Make Your Home Among Strangers (32 page)

She struggled against the arms of Myra and her other friends—it looked like they were trying to hug her. I reached out to grab her shirt and pull her to me, my hand squeezing between the shoulders of the women surrounding her, but she pushed herself forward, her upper body hanging over Ariel's fence.

—So his mother died in vain, she screamed. She died for nothing! Nothing!

Someone yelled, ¡Señora, por favor! But from elsewhere came a barked, No! Then more pushing, and Myra and the rest of my mom's group began yelling, a ridge of sound rushing at Ariel's house.

The uncle had stopped speaking and was also crying—or as close to crying as he would allow, his face suddenly red and blustery, hands rubbing against his eyes in wide passes. He walked to the fence, began grabbing the hands of the people there suffering with him, sputtering and nodding at us. This move made my mom worse. She fell to her knees, her hands still grasping the fence. When the uncle got to her, she pushed herself up again and squeezed his hand, said, No please, no.

The uncle nodded, wrapped his other hand around their joined fists, then released her to keep moving along the line of people. She reached after him, touching his back, her fingers trailing down it as he eased away.

—He can't! Mami screamed. He can't go back! Don't let them take him!

Nothing she was yelling made any sense to me; I turned to Myra.

—Go back? I said.

I hadn't had any more contact with her since meeting her three days earlier, but she slapped the side of my head the way my dad did whenever I talked back to him or said something he found especially funny or stupid.

—Are you deaf? she said. INS says his father has custody. They have two weeks until Ariel is deported.

This didn't seem at all connected to the news we'd come to hear: the family had filed for political asylum on Ariel's behalf—custody wasn't part of any conversation I'd heard or seen on TV, not yet.

—Wait
what
? I yelled at Myra.

—They don't have the right! she said.

I thought she meant INS, which if they'd weighed in meant they probably
did
have the right, but what I learned later was that Myra was trying—in the whirlpool of crying and the new chant of ¡No se va!—to explain a legal technicality to me: Ariel's
U.S. family
didn't have the right to apply for asylum on his behalf in the first place. Only his legal guardian could do that, and so only his father, in Cuba and apparently staying in the capital as a guest of Fidel Castro, had the right to file the motion that his son be granted asylum. The paperwork everyone had spent the last few weeks talking about, which Tía Zoila had called bulletproof at Noche Buena, was all a waste of time.

Caridaylis stood alone, frozen to the spot where the uncle had left her. She was not looking at anyone, not even at the reporters snapping photos and spearing her with questions. She stared at the ground a few feet ahead of her. One reporter—sunglasses atop a perfect helmet of hair—yelled, Cari, what will you do now? What are you going to do now? I pushed closer to him, the crowd having turned more liquid in everyone's rush to find a neighbor and spread the horrible news, and as soon as my arm could reach it, I raised my palm and covered the lens of his station's camera, blocking his shot of Caridaylis. The cameraman was used to this, though, and quickly pressed something that raised the machine out of my reach. I looked back at Caridaylis just as she covered her face with her hands. She must've watched the concrete path leading back to the house through the spaces between her fingers, because she ran the length of it with her hands still shielding her.

At Cari's sudden exit, my mom a few feet behind me yelled, No no no no! I turned around but couldn't see her. She yelled, This can't happen! We're her voice! You hear me? We are her voice!

A few seconds later, Myra was at the fence diving after someone who'd just collapsed, yelling, Lourdes! Lourdes!

I yelled, Mom, and lowered my shoulder, used it as a wedge to move sideways through the mass of people flooding against the fence to chase Caridaylis with their words of support, throwing them at the house like rocks. I ducked down, making myself as small as I could, and through the spaces between torsos, I caught flashes of my mother near the ground, limbs trampling limbs, her arms flopping around Myra and another woman's neck as they struggled to lift her.

Myra fanned my mother's face, yelled, Help! Somebody help!

The other woman said, Lourdes, stand up, please! These people are gonna crush you!

She was maybe seven or eight feet away. From my ducked-down place, I pressed against stomachs, squeezed my shoulders past the butt pockets of people's pants. An elbow flew back and crashed into my ear, sending a blast of pain so bright and loud that, as spots tracked across my vision, I thought I'd been punched on purpose, thought I'd never hear again. I fell from the searing of it, almost all the way to the ground, lurching forward, my hands stopping my fall when they landed on and clutched someone's sneakers—my mom's shoes, her ankles turned and rubbery at the ends of her legs.

—Mom! I yelled, but her head lolled forward like she'd decided right then to take a nap. I climbed her, used her knee and then her hip to pull myself upright, and I scrambled to my feet, pressing a hand to the new pulse at my ear the whole time. The pain was so bad that when I looked at my fingers, I was shocked not to see blood.

I grabbed my mom's face the way she'd grabbed mine the last time we found ourselves in front of this house with these people. I shook her whole head and yelled, Mami! Mami! Wake up! Say something!

Myra grabbed my wrist and flung it away.

—Stop that! she hissed. Her name is Lourdes.

I blinked at her, the whole side of my head burning hot; blood had to be pooling
somewhere
in my ear. Myra didn't know who I was, had no idea, and so I couldn't ignore it anymore: my mother had never talked about a version of her daughter that could be me.

—You're making it worse, she said. You're not helping, just get out of the way.

Myra and the other woman began pulling my mom's body in the direction of the street, leaving the fence behind and yelling, Get away get away, as they charged against people whose faces glowed as red as some of their shirts. They pushed past people clasped in hugs, people still turned toward the house and vowing, in the form of various slogans, to fight this, to stop this from happening, to do whatever it took to keep their new family together.

—I'm her daughter, I said to my mother's back as the others dragged her away. Protestors filled in their wake. ¡Soy su hija! I'm her daughter!

But they didn't hear me. They didn't know who I was, and as I tried and failed to push through to them, they never even turned around.

 

25

IN THE HANDFUL OF DAYS BEFORE
I flew north for the spring semester, Ariel's uncle, at the urging of a team of Cuban-American lawyers working pro bono in response to the INS mandate that Ariel return to Cuba within two weeks of the day my mother collapsed in front of his house, sued for temporary custody. So he was not Ariel's legal guardian—then he would pursue becoming just that, his daughter Caridaylis dutifully at his side. While I was on the plane back to school (somewhere over Georgia would be my guess), this custodial status was approved as an emergency measure by a Miami court as legalities got sorted out. I imagined poor Omar—who'd driven me to the airport because, when he came over that morning to say goodbye, I'd shown him the note my mom left saying that she couldn't take me; she'd gone to the courthouse before I'd woken up—stuck in the Ariel-related traffic that no doubt plagued his drive home.

That court's decision, according to some experts, nullified the order that Ariel be deported by mid-January. According to other experts, this decision meant nothing because a federal agency had already implicitly decided otherwise. I heard these news bites secondhand from the bank of TVs near the school store's cash registers while in line to buy my spring books, or from the sets I passed on my way in or out of the student union—and not from our apartment's window or my mom's mouth. Although at some point I'd likely be required to take a government or history course like the one Jaquelin took in the fall that would explain the origins of these legal complications, I was far from anything close to that kind of understanding, and the truth was I didn't want it; this was going to be some long, legal nightmare, and I planned to stay as ignorant about it as possible in order to avoid becoming the Representative Cuban at Rawlings College. But escaping that fate became almost as big a challenge as getting Ariel's status in the United States settled.

That first week back on campus, many of the people in my dorm asked me my opinion—while I brushed my teeth, in line at the dining hall—and they thought something was wrong with me when I'd shrug and answer, I don't know
.
They said, How can you not
know
? I wanted to hate them for asking—to prop the ever-gracious and ever-accommodating Jaquelin in front of them as the better Rawlings Latino Ambassador—but it was hard to do that because they were right: I
did
live two blocks from Ariel, even if they didn't know that. Two days after we returned, my RA knocked on our door, and right in front of Jillian, said she'd gotten an e-mail from a woman in the Dean of Students office asking her to check in with me, to remind me of all the people willing and able to support me. Support me through what, I said. And Jillian answered for her: Through everything going on back home.
Nothing's
going on! I laughed. He's not my freaking brother, sorry to disappoint you. This outpouring had nothing to do with my mom's participation in the rallies: I was careful to keep those facts from everyone but especially from Jillian, who thought she was hearing some nonexistent code in Leidy's messages. But I might as well have been Caridaylis herself, the way people kept asking me what I thought. I feigned disinterest because I didn't want their assumptions proven right. It was only a coincidence that I knew and cared about the protests, not a consequence of being Cuban, and so I denied caring at all. I just want to study, I told the RA, told Jillian again and again. I just wanted to lose myself in the spectacular classes on my schedule—spectacular to me mostly because they were courses I'd chosen rather than those I would've been forced to take had my fall grades been lower. I was enrolled in the next round of biology, the next round of calc, and the Spanish II class I'd placed into during orientation week but which I'd left off my fall schedule, thinking I knew enough Spanish and not realizing I'd need to prove proficiency in a foreign language in a Rawlings-certified way. I sat out chemistry just so I could tell my advisor, who now sent me a perfunctory e-mail every couple weeks, that I'd learned something about
balance
the semester before. In its place, I signed up for the Monday morning section of a weekly lab course called Investigative Biology Laboratory: Best Practices, a sort of boot camp for people hoping to do laboratory research someday. I figured it would help me, in some vague way, build the equally vague community clinic I'd written about in my admissions essay. I still worried that someone would hold me to the claims I'd made in that document, and I wanted to show I was already on my way to making good on those promises.

The classroom for the lab wasn't a classroom at all: it looked like a bona fide laboratory, though I later learned it was a teaching lab, a sort of Fisher Price version of the real thing. Six rectangular black benches—three on each side of a central, square bench—stood in the middle of a room lined with shelves of glassware and industrial-looking vents. We were each assigned the right or left side of a bench as we walked in the first day. There were twelve of us, and while we would share the benches for ease of use when it came to large pieces of equipment or distributing supplies, we'd be working alone, and I felt weirdly relieved by that—by having total control over my own space.

Our professor, Dr. Kaufmann, was a biophysicist, internationally recognized as a leader in population ecology. I'd looked up each professor running a section of the lab once I was able to register, and I signed up for hers because she was, technically, the only immigrant: she was born in Germany but came to the United States for her Ph.D. and stuck around after falling in love with our beaches (her faculty Web page said exactly that). I realize this was a stretch—thinking of Dr. Kaufmann as an immigrant the way my parents were—but I saw my very presence at Rawlings as a kind of stretch, and besides, I was basically
from
the beach, and maybe she'd sense that somehow and see it as a positive.

Dr. Kaufmann was very tall—six-two or six-three—easily the tallest woman I'd ever seen in real life and the only born-in-Germany person I'd ever met. As she assigned us to our benches, I couldn't guess her age. She was already a fixture at Rawlings, but if I'd seen her on the street I would've guessed she was twenty-seven or twenty-eight—impossible considering her rank in the department, which implied enough time there to put her closer to forty at the youngest. Her eyes were small, hidden as if always squinting from a smile, and she gave the same smile to each of us as she told us where we'd be standing all semester (the only chair in the room was behind her bench). She'd been featured on the Rawlings Web site for her groundbreaking study on plankton populations, and I'd read her write-up of the project twice, enthralled by her findings but also a little envious that she got to spend her time researching questions so simultaneously complex and simple: How did these get here? What does that mean?

Dr. Kaufmann spent the first half of day one orienting us to both the lab (This is the eyewash station; this is the emergency shower; pray you never need to use either
.
) and to the project we'd work on all semester: isolating genes from one organism and learning how to express those genes in another. She showed us a series of slides illustrating the steps the project entailed.