Now when Talia looked at her father’s arms, above the calloused hands she’d rub with her perfumed lotions every night when he came home from work as had been their ritual for years, she would see her brother’s name etched above her sister’s, and above Nando’s name, Talia’s own name in filigree script.
On his other arm, otherwise unmarked except for scars from his years working in the campo and those that followed in Ciudad Bolívar and Paloquemao and the United States, on the papery flesh over the veins of his wrist, was the name he should have imprinted himself with long ago. Elena. Though he would ask Talia not to tell her mother about it. He hoped one day to be able to show her himself.
Talia was not a sentimental girl. Not like Mauro, who the world might still consider young and vibrant but to his daughter was a melancholy old man. She might think his gestures soppy and insignificant rather than seeing, as he did, that once she got on that plane, he’d have little more than his family’s names carved into his arms.
The apartment, though small, would be too big for only him. The sight of his daughter’s empty room, those posters of gringo singers and bands she taped to the walls, would sting. He would return to his silence, something he’d gotten a dose of during her confinement, and the thought of the unending solitude that awaited him with her returned to North America was more than he would be able to bear. Some nights he even longed for the chaos he knew when he slept on the streets because, Mauro realized, it was a distraction from the echoes of his interior. He went to his meetings nearly every evening and hoped they would be enough to keep him from his former vices during the wilderness of time he’d be sentenced to after Talia’s departure.
TWENTY-FOUR
It was my idea to go to the Palisades like when we were kids, Sundays when almost everyone in the Sandy Hill house had the day off and we’d caravan north for a picnic on Hook Mountain. I’m the only one with a driver’s license in our house, and Mom’s bosses are cool about letting me take out their Jeep since they hardly use it and—you don’t know this—I go up there on my own sometimes just to draw the view, those swirly candy colors, especially the hour before the sun slides out of sight. That day you and I walked our favorite trail up to the rocky shelf on the mountainside, took in the drop into the bruised Hudson. It looked and felt like it did when I was a kid, like the end of the earth and the end of time.
People die on that mountain. Mostly hikers who wander off the marked paths and slip from the precipice. People fall while photographing the highlands and waterway. Dogs air-bound for a Frisbee. We sat facing Sing Sing across the river. As kids we thought it was a castle where the King of America lived until someone told us it was a prison where they locked up murderers and lunatics. It was years before I understood that our father’s detainment and deportation, which I don’t remember at all, meant he’d spent time in jail. Maybe one like Sing Sing, with its spindly watchtowers and wire scaffolds.
Our mom tells me stories about how much he loved me. First son, only boy, how it’s supposed to be special for a man and how, before I was born, he told her about the ancient ruler of his mother’s hometown whose virgin daughter became pregnant by the sun and she gave birth to an emerald that she guarded until it grew into a man who became this warrior king named Goranchacha, son of the sun. But when I see our dad through video calls, I can’t help thinking of him like some distant relative. Somebody I know I’m supposed to care about even if it feels like an act. I know it’s different for you, Karina. You’ve perfected your I-don’t-give-a-fuck look, but then you hang up from one of those calls with our father and rush to your room, and I hear you pillow-cry through the walls. Then you go quiet, and I know you’re writing.
That’s what you do when you’re not at the library or reading the books you bring home. And you write in English even though Mom acts like it’s kind of a tragedy you can’t write in Spanish, but I know you’d rather not worry about her reading what you write and you probably think I don’t care enough to snoop. That one time I asked what was in your notebooks, you told me the government says you don’t have the right papers so you’re writing your own. And when things finally get fair and safe enough for people like you to come to the light, they’ll have to listen to everything you’ve been waiting to say.
I’ve only ever seen our mother on her own. I know there was a time when it was different, but I can’t remember our parents together. Don’t know their faces in love. I didn’t witness them as a couple long enough to see them fight or start to hate each other like everyone else’s parents till they decide they’d rather love other people instead.