This Side of Providence (27 page)

Luz

I
t's always warm in Miss Valentín's apartment. All the heaters work and the sun shines straight into my room in the morning. Plus, she can afford to pay the gas bill. Every room is painted a different color—peach, yellow, and many of shades of blue—and all the appliances work. The floors are all a shiny, caramel-colored wood, even in the kitchen, and I like to run on them in my socks and slide halfway across the room. Miss Valentín says I might get a sliver in my foot but she lets me do it anyway. Sometimes I wonder how long I'm going to stay here, but most of the time I pretend that it's going to be forever. I could ask Miss Valentín but usually I don't want to know the answer.

The night she came to get me from the foster home seems like a hundred years ago. She showed up after dinner with a short white lady who wore a badge on her lapel like she was a detective. Nobody told me she was coming. When I saw her I stood up from the table and didn't even finish my bowl of ramen noodles. I gave her a hug with both arms and she picked me up off the floor. I thought she was just coming to visit me, but when she said I was going home to live with her I started to cry. And I don't cry easily like some girls.

I didn't have to pack my bag because I had never unpacked it, even though I stayed there for almost a week. I said thank you and good-bye to the lady who ran the house, and she waved at me from the recliner she spent most evenings stuck in. None of the other kids came out to say good-bye and I didn't want to
walk into the back of the house to see them. I've already forgotten their names and pretty soon I'll forget their faces, too.

The first time Cristo comes to visit me here I show him my new bedroom, the same room where he and I slept that weekend back in September when we ran away from home. I know he's jealous because we painted the walls and put up new curtains that Miss Valentín let me pick out.

“Why'd she paint the room yellow?” he asks.

“She said the old color made it look small.”

“Small? This is a huge room, you could fit three beds in here.” He hops onto my bed and puts his feet up.

“I could share, if you want to come back.”

“And what about Mami?” He glares at me. “I can't just leave her.”

“We could ask Miss Valentín if she could come, too.”

“Mami didn't want to live with Kim, why would she want to live with Teacher?”

“Look around. It's nice here,” I can't help but say it with a huge smile on my face.

He shrugs. “The shelter's not so bad.”

“You said they stole your books and your Yankees hat.”

“That was my fault,” he says, using two pillows to prop himself up. “I shouldn't have left anything out. Now I know to leave my books at school.”

“But how can you do your homework if you have to leave your books at school?”

He stares at me like I'm an idiot. “We only have a few more weeks to wait anyway, before Mami's case manager finds us a new apartment. Then we'll get Trini back and you can come live with us and we can all be a family again.” He sounds just like Mami when he talks like that, but I don't believe him anymore than I believe her. I decide it's best to change the conversation.

“That Colombian girl asked about you the other day. Graciela.”

“Who?” He pretends for a second to not know who I'm talking about. “What'd she say?”

“She wanted to know if you were my brother.”

“What'd you say?”

“I told her the truth, dummy.”

“Did she say anything else?”

I shake my head. “She didn't have to.”

“What's that mean?”

“It means she likes you.” I lower my voice. “You should ask her out.”

“Why, so I can bring her back to the shelter?”

I can't think of a response so I just stare at him. After a while there's a knock on the door. I've never lived with anyone who knocks on doors.

“Come in,” Cristo says, as if he lives here. He kicks off his sneakers and slips his socked feet under my comforter.

Miss Valentín peeks her head in the door. “I'm making
pernil
and
arroz con gandules
. Are you staying for dinner?” She looks at Cristo and smiles. “Well don't you look comfy?”

“No, I should go back. I have to meet Mami.”

“Why don't you wait until it's done, so I can send you home with some. For you and your mother.”

“Okay.” Cristo looks around the room. “By the way, I like the paint job, Teacher.”

“Thank you. Luz helped around the baseboards.” She points toward the floor as if we don't know where they are. “You're welcome to stay over any night. You know that, right?”

“I'm going to help Mami get back on her feet and then neither one of us will have to stay here.”

Miss Valentín nods, and makes herself smile. She tries to cover the hurt on her face but I can still see it. She closes the door behind her, her head bowed like she's in church. Cristo leans against the wall behind him. I try to look into his eyes but he keeps them focused on the ceiling. He stares into the light as if he's trying to make himself go blind.

“Have you seen César lately?” I ask him.

“Sure, I seen him around.”

“You talk to him?”

He turns to face me. “Just spit it out, Luz. What are you asking me?”

“I heard he dropped out.”

“He's ten. He can't drop out.”

“Well, he's on medical leave or something. And he's so far behind that even if he does come back, he's going to have to repeat the fifth grade.”

“Who told you that?”

“I can't reveal my source,” I say, using a cliché I've heard a bunch of times on TV. Besides, what am I going to say, that I was eavesdropping outside the principal's office?

“Well I think I'd know if my best friend was dropping out of school.” Cristo stands up to put his sneakers back on. “Don't go spreading any rumors, okay? And don't believe everything you hear in the office.”

He walks out before I can say anything else, just like he's always done. Part of me wants to go after him and part of me wants to stay here by myself and enjoy the silence of an empty room. I roll into the space where he just was, smelling his head in the pillow, and close my eyes. Just like that, I'm home.

Today my baby sister Trini turns four years old. I still call her that, but she's not my baby anymore. Cristo picks me up at Miss Valentín's and we bike together to Scottie's sister's house for the party. Miss Valentín bought my bike at a yard sale, a girl's Huffy with knobby pink tires. Cristo rides a ten-speed that he's holding for a guy from the shelter who went to Pittsburgh to bury his mother. It's way too big for him, and it surprises me each time when he can actually reach the pedals. With an umbrella, it could be part of a circus act.

The house is packed with people when we get there. It's hot inside and there's enough food on the dining room table to feed the whole block. Scottie waves at us from a chair in the corner and tells us to get drinks from the cooler in the hallway. He doesn't introduce us to anyone. We find Trini in the kitchen, eating spaghetti out of the serving bowl with her fingers. She looks so grownup today, like her face knows it is an entire year older. Her round cheeks are mostly gone and Scottie has let her hair grow long, tying it in a braid down the middle of her back.

Cristo tackles her in a bear hug, and when they get up off the floor I kiss her dimpled cheek and rub her head like my mother used to do. She asks where Mami is and we tell her she's coming by later, after her doctor's appointment. Trini wants to know what her present is but Cristo holds the bag above her head and won't let her see inside.

After we fill our plates, Trini entertains the party by dancing all alone in the middle of the living room. She's wearing a long pink dress and she keeps picking up the bottom to twirl it around. She laughs and falls onto the carpeted floor. It makes me happy to see that she is still laughing. The music they're playing is that old Motown stuff that only adults and little kids like to dance to. Scottie dances with her standing on his feet. She marches like a soldier, stamping his boots like she's trying to break them. He lifts her onto his shoulder and spins around and around, almost knocking down the light fixture. He stops suddenly. His eyes are closed and he has a goofy smile on his face. He drops Trini onto the couch by her leg. Then he collapses into the coat rack, too dizzy to stand. Several coats drop to the ground, as heavy as falling bodies.

Cristo sits next to me on a folding chair, balancing a plate of meatballs on his lap. He eats them in single bites like doughnut holes. We both stare at our sister and at her father.

“Do you think she's doing okay here?” I ask him. I don't want to admit that this stranger's house, this strange family, could be better than our own.

He shrugs. “She seems fine.”

I twirl the spaghetti onto my fork. “They look like they have a lot of fun.”

“This is a party,” he says. “You know every day isn't like this.”

“But it's better than the shelter, don't you think?”

Cristo gives a mean laugh. “The only thing the shelter's better than is the street.”

He sounds older when he talks like that, like the teenagers who hang out on street corners with their pants falling off. He pops another meatball into his mouth and shakes his head like the whole world is ridiculous. Scottie stumbles out of the room
with a drunken smile on his face. My eyes follow him to the hallway, where he takes another beer from the cooler.

“She's lucky to have a father.” I don't know why I say that out loud.

Cristo looks at me. “We have one, too, you know.”

“Ours doesn't count. He doesn't live with us.” I take a bite of the coleslaw on my plate. “And he doesn't think about us.”

Cristo wipes his mouth with a napkin. “Do you think about him?”

“Sometimes.” I sit back in my chair, trying to remember the last time.

“Well I bet he thinks about you, too.”

After we eat, Cristo goes into the kitchen to throw away our plates. Later, I find him taking the empty beer cans out of the garbage and lining them up on the countertop in a straight line. He does that with a lot of things—cigarette cartons, juice boxes, sugar packets—like he's trying to organize the world. When I pass through on my way to the bathroom, I count twenty-two cans. There are several other people drinking beer, like the girl with too much makeup who hangs on Scottie like a wet sweater and the men that he works with, but Scottie drinks the most, and it shows. He trips over a stool and spills a bowl of rice and beans, then yells at his sister for leaving it so close to the edge of the table. I spend the next ten minutes on my knees, helping his sister pick rice kernels out of the thick yellow carpet.

When we sing “Happy Birthday,” Scottie shouts at the top of his lungs and keeps singing even when the song is over. Trini reads the letters on her birthday cake while the candles continue to burn. She touches each letter of her name, collecting bright red frosting on her fingertips. When she licks it off she says, “Umm,” purring like a cat. She closes her eyes to blow out the candles, squeezing them so tight she looks furious. I know it's her birthday, but I make a wish, too. For her to come back to us. After three tries she blows out all the candles. The whole room claps together. The room vibrates with the sound of applause.

Trini looks at me. “Your hands were like balloons,” she says. I'm not sure what she means but it makes me smile. She
reaches for my hand, looking inside it.

“What makes that sound?” she asks. “You holding something?”

“Only the air,” I say.

I watch Scottie stare at Trini from across the room. He can't stop looking at her, his angel, his sweet little girl. There's something sad about how he looks at her, like he can't quite believe she's his. It's the same way he used to look at my mother. I don't like to think about it, but I wonder what's going to happen when she gets older and loses some of that sweetness. Will he yell at her like he did us? Will he hit her? I guess it's different because she's his real daughter and doesn't need to get punished for not being his. I make another wish right then, while I'm watching him, and while I can still watch over her: that he loves her in a way he never loved us.

My mother shows up when we're cutting the cake. She takes a small piece and stands alone in a corner, trying to blend into the wallpaper. She doesn't talk to anyone. Cristo brings her a soda and stands by her side like a bodyguard. She puts her hand on his shoulder to steady herself. Trini pushes a plastic lawn mower into the room. When she sees our mother she jumps up and down and claps. She spends the next twenty minutes mowing the carpet in front of her, over and over again. I should go over there, too, but I don't. Nobody needs two bodyguards. Nobody needs two daughters.