The Book of Unknown Americans(73)

“She doesn’t want to sleep in the bed anymore.”

“Oh.”

“We’re leaving tomorrow,” Maribel said.

“Tomorrow?” I said, looking at her.

“My mom wants to go back.”

“So that’s it?”

“She says we have to.”

The melting snow trickled into the street grate next to us. I didn’t know how to comprehend it, really, the fact that she was leaving. I mean, all my life people had been coming and going—neighbors came and left, kids at school showed up and were gone again the next year, but the difference was that none of them had been her.

The green notebook I had gotten so used to seeing her carry around was on top of the mattress. Maribel picked it up and thrust it toward me. “Here,” she said.

“What? Did you write me a letter or something?” I asked. I was only half joking, hoping that maybe she had.

But when I took the notebook and flipped through it, there was nothing but the lists she kept and her notes to herself. I closed the cover and fingered one of the rounded corners, feathered and frayed from overuse. I tried to hand it back to her, but she shook her head.

“You don’t want it?” I asked.

“Not anymore,” she said.

It seemed like a measure of something, evidence of how far she’d come. She hadn’t even talked that first time I’d seen her in the Dollar Tree, hadn’t even made eye contact.

“You could come back one day,” I said. “Or I could come there.”

“Maybe.”

“I could find you.”

Maribel shook her head. “Finding is for things that are lost. You don’t need to find me, Mayor.”

She had her hands on her knees and I touched my fingers to her knuckles, tracing the peaks and valleys, staring at her skin. The only girl who had ever liked me. It wasn’t fair, I kept thinking, even though I had no right to complain. There were worse things, way worse, that happened in the world. If I hadn’t known that before, I knew it now.

They were gone by the time I got up the next morning. I didn’t want to wake up early just to see them leave. I thought it would come pretty close to wrecking me to stand at the front window and watch them—two of them this time—walk out with their things in their arms. Besides, I could imagine it well enough. Maribel and her mom climbing into a truck similar to the one they had climbed out of seven months earlier. Maribel with sleepy eyes and uncombed hair, sitting cross-legged on the seat, turning around and looking back for me. But it would be okay, I told myself, that she wouldn’t find me. It was like she had said—finding is for things that are lost. We would be thousands of miles apart from now on and we would go on with our lives and get older and change and grow, but we would never have to look for each other. Inside each of us, I was pretty sure, was a place for the other. Nothing that had happened and nothing that would ever happen would make that less true.





Alma


I detached from myself. I saw my life as a spectator would, from outside, from a distance so remote that I couldn’t feel any of it. “Se?ora Rivera,” they said, “we’re sorry. The surgery was more complicated than we anticipated. There was nothing we could do.” The translator at the hospital, a woman about my age with a wide, round face, cried as she delivered the news. I stared at her hands trembling against her chest as she spoke. “Mi más sentido pésame,” she added, on behalf of herself. I reached out and gave her a hug. I saw myself doing this, but I didn’t feel her shaking in my arms. I went to Maribel. I saw myself walking, but I didn’t feel my feet upon the thin carpet. “It’s time to go,” I told her. I saw myself talking, but I didn’t feel the words crawling up through my throat.

“Is the surgery over?” Maribel asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Get your things.”

“Are we going to see him?”

She looked so hopeful, so nervous. She stared, waiting for me to say more. Are we going to see him? Are we going to see him? Had she really asked that? Are we going to see him? My God! I blinked and came back to myself. Are we going to see him? What a simple question to break my heart.

“No,” I said, the word as fragile as an egg.

“Why not?”

My breath rose up through my lungs and emptied out again. Blood swept through my veins. My lips were dry.

“Is he … resting?” she asked.

He was, in a manner of speaking. So I said, “Yes.” Then, “No. No. Maribel, come here.” I pulled her to my hip, feeling her wiry, warm body against mine. “The surgery didn’t go well,” I said.

“Why?”

“He …” I took another breath. “He didn’t make it.”

Maribel closed her eyes, and I tightened my hold on her. “What does that mean?” she asked.

“He—” I started. But I couldn’t go on. There weren’t enough words in Spanish, not enough words in English no matter how many classes I might have gone to, not enough words in any language on earth, not the right words, nothing to match the depths of what I felt. My tongue fumbled against the back of my teeth, trying to give shape and sound to what had happened, struggling to explain, when Maribel opened her eyes and said, “He died?”