The Book of Unknown Americans(76)

“She did well here,” Phyllis said. “Maribel’s a different girl now than when you arrived.”

“We’re both different now,” I said.

When no one came over, Maribel and I watched television, hours and hours of it, finding small comfort in its ability to numb, to keep us from losing our minds. And yet, sometimes out of nowhere, Maribel asked where he was, or when he was getting home from work, and I had to remind her, “No, hija. No.” I would hold her hands in mine and explain everything again. I hugged her and let her cry as often as she wanted. Once, because repeating it was too much to bear, I let impatience get the best of me. I snapped, “Stop asking me that!” She looked at me so woefully that I collapsed in shame and said “I’m sorry” again and again, repeating it until I hoped maybe she believed me.

When I wasn’t watching television or receiving guests, I spent time packing, preparing for the journey back to Pátzcuaro. I stood in our bedroom and looked at Arturo’s clothes folded in neat towers on the floor. I took his shirts and his underwear, his socks and undershirts, and stuffed them all into plastic trash bags. I held up the one extra pair of jeans he had besides the ones he had been wearing that night. These were Wrangler, and he rarely wore them because the others were Levi’s, which he claimed were better, but he’d kept the Wranglers for years anyway. They were stiff and smelled of detergent. I shoved them in the bag. I took his razor from the shower floor, bits of his black hair still caked between the blades. I took his toothbrush from the sink counter and sucked on the bristles, trying to find the taste of him, but there was only the flavor of watery mint toothpaste. From behind the faucet, I took the scissors he used to trim his mustache and slipped them into the bag, too. I pulled the sheets off the bed with the idea that I could gather up the imprint of him and save it. I thought, I can unfurl the sheets on our old bed at home. I can lie in the creases formed by his body. I can sleep with him again. I plucked his used toothpicks out of the trash and clutched them in my hand before dropping them all into a bag. I watched them scatter and sink into the crevices of the things I had already packed. And then I came across his hat, the cowboy hat that he’d worn for almost as long as I’d known him. At the hospital, they had given it to me when we left. I remembered when he had bought it, how proud he had been because it was a good hat, finely woven and crisp. Now it was soft, and dirt had settled into the notches where the pale straw fibers crossed each other, especially in the crown. Parts of the brim were frayed. I put it over my face like a mask, feeling the sweatband, soft as felt, against my cheeks. I took a deep breath. And there he was. The smell of him. I closed my eyes and felt myself sway. There he was. ?Dios! I put the hat on my head.

I learned something about grief. I had heard people say that when someone dies, it leaves a hole in the world. But it doesn’t, I realized. Arturo was still everywhere. Something would happen and I would think, Wait until I tell Arturo. I kept turning around, expecting to see him. If he had disappeared completely, I thought, it might be easier. If I had no knowledge that he had ever existed, no evidence that he was ever a part of our lives, it might have been bearable. And how wrong that sounded: part of our lives. As if he was something with boundaries, something that hadn’t permeated us, flowed through us and in us and all around us. I learned something about grief. When someone dies, it doesn’t leave a hole, and that’s the agony.

Two days before the scheduled burial, I started packing everything in the kitchen. I had spoken to someone at a funeral home that partnered with the hospital and confirmed yes, we would lay Arturo to rest there. For a week, his body had been in the morgue, waiting to be taken someplace. The burial felt wrong, but what could I do? I didn’t have the money to fly him back. I had no way of getting it. I called my parents, who cried and cursed the heavens when they heard the news, but they had nothing either. I was told I couldn’t drive him because it was against the law and the authorities would take him at the border rather than let his body cross. I didn’t know any other way to get him from here to there. It would have to be this. Arturo would be buried on Thursday morning at the All Saints Cemetery. He would be lowered into the ground in a casket I could barely afford, even though I had instructed the funeral home to use the most inexpensive one they could. “There’s no shame in a pine box,” I told them. In fact, I thought Arturo, who had been so humble, would have appreciated it.

I put most of the silverware, loose and clattering, in bags. I packed the comal, the escobeta brush, the plastic baggies filled with spices we had brought, the molcajete and pestel. Except for the coffee mugs, which I thought we would use until the very end, I packed every cup. And then I started with the dishes.

I pulled the top plate from the stack. It was solid green and glazed with a clear lacquer. I held it in my hands and remembered when we had come, how carefully I had set the plates in the cabinet once they were unpacked. How carefully I had set up our lives here. How na?ve I had been to think I could control any of it.

And then I let the plate drop on the floor. It plummeted straight down from my open hands and landed with a crash, shards of ceramic bursting apart and skittering across the floor.

“What was that?” Maribel asked from the other room.

I didn’t answer. I took another plate from the cabinet and dropped it, too, watching it bloom at my feet. Then another. Then another. I thought suddenly, What is the meaning of all these things? All these bags and bags I’ve been packing? We could take everything we have with us. We could take every single thing that every single person in the world has ever had. But none of it would mean anything to me. Because no matter how much I took and no matter how much I had for the rest of my life, I didn’t have him anymore. I could have piled everything from here straight to heaven. None of it was him.