The Book of Unknown Americans(70)

My dad lit another cigarette as he cut across the dark, snowy parking lot to the entrance at the emergency room. Maribel and I followed. The doors slid open when we reached them, and my dad stubbed out his cigarette in a standing ashtray before we walked inside.

The second I saw my mom sitting in the waiting room, I knew it was bad. My dad walked straight over and put his hand on her shoulder. She jerked her head up, frightened. “Nothing yet,” she said.

My dad nodded toward Maribel and me. “They just got back.”

“One good thing,” my mom said.

But she didn’t get up like I thought she would.

“They’re okay,” my dad said.

It was only then that my mom looked at me. She curled her lips in between her teeth and blinked fast. Her nostrils flared, and I thought she was going to cry, but she just nodded and turned away again.

My dad sat down next to her and balanced his elbows on his knees, tenting his fingers and staring through them to the white floor, to the radiators along the baseboards, to what? I had no idea.

A fat woman with a Phillies baseball cap and a plastic bag on her lap sat in a chair against the wall. A tattooed man in jeans and a jean jacket—his legs outstretched, his ankles crossed—was sleeping a few seats down.

“What’s going on?” Maribel asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“What’s going on?” Maribel asked, louder now.

I saw my mom form her hands into fists and then let them go again. She looked at my dad in agony, which was the same way he was looking back at her. They seemed to be questioning each other, and from the expression on both of their faces I doubted either had the answers the other was searching for.

Finally my mom locked her gaze on Maribel. She reached her hand out, but Maribel didn’t take it. “It’s your father,” my mom said. “We don’t know the details yet, but they brought him here. He had surgery and now we’re just waiting. Your mother is with him.”

“My father?” Maribel repeated.

“What happened to him?” I asked.

“We tried to call you,” my mom said, “but your phone was off. We called you a hundred times.”

“I didn’t know …”

“We called the police, too.”

“The police—why?”

“Why?” my dad said. “Because when I came home, the car—my car—was missing. I thought someone had stolen it.”

“I’m surprised they didn’t find you,” my mom said.

“What happened?” I asked.

Again, the agony on her face. Her mouth tightened into a lock.

“We don’t know anything yet,” my dad said. “Just sit down.”

“Ven, hija,” my mom said, reaching her arm out to draw Maribel in. Maribel took a step away and lowered herself into a chair. When I didn’t move, my mom said, “Please, Mayor. Just sit down. There’s nothing you can do. There’s nothing else to know yet.”


WE STAYED IN those seats for hours. A nurse took Maribel back to the surgical waiting area, where Sra. Rivera was, while my mom and dad and I stayed put, waiting for word.

A television mounted in the corner was playing ESPN, and I stared at it until I couldn’t anymore. I kept pulling out my phone, checking the time. My dad walked out through the automatic doors at the entrance to smoke, and each time he did, I looked out at the sky, which lightened little by little with the coming dawn. My mom kept filling paper cups with coffee from the vending machine and then she’d sit down and drink it, staring at the floor, and stand up and get another.

Finally, by the time my dad was down to his last cigarette and my mom was out of money for more coffee and my ass was numb from sitting in one spot for so long, a doctor—a tubby, middle-aged guy in green scrubs and a pair of glasses hanging by a strap around his neck—came out and told us that Sr. Rivera was in recovery but that he hadn’t woken up yet.

“What happens now?” my mom asked.

“We wait,” the doctor said.

“Is he going to be okay?”

“We’ve done everything we can.”

We headed home after that, trudging through the parking lot in the white early-morning sunlight, the air as thin as paper, while my mom said, “Shouldn’t he be able to tell us more? ‘Everything we can.’ What does that mean?” But my dad didn’t have an answer, and neither did I.

I still didn’t know what had happened—every time I asked, my dad cut me off with some variation on “Let’s just wait. There’s no use worrying before we know anything”—except that I knew it was bad enough to land Sr. Rivera in surgery and bad enough that my parents didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t need to know much more than that to feel sick to my stomach. Whatever was happening was all my fault. I knew it. I’d taken Maribel away because why? Because I’d wanted to see her? Because I was trying to be romantic? Because I was trying to free her from the confines of her life? Because I’d wanted to show her the snow on the ocean, the thing that had made my mom fall in love with this country, and I had wanted to make Maribel fall in love, too? With me?

My parents wouldn’t tell me anything, so all Saturday morning I waited for news. My mom wanted me to try to sleep, so I went to my room for a while, but all I managed to do was sit up in bed—awake and fully dressed—waiting for the phone to ring so that maybe my mom would answer it and I could overhear what was going on. As soon as my dad came home from his newspaper shift, he asked if my mom had heard anything, but she told him no. By then my mom was sitting at the kitchen table with the telephone next to her elbow. Her eyes were red. Her hair was flattened at the back.