On the Way Read online

  I don’t remember how I got to the hospital. If it wasn’t for the keys that I squeezed so tightly in my fist the metal pierced my skin, I’d have guessed I had thought myself there.

  Mom was in a bed with a steel frame covered in a sheet so thin I could see the blue dots on her hospital gown underneath. A doctor, a nurse, and two police officers were talking in hushed voices on one side of the room.

  “Mija,” she said, whispering. I took a few steps toward her. White strands of her hair wilted on her forehead. Her eyes were dull, and her lips quivered, but she managed to smile. “We’re done for now. We’ll leave you two alone,” the doctor said, and led everyone out of the room. The nurse stopped to fold in the steel stirrups on the bed, and covered Mom’s feet with the sheet. One of the officers folded his small notebook and put it in his pocket. The other held a crisp white bag in his hand.

  “Mom,” was all I could say. I grabbed her hand, which felt as cold as the room, and she grabbed back. All I could do was kneel next to her, our hands connected between the bars of the steel frame, and not let go.

  Mom never went back to her apartment. She stayed with me that night and every night that followed. She didn’t talk about what happened, except once to say that it had happened a block away from her place. The only description she’d been able to give to the police of her attacker was a Latino male in his early twenties, mustache. It sounded like over half of the guys in her neighborhood.

  She broke her lease after a month of staying with me and then officially moved into my place. One night, after she took two of the sleeping pills the doctors prescribed her, I went to her apartment. I packed up what I thought she’d want to keep with her: the framed pictures that stood on the living room table, her clothes, her plants. Everything else was going into storage.

  I was making my final trip out to the car with the last box when I noticed a man standing on the sidewalk in front of the apartment building. I felt him take in my entire body, from my gym shoes, my sweats, up to the box in my arms. And then his eyes met mine. I kept walking. The box was heavy, and I staggered to my car.

  He was young, Latino, and was sprouting a mustache that curved upward. I wanted to tell him to lie on the grass, right where the dogs pissed and the squirrels shit. I wanted to drop that box on his head, crush him into the ground. I wanted to line up every man in that neighborhood, crush skull after skull with box after box until they were all gone.

  The nurse had said they washed the dirt and blood from my mother twice, that she had cried both times. She had called this reaction normal.

  “You need help with that?” he asked. I sneered at him. The box banged into the others as I put it in the trunk.

  Those first few months Mom didn’t leave my apartment. Instead, she quit her job and stayed inside lying in bed or cleaning the kitchen counter so many times, the granite shined like glass in the dark. My windows were so clean I could clearly see my reflection in them.

  Every night when I got home from work, Mom had dinner ready. I always asked about her day. She always responded, “Better than yesterday,” but I never did believe her. “If you ever want to talk about it, Mom...” I’d try.

  She’d shake her head and put her hand on mine. “Thank you, mija, but not now.”

  I don’t know if it was because she didn’t want to remember, or if she was trying to protect us from what might happen if we talked about it. I would have listened to every word, and yet I felt relief when she didn’t say anything. I didn’t know if I could handle hearing what had been done to her.

  Almost a year later, we were invited to a suspect lineup at the police station. The ten-minute drive felt more like ten days. Mom’s hands never left her lap. She’d lost a lot of weight in the last year, and her sweater hung loosely from her small frame.

  “What happens if I don’t recognize him?” she asked without looking at me. Her eyes were closed.

  “Everything will be OK,” I said, having no idea if it was true.

  I pulled into the station’s parking lot. Mom opened her eyes and took a deep breath. “Everything will be OK, Mom,” I said again, taking her arm and slipping it through mine. She held onto me. If not for her sweater against my bare arm, I wouldn’t have felt her there.

  As the door opened, we were bombarded with screeching telephones, laughter, shouting, babies crying, and one single, “How can I help you?”

  Mom squeezed my hand, her nails in my palm, short and jagged. She leaned into me, and asked, “What happens if it is him?”

  It wasn’t him. So, another year passed. Mom met with a therapist. She’d begun having nightmares, many nights of no sleep, and bouts of anger and frustration. As calls and visits from the detectives diminished, so did our hope that he would ever be caught.

  One Friday night that winter, when the snow fell so that the streets looked like they were covered in a sheet of sugar, I came home from work to find dinner, as usual: rice steaming off the plate and baked chicken.

  “How was your day, Mom?”

  And then, finally, she told me everything.

  I listened, even though it hurt my insides, and I wondered about her insides and how much they must hurt, still. And when she was done, I knelt beside her like I had in the hospital room, clutching her hand, crying in her lap as she caressed my head, and I couldn’t tell who was holding whom anymore.

  ON THE WAY

  People used to say I was my daddy’s girl. I went everywhere with him, to the store, to the mechanic, to his poker games because he said I was his good luck charm. He and Mom would laugh when they weren’t fighting. Things never seemed that bad, and when Dad left for work one day and didn’t come home, I didn’t know why.

  “He’s just gone, baby,” Mom said. Soon after that, she began working double shifts, and Grandma—Dad’s mom—moved in with us a little after that. She’d been kicked out of her nursing home for cursing out the staff and throwing things at the other patients. Again.

  Mom wouldn’t tell me where Dad went, and after a few weeks I stopped asking. But I wrote him letters that I crammed into blank envelopes and put in the mailbox down the street. I never told anyone about this, not even my best friend, Benny. I knew they would never get to Dad, but they had to go somewhere, I figured.

  Grandma yanked me by the arm while waiting for the Cicero bus; her sharp nails dug into my skin. The bus doors opened and she pulled me up the steps as though afraid I’d escape.

  “She nine,” Grandma yelled at the bus driver, a fat woman with CTA stretched out beyond recognition on her wide blue sleeve. The bus driver bent at the waist as far as she could. One of her hairy brows raised, and she eyed me up and down like I was a criminal.

  “You’re nine?” she asked me. I felt Grandma’s nails on the back of my neck and I nodded.

  “She nine,” Grandma said again. Sighs and a couple of c’mons echoed from the back. I hadn’t been nine for almost five years.

  The bus driver waved her big hand and we boarded. There were two empty seats left—one way in the back where some kids sat and laughed, and one toward the front where the old people were. Grandma said nothing and shoved me into the seat between two old folks that reeked of Bengay and hairspray.

  “You’re not nine,” said one of the old ladies. Her hands were shaking, and the bunch of keys that hung off the strap of her purse jangled. Her lips were thin and wrinkled, just like the rest of her. She had big brown blotches on her face, the color of the oatmeal cookies we ate at home.

  “Yeah, you’re not nine,” said the other. Her lips had no wrinkles, but her hands had big blue veins, like pipes beneath her skin.

  I did what I usually do when I don’t know what to say to strangers. I acted like I didn’t understand.

  I shook my head and raised my arms, my palms toward the sky like I was balancing an invisible glass in each one. It was easier than explaining Grandma didn’t want to dish out an extra buck to let me on the bus even though she had wads of cash
in her bra. I had watched her take out a stack of bills, damp with sweat and smelling like the Walgreen's perfume she wore, to pay for things like vitamins and pantyhose at stores.

  The old lady with permed hair shook her head. She sneered at me and said, “You’re a liar. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  Her words made my skin itch. I looked to my side and the other old lady was nodding in agreement. I leaned even further to scan the back of the bus, past the couple making out, and the baby crying and flailing its arms like it was winding up to fly away, and spotted Grandma eating one of her cookies that she always kept inside her purse, wrapped in like twenty napkins. I wanted to get up, walk over, and yank that cookie out of her mouth. She'd put me in that seat. She'd refused to pay because she was cheap. She dragged me everywhere since Mom had to go to work. And she was the one that made sure I knew that my dad left almost half a year ago because Mom and I didn’t make him happy. I stared at Grandma and wished she could feel my eyes on her.

  In the mornings, she’d stomp from our spare room and plop down at the breakfast table. It was my responsibility to make sure we ate, since Mom had to leave for work before the sun came up. Grandma would shoot herself up with the medicine for her diabetes and wait at the table ’til I was finished cooking breakfast: eggs, no salt, toast, no butter, hand-squeezed orange juice from the oranges she got from the guy that sold fruit out of the back of his truck.

  We got mangos from the fruit truck guy, too. I loved mangos. I loved slicing them up in three perfect pieces and sprinkling them with chili powder and lemon juice and sucking the juice from them. Dad taught me how to eat mangos like that. We’d sit on the back porch and he would scrunch up his face and smile, “This chili is hot. Too hot for you, Lucia.” I would take him up on his challenge. I’d take a piece of mango off his plate, the fruit slimy under my fingertips, raise it to my lips, the juices dripping onto my lap, and take a bite. I’d try not to make a face, but he would watch me and laugh when my eyes began watering.

  I was staring at the floor of the bus when I saw Grandma’s familiar shoes.

  “Vamanos,” she said, and hurled me off my seat. I turned back to the two old ladies, but neither of them bothered to look at me.

  She wouldn’t let go of my wrist as we walked. This meant she was tired, and with her swollen ankles, couldn’t walk as fast as I could. She used me to keep her balance.

  In these moments, moments when she needed me—like when she couldn’t get the needle in, or needed me to make her breakfast—she didn’t say one word about Mom. Didn’t call her bad words in Spanish and say she was the reason my father left because “a real wife stayed home and didn’t go out to work,” the reason I was a spoiled brat, the reason she was going to die without seeing her son again because we drove him away. Mom told me Grandma was just old and bitter and to ignore her, but all I wanted to do was yell at her. I think Mom hoped that Dad would come back one day and see how great she was for taking care of his mother.

  “Alli,” she said pointing to some dirty, stone building that looked abandoned.

  “What is this place?” I said, but Grandma, who understood more English than she let on, just slapped me on the back and pushed me toward the door.

  The lobby smelled musty. A dusty gumball machine with no gumballs sat in the corner. Almost all the seats in the room were filled with women; the only males were babies, cradled in their mothers’ laps. One little boy with barely any hair played all alone near a chair with a teensy paper cup.

  Grandma approached the counter and said she had an appointment. Behind it a woman took down her name. They spoke in Spanish. I didn’t let Grandma know that I knew more Spanish than I let on. The lady told us to take a seat. We sat together next to a woman who anxiously tapped her feet, like she was sending Morse code. From a bottle with a picture of a strawberry on it, she rubbed pink lotion into the folds of fat in her arms. The too-sweet smell of it filled the lobby.

  “Fabian!” a nurse yelled from an open door by the counter just a few minutes later.

  We both stood. Grandma pushed me on the back of my head to move me forward.

  The nurse showed us to a room at the end of a narrow hallway. A man with a white coat stood there holding a clipboard. He smirked at me and I immediately didn’t like him.

  “Hola, Doña Miriam,” he said, and they kissed on the cheek like they were old friends.

  “Is this little Lucia?” he said in English.

  “Humph. Not so little,” Grandma said in Spanish. She grabbed my stomach and pinched it. I winced. “She’s eats like a boy. She eats everything.”

  “We can take care of that,” the man said, and then looked at me.

  He turned and picked up a syringe off the table. “You should lose twenty pounds. How old are you, Lucia?”

  “Almost fourteen,” I said. I stared at the syringe.

  “See? Now is the time. You’ll want a boyfriend soon. Now, lower your pants. I need to give this shot in your behind.”

  “Ahorita,” Grandma said.

  “No.” I stepped back.

  “Lucia, don’t be scared. It’s just a shot, a secret formula that will make you beautiful. I’ll give you pills, too.”

  He got closer and I could see the brown liquid in the syringe. I shook my head.

  Grandma slapped me hard. I kept my face still, refusing to show it hurt even as the pain shot into my cheekbone and stayed there. The doctor stayed silent.

  “Ahorita,” Grandma repeated, and I unbuttoned my pants and pulled them down. The needle felt as thick as a tree as it slid beneath my skin and then slowly came back out. I wanted to cry, but held it in.

  “Good. Now, maybe I can finally say you’re my granddaughter.”

  I walked into the lobby and surveyed the room. I guess all the women were there for the same reason. They all wanted shots and pills. They all wanted to be pretty. The pain from the shot spread to my chest as we walked out of the building and into the bright sun. Grandma smiled at me for the first time in a while, as though whatever had been in that shot was transforming me already.

  The next morning, Mom was still working her double shift, so I didn’t have a chance to tell her. Grandma called me from the kitchen.

  “Yes, Grandma,” I said. I trudged over to the fridge and took out the eggs and the cheese and the oranges. She sat at the table rubbing alcohol on a cotton ball over the same spot on her thigh, blue veins thin as strands of hair under her skin.

  “It’s almost six months since your dad left. You know why, don’t you?”

  The eggs slowly began to cook. I carelessly turned them over in the warming pan. I didn’t like to see her inject herself. She always made it a point to make a face that showed how much it pained her.

  After she was done, she rubbed the injection with the same cotton ball and said, “He left because you’re fat, Lucia. Who wants a fat daughter?” She drank her orange juice. A little spilled from the corner of her mouth. She tapped her plate and I pushed the eggs, brown with cheese, from the skillet. She picked up her fork, and stuck me in the side. “I’d be embarrassed, too. Did you take those pills the doctor gave you?”

  I sat down next to her. A bit of egg stuck to the mole near her mouth. I nodded, but we both knew I was lying. She hit my hand with her fork, and I got up and went to my room. I heard her humming as I grabbed the pill bottle that the doctor gave us the day before.

  When I came back to the kitchen, there was a glass of water in front of my seat. I opened the bottle and threw a pill into my mouth. It wasn’t coated, and the sour taste almost made me gag. I took a big gulp of the water and swallowed.

  “Now, remember. Don’t tell your mother about this. I’m just trying to help. When your dad comes back for me, maybe he’ll stay this time. If you and your mother can get it together.” She ate the last of her eggs. I waited ’til she was done to wash the dishes, and when I heard her snore from her late afternoon nap, I snuck out of the house in hopes of
finding Benny.

  Benny used to look up to my dad. He lived down the block in a house with a yard where the bushes were groomed to look like different animals: a dinosaur, a llama, and a spider, even. His dad and mine had been friends long before we were even born. Benny’s mom had left years ago, so now it was just him and his dad.

  Benny and I liked to go to the park down the street. We’d talk about movies or school, or sometimes we’d talk about his mom and where she could have gone. Sometimes we’d talk about my dad and why he left. We could only wonder, because no one ever told us anything.

  I found Benny in the park playing basketball by himself. He waved at me and jogged over. My stomach got a nervous feeling, probably from the pill I’d taken. I wanted to tell him what my grandma was making me do. As we started walking, he slung his arm around my shoulder, holding the basketball in the other. Benny said, “Walking with you must be what it’s like to get hip checked in the NHL.” He laughed and pushed me playfully.

  There was no one in the park. Benny was wearing the track jacket that used to be his dad’s. The wind blew my hair around and some strands stuck to my lips. Some birds called to one another between the trees and the sun came out, making our shadows darker. I watched mine, falling on the pathway bordered by dying grass, swaying left to right as I walked. My hips nearly took up the whole sidewalk.

  “Benny likes you,” Julia had told me one day in class. “He’s gonna try to kiss you soon, and probably feel you up.” We giggled. I hoped now that he’d grab me and kiss me. I’d even let him feel me up, even though I didn’t really have any boobs.

  Benny’s shadow came closer to mine, both of them stretched out on the cement like people bigger than us. I looked up at him. Benny’s pimples were all in one cluster on his forehead, but everywhere else his skin was smooth. He smiled at me. He had those clear braces that you could still see.