesenia altogether. It was a good excuse—his father reappearing after a lifetime absence—but Alex hated excuses, and Yesenia did too. He’d left her waiting.

  He stabbed his avocado rolls with a fork, eating them as quickly as he could and then waiting an excruciating eternity for his father to finish. If his father noticed his impatience he didn’t show it, talking on and on about his work and asking questions about Letty—Did she go to college? Had she ever been married? Where did she work?—before paying the bill and driving him home. There was a quiet standoff then, Wes idling in his car waiting for Alex to go inside, Alex standing with his hand on the doorknob waiting for his father to leave so that he could run the other direction. It was just after eight and dark out. In his father’s mind it was probably dangerous. Finally, Alex opened the front door of Building C and waited in the stairwell until the sound of his father’s engine faded down Mile Road; then he opened the door again and started to run.