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You will recall the old wooden table and the three oak chairs, the sound they make when the imperfect legs drag across the cold linoleum, like a happiness that lost its footing, trying something new each time to find it. You’ll reminisce about the coldest Novembers, the trees losing each of their leaves, the little heaters with their orange hearts glowing throughout the house, the sun radiating whittled promises and pacts it makes with birds from high in the sky. You will remember the day your Uncle Claudio came home. His fistfuls of newspaper, his arms that were grayed by experience, by peacocks, ganas, pyramids and sacred hearts. Your grandmother’s laughter, too. Filling her throat like a mountain of moths, then, filling the kitchen and all of the rooms, so much fluttering, so much wingspan. The fluttering that was hope. Each laugh with a set of its own bold wings. The day the whole world changed—the beginning, the middle and yes, of course, naturally, the end.
You will tell your first love all about her. About the swan. About your grandmother. About Becky and your uncle. About the little crooked table with its pantheon of tablecloths, so many different hues and prints, each fabric folded neatly into impeccable squares in the hall closet by the Saint Michael painting. About how everything, soon, not long after your uncle with his big hog hands and his mud voice came, as you’d feared, went horribly, irreparably wrong.
Sometimes, later, when there is hardness happening inside of you, when your face explodes into ten thousand splatters, when you don’t know what to do next or what has happened or how you will ever resolve it, you will think of the swan, the soft chatter like an easy gravel falling onto a long road, unpaved, simple and difficult and necessary—a road all boys, or boys like you, must walk.
One day when you tell your girl about the swan, you will stand there by the cabinet where your grandmother keeps all the good pots and pans, the ones her sisters gave her the Christmas your grandfather died, long before you were made. This conversation with your girl will occur long after your grandmother has also died, six or seven years after that fact, and you will look at Ophelia, noting the stem-brown flecks of her eyes, like a field of bone grass or fallen pecan leaves, thinking of the sweetness that Ophelia carries, all jasmine and the eucalyptus of searching, recalling your grandmother toiling in the little room, her hands over the sink by which you and your love stand, washing dishes or putting away forks, the wrinkles of your Buela’s hands wiping the counter with the lemon cleanser she liked, the yellow rag in her palm like a wrinkled petal from a strangled flower. Recalling the hard clangs and racket of the pots being moved after washing or before a meal, the big swan crossing paths again and the painting of Saint Michael overcoming your demon, you will say, “Yes, I miss her.” At this point, your voice has whittled itself down to a twig, so thin that it’s nothing and all of what you have. Your love will understand how this means you are alive, and she will hold you about the waist, and it will be the first time in many years that riots of hot tears will exit your eyes. “Yes, I love you,” you will say to your love, whisper to her in the soft leaf of her neck, her heart entering you from behind. You are a memory, she will pull you to her, and the pulse that steps inside you is your song. You name the swan Maribel, and you think that’s a lovely name for a white bird that is lighter than smoke.
At the little wooden table with its crooked legs, you watch your grandmother’s coffee swirl as she hears your uncle’s big plans for you and your fists. So many turns, so many little revolutions. You lose count of how many times the spoon circles. But by then, the sugar has all dissolved and your uncle is still telling his story.
“Like boxing, Mom. I’m thinking Abraham, I could get him into boxing. In no time, he could go pro. Pro, Papo. You hear what I’m saying? Big time. Cash, Daddy. I’m thinking today is the day.”
You don’t want to look up.
Your uncle’s voice is shining, its own pilfered fuel hot and marvelous. His voice is larger than itself, greater than the greatest oaks, larger than the tower in the very center of your city. And you want it to stop.
“Yes!” Your grandmother has bitten the bait. She drops her mug onto the saucer. It clangs, and she praises God.
Your uncle glances at his phone. “Or tomorrow. We should jump on this tomorrow,” he says, slurping a spoonful of meat and broth. The broth dribbles on his chin, and your grandmother hands him her napkin. “I gotta handle some stuff, but tomorrow. We start this. First day of the rest of our lives!”
His teeth are as big as stones, and at the table, beside him, your plate scraped bare, your teeth press into themselves. It is a friction you loathe. Your fists swell, and the swan is nowhere to be found. You stare at your grandmother’s grin, a sweet, simple happiness, but you wish she’d take back her napkin and wipe it away. Wipe it off before it crumbles. You don’t want him to see that a piece of you, a slim mote of care somewhere in the flat swamps of your gut, wants you to believe in him.
Your grandmother stares at you, anticipation in her eyes.
“Sounds good,” you utter. Your arms arching, sore and bitter from the pressing, from the tears.
“Sounds good? Real damn good,” he adds, lifting himself from the table, occupied by the screen of his phone.
Your voice tells you, Calm down. All the muscles around your heart begin to scream.
6
In the morning, while your grandmother gets ready for work, you stand in the hall and stare at your uncle, who has slept on the sofa, his shoes strewn across the rug.
“Shhhhh,” she whispers. “Your uncle, he’s asleep.” With her chin, she points, her hands loaded with foil and spoons.
The house is quiet.
Three tacos wrapped in foil, which are warm in your palm as if they were alive and had heartbeats that gave heat and kindness and love. She hands them to you and kisses your temple. You place the tacos in your backpack, behind a book, a notebook and the homework you forgot to do.
It doesn’t make sense. Looking at your uncle, his thickset chest rising, the soft eagle blanket from Mexico pulled over his forehead, you wonder why he isn’t up, isn’t helping, isn’t with his eyes buried in a newspaper searching for work. Instead, he’s asleep as your grandmother tiptoes around him, readying herself for work, leaving his tacos in the microwave.
You wonder what he did last night.
Your arms are sore, all the muscles of your chest, too. But your hands want to drop a glass or rattle the pans, flip on the TV or knock firmly on his skull. Anything. Purposefully. A reminder that this isn’t the way it should be. Something to make this right, even, level. So you try to conjure some other event to occupy your mind, some story or song or one of the Greek myths you are learning at school that can absorb your thoughts from the anger staring you down. But Icarus is not interesting today. And Medusa cannot turn this to stone. Nothing comes to mind.
A mute rain falls. The road shines. It is vague and soft and noiseless. You stand by the door. Your backpack tugs down on your shoulders, heavier now than you ever remember—books and notebook paper, your three tacos, your father and the steep, shivering fear that you will bend, ending up like him or your uncle, a bad man with a bad life, suffering and rage and destructiveness.
From the glass door, you watch your grandmother dart out to Becky’s old red truck. She holds an egg-blue scarf over her hair and a clump of foil in her hands. She wears happiness and waves as she jumps into the open waiting door. The rain makes the whole world fuzzy.
Your phone buzzes: Going to read you a letter.
The sound of it places a small joy inside of you. So you sit at the edge of your bed and think of a box of letters. Ophelia’s most valued possession. Once Ophelia told you about this box, these letters—from her mother—they were everything. Reading them, penning responses, holding them in the emptiness of her hands, the ones attached to her arms and the other pair, too, the hands that grew inside her heart, which allowed her to hold things and keep them.
Beneath her bed Ophelia keeps her stash of envelopes. Each one from Afghanis
tan. After she’d read one a dozen times, she’d place it in this box, reading it again when sadness or other afflictions sat on her shoulders like a pallet of bricks. Sometimes she’d just sit with the tin box of letters on her bed, beside her or perched on her belly, balanced there, as if holding them near her is enough to quell the fusillade occurring inside.
The rain subsides. But it falls still, slovenly, striking the weak glass in a slow patter. You wonder what it would be like to lay on the bed with Ophelia. Would it solve everything, anything at all? To hold her, to weave your fingers inside the lace of her fingers, and the sky, would it still be gray? Would she ever let you get that close?
When Ophelia texts, your bones breathe new life: Aunt’s truck won’t start. Walk to school??
“Yeah! Hell yeah!!” you want to respond, but instead, you hold your excitement like a pup that wiggles wildly, wanting to free himself from its tethers. Instead, you wait a couple of seconds, then reply: Yup yup see you in ten.
It takes less than that for you to run three streets over to Ophelia’s aunt’s house. Each stride, your backpack smacks your spine and threatens to tackle you from behind. You wear a bulky black hoodie, the cotton absorbing most of the raindrops, absorbing them, pulling them in, keeping them so that the fabric grows increasingly wet. Pummeling your back, the weight of the backpack is enough to crush you, to topple over every solid happening. Like a paddle, your heart beats in your throat, a long wooden oar slapping at water. The rain has died down. But still, the puddles jettison water upward, soaking your pant legs and shoes and socks, splashing you each time your foot strikes the sidewalk.
At the corner before Ophelia’s house, you stop and catch your breath, which slips from you now in thrusts and hissing. In November, in the part of the world where you’re from, the trees blacken, have lost nearly all of their leaves, and what’s left are the dark sinews, the fat mired trunks that split off into a hundred besmirched limbs, not so heavy looking now as they jut into the sky.
Ophelia waits on the porch, thumbing through a book. You pull out the umbrella you’ve stashed in your bag, which is apple-orchard red, a single burst of color on this gray street with its leaflessness and wet worry and the puddles that grow larger with every breath of the dark clouds. It isn’t a long walk to campus, but it’s a good one, because it gives you time to talk.
“Thanks.” She hugs you.
Because your hoodie is wet, she giggles, and her smile is a valise in which so much is held. You hold out the red umbrella, and she steps under it. As you walk, she reads to you.
So you walk slowly.
Some days you talk about school—teachers and fights and homework and things she read in English, her favorite subject—but other days, you walk in silence, the worlds inside each of you loud enough to fetter tongues.
Today, though, she reads to you. A letter from her mother. A letter about rain.
It’s raining here at the base. Her voice ardent. You listen carefully enough, and you can hear its light. Each word emerges from her throat with purpose and fuel, glimmering, throwing its colors, coming together in awesome formations of meaning and delight and assemblies of thought, constellations of hunger and comfort.
Today she reads a letter about happiness and truth and rain.
M’ija, I am afraid sometimes that I have not told you how much I love you. I want you to know this. My love for you. To never forget it. Though I am far, the other side of the world, to be exact, remember this: I love you, Ophelia. I love you, my beautiful, beautiful girl.
You wonder why she reads these parts. The parts that name her. The parts that put sadness like a splinter in your wet heart, the heart wishing jealously, though you’d never confess it, that you, too, had someone to write you letters and tell you these parts. But instead, instead of passing over them, the parts about the love her mother holds for her, Ophelia puts them out for the trees and the long, cracked sidewalk and the darkness of the sky and the darkness inside you to hear—if these were your letters, you would skip over these parts, swallow them whole or leave them on the page. Never speak them to anyone at all, because, well, just because. But again, maybe you wouldn’t even tell anyone you got letters, much less read them out loud or take them to school, or maybe you would, maybe you’d only tell Ophelia, because Ophelia is Ophelia and would understand the value of letters and mothers and true things about rain.
As she reads, Ophelia is unhurried, holding each page firmly, with care and tenderness in the tips of her fingers, with her eyelashes extending themselves deeply into the fibers of every paragraph, each syllable, every line made for her eyes, her thumbs gripping the soft pages’ damp edges. Around you, the water falls.
So you hold the umbrella above your heads. You fear the ink will smear. You want nothing in the world to disturb her. Raindrops smack the soft pages, which are fragile and precious, and so you tip the red umbrella forward to shield Ophelia’s letters, and this is how she reads, making sounds from the pen marks made on the other side of the world. She reads with you by her side, with the sky above her giving the world its smallest parts, with the taut red nylon deflecting rain and keeping things safe. Unfaltering, Ophelia walks, with her sunflower rain boots interrupting the flat gloss of the wide, imperfect sidewalk, the gloss that is water and chance and the reflection of the leafless trees, the grayest of mornings, her red, red hair, paper.
And so, I need you to love you, her mother wrote, and Ophelia reads. I need you to look in the mirror each day and see goodness and to do goodness and to remember goodness, because there are enough bad people in the world, honey, bad people doing bad things, bad people who would eagerly steal that goodness, your goodness, and do God knows what with it. I need you to do this all of your life: know yourself, guard yourself, be true to yourself, love yourself, my good girl, my Ophelia.
Be friendly, but do not trust that every man or woman is your friend, nor that each of your friends is as trustworthy as you. Love your friends, keep them safe and close to you, especially the ones who would do for you as you would do for them. Not everyone can do that, m’ija. Not everyone will. Not everyone is your friend. And that’s okay. It really is. And yes, speak your mind, speak what you know to be true, but sometimes, many times, remember that some speech only requires you to listen. Know when to speak. Know when to battle. Know to think, yes, think, think, think always, before you send your true things into the world like birds, m’ija. When you are angry, especially, or remembering hurt or hurting, then, especially then, watch your tongue, hold it very near your heart, ensure that what you say is pure and necessary and from a place of love. Love the world, love its goodness, love that you are part of it. But most of all, more than anything else in the world, love you, Ophelia. Love you. Nothing good can come from not loving oneself. I know this. I have learned the hard way, and I write this so that you do not follow my errors, but so that you can do better and reach higher and have more, and should the day come that I am no longer living, remember that I have loved you like I love myself.
By the time you have reached the front of the school, Ophelia’s throat is in a knot. Her fingers, delicate things, thin like twigs, gnarl and grip the letter tightly. None of this inflicts harm or discomfort, because the only thing you feel is warmth, a warmth no one in the world ever bothered to tell you about.
“I miss her,” Ophelia says, standing in front of the school as rain pelts the world.
Her hair is redder than anything else.
Her mouth is a time and a place that you will return to later, unavoidably, for joy, for something marvelous to offset the heaviness of despair.
There is no sun to be found, and the clouds gather like dark geese, and they rumble.
She hugs you.
“I’m afraid, Abram. I want her to come home.”
7
In front of your grandmother’s little wooden house, the sun occupies the sky like an enormous yolk. Ophelia pats your knee as you sit on the front fender of your uncle’s car. Her touch s
ends tremors down your leg. Puddles still polish the ground, and mud ruts dig into the earth, wide infractions, deep cuts. A few last brave leaves cling to the trees.
“She just didn’t like my essay, I guess,” Ophelia admits, swallowing her words like lumps of clay.
“Why?” you ask, unsure of what to say back to a girl as smart as Ophelia.
She is perched on the hood, her foot resting on the bumper, chrome and shiny, even in the fading fall light. Upset by her English teacher, Ophelia confesses, “I could have lied and written a different essay, and maybe she would have liked my lie and maybe, then, I would have a good grade.”
“What was the topic?”
But before she can respond, your uncle sticks his bald head out the door and yells, “Get your ass off my car!”
His voice is brutish. Rust clad and gruff, thick like chain.
You help her down.
“Thank you,” she whispers, her mouth halved like an apple.
You wait.
Blushing a deep red from the rebuke, she continues hesitantly. “I haven’t heard from my mom. It’s been awhile. No letters.”
The blood in your throat crusts and takes on the weight of her sadness. It makes your throat grow fat with words you want to say.
This was the reason she’d taken the letters to school. In English class, they were to write an argument about whether fear was beneficial or if it hindered, and Ophelia took the letter to prove that fear impedes and harms and binds us. She tells you this as you walk to your grandmother’s wooden porch, the last shards of sun reflecting on her hair, your uncle’s voice forgotten now and minuscule.
“You think she’s okay?” you ask, knowing well it’s the wrong thing to say, but what else can you say? Isn’t silence worse?
Often you’ve wondered about her mother. What life must be like for her. So far from home. In a war zone. Living so near dying. So far from Ophelia.