The Book of Unknown Americans: A novel (11 page)

One morning, I saw a Mexican woman there taking three drumlike containers off a shelf.

“What is that?” I asked her, pointing.

“Avena,” she said. “Oatmeal.”

“Like atole?”

My mother used to make me atole de grano when I was a girl, the dense corn kernels buried in the anicillo broth. But I hadn’t eaten it in a long time. The idea that this might be something similar piqued my interest.

“This is the American version,” the woman said. “It’s not the same. But it’s cheap. One can will feed you for a week. And it’s hot. Good for the winter.”

“Thank you,” I told her, and started loading containers of oatmeal into my basket until I cleared the shelf of it.

I made it that afternoon. The instructions on the back were in English, but there were drawings, too—a faucet pouring water into a measuring cup, a hand holding a spoon and stirring—and there were numbers that I could read. I followed it all, heated it on the stove, and before I knew it, I had made a pot of pale gray mush. I dipped a finger in. It tasted like paper. Maybe the slightest hint of nuttiness somewhere at the edges. The woman had been right. It wasn’t good. Not at all like the atole I remembered. But I had barely made a dent in the oats and I had cooked a whole pot of them. It was enough to feed all three of us. Maybe, I thought, I could sprinkle some cocoa powder on it, or stir in some honey, just to liven the flavor.

Maribel and Arturo looked skeptical when I set out the bowls that night.

“What is it?” Maribel asked, poking at it with her spoon.

I had made it too early. I didn’t know that the longer it sat, the more it hardened. By the time I put it out for dinner that night, it was like rubber.

“Oatmeal,” I said, pronouncing the word in English. “The Americans love it.” I pointed to one of the cardboard cans on the counter. “You see that man? He makes it on his farm.”

Maribel touched the surface with her finger. “It feels … weird.”

“You’re not supposed to use your fingers to eat it. Use your spoon and put some in your mouth. Come on. Which one of you is going to try it first? Arturo?”

But I could tell Arturo had his own reservations. He just stared at the bowl with his spoon poised in his hand.

“Maribel?” I asked.

“What’s it called again?” Arturo said.

“Oatmeal.”

Arturo tried to stifle a laugh in his nose that escaped anyway.

The sound of it—the tinkle of joy in the midst of our bleak American winter—was startling. “What are you laughing at?” I asked.

“Say it again,” Arturo said.

“What? ‘Oatmeal’?”

His face cracked into a smile beneath his mustache. I loved seeing that smile. So rare these days. I would have said the word for the next hundred years if it made him smile like that.

“Oatmeal,” I repeated.

Arturo started laughing. “Oatmeal!” he said, and I laughed, too.

In English, it sounded funny to us, as mushy and formless as
the cereal itself. And then, the sound of angels: Maribel laughed, too. Light and crystalline. Thin glass bubbles of laughter.

Arturo looked at me in astonishment. She was laughing. Laughing! She had smiled once in Pátzcuaro when the three of us were eating ice cream in the square and Arturo’s had fallen and splattered on the sidewalk, and she had cried at no longer being able to do simple things like hold a fork or write her name or wash her own hair, although of course in time she had relearned all of that. But laughter? It was the first time in over a year that we had heard it. Just like her old laugh. Just like our old Maribel.

“Oatmeal!” I bellowed.

“Oatmeal,” Arturo said with tears in his eyes. He jammed his spoon into the bowl and dug out a mouthful. “Delicious!” he declared, rubbing his belly after he had swallowed, making a show of it, and the three of us broke out in helpless, gorgeous laughter once again.

I LAY IN BED
most nights, long after Arturo and Maribel had fallen asleep, and stared at the ceiling. Sleep was like wealth, elusive and for other people. I lay rigid on the mattress, remembering what it used to be like, before all of this. Maribel running at the hammock, flipping it over her head, laughing wildly. Maribel darting across the street ahead of us, looking back and tapping her toes in mock impatience. Maribel swimming in the lake with her friends, coming home with her hair dripping wet, her clothes clinging to her thin frame. Arturo and I looked at her sometimes in awe. It had been difficult for us to conceive a child. We had tried for nearly three years, visiting doctors and curanderas. My mother had said prayers and begged for an audience
with the priest. Every month, we waited to see if perhaps it had happened at last. Every month, suffering the disappointment that it hadn’t. And then, after we had said enough with the doctors and with the discussion, just as we started to believe that having a child simply wasn’t going to be part of our lives, that being parents was a distinction we weren’t meant to have, when we had hardened ourselves to the pain of seeing everyone around us carrying and feeding their babies, those downy heads and wet lips, I missed my period. We had a hiccup of hope. Could it be? we thought. Nine months later we were holding her in our arms. Tiny starfish hands, ribs pushing up against her skin like piano keys. She wriggled and croaked. Our Maribel. “You won’t ever have another one,” the doctor told us. But that didn’t matter. We had her.

Maribel was fourteen when the accident happened. Arturo was leading the construction of an outbuilding for a rancher who had bought more livestock than he had room to house, and Maribel had circled around me that morning like a gnat, begging me to let her go to the job site with her father. Ever since she was young she had clung to Arturo, interested in everything he did, every move he made. That day I told her, “I don’t know. Your father’s going to be busy.” She said, “But I won’t get in his way!” And I had glanced at Arturo, who was across the room pulling his boots on, asking him with my eyes what he wanted me to tell her.

He stood and said, “You could come with us, too, Alma. If you’re worried about it.”

“Yes!” Maribel said. “You come, too.”

“It will be like the old days. Remember when you used to come? Sitting there in your dresses.”

“You wore dresses?” Maribel asked, surprised.

“She used to try to look nice for me,” Arturo said. “She was almost as pretty as you are now.”

“Almost?” I said, and when he laughed, at last I gave in.

The building was simple—walls built from mud bricks and straw, a roof made of wood beams and clay. There were plans for a swinging, louvered door at the front that the men hadn’t yet installed. The roof was nearly complete, although Arturo pointed out a few areas where sunlight filtered through, which needed to be patched. That’s what he was working on that day.

He climbed a ladder that was leaning against the overhang and settled himself onto the roof with a bucket of clay and a trowel he used to spread it. Maribel hurried around, handing things to the men when they asked for something, smiling at me giddily as she trotted from spot to spot. She hammered a row of nails into a board. She sanded around the latch on the door. She rinsed out the towels in plastic buckets of water. I stood off to the side, watching her and Arturo, and, when I thought it wouldn’t distract them, speaking occasionally to the men on the crew, some of whom had been at our wedding and some of whom had been at the hospital the day Maribel was born.

The air was still damp from rain the night before, but the sun had burned through the haze of the morning and shone brilliantly in the sky. One of the workers—a husky man named Luis—gave Maribel his hat when he saw that she didn’t have one. She laughed. “It’s too big on me,” she said, letting the brim fall to her cheeks. “Oh, come on. You look preciosa,” Luis told her.

Arturo was on his knees on the roof. He was pulling clay out of the bucket with his hands and slapping it into the crevices
between slats of wood. He was smoothing it with his iron trowel. And then he ran low on clay. Maribel was just below him, talking with Luis.

“Luis,” Arturo yelled, “I’m going to need another bucket of clay soon.”

Luis nodded and Arturo turned back to what he was doing.

“I’ll get it,” Maribel told Luis.

“Do you know where it is?” Luis asked.

“Of course,” Maribel said, and ran off to find another bucket. When she returned, Luis offered to take it from her.

“It’s so heavy,” he protested.

Maribel grinned. “I’m so strong,” she replied.

“Do you have it?” Arturo yelled down.

“I got it, Papi,” Maribel said.

“It’s heavy,” Arturo said.

“She’s strong,” Luis yelled up, and Maribel and I laughed.

“Let Luis bring it up,” Arturo said, and turned his back again, smoothing clay.

Maribel pouted.

Her whole life, I had watched her climb trees and scale stone walls in the courtyards in town with ease. Arturo usually frowned when she did those things—they didn’t fit the Mexican conception of what girls could and should do—but I loved that about Maribel. The ways she was unconcerned with trying to be like everyone else. She and Arturo were similar in that, although he didn’t seem to recognize it.

“Can I take it up?” Maribel asked me.

“Let me,” Luis said, reaching for the bucket.

But Maribel moved it away from him. She looked at me again with her big, expectant eyes. I never could resist her.

“Go ahead,” I said.

I stood at the bottom to hold the ladder secure.

“Cuidado,” Luis cautioned as she started climbing.

When she reached the top, Maribel shoved the bucket onto the roof. “Here you go,” she said.

Arturo turned. “I thought I told you to let Luis bring it up.”

“Mamá said I could do it.”

“Alma!” Arturo shouted down. “She shouldn’t be up here.”

“She wanted to surprise you,” I shouted back.

Arturo walked like a crab over to the bucket, careful to keep his footing on the slanted roof.

“I’m stronger than you think, Papi,” Maribel said. From the ground, I watched her hold one arm out and make a muscle. Such a small muscle. Like a torta roll.

Finally, Arturo softened and laughed. “Superwoman,” he said.

“Come back down now, hija,” I said.

“Are you holding the ladder?” Arturo shouted.

“I’ve got it.”

“Go on down,” I heard Arturo say.

And so she started. One rung. Two. Then, a noise. Something clattered off to the side. I startled and turned. I must have jerked the ladder. It slid in the mud on the ground from the rain the night before. And when I turned back again, it was as if the world was unspooling in slow motion. I saw Maribel’s body tilt backwards. She let out a sharp scream. She reached her hand for the ladder, but her fingertips only grazed the rung. Arturo yelled. Maribel dropped two stories to the ground below. Her body smacked against the mud, sending it splattering into the air, all over me, all over Luis. Her neck snapped back. Her eyes closed.

Luis got to her first. Arturo scrambled down the ladder, jumping off when he was halfway down. “Maribel!” he was shouting. “Maribel!”

I stood in shock, blood frozen in my veins.

“Don’t touch her,” Luis said, but Arturo didn’t listen. He held his hand under Maribel’s nose to make sure she was breathing, then picked her up, her body limp as a rag doll, her head rolled back over one of his arms, her legs hung over the other, and said her name, over and over and over again, as if it was the only word he knew. She didn’t wake up.

The other men on the site started running over, asking what had happened, offering to help. Without a word, Arturo cut through them all, cradling Maribel, trying to keep her still, walking quickly toward the truck while I hurried behind them, afraid to look, afraid to know what I already knew.

There was no discussion. Luis got in the driver’s side while Arturo climbed in the back with Maribel, holding her across his lap. I sat in the front, staring out the window, my eyes unfocused, my palms sweaty, my breath catching in my throat.

At the hospital, Luis jumped out of the truck and came back not a minute later with a nurse, who took one look at Maribel and called for a gurney.

“We have to take her away now,” the nurse said. She was stocky and firm.

“We’ll go with her,” I said.

The nurse shook her head, and when someone else arrived with the gurney, Arturo laid Maribel down on it. As they started to wheel her away, I tried to follow.

Arturo put his hand on my arm. “Let them do what they need to do,” he said.

We sat in the waiting area, a small room with a cluster of wooden chairs. Arturo had sent Luis back to the job site. I trained my gaze on the floor, squeezing my hands. Once, I dared to look at Arturo. He had a wild, frantic look in his eyes. He saw me looking at him.

“What happened?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “She fell.”

“But what happened to the ladder, Alma?”

“I don’t know. I—”

“You were supposed to be holding it.”

“I was!”

“Then how did she fall?”

“It must have slipped.”

“You were supposed to be holding it,” Arturo repeated.

“I turned around. Just for a second.”

“Why did you even let her go up there? It wasn’t safe.”

“I thought she would be fine.”

“But I
told
you!”

“I know.”

“And now she’s not fine!”

“I’m sorry,” I murmured, the combined weight of horror and reproach pressing against my chest.

Arturo leaned forward, propping his elbows on his knees, burying his face in his hands. I stared at the curve of his back and tried to remember: I’d had my hands around the ladder, and I had turned. Had I really let it slip? Was it my fault? Arturo had said as much, hadn’t he? My fault, I thought. My fault. Repeating it in my head again and again.

We waited. And waited. Until finally the doctor emerged from the bowels of the hospital and told us: A bruised tailbone. Two
broken ribs. Minor injuries except for one. Her brain. Because of the way her head snapped back against the ground, the way it had snapped back up again and down one more time, her brain had been shaken inside her skull. “The brain is very tender,” the doctor said. “When it shakes like that, it can tear against a small piece of bone in the skull that acts as a ridge. It’s called shearing. That’s what happened here. And now her brain is swelling. We can’t let it keep swelling. There’s only so much room inside the human head. If it swells too much, well—” He looked at us both. He was an old man with a bushy mustache. “She might not survive,” he said. At the moment those words came out, someone—some spirit somewhere—snatched the air from my lungs. The doctor went on: “She’s intubated and on a ventilator. We gave her drugs to relieve the pressure, but they haven’t helped in the way we hoped they would. So now what we need to do—what I need your permission to do—is remove a small piece of her skull to make room for the swelling and to keep the pressure from building too much.” He stopped and looked at us again. “If it builds too much, she could die. And the longer we wait to relieve it, the more damage she’ll likely experience.” Neither Arturo nor I said anything. We were holding hands. Gripping each other’s fingers as if strength could be found there. “It’s the only option,” the doctor said.