It’s kind of amazing how rapidly language is diluted if not altogether lost, quicker than memories, which I still have of Colombia. A house of dark wooden walls, permeated with gentle voices and the tang of soap. A sky vast as an ocean. My father holding me atop a crater, silver water below. You want to say I was only a baby when I left. How could I possibly remember anything? But the pictures and scents come from a place deeper than recall. I wish I could see it again, but that’s the thing about being paperless. This country locks you in until it locks you out.
I also remember the day Talia was born. We lived then in a yolk-yellow room that reeked of pizza, and this must be why I can’t stand the taste of it. Our parents were gone a long time. The lady watching us couldn’t pry me and Nando from the window above the alley, topped with snow. Then our parents arrived, something bundled and round in our mother’s arms.
“This is your sister,” she said, and Nando started crying.
Mami lowered herself to us, and I remember reaching for the baby’s face. “Suave, suave,” she said, as I felt the baby’s fuzz of hair and warm cheeks.
At night we slept in a family tangle, my head on my father’s chest, hard and flat under my small body. One day he was gone. The mattress huge and empty without him.
I’ve wondered if he remembers these things as often and as intensely as I do. In the years since he was taken, I’ve guessed at why he didn’t call more. If he didn’t miss us as much as we missed him. Or if it was his plan all along to deliver us to this country and leave us here alone. When we did speak on the phone, I worried he was just dealing with Nando and me like you deal with an old bill you forgot to pay or some stinky chunk of meat you’ve left on the kitchen counter too long.
If I were completely honest, I’d tell Talia I’ve always been jealous of her. She might think me nuts since, from where she stands, it might look like Nando and I got the better life deal while she was stuck with our drunk dad and dying abuela. But I sensed our mother saw Talia as her lost treasure, something she lived her whole life in hope of reclaiming, that even with two children holding on to her as we slept after our father was gone, the child our mother most loved was the one she couldn’t touch because she’d sent her away.
TWENTY
You asked me to tell you what happened, and I said hell no. Then you said write it down because you’re putting together a record of our family, so this is the best I can do.
We’ve been trying to pass since we moved to this town. You were the one who told me performing Anglo is in how you walk, talk, and dress. It’s in how you think, what you spend your money on when you have it. It’s in what you love and who you hate. You said if I believed I was one of them, they might believe it too.
I try to avoid them, but they always find me. Like one time on the hot-food line in the cafeteria, this kid pinched my neck from behind calling me spic boy and little Escobar, asking when I’m going to get the fuck out of the country already. I pushed my tray along the counter, hoping the lunch lady who saw and heard would say something, but she didn’t.
I was talking to Emma back then. She wears one of those Irish rings with the heart pointed out and is seriously into ballet. We had our photography elective together. We were learning to use the old kind of cameras and develop prints. She hated how the chemicals burned her nostrils, so I did her darkroom work for her. We took photos of each other. Me, against the wall behind the science wing, staring at a tree branch like it was calling my name. Emma, pulling one of her legs to her ear.
When we spread our prints on the table she said my eyes are amazing, like someone just carved me open.
Like a fucking pumpkin, some dude I’ve never even talked to said, elbowing his way between Emma and me. Everything that followed was shit I’ve heard before. Even on the news. To Emma: Don’t you know his people are rapists? To me: You’d better leave her alone, latrino, or I’ll make a little phone call and have your whole family deported.
Latrino. That was a new one. I got a whiff of his jock funk, saw Emma’s eyes lower like she was bound to him out of some secret loyalty. Next class she had a note for the teacher saying she couldn’t develop prints because of her allergies, so he assigned someone else to do hers for extra credit.
* * *
The last time I went to the principal with complaints about this sort of thing, she called three of the guys who were harassing me down to her office to get their side of the story. I was hopeful because the school staff was being extra sensitive, since a few weeks before when that kid in Florida busted into his school and killed seventeen people. We sat in a row of chairs facing her desk. She asked if it was true that they called me names and threatened my family.