“Now, there’s a Catholic,” she said, pulling him out of the car.
“You sound like my mother.”
Letty smiled. It was what Maria Elena always said, as if fashion and faith were somehow connected. But it wasn’t about piety, she understood now; it was about respect. He’d dressed up for God and he’d dressed up for her, and she thought about how much her mother would like this Ricardo Lorenzo Moya, as she took his hand and pulled him up the steps and back into the house.
Wes’s eyes followed them as they walked into the room. Everyone else was eating, plates balanced in their laps as they squeezed into the living room, but Wes’s plate was still full. He’d been waiting. He lifted his glass now, as if to toast, but before he could get anyone’s attention, Rick lifted his own glass and tapped it with a fork.
“To our hostess,” Rick said, when everyone turned to look, “for a beautiful meal.”
Letty was about to protest—the meal had been all him, after all—but he touched her lips with a soft fingertip, quieting her. He wouldn’t take credit, not for any of it.
In the silence after the toast, Alex took a step into the center of the room. Letty looked up just in time to see Yesenia’s hand drop from the small of his back. She had pushed him forward.
“I wanted to say something,” he said, and everyone hushed, waiting. He looked nervous, standing in the middle of the crowded room, but when he glanced up and saw his father, his face broke into a smile.
“Yes!” Wes exclaimed, shooting forward and punching Alex on the shoulder. “Yes, yes, yes! I told you, didn’t I?” He bounced around the room, whooping like a teenager, and Alex laughed, watching him.
“What?” Letty demanded. “What’s going on?”
Wes stopped dancing, and Alex cleared his throat, running his hands over his rumpled dress shirt.
“I won,” he said quietly.
“You what?” She couldn’t believe he’d known, all this time, and hadn’t said anything. The judging had been on the last day of school before Christmas break, and when he hadn’t mentioned it, and then when he hadn’t answered his father’s calls, she’d assumed his project hadn’t been chosen. But as she stood there, Alex beaming at her and then at his dad and then back at her again, she understood: this was a family announcement. He’d kept it from both of them, because he wanted to celebrate together.
“Are you serious?” she said. “That’s amazing!”
“It’s just the first step,” he said and then grinned sheepishly. “But Mr. E said I’m the first freshman in his class to be lead scientist on a state entry. Ever.”
“Of course you are!” Sara said. She’d slipped into the kitchen and returned with a second bottle of champagne, popping the top and refilling everyone’s glasses. Into two empty glasses she poured an inch each for Alex and Yesenia, toasting them. “You know not one person in this room is surprised—but we’re proud of you, Alex.”
Letty nodded, lifting her glass. “We are proud of you.”
Alex drank his champagne in one gulp and then turned the music all the way up, drowning the attention in noise. He’d somehow finished eating already, and he and Wes set down their plates and started to dance, a horribly awkward collection of elbows and shoulder bumps that Letty almost couldn’t watch, but she had to watch, her love for her son expanding out of her heart and filling every corner of the small room. He’d done it. With Wes’s help he’d won, and they were celebrating together. When the song was over, she saw Alex lean in to thank him. They were a team, and even if she didn’t get any of the credit, Letty knew she was part of it too. She’d put him in that class, in that school; and now she’d moved into the district. He might have won with the help of his father, but she’d made it so that no one could take his victory away from him.
She ate slowly, leaning into Rick and watching the miniature dance floor fill up: first Alex and Wes, then Alex and Yesenia, then Carmen and Wes. Sara and Luna jumped in, Luna demanding to be spun until Sara fell onto the window seat, exhausted; then Luna clung to Alex’s arm until he finally picked her up and continued where Sara had left off. Letty might have jumped in too, but just then Alex changed the music to something slow and, taking that as her cue to do the dishes, she ducked out of the room. When she turned around, she saw that Carmen had followed her, her arms stacked high with the remaining plates.
“Thanks,” Letty said, taking them.
Carmen gestured to the living room, where Alex leaned over Yesenia, their noses touching.
“No puedo verlos así.” She couldn’t watch them like that; at least that’s what Letty thought she’d said.
“Me neither.” Letty shuddered and closed the door, while Carmen set the dishes on the counter. A long strand of hair fell across Carmen’s round face, and when she tucked it behind one ear in a quick, childish gesture, Letty realized just how young Carmen looked. Her skin was perfect, her face unlined even as she frowned.
“How old were you?” Letty asked, nodding toward the closed door, beyond which Yesenia danced.
“Catorce años,” Carmen said, turning on the water. She pushed up her sleeves and added dish soap to the filling sink.
Letty frowned. Fourteen? Carmen couldn’t have understood her question, she thought, and so she tried again: “When Yesenia was born? ¿Cuantos años tenías?”
“Sí, catorce años,” Carmen repeated. She met Letty’s eyes briefly before submerging the stack of plates in the steaming water. Watching her, Letty tried to remembered herself at fourteen. She’d been a freshman at Mission Hills, a little girl alone at lunch, before she’d met Sara, before she’d met Wes, before she’d found her place in the completely foreign world she’d been dropped into.
“Wow,” Letty said. “I was eighteen. And even then it felt impossible. My mom did everything.”
A dark shadow passed over Carmen’s face then, and Letty understood it had not been the same for her. She checked the door, to make sure it was closed.
“Es por eso que venimos aquí,” she whispered, and Letty wished, as she often had, that her parents hadn’t stopped speaking Spanish to her when she started kindergarten. It took complete focus to decode Carmen’s words, and still she wasn’t sure she understood.
“No entiendo,” she said. “What do you mean?”
Carmen returned to the sink. The water was hot enough to scald her hands, and Letty saw the skin of her inner wrists pink as she moved them in and out of the water, reaching for one plate and then another.
“Estaban locos,” she said finally, and then continued softly, her words in rhythm with the washing. Letty didn’t catch every word, but she understood that Carmen’s parents had been furious when she’d gotten pregnant. Falling down drunk the day she’d brought Yesenia home, her father had hurt the baby. Casi se murió, Letty heard: she almost died. But Carmen had taken her baby and run, wrapping tight the tiny, broken legs and riding two buses and a train to the border, where she’d crossed the river on foot. After that, she’d hitched rides all the way to Stanford Hospital, because someone had told her it was the best. The doctors there had saved her daughter’s life.
“How did you even survive?” Letty asked, after she’d gotten over the shock of the completely normal-looking superhero standing in her kitchen. She remembered the empty road outside Tijuana, the casket-ridden fence; tried to imagine a fourteen-year-old torn up from birth, walking the road with a newborn. She couldn’t. Her experience had been the extreme opposite, Maria Elena taking care of absolutely everything and leaving nothing for Letty to do. “How did you even feed yourself?”
The stack of clean plates dripped from the counter to the floor. Carmen glanced at the door again. She looked nervous.
“Trabajaba en el hospital,” she whispered. A doctor had arranged for her to work the graveyard shift cleaning the hospital, and she had the same job still. She cleaned that hospital like it was the palace of the pope, she said, for saving her tiny baby.
Carmen stepped over the growing puddle on the
floor and grabbed a dish towel, starting to dry. Letty had done nothing but listen, and she was suddenly embarrassed, standing in her own kitchen while Carmen did all the work. She found a second towel and grabbed the pile of utensils all at once, racing through the rest of the drying and putting the clean dishes away in the cabinets.
When everything was done, Carmen folded the dish towel and set it on the counter. She looked at the closed door and then back to Letty like she wanted to say something, but Letty understood without her having to say. Yesenia didn’t know. Not any of it.
“You don’t need to worry,” she said. “I won’t say anything.”
“Te lo agradesco,” Carmen said and gave her a hug before pushing the kitchen door open.
In the living room, the music was still slow. Rick held Luna, twirling her like a baby, and Alex and Yesenia sat in the window seat. Color from the Christmas lights mottled their faces. Alex leaned down until his forehead touched Yesenia’s, and they both closed their eyes at the same time.
Letty sighed. “What are we going to do about them?”
Carmen said nothing. There was nothing to say. Alex and Yesenia were happy, and in love, and if there was a time when either mother could have stopped it from happening, that time had long since passed.
Letty slipped down the hall and into the bathroom, wanting to avoid Rick and Wes for just a moment longer. In front of the mirror she took her time, applying lip gloss and adjusting her hair, and when she finally opened the door, Wes stood outside, leaning against the wall.
For a second she thought he was waiting for the bathroom, but when she stepped aside to let him through, he didn’t move. He’d been waiting for her. In his hands were both their champagne glasses, refilled to the brim. She took a long sip and braced herself for whatever he’d come to say.
“I feel like you’ve been avoiding me all night,” he said. He took a sip of his drink, and before she could think of how to respond, he pointed to a photo on the wall in front of him. “God, he was cute, wasn’t he?”
It was a photograph of Alex as a toddler, drinking from one of Enrique’s birdbaths. The bright blue sky and Alex’s round face were reflected on the surface of the water, his joyful expression doubled, and in the background Letty laughed, head back, mouth open.
“He was,” Letty said. “Hey—congrats on the win.”
Wes shook his head. “It was all Alex.”
“That’s not what he says,” Letty said. “For weeks I’ve been subjected to the intricacies of your brilliance over dinner.”
“He gives me more credit than I deserve.”
Letty took another sip of her drink. “Welcome to my life.”
Wes looked at her curiously, waiting for her to explain, but instead she drank her champagne in one long gulp and, in a surge of alcohol-induced courage, pulled him into the bedroom.
“Sit down,” she said, gesturing to the bed. She should have done this a long, long time ago. “I have something for you.”
From the shoe box under the bed she retrieved a fat envelope. It was covered in dirty fingerprints, and Letty realized all at once how Alex had found his father. She pointed to the marks, but Wes saw only his name and address on the front, where she’d written it over a decade before. He took the envelope and ripped it open along the edge.
Inside was a collection of photographs from the first year of Alex’s life. She’d put them in chronological order, with the date and a description written on the back of each one. For months after his birth she’d been meticulous, and she saw in her handwriting how much she meant to tell Wes—how she’d been trying, in her own impossible way, to explain. She hoped Wes saw it too.
He picked up the first one. It was a wrinkled mug shot of Alex in a blue and pink striped hat, taken in the hospital, just minutes after he was born. Even then, he looked exactly like his father. Wes turned the picture over, unable to look. On the back she’d written the time and place of his birth, his weight, and his Apgar scores.
“He was perfect,” Wes said, and Letty didn’t know if he was talking about the picture or about his scores, but she nodded, agreeing.
“He was.”
Wes flipped the picture back over and held it just inches from his face, as if trying to catch a whiff of Alex’s newborn smell.
“I miss him,” he whispered. “At night I dream about him, six years old with skinned knees, crying, and then he becomes one of my patients, dying, and I wake up sweating. Every night a different age.”
It made Letty feel sick, what she’d taken away from him, but there was nothing she could do, no way to bring back Alex at six, eight, ten, twelve. So instead she sat down beside Wes and started at the beginning, talking him quietly through each photograph. She told him about the way Alex had lunged at his first bite of rice cereal, about the fall after his first step, and how he didn’t try again for another month. She told him everything she could remember, but there was so much she didn’t know, and she wished Maria Elena had been there to fill in the gaps. Maria Elena knew everything.
When she finished, Wes put the photographs carefully back in the envelope and looked up, holding her gaze.
“Maybe we should try,” he said quietly. “Maybe it’s the best thing—for all of us.”
From the living room, Christmas music drifted down the hall. She imagined a burning fire, a big tree in a big window, the kind of home and family she’d wanted as a child, long before she’d gone to Mission Hills, or met Wes, or had Alex. She’d loved Wes. It wasn’t a far stretch to imagine that she could love him again. They could have a good life together. And it would be the right thing to do for Alex; it would make up, if only a little bit, for the landslide of wrongs she’d done throughout his short life.
But just then the music turned off, and when she looked up, Rick stood in the doorway, a sleeping Luna in his arms.
“I’m sorry,” he said, startled. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
Luna slipped from his elbows to his forearms, and he jostled her up. Her head flopped back, mouth gaping open.
“You’re not interrupting,” Letty said, jumping up, and even though she didn’t look at Wes, she could imagine the expression on his face—wounded, incredulous, confused. She pulled down the covers on Luna’s bed, and when she turned back, neither Rick nor Wes had moved. The muscles in Rick’s arms were taut under the weight of her daughter; on the bed, Wes sat with knuckles white, clutching the envelope of photos.
Oh, God, what was she doing? Looking at them both, she was reminded of her mother in Mexico, buried in feathers and glass and the weight of having to choose. Letty had to choose now too, and either way she would lose.
Taking Luna out of Rick’s arms, she tucked her into bed and pulled the covers up tight. From the living room she heard Sara calling her, trying to say good-bye, and she looked at Rick, and then Wes, and then Rick again.
“I guess that’s it,” she said, finally, escaping into the hall. “I think this party’s officially over.”
They followed her onto the front porch, where she said good-bye to everyone at once. When the last car had pulled onto the main road, Alex kissed her cheek and went to bed, but Letty didn’t want to go inside. The cold night air was numbing, and she sank down onto the steps.
Christmas morning was only a few hours away.
She had stockings to fill, presents to wrap. It would be no use to try to sleep now. Leaning against the railing, she took a long breath and closed her eyes, listening to the cars in the distance, and then to the barn owls, and then, for a long time after, the quiet.
Alex and Yesenia were still high on Christmas, draped in new clothes and shoes and backpacks, when they met at the top of the pedestrian bridge on January 5, the first day back at school. They would tell their mothers what they’d done after Yesenia was settled in and doing well, when it would be too late to pull her out. So for now, the secret was still theirs alone. Yesenia tried to hide her smile, just as Alex had tried to do on his first day at Mission Hills. But her
happiness escaped her eyes, those deep black orbs taking in the sky and then Alex and then the sky again, and in her gaze he felt her joy envelop him and wondered if the sky could feel it too.
She looked beautiful. Carmen had bought her a fuzzy pink sweater for Christmas, tight in all the right places, a belt with a symbol of some fancy brand that Alex could never remember, and dark jeans long enough to cover up most of her orthopedic shoes. She’d fixed her hair the way Alex liked best, long and straight with the ends curled under and the red stripe in front held up by a diamond-studded pin, so that he could kiss her without getting a mouthful of hair. He kissed her now, and she smelled good, different—as if she’d guessed the perfume cloud at Mission Hills, though probably she’d just gotten something new in her stocking.
“Last kiss,” Yesenia said. “At school I’m your cousin, remember?”
Alex frowned. “Only if anyone asks. We’ll give it a few days, and if no one asks, I’m telling everyone you’re my girlfriend. I don’t want my friends hitting on you.”
“They won’t hit on me.”
“You’ll see,” Alex said. “The guys here have this thing for pretty girls.”
Yesenia smiled and took his hand, and they started the long walk to school. They talked about Christmas, Yesenia describing her gifts and the movie they’d seen, on Carmen’s first Christmas off, ever; Alex told her about the ecstatic mayhem that had ensued when he and Luna had pulled the pretend plane tickets out of their stockings. As they got closer to the school, their conversation shifted to Mission Hills, and Alex told Yesenia everything he could think of: where he sat in Mr. Everett’s class and the latest developments in his science project (he’d gone to the lab with his father three times over break) and who his greatest competition was and also that Mr. Everett disallowed competition; he told her what they had just finished reading in English and what they were about to start and about the kids in his classes, Nathan and Bobby and Sophia, who he’d already decided would be her best friend—they both liked salt water, wasn’t that enough?—and about the piles of homework and the weight of the textbooks.