— The Distance Between Us —
Reyna Grande

20

A COUPLE OF WEEKS after we’d gotten back from Mexico, Mago said, “Gaby and I are looking into renting an apartment together.”

“Really?” I asked, looking away from the TV where I had been watching Anne of Green Gables on the Disney Channel. “You aren’t leaving me, are you?”

She shook her head and threw a pillow at me. “How can you think that? Of course I’ll take you with me. We can leave here and finally be in a place where we can be happy.”

I threw the pillow back at her so that she wouldn’t see how relieved I was. I knew she had forgiven me for the fight we’d had in Mexico. She said she understood, but for a second there, I thought she was going to tell me she was leaving without me.

I turned back to the TV and continued to follow Anne Shirley on her adventures. I wanted to be like Anne, strong, adventurous, pretty, and smart. I wanted to have her imagination and her way with words. But most of all, I wanted to live in a beautiful place like she did. Like me, Anne had lost her parents when she was little, and as a little orphan, her childhood had been very difficult. But Anne got lucky when she was adopted by a brother and sister who let Anne be who she wanted to be, who learned to love her and praise her for her talents, and who were not afraid to tell her that they were proud of her.

Sometimes, I would imagine getting adopted by Marilla and Matthew, too. I knew they would have been proud of my accomplishments. Like my latest one—where I had been chosen to be the assistant drum major of Franklin’s marching band now that I was in my senior year. Since the drum major was a Jehovah’s Witness, and his religion didn’t allow him to participate in most of our events, it was me who designed the field formations to the music Mr. Quan had chosen for us to learn. It was me who led the band to second place in a competition held at Wilson High School. It was me who led the band at the 1992 Highland Park Christmas Parade on Figueroa Street. Even though the parade route was only a ten-minute walk from my house, my father had not come to see me march.

This is why I was jealous of Anne. Because, unlike me, she had people who noticed even the smallest of her accomplishments.

The weeks passed with no news about an apartment. That spring semester of 1993, I enrolled in track and field. I didn’t really like running, but Mago did. On the weekends we would go to Franklin to jog around the football field, and she always left me in the dust. I thought that if I practiced every day at school, I would get faster so that I could keep up with my sister. So far, track and field hadn’t made me faster, but it had gotten me a boyfriend!

His name was Steve, and he was two years younger than me. He was fifteen, and I was seventeen. But he was so cute I didn’t care what anyone said about me dating a freshman. Even though he was younger, Steve tried to act older than me. He would tell me he wanted us to make love, to be each other’s firsts. I would tell him no, absolutely not! I wanted to be a virgin when I got married, as Mago wanted to. Besides, I told him that soon he and I might not be together anymore. If Mago rented an apartment too far from Franklin, I knew I would have to transfer, never mind that I was in my last semester of high school. I would follow my Mago to the ends of the earth if I had to.

A week later, while we were getting ready for bed, Mago said that she and Gaby had found an apartment in La Habra. I didn’t know where that was, and how far from school it would be, but before I could tell her that anywhere was fine with me she said, “Nena, I won’t be able to take you with me.”

I sat down on my bed and looked at my feet, not knowing what to say. I thought about my quinceañera, about receiving communion when I wasn’t supposed to. Here it is, I thought. Judgment Day. Please, don’t take away my Mago, God. Punish me in another way, if you must. But don’t take her from me.

“Why?” was all I managed to say.

“The manager doesn’t allow extra people in the apartment. Gaby already has her son, and her aunt is also going to be living with us so that she can babysit. With me that makes four.”

“But I could share a room with you, just like we’ve always done.”

“I know, but they won’t allow more than four people in the apartment.” She stood up from her bed and came to sit with me. “Besides, Nena, you have two and a half months to go before you finish high school. It wouldn’t be right to pull you out now and transfer you to another school. I’m sorry, Nena. I really wanted to take you with me.”

“Then stay,” I said, clutching her hand. “Like you said, I’m almost done with school. In June I could start looking for a job, and we can rent a place together. We can even take Betty with us. Be a family.”

She stared at the floor and shook her head. “I can’t stand being here anymore. I feel that I’m going to go crazy. I want to live my life in peace, do what I want without having to explain anything to anyone.”

I thought about her new boyfriend, Victor, whom she had met at La Opinión. I knew she hated it that Papi didn’t let her go out much. Now that Carlos had married and left home, Papi had been even more vigilant with us girls. I knew Victor was one of the reasons why Mago was so desperate to get out. Like Carlos, she was also in love, too in love to put up with our father’s restrictions and house rules. But how could she not wait for me to graduate so that we could leave together? She put her arm around me, and we stayed like that for a long time. She didn’t say when she was leaving and I didn’t ask. I kept hoping that maybe, just maybe, things would change.

A few days later, I knew that it was for real when Mago broke the news to Papi. “You’re such an ungrateful daughter. After everything I have done for you, ¿así es cómo me pagas?” He said that she just wanted to be able to go out with as many men as she wanted without anyone telling her what was right or wrong. He banged his fists on the table and stood up. “If you leave this house,” he told Mago, “you will be dead to me. I won’t ever want to see you again.”

Mago didn’t say anything. We stayed at the kitchen table long after Papi had left.

“Stay with us, Mago,” I said, grabbing her hand. “Stay with me.”

Every day I would come home from school, wondering if that was the day she would leave. But in the evening, Mago would come home as she always had. Papi didn’t talk to her, but by the second week it was as if nothing had happened. Mago didn’t bring up the subject anymore and Papi ended the silent treatment. All of us even went out to dinner at Papi’s favorite restaurant—La Perla in East L.A.—when I received my acceptance letter from the University of California, Irvine, which I would be attending in the fall. Although I knew that a university was much more expensive than a community college, my guidance counselor had encouraged me to apply to universities. He’d said that I couldn’t waste my good grades. All the extracurricular activities I had done, like marching band, creative writing, art, and track and field, would only help me to get in. He’d been right.

Mago told me how proud she was of me. Papi didn’t say anything like that, but the fact that he took us to his favorite restaurant said a lot, especially because he hardly ever took us anywhere. I loved the murals at La Perla. My favorite was one of a little fishing village. I didn’t know what magic the artist had used to make his murals change from day to night as the lights hanging on the ceiling changed color from red to blue. We sat there and listened to the mariachi, and I sang along with them. Papi sang along to “Volver, Volver.” I looked at his smile and I smiled, too. Nothing made him happier than to listen to the songs of Vicente Fernández. Mago and I sang along and I got lost in the beauty of the murals at La Perla. I imagined living in the perfect little village with all my family. Always together.

Two days later, I came home to an empty bedroom.

If I had known she was leaving that day, I would have stayed home, convinced her not to go. But she had not said a word when I left for school. Instead, after hanging out with Steve after school, listening to him harass me yet again to have sex with him, I came home at four thirty, an hour before Papi got back from work, enough time to tidy up the house and pretend I had come home a lot earlier.

But when I opened the door of the bedroom, the first thing I saw was the empty closet. All of my sister’s clothes were gone, all except for a pair of overall shorts I often borrowed from her. A farewell present? I dropped onto her bed. I looked up at all the posters she had taped on the wall, photos she had torn from magazines, many of which were of Adela Noriega and Thalía, her favorite actresses ever since she had watched the soap opera Quinceañera. I couldn’t believe she would leave like that, without telling me goodbye. I thought about when my mother left with the wrestler without saying goodbye. Perhaps, like my mother, Mago didn’t want to see my tears. Maybe she thought it was better this way. But I didn’t think coming home to an empty closet was better than saying goodbye and watching her go out the door.

I heard the front door open and close. My father was home, and I hadn’t done my chores. I rushed out to the kitchen to wash the dishes. My hands shook as I picked them up to lather them. My eyes burned from crying.

He came into the kitchen and grabbed a beer, not saying anything to me. I’d gotten used to him ignoring me. And honestly, I preferred that to the times when he did pay attention, because when he did, it was only to insult me or reprimand me for something or other. But that day I knew I had to break the silence. I just didn’t know how to tell him that Mago was gone. I waited until he took a drink from his beer, and before he disappeared into his bedroom, I blurted out the news.

“Mago se fue,” I said.

He turned around to look at me. I shut off the faucet and dried my hands with a towel.

“What?”

“She’s gone.”

He turned around and headed to my bedroom. He stood there in the middle, just as I had done earlier, and looked at the empty closet, the empty dresser drawers. He glanced at Mago’s posters on the wall, the only reminder that she had lived there.

“You’re not allowed to see your sister anymore. If she wants to leave, que se vaya. But you,” he said as he pointed a finger at me, “will have nothing to do with her.” I stood in the room, listening to him say that my sister was an ungrateful daughter. “After everything I’ve done for her, this is how she repays me? If she wants to go and live a corrupted life, then I’ll start thinking of her as being dead to me,” he said. He talked about Carlos, about how disappointed he was in him, and now, in Mago. He looked at me and shook his head. He looked at me as if I had disappointed him, too, even though I was still there, with him.

I wanted to tell him that I would be different, that I had seen with my own eyes the poverty he had helped us escape. I had seen with my own eyes the reason he had been such a tyrant about school. I wanted to tell him that I would do what Mago and Carlos hadn’t done. I would go to UC Irvine, and get my degree. I would be somebody he could be proud of.

But he said to me, “You can forget all about going to that university. You’re going to be a failure, too, just like them, so don’t even bother.” Then he walked away.

“No, Papi, please!” I begged. But he slammed his bedroom door shut.

I went back to my room. A room which was now only mine. He isn’t serious, I told myself. He’s just angry with Mago. He’ll change his mind tomorrow. He will. He knows how important this is for me, for the family. He will let me go. I got under the covers of my sister’s bed and buried my nose in the pillow, trying to drown myself in her favorite scent—Beautiful by Estée Lauder. I thought about Abuelita Chinta, my mother, and now my sister. The void inside me became bigger and bigger, as I realized that the women I loved most in my life were far away.

My graduation came and went, and true to his word, Papi wouldn’t allow me to send in my paperwork to UC Irvine. Since I was still underage, it required his personal and financial information, and his signature, which he refused to give me. I was too much of a coward to falsify his signature. I was too much of a coward to fight him on it. I fought him instead about Mago. I couldn’t win two fights, but maybe, I might win the one that mattered to me more. Papi threatened to beat me if I dared to step out of the house to go see her. I hoped with time he would change his mind about that, too.

Then the news broke that Carlos’s wife was pregnant, and a month later, Mago confessed that she, too, was expecting. This pushed my father over the edge. And it terrified me to the core. Now that Mago was going to have her own baby to hold and cherish, there would be no room for me in her life.

“You’ll always be my Nena,” Mago said to me over the phone. When I didn’t say anything she said, “I’m going to go pick you up and take you somewhere. You tell your father that I’m going to go visit you, and he can’t do anything about it.”

“You know he’ll get angry,” I said.

“Who gives a damn?” she said.

Several times during the week I approached my father to tell him Mago was coming to pick me up on Sunday, and that I was going out with her whether he liked it or not. But just as I was about to say it, I would get choked up with fear, and I would turn around and go back to my room.

That summer was when my father’s drinking worsened. Following my mother’s suggestion, I’d been selling my father’s empty beer cans at the recycling center. I could always tell how much he’d drunk that week by the money I would get. The previous week, I had gotten thirty dollars. That was the most I’d ever gotten. Lately, in the morning, I would wake to the sound of a beer can being opened. My father had now started to drink before he left for work, and when he returned, he would drink all evening before going to bed. He argued with Mila over everything, even about her weekly visits to her children. He would tell her that her place was here, at home. Mila’s older son was legally blind, and Mila had to make sure he got the help he needed. Her second son and Cindy had troubles of their own. I couldn’t blame Mila for always wanting to be over there, by their side. My father didn’t see it that way. He hated her family because they had never accepted him. They had always blamed him for breaking up Mila’s first marriage. Although I had never seen him hit Mila, there were times when I could almost see the urge inside him. He would hit me instead.

True to her word, Mago came over on Sunday. I told Mila that Mago was downstairs, and she didn’t think it was a good idea. “Your dad’s going to get mad,” she said as she watched me head toward their bedroom.

When he didn’t open the door, I mustered the nerve to open it myself. He was sitting on a chair looking out the window with a beer in his hand. I went in with hesitant steps. This was foreign territory to me, having never been allowed to spend much time in their bedroom. He was listening to his favorite song by Los Tigres del Norte, “La Jaula de Oro.”

Even though the music wasn’t too loud, he acted as if he hadn’t heard me coming in.

“¿Qué quieres?” he said when I came to stand right next to him.

“Mago is downstairs. She wants to take me out.”

“Tell her to leave. I already told you that I don’t want her coming here. I don’t want her seeing you.”

“But she’s my sister!”

“She chose to leave, didn’t she? If she really cared about you, she wouldn’t have left.”

I started to cry then, like I always did with him. He always knew how to say things that would hurt me to the core. I hated crying. I hated letting him see how much power he had over me. To make me cry just like that, without even laying a finger on me. “She’s my sister and I want to see her,” I said.

“¡Ya te dije que no!”

I started walking away, determined to disobey him. “Well, I’m going anyway. She’s all I have, and you can’t keep me away from her!”

Just as I got to the door, he called my name. I stopped and turned around. “If you go out with her,” he said, “don’t you ever come back here.”

“Fine!”

I rushed out of the room, past the dining room, the kitchen, out the back door. This is what I needed! Now that he’s kicked me out, Mago will be forced to take me with her. I can finally be with her! I was halfway down the stairs, and I could see Mago’s green Tercel parked in front of the apartments. Suddenly, I felt as if my hair was tearing right out of my scalp. “You aren’t going anywhere!” Papi yelled, yanking my hair so hard I fell over backward. I reached up to hold on to my hair. He tightened his grip on it and dragged me up the stairs. I screamed for Mago. The last thing I saw before he dragged me into the apartment was Mago getting out of the car.

“Mago! Mago!” I yelled over and over again. My father slammed me against the kitchen wall and began to beat me with his fists. Mila stood by the door of the living room. “Get my sister,” I yelled to her. “Get my sister!” She turned and ran out of the house.

The beating continued and his fist connected with my nose. I covered my face, trying to protect myself. I looked down at my shirt and saw drops of blood landing on it. Where is she? Why won’t she come and stop him? Take me away from him? “Mago! Mago!” I yelled. There was a rushing in my ear as his fists fell on me, hard as rocks.

“¡Ya déjála!” a voice said. Suddenly, the blows stopped.

I opened my eyes. I was on the floor, crying. My father stood above me. Mila walked back into the kitchen, and I asked her where Mago was. It wasn’t her voice that I had heard. “Why won’t she come?” I said.

“She left,” Mila said.

I shook my head, unable to believe what Mila had said. It couldn’t be true. How could Mago have left when she knew he was hitting me? No, no. There has to be a mistake. “Mago!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. “Mago!”

But no one answered.

“¿Ya ves?” Papi said. “That’s how much she cares.” I glanced at the door, waiting for my sister to come, but she didn’t. I looked up at my father, at his fists, and at that moment I just wanted him to keep going, to keep beating me and beating me with those hands that were the same shape as my own. Beat me until I could no longer think anymore, until they made me disappear, cease to exist. She left. She left. She left.

He went back to his room with another beer in his hand. Mila helped me to stand up.

“You should understand,” Mila said to me as I headed to my bedroom. “Your sister is pregnant. If she had come up here to defend you, who knows what he would have done to her. He could have hurt the baby.”

I left her in the kitchen and made my way to my room to lock myself in.