Make Your Home Among Strangers (47 page)

—No, I don't have it. Are you – have you been watching the news? About what happened, what's happening down in Miami?

—No, she said, but she smiled and nodded. Oh, she said. You mean the little boy. It's very sad. It's very complicated!

—Right, yes. Well I didn't know until now but it's not going to work out, I think. I can't participate this summer. At the internship with you. I need to be in Miami then.

—Oh no! she said, genuinely surprised, but she didn't ask for details.

After a pause filled solely with her nodding, I said, Because of that boy. My family – well, my mom is sort of involved in the protests, and it's been tough on my sister and her baby. I have to be there this summer to sort of help deal with that.

She nodded slowly through my whole explanation and stopped just after I stopped. She said, Why?

—Well because. Because it's my
mom
, so I should be there.

She blinked. I don't understand, she said. What will you be doing down there?

—Like, supporting them. Her and my sister.

—Oh! You've found something with better funding?

—No, no, I mean like other kinds of support, I guess.

—I see, she said.

She picked up her pen and wrote something; I recognized it as some sort of integral. She scratched it out, wrote something else.

—It's hard to explain, I said.

And I regret what I said next: It's like a cultural thing, I said.

—Ooooh, she said. Oh, well, then I'm sorry it won't work out.

She rested the pen on the pad and smiled again, said, It's a shame that your family won't let you participate.

—No, it's not like that, I said. I just feel obligated to be there for them.

—So ask them! Perhaps they will let you come!

—It's not them letting me or not letting me, I didn't even talk to them about it.

—I don't understand. I had the forms sent weeks ago to your home address.

—It's just very bad timing, I said. I'm really sorry.

—Bad timing?

She picked up her pen, clicked it closed, returned it to the exact same spot.

—This is fine, she said. Thank you for being clear. Perhaps just keep thinking about it? About the offer? Perhaps that's all for now, she said.

I thanked her for understanding even though she obviously didn't, but her confusion about how I'd be helping my mom and sister opened up a place for all the disloyal parts, all the parts that were jealous of Caridaylis. Still, in declining the internship, I was keeping my promise to my sister and making up for other failures. Of course Professor Kaufmann didn't understand. She was destined for a bigger life than I was—was already living it. I'd been stupid to see myself following in her footsteps and having a life like hers, and the severity and intensity of the protests and counterprotests in Miami over my last weeks at school proved me right. And so did Ethan, with his silence; I didn't see or hear from him again until the onset of study week, when he sent me an e-mail. The subject line read only
Hi
, and all he wrote was,
You OK, OK?
As if our first joke were a magic spell that could conjure the swagger I'd wielded at that party months earlier, back when something as silly as
wielding swagger
could even count as a priority. So I didn't write back. And anyway, there was no point: we were leaving campus in a matter of days, him for good, and I didn't deserve whatever goodbye he imagined. I was proud of myself for giving him that, for releasing him from the obligation I might've let myself become. I felt in those weeks that school was a job: finish my courses with the highest grades possible and get back home. It brought me a sense of calm, to recognize my place, to admit I could only rise so far above where I'd come from and only for so long. It was even a relief—to have removed the pressure of long-term success by accepting that it was just beyond me—one that led me to have the second-best semester I'd ever have at Rawlings.

 

35

ARIEL HERNANDEZ LEFT THE UNITED STATES
for good on a Wednesday in June of that year. I'd been living under the cold war of our apartment for just over three weeks on that day, back in time to witness the worst of a different set of protests, the ones aimed at letting Cubans know that Other Miami had suffered enough of our antics.

Leidy was behaving in what I now think of as a civil manner. She'd started dating this guy named David, a cop she met while trying to track down our mom the day I flew back to school. They were the ones to pick me up from the airport—in David's patrol car, Dante's car seat in the back with me—when I came home for the summer. I was the first one to be nasty: You don't mind that my sister has a kid? I said through the air holes in the Plexiglas separating him and Leidy from where Dante and I sat. I was cranky, dismayed at how much summer loomed ahead of me, embarrassed to be in the back of a cop car like a suspect.

—No way, he said. He had a buzzed head and wide, clean fingernails, the tips of his fingers the only thing steering the wheel, and he did that with such ease that I was jealous of him, of Leidy for having him.

—Dante being around is how I knew right away that your sister puts out, he said.

Leidy smacked his arm but laughed with her whole body. I liked him from that moment on.

We were careful with and around each other: it was the only way to deal with our mom, who vacillated between distraught and enraged. She'd been fired from her job, and though Leidy had corralled her into applying for unemployment, the money wouldn't last long, and it wasn't enough anyway. They'd scaled back on Dante's daycare since Mami was around to watch him more, but twice Leidy had come home from the salon to find a note on the fridge from Mami saying she'd stepped out to go lie down in the street in a protest on Calle Ocho, or to speak on camera with a news crew she'd seen pass by on their way to Ariel's old house. Both times, Dante was still in his crib, playing alone, or, the second time, sleeping in a wet diaper, but this was
Definitely not okay
, as Leidy had put it, and I agreed with her.

—I'm here now, I said the night I got home, when she filled me in on all this as her way of apologizing for how we'd left things the last trip. I told her I didn't need to get a job right away; I'd earned good work-study money from all the extra spring break hours, had almost seven hundred dollars saved up even after buying that April flight home, plus I had my credit card. We'll be okay, I told her. We'll be good. I wished I had footage of that conversation—evidence for Professor Kaufmann. I could've shown her that tape, could've paused it and said,
Now
do you understand?

It became my summer job, then, to watch Dante, and to watch Mom. To pack up Dante's diaper bag if Mom wanted to head out to a march, where I'd stand on the sidelines like a chaperone. To make her sit down and read the classifieds and look for another customer service job that didn't ask for references. To take her and Dante with me to the library every day when I checked my e-mail while my mom read a book to Dante in the kids' section. On that June morning, I got an e-mail from Jillian, who was two weeks into her internship in New York City. I could barely read the whole thing: she was subletting an apartment in the city itself, splitting the place with the girl she'd be rooming with off campus next year. The internship sounded boring despite the ways she tried to fancy it up (
A file crossed my desk that had Marisa Tomei's name on the label!
), but I couldn't help being jealous. The last weeks in our room were a lot like the first in the way we were careful around each other, but she almost always slept over at her All-Nighter's apartment now that they were serious. There was one night when she was around, on the eve of some campus-wide debauchery, a year's-end tradition called the Hill Spill that involved not much more than drinking outside all day on campus property. A friend of Jillian's stopped by to pick her up for a midnight party that was a nocturnal pregame for the Hill Spill, and the friend—a girl I didn't know and who didn't live in our building and so wasn't aware of my history there—said to me, You want to come? I surprised us all by saying, Yeah sure, changing out of my pajamas in just a couple minutes. Several hours and too many cups of sticky vodka-laced punch later, Jillian and I had our arms around each other's necks, singing along to the same rap songs at the party. We were the only two who knew all the words to anything the laptop—set to random and plugged into high-quality speakers—could throw our way. Hours after that, Jillian was vomiting into our recycling bin, my hands holding her hair back from her face, and she marveled at my ability to
keep it together
, and we confessed how we each thought the other was
so gorgeous
, each of us taking compliments where we could've just as easily found insults: she said I was
exotic
before clamping her hands on the sides of the bin and retching more vomit over our aluminum cans, while I stroked her unbelievably slick ponytail and slurred, I'd
kill you
for this white-girl hair. I spent the next morning—the day of Hill Spill itself—recovering from the punch I'd kept down as she'd puked hers up, while she stumbled back out to keep the celebration going. She considered us friends again thanks to that night, had promised to e-mail me over the summer, and in the absence of anything from Ethan—my
I'm okay, OK?
response lingering unsent in my head—I'd been looking forward to hearing from her until the e-mail actually appeared and hinted at everything I was missing by being home.

There was also, that day, an e-mail sent on behalf of Professor Kaufmann to all the students participating in the internship, which started soon and which would run through most of August, ending right before classes began again. The e-mail detailed how to check in once we arrived at the facility, where to pick up our keys and meal cards, driving directions for those coming to Santa Barbara by car, important phone numbers to call if we had any difficulties or changes in our travel plans. I'd clearly been added to the recipient list by accident (there was a reference to separate, prior e-mails I hadn't received), but it killed me to see it. I read it over and over again, inspected the list of names—only nine other people, from schools all over the country, some I'd never heard of: Reed, Pomona, Grinnell—and I opened another browser window and looked up all these places, these schools like Rawlings that didn't exist before that moment. I sat there reading and rereading that e-mail and the Web pages about the colleges until my mom snuck up behind me with Dante on her hip. She dipped him over my head and put his hand in my hair, and he took the bait and pulled.

I'd promised my mom we'd leave the library in time to drive to what she assured me was a tame protest, a silent march Madres Para Justicia had organized in response to the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court was, at that very moment, deciding whether to hear the case that argued Ariel
himself
had legal standing to file for asylum despite being a minor. Even though she guaranteed its subdued nature—
We have a permit, there'll be police escorting us and everything
—I would not be marching with her. Dante and I would wait down the street at the Cuban restaurant that was sponsoring the march, meaning, I thought, that it would be empty and quiet once the protest got under way. I checked out a book about the world's oceans for the pictures—something to keep Dante entertained—and we drove down there, me dropping off my mom a few blocks from where we would wait for her.

At the restaurant, we had to sit outside: the inside was home to a meeting run by another, separate group of organizers glued to a radio and also watching a live broadcast of the courthouse in Miami, despite the fact that the deliberations were happening in Washington (and isn't that perfect, the way so much of Miami thought itself the center of everything, even that late in the fight?). I ordered a café con leche for myself and a plate of French fries for Dante, to function more as toys than food. He grabbed fries by the fistful and dropped them on the patio while saying
bye-bye
. I pushed the plate away when he wouldn't stop doing this, then I busted out the ocean book and read to him about calcium carbonate shells and anemones and a whole host of organisms and structures. The pictures—glossy and full-color—promised us that places even farther away than California really existed, promised that the world was so much bigger than our block and the disappointment of that summer, that there was something much more vast than the despair sitting there with Dante brought me. The pictures did their job, occupying his attention for a few seconds at a time. I wiped off his hands with a paper napkin and let him flip through the pages himself, watching to make sure he didn't rip any of them.

After about twenty minutes, something came toward us from down the street, louder than the traffic already passing, than the voices suddenly rising inside the restaurant, though this new sound was way too loud to be my mom and her group's silent protest. It rang like a celebration, cars honking and people cheering, like the party in the streets after the Marlins had won their first-ever World Series. Within a few seconds I saw them coming: a brigade of pickup trucks and SUVs, some with oversized wheels, big banners flying behind them, American flags, Confederate flags. Car horns blaring, white men hanging out of the windows, banging hard on the roofs of their own trucks like they didn't care about dents. As they approached, some people on the street just stopped and stared. Some dropped the grocery bags they held. But others waved back, pumped fists in the air. When the first of the trucks passed me, I read the banner twice before understanding everything it meant. The letters and numbers on it, spray-painted in wide, black script on what I now saw was a king-sized white sheet, read:
1
DOWN,
800,000
TO GO!!!