There was a long silence. Eventually Daniel got up and went to his bedroom. Later that night he awoke to music. “The Agony and the Ecstasy.” He could hear his mother singing. Birdy too. He knew his mother was happy. He fell back to sleep.
His mother turned off the expressway. A few more minutes and they were at the airport entrance. A sign over the right-hand lane said what seemed like fifty different things:
BAGGAGE PICK-UP
UNITED PARCEL SERVICE
TERMINALS 1, 2, 3, 4
INTERNATIONAL TERMINALS 1, 2, 3, 4
CAR RENTAL
HERTZ
INTERNATIONAL
Beneath each number, in even smaller print, was a list of the airlines each terminal serviced. Over the left lane another sign read: PARKING, OVERNIGHT PARKING… Daniel couldn’t read the rest. His mother pulled into the left lane and followed it around a curve.
“Did you see Mex-a-cana up there?” his mother asked.
“No,” Daniel replied.
His mother started to ask another question, started to say something, but Daniel caught sight of a large, bright billboard and stopped paying attention. AIR JAMAICA, the sign read. In the background were palm trees, sky-blue water, a pink flamingo. Daniel thought the billboard was so huge passengers taking off could read it. Then Daniel saw another billboard, this one to the left, across the road. UNITED AIRLINES. In the corner a British flag blew in a breeze. Big Ben stood in the background, bold and bright — Daniel had read about Big Ben once in school. He turned his head to follow the sign. As his mother drove past, the sign’s backside showed up pitch-black like a lost opportunity. He wondered if people came to the airport with nowhere to go. He wondered if there were some people so rich they could just look at a billboard and say, “Ah, England, that’s where I’ll go, see Big Ben.”
“Mom,” he said. “Would you ever go to England?”
“Sure,” she said. “You going to take me?”
“Yes,” Daniel said.
“Fine,” she answered. “I’ll pack when we get home.” She turned into the parking garage. “We’ll leave your grandma here.”
They found an empty spot after three floors of searching. Daniel stepped out of the car. Immediately he recognized the smell of airplane exhaust. He took a deep breath. Back home the slightest whiff of truck or car exhaust started him retching, prompted an instantaneous headache. But here, airplane exhaust, he didn’t mind. It meant travel, long-distance travel. And there was noise. Even at this hour, 1:15 a.m., people were walking. There was luggage. There was traffic. Not delivery vans grinding through gears, not sixteen ice cream trucks playing “Pop Goes the Weasel” over and over, but a different kind of traffic, a quiet traffic, things moving, flowing, like air pressure releasing when a bus comes to a stop.
The terminal’s automatic doors slid open. Daniel’s mother walked fast. She was oblivious. Daniel, on the other hand, walked slow, pimped even, strutted, like the gangbangers did out in front of his apartment building. At one point his mother stopped and held out her hand for him. She snapped twice rapidly, her bright red fingernails reflecting the sharp, fluorescent light of the airport. Daniel caught sight of his mother’s tattoo. He took her hand and followed her for a quick few steps. Then he let go and began strutting again.
His mother walked to one of the monitors hanging high in metal cabinets behind the benches.
“Mex-a-cana. Mex-a-cana.”
She was saying it wrong. Daniel knew. Me-he-cana, it should’ve been pronounced. Daniel repeated the word to himself.
“Mom, how come we don’t speak Spanish at home?”
His mother sighed. “I don’t know, Daniel. We’re late. If your grandmother has to wait five fucking minutes I’ll hear about it for the next two months.”
They walked quickly through the terminal. His mother’s short heels snapped hard against the tiled floor.
In the week before his grandmother’s arrival, Daniel had heard more about his grandmother than ever before. In the past she had always been an unmentioned subject. He knew he had a grandmother; he’d seen pictures. But she was never talked about. The few times his grandmother had ever called, long-distance, Daniel hadn’t known until after his mother had hung up. “That was your grandmother,” his mother would say, exasperated. Then she would take a seat on the couch and stare at the television set, that distant look on her face, never a word about the actual conversation.
But in the last week there’d been a grandmother story for every day. “She’ll say anything to get what she wants,” one story went. “She won’t even say she’s hungry. Instead she says, You look hungry. What is that? Don’t trust her. I don’t. Why do you think I left?” Daniel had heard that one before. How his mother, when she was eleven, had left Mexico to come live with her uncle in Chicago. He had heard the story from his cousins. How his mother had left his “crazy” grandmother. How his mother had taken a bus alone all the way from Monterrey, Mexico. During that conversation his cousins had made small, biting comments—“Why do you think his mother’s so crazy?” “Like mother like daughter.” When Daniel asked his mother about what his cousins had said, his mother replied, “Yeah, well, your cousins are nuts too. Don’t forget I left them also.”
Daniel had heard this story before as well. How his mother’s pregnancy had angered her great-uncle. How the family had stopped talking to her. Soon after Daniel brought up what his cousins had said, his mother stopped dropping him off there for babysitting.
That was two years ago. They’d seen his cousins again recently, stepping out of Providence of God Church while he and his mother were driving to the laundromat. “Duck,” his mother said. “Your cousins.” And he and his mother sped by completely unnoticed.
Where they had gone before, when Birdy had arrived, was upstairs. Mexicana Airlines flights seemed to arrive in the airport’s basement. There were no windows in the terminal, just rows of orange padded seats, and more people, it seemed to Daniel, than he had seen in the entire airport. The room smelled of perfume and it all reminded Daniel of the supermarkets back in his neighborhood, the crying babies, the cowboy hats.
“Vuelo diez-cuarenta,” his mother said to the attendant behind the counter. Daniel was startled. He was always startled when he heard his mother speak Spanish. He knew she could speak the language, but she did it so rarely that whenever Daniel heard her, how crisp and sharp she could sound, he was surprised.
The attendant said something back. She said it so fast Daniel couldn’t understand.
“Whew, not here yet,” his mother said.
Daniel’s mother turned. He followed, listening to her heels, watching her part the sea of people the way she’d always been able to do.
She stopped at the end of a row of seats. All were taken.
“Por favor,” a man in a cowboy hat said. He rose from his chair at the end of the row. “Please, sit down here.”
“Gracias,” Daniel’s mother said. She walked to the chair and ushered Daniel into it. She put her purse down in his lap. The man remained standing next to Daniel’s mother. Daniel waited for the man to start speaking. In the clinics at home this always happened. Men offered his mother seats and they wanted conversation in return. Daniel knew they probably wanted more, a phone number, a date. His mother flipped her dark hair over her shoulder in the direction of the man next to her.
There was definitely something confusing about Mexicana. Every few minutes the attendant behind the counter made an announcement and each time some of the crowd moved to the left, and a new group filled in the open spaces. Along a glass wall people were standing, duffel bags hanging from their shoulders. Suitcases lay on their sides on the floor, and on some of these children sat.