We Never Asked for Wings

  Alex retrieved a lollipop he’d reserved for exactly this purpose and bribed Luna onto the couch. He turned on the TV.

  “Stay,” he told his sister, and then turned to Yesenia. “They’re in here.”

  Yesenia followed him into his grandparents’ bedroom, where they stood over the almost-finished mosaic. Her eyes grew wide, and Alex could tell she felt about the piece the way he always had, that they were standing in the presence of something miraculous. It shouldn’t be possible to create such detail with something as imprecise as the tip of a feather, yet his grandfather was able to, over and over again.

  “You can see how he starts, here,” Alex said, pointing to the ring of exposed wax around the moon. From the envelope of feathers on the workbench he pulled a deep blue feather, cut it half an inch from the top, and pressed it into the wax. It looked like a kindergartener had added the final stroke to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. He pulled it out again, turning to the black metal cabinet that stood beside his grandfather’s workbench.

  “He files them in here, so they aren’t exposed to light.”

  Reaching for the second drawer from the top, he glanced reflexively over his shoulder—he’d never looked at his grandfather’s feathers without him there. He flipped through the files until he found his favorite. It was labeled first with the color, using a system Enrique had inherited from his father: MINERAL RED 1033, and then with the bird species and date found: ALLEN’S HUMMINGBIRD, APRIL 2006. The feathers inside were Alex’s favorite, and had been his grandfather’s favorite too, for being exactly the same color as the setting sun. The red-throated birds passed by en route to Mexico every year, and Enrique encouraged their visits with a web of hummingbird feeders forever full of sticky sweet syrup.

  As he extracted the envelope from its file, a blue Post-it note fluttered to the floor. He recognized his grandfather’s handwriting immediately and bent to pick it up. It was only two lines, the small, neat printing centered on the paper.

  For my Alex, it read. Make wings.

  “Wings?” Yesenia asked, looking over his shoulder.

  Alex understood what he meant: use them. They are yours now, the note said, to have and to hold and to analyze and to deconstruct. Enrique knew his grandson wasn’t an artist: on the most recent occasion he’d attempted to teach Alex the family trade, the day had ended in a four-part experiment mixing campeche wax with various substances—beeswax, candle wax, white glue, maple syrup—and then heating them at different temperatures and for different lengths of time. But he knew also that his grandson worshipped the feathers as much as he did, just for different reasons: Enrique loved them for the masterpieces he could create; Alex loved them for the clues they held to the world around him.

  Alex put the note back where he found it.

  “It means they’re mine now,” he whispered. “It means he’s not coming back.”

  —

  In the living room, Luna chewed on the now lollipop-less stick and jumped up and down on the couch.

  “Stop that,” Alex said, yanking the stick from her mouth. “You’ll choke.”

  His grandfather wasn’t coming back, which meant his grandmother wouldn’t either. He imagined his mother charging in alone to find Luna impaled on a lollipop stick and Alex delirious from fever. It was more than she could handle. It was more than Alex could handle.

  “But there’s nothing to do,” Luna complained. “I’ve already seen this one.”

  Alex was about to snap at her to watch it again, whatever it was, but Yesenia raised her eyebrows and nodded to the recliner pressed up against the window. You look like you could use a break, her eyes said. Which was the understatement of the century.

  “I’ll play with you,” Yesenia said, turning to Luna.

  “You will?” She bounced off the couch and knocked right into Yesenia. “What do you want to play?”

  “What do you have?”

  “Yahtzee?”

  Luna went to get the game, and Alex sank into a chair. He hadn’t realized how tired he was, or how cold. With Yesenia in the house he felt like he could relax for just a moment, and he did, the sound of dice in leather shakers like a bedtime story in which all the kids were happy, and safe. Almost as soon as his eyes closed he fell asleep, and when he woke up hours later to Luna shrieking something about Park Place, he saw the coffee table had been pushed to the side of the room and a Monopoly board—along with every other game they owned—had been laid out in its place. It was dark out. Alex was sweating.

  Yesenia looked up. His already hot face flushed. He was grateful to have her there, but embarrassed too. When he’d invited her over he’d imagined their fingers in the feathers, soft and maybe even touching, not Alex asleep in a chair and Yesenia playing endless games with his little sister.

  “Are you hot?”

  Alex shook his head. “Cold.”

  Yesenia disappeared and came back with the blanket from his bed. He pulled it up to his chin, and Luna crawled onto his lap, wrapping her arms around his neck.

  “Are you okay?” Luna asked. “I don’t like you like this.”

  “He’s just a little sick,” Yesenia said, running her fingers through the knot of hair over Luna’s ear, untangling it strand by strand. She turned back to Alex. “Are you hungry? There are taquitos.”

  The heavy scent of hot oil hung in the air.

  “You made them?”

  “They were in the freezer. I just microwaved them.”

  The freezer—of course. For two days they’d eaten everything raw and cold, corn tortillas with butter and jam, and beans and black olives straight from the can, Alex too scared to light the stove. But his mother couldn’t cook either, and his grandmother knew it. She’d probably left a dozen meals labeled with instructions in the freezer, but he hadn’t thought to look.

  He shook his head no, his temples pounding with the effort.

  “Did you eat?”

  Luna nodded.

  He let his eyes close, just for a moment.

  —

  When he woke again his sister was asleep. He felt her thin weight on his legs, her toothpaste breath on his cheek. Something was pressed against his lips. He opened his mouth, tasted powdered grape. He chewed. They’re back, he thought, but when he opened his eyes it was only Yesenia.

  “I’m going home,” she whispered.

  “Will you come back?” His voice broke. It was Maria Elena he wanted, but Yesenia nodded and pressed both his eyes closed.

  “I will. First thing in the morning.”

  Minutes later, or hours, Alex woke to a sharp knock on the door. Yesenia had forgotten something. He thought of her muddy feet—maybe she wanted to borrow his rain boots after all. He tried to get up, but his hot body was heavy, and he was just starting to drift off again when the knock returned, louder this time. It wasn’t his body that was heavy, he realized then, it was Luna, still asleep on him. Wriggling out from under her, he lifted her up and set her on the couch. He wasn’t cold anymore. Whatever Yesenia had given him had worked. He would thank her, he thought, opening the door.

  But it wasn’t Yesenia.

  It was Sara, his mother’s best friend. And seeing her there, he knew. His stomach sank. They were dead. All of them.

  “I’m sorry,” Sara said. The cell phone in her hand counted the seconds on a flat screen. Someone was on the other end of the line. The police station? The morgue?

  “What happened?”

  “It’s your mother,” Sara said, holding up the phone. “She’s been in an accident.”

  The room smelled like too many bodies. In the dim moonlight she counted them, wrapped in blankets and sleeping bags, pillows scattered across the hard floor. Twenty-seven. Men, women, and children pressed so close together it was hard to tell who was snoring. That was how it was here. Ten beds per room, one nurse per floor; there were no visiting hours, only family, day and night, changing sheets and bedpans and carrying the old or injured to and from the bathroom.

 
Letty ached for Maria Elena, a pain more acute than any of her injuries, but from the moment the seventeen-member support squad found out that she was alone and no one was coming to care for her, Letty lacked for nothing. In fast, serious voices, pesos had been exchanged, plans made. It was a bring-your-own-food, bring-your-own-toilet-paper kind of a place, and within minutes she had been surrounded by trays of sliced mango, pineapple, pan dulce, and (because she was American) a small, wrinkled hot dog.

  After she ate, an old woman washed Letty’s hands with sanitizer and warm towels. She had tried to pay them back, but not a single person in the room would take her money. Just by virtue of being in the public hospital, Letty knew every single one of them was poor, and their refusal made her eyes fill, which just brought more sweets, more flowers, more hand-crocheted handkerchiefs, until she thought she might be buried alive in their generosity.

  Twenty-four hours later she still felt the physical shock of what had happened to her, a dizzy tingling as she replayed over and over again the bloody ride to the hospital in the flatbed of a farmer’s truck, convinced she was going to die right there underneath the starry sky. She could have died—she’d swerved to avoid the oncoming car and driven straight off the mountain road—but she’d fallen into a shallow ravine instead of careening off one of the many steep cliffs, and the dense shrubbery had cushioned her fall. At the hospital she’d needed ten stitches for a cut to her forehead, just above the hairline, and they’d given her a series of tests to rule out traumatic brain injury. Afterward she’d asked to use the phone.

  It was the middle of the night, but Sara had answered, finally, accepting Letty’s collect call and then driving straight to the Landing with Letty still on the phone. I’m glad you’re okay, Alex said, relief and something more complicated in his voice, and then Luna, sleepy and uncensored: Where’s my nana?

  Letty asked her to put Alex back on the line.

  I’m not telling Luna, he said when she told him his grandparents weren’t coming back. So she asked for Sara—but already she could hear Luna in the background. Tell me what? Tell me what? Alex whispered something to her, and she sniffed once and then started to cry.

  It was a tiny sound, that sniff, just a whimper, but it haunted her: the physical incarnation of everything she feared, proof that it wasn’t her they wanted, that it didn’t matter if she went home. All day she had heard her daughter in the chatter of the children stretched out on the neighboring beds, in the tears after poorly executed shots, in the excitement over a pending patient release.

  Now, night had fallen, and her anxiety had gotten worse: every whimper of a sleeping stranger sounded like Luna crying out for her grandparents. Letty covered her ears, but she could still hear the gasping and snuffling all around her. She would never fall asleep. There wasn’t enough air in the room to satisfy all the hungry, gaping mouths. Standing up, she felt her way along the wall—gingerly stepping between elbows and knees, noses and ankles—to the window at the far end of the room. It was open, but there was no breeze. Fresh air hovered stubbornly on the other side of the screen. Leaning into it, she pulled a breath through the dusty metallic mesh.

  “Are you okay?”

  Letty was startled to hear perfect English, without even a trace of an accent. She looked down the row of bodies. Only one pair of eyes was open: a girl wrapped in a red crocheted blanket, sitting against the cinder-block wall. She looked sixteen, seventeen at most. It wasn’t the first time Letty had noticed her—she was the only one who’d been there as long as Letty had. It was why she had the coveted spot, underneath the only window.

  “I’m okay.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure,” she said, but she felt more light-headed than sure. “I just need some air.”

  “I’ll take you outside, if you want.”

  Letty followed her through the maze of bodies. When they were outside, the girl unwrapped herself and draped her red blanket across Letty’s shoulders.

  “Thank you.”

  They walked to a bench and sat down, looking across the mostly empty parking lot and into the forest. Out of habit Letty looked for her own car, even though it was still in the ravine where she’d crashed it, and it would stay there, being scavenged for parts and scrap metal, until there was nothing left. She took a big gulp of air and thought about her children, asleep in Sara’s loft. Safe. She didn’t like having to ask so much of her friend, but what choice did she have? And anyway, Sara owed her. In high school it had been Sara who was a constant runaway. Letty had spent years tracking her down in San Francisco, sheltering her from her parents’ violent fights and from a long chain of bad boyfriends. Sara always said Letty was the only reason she’d even survived high school, and when she’d gone off to college she’d remained fiercely loyal to her high school friend.

  “How much longer will you be here?” the girl asked after a time.

  “Six more days,” Letty said. It was the soonest Sara could get a ticket. “What about you?”

  “I don’t know.” The girl nodded toward the building. “My grandma’s in the hospital, and our family’s small.”

  “Where are your parents?”

  “I lived in Los Angeles with my mom until she died.”

  It explained the girl’s English, for which Letty was grateful. Maria Elena and Enrique had stopped speaking Spanish at home when Letty started school. She could still understand a lot of what was being said around her, but it took all her concentration to figure it out—and her head hurt too much for that now.

  “I’m sorry about your mom,” she said.

  “It was ten years ago.”

  The girl had been tiny when she’d lost her mother. Luna’s age. Letty’s heart leapt, thinking how very close she’d come to leaving her own children motherless.

  “Where’s your family?” the girl asked Letty, changing the subject.

  “I just left my parents in Oro de Hidalgo, near Morelia, but I was born and raised in California. My kids are still there.”

  “With their father?”

  “No,” Letty said, shaking her head slowly. “No father.”

  Singular: as if there had been only one. Because in Letty’s mind, Luna’s father was hardly a person at all, just a fuzzy moment she tried not to remember, and even when she was pressed—as Luna had done on more than one occasion—she couldn’t recall much, and nothing at all she could tell her daughter. She remembered the bartenders she’d gone out with after closing one night, and the woozy feeling of too much to drink; she remembered the room spotting out in black and gray and thinking she should put on her pajamas, as if she could go to bed instead of watching the couples pairing off in twos or threes, not even bothering to look for a private room. Then—and this was the clearest memory—she remembered thinking how very glad she was that she was only watching the sloppy groping, at the very same moment she had a surreal, almost out-of-body realization that she wasn’t watching at all. She was doing, or being done to, and she would have stopped it if the next thing she remembered hadn’t been waking up alone in a filthy, unfamiliar apartment. When she’d found out she was pregnant she’d considered having an abortion, but she’d been such an absent mother with Alex, she couldn’t help but think this was her mother’s God, giving her a second chance.

  “What happened to him?”

  The question pulled Letty back to the only father that mattered. Alex’s father, Wes. “He left. It was a long time ago—after high school.”

  They were quiet for a long time, the girl studying Letty and Letty studying her hands. Blood flaked from deep underneath her fingernails, trapped there from the hour she’d spent holding the cut on her forehead closed before they reached the hospital.

  “Did you love him?” the girl asked.

  Letty thought about denying it, but she couldn’t. She’d loved Wes immediately. It had surprised her—she actively disliked blonds, and there was Wes in the front row of honors science, his shaggy yellow hair long enough to partly cover o
ne eye, his hand stretched high in the air. She was a junior, finally confident in the extremely foreign universe of Mission Hills, and her first conversation with him had been an argument. Why don’t you do something that matters? he’d asked, when she and Sara presented their project idea to the class. They had designed an experiment testing whether different colors of food dye affected the temperature at which sugar hardened. Wes was working on a water purification system for use in third-world countries.

  Later, he told her that his father had tasked him to “use his powers for good,” and Wes’s powers were many: he’d been given more than his fair share of money, intelligence, and good looks. Letty might not have had exactly the same powers in exactly the same proportions, but Wes argued with her like she was squandering her talents, and though she fought him hard and loud, she was secretly flattered. Did he really think she had talents that could be squandered? His pencil pounded the desk in a way that could only mean he did, and his belief in her made her work harder, and her hard work impressed him, and soon they weren’t fighting, they were dating.

  She remembered the first time they’d gone out, to Half Moon Bay at low tide. He identified all the invertebrates by their scientific names and then took her to an Indian restaurant, where she pretended she’d eaten palak paneer and aloo gobi a million times before and that the dishes didn’t slightly scare her, the neon yellow cauliflower and pureed spinach with something floating in it that Wes called cheese. But she felt better for having tried it, brave and cultured, and that was how it was between them. Wes pulled her into his world and acted like she belonged there, and she struggled to keep up.

  The girl was quiet beside her, and when Letty looked at her, she realized she was waiting for an answer to a question that Letty hadn’t heard. “What?”

  “Was he angry?” she repeated. “Is that why he left? That’s why my dad left my mom. He said she got pregnant on purpose.”