The Book of Unknown Americans(42)

As soon as I got off the bus and turned around, I saw it: a neighborhood that was probably only two kilometers from us, a place I must have passed a dozen times and never noticed. Capitol Oaks, with a sign screwed into a low brick wall at the entrance, half covered by weeds.

I crossed myself and whispered, “Dios me lleve,” then clutched my purse and walked past the sign to the rows and rows of ranch-style houses. The yards were dry and overgrown, and lighted reindeer and inflated snow globes from Christmas still littered some of the front lawns. In México, Arturo had built our house before we married. He and some friends had dug a plot of earth with shovels and pickaxes. For weeks, they had poured cement and laid rebar. They had stood in a line that stretched from a pile of cinder blocks to the foundation, heaving each block from one man to the next until Arturo, who was nearest to the house, laid it. Until they had laid enough blocks that they rose high enough to call them walls. Into the hollows of one of the cinder blocks, the one centered just above the front door, Arturo placed a print of San Martín Caballero encased in a plastic bag, to bring us luck. Here, on the house fronts, the paint was peeling and the porches sagged. Pickup trucks and two-door cars were parked in the driveways. I could feel, like some sort of mist that hung in the air, that I was unwelcome.

I walked for ten minutes, maybe more. There was no sign of the boy nor of anyone. Just a chill in the air, an arc of gray sky overhead. This wasn’t going to work. There was no one here but me. And how did I think I was going to find him anyway without an address? I was heading back toward the entrance when behind me I heard a sound.

I turned. And there, walking down the driveway of a brown clapboard ranch-style house with rusted gutters and a storm door askew on its hinges, I saw him—the boy—dragging a trash can down the cracked driveway.

He had seen me, I realized. He’d been watching me wander down the street. He came out here on purpose.

The two of us stood maybe ten meters apart, fixed in place, for a long time. Finally the boy stood the trash can upright. He walked closer, and I felt the world constrict, my heart pulsing against my ribs. When we were only an arm’s length apart, he stopped.

I squeezed my hands around the lining of my pockets and whispered, “Leave alone.”

He stared at me from under the hood of his navy sweatshirt.

From somewhere in my depths, somewhere beyond where I knew I could reach, I summoned enough courage to say it again, louder this time. “Leave alone.”

The boy locked his eyes on me and said something I didn’t hear. He repeated it, and the second time I understood.

“Go home,” he said.

I knew those words, and I knew by the way he said them that he didn’t mean I should go back to the apartment.

Then he lifted one hand and pointed at my face. He took a step forward and touched his fingertip to my cheek, to the bone that curved just under my left eye. He twisted his hand forty-five degrees and cocked it like a gun, three fingers drawn back, his thumb up in the air, and let a burst of air explode from his lips, his warm breath like a ball of fire against my face.

“?Comprende?” he said.

I felt light-headed. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to leave. I wanted to run out of there and never see the boy again. But my feet were like dead weight. Move, I told myself in my head. Go, Alma.

I turned around and forced myself to start walking, listening for the sound of his footsteps, bracing myself for him to run up and shove me from behind or knock me down or do whatever he was going to do. But there was only the swish of my jeans as my legs scissored past each other until I got to the main road.




I WAS ON EDGE the rest of the day, the encounter with the boy sticking to me like burs pricking at my skin. I couldn’t shake it off. When Arturo and I sat together at the kitchen table that night, I was quiet and preoccupied, staring into my cup of tea, the only sound the knocking of the radiator. I could feel Arturo looking at me—I knew he could tell something was wrong—but unlike last time, he didn’t ask what it was.

I ran my fingers around the rim of the mug. Arturo cleared his throat and took another sip of tea. I lifted my eyes enough to watch him raise it to his mouth, to see his hands around the lacquered clay—those rough hands, the onion-thin peels of skin around his thumbnails where he’d bitten them, the scrapes on his knuckles where they rubbed against the top of the crate when he pulled mushrooms out from the soil inside. I saw the drooping neckline of the Baltimore Orioles sweatshirt we had bought from the Goodwill store and that he wore around the house, the field of dark stubble along his jaw. I knew every inch of him, it seemed, and yet, in the last year, we’d had such trouble finding our way to each other. Before the accident, we had been the happiest people I knew. “No one else,” Arturo used to say to me, “has ever been in love like we are. No one else even understands what that word means.” We believed we were special. We believed we were indestructible. But after the accident, under the gathering clouds of fate, something changed. We still loved each other as much as we ever had, but it was as if neither of us knew what to do with that love anymore. It was as if our sorrow was so consuming that there was no room for anything else. When we did fall into bed together or into each other’s arms, pressing our bodies together skin to skin, it was out of desperation, a longing to somehow rediscover what was familiar and what was good. But what used to feel like a communion only emphasized our grief and eventually we had stopped trying altogether.