B0061QB04W EBOK (30 page)

T
HE DAY BEFORE
my first Halloween in this country, Mila came home with a costume she had picked up at the store for me. The plastic mask had a string on it, and the eyes were cut out so that I could see through the holes. The costume was of a girl with reddish hair and a purple star on the upper part of her left cheek. The dress was made of plastic, and it had sleeves in the colors of the rainbow.

“Who is it?” I asked my stepmother.

“It’s Rainbow Brite,” she said.

“Who?” I asked.

Mila shrugged her shoulders and handed me the costume.

“And what exactly is Halloween?” Mago asked.

“It’s just a day when kids get to dress up and go from house to house to get candy,” Mila said.

“You mean people give out candy for free?” Carlos asked, looking up from the minicars he’d been racing on the floor.

Incredible.

I no longer had any reservations about putting on the costume of that girl named Rainbow Brite. Whoever she was, all I cared about was getting my free candy.

Mila had only bought a costume for me because she said Halloween was for little kids. But at hearing about the free candy, Mago and Carlos wanted a costume, too, never mind that she had just turned fourteen a week before, and he was almost thirteen.

“We don’t have money for any more costumes,” Mila said. “You can share your sister’s candy tomorrow.”

Mago and Carlos went to bed disappointed about not getting a costume. I hung mine on the door so I wouldn’t forget it for school the next day.

When October began, Mrs. Anderson started giving us art projects to do, things like witches and black cats, ghosts and pumpkins made from poster and tissue paper. In Mexico, we would had been preparing for the Day of the Dead celebrations, and I would have been looking forward to eating Day of the Dead bread and visiting the graves of my grandfather and my little cousin Catalina. We would have been decorating our altar with candles and marigolds and plates of food for our dead relatives to enjoy. But here, there was nothing like that to be done. We cut out skeletons, connected the bones with clips, and hung them on our door to announce the arrival of this holiday called Halloween.

In the morning, I was awakened by Papi yelling. In the dim morning light streaming through the window, I saw Papi hovering over Carlos. The living room smelled of Old Spice, Papi’s favorite cologne, and something else, like the smell of vinegar and rust.

“I told you to stop doing that!” Papi said. Carlos was sitting on the floor, where he slept. He pulled his covers up to his neck as he looked at Papi.

“I’m sorry, Papá. I won’t do it again,” Carlos said, cowering beneath his blankets. Now I knew what the smell was. Mago and I had
been taking turns waking Carlos up at night so he could use the bathroom. Papi would spank Carlos when he had his little accidents, and because we didn’t want our brother to get spanked, Mago and I would try to help him. But the previous night, neither of us had awakened him, and the inevitable had happened.

Papi went to the bathroom and turned on the water in the bathtub. He came back for Carlos. “I told you not to wet yourself again, and now you’re going to pay for it.”

“No, Papi!” Mago yelled.

Carlos didn’t say anything. Papi whisked him up on his feet and dragged him to the bathroom. Mago and I rushed behind them. The next thing we knew, Papi was picking Carlos up as if he were a doll and tossing him into the bathtub, pajamas and all. Water splashed onto the floor and the walls and on Papi’s blue work uniform.

“Wash yourself up!” Papi yelled. He picked up his car keys and headed to the door. Mila looked at us. Her mouth opened, as if she wanted to say something, but then she shook her head and followed Papi out the door. They left for the retirement home where she and Papi worked, he as a maintenance worker and she as a nurse’s assistant. It had a fancy name—Kingsley Manor, which made me think of princesses and lords, not old people. But I guess that was the point.

Mago and I rushed to pull our brother out of the bathtub, where he was crying. Papi had only turned on the cold water, and Carlos shivered while we dried his hair and helped him out of his wet pajamas. He didn’t stop shivering even after he was in dry clothes.

“He didn’t have to do that,” Mago said.

“He left me for years. How can he treat me like this now?” Carlos said between tears. Mago and I left the soiled covers soaking in the bathtub. We sat on the couch, not knowing what to do. I thought getting dumped into a bathtub full of cold water was worse than getting a spanking from Papi, even though his spankings hurt more than Abuela Evila’s, not because he was a man and could hit harder, but because he was our father, our hero. Like Mago had once said he would be.

“Come on, Carlos, we’re going to miss our bus,” Mago said as she got up to get ready.

“I’m not going to school,” Carlos said, his bottom lip quivering, tears threatening to come out again.

“Come on,” Mago insisted. “You’ll only make it worse. You know how Papi feels about school.”

She and Carlos left to catch the bus, and I was left there with my costume in my hands, the excitement of Halloween gone. I put Rainbow Brite back on the hook on the door, and then I left for school.

When Mila and Papi came home, he didn’t say anything about what had happened that morning. I wanted him to say he was sorry, but we’d lived there long enough to know that Papi never apologized for anything. He still hadn’t said he was sorry for leaving us in Mexico for eight years. Instead, he just walked past us and headed to his bedroom to change out of his work uniform, which was dark-blue pants and a light-blue short-sleeve shirt that had the word “Grande” embroidered over the left pocket. His hair had streaks of white in it, and I wondered what he had painted at Kingsley Manor that day. He never told us much about his job, but I knew a few details, such as that the name of the paint he used there was
Navajo White
. I knew that because Papi painted the interior walls of the fourplex units that color, which he brought from work in buckets. Sometimes, I would hear Mila and him talk about their coworkers, or the old patients, and I wished I knew those people, too, so that I could feel included in their conversations.

“Why aren’t you ready, yet?” Mila asked me. I’d been sitting on the couch with Mago and Carlos for most of the afternoon. None of us could enjoy the cartoons on TV, so we had turned it off.

“Trick-or-treating will be starting soon,” Mila said. “And it only happens once a year.”

“We aren’t going,” I said.

Mila stood there and shook her head. “I know what your father did was wrong, but try to understand him. It’s been a long time since he has had to be a father. Give him time to adjust.”

Mila handed Carlos a plastic bag. From it, he took out a white sheet which Mila got at Kingsley Manor. “We already washed the sheets, Mila,” Mago said. “They’re drying on the clothesline outside.”

“Oh, that isn’t why I brought this,” Mila said, grabbing a pair of scissors. She told Carlos to stand up and put the sheet over him.

“What are you doing?” Carlos asked. Mila cut out holes over the area where Carlos’s eyes would be.

“I’m making you a Halloween costume,” she said. A costume? Out of a sheet? She walked him over to the closet door so Carlos could see it for himself. He turned to look at us. Mago and I giggled. My brother was now a ghost. It was amazing. From that year on, Mila always brought us white sheets for Halloween, and she never bought me a costume again. If I had known she would do that, I wouldn’t have praised Carlos’s ghost costume so much.

“Let me see what I can come up with for you, Mago,” Mila said. We looked out the window and saw that kids were starting to come out of their houses with their costumes on.

Mila came out of her room with the wedding dress she had worn when she married her first husband. The satin had yellowed by then and most of the sequins had fallen off. Mila’s older son was about seventeen years old, so the dress had to be older than that.

“I can’t wear that,” Mago said. “I’ll ruin it.”

“It’s already ruined,” Mila said. But the way she said it made me think she wasn’t just talking about the dress.

It would take us years to piece together the story of Mila and my father. They met at Kingsley Manor. Mila was already married and had three children—two boys and a girl. Mila left her husband and children for my father. She wasn’t planning on leaving her kids forever, just until she and Papi got settled into a bigger place. Mila’s whole family shunned her for breaking up her marriage and leaving her children. Her husband wasn’t able to take care of them by himself, so he dumped them at Mila’s mother’s house. Her mother took Mila to court and fought her for custody of her grandchildren, claiming abandonment. The judge asked the older son—who was in his teens—whom he wanted to live with. He chose his grandmother. So the judge gave Mila’s mother full custody of all three kids, and Mila only got visitation rights. She also had to pay child support.

Back then we hadn’t known all of the details, but the way Mila was handing off her wedding dress to Mago, knowing that she would have to throw it away once we got back, hinted at her dark secret.

“Try on the dress, Mago,” I said. “If we don’t leave soon, all the candy will be gone.”

Mago went into the bathroom and came out looking like a bride, and blushing like one, too. After a good laugh at her expense, and taking pictures with Papi’s Polaroid camera to send to Mexico, we got ready to go. Mila made us practice the words “Trick or treat. Trick or treat.” The words were hard to pronounce, and we stumbled on the harsh sounds.

“Well, it will have to do,” Mila said. She gave each of us a large plastic bag and told us to be careful. “Don’t eat the candy until you get home. Your father and I need to make sure it’s safe.”

The holiday reminded me of las posadas in Mexico, except there we would only get a small goodie bag and only one house would give them out, but here the offerings were endless! My brother, my sister, and I walked from street to street, venturing into neighborhoods we had never been to.
“Treecotree! Treecotree!”
we yelled as we knocked on the doors of the Victorian and Craftsman homes scattered throughout Highland Park, and the doors of the apartment buildings where immigrant families lived. By the time we returned home, it was past nine and our bags were bursting with candy. We had to carry them in our arms because the plastic handles had long broken from all the weight, from the abundance only found in El Otro Lado.

Papi and Mila were sitting in the kitchen when we got home. We put our bags on the table and she and Papi looked through our candy, throwing away the ones that seemed as if they’d been opened before. Papi found a tamarind candy coated with chili powder in Carlos’s bag. “I used to like these when I was your age,” Papi said.

“Here is another one, Papi. You can keep that one,” Carlos said.

“Thanks, Carnal.” Papi gently slapped Carlos on the back as they ate their tamarind candy.

3

“R
EYNA, YOUR MOTHER
is here to pick you up,” Mr. López said, handing me a slip from the main office. I gathered my things and left. I ran down the hallway.
Is Mami really waiting for me? Has she come all the way from Mexico to find me? Does she miss me?