B0061QB04W EBOK (12 page)

Tía Emperatriz walked over to us, took my buckets, and whispered, “Go give your mother a hug.”

We still didn’t move from the gate. I clutched Mago’s dress and hid behind her. Mami didn’t look like the mother I had tried so hard not to forget during those two and a half years.

“Look at you kids, you’ve grown so much!” she said. When she took off her sunglasses and I saw those eyes that were also Abuelita Chinta’s eyes, I could no longer deny that she was my mother. Carlos ran to hug her. I waited for Mago, to see what she was going to do so that I could do the same. But she just stood there clutching the handles of her buckets. Élida left my grandmother’s side and went into the house without another glance.

“Where’s Papi?” Mago said. “Is he back, too?”

“No, he’s not back. Now go and get your things so that we can leave,” Mami said.

“We’re leaving right now?” I asked. I looked at Tía Emperatriz.

“Of course,” Mami said. “Don’t tell me you want to stay here?”

When we didn’t say anything, Tía Emperatriz said, “We’ll go another day, niños. Do as your mother says.”

“I’ll get our stuff,” Mago said. She put a hand on my shoulder and then went inside the house while Carlos and I stayed with Mami.

“I’m nine now,” Carlos said. I was three months away from turning seven, but I didn’t want to tell her my age because I kept staring at the little sister we had never met before.
She really does exist. She really is real.

“Ven acá, Reyna,” Mami said. I went to her, and I let her hug me with one arm. I hesitantly wrapped my arms around her waist, feeling as if this were a dream and she would disappear any minute. I looked at the hand she had around me and saw the silvery scars that ran the length of her index, middle, and ring fingers. It took me a second to remember that when she met Papi, and up until she was pregnant with Carlos, she’d had a job at a tortilla mill and one time her hand had gotten caught in the grinder as she was stuffing the dough into it. She had almost lost her fingers. That was why she switched to selling Avon. I hugged Mami tighter, as many more things I had forgotten about her returned to me.

The little girl pulled my hair, and I cried out.

“Betty, no!” Mami said.

I moved out of the little girl’s reach and massaged my scalp. Mago returned with our things stuffed into two pillowcases, and we said our goodbyes. We didn’t hug our grandmother. But we thanked her for letting us stay at her home and for taking care of us.

“Well, at least there’ll be three fewer mouths to feed,” she said, as if the food she had given us those two years and a half had come out of her own pocket, and not from my parents’ hard work.

“Ay, Amá, you’ll never change, will you?” Tía Emperatriz said. She opened her arms, and we ran to her and hugged her.

“Come on, it’s getting late and my mother is waiting for us,” Mami said.

“Bye, Tía,” Mago said to our aunt.

I looked at Tía Emperatriz. There were many things I would have liked to say to her, but when I glanced at my mother, I knew it wouldn’t be a good idea to say anything but thank you. Mami narrowed her eyes as she looked at me, and I wondered if she knew I had betrayed her while she was away.

“Come back and visit,” Tía Emperatriz said as she walked us out to the gate.

Élida stayed in Abuela Evila’s room and didn’t come out to say goodbye.

“Wait! The photo,” I said as we were leaving. I ran back into the house. Even though I had memorized every part of his face, I couldn’t leave the Man Behind the Glass.

Mami hailed a cab, and the three of us sat in the back. Mami and her little girl took the front. We had so many questions to ask her but didn’t because the taxi driver started a conversation with Mami.

“You’re coming from El Otro Lado, aren’t you?” he asked.

To this day I still don’t know how it is that people always seem to know when someone has just gotten back from the United States. Do they smell differently? Speak differently? Or is it their clothes?

Mami laughed and told him yes. “I just got back last night,” she said.

“Did you like it? Is it as nice as people say?” the taxi driver asked.

“Oh, yes. It is beautiful,” Mami said. “A truly beautiful place.”

“So why did you come back? I mean, with our economy in the toilet, everyone is leaving for El Otro Lado, not the other way around.”

Her little girl started to cry, and Mami didn’t answer.

Despite our sadness at leaving Tía Emperatriz and missing out on the movie, we were thrilled that our mother had returned. We kept waiting for her to say that she had missed us, but she’d hardly said a word to us. We got off at the main road and walked the rest of the way to Abuelita Chinta’s house in single file behind Mami. The air smelled of smoke as trash piles burned on either side of the train tracks. Abuelita Chinta’s house was the only one on the block made of bamboo sticks. It was covered with cardboard soaked in tar on the outside, and the roof was made of corrugated metal. The neighbors’
houses were made of brick and cement. The prettiest house belonged to Doña Caro. Her husband, Don Lino, was a welder. He made good money and his family had a refrigerator and running water. Abuelita Chinta didn’t have those things, but she had a stove and electricity. She bought water from the next-door neighbor and carried it home in a bucket.

Sixty feet from Abuelita Chinta’s shack, to the west, was a canal that sometimes overflowed during the rainy season. Perpendicular to the canal were the train tracks which served the El Río Balsas Railway up until the 1990s, when the government privatized the railroads and the train from Iguala was suspended. But back then, the trains would come by carrying iron ore, grain, sugar, salt, fuel, cement, fertilizers, and passengers. The bamboo sticks of my grandmother’s shack rattled like maracas when the train passed by. It was especially scary at night because everything was quiet, except for the barking of the neighborhood dogs, when all of a sudden the train would come rushing by with its whistles and roaring engines.

Doña Caro was sitting outside her house combing her long, gray hair. When she saw my mother, she said, “Juana, you’re back.” I wanted to scream that yes, Mami was back, and we would no longer be the little orphans!

How is Papi?

Tell us about the U.S.

What did you do while you were there? Is it true what people say?

Did you miss us?

Does Papi miss us?

Why didn’t he come back with you?

“Why don’t you kids go outside to play with the new neighbors?” Mami said without answering our questions. She said she had something to tell us, but that now was not the time. Only Carlos listened to her and went in search of kids to play with. Mami handed Mago her little girl and told her to take care of her while she and Abuelita Chinta prepared dinner.

Mago refused to take the baby.

“She’s your sister,” Mami said.

“She’s your daughter,” Mago said, and ran out of the house.

“Reyna, you take care of her.”

“But—”

She put her little girl on my lap, and I did as I was told. I didn’t want to watch this little girl. But Mami was back, just as I had hoped for, and it was better if I behaved or she might decide to leave again.

My grandmother’s shack was just one big room. (Unlike Abuela Evila’s, this house had no interior walls, so privacy was hard to come by.) A curtain separated the front from the back part of the house, and that is where my grandmother had stored our belongings from our old house, like my parents’ bed, the broken refrigerator, the dresser. In the middle of the shack was the dining table. To the right hung a hammock from the rafters where my uncle, Tío Crece, slept. Abuelita’s bed was on the left side of the dining table. The kitchen area was in the front part of the house. Next to the stove was a small table full of saints, candles, and flowers. In the center was a portrait of my dead grandfather.

I sat on Abuelita Chinta’s bed and watched her and Mami make dinner. Finally we would start having real meals. Meals that were more than just beans and tortillas. I was so happy about the food that for a moment, I forgot I was supposed to be mad about watching Elizabeth, or Betty, as Mami said we should call her youngest daughter. My little sister. A complete stranger. She was a year and three months old. She looked at me and smiled. Part of me wanted to smile at her. Part of me wanted to hold her in my arms and smell her scent of baby powder and milk, but I didn’t do it. Instead, I studied her face, and I was jealous that she was prettier than me, even at her age. I was jealous that her hair was curlier than mine, and her eyelashes were thicker and longer than mine, and her eyes were not slanted like mine, but instead were round and framed by those thick, dark lashes that made it seem as if she were wearing eye makeup.

But then I looked at her skin. She was very dark, this little girl. And it made me feel glad that she was so dark. I had heard people say that in El Otro Lado there were a lot of golden-haired people, with eyes as blue as a summer sky and skin as white as a pig’s belly. But this little girl, who was born in that special, beautiful place, was almost as dark as the Nahuas, the indigenous people who came down from the hills to sell clay pots at the train station.

Mami had forgotten I was there and didn’t whisper as much as
before. Now I could hear a little of what she was saying to Abuelita Chinta. Something about another woman. A fight she had with Papi. She was making green salsa, and as she talked she smashed the roasted green tomatoes with the pestle so hard the juice splattered on her dress. But she didn’t care. She said she hated Papi and never wanted to see him again.

“I’m going to get back at him, Amá. I swear.”

“Hush, Juana. Don’t say such things. He’s still the father of your children,” Abuelita Chinta said.

“But it can’t be true,” I stammered. “Papi can’t love another woman.”

Mami looked up, startled, and when she realized that I was in the house with them—and that I’d been there all along—she got furious.

“What are you doing standing there? Go outside and don’t come back until I call you, you hear!”

Betty started to cry. Tears stung my eyes, but Mami didn’t care about our tears. “Get out!” she yelled again, and I ran out.

Carlos was playing marbles with the boys, but Mago wasn’t playing jump rope with the girls. Instead, she was all alone, perched up
on the metal thing used to change the direction of the train tracks. I carried Betty in my arms and struggled to hold her up. Her cheeks might have looked as if they were stuffed with cotton candy, but she weighed more than a sack of corn.

Mago was staring into the distance, past the huizache trees, and when I looked in her direction, I saw the towers of La Guadalupe Church near Abuela Evila’s house sticking up like two fingers. Behind the towers, the Mountain That Has a Headache touched the sky.

“Do you miss her?” I asked.

Mago glanced at the mountain one more time and then jumped off the track-changer. “Who, Mami? But she’s back,” she said. “And why were you crying?”

I started crying again. I didn’t know why I still felt that familiar emptiness inside when I looked at the Mountain That Has a Headache even though my mother was back.

Carlos came over to us, smiling and pointing toward the house. “Can you believe she’s here?” He took a deep breath and said, “Finally, everything is going to go back to how it was before she left.”

Mami stood at the door and told us to come inside. As I looked at her in the doorway, beckoning us to come in, I knew why the emptiness and the yearning were still there. Carlos was wrong.

The woman standing there wasn’t the same woman who had left.

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