90 Miles to Havana (26 page)

“Hey,
Cubanito
,” he yelled as the car started to drive off. “Stop,” I heard him say to the driver. “What's the hurry? I want to say good-bye to my friend.”

I ran up to the car, and we shook hands. “Julian, thanks for letting me catch you,” he laughed and then took his sunglasses off. “Cases like yours are what make my job worthwhile; I just wish they all worked out as well,” he said, and the car started moving again. “I guess it's good-bye for now. Maybe I'll see you in Havana next year!” he called out the window.

I waved good-bye thinking about Lucia, the girl who sold hats and made drawings for the tourists. I wonder if she ever saved up enough money for her mother's plane ticket?

Besides Dolores, Ramirez was the only familiar face I found in the camp. The dormitory, dusty baseball field, and the pool were crowded with new kids. Where did they find all these new kids and what did they do with the old ones?

A group of girls are sitting around the picnic table weaving fancy palm hats with swans swimming on top. I walk over hoping that Marta will be there. I ask who taught them how to make the hats, and they said that it was a girl named Raquel who had left a week ago. Marta probably taught Raquel and then she taught these girls.

I sat on the shed roof reading my brothers' letters. The
first letter was about snowfalls that buried the windows and doors, and trapping them inside with nuns that smelled like mothballs. The second one told about the tricks they had to learn and the things they had to do just to avoid getting into fights. Alquilino described it best: “It is very important to avoid fights as the inmates here are big and dangerous.”

The last letter announced that Caballo had got beaten up on the first day there. “Now he follows us everywhere we go,” Gordo wrote. “This morning I woke up and there was Caballo sitting next to our bunks with that weird smile on his face. Now he wants to be our friend. Yesterday he returned your dumb drawing book!”

I had barely finished the last letter when I heard someone calling my name, telling me to get ready. It was the new director.

“I haven't even unpacked!” I answered.

“If you don't mind flying alone to Connecticut, you can leave today.”

“Of course not; I've flown before,” I said as if I had done it a thousand times.

I am feeling very grown up when I board the airplane all alone, carrying my blue suitcase—I'm not scared at all.

When we land in Connecticut, I find a man holding up a cardboard sign with my name on it. I introduce myself to him.

“Welcome to Connecticut. I'm Mr. Mooney,” he says,
and then tries to grab my suitcase. When I won't let go, he says, “Independent little guy, aren't you?”

As he drives out of the airport, Mr. Mooney keeps telling me how lucky I am that my uncle was willing to take our whole family, even though he has four kids of his own. “Some kids are not as lucky, you know!”

“I know,” I say, thinking about Lucia and all the other kids that disappeared from the camp. I hope they are all back together with their families.

“You're going to live in a brand-new neighborhood,” Mr. Mooney says as we turn onto a freshly paved road. At the bottom of the hill there are gray foundations rising out of the mud. Near the top, the framed houses without shingles or siding look just like birdcages made of yellow sticks. On the other side of the hill the houses are all finished. All the houses are the same. They all have a green patch of lawn in front, but each one is painted a different color. Why would they build the same house over and over again?

“This is it,” Mr. Mooney announces. My stomach starts to jump as he slows down.

The woman standing in the middle of my uncle's living room holding a vacuum cleaner looks a lot like my mother, but I'm not sure. I've never seen my mother near a vacuum cleaner. Maybe that's why I can't recognize her, or maybe I just got too good at forgetting.

“Julian!” the woman yells, drops the vacuum cleaner, and then throws her arms around me. I bury my head in the soft place at the base of her neck. My mother's warmth and the waves of perfumed hair crumble the sandcastle walls I had built around her memory. Now I'm home and swimming in her warm sea again, barely aware that my brothers are standing in the doorway. They come closer to poke and measure me, and then grudgingly declare that I did
grow a little. But they're just looking at my skin—the outside of me.

Safe with my mother and brothers around me, I feel like I've been holding my breath for a long time and now I can finally exhale. But I can still feel something hard and brittle around my heart. I think that's the shell I had to grow to be able to make it through all that time I was alone. I think it's going to take a long time to melt that shell.

When my younger cousins come thumping and tumbling down the stairs, they jump around Alquilino and Gordo, begging to be picked up and spun around.

My brothers have grown, too. Alquilino has more little black wires growing out of his chin and Gordo has an angry red scar on his forearm. I'm sure they have a lot of stories to tell. As they bounce and toss the cousins between them, I wonder if my brothers have that little hard place inside of them, too.

My mother is smiling. She doesn't seem to hear the high, anxious note the vacuum cleaner is now singing as it tries to swallow my aunt's new drapes.

“Where's Papi?” I ask, and her smile tightens.

“They didn't let him out.”

“Why?”

“He's building a hospital and they won't let him leave until he finishes.”

“When is he coming?”

“I don't know, Julian, but we're all trying to get him out
as fast as possible. Now come see your room,” she says and leads me downstairs.

The large bed in the too-small room leaves barely enough space to squeeze around it. I'm picturing myself stretching out alone in the big bed when she says, “You'll sleep here with your brothers. There is plenty of room for all of you. Now, let's open up your suitcase.”

“Don't you want to know where I went? Aren't you curious about what I did?” I say, hoping I can at least get a chance to explain before she finds out.

“Of course, Julian. But first . . .” she points at the bed.

I swallow hard, swing the suitcase up on the bed and then open it. She picks up the cracked plate sitting on top of a tangled knot of damp clothes. As her fingers worry the rough edges of the hole in the middle where the fish should be, a tear crawls down her cheek. “You gave this to Papi for Father's Day, remember?”

“I was missing one piece, but I glued it back together the best I could; I thought you'd be happy to have it,” I say, and wipe the tear away.

“Thank you, Julian. When we get our own house, I'll hang it where everyone can see it, so we don't forget,” she says as she stares past the knot of my wet clothes. “What a mess!” she says and then runs her fingers along the inside of the suitcase. I'm starting to get nervous because I know what's coming.

“I had to jump into the river from a bridge; that's why
my clothes are all wet,” I blurt out. “It was higher than the high diving board at the beach and then I went on a boat. . . .”

Her hand stops near the corner. “You can tell me all about it later, Julian.” She's found the empty compartment.

“Where is it?” she says in a hoarse whisper.

“I traded it for . . .” The words mumble out.

“Julian, I trusted you to take care of it. Where is it?”

Alquilino and Gordo are hovering over me, shaking their heads. As soon as they came in, they squeezed all the air out of the too-small room. I'm having a hard time catching my breath.

“Tomás, he needed the money,” I gasp. “He took me in, fixed up an old boat; there were fourteen people on a dock in Havana and he couldn't let them down!” I try to get it all out but still, she's not listening.

“I was going to sell it and use the money to get Papi out,” she says and sinks down onto the bed. “Now we have nothing.” Suddenly the room has gotten even smaller.

“My friend Tomás promised he would get it back.”

“He promised?” my mother asks as if I was crazy to give it away on a promise.

She hides her face in her hands. “We have nothing,
nada
!” she cries. All the air and the confidence that had bloomed around my heart starts to leak and wither, but the hard shell is still there, still insisting.

“Tomás risked his life on a leaky boat to go back,” I say.
“He kept his word to them and he'll keep his word to me!” I yell.

Alquilino sits down and puts his arm around Mami. Gordo leans against the wall and shakes his head. I don't know what else to say. The room is quiet except for the echo of my words, buzzing like angry bees in my ear.

“You should let him explain,” Alquilino says softly.

My mother gets up. “You don't understand,” she says and scoops up my clothes and bumps past Alquilino.

She stops in the doorway and asks, “Well, did they get out?”

“Yes, six men, five women, and four children.”

My mother stays up washing my clothes so I'll have something to wear for my first day of school. I stay up late, too, listening to her mumbling and ironing late into the night.

If she had seen their grateful faces, heard the nice things they said, she would understand why I did it.

In the morning I wake up to find my mother folding my clean clothes at the foot of the bed. She sets aside my dress pants and shirt. “I want you to look good for your first day at school, make friends.”

I have never set foot in an American school so I have no way of knowing for sure, but I have a feeling that the clothes she set out are not going to help me fit in.

My mother insists that Alquilino and Gordo walk me to the bus stop even though it's at the bottom of the hill and you can see it from the kitchen window.

“I'm old enough to walk by myself,” I say.

“A boy your age should not be walking alone.”

I could tell her that I rode buses all over Miami by myself, jumped from a bridge into a river, sold lemonade on a street where everyone was a stranger, but I don't think this is the right time. That will have to wait.

As the yellow bus chugs up the hill, Gordo turns to me with a smirk on his face. “Julian, don't be afraid. If anybody bothers you just let me know,” he says.

“I'm
not
afraid!” I snap back.

“Little Julian sure looks scared to me,” he says in his old singsong, insulting way.

“I'm just worried about the bird, that's all.”

“You should be worried. You really stuck your foot in it this time,” Gordo says as the bus doors creak open. “Mami should have known better than to trust you with it!”

“You don't know what you're talking about, Gordo!” I shout and climb into the bus.

I stomp past the driver and I'm halfway down the aisle when I notice that everybody is staring at me like I'm from outer space. The last seat is empty, so I drop my eyes and follow the rubber floor mat to the last row.

Gordo is standing right outside my window. I open it, thinking that he wants to apologize. “What do you want?” I ask.

Gordo jams his thumb into his chest. “Remember, if anybody gives you any trouble,” he yells so that everybody
on the bus can hear him, “just let me know. I'll take care of them for you.”

Great, now everybody is going to think that I need my brothers to take care of me. “I can take care of myself,” I say and snap the window shut.

The schoolyard is brimming with kids running across the wet grass, or huddled in bunches around the swings. As I wait for the bus to empty, I see a circle of kids forming by our bus door. I'll be the last one off so they must be waiting for me. How could they know I was coming?

There is nowhere else to go so I step into the circle. The kids standing around me are wearing jeans, khakis, T-shirts, and sweatshirts. I'm dressed in a green silk shirt, gold linen pants, and two-toned shoes. I was hoping that I could blend in, just disappear into the crowd, but now I know there's no chance of that. They're all looking at me like I'm the parakeet in a flock of sparrows.

A stocky boy walks across the empty space toward me. “Hello,” I say, but he keeps coming until he's standing so close that I can count the freckles on his face. We look at each other; I try to smile but he's giving me the look. It's the same look in English as it is in Spanish. I should have known that they'd have bullies here, too. He bumps his chest into mine and right away I know what he wants. I can't fight in my silk shirt—my mother would kill me! It's my first day of school and I'm supposed to be making friends, not enemies. I lower my head and try to walk past
him, but he steps in front of me. He pushes me against the bus and I feel the anger bubbling up inside me. I push back hard, hard enough to topple a Caballo-sized bully. I follow the boy as he flies backward, trips, and lands on his back. I jump on top of him, pinning his arms down with my knees. The crowd is yelling; the boy is squirming beneath me. I raise my fist but I notice his freckles are melting into his angry red face, and there is a spark of fear in his eyes. Suddenly, I understand what Angelita was trying to tell me about bullies. They wear the same look, because they're all trying to hide the same fear. They're afraid that if they don't push and bully, someone will push and bully them. They have to be that way. That thought suddenly sucks all the anger right out of me.

Now I don't feel like fighting, but I'm still sitting on his chest and the crowd is yelling, rooting for the boy to squash the newcomer-parakeet. How can they be angry with me? They don't even know me.

I stand up and the crowd closes in. They're shouting insults at the boy because he's letting me get away. I feel bad for him so I reach down to help him up, but he grabs the sleeve of my green silk shirt instead of my hand. Just then somebody pulls on my right ear, jerks my head around, and I hear a tearing sound.