We Never Asked for Wings (11 page)

Turning back to Carmen, he congratulated her on passing her test. She looked to her daughter, who translated.

“Yes,” she said, beaming. “Thank you.”

While they ate, Yesenia told him how her mother had done it: the eight years she'd studied, the community center where she took English and math, the three failed attempts before she passed. This fall she would quit her day job and enroll in Cañada College's medical assistant program, Yesenia said. She would keep working nights and go to school during the day.

“It usually takes eighteen months, but it might take my mom longer, because we have to pay full tuition. She can't apply for financial aid, because…well.”

Carmen was undocumented, she meant, but Yesenia skipped over this detail and went on to describe the classes her mother would take, Carmen interrupting every few minutes to correct her. Alex listened, struck by the ease with which they wove in and out of languages, finishing each other's sentences and talking about themselves as a single unit.
This is what a family looks like,
he thought, and for the first time in his life he realized his wasn't one. It wasn't that he didn't have a father, or that his mother worked all the time, or that his grandmother was too strict: it was that they didn't share a life, not any of them. They didn't share a vision of the future, not like Yesenia and her mother did. All his grandfather ever wanted was to move back to Mexico; all his grandmother wanted was to keep them safe, no matter the cost. His mother—well, he had no idea what she wanted, he realized then: no idea what she thought about all day, what she was working toward, or if she was working toward anything at all.

Yesenia and her mother had gone quiet, and when Yesenia spoke again, Alex realized it was to repeat a question.

“The soup?” she asked.

He took another bite and chewed slowly, pretending to linger over the flavor. When he swallowed, he looked up at her and smiled.

“I love it,” he said.

And strangely, he did.

It was dark when they headed back across the marsh. Carmen and Yesenia had taught him
burro castigado
after dinner, a card game that Alex didn't know and that he'd lost, badly, and when Carmen left for work Yesenia said she'd walk Alex halfway home.

“My mom likes you,” she said as they crossed the parking lot outside her apartment building.

“Do you think so?”

“Yeah. I knew she would. She likes people that dress nice.”

“I like her too. I think it's cool she's—you know. She's an adult but it's like she's still trying to go somewhere, like we are. If that makes sense.”

“Yeah, it does. She's only twenty-eight.”

Alex did the math in his head. She'd had Yesenia at fourteen. “My mom's thirty-three.”

They walked in silence for a time, each thinking the same, separate thoughts.

“Do you think about it?” Yesenia asked finally, and Alex knew exactly what she meant. Their lives weren't planned, weren't desired; he wondered if Carmen had had a decision to make in Mexico, or if there hadn't been any other options for her there.

“Sometimes.”

They were halfway across the marsh, and Alex couldn't remember when they'd stopped walking. It was dark all around. Facing the water, they couldn't see anything, not even light reflected off its surface, just a great expanse of nothing.

When Alex turned to Yesenia, she stepped closer to him, her head tilted up to his. “So,” she said softly. “Are you ever going to kiss me?”

He nodded, slowly and then with more determination, and she was almost all the way to him, tilted on the tops of her toes, before he closed his eyes and bent down to meet her. Their lips touched—four stiff straight lines brushing against one another.

She pulled away and studied him closely.

“Hmm,” she said, and he feared he'd been a great disappointment, but then she pinched his lips and cheeks, loosening him up, and leaned in again. His lips tingled where she'd pinched them. Wrapping his hands around her back, he kissed her harder, her lips parting. Beneath them, he felt the muddy earth give way, his shoes sinking inches into the path, and suddenly, as he stood there with her, the mud felt incredibly sexy—the wetness of it all, the suction—and he wanted to take off his shoes and be barefoot, wanted to take off her shirt, wanted her to keep kissing him that way and any way she wanted for as long as she wanted. But just as he began to hope they might stay locked that way for the rest of their lives, she broke away and started running, with that dip in her step but fast, not to her house and not to his but to the water. On the dock she unlaced her heavy shoes and stretched her bare arms to the sky and he chased after her, scrambling over the rock levee and the short strip of pebbly sand. At the end of the pier he caught her, grabbed her, kissed her again, and when he let go she tipped backward, a shriek, arms flailing; a splash.

And then silence. Alex thought about jumping in after her, but he couldn't swim very well, didn't know how deep the water would be, and so he just stood there in shock, watching the place where she'd disappeared.

She didn't come up for a long time, long enough for the rings of her entry upon the surface of the water to smooth over, to become still and then fall into the rippling pattern of the waves, and when she finally did she gasped and started to laugh.

“Did I scare you?”

Alex shook his head slowly, dropping to his knees.
Scared
was not the right word. Alex had died when she went under, brought back to life only by her reappearance. He reached one arm out, and she took it, and he pulled her, wet and salty, out of the water.

F
lakes of dried mint floated on top of a pee-yellow drink. She was pretty sure they weren't supposed to do that. Taking a sip, Letty inhaled a fleck and coughed out a mouthful of what tasted like pure acid. Luna whimpered as a spray of liquid landed on her cheek. She was asleep. Hours earlier, Luna had given up halfway through a Happy Meal and laid her head down on the table, refusing the bits of meat and bun Letty tried to push into her mouth and falling asleep right there. Letty should have moved her, but she was too exhausted and afraid Luna would wake up, so instead she covered her with a blanket and left her at her seat.

Reaching across the mess of a table—empty McDonald's bags, an open jar of applesauce, the mint, a yellow plastic lemon, half a dozen dissected green olives—Letty grabbed an open bottle of rum. It was ten o'clock. Alex was still out, somewhere. Across the dark field, past the red lights of the runways, Rick was still at Flannigan's, surrounded by his bottles and his fancy specials, making conversation with her customers. Thursday meant Joel would be waiting for the red-eye to New York; Manny would be just flying back from three days in Houston. The bar would be full, and in all likelihood, her regulars would have stopped asking about her. Rick had taken over, stealing her relationships and her tips, and she was stuck at home with a sleeping six-year-old and a mess of bad drinks, sipping rum straight from the bottle.

In the quiet, Letty heard Alex's footsteps on the stairs. He threw the door open and tripped out of his muddy boots, bounding straight to the kitchen sink, where he flipped on the faucet and dunked his head into the water. At first Letty thought he must be thirsty, but then she saw he wasn't drinking, just smiling, the water running over his half-open mouth. It took her a moment to figure it out: he was making sure he was awake, not dreaming. She remembered feeling the same way as a teenager, returning from making out with Wes in the marsh, rolling over on top of him on the deserted pier. She should never have let Alex go out alone with Yesenia—not that he'd asked her permission.

“You okay?” she asked. “Have fun?”

Shaking the water out of his hair, he looked at her as if she'd just asked Neil Armstrong if he'd had fun, walking on the moon.

“It was amazing.”

“I hope not too amazing.”

“Mom,” Alex groaned. “I just turned fifteen.”

“Exactly.” She felt a pang of guilt, remembering his birthday. She'd bought him a chocolate cupcake at the airport, but Luna had licked all the frosting off on the walk home. “So what did you eat?”

He turned off the running water. “Her mom made some kind of fish soup. It was actually pretty good.” He slicked back his hair and dried his hands on the dish towel she'd used to mop up runaway olive juice. Lifting it to his nose, he smelled the towel and noticed the mess on the table. “What're you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?” He picked up the glass applesauce jar and spun it around in his hands. “You and Luna feast on olives and lemon juice for dinner, with expired applesauce for dessert?”

“Expired?”

“It's the only reason we didn't eat it when you were gone.”

He stopped speaking abruptly and looked away. They had an unspoken agreement not to talk about Letty's disappearance. If he had to mention it at all he said,
When we were at Sara's,
a euphemism that sounded a lot less like child abandonment than the truth did.

She took the jar out of his hands.
USE BY DECEMBER 31
. Her stomach turned, though whether it was the rotten applesauce or the lemon juice or the rum or any of the other ingredients she'd sampled, she couldn't be sure.

“It was for a drink,” she sighed, handing him the book she'd borrowed from Rick:
The Art of Mixology: Creative Cocktails Inspired by the Classics.

“Cool.”

“It should have been. Until this happened.”

“What were you trying to make?”

“Mojito y Más,”
she said, gesturing to the lemon-mint mess. “And a ‘riff' on a None but the Brave
.
But it didn't work out. Obviously.”

Alex leaned over the open book.
“Fresh muddled apples,”
he read.
“Pimento dram.”
Looking up, he scanned the table again, where an entire jar full of green olives lay on the cutting board. Their red hearts had been extracted and now floated in a sweating glass on top of the applesauce.

“Wrong kind of pimento,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

Alex pulled open a drawer next to the oven and rummaged through a pile of plastic bags until he found one with the same two words written on it in black marker. “Pimento dram. Allspice. It was confused by the early Spanish explorers with a kind of pepper, which is why it shares a name with the peppers inside Spanish olives.”

Letty snatched the bag away from him, studying her mother's writing. “And you are an expert on the history of the pimento for what reason?”

He shrugged. “I read about it.”

“You read about it,” she said, unbelieving. “Where?”

“In the encyclopedia.”

The fine hairs pricked up on her arms. The only person she'd ever known to read the encyclopedia was Wes. She dumped her failed experiments down the drain one at a time, avoiding eye contact with her son. “I didn't know the encyclopedia still existed.”

“It does. At least L through R does. Those are the only volumes we have at school.”

Letty stacked the empty glasses in the sink and turned back to the table.

“So I could quiz you on lemons or rabbits, but you wouldn't know anything about, say, salamanders.”

“In theory,” he said, and she raised her eyebrows, waiting for him to explain. “I got
Amphibians and Reptiles of the United States and Canada
for my eighth birthday. So the salamander isn't a good example. But it's the right idea.”

She rolled her eyes to the water-stained ceiling, awed by her encyclopedia-reading, fact-reciting son.

He flipped back to the mojito recipe. “So you want to make this? I think we could find the ingredients.”

“What do you mean, find them?”

Alex looked at his sleeping sister and disappeared into his bedroom, returning a moment later with a heavy black flashlight. He grabbed the book.

“I'll be right back.”

Before she could stop him—or even decide if she should—Letty heard his footsteps retreating down the stairs, and a moment later he appeared in the marsh below the kitchen window. She watched him cut straight toward the water. The slant of yellow light bounced on the path as he jogged. She went out onto the porch and called his name. The sound echoed, and after a silence she heard:
Just a sec!
Or
I'm coming!
Or
I found it!
But whatever it was he wasn't afraid. He was happy. It might be wrong that she'd let him out at night alone to run straight for the water, and it might be worse that she was letting him play head chef in the creation of an alcoholic beverage, but the truth was they'd exchanged no more than two dozen words in the month since she'd returned, and all of them had been awkward. For the first time since Maria Elena had left—or, if she was honest, for the first time since the ambulance had whisked his stiff little body down Mile Road all those years before, they were, suddenly and miraculously, partners in something besides fear.

She returned to the kitchen for the bottle of rum and a blanket, setting up in the stairwell to watch for his return. The way the dry brown grass smelled in summer, it reminded her of everything good about the Landing, back when she was a little girl and the buildings were still safe and crowded and she traveled with the other kids in a pack, stomping through the hollows. She took a long breath and an even longer drag on the bottle of rum, pulling in the antidote for her surging emotions.

When Alex finally returned he was shirtless, carrying his white cotton button-down like a knapsack, the arms tied in a knot. She took another quick sip from the bottle while he climbed the stairs two at a time, his boots pounding so loudly she worried he'd wake his sister. At the top of the stairs he untied the shirt and emptied a tangled collection of weeds, a handful of strawberries, and a fat lime onto the blanket.

“Find what you were looking for?”

“Yep. Do we have soda water?”

She went to get it and a few other supplies: ice and sugar and a wooden spoon and a pair of jam jars, while he went to put on a shirt. When he returned he carried a set of glass beakers, rattling on a metal tray. He set them on the blanket.

“Where'd you get the berries?”

“From the old sandbox. The lime too.”

Mrs. Puente had converted the sandless wooden box into a garden a decade earlier, and her reputation had kept everyone away from it. “You aren't afraid of her?”

“She likes me,” Alex said, handing Letty a bundle of tangled greenery.

“What's this?”

“Mint. It grows like crazy down by the water.” He plucked a leaf and rubbed it between two fingers, breaking it up and releasing a strong smell. “It's easy to identify. And it doesn't have any poisonous look-alikes, like parsley and garlic do.”

Was there anything her son didn't know? Watching him measure in glass beakers brought to mind Wes in their high school chemistry class, and she suddenly missed him. Perhaps Sara was right. Maybe it
was
time for her to tell Alex something about his father. It was wrong that she hadn't. She knew that, and had known it for a very long time. But she couldn't do it now—she didn't want to share this moment with anyone, not even the memory of Wes.

“I thought we should try different ratios of soda to rum,” he said. From right to left he poured light to heavy, and then filled them to the top with soda water. Looking at the book, he asked: “What's it mean to muddle?”

Letty showed him, squeezing the lime and dropping a handful of mint into a jam jar and mashing it with the wooden spoon. She added sugar and handed the jar to Alex to mix while she sliced strawberries into a second jar. Filling it with ice, she scooped a portion of the muddled mint and filled the glass with the lightest-pour beaker.

She stirred and took a sip.

“Wow.”

Alex smiled. “Good?”

She took a second, longer sip. It was amazing. Sweet and sour and exotic somehow, even though Alex had gathered all the ingredients from their own backyard.

She handed the drink to him.

“You try. Just a taste.”

He looked around the empty stairwell. A moth buzzed on the yellow porch light. Taking the jar, he smelled it and then tilted a negligible amount into his mouth. He grimaced.

“You don't like it?” She wanted him not only to taste it but to love it, to understand the perfection of the drink they'd made together. Hearing the disappointment in her voice, he tried again, digging out a mouthful of strawberries with a spoon to chase the alcohol.

“It's pretty good,” he agreed, finally. “Simple syrup would have been better than sugar, though. Ice causes water molecules to slow down, which is why most of the sugar is still sitting undissolved at the bottom of the glass.”

“Oh, my God, would you just drink!” Letty laughed, mixing a second glass and thrusting it into his hand. He grinned and drank the entire cocktail as quickly as he could. When he was done, he slammed the empty jar down on the blanket.

“See, it's good, right? Tell me you like it.”

He shuddered, and then smiled. “I like the strawberries.”

She laughed.

“Well, that's a start,” she said and mixed another drink.

Three beakers later, they were both officially drunk. Letty had heard about the kiss (So sweet! So innocent!) and about Yesenia's play-fall off the pier, and about Alex's near-death experience while watching.

“You can't act like you care so much,” she said.