The Secret Side of Empty (5 page)

Mrs. Yarrow turned to me, “And sweetheart, you’re a big girl now, so stop crying. Use a different color. Look how many you have!”

I looked at the empty spot where the silver one should be and cried some more. I had spent an hour taking each crayon out and putting them back in rainbow order. Now there would always be a hole where the silver one should be. I cried harder.

Chelsea looked at me with her big Chelsea eyes. She waited for Mrs. Yarrow to walk away. Without saying anything, she took her silver crayon out of her box—her box was even bigger than mine—and slipped it in exactly the right empty spot in mine. Her thin fingers were graceful. She had chipped Granny Smith−green nail polish. I stopped crying and looked at her, then at the crayon. Her silver crayon was pristine, untouched. She smiled and looked down at her paper, going on with her work. I sucked my boogers back into my nose and went back to coloring mine, too.

It was then I knew I wanted to stick by this girl for life.

M
y room is narrow, with Jose’s little twin bed on one side and my folded-up futon on the other. It doesn’t feel mine much, maybe because it’s the fourth bedroom I’ve had in as many years. I bump my head into the model airplane hanging from a clear wire. I’m pretty sure that big chunk of dust has been on it since about three apartments ago.

We are what people would call poor. People around here, anyway. The trouble with having parents with no papers: they can’t get very good jobs. You need a Social Security number for everything from garbage man to clerk at Walmart. So being an office dude with health insurance and paid vacation time is definitely out. There are some jobs that pay cash that look the other way if you don’t have a Social Security number. I’m not sure how information about those jobs spreads, but somehow my dad hears about them.

In Argentina, my dad dreamed of being an architect. But no one in his family had gone to college, and he left school after his sophomore year in high school. At twenty-two, he came to America. He wanted to save up money and go back home to start a little business. He might not be able to be an architect, a professional, but he’d be a businessman
.

But even when I was little, he still used to talk about architecture. He loved drawing and dreaming things up. He used to get architecture books and sketch late at night. I’d find his drawings scattered all over our little plastic table.

Now he is thirty-nine, and he is still a waiter. And he doesn’t draw or make models anymore.

I sit on the futon and look at the model airplane for a second. It’s got to be about six or seven years since we built that model together. The day we made it, it was raining outside. I remember because he came in out of the rain and his jet-black hair drooped a little over his forehead, but he was still handsome. He turned and half-handed, half-threw me the box under his arm.

“I found a Messerschmitt,” he said.

I wasn’t quite sure what that meant. My brother hadn’t been born yet. I was still young enough to want to be the boy he’d never had.

“Let’s build it,” I said.

He moved some of my mother’s sewing off the Formica table and spent a long time organizing all the parts, sending me for glue and paper towels and cotton swabs. Finally, he started building.

“Okay, hand me the propeller.”

“Can I glue this one, please?”

“You want it to be perfect, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well then, just let me do it.”

“But I want to help.”

“You’re helping me by getting me the stuff.”

“What kind of plane is this again?” I asked.

He pointed to the box. “A German Luftwaffe Messerschmitt twin engine. This is an old model. I got lucky at the craft store.” His eyes lit up. “You know, when we move to Argentina, we’re going to have one whole room in our big house just for all our models. That will be cool, right?”

I said nothing.

“You love Argentina, right? You can’t wait to go back?”

“I don’t really remember Argentina. It wouldn’t be like going back.”

“No, of course, silly, you were a baby when you came here.”

“So how can I want to go back?”

“Because it’s where I’ll be. And your mother will be. It’s where all your people are. It’s where you’re from. We’re only here temporarily.”

“How will I see Chelsea when we go to Argentina?”

“That doesn’t really matter. You have cousins over there. Your real blood. You love your cousins, don’t you?”

“Well, I . . .”

“Of course you do. Hand me the plastic part, the top of the cockpit.” I did, and he picked it up carefully with my mother’s tweezers while holding the little glue tube in the other hand. “You’re going to have the best life in Argentina. We’re going to be rich and build our round house. Remember the round house blueprints I showed you? With that big room? The secret staircase? Mendoza is the best place on earth. Not gross and humid like here, with all these bossy people.”

“But I’ve only ever been here. This feels like home to me.”

He looked away from the model and raised his eyes to meet mine and straightened his spine slowly. I felt his mood change, like a cold wind that gets in your mittens and up your coat.

“This isn’t home. You’re just a kid. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“But what if . . . when I’m a grown-up . . . what if I wanted to stay here?”

“Now you’re just being ridiculous.”

“I’m just asking.”

“Well, you can’t, because we’re going home. We’re illegal here, so you can’t stay anyway, even if we wanted to, which we don’t. Now hand me the wheels.”

A
FEW
DAYS
LATER
,
MY
MOTHER
’
S
COUSIN
C
AROLINA
is sitting at the kitchen table when I get home. Her baby, Julissa, is on the brown linoleum, picking at a little corner that is broken and peeling.

It makes me furious that Julissa is on the floor, eating linoleum. Who chooses who gets to be a linoleum eater and who gets to grow up on marble floors, like the ones at Chelsea’s house? Julissa is a baby and she doesn’t know that she got some life lottery ticket that won her broken brown linoleum instead of marble. She won’t know for years, long after it’s decided all kinds of important things in her life, like what kinds of school she’ll get to go to and who she’ll know.

I pick Julissa up. She smiles her four-tooth smile. I pick a little piece of linoleum off her bottom lip. For a second, I want to kick Carolina, not for losing sight of Julissa, but for bringing a baby into a brown-linoleum world at all.

“I swear she’s bigger than last week,” I say, trying to put the linoleum out of my mind.

“The way she eats! She eats everything! I make her garbanzos and she mostly mashes them all over her head, but she gets enough of them in her mouth that she’s getting to be a fat little girl!”

Julissa gurgles and coos at her mother’s voice. We all laugh.

“And you? Finishing school this year, huh?”

“Yes, I just started senior year.”

“Your
abuela
back home must be so proud.”

It hadn’t occurred to me that my grandmother in Argentina would even know, or care.

“When I came here from Argentina a few years after your parents, you were a baby like Julissa. And your
abuela
waited every week for pictures to come in the mail, I remember. Imagine now that you’re all grown up. And the first one in the family to graduate high school.” She turns to my mom. “You have a good
suegra
; you’re lucky. Too bad she is so far away.”

“Yes, she was always good to me after I married her son. Although I do think maybe she thinks it’s my fault that we stay here,” says my mother.

“Ah, mothers with their firstborn boys. You know!”

“Yes, she babied him a lot. She combed his hair for him until he was thirteen!” laughs my mother.

“She’d probably
still
be combing it if he was still back home!” They both giggle.

Carolina turns to me. “So, do you think you’ll go one day? To Argentina?”

“Well, there is the problem with the papers. I can’t leave the U.S. Or I guess I could leave, but I won’t be able to come back.” It’s okay to say this to Carolina because she’s got the same issue.

“They can’t keep up these stupid laws like this forever. They want us to work in their businesses, but they don’t want to let us stay here legally, get licenses, have normal lives? It can’t stay that way.”

“Bah, politics, forget about it,” says my mother.

“But, really, Monse,” says Carolina to me. “If papers weren’t an issue and you could come and go as you pleased, would you ever go live back home?”

“This
is
home.”

“That’s how it is,” she says to my mother, raising her hands in the “I don’t know” position, as if I’m not here. “The kids grow up here and they don’t know anything else. It’s natural.”

“Not everyone understands that,” says my mother quietly.

“That’s why we’ve got to save up and get Julissa home before she’s old enough to think like that. Paco talks about it all the time. But it’s so hard to save. And go back there for what? No jobs. The crime rate . . . it’s a shame what’s happening in our country.”

“There are no good answers,” says my mother, putting the maté gourd with the little chopped up green leaves and the spoonful of sugar inside in front of Carolina, then filling it up with boiling water from her thermos.

Julissa grabs a piece of my hair and tries to put it in her mouth. I make a face at her and she giggles. She is so little and oblivious. Her fate is entirely outside her own hands. Maybe Carolina and Paco will go, and maybe they will stay here without papers. Either way, Julissa will be living out the consequences of those decisions for the rest of her life.

Suddenly Jose slams into me from behind. “
SpongeBob
is starting! Come on!” And I’m relieved to just stare at a little yellow sponge for a while.

G
ROWING
UP
IN
W
ILLOW
F
ALLS
, I always saw that other people had more than I had. But for the longest time it was just a thing that was, like the sky being blue or how old teachers always seem to have mustaches. It wasn’t until the end of sophomore year that it occurred to me that I could do something about my financial situation.

One day at lunch, Patricia from geometry had come over with some formula she just couldn’t get, and I’d explained it to her on a napkin.

Patricia said, “Wow, that’s awesome. Why can’t Prune-strand explain it like that? Thanks.”

Chelsea, looking up as Patricia walked away, said, “You should charge for that.”

It started slowly. But by the start of junior year it was known I was for hire. Patricia’s little sister was one of the first ones I started tutoring. Then came her friend and that little freshman who lived on Chelsea’s block and always mumbled through her stringy brown hair. I specialized in math—the most tutorable subject—but also critiqued and edited English papers and social studies projects. I found out what a local teacher was charging for the tutoring he was doing on the side and underbid him by twenty dollars an hour. It was still more cash than I had ever seen.

Business is still strong. Of course, no seniors want tutoring—they will be getting into college with their junior year grades, so they’re looking to coast. But I have my old-time customers, plus a whole new crop of clueless, baby-faced freshmen to tutor. Sometimes I think they just like an excuse to come up and talk to a senior, saying things like, “You’re still coming to my house this afternoon, right?” But everyone knows it’s a business thing, so it doesn’t do anything bad for my reputation.

By now, I have $175 saved up. I keep every crisp and wonderful bill in the inside pocket of my journal. At this pace, I may be able to buy myself an inexpensive laptop before Christmas. I’ll buy my brother a DVD player and a bunch of seasons of
SpongeBob
. I’ll make sure I have enough clients so I can hook up Wi-Fi and pay for it every month and maybe even buy a prepaid cell phone.