“But here you are, standing after all of that,” Guadalupe said.
“Yes, and I can walk and move. It hurts, but I can do it.”
“That’s a miracle,” my mom said.
They sat together and prayed a rosary while I stayed silent, wondering what would have happened to my mom and me if my dad had died. Would we have stayed, alone in a new country where we were afraid to answer the phone for fear the caller would speak only English? Would we have gone back home and begged one of our relatives to take us in while we figured out what the rest of our lives would become without him? And what would our lives become now?
When we opened the door of our apartment, it was evening and the phone was ringing, but we didn’t answer it. It rang and rang, until I got a look from my mom that had started to become familiar in this new life, which begged me to speak on their behalf to whomever they couldn’t understand and couldn’t understand them.
I recognized Nicole’s voice through the receiver, but not what she said. She was yelling rapidly, and the words sounded like they were reaching me from the other side of an ocean.
“What happened?” I asked a couple of times, but it was useless.
She yelled and cried, and the only word I understood was “Help!”
We drove to her house. The car still smelled of the remnants of our McDonald’s dinner, which we had shared with Guadalupe. My parents didn’t like the food, but it was cheap, and the air-conditioning inside offered relief from the heat. I loved it and had gleefully eaten my oily apple pie on the ride home. Now the smell made my stomach turn when I thought of Nicole’s ragged voice. I wasn’t even sure I could point my mom to her house without getting lost.
When we arrived at her street, the car got flooded with waves of blue and red light. We parked by the corner, where police cruisers and vans didn’t obstruct the way, but as I ran toward her house, my parents yelling after me, cops standing around chatting to each other and looking at their watches and lazily shooing away the small crowd that was starting to gather behind the yellow tape that cordoned off Nicole’s house, I felt as if I were the only one with any sense of urgency. That was until I saw Nicole, and she saw me and started running to me, her face a mask made of garish red and blue light, yelling, “He killed her! He killed her! He killed her!” and in that moment I remembered that earlier at McDonald’s we’d seen a very old man making his slow way to the counter with the aid of a walker, and that having picked up his food, he couldn’t maneuver his way to a table, and that my dad had said to me to go give him a hand, and having felt shy, I’d said no, so he’d gotten up himself and helped the old man in his own slow way. I thought of this as Nicole extended her arms to me, and I understood she had no one else, and that was why she’d called me, and she didn’t have to tell me the whole story for me to now understand what she had said on the phone, which was that her dad had killed her mom and now she was all alone. I understood that when Jake had said that I’d be there for Nicole someday, that his help to us had been purely selfish; he’d meant it not in the way of self-deprecation, but in the way of a payback he expected me to give someday. Well, that day had come, and as the steam of Nicole’s breath gathered on the skin of my neck when I took her in my embrace, I knew it was time to pay back the things America had given us.
Wings Beating
by Eliot Schrefer
Safety Harbor
I guess I should have figured a Florida vacation would have lots of cars in it. This trip has been red arrows, four-way stops, ogling the rare pedestrian, hailing a car on this app or that, or waiting for a crusty cab with a crustier driver. How much of a life around here is spent wallowing in seats, hands at ten and two or a pinkie at six, waiting for a light to tell you when it’s time to act?
I’m driving around all the time in Maryland too, don’t get me wrong. On Darren weeks I’m chauffeuring him plenty. Violin lessons or swim practice or trips to the mall food court with his girlfriends. Darren’s a busy kid — the only thirteen-year-old I know who uses his calendar app — but driving with him back home means not having to talk. Now we’re on vacation so we’re pressed in the back of these hired cars, not me in front and him on his phone, but right next to each other, shoulder to shoulder, like we’re sweethearts on a date. Like we’re me and his mom, back before the split.
We’re done with the sightseeing part of the vacation and onto the spa stay, the whole point of this trip. I’m no spa guy, but I was the third-place-out-of-three winner of an episode of Guess It Now, and this spa trip was my prize. I thought Darren and I could bond a little. Maybe we can laugh about it.
That’s why we’re in the back of a car whose upholstery smells like nightclub cologne, driving down the main street of this town called Safety Harbor, even though there’s no ships here. Pretty safe though!
“Nearly there, kid,” I say. “The glamorous resort and spa.”
Darren puts his phone away — he’s pretty good about that stuff, not an addict like most of them — and casts his liquid staring attention toward the spa. I guess it’s the same place as the cutaway graphic on the game show: curved brick drive, blue rectangle of a pool behind the front windows, a restaurant that looks like the conservatory from Clue. There’s something a little seedy about all of it too, which I definitely didn’t expect. Hard to put my finger on. There’s probably microscopic grime between all the tiles.
Valet boys in polo shirts lounge in front. One says, “Good afternoon, sir,” when I pass. It’s in this put-out way, though, like his mom just made him say it.
The other boys look at Darren, with his skinny jeans and gay or at least rainbow-spectrum-y designer eyeglasses, and I can feel the smirks they’re all hiding, each and every one.
I don’t know, maybe I thought the game show would have called ahead, said, Hey, a prize winner’s coming in to stay for a while, give him a congrats when he gets there, and Darren could have had a moment of being proud of his dad, but I guess we’re just like any other guests, because the lady behind the counter says, Enjoy your two nights with us, as she gestures me and Darren toward our room.
The hallway’s covered in aggressively ugly carpet, a blue-green run through by ship’s wheels and nautical rope. It saps the sound from our feet and our luggage wheels.
The room is perfectly clean. It’s also perfectly stale, like a mock-up that was never meant to be lived in. While we slot our clothes into drawers the window air-conditioning unit rattles and chugs, goes quiet, rattles and chugs, goes quiet. I open the blinds, see the license plates of the cars parked right in front, the gas station on the far side, and close the blinds again.
It’s a third-place-winner sort of joint, I guess.
Darren’s messaging on his phone for a while. When the air conditioner’s off, I can actually hear the sound of his thumbs on glass. I wonder, not for the first time, if he’s cruising nearby guys. A little young, sure, but I’d have taken up any chance to have sex at his age, though willing girls are harder to find and I didn’t have apps or anything.
It’s not like he’s come out to me, but I’m operating on the assumption that my son is gay until proven otherwise. I work with three gay dudes — maybe four, actually — and I find it hard to keep up with their fast and mocking conversations, but they’re good guys. My son has their same armoring wit, the same tendency to check his hair, the same examined life.