Until I Find Julian

She was smiling at me, happy.

  Weird.

  And another thing. She cleaned the whole kitchen during the morning while I was gone; I saw that. She scrubbed the last of the cereal stains off the floor and the fingerprints off the cabinets.

  I sit under the tree for a long time. I’m so quiet now that I hear the small noises the forest makes: the swish of the branches, a soft hoot. I look up slowly, moving my head an inch at a time, and I see an owl, feathers so soft, yellow eyes blinking.

  Suppose Angel doesn’t come back?

  Angel, who helped me cross the river, who shared soup with me.

  Angel with her bag over her shoulder.

  Was she heading toward the train station?

  I picture her climbing onto a train just before it begins to move.

  Angel sitting on one of those seats next to the window, napping while the engine carries her south.

  Angel gone.

  Would she do that?

  I scramble up and run through the trees, down the narrow path where I saw the deer. I veer onto the street, my sneakers slapping the pavement, my breath loud in my ears.

  I see that woman again; this time her hair hangs straight down her back. She carries an umbrella, swinging it along in the dark.

  Never mind that she sees me, an illegal. I’m fast and I’m away from her.

  Angel!

  I have to make sure Angel is still there.

  I circle a telephone pole and a pair of garbage cans, dash across the yard, and push open the kitchen door, not even bothering to close it behind me. Fingers crossed, I call, “I’m back, Angel,” and stop to catch my breath.

  I walk through the house, holding my side. The bedroom is neat without Angel’s bag and her things on the floor.

  Empty.

  Everything is completely quiet.

  “Angel?” It almost sounds as if my voice is echoing. “It’s Matty. I’m here.”

  Where is she?

  In the kitchen, I sink onto a chair. She’s going to take the train south. Maybe she’ll go back over the border. She knows how to do that.

  I race back through the living room, slip on the rug, right myself, and tear out the front door.

  I don’t care who sees me….

  I have to find her before she gets on a train.

  I stumble over the curb, stubbing my toe. My eyes tear. I don’t even know her last name.

  Suppose I never see her again?

  The train station is a block ahead now; I raise my head, searching. I take the steps to the platform two at a time, and slide onto the nearest bench, my chest heaving. Sit, I tell myself, just for a second.

  From there, I can see the length of the station. It’s totally empty; a few overhead lights cast a yellow glow across the platform and shine on the tracks. It’s late; no one’s there…

  Except for the figure huddled on a wooden bench, under one of the lights, all the way down at the end.

  I stare at the tracks. They run a long way, partners, next to each other, before they disappear into the dark. There’s no train in sight. I have a few minutes to figure things out, so I stay where I am, thinking. What can I say that will make her come back?

  But then I go toward her, still not sure what will make her change her mind. I sit down next to her, but I can’t think of a single word.

  Her feet are up on the bench, her arms circling her knees. Her fingers and hair are so much cleaner than the first time I saw her.

  “Let’s go home,” I say.

  She doesn’t answer.

  “Come on, Angel.”

  She turns her head away.

  “I don’t even think there’ll be a train this late.”

  She rests her head on her knees. “One will come along sooner or later, and I’ll be on it.” She shrugs. “I’ll send the money back; you know I will.”

  She’s been crying, and now tears slip down her cheeks. “Don’t cry.”

  She brushes furiously at her cheeks. “I never cry.”

  “I’m sorry.” I raise my shoulders, trying to think of what I’ve done.

  “I don’t belong here,” she says.

  I shake my head. “I don’t either.”

  “I don’t belong anywhere.”

  Belong. I can almost see Abuelita’s thick gray braid swinging, her hands rough as she slips the medal and chain around my neck. Mami sings at the stove, turning to pop a spoonful of rice pudding into my mouth. There’s Lucas spinning around, grinning at me. And outside, the cat purrs as she feels the sun on her back.

  “Maybe you don’t have to belong in a place,” I say slowly. “Maybe it has to do with belonging to people.”

  “I don’t have people,” Angel says.

  “Why aren’t you home with…” I hesitate. “Your grandfather?”

  She turns to me, her eyes huge, swimming with tears, her voice so low I can hardly hear her. “My brother, Diego, is my family, but now he’s in the army.” She wipes her eyes. “He says that will help him become a citizen; we’ll live legally in Texas someday. We’ll even bring our grandfather.”

  She stops talking, and I wait.

  “Diego doesn’t know that I’m not with our grandfather.”

  She looks at the tracks. Is that a train in the distance? “I can’t even write to Diego. Can’t write…” Her voice trails off. “I wanted to go to school so much.”

  The train wails. I grab her arm. No way is she going to get on that train.

  But it seems as if she hasn’t even heard the rumble on the tracks. “Just before my mother died, we were living in Texas, then Mexico, back and forth. I never knew my father. I was late starting school, but my teacher was friendly, even though she knew how far behind I was.”

  I reached for her hand.

  “But then Diego and I were picking crops, so I didn’t go to school. He took me to our grandfather’s in Mexico, and I started school all over again. I was so tall, so much older than the others. The little kids in my class laughed at me. I just about knew the alphabet. I lasted only a few days.”

  She glances along the tracks, sees the train, and stands. I stand with her, still holding her hand.

  She begins again. “My grandfather was furious with me. ‘No one lives here who doesn’t go to school.’ I never told him I couldn’t read. And after Diego left, we had our last argument. I walked out.”

  She raises her shoulders. “So I’ve been walking ever since, grabbing food here and there. Sometimes people help.”

  I shake my head.

  “You see?” she says. “You see? I can’t read. I can’t write. And the odd part is that I love my grandfather. He feeds the animals outside, and when he holds out his hand, birds swoop down and rest on his wrist, eating small pieces of fruit.”

  I don’t know what to say.

  “I can’t do anything,” she whispers.

  “You know all about the desert,” I say. “And you swim better than anyone.” I reach back and loop her bag over my arm. Still she doesn’t move. “I’m here because of you, Angel.”

  The train explodes into the station with a blast of wind behind it. Bits of paper swirl onto the platform. Whatever Angel says next is lost. We close our eyes against the dust that rises up from the tracks below.

  “I’m really tired,” I tell her.

  “Mateo-Matty.” She reaches into her pocket and pulls out Sal’s money, the paper bill and silver coins clenched in her hands, and gives them to me.

  I take them, because without them, she can’t change her mind and take the train away from here.

  We walk home together. Only a few cars are on the road, their lights beaming. The houses are dark; people are wrapped up in bed, sleeping.

  At the back of the house, Angel stops. “You left the kitchen door open.” She’s almost back to her old self.

  Inside, I close the door slowly, quietly. We stand there looking at each other. I reach into the closet and pull out a can of soup; I can almost taste tomatoes and onions.

  “I have no
more secrets,” Angel says. “Not one.”

  I nod, opening the soup. Later I’ll write a memory about Abuelita. I know now why Angel’s so mean sometimes. I think about her grandfather and wonder if he wishes things were different.

  Abuelita and I walked back along the creek road, carrying packages of fabric from the post office. They weren’t so heavy, but they were bulky, and the sun beat down on us. I could hear her heavy breathing; she began to walk slower.

  Halfway home, she tapped my shoulder. “Let’s do this…. ”

  “What?”

  Without answering, she put her package under a tree. In two seconds, her shoes came off, and her bare feet rested in the mud.

  She grinned, and for the first time I could picture her as a young girl.

  She went ahead of me, down to the creek, and splashed into the water, holding up the hem of her housedress. “Why are you waiting, my boy?”

  I dropped my package on top of hers, slipped out of my sneakers and into the water right behind her, both of us saying “Ah” at the same moment.

  As she reached down to splash me with a little water, we saw the miserable old woman walking along on the other side of the creek. She glanced at us and sniffed, then looked away as she kept going.

  “Old witch,” I whispered, thinking Abuelita would laugh. “Wretched.”

  “Poor thing,” she said instead.

  “Ha!” I cupped my hands and brought water up to trickle over my face.

  “People who act tough, who act mean, are usually unhappy,” she said, twisting the braid that hung over her shoulder. “And that one is surely unhappy. She has no one there to love.” Abuelita turned her head. “And I have you. So lucky.”

  I was the lucky one. I knew that.

  She looked serious. “I know you will be a writer; it’s easy to see that. But remember you have to study people like that one.” She pointed toward the road where the woman had disappeared. “And maybe,” she said, “you’ll understand.”

  After a while, we splashed our way out of the creek, shaking ourselves off to dry. I grinned seeing her wet dress, her braid dripping.

  “Yes, I was young once,” she said.

  “A thousand years ago,” I teased.

  She patted my cheek. “True,” she said as I smiled up at her.

  In the morning, before Angel wakes up, I tear a piece of paper out of the notebook. I’m not such a hot artist, but still I draw, erasing every two minutes: the head, the body, the stick-like legs. “Not bad,” I tell myself, and write la ciguena underneath.

  I tiptoe into the kitchen and prop it up on the table. Then I wait.

  Angel comes in, rubbing her eyes and yawning; she stops. “What’s that? A chicken?”

  “Are you crazy? Does a chicken have legs two feet long?”

  She’s laughing now. “A stork. The worst-looking stork I’ve ever seen.”

  She touches the word. “What’s this about?”

  “Simple. You can read that: la ciguena. Take a good look and remember.”

  She cuts an apple Sal sent home and munches on slices as she looks at the stork, its chicken body, its pencil-thin legs. “So, one word,” she says at last.

  I go into the living room and pick up the mail on the floor: shiny papers with pictures of cars, all colors, all sizes, in a language I can’t understand.

  There’s a small folder with red sweaters, and sweatshirts, and a picture of a woman wearing huge bracelets halfway up her arm. She reminds me of the woman I saw outside the unfinished building, the same woman who feeds the animals in the pine forest.

  “Come and see something,” I call into the kitchen.

  She comes to the doorway and taps the molding. “What, Matty-Mateo?”

  “I was thinking. Maybe today you’ll learn some words. And I’ll learn to speak English.”

  I hold my breath, afraid she’ll be angry, but she just tilts her head and looks away. So I gather up the papers and spread them out on the floor. She hesitates, then sits across from me.

  On top of a shiny car page, I spell out car in Spanish. “Simple,” I say.

  Angel bends over the page, writes car in shaky letters underneath.

  From there we go to eyeglasses, to sweater, to sweatshirt, and she says them aloud in English as she writes.

  “Car,” I say. “Eyeglasses. Sweater.”

  But I want more, need more. She tells me outside words like pine and sky and tree. She tells me Sal words like work, soup, please, and a long piece that means See you tomorrow, Sal.

  Now it’s late afternoon and we have nothing left to eat, so I have to go to Sal’s; I want to anyway. I splash water onto my face, and then I picture all of us squeezed in at the table at home, eating Mami’s beans and rice, while Lucas plays the guitar, mouth full of food.

  My stomach hurts with thinking.

  I washed my T-shirt this morning, and it’s still damp. But the sun is beating in the window, leaving patches of heat on the couch and the table, so I pull it on and the dampness feels terrific.

  I leave Angel to write car and eyeglasses a million times.

  It’s even hotter outside. I walk along the streets with no one paying attention. I look for the kid who took my money, but he’s nowhere around.

  Sal’s store is dim and cool from the air-conditioning. He’s at the counter, putting containers of milk into a bag for someone.

  When she turns, I see it’s the woman who scattered sunflower seeds. She smiles at me and Sal raises his hand in a wave. “He’s a good kid, that Matty,” he tells her.

  He grins at me and points to the back room. “Eat.”

  I know that word. I can taste the soft dough, the sugar thick on the outside, and the jelly hidden in the center. He’s probably left juice there, too.

  I go back for the broom, and stop to see what he’s left for me. On a plate is a sugary cake. I take a bite of the soft dough; jelly is hidden in the center. I gulp down some of the juice, and then I sweep the back room. I take huge strokes, bending under the table to get up every crumb. Miguel at the factory wouldn’t believe it.

  My shirt is drying now, sticking to my ribs, when Sal comes back nodding. “Good job.”

  “Yes,” I say, not sure what he means, but he has such a kind face. He must know that I’m illegal, and a word Angel said this morning: undocumented something. But he doesn’t seem to mind.

  “When,” I begin. No. I shake my head. “What.” Wrong again.

  “Who,” I say at last, pointing to the door.

  “The woman?” he asks.

  “Yes.”

  I dredge up the words. “She was…” The word crying comes to me. I begin again. “She was crying at the unfinished building.”

  “Elena,” he says. “She owns the building.”

  “Owns?”

  “It’s hers. The police took away some of the workers that she’d already paid. She can’t afford to hire others.”

  In my mind, I put it together. This is the person Julian worked for. She paid him, and Tomàs, and the others. The woman with a clip in her hair, and the black eyeglasses, crying over her building.

  I begin to tell Sal about Julian slowly. I tell him in Spanish, putting in some English words that I somehow know.

  He sinks back against the glass doors of the refrigerator that holds all the sad-looking chickens.

  Sal raises his hand. He’s trying to understand. “Your brother?”

  “My brother. Missing.”

  I can’t believe I know that word, missing, but I do, and I know he understands by the look on his face, the droop of his mustache. He tells me, “Sorry.” He puts his large hand on my shoulder for a moment.

  I swallow and begin to sweep again. And the long swishing sounds of the broom seem to say, You’ll find him. Don’t worry. You’ll find him somehow.

  If only that were true.

  I finish everything and pick up the bag Sal has given me. “See you tomorrow,” he says, and I nod.

  I walk back to the hous
e. It’s late. Angel will be asleep, so I’ll write again, write about Julian.

  I’d stolen the broom, walked right up there on the stone path the old woman had made. Without meaning to, I scuffed up the stones, ruined her path. I was sorry about that.

  The next day, Julian came home, his fishing pole over his shoulder, a mess of fish on a string for Mami to cook up for dinner.

  “Not only the broom,” he whispered so I was the only one to hear. “But you scattered her path.”

  I could hear the anger in his voice. “You did that, Mateo.”

  I didn’t know what to say, and Julian shook his head and looked away from me.

  We ate the fish that Abuelita fried, and carrots or pole beans, I guess, I don’t remember. But instead of enjoying the usual sweet taste of the poor fish who’d been swimming in the creek just an hour ago, I could hardly swallow the pieces in front of me.

  Julian talked to Mami and Abuelita about going to el norte someday.

  And Mami sighed. “Not now,” she said. “Not until you’re taller than I am.”

  Abuelita winked at Julian. He was inches taller.

  The next time I waded down the creek, I saw that the stones on the woman’s path were back in place and swept clean.

  And I was sure Julian had done that.

  What had Abuelita said? Everyone has something. Julian had his painting. But much more than that.

  It’s another morning; we’re sitting at the kitchen table. Angel is bent over a page from the notebook, working in her loopy handwriting. And I’m asking for English words: owl, bobcat, and deer. And then: gray rocks and cave.

  She draws in her breath at a noise outside. The rattling of an old truck? Is it coming down the alley?

  She jumps up quickly, goes to the window, and lifts the curtain an inch or two.

  “What?” I ask absently, gray rocks and the cave still on my mind.

  She turns and I see she’s afraid. She gives her head a quick shake, her fingers go to her lips.

  I jump up and peer out. It really is a truck. The alley is narrow; the top of the truck grazes the trees, and leaves scatter. It stops directly behind the house.

  Two men, both whistling, come around to open the back of the truck. It’s hard to see what’s inside, but Angel takes a guess. “Furniture,” she says. “They’re coming here. Someone’s moving in.”