I half scoffed a Mom, please but she was glaring at me. I pulled my legs up and hugged my knees to my chest, and she turned back to the screen, the corner of the nail on her middle finger rooting around her bottom teeth for leftovers. Around that finger, she said, It’s like you don’t think about things, like about anyone but yourself. Like you forget how bad the world is.
Leidy gave a collaborative grunt, and I thought about confessing my lie to undo the very unintentional direction my story had taken the conversation. I hadn’t really heard anything while trying to fall asleep the night before in Pittsburgh—just sirens outside, cars rushing down the street below, nothing I wasn’t used to from home—but I didn’t know how to tell them, without it sounding like bragging, that once I figured out how to turn off the disco ball overhead and got used to the weird staleness of the sheets, I fell asleep watching myself breathe in the mirror on the ceiling, my too-long hair fanned around my head like a dark cloud, amazed at where my own planning had landed me.
Leidy paced around the living room with Dante in her arms, bouncing him in an effort to make him fall asleep but shouting questions at the TV at the same time: But this Ariel kid, why is he famous? So okay, he just got here but so what, take a number, bro. I mean, what makes him so special?
—His mother died, my mother said, then kept saying: a new chant, this one to the TV, to the bare walls of her apartment.
She grabbed the remote and scanned up a few channels, but every one of them ran the same footage on a loop, my mom engaging with it through a one-sided call-and-response that reminded me of the very few times we’d gone to Mass. They’d show the shot of the inner tube, and she’d whisper, His mother died. The snippet from an interview with the fisherman who’d first spotted him: His mother died. The beachside reporter (why was he even on the beach when they’d brought Ariel in hours earlier?), foam-topped microphone in hand: His. Mother. DIED.
When the Spanish-language news showed, for the eighth time, Ariel’s hand being waved for him by his uncle’s grip as they left the hospital that afternoon, I asked my mom if she was trying to tell me something. She said to the TV, Tell you what? and so I stood up and walked away—she yelled to my back, Well I’m glad you’re home even though you lied to me!—and went to what I thought of as my sister’s room. It was technically our room, but I hadn’t slept there enough nights to really feel that, and I didn’t have a real bed; we had left it in our house, knowing it wouldn’t fit in the new room. I’d be sleeping on the pull-out sofa that separated Dante’s crib from my sister’s mattress.
I pushed a pile of blue and white baby clothes and blankets to one side of the sofa and lugged my suitcase up onto the other, unzipping it just as Leidy came in behind me.
—We could’ve cleaned if we knew you were gonna be here.
—No, I know, don’t even worry about it, I said. Did you guys do Thanksgiving dinner?
She lowered Dante into the crib and handed him a stuffed bunny, the long ear of which he shoved in his mouth. I opened the top drawer of the dresser and tried to make space for my stuff.
—Sort of. It’s Dante’s first Thanksgiving so yeah, we made like a chicken and some mashed potatoes or whatever, and Mom said grace.
She sat down on the floor next to the pile of baby stuff and pulled a shirt loose from it, then folded the shirt into a tiny square.