She turned and walked down the hallway.
Leidy said, Get back here, we’re not done talking about this!
Our mom passed through the doorway into her bedroom, and Leidy screamed at her closing door, Mom! This is for real! This is not Ariel!
We heard the lock click shut. Leidy stood in front of me, breathing through her teeth. She yelled, You know I can’t leave Dante with her. You know you’re supposed to help her find a job. You know we’re next to broke.
She grabbed my shoulders and shook me, saying, You can’t do this. You can’t leave me here with her again. Please don’t leave me here like this.
If I let her shake me for a second longer it would work, so I stopped trying to fight her grip and decided instead to go through her—I could tell she thought for an instant I was collapsing into a hug—and into our room. I ripped my clothes from the hangers on my side of the closet, wiped tears and snot from my face with a T-shirt before tossing it in my suitcase, which was still propped open on the floor even three weeks into being back. It was already half filled with the dirty clothes I’d planned on dragging down to the laundry room—like the suitcase knew before I did that I’d be out of there so soon.
And my dad knew before I did, too, but only because from her room, from behind that door, my mother called him. Even Leidy stopped screaming when she heard it.
—Come get your daughter, we heard Mami say.
All that time, our mom knew his number and never let on that she did. All that time, she’d maybe even known it by heart.
—I don’t care, she said. I want her gone. I want her gone now.
The first time they’d spoken to each other in months.
*
I waited for Papi downstairs. Before he even hoisted my suitcase into his van, he said, What the hell did you do to your mother?
—I got a job in California, I said.
—You’re quitting school?
—No, it’s just for the summer. It’s an internship.
—Then why didn’t you say internship? he said.
He tapped the side of his own head and held his hand out afterward, like offering me something. He looked up at the building, searching the windows for anyone he recognized.
That night, over some yellow rice and chicken that Rafael had bought for us at a food-by-the-pound place near the Villas, I told my dad and his roommate everything about the internship, about my lab class, about Professor Kaufmann and how weird she was, about how much better my spring term at school had gone than my fall.
—Even with all this shit going on back here? Papi said, his mouth crammed with rice.
I’d never told him about how close I came to being asked to leave. I don’t think he even knew my roommate’s name. I filled my own mouth with food.
—Even with all that, yeah, I said. My work helped me not think about it.
—Thank god for work, Rafael said to his plate.
The three of us nodded, chewed and chewed.
Papi took me to the airport two days after that night, the lines through security extra long because this time around, Ariel had already been through and upped the chaos; unlike our arrivals, our departures wouldn’t have the date in common. My dad parked at the airport without me asking him to, and he made the security line with me, and I was careful to act like this was normal for him, to not show him how happy it made me that he’d be seeing me off at the gate, something he’d never had the chance to do. This would be the last time, too: September 2001 was fourteen months away, and in that time, before the rules changed, he wouldn’t need to take me to the airport again.
We sat at my gate in a part of the airport I’d never seen, one of the renovated terminals that catered to the airlines dominating the sky in that direction—Southwest, Northwest, Frontier—airlines someone like Ethan flew to get to Rawlings. My dad asked me questions about the technicalities of air travel: Do your ears keep popping the whole time or just at the beginning and end? Will they feed you on this flight since it’s longer? When you land over there, what time will it be at the airport?
—You don’t remember your flight? I said.
He shook his head, snickered and said, That was so many years ago, the whole thing was over before I knew what was going on.
I tried to imagine my dad on his one and only plane trip, at fourteen—more than twice Ariel’s age—crossing the Florida Straits. I wished he was the kind of man I could ask about that day, but that would make him more like my mom.
—When the plane takes off, he said, is it really rough, or does that turbulence stuff only happen once you’re in the air?