TWENTY-NINE
The morning before my flight, I call Freddy and Alicia to tell them I’m going to NYU. They’re proud of me, they say. I wonder why exactly, since I hardly know them, but I promise to call them when I come home for winter break. As I’m hanging up, Lorena walks into my bedroom and sits on my bed. She’s enrolled in nursing school and works as a waitress at a Mexican restaurant downtown. She says she has to wear those ridiculous frilly and embroidered dresses, but the money is good. She and Juanga, who now works in the Macy’s makeup department, are planning to get an apartment together in Logan Square as soon as they’ve saved enough for a deposit. I guess the three of us are desperate to move on with our lives.
“Can I help you pack?” Lorena says as she looks around my messy room. She’s wearing tiny black shorts and a gray tank top with a silver dollar sign on it. I’m really going to miss her fashion choices. She’s finally dyed her hair back to brown, like I’ve been telling her for years. I’ve never seen her look so pretty.
“No, it’s okay. Mostly everything is ready to go. I just have to clean up,” I say. “I know I’m going to sound like an old geezer saying this, but I’m really proud of you. You’re going to be an amazing nurse. You have always known how to take care of me.”
“Oh my God, shut up. Stop it. You’re going to make me ruin my makeup.”
“I’m serious. I love you, and I don’t know what I’m going to do without you. I’ll probably call you, like, ten times a day.”
“You’ll be too busy with your new fabulous life. You won’t even remember me.” Lorena puts her face inside her shirt. I have only seen her cry three times before—when she fell and split her head open in the fourth grade, the day she told me about her dad, and right after I got out of the hospital.
“Lies. All lies. You’ll see.” I start crying, too, but a sliver of me wonders if what she’s saying is true.
“I should go now. I have a shift in two hours,” she says. “If I get there a minute late, my boss will probably fire me. He’s such an asshole.”
“I love you,” I say again, looking at my dirty floor. A roach crawls under my bed, but I don’t bother killing it.
“I love you, too,” she says. “Try not to forget about me.”
I hug her one last time at the door, then watch her walk away into the blinding afternoon sun. I can’t help but laugh at her stick legs in her ridiculous short shorts. Lorena has never had any shame about her body. Now that I think about it, she’s never really had much shame about anything, which is partly why I love her.
—
Apá is wearing the same faded blue shirt as the day he found me. Amá must have figured out a way to get the stains out because she hates throwing anything away. For months, I’ve tried to forget what happened, but it comes back in flashes and specks, no matter how much I try to drown it out. Apá has never once mentioned it to me, but I can see it in his eyes. There’s so much I wish we could both un-see.
Amá was working that night, and the house was quiet, except for my sobbing and the song I had on repeat—“Todo Cambia” by Mercedes Sosa. I became obsessed the first time I heard it. Everything in the song is true—everything changes, for better or worse, whether we like it or not. Sometimes it’s beautiful, and sometimes it fills us with terror. Sometimes both.
Cambia el más fino brillante
De mano en mano su brillo
Cambia el nido el pajarillo
Cambia el sentir un amante
Cambia el rumbo el caminante
Aunque esto le cause daño
Y así como todo cambia
Que yo cambie no es extraño
I heard Apá at my door when I made my first cut. “Mija,” he said quietly. “Mija, ¿estás bien?” He was supposed to be helping tío Bigotes with his car, but I guess he had finished early. He must have felt like something was wrong, because, unlike Amá, he never bothers me when I’m alone in my room. I tried to quiet myself by pressing my face against my pillow, but I couldn’t. The noise came against my will. My body wouldn’t let me silence it.
“Mija, open the door! What are you doing? Please open the door. Open it for your father, please.” He tried pushing it open, but I had pressed my bed against it. I heard the panic in his voice, and I felt terrible for hurting him but couldn’t force myself up. I had never loved him like I did at that moment.
My life didn’t flash before my eyes. All I saw was the picture of me and Olga, in front of Mamá Jacinta’s house with her arm around my neck. I could even hear the birds chirping.
—
O’Hare is brimming with frazzled people in a hurry. We try to move out of the way as the crowds shuffle past us, but there’s nowhere to turn. “I’ll have to board soon,” I tell my parents. The security line looks endless.
Apá puts his hand on my back, and Amá begins to weep. How can I leave them like this? How can I just live my life and leave them behind? What kind of person does that? Will I ever forgive myself?
“We love you, Julia. We love you so much,” Amá says, and presses some money into my hand. “Para si se te antoja algo,” she says, in case I crave something when I get to New York. “Remember you can come back whenever you want.”
My eyes are faucets now, but it doesn’t matter. If there’s any place on earth where people should be allowed to cry as they watch their lives transform before them, it’s the airport. In a way, it’s kind of like purgatory, isn’t it? An in-between place.
“I have something to give you.” I crouch down to look through my backpack. Amá and Apá look confused.
“Here.” I hand Apá his drawing of Amá in her long dress in front of the fountain. “It’s beautiful, and you should have it,” I tell him. “I wish you’d draw again, Apá. Maybe you can draw a picture of me sometime?” I smile and wipe my face with the back of my hand.
Apá closes his eyes and nods.
—
I wake up to the New York skyline. I thought Chicago was big, but New York is vast, enormous, overwhelming. I wonder what my life will be like there, who I will become. Connor says we’ll see each other again. I’ll miss him, but neither one of us knows what next year will be like.
Looking at all the cities and towns below reminds me of borders, which remind me of Esteban and his perfect white teeth. Part of me wonders if he will ever cross over here. It’s his dream to live in the U.S., but I almost wish he won’t. Even if he makes it alive, this place is not the promised land for everyone.
I know I’ve come a long way, and though it’s hard, I’m trying to give myself credit for that. If I think about it, just a few months ago, I was ready to die, and now here I am on a plane to New York City all by myself. I honestly don’t even know how I was able to pick myself back up, and sometimes I’m not sure how long it will last. I hope it’s forever, but how can I know for certain? Nothing is ever guaranteed. What if my brain fails me once again? I suppose the only thing I can do is keep going.
I still have nightmares about Olga. Sometimes she’s a mermaid again, other times she’s holding her baby, which is often not a baby at all. Usually, it’s a rock, a fish, or even a sack of rags. Though it’s slowed, my guilt still grows like branches. I wonder when it’ll stop, feeling bad for something that’s not my fault. Who knows? Maybe never.
In some ways, I think that part of what I’m trying to accomplish—whether Amá really understands it or not—is to live for her, Apá, and Olga. It’s not that I’m living life for them, exactly, but I have so many choices they’ve never had, and I feel like I can do so much with what I’ve been given. What a waste their journey would be if I just settled for a dull, mediocre life. Maybe one day they’ll realize that.
When I told Mr. Ingman about the responsibility I felt to Olga, to my family, he told me I had to write about it. In fact, he pretty much forced me to do it then and there. That day I sat in his classroom for nearly two hours, crying over my notebook, smearing the ink on the pages. Mr. Ingman never said a word the whole time. He just touched my shoulder and then sat at his desk until I finished. Though most of it came gushing out, it was the hardest thing I’ve ever written. At the end, I had eight handwritten pages, so sloppy, only I could ever read them. That’s what became my college essay.
I pull out Olga’s ultrasound picture from my journal before we land. At times, it looks like an egg. Occasionally, it looks like an eye. The other day I was convinced I could see it pulsing. How can I ever give this to my parents, something else to love, something dead? These last two years I combed and delved through my sister’s life to better understand her, which meant I learned to find pieces of myself—both beautiful and ugly—and how amazing is it that I hold a piece of her right here in my hands?