The Book of Unknown Americans(71)

“Can’t you just tell me?” I said.

My mom started crying.

“What? Did something go wrong?” I asked.

“Everything went wrong,” she said.

“Did he have a heart attack or something? Or did he fall on the ice and crack his head? Just tell me. Please, Mami.”

She cried for a while longer, then wiped her cheeks with the heel of her hand. “He was trying to find Maribel,” she said. She looked at me, her eyes wet, her cheeks broken out the way they always got when she cried. “They shot him.”

“What?”

“They shot him.”

“Who shot him?”

“I don’t know, Mayor. I wasn’t there.”

“Like with a gun?”

“Oh my God,” she said, and threw her hand over her mouth, like hearing me actually say it out loud was too much for her. She pushed away from the table and ran to the bathroom where, even after she closed the door behind her, I heard her heaving and coughing. I stood there like an idiot, blinking. I felt—what? Nothing. The blankness of incomprehension. They shot him, I kept repeating to myself. They shot him.


THE PHONE STAYED QUIET most of the day, even though the doorbell kept ringing. Quisqueya and Nelia came over to see if my mom knew anything, and when she told them she didn’t, the two of them chattered on about what they’d heard. Micho stopped by and told us a story about a buddy of his who got shot in Afghanistan and survived. “Lucky bastard,” he said. “God gives out a few free passes like that every year. Saves them for the best people. But listen, Arturo will be fine. He’s one of the best people.” Sr. Mercado dropped in, and then Benny, and I hung around enough that little by little the story emerged: Sr. Rivera had gone to Capitol Oaks. There had been a confrontation, and at some point a man walked out with a shotgun in his hand. He fired, and that was that.

I couldn’t stop myself from imagining it, like some sort of television show. I saw Sr. Rivera in his jeans and cowboy boots, his hair wet from the snow, combed to the side like he always wore it, wandering down Kirkwood Highway, peeking behind the Steak ’n Shake and the bowling alley and the Panera Bread, looking for Maribel. I felt his breath in the air as he walked. I heard the hard soles of his boots on the pavement. I saw him approach Capitol Oaks and walk past the entrance, shouting Maribel’s name into the cold. I saw people in their houses, pulling back their blinds, peeking out their windows at the noise. And I saw someone come outside—Garrett Miller, I thought, because I had the feeling that somehow all of this had to do with him. In my mind, I heard Sr. Rivera ask him about Maribel, and I saw Garrett screw up his face because he didn’t understand what Sr. Rivera was saying. But Benny had said it was a man—a man—who came out with a shotgun. So what had happened then? Maybe Garrett’s dad saw Sr. Rivera on his front lawn. Maybe he was drunk or high or maybe he was just pissed off. He came outside, carrying the gun, pointing it toward Sr. Rivera.

Sr. Rivera stepped back, raising his hands in the air to show he meant no harm. “I’m looking for my daughter,” he said in Spanish.

Garrett’s dad didn’t understand. “We speak English here,” he said. He came closer, holding the barrel of the gun in line with the tip of Sr. Rivera’s nose.

“Where is she?” Sr. Rivera managed to say.

What could Garrett’s dad have said in return? “Get off my property.” “Shut up.” “You f*ckhead.” “This is what you get.” What could he have been thinking?

“Please,” Sr. Rivera said, in English this time, one of the few words he knew.

And then Garrett’s dad pulled the trigger.


THE HOURS WERE like mountains we had to climb, enormous and exhausting. One after the other, and still no word from the hospital.

My mom foraged through her closet for clothes she could give the Riveras when they got home, even though my dad looked at her like she was crazy and asked, “What do they need with clothes?” My mom said, “I don’t know. I just want to do something!”

She devoted herself to the kitchen after that, preparing meals that she spooned into plastic containers and the tins usually reserved for Christmas cookies. She taped notes to the top that detailed what was inside and how to reheat it, and saved it all in our freezer to be delivered when the Riveras returned home.

My dad paced around the house with a drink permanently in his hand and a cigarette permanently in his mouth. He didn’t even bother to smoke outside, and my mom didn’t bother to make him. He would wander to the couch, sit for a while, stand up, then check the phone again to make sure it still had a dial tone. When he heard it, he would put the receiver back down and stare at it, like he was trying to exert some kind of mind control over it to make it ring.

And me? I was mired in a feeling that was heavy and sick. Once, I walked out onto the balcony and looked up at the Riveras’ door, where bouquets of flowers wrapped in cellophane were piled at the threshold. I ran over and started kicking the shit out of those flowers until my dad came out and asked me what I was doing.

I didn’t have an answer, at least not one that I could articulate.

My dad said, “He’s going to be fine.”

I tried to slow my breathing.

“He has to be,” he said.


BUT HE WASN’T. Close to eight o’clock that night, the phone finally rang and when my dad, who answered it at my mom’s terrified urging, hung up, he shook his head.