The Book of Unknown Americans: A novel (12 page)

They opened her head. They removed a piece of our daughter. And when it was over we realized that in that piece had been everything. Until then, I had believed that a person inhabited his or her whole body. I had believed that a person’s essence was spread throughout them. Who could think that a person’s entire being is housed in a finger or in a hip bone or in a small piece of a skull, and that the rest of the body exists for appearances only?
But Maribel changed so completely after the surgery, what else could I believe? Of course, I knew better. Medically, scientifically, they had explained everything to us. It wasn’t the surgery that stole her from us. It was the accident. The moment her head snapped and bounced up and fell back again, her brain, like a mass of Jell-O, slid inside her skull. Forward and back, and it tore against bone. And when it tore, it destroyed some of the connections between neurons, which was a word the doctor had to explain to us. And then there was the swelling, which second by second was only making everything worse. No, the surgery wasn’t the thing that took her from us. It was the thing that supposedly saved her.

Maribel stayed in the hospital for weeks. She regained consciousness shortly after the surgery and woke agitated and confused. With the tube in her throat, she couldn’t speak. She looked hysterically at us, asking with her eyes where she was and what had happened. We explained everything. We explained it and told her we loved her until she calmed down.

Most nights we slept on a blanket on the floor of her hospital room. When we slept at home, we trembled and huddled against each other in our bed in the dark. Many times, we cried. My parents came over and cried with us. Our friends came and wrapped their arms around us. I woke up every morning and knelt on the floor, praying to God to heal her. I might have questioned God, I suppose, about how He could have allowed such a thing to happen, except that it didn’t just happen. It wasn’t an earthquake or a gust of wind that knocked her to the ground. It was me. I believed that completely by then. So I prayed for forgiveness and for God to bring her back to us. I wanted Maribel to grow up and get married and have children and friends and find meaning in her life. I wanted to see her graduate from high school, and I
wanted to see how shy she would become when she introduced us to the man she had fallen in love with, the man that one day Arturo and I would welcome to our family. I wanted to sew yellow, blue, and red ribbons into her wedding lingerie for good luck. I wanted to see her grow round with a child and hold that child in her arms. I wanted her to stop by the house for meals and laugh at the television and rub her eyes when she was tired after a long day and hug me when it was time to leave again, her husband waiting in the car, her child’s hand in hers. I wanted her to have the full, long life that every parent promises his or her child by the simple act of bringing that child into the world. The implicit promise, I thought. I said every prayer I knew.

After the surgery, a therapist came to Maribel’s room and administered tests, to make sure she could move, to make sure she could understand basic instructions, to make sure that her brain could still tell the rest of her body what to do. The doctor was pleased. She had a brain injury, but it could have been much, much worse. We began to hope. Would she come back to us? Our Maribel? The Maribel we had known for nearly fifteen years? They said perhaps. In time. But more likely, there would be something about her that remained permanently changed. They couldn’t say for sure. Every brain injury patient was different. We heard that too often. It began to sound like an excuse for ignorance. It made me want to scream, “What
do
you know?” After weeks of rehabilitation, after working with a psychologist and a speech language pathologist and the doctor, all they could tell us was things like: She struggles with finding the right words sometimes, and that will likely persist. Her short-term memory is erratic at best. Her emotional affect is flat, which may or may not change. She has trouble organizing her thoughts and her
actions. She gets easily fatigued. She might be more prone to depression, even long-term. But she’s young, which gives her a better chance at recovery. “Besides,” they all said, “the brain is a remarkable organ. With the right attention and exercise, it can heal.”

Neither Arturo nor I knew what that meant. We thought, We’ll be gentle with her. We’ll be patient. And when she was released from the hospital we sent her back to school with the idea that a learning environment was exactly what she needed. Get her using her mind again, we both thought. That would be good.

But day after day Maribel came home frustrated and depressed. The teachers talked too fast, she said. She spent hours in the nurse’s office, complaining of headaches. Even when the teachers tried to be accommodating—giving her extra time to take tests, repeating things for her benefit—it was of little help.

After two weeks, we went back to the doctor at the hospital and asked for advice. He told us that if we could find her the right kind of school, a school with a strong special education program, it would help immensely. There were a few in México City, he said. But the best were in the United States, if we were willing to go. He gave us a list of schools that he knew, schools with good reputations. Which one we chose was just a matter of where Arturo could find work.

I said, “Well, why didn’t they tell us that earlier!”

“The United States?” Arturo said.

“You can get a job there, can’t you?” I was energized now that a solution was within sight.

“But this is our home,” Arturo said. “It’s always been our home.”

“It would only be temporary.”

He furrowed his brow in his particular way. “Why are you so sure she can’t get what she needs here?”

“¡Qué vergüenza, Arturo! I’ll take her there myself if you won’t go.”

“It’s just … So much has changed already. We’ve been through so much.”

“So it’s just one more thing.”

“I don’t know if she can handle one more thing.”

“Well, she can’t stay here, doing this. Don’t you want her to get better?”

“Of course.”

“Then … ?”

He nodded. But when I looked at him, I understood. He was the one who wasn’t sure he could handle one more thing.

“We have to do this,” I said. “All I need is for you to say yes, and I promise I’ll take care of everything after that. You won’t have to worry about anything.”

“I want to do what’s best for her,” Arturo said.

“I know. This is it.”

And finally Arturo agreed, and the decision was made.

What can I say? She grew on me. Those Sundays after church, instead of sitting on the couch with our parents, Maribel and I started hanging out in the kitchen by ourselves. She wasn’t always good at keeping up a conversation—she lost her train of thought sometimes, and she talked slow in order to find the right words as she went along, and sometimes she forgot that we’d already discussed something, so I had to repeat myself—but a lot of the things she said were smart. Besides, I had learned that she was listening even when it seemed like she wasn’t. When I had met her in the Dollar Tree, before I knew anything about her, she had seemed intimidating and aloof. But now that I knew better, I understood not to take it personally. She would trace her fingernails along the top of the kitchen table or look at the ceiling sometimes, but when I stopped talking, she would respond in a way that proved she’d been paying attention all along and, even better, that she was actually interested in what I’d said. Which was more than I could say for most people and definitely more than I could say for any girl I’d ever known.

My dad didn’t like it. “Why can’t you talk to normal girls?” he asked me once after the Riveras left.

“What is that supposed to mean?” my mom said.

But we all knew what he meant: Why couldn’t I talk to a girl that wasn’t brain-damaged? I did talk to the so-called normal girls, of course. I mean, I asked them to pass me a paper in class
or I mumbled an apology when I bumped into one of them in the hall. But it was never easy for me, at least not the way it was easy for me with Maribel, maybe
because
she was brain-damaged, maybe because she didn’t seem so intimidating because of that. In another life, one before whatever had happened to her had happened, I was pretty sure she would have been just another girl I was scared of. And I was pretty sure, too, that she wouldn’t have given me the time of day. I had a feeling she’d been one of the popular girls, the one all the guys lusted over. But this was a different life, one where I was getting a chance with her. Maybe it was terrible to think of it like that, but I wasn’t going to pass it up.

“Do you remember that girl Enrique used to date?” my dad went on. “What was her name? Sandra? The one who wore headbands. You can’t find someone like that?”

“I don’t want someone like that,” I said.

“Leave him alone,” my mom chimed. “Maribel’s a nice girl.”

“Maybe,” my dad conceded. “But not for Mayor.”

My dad’s narrow-mindedness only made me feel more connected to Maribel, though. Like maybe I was the only one who understood her, the only one who was willing to give her a chance.

I started stopping by her apartment sometimes after school. Her mom wouldn’t let Maribel actually go anywhere with me, so she and I just sat on the floor in the bedroom she shared with her parents and talked. They had clothes folded in piles along the wall and a mattress wedged into the corner. Maribel had a sleeping bag that she rolled up during the day and set under the window. But the atmosphere was uninspiring, to say the least, and I found myself wishing that I could take her somewhere,
even just to Dunkin’ Donuts down the street, where I knew we could score free doughnuts if they were about to throw them out anyway, or maybe to the movie theater, where I could show her how to sneak in the side door, which William and I had been doing forever. I thought she deserved it, you know, getting out into the world. As far as I knew, she only went to school and came straight home, which made her seem a little like a caged bird who no one trusted to fly. But her mom wouldn’t budge. The rule was that if I wanted to see Maribel, it had to be at either her apartment or mine—no going outside, no taking a walk, no nothing.

Most of the time I found her sitting on the bedroom floor, writing in her notebook or standing and staring out the back window. I’d ask her what she was looking at or what she was writing about. Sometimes she told me. Other times she didn’t. Either way, it didn’t matter much to me. I was aware that my original reason for talking to Maribel, which had been fueled by a sense of responsibility, had been replaced by something else: I just wanted to be around her. I still wanted to take care of her in certain ways, but it was more than that now. I liked her. I liked her more than I’d ever liked anyone.

We talked about nothing mostly, like what she was doing in school and about music and our parents. I would tell her the most random things—“Did you know that the average person drinks sixteen thousand gallons of water by the time they die?” or about the time I saw Vicente Fox on TV—and she would smile sometimes, which was always my goal.

We talked about the weather because now that it was getting colder she was waiting for it to snow, to see what it was like.

“I guess there’s no snow in México, huh?” I said.

“Yes.”

“ ‘Yes’ there’s no snow or ‘yes’ there is snow?”

“There is snow.”

“In México? No way.”

“In the north, yes,” she said.

“You know there’s different kinds of snow, right? There’s wet snow, which can get crusty and freeze. And then there’s really light snow, which is soft. And don’t even get me started on snow-flakes. There are four classes of those: columns, dendrites, needles, and rimed snow.”

She pulled out her notebook. “Say it again.”

I did, and she wrote it down.

“You liked that?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Can I see?” I held out my hand.

Without hesitation, she gave me her notebook. On the page that was open, she’d written, “Wet snow is hard. Light snow is soft.” Her handwriting was small and tight, and she pushed down so hard with the black pen she was using that she made indents on the paper. Everything was centered—one line at a time—down the middle of the page. At the top, way up in the margin, she had written her name and address. I kept reading.

I flipped back a few pages and read:

I handed the notebook back to her. “What happened?” I asked.

“What?”

“Was it a car accident?”

“When?”

“Sorry. I mean, what happened to you?”

“I fell. I was on—” She stopped. “It’s long.”

“It’s a long story?”

She shook her head. “A long thing. Of wood.”

I racked my brain. “A bat?” I hated it when I didn’t know what she was getting at. I wanted to show her that I could follow her. I wanted to be the one person that it was easy for her to talk to.

“A ladder,” she said finally.

“Oh, a long thing made out of wood. Right. You were up on a ladder?”

“I broke two”—she held up two fingers—“of my ribs.”

“And you hit your head?”

She lifted a flap of hair and showed me a scar, pink and waxy like a gummy worm, behind her ear.

“Does it still hurt now? Like, can you sleep on it?”

“I get headaches.”

“So that’s what the sunglasses are for.”

“Yes.”

“Do you even remember it?”

“I was on the …”

“Ladder,” I filled in.

She nodded. “And then I was in the hospital. I don’t know where I went in between.”

“Well, someone must have taken you to the hospital.”