The Book of Unknown Americans(78)

I tried not to think, but of course that was impossible. Why hadn’t I simply told Arturo about the boy in the beginning? Would it have made a difference? There was no way to know the answer, and yet I remembered what Arturo had said, one of the last things he had told me, as if somehow he had known to offer me absolution in advance: Forgive yourself. Was that possible? Was it possible now, in this, too?

By noon, the sun was high in the blue sky. It shone like honey. It lay upon slender blades of grass, and draped over the hood of the truck. I leaned my head against the warm window and looked at the road stretched out before us and at the land rolling away endlessly on either side. I looked at the billboards and at the trees between them, remembering how when we had come, seven months ago, the trees had been full of green leaves and small berries, their branches so delicate and thin, bobbing in the breeze like something joyful. I stared at them now, leafless at the end of winter, and saw the same thing. To my surprise. I saw trees that looked happy, trees that looked hopeful, their naked branches suspended in reach toward the sky. Spring would come soon, I thought, and fill them up again.

We were six hours into a nearly fifty-hour trip. At the end of it we would be home, and Arturo would be there to meet us. I had canceled the arrangements with the funeral parlor and told them instead to prepare the casket for transport. I had called the consulate, filled out the papers, gotten them notarized and translated into Spanish. I had paid everyone their money. I had done it all urgently, as if my life depended on it. Which, in a way, it did. But it was worth it. Arturo was going with us to the wide, silent lake and the butterfly fishermen who glided over its surface. To the red tile roofs and the rough adobe walls of both his childhood and mine. To the cobblestone streets and the brilliant sunshine and the arched doorways and the flowers spilling over people’s roofs. To the market in La Boca and the bench in Plaza Grande where the two of us ate ice cream on our first date while the late-day sun quavered above us, sliding down slowly against the curve of the sky. To the basilica and the cathedral and the painted store names in red and black. To the dirt and the wandering dogs. To our friends and generations of our families. To that stupid glass bowl that he missed so much. To home. Our home.

Somewhere in the mountains of Virginia, where the road grew narrower and hillier, Maribel complained that her stomach hurt. Without a word, the man pulled the truck over.

“Come on out, hija,” I told her, opening the back door.

She threw up in the pebbles and the dirt along the shoulder while I held her hair and rubbed slow circles on her back.

“A napkin,” the man said in Spanish, holding a crumpled tissue across the seat to me.

I wiped Maribel’s mouth. “Are you okay?” I asked.

“Do I have any in my hair?”

I opened my palm and looked at the strands, long and dark and tangled. “No,” I said.

“I want to get it cut when we get home.”

“Your hair?”

“It looks bad.”

I cupped my hand against the back of her head. “You look beautiful.”

“And I want to dye it purple.”

Suddenly, out of nowhere, there she was. My Maribel. The one who once upon a time had painted her nails black and now wanted to dye her hair purple. The one determined to assert her independence and throw her arms around life. There she was again. The person Arturo and I had been waiting for, the reason for all of this.

And as I looked at her I saw that maybe she had been here all along. Not exactly the girl she used to be before the accident, which was the girl I thought I had been searching for, but my Maribel, brave and impetuous and kind. All this time I had been buried too far under my guilt to see her. I had been preoccupied with getting us to the United States because I wanted it to make her whole again. I believed that I had lost my daughter and that if I did the right things and brought us to the right place, I could recover the girl she used to be. What I didn’t understand—what I suddenly realized now—was that if I stopped moving backwards, trying to recapture the past, there might be a future waiting for me, waiting for us, a future that would reveal itself if only I turned around and looked, and that once I did, I could start to move toward it.

“We can call Angelina when we get back,” I said. “You remember Angelina?”

“From the salon?” Maribel said.

And I nodded, marveling that she knew. Only a few months earlier, that might not have been the case.

I said, “It feels like a long time, doesn’t it, that we’ve been gone?”

“Yes,” Maribel said.

“It will be good to see it all again.”

The sky was dark by the time we got to Tennessee. I stared at the tall overhead highway lights as we drove beneath them. Loud semi-trucks passed us in the right lane, and each time I looked at the driver perched up high, wondering where he was going. After we’d eaten some of the crackers and drunk the bottled water that Celia had thrust into my arms when she and Rafael had said good-bye, Maribel fell asleep again, lulled by the sound of the road, and I closed my eyes, too.

When I woke in the morning, we were in Arkansas. I asked the man and that’s what he told me. I thought we would have been farther by then, but perhaps the driver had pulled over the truck for a time to sleep himself. The land in Arkansas was lime green and lush, flat and boundless. Tiny buds stood on the heads of blades of grass all over the fields. They swayed whenever there was a breeze or a gust of wind. I remembered that I had said to Arturo many months ago, as we came through in the opposite direction, that it was all so beautiful.