The Book of Unknown Americans(8)

“I can wear this,” she said, holding up the top.

“You can wear whatever you want,” Arturo said.

She slid the jeans up her legs and, when they were over her hips, I raised the zipper and snapped the button for her. She wrestled herself into the sweatshirt after that, pulling it on backwards, and though usually neither Arturo nor I would have pointed it out—we tried to make her feel capable when we could—I wanted her to look nice on her first day, so I started pulling her arms back through the sleeves to turn it around.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m fixing your shirt.”

“I liked it how it was,” she said.

“But it was backwards.”

“I liked it how it was.”

So I left it alone. I didn’t comb her hair either, because any time I tried to, she complained that it hurt, that it pulled at the scar across her scalp. When Maribel was little, she used to get up early in the morning so I could plait her hair in two long braids down her back. She inspected them when I was finished, and if the braids weren’t tight enough, she would undo them and make me start again. So stubborn. So sure of what she wanted. One thing that hadn’t changed.

We ate eggs in the kitchen, and when it was time to go, I handed Maribel a backpack—the same one she had used in México—that I had packed with a pencil, her green notebook, a ruler that was part of a sewing kit my mother had given me for my quincea?era, a small wooden box filled with medicine tablets, a note for the nurse, and a tag with her name, address, and phone number written on it.

“Are you ready?” I asked.

“For what?”

“Maribel, you’re starting school today. Remember?”

“What school?”

She stared at us with those wide, beautiful eyes. The way she used to stare at us when she was a baby. It had taken us so long to have her, so many years of trying and failing. So many doctors, so many prayers. But then I had gotten pregnant. At last. Our miracle de Dios. And after she had arrived, Our Everything.

“It’s a new school,” Arturo said. “I think you’ll like it there.”

Maribel studied his face. Arturo and I waited. So much of our life with her now was about waiting, something I wasn’t very good at.

“Okay,” she said.

There was no rhyme or reason to it. Sin pies ni cabeza. She resisted, she was confused, and then, suddenly, something would snap back into place and she was compliant, agreeable. Even a year after the accident, I was still unable to discern the pattern.

It was humid when we walked outside. The three of us stood in the weedy grass along the edge of the parking lot until a long yellow bus dragged itself up from the street. It stopped in front of us and the door folded open. The driver, a woman wearing a baseball cap, waved and yelled hello. That much I understood. But when she kept talking, I got lost. Arturo looked at me as if to ask whether I knew what she was saying. I shook my head, and thought, This is how it is for us here. This is how it will be. We simply had to trust that the bus driver would deliver Maribel safely to school and that her teacher would make sure she was in the right classroom and that all day long, people would take care of her the way she needed to be cared for. We had to push past trepidation and believe that by sending her off we were doing the right thing. What other choice did we have?

Standing next to each other, Arturo and I watched as Maribel climbed aboard the bus. Through the windows, I saw her sit in a seat near the front and push her sunglasses up.

We had been planning our life here for so long. Filling out papers, hoping, praying, waiting. We had all of our dreams pinned on this place, but the pin was thin and delicate and it was too soon to tell whether it was stronger than it looked or whether, in the end, it wasn’t going to hold much of anything at all.

As if he had read my mind, Arturo said, “She’ll be fine.”

But I couldn’t tell if he was only trying to convince himself that it was true.

“Say it again,” I said.

“She’ll be fine.”

And because I wanted to believe him—because I wanted more than anything for her to be fine and fine and eventually better than fine, for her to transform again into the girl she used to be, for this past year to have been nothing but a strange, cruel detour that we could move beyond and never venture down again—I nodded and watched the bus heave away.


ARTURO LEFT FOR WORK not long after—he had his own bus to take, three of them, actually, all the way to the mushroom farm—which meant that I was alone in the apartment for the first time since we had arrived. I wasn’t used to being alone, here or anywhere, and the silence felt like an invasion. Usually in Pátzcuaro someone—either my mother or else one of my friends—stopped by in the morning. I would make café con leche and we would talk, sometimes for only a few minutes, sometimes for hours. And even on the days when no one came over, through the open windows of our house I could hear the noise of our neighbors—a Juanes song from a nearby radio, a barking dog, the dull banging of a hammer, the ripple of voices, the hush of the breeze. Here, it was as if I was sealed into a noiseless box, and even when I opened a window, all I could hear was the rhythmic whisper of cars driving on the nearby road.

I turned on the television for company and studied people’s mouths as they spoke in English, trying my best to replicate the sounds, even though I had no idea what they were saying. And they spoke so fast! I wasn’t sure if I was mouthing individual words or bunches of them strung together like grapes.