B0061QB04W EBOK (49 page)

Every day I would come home from school, wondering if that was the day she would leave. But in the evening, Mago would come home as she always had. Papi didn’t talk to her, but by the second week it was as if nothing had happened. Mago didn’t bring up the subject anymore and Papi ended the silent treatment. All of us even went out to dinner at Papi’s favorite restaurant—La Perla in East L.A.—when I received my acceptance letter from the University of California, Irvine, which I would be attending in the fall. Although I knew that a university was much more expensive than a community college, my guidance counselor had encouraged me to apply to universities. He’d said that I couldn’t waste my good grades. All the extracurricular activities I had done, like marching band, creative writing, art, and track and field, would only help me to get in. He’d been right.

Mago told me how proud she was of me. Papi didn’t say anything
like that, but the fact that he took us to his favorite restaurant said a lot, especially because he hardly ever took us anywhere. I loved the murals at La Perla. My favorite was one of a little fishing village. I didn’t know what magic the artist had used to make his murals change from day to night as the lights hanging on the ceiling changed color from red to blue. We sat there and listened to the mariachi, and I sang along with them. Papi sang along to “Volver, Volver.” I looked at his smile and I smiled, too. Nothing made him happier than to listen to the songs of Vicente Fernández. Mago and I sang along and I got lost in the beauty of the murals at La Perla. I imagined living in the perfect little village with all my family. Always together.

Two days later, I came home to an empty bedroom.

If I had known she was leaving that day, I would have stayed home, convinced her not to go. But she had not said a word when I left for school. Instead, after hanging out with Steve after school, listening to him harass me yet again to have sex with him, I came home at four thirty, an hour before Papi got back from work, enough time to tidy up the house and pretend I had come home a lot earlier.

But when I opened the door of the bedroom, the first thing I saw was the empty closet. All of my sister’s clothes were gone, all except for a pair of overall shorts I often borrowed from her. A farewell present? I dropped onto her bed. I looked up at all the posters she had taped on the wall, photos she had torn from magazines, many of which were of Adela Noriega and Thalía, her favorite actresses ever since she had watched the soap opera
Quinceañera.
I couldn’t believe she would leave like that, without telling me goodbye. I thought about when my mother left with the wrestler without saying goodbye. Perhaps, like my mother, Mago didn’t want to see my tears. Maybe she thought it was better this way. But I didn’t think coming home to an empty closet was better than saying goodbye and watching her go out the door.

I heard the front door open and close. My father was home, and I hadn’t done my chores. I rushed out to the kitchen to wash the dishes. My hands shook as I picked them up to lather them. My eyes burned from crying.

He came into the kitchen and grabbed a beer, not saying anything to me. I’d gotten used to him ignoring me. And honestly, I preferred that to the times when he did pay attention, because when he did, it was only to insult me or reprimand me for something or other. But that day I knew I had to break the silence. I just didn’t know how to tell him that Mago was gone. I waited until he took a drink from his beer, and before he disappeared into his bedroom, I blurted out the news.

“Mago se fue,” I said.

He turned around to look at me. I shut off the faucet and dried my hands with a towel.

“What?”

“She’s gone.”

He turned around and headed to my bedroom. He stood there in the middle, just as I had done earlier, and looked at the empty closet, the empty dresser drawers. He glanced at Mago’s posters on the wall, the only reminder that she had lived there.

“You’re not allowed to see your sister anymore. If she wants to leave, que se vaya. But you,” he said as he pointed a finger at me, “will have nothing to do with her.” I stood in the room, listening to him say that my sister was an ungrateful daughter. “After everything I’ve done for her, this is how she repays me? If she wants to go and live a corrupted life, then I’ll start thinking of her as being dead to me,” he said. He talked about Carlos, about how disappointed he was in him, and now, in Mago. He looked at me and shook his head. He looked at me as if I had disappointed him, too, even though I was still there, with him.

I wanted to tell him that I would be different, that I had seen with my own eyes the poverty he had helped us escape. I had seen with my own eyes the reason he had been such a tyrant about school. I wanted to tell him that I would do what Mago and Carlos hadn’t done. I would go to UC Irvine, and get my degree. I would be somebody he could be proud of.

But he said to me, “You can forget all about going to that university. You’re going to be a failure, too, just like them, so don’t even bother.” Then he walked away.

“No, Papi, please!” I begged. But he slammed his bedroom door shut.

I went back to my room. A room which was now only mine.
He isn’t serious
, I told myself.
He’s just angry with Mago. He’ll change his mind tomorrow. He will. He knows how important this is for me, for the family. He will let me go.
I got under the covers of my sister’s bed and buried my nose in the pillow, trying to drown myself in her favorite scent—Beautiful by Estée Lauder. I thought about Abuelita Chinta, my mother, and now my sister. The void inside me became bigger and bigger, as I realized that the women I loved most in my life were far away.

My graduation came and went, and true to his word, Papi wouldn’t allow me to send in my paperwork to UC Irvine. Since I was still underage, it required his personal and financial information, and his signature, which he refused to give me. I was too much of a coward to falsify his signature. I was too much of a coward to fight him on it. I fought him instead about Mago. I couldn’t win two fights, but maybe, I might win the one that mattered to me more. Papi threatened to beat me if I dared to step out of the house to go see her. I hoped with time he would change his mind about that, too.

Then the news broke that Carlos’s wife was pregnant, and a month later, Mago confessed that she, too, was expecting. This pushed my father over the edge. And it terrified me to the core. Now that Mago was going to have her own baby to hold and cherish, there would be no room for me in her life.

“You’ll always be my Nena,” Mago said to me over the phone. When I didn’t say anything she said, “I’m going to go pick you up and take you somewhere. You tell your father that I’m going to go visit you, and he can’t do anything about it.”

“You know he’ll get angry,” I said.

“Who gives a damn?” she said.

Several times during the week I approached my father to tell him Mago was coming to pick me up on Sunday, and that I was going out with her whether he liked it or not. But just as I was about to say it, I would get choked up with fear, and I would turn around and go back to my room.

That summer was when my father’s drinking worsened. Following
my mother’s suggestion, I’d been selling my father’s empty beer cans at the recycling center. I could always tell how much he’d drunk that week by the money I would get. The previous week, I had gotten thirty dollars. That was the most I’d ever gotten. Lately, in the morning, I would wake to the sound of a beer can being opened. My father had now started to drink before he left for work, and when he returned, he would drink all evening before going to bed. He argued with Mila over everything, even about her weekly visits to her children. He would tell her that her place was here, at home. Mila’s older son was legally blind, and Mila had to make sure he got the help he needed. Her second son and Cindy had troubles of their own. I couldn’t blame Mila for always wanting to be over there, by their side. My father didn’t see it that way. He hated her family because they had never accepted him. They had always blamed him for breaking up Mila’s first marriage. Although I had never seen him hit Mila, there were times when I could almost see the urge inside him. He would hit me instead.

True to her word, Mago came over on Sunday. I told Mila that Mago was downstairs, and she didn’t think it was a good idea. “Your dad’s going to get mad,” she said as she watched me head toward their bedroom.

When he didn’t open the door, I mustered the nerve to open it myself. He was sitting on a chair looking out the window with a beer in his hand. I went in with hesitant steps. This was foreign territory to me, having never been allowed to spend much time in their bedroom. He was listening to his favorite song by Los Tigres del Norte, “La Jaula de Oro.”

Even though the music wasn’t too loud, he acted as if he hadn’t heard me coming in.

“¿Qué quieres?” he said when I came to stand right next to him.

“Mago is downstairs. She wants to take me out.”

“Tell her to leave. I already told you that I don’t want her coming here. I don’t want her seeing you.”

“But she’s my sister!”

“She chose to leave, didn’t she? If she really cared about you, she wouldn’t have left.”

I started to cry then, like I always did with him. He always knew how to say things that would hurt me to the core. I hated crying. I hated letting him see how much power he had over me. To make me cry just like that, without even laying a finger on me. “She’s my sister and I want to see her,” I said.

“¡Ya te dije que no!”

I started walking away, determined to disobey him. “Well, I’m going anyway. She’s all I have, and you can’t keep me away from her!”

Just as I got to the door, he called my name. I stopped and turned around. “If you go out with her,” he said, “don’t you ever come back here.”

“Fine!”

I rushed out of the room, past the dining room, the kitchen, out the back door.
This is what I needed! Now that he’s kicked me out, Mago will be forced to take me with her. I can finally be with her!
I was halfway down the stairs, and I could see Mago’s green Tercel parked in front of the apartments. Suddenly, I felt as if my hair was tearing right out of my scalp. “You aren’t going anywhere!” Papi yelled, yanking my hair so hard I fell over backward. I reached up to hold on to my hair. He tightened his grip on it and dragged me up the stairs. I screamed for Mago. The last thing I saw before he dragged me into the apartment was Mago getting out of the car.

“Mago! Mago!” I yelled over and over again. My father slammed me against the kitchen wall and began to beat me with his fists. Mila stood by the door of the living room. “Get my sister,” I yelled to her. “Get my sister!” She turned and ran out of the house.

The beating continued and his fist connected with my nose. I covered my face, trying to protect myself. I looked down at my shirt and saw drops of blood landing on it.
Where is she? Why won’t she come and stop him? Take me away from him?
“Mago! Mago!” I yelled. There was a rushing in my ear as his fists fell on me, hard as rocks.

“¡Ya déjála!” a voice said. Suddenly, the blows stopped.