Yesenia wouldn’t be at the water. It was way too late for that. As he ran he tried to picture what she was doing now, watching TV on the couch or doing homework in her room, but when he got to her apartment he looked up to see her windows as dark as the night sky. Carmen would be at work already. Inside, Yesenia was either asleep or punishing him, pretending not to be home.
“Yesenia?”
He called her name once and then raced around the building and up the stairs, knocking on the door and calling her name again. When he heard footsteps his heart pounded, but as they came closer he realized they were on the stairs, a troupe of boys in school uniforms passing. He looked around, trying to think of a way inside. If her apartment hadn’t been three stories up he would have found a way to crawl through the window Romeo-style; if he’d known where her mother worked he would have gone there and asked to borrow the key. As it was, all he could do was knock, and he did so with one ear against the door, knocking and waiting, knocking and waiting. But an hour passed, and still she didn’t come.
She didn’t want to see him; that much was clear. There was nothing to do but go home. He didn’t want to go home, though, didn’t want to face his mother, who’d probably waited up for him and would grill him about every aspect of his father’s life, and so instead he wandered for a while: through what was left of downtown Bayshore—a Western Union and a boarded-up bank and a liquor store—around Cesar Chavez, and down to the shoreline, scooping up rocks and throwing them into the bay one at a time.
So this is what it feels like to be the bad guy, he thought and realized then it was the first time he could ever remember being in this position. He’d spent his whole life living up to everyone else’s rules, no matter how crazy or impossible they were; until now, he had never let anyone down. But now he had, and it was Yesenia, the person who deserved it the least. He imagined her curled up under her covers, blankets muffling the sound of the knocking she was determined to ignore.
But just then, this image was replaced by another: Yesenia sitting on the end of the pier, her body wrapped in a blanket whiter than the moon, her face pressed into her knees so that only her hair, tied up high in a ponytail, showed above the cloth.
Alex started to sprint. When he reached her, he kneeled down, placing one hand on the soft curve of her back, where her spine should have been straight but wasn’t.
“I’m so, so, so sorry,” he said. “Didn’t you go home for dinner?”
Yesenia shook her head no.
“Your mom’ll be worried.”
Yesenia moved her shoulders up and down, as if to imply that this did not bother her, when in fact Alex knew with certainty that it did, and he told her as much. She sat up then, turning to him. “I can’t go home.”
Something had happened to her face.
Her right cheek was swollen, so big that it almost shut one eye. There were scratches too, on her jaw and on her neck, pale pink marks just visible in the soft light reflecting off the water. Whether her lips were purple because they were bruised or because she was freezing, Alex couldn’t tell.
His stomach swimming, he tried to think of something to say. Finally: “What happened?”
“I got in a fight,” she said. But the way she explained it, it didn’t sound like much of a fight. Yesenia was drawing after school, waiting for the bus, when a girl threw her sketchbook into the street. She’d tried to get it, but she wasn’t fast enough, and the girls had laughed as she’d stumbled and another girl had picked it up and thrown it farther, and when she’d reached it the second time, both girls had pushed her down and what had happened after that she didn’t need to explain because it was all over her face.
When she was quiet again, Alex asked: “Is this the first time?”
Yesenia said nothing, and Alex’s heart sank. Clearly it wasn’t. How could he not have known?
“Does your mom know?” he asked.
“I can’t tell her. You know her English, and she’s afraid if she goes to the school someone will ask for her papers. I didn’t want her to worry.”
It wasn’t right. She’d been hurting, and hurting alone. He understood why she didn’t tell Carmen: after all her mother had worked for, Yesenia wouldn’t want to put her in a position of having to choose—to protect her daughter or protect the life she’d built for them. But what he didn’t understand was this: “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Yesenia looked out at the water for a long time before turning to him. “You were just so happy. Why would you ever want to be with someone miserable?”
Alex touched her swollen cheek. “I want to be with you, however you are.”
Lowering himself onto his back, he looked up at the sky, and she curled into him, her knees against his hip and her head on his chest. Wrapping his arms around her, he held her still, and when she started to shake, cold or crying or both, he covered her with the blanket and held her tighter. For the first time since they’d started school he regretted his decision deeply, regretted leaving her to face Bayshore High when he could have been there beside her. He’d never seen her as weak because she wasn’t—but she was vulnerable, and he had left her alone.
Yesenia’s body grew quiet. She tipped her face up toward his. “Kiss me?”
Dipping down, he kissed her frozen lips, and when he started to cry she held him as tight as he’d held her, and they stayed that way all night and into the early morning, when Carmen came and carried Yesenia home.
Wes was back. Without warning he’d burst into their lives, showing up on her doorstep and shaking Alex’s hand and taking him out to dinner. I would have stayed. His words echoed in Letty’s mind, and it had taken an entire bottle of wine to wash away the image of what her life might have been like if he had; so much wine, in fact, that she’d woken up sick at four in the morning to a second shock: Alex hadn’t come home. She was about to call the police when the front door opened and he stumbled through, his eyes bloodshot and his hair full of dirt. He’d been out all night with Yesenia.
It was too much.
Wes, Alex, Yesenia—everything. Standing across from her son in the predawn darkness, Letty felt the walls begin to pulse. She grasped the edge of the sofa as Alex swayed past, on his way to bed. His motion upset the air; she felt it blow against her face, cool and fresh, and she tried to breathe it in, to steady herself—but then Alex disappeared into the bedroom, and it felt as if all the oxygen disappeared with him.
She collapsed onto the couch. What had he been doing, out all night? Letty could imagine all too well, and the thought made the room spin, a woozy pressure building. Everything she had tried to do, it was all too little too late. The new school—the lies it had taken to get him there—none of it mattered. Their family history was set on repeat, and her uncertain attempts to chart a new course were no match for destiny. Even Maria Elena had been no match. Stomach lurching, Letty turned her face to the couch cushion, pressing her forehead against the filthy material. She should set an alarm, she thought, but she couldn’t move. And what did it matter if they missed a day of school, or even a week? It wouldn’t change anything.
But just as she was about to surrender to sleep, Luna cried out. The sound echoed in the silent apartment, growing louder. Go to her, Letty silently pleaded to Alex, but there were no footsteps, no whispered comforts—only Luna’s cries, tunneling through the unbreathable air.
She had to get up. Pulling herself to standing, Letty felt her way back to the bedroom. Luna had lost her blankets; her skin was cold to the touch. Finding them, she tucked the corners tight around her daughter’s shoulders and then sat down next to Luna, rubbing her back until she grew calm. On the other side of the room, Alex sat on his bed facing the window, watching the morning’s first flights line up on the runway. The collar of his shirt quivered with every careful breath, until he too lay down on his bed and fell asleep in front of the rising sun.
Letty lay down. Wriggling close, she felt her daughter’s heartbeat against her own, the rhythm like a jolt, r
echarging her. She couldn’t surrender. At any other point in her life she would have succumbed to failure, but there was no one to pass her kids off to now, no one to cook dinner or pack lunches or feed her custard rolls while she lay flat on her back and watched the ceiling breathe. It didn’t matter that her world had turned upside down. Her kids were still cold, and tired, and soon they would wake up, and they would be hungry.
After a time, she got up and changed in the darkness. In the kitchen she emptied the refrigerator quietly, looking for something to cook. There was cheese, and stale tortillas, and in the cupboard she found a can of green chiles and a jar of salsa. She looked up chilaquiles in one of her mother’s cookbooks. There were dozens of recipes, calling for everything from chopped onions and roasted tomatillos to fresh Oaxacan cheese. But she didn’t have any of those things, so she set about trying to make the dish the way she remembered her mother making it, frying strips of tortillas in oil and adding chiles and salsa and cheese. It was a big gooey mess when she was done with it, nothing like the perfectly layered concoction Maria Elena made, but it smelled good at least.
She had just set three big bowls on the table when Luna bolted into the room. In her wide, searching eyes, Letty could see that she thought her nana had come home, but instead of crying, Luna pulled out a chair and sat down in front of her breakfast.
“Edible?” Letty asked, as Luna spooned great bites of chile-cheese tortilla strips into her mouth. She’d filled a bowl for herself, but she was unsure if her queasy stomach could handle anything more than soda water.
“Mmmm-hmmm,” Luna said, her mouth full.
From the bedroom they heard a crash, and then a curse, and then the door to the bathroom slam shut. Letty had let them sleep in—Alex would miss zero period, and maybe first period too. When he walked into the kitchen a minute later, he’d gotten dressed and washed his face, but it hadn’t helped much. A streak of mud ran from his temple to his chin.
“Why didn’t you wake me up?”
“Because you were out until four o’clock in the morning!” She pulled out a chair and motioned for him to sit. “I made you breakfast.”
“I don’t have time.”
“You’re already late. Eat your breakfast.”
Alex scowled but sat down. He picked up his spoon and used it to push the tortillas around in the bowl, excavating a long string of burnt cheese.
“Aren’t you hungry?”
He shrugged. Letty studied him closely. It was more than just the dirt and exhaustion. He looked terrible, his eyebrows and jaw and shoulders all tense. She’d rehearsed what she would say to him over breakfast (Don’t you think for one second I’ll welcome a grandbaby at thirty-three years old. I’m no Maria Elena), but looking at him now, she couldn’t bring herself to say it. He might have stayed out a good seven hours longer than he should have, but he had also just met his father for the first time, and he was clearly upset. She sat down at the table and poured him a glass of Kool-Aid.
“Are you okay?” She waited for him to look up, but he didn’t, just set down his fork and used his fingers to stack the tortillas, the way Maria Elena would have made them. But he still didn’t take a bite. “Alex?”
He nodded, looking out the window, away from her.
“You don’t have to be okay, you know. It’s a big deal.” And then, when he still said nothing: “You can be mad at me.”
“Why would I be mad at you?”
He turned to her, confusion in his eyes, and she saw right then: Wes hadn’t told him. She had no idea how he’d explained his complete absence from his son’s life, but she knew Wes hadn’t told him the truth. Across the table, Luna finished her bowl and reached for Alex’s, but he grabbed it back and took a bite. Letty watched him push the food around in his mouth and attempt to swallow, hoping he would offer up more information about his evening. When it became clear that he wouldn’t, she prodded. “So what did you think of him?”
Alex shrugged. “He was kind of awkward.”
Letty couldn’t help but laugh at the observation coming from Alex, who was so much like his father.
“But he’s smart,” Alex continued. “Did you know he went to Haiti after the earthquake? He was one of the first doctors to arrive.”
Letty snorted. “It doesn’t surprise me. He was always trying to save the world.”
“Well, I liked him,” Luna said, and Letty turned to her in surprise. She hadn’t even been introduced to Wes. “I wanted to go too, but Mom said no.”
“You wouldn’t have liked it,” Alex said. “We had sushi.”
“What’s sushi?”
“Raw fish.”
“Gross!”
She popped up and dropped her dish into the sink. On the kitchen counter, Letty’s cell phone began to ring. Luna handed it to her and then climbed into her lap. Letty recognized the area code from when Wes lived in New York. Just the number made her stomach flip, the way it had done every time the phone rang the year after he’d gone to college.
“Aren’t you going to answer it?” Alex asked impatiently.
She was absolutely not going to answer it. Wes’s anger, the night before, had been tempered by shock. There was no way he’d spent all night thinking about Alex and that anger hadn’t turned to fury. She didn’t want him yelling at her now, in front of her children—or ever, if she was honest.
“No.”
Alex grabbed the phone out of her hands, and for a second she thought he was going to answer it, but instead he slid it across the table, away from them, and blurted out: “Are we still moving to Mission Hills?”
Luna scurried along the table to retrieve the phone, handing it to her mother a second time. Letty looked at Alex, confused. “Why?”
“I just want to know.”
“I’m working on it. I opened a bank account yesterday.”
“Will it be soon?”
“I hope so.”
He lifted another scrap of tortilla, chewed it, and swallowed. It looked like it took every bit of strength for him to force the food down his throat, and then for him to say what he said next, a quiet, desperate plea: “When we do, can Yesenia and Carmen come live with us?”
“What?” Letty said, caught off guard. “Of course they can’t.”
The muscles in Alex’s jaw bulged, and he spoke through clenched teeth. “Why not?”
It was so absurd—both that he was asking and also his apparent focus on Yesenia, the morning after his father had walked back into his life. But Alex was serious, his eyes round and unblinking. Letty thought about all the reasons they could never come live with them, including the fact that she’d be lucky to afford a one-bedroom apartment and the even more pressing fact that she would do everything she could to keep Alex from spending too much time with his girlfriend. Not wanting to argue, though, she said only the most obvious: “I’ve never even met them. Among many, many, many other reasons.”
“Could she use our address at least?”
“We’re moving so we can stop lying, not start telling new lies! What’s going on with you, anyway?”
The phone in her hand rang again, but it wasn’t Wes this time—it was Rick. Just a few days before she’d been a single mom alone in the world, and now her phone wouldn’t stop ringing, two men wanting different things from her: Rick, a relationship; Wes, an explanation. She opened the phone and snapped it shut, hanging up on him, and then turned back to Alex, but it was too late. He’d pushed his chair away and stood up. The conversation was over.
“I have to go,” he said, grabbing his backpack from a hook by the door. “Don’t wait up.”
“Excuse me?”
His backpack was heavy. The straps dug into his shoulder blades, and he took it off, adjusting the contents before swinging it on again. “I said don’t wait up. I’m going to Yesenia’s after school.”
“You just saw her.”
“So I’m going to see her again.”
Luna leaned back—a trust fall with no warning—and Lett
y lurched forward to grab her before she fell on her head. Alex stood waiting for her response, obstinate and insecure all at once. He wanted her permission, even though he wouldn’t ask for it. And as much as Letty wanted to give it to him, give him anything he wanted, forever and ever, to make up for all the things she hadn’t given him, she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t bear the thought of him out there in the world alone, making the same mistakes she’d made.
She’d been only sixteen the first time she had sex with Wes. He snuck over in the middle of the night with a flashlight and a blanket and pulled her up the hill, onto the roof of his neighborhood church. The flat metal roof had stored the sunlight; she remembered even now exactly what it felt like pressed against her back, the heat internal, like skin. She’d felt safe, close to Wes and close to God, and afterward she’d prayed fiercely that the sun would never rise, so that they could stay there, naked and tangled and happy, for the rest of their lives.
Her son was still looking at her, waiting for an answer. She shook her head no. It wasn’t going to happen, not on her watch.
“What?”
“No. You can’t go. I want you home for dinner.”
He pulled the straps on his backpack as tight as they would go, so that she was sure he’d cut off all blood flow to his arms and shoulders.
“Why not?”
“Because you’re too young.”
Alex looked down at his shoes, glossy black high-tops that Yesenia had picked out. His laces were triple-knotted.
“Listen,” she said, softening her voice. “I’m not trying to be mean. I’m just trying to look out for you.”
“Is that what you were doing when you got me drunk?” He looked up from his laces, daring her to protest. “Or when you left us alone in our beds and drove to Mexico?”
“Alex!” Luna hissed. She twisted around in Letty’s lap and wrapped her arms and legs around her mother’s torso.