The Book of Unknown Americans(61)

I watched Arturo fight a smile. “Yes,” he said.

Maribel swallowed and curled her lips back with her fingers. “What if I looked like this?”

Arturo grinned. “Yes.”

She tensed the muscles in her neck until every tendon rose to the surface beneath her skin, like strings under a drooping tent. “What if I walked around looking like this all the time?”

“Maribel, stop it,” I said.

Arturo looked right at her, struggling to keep a straight face. “No matter what,” he said.

It was still the truth, but the way she was acting now had me worried. She had been showing so much improvement—the latest report from the school had said that Maribel could easily answer questions and follow prompts, and that her attention span had increased—and I hoped we hadn’t just undermined all of her progress.

“Do you think we did the right thing?” I whispered to Arturo one night when I couldn’t sleep. I shoved him awake and said it again.

“What?” he asked.

“About Mayor and Maribel? Do you think we did the right thing?”

“It’s the middle of the night, Alma,” Arturo said.

I glanced to where Maribel lay, curled up in the sleeping bag, her hair spread like a veil over her face, then I turned back to Arturo. “It seems like it’s only made things worse.”

Arturo rubbed his eyes. “We’ve talked about this already. You heard what Quisqueya said.”

“We don’t even know if she was telling the truth.”

“Mayor admitted to his parents that they were in the car together. You’re the one who was so upset about that part of it. ‘He knows he’s not supposed to be outside with her,’ you kept saying. As if that was the worst of it. Being outside together?”

“You don’t know what it’s like out there,” I said quietly. “You don’t know the sorts of people who are out there.”

“What people?”

I looked at his disheveled hair, his heavy eyes fighting the dragging tide of sleep. I said, “Never mind. Let’s go back to sleep.”

“We did the right thing,” Arturo said. “She doesn’t know what’s best. Especially not now.”

“What does that mean?”

“A year ago it would have been different.”

“A year ago you would have let her be with Mayor like that?”

“A year ago we weren’t here. She wouldn’t have known Mayor. But if there had been a Mayor in México, then maybe.”

I stared at him, piercing holes through the dark. “Why don’t you just say what you mean?” I asked.

He was quiet.

“Say it, Arturo.”

“Say what?”

“Say whether you’re upset about Mayor and her because she’s your daughter or because she’s your brain-damaged daughter.”

“I never used that word.”

“Say it,” I insisted.

Arturo propped himself up on his elbow and hissed, “You don’t think I have a right to treat her differently now than I would have before the accident? You don’t think we have the responsibility to do that? She’s not the same person, Alma. There’s not some piece of her just sitting there, waiting for us to find it again. No matter how much schooling or medical care she gets, we can’t just put her back together.”

I felt something collapse inside of me. “She’s getting better,” I said.

Arturo peered past my shoulder at Maribel. “We shouldn’t be having this conversation now.”

“She was getting better before all of this happened,” I said.

“But even if she gets better from now until eternity, she won’t be the same person anymore.”

“But the doctors said—”

“The doctors said her brain can heal, but they warned us she would never be the same again.”

“They didn’t say that.”

“They did, Alma. You just didn’t want to hear that part.”

“She’s getting better,” I said, as if by repeating it enough, I could somehow make it part of the public record, an indisputable fact.

“But don’t you understand?” Arturo said. “We don’t get her again.”

Across the room, Maribel stirred. I smoothed my hand over the rippled sheet, tears burning in my eyes. Arturo had dropped his head back against the mattress, but I could see that his eyes were open and that he was staring at the ceiling. The weight of finality—so heavy that it felt like a physical thing—hung in the air between us. I didn’t want to accept that in order to move forward, I had to walk through it. It was so much easier just to believe there was another path that I could take around it and that at the end of that path would be the destination I wanted. It was easier to want to end up at a lie, instead of at the truth, which was just as Arturo said: We wouldn’t get her again. Not ever.





Mayor


In March, my dad landed a job as a newspaper carrier for the News Journal. He’d gone in because he’d heard that they needed workers on the floor of the press and after burning through all the restaurants in town, he was getting desperate, even if it meant applying for jobs he was totally unqualified for. He got turned down from the floor job pretty quick, apparently. “They asked me three questions. Then the woman who was interviewing me started shaking her head, saying, ‘No, I’m sorry. This won’t work. We need someone with experience.’ Experience!” my dad cried, telling my mom and me the story. “I told her, ‘All I know how to do is make breakfast.’ ”