“I heard Mr. Baker is helping you learn English…hablar inglés…Baker?”
“Sí.”
My smile faded.
“You don’t like him? Er…no le gusta?”
“No,” I said emphatically, and he laughed.
“Me, neither,” he said, shaking his head and pointing to himself.
I didn’t realize I had been gobbling my food until I looked down and saw it was nearly all gone.
“You were definitely hungry,” he said.
He just stood there staring down at me. It wasn’t until then that I realized I was just in my nightgown. Although it wasn’t sheer, it was slight enough to bring a flush of red heat into my neck and face, especially when I traced his gaze to my breasts. I put down the plate when I finished and folded my arms over myself.
He smiled. “Enough? Más?”
“No más, gracias.”
“Okay, I’m going,” he said. “I’m sorry about all this. Mi hermana is an idiot, and mi madre…” He shrugged and shook his head. “I will talk to her. I will habla mi madre.”
I smiled. He was the only member of the family who had been nice to me.
“Buenas noches,” he said.
“Buenas noches.”
He nodded and left. I went to the door and watched him leave the building, and then I looked up through the cloudy pane and stared at the stars. These were the same stars above my house back in Mexico, where mi abuela Anabela was probably preparing for bed. All my life, except for when I slept in a cradle in mi madre’s room, I shared this bedroom with my grandmother. Together, after we had both prepared for sleep, we would recite our prayers, and she would say a prayer for me at my bedside, praying for me to have a long and healthy life. She was the last person I spoke to before I went to sleep and the first one I spoke to when I woke in the morning. She was there for my nightmares and there to nurse me when I was sick, and now, she was sleeping alone in the house. Despite where I was in this two-by-four of a cold, stark room, I felt sorrier for her.
Surely, the house back in Mexico was full of echoes, memories that had begun to haunt her. How much despair could her aged heart withstand? Did she feel betrayed, lost, and alone? What would drive her to care about the next day, about rising to clean the house, wash clothes, prepare food for herself? How many times would she look at my empty bed and think about me?
And what of the son she had lost, his life snuffed out like some small flame that had promised to burn brightly and keep us all safe and warm? How severe her mourning surely had become. The echoes of yesterday weren’t only the echoes of my voice, my footsteps, and my laughter through the house. I was sure she was fixed on her memories of my father as a young boy, fixed on her memories of holding him, protecting him, feeding and clothing him. The little boy fades into the man, and the man fades into his old age, mi abuela Anabela would tell me, but the images remain, lingering like smoke in your mind, bringing sm
iles back, old smiles, old laughs from time past.
When I had first set out for mi tía Isabela’s hacienda, I envisioned her enabling me to keep in contact with my grandmother, perhaps making a phone call that the postmaster would receive, and then, perhaps, she would be able to call me. My letters would go out to her, and her letters would come to me here. Now I wondered what, if anything, my aunt would do for me. I had left Mexico clinging to the belief that I would somehow return to see my grandmother again, clinging to the belief that this wasn’t a final good-bye.
However, I felt more like a prisoner trapped on this estate of my aunt and cousins. Not only was I being treated as if I were just another immigrant worker, but my identity was being taken from me. I was truly turned into an orphan, someone without any familial past. Being forbidden to mention any of it, it was erased. Who was I now? Who would I become?
I couldn’t help but wonder if my cousin Sophia would have treated me any differently if she had known we were related. Would she have been as cruel? Look at how kind my cousin Edward was even before he knew we were cousins. There was hope in all of that, I told myself, wasn’t there? Now that Edward knew the truth, perhaps he would get my aunt to change the way she was treating me, and perhaps Sophia wouldn’t be so antagonistic and mean.
Clinging to that tidbit of optimism, I said my prayers and got into bed. Everything had a starchy machine smell. The sheet and the blanket must surely have been in that closet for a very long time, I thought. And of course, this room, with its one window, was dank and stuffy and still smelled like old fish. I almost decided to sleep outside but then thought that might attract more negative attention to me and make my aunt even angrier.
I closed my eyes, but opened them moments later to listen to the heavy footsteps in the hallway. Who was coming now? I couldn’t lock my bedroom door, either. The footsteps went by my room, so I imagined it was Señor Garman. I heard a door close and then the sound of water running. Other than that, it was very, very quiet. After I heard him go into his room, the stillness felt like a heavy blanket thrown over me.
I folded myself into a fetal position and tried desperately to fall asleep. Minutes after, far more exhausted than I had imagined I was, I did tumble into a twisted tunnel of nightmares, with flashes of my aunt’s angry face and my cousin Sophia’s sneer appearing on the dark walls. I careened into one long, screaming descent and broke out into sunlight when the morning light flowed through the window and snapped me into reality, a reality that wasn’t much better than the nightmares I had just escaped.
I groaned and turned on my narrow bed, grinding the sleep out of my eyes just as my bedroom door opened and Señora Rosario looked in at me.
“Why aren’t you up and dressed already?” she demanded.
“What time is it?”
“It’s six forty-five. I told you to be in the kitchen at six-thirty. There are preparations to be made. Señorita Sophia and Señor Edward go to school at seven-thirty unless Señorita Sophia oversleeps.”
“Señora Dallas still wants me to serve?”