B0061QB04W EBOK (28 page)

“Home?” Papi said. “This is your home now, Chata.”

I could hear the anger in Papi’s voice, and I wished I could tell him that even though this was my home now, my umbilical cord was buried in Iguala.

The smuggler said, “Guerrero is about two thousand miles or so from here.”

Two thousand miles was the distance between us and Mami. Between me and the place I had been born. Between me and my childhood, however painful it had been. I turned to look behind me as the car sped on. Mami had once said she didn’t want me to forget where I came from.

“I promise I’ll never forget,” I said under my breath. We exited the freeway and arrived at our new home.

Book Two

THE MAN BEHIND THE GLASS

Prologue

I
N 2010, TWENTY-FIVE
years after my new life in the United States began, my father was diagnosed with liver cancer. By then, my siblings and I had little communication with him. By then, he’d managed to chase us away. But as is often the case with terminal illnesses, broken families put themselves back together, and I began to find my way back to my father, although the journey—like the one I took across the U.S.-Mexico border—was not at all easy.

On Tuesday, September 6, 2011, the day before my thirty-sixth birthday, Mago, Carlos, and I found ourselves around my father’s hospital bed listening to the doctor tell us he had done everything he could for him. The doctor said we should let our father go.

He didn’t know about all the times I had already lost him. Back in Mexico, there was always the hope that he would return. But now there was no hope to cling to. If we let him go, he would not be coming back.

I turned to look at my father. He lay on his hospital bed, only 130 pounds of flesh and bones. His face was sunken in. His skin sagged from all the weight he’d lost. Once, his skin was the color of rain-soaked earth. Now, it was a dull grayish color—like in that black-and-white photograph of him I so cherished. I could tell that he was not here. His eyes were slightly open, and they were glazed over, looking into space, looking at nothing. I wanted him to
see
me. I had always wanted to be
seen
by him.

I couldn’t follow all the cords and hoses that came in and out of him. I couldn’t understand all the numbers on the monitors next to him. But the wavy lines that represented his heartbeat told me of the conflict within him. His mind had already gone elsewhere. Yet, his heart struggled to hold on. It was fighting a losing battle. His blood pressure was now down to sixty.

The doctor waited for our decision.

I looked at Mago, then at Carlos. Betty lived in Watsonville, a six-hour drive from Los Angeles. But even if she lived here she would not have come. My mother knew what she was doing when she did not allow my father to take Betty. So now it was Mago, Carlos, and I who got to decide our father’s fate. Were they thinking what I was thinking? How shocking it was to see him like that. I wanted to remember him how he once was. Robust. Strong. Proud. Cancer had taken so much from him already. It had humbled him in a way I never imagined him being humbled.

“Okay,” we said. Mago, Carlos, and I looked at one another and nodded, reassuring ourselves of our mutual decision. “Okay,” we said again.

“I’m sorry,” the doctor said. “It’ll be over quickly. He won’t suffer.”

We stood around our father. The machines were disconnected one by one from his body. During the interminable twenty minutes that it took for my father’s heart to stop beating, the years I spent with him flashed through my mind, from the moment I first laid eyes on him after our eight-year separation, to the first day I came to live with him, to the day I left his house for the last time, to now.

I reached to grab his hand, that hand that was the exact shape of my own, and I held on tight.

1

I
T WAS
S
EPTEMBER
1985. We had been in the United States for three months. The following day, I would be starting fifth grade, Carlos seventh grade, and Mago eighth grade. We didn’t speak a word of English, and we were frightened. But Papi wasn’t worried about our lack of English. He was worried about something else.

“Don’t tell anyone you’re here illegally,” he warned us.

“We won’t, Papi,” we said.

“I’m serious,” he said. “If you tell anyone anything about how you got to this country, you can kiss it goodbye. You understand?”

Papi said we had broken the law by coming to the United States, but back then I didn’t understand much about laws. All I could think of was why there would be a law that would prevent children from
being with their father. That was the only reason I’d come to this country, after all.

“And you three better do well in your classes, because if you don’t, I won’t wait for la migra to deport you. I’ll send you back to Mexico myself!”

“We won’t disappoint you, Papi,” my sister, my brother, and I promised while nodding our heads.

Papi leaned back on his chair and took a swallow of his Budweiser. He put it down on the kitchen table and looked at us. First at Mago, then at Carlos, and then at me. I leaned closer to my sister, cowering under my father’s gaze.

“I brought you to this country to get an education and to take advantage of all the opportunities this country has to offer. The minute you walk through the door with anything less than As, I’m sending you straight back to my mother’s house.”

Oh, no, not to Abuela Evila!
I clutched my sister tighter.

“Don’t worry about us, Papi,” Mago said. “We won’t tell anyone we’re illegals, and we’ll get good grades. We promise.”

Carlos and I only nodded, too frightened to say anything.

“Está bien,” Papi said as he finished his beer. “Well, off to bed. You have to get up early tomorrow. And I wasn’t kidding about what kind of grades I expect from you.”

We left the kitchen and went into the living room, where my stepmother was watching TV. Seeing us come in, Mila got up and headed to the bedroom, the only one in the apartment. Mago, Carlos, and I had been sleeping in the living room since we arrived from Mexico.

Our new home in the U.S. was in Highland Park, a predominantly Latino neighborhood in northeast Los Angeles. Mila and my father owned a fourplex apartment building on the corner of Granada Street and Avenue 50. We lived in the one-bedroom unit because Papi said he needed the rent money from the bigger units. “The first thing I have to do is pay back all the money I borrowed for the smuggler,” he’d said.

Mago and I pulled out the sofa bed and lay down. Carlos slept on the floor. That night, though, because he was also anxious about the next day, he snuck into our bed. We huddled together while we listened to a helicopter flying very close to the apartment. For a moment, I forgot we were at the fourplex in Highland Park. I thought I
was back at the border, running through the darkness, trying to hide from the helicopter flying above us. Once more, I felt frightened at the thought that if we didn’t make it, we would lose our chance at having our father back in our lives.

“It’s okay, Nena,” Mago said, putting her arm around me. I snuggled against my sister, and thankfully the roaring of the helicopter faded away. “We’re safe. Now go to sleep. It’s a big day tomorrow.”

I tried to do as I was told, but it was a restless night for me. I was not used to living in a noisy place. While living at Abuelita Chinta’s shack, the nights had usually been quiet, except for the occasional barking of dogs and the passing of the evening train. But here, it seemed as if people never slept. Cars zoomed by on Avenue 50 at every hour of the day and night. Sirens echoed against the buildings. Police helicopters circled the neighborhood. Sometimes we even heard gunshots farther down the street from the gang members living nearby. The only familiar sound I heard at night was the lonely whistle of the midnight train, which made me yearn for my country and for those I’d left behind.

Since we had arrived three weeks before school ended, Papi didn’t enroll us. He said to wait for the new school year, so we stayed home all summer. We didn’t mind because mostly we just watched TV. Finally, we had unrestricted access to television, yet strangely enough, sometimes I would miss the radio and the fairy tales I’d liked to listen to. I didn’t like that TV took away my ability to imagine what things looked like.

Mago, Carlos, and I would clean the apartment so that Papi and Mila wouldn’t think we were lazy. We would sweep the carpet with the broom because the one time Mago had tried to use the vacuum cleaner it had swallowed up the bottom of the curtains, and we hadn’t known what to do. The vacuum starting smelling as if it were burning, and we pulled and pulled, but it wouldn’t let go of the curtain. Finally Carlos rushed to yank the cord from the outlet, and we were able to get the curtain out of the vacuum. After that we decided it was safer to sweep. We knew how to use a broom. The vacuum cleaner was going to take some time.

But my favorite thing about that summer was that we got to see the ocean for the first time. One day in July, my brother, sister, and I had hurried into Papi’s red Mustang, and we headed to Santa Monica.
When we arrived at the beach, Carlos, Mago, and I took off running to the shore and stared at the endless ocean before us. The few pictures I had seen in books or magazines couldn’t capture its immensity. Miles and miles of water glittering under the summer sun. I had never imagined the ocean to be like that. I breathed in the salty scent and stood there as the wind blew my hair around my face.

“Well, what do you think, kids?” Papi had said as he came to stand behind us.

“It’s beautiful,” we said.

While Mila and Papi made sandwiches, Mago, Carlos, and I lay down on the blanket to get a tan. Papi said we were dark enough as it was, especially his “Negra,” Mago. But it felt so nice to lie there under the sun, listening to the waves and the chatter of the families around us. For the first time, I felt as if we were a normal family, a family with two parents, as I had often dreamed about. If anybody had looked at us, they would have said, “Look at that happy family.”

Mago, Carlos, and I dug a hole in the sand and filled it up with the water we carried in a bucket. The hole was only big enough to put our feet into. We looked for seashells along the shore, stood at the water’s edge, and felt the sand give under us, but we didn’t go in deeper. We didn’t know how to swim. In Mexico we hadn’t been afraid to splash around in the canal when it was waist deep, but there at the beach, with all those waves crashing down every few seconds, and the current
pulling us in, it was hard not to be terrified of drowning in that beautiful, endless water.

Papi said, “You all better get in, or I’m going to take you home.”

Carlos and Mago walked farther into the water, but I stood by Papi’s side thinking about the time I had almost drowned in the canal and about my cousin Catalina being carried away by the river.

“Come on, Chata, go in,” Papi said.

“I’m afraid, Papi.”

He grabbed my left hand and said, “Come on, I’ll go in with you.” Together we walked into the foamy water.

“Don’t let go of me,” I said to Papi as I clutched his hand, my toes digging into the sand eroding from under me. I tightened my grip on his hand, a hand that was a mirror image of my own with its long, long fingers. Piano hands, although back then neither of us had ever touched a piano. I still couldn’t believe he was real, that he was no longer just a photograph hanging on the wall.

“I won’t let go, Chata,” he said. I held on to my father’s callused hand and walked deeper into the water with him. I closed my eyes and thought about the saints I had prayed to. I thanked them for that day. That was the perfect way to see the ocean for the first time—holding on to my father’s hand.

As he had promised, never once did he let me go.