B0061QB04W EBOK (54 page)

“Tell me about your new school,” he asked me one day as we were jogging side by side.

So I told him about Santa Cruz, about the redwood trees, about the ocean, about the literature and writing classes I was going to take there. “Diana said UCSC is a special place. It’s a great school for students who are into the arts. She thinks it will help me grow as a writer.”

“Six hours is a long drive,” he said.

“I’ll come visit you every chance I get,” I said. “And you can come visit me.”

We didn’t speak for the remainder of our jog. But my feet felt heavy as I began to wonder if I should stay. How could I leave now when things were starting to turn around at home, when finally my father was beginning to change? What if I stayed? I had gotten accepted to UCLA, and even though I had turned them down for UCSC, couldn’t I tell them I had changed my mind? Wouldn’t they take me back?

Diana had said that everyone and their brother want to go to UCLA. There I would be just one of thousands. She’d said that at UCSC things would be different, and that I had to get out of my comfort zone. I couldn’t become my own person until I learned to live on my own. When I graduated from PCC, Diana was my guest at the La Raza Scholarship Breakfast. Out of the twenty Latino students who had received scholarships, I was the only one transferring out of the L.A. area.

I wondered if those students found it difficult to leave their families, and if that was why they’d decided to stay close to home. Before I returned to my father’s house, I had no family to cling to, so it had been an easy choice to leave. But now, now that I had that father I’d longed for, how could I give him up?

One night, while we were eating the chiles rellenos I’d made for him, he put his fork down and looked at me. He said, “I’ve been talking to Mila.”

“About what?”

He told me he’d been visiting Mila at her mother’s house, and they were going to work things out. “I called the lawyer yesterday,” he said. “Told him to hold off on the divorce.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means she’s coming back,” he said. I forced myself to swallow my food and I put my fork down. “But there’s one condition to her coming back.”

“And what’s that?” I asked.

“She doesn’t want you, Mago, or Carlos around.”

“And you’ve agreed?” I asked, feeling the chile relleno burn a hole in my stomach.

My father looked at his plate, not at me. He didn’t look at me, not even once. I stood up and went to pack my bags.

I went to stay at Diana’s house for the remaining days before my departure.

Carlos and Mago were furious about what our father had done. Carlos said, “I spent all that time helping him with the lawyer, defending him from Mila and her restraining orders, for what? So that he could just betray us like this?”

“I’m never speaking to him again,” Mago said. “He used us. He just wanted us around because he was lonely and depressed, and now that he has her back, he doesn’t need us!”

Once again, we were orphans.

I thought about the border that separates the United States and Mexico. I wondered if during their crossing, both my father and mother had lost themselves in that no-man’s-land. I wondered if my real parents were still there, caught between two worlds. I imagined them trying to make their way back to us. I truly hoped that one day they would.

24

D
IANA WAS THE
last person I saw before I left for Santa Cruz. Edwin picked me up at her house, and there in her front yard, I said goodbye to her. I waved to her from the car window. As we drove down Colorado Boulevard, I promised myself that one day I would tell everyone about Diana, about this woman who had come into my life when I had most needed someone, and how she had changed it for the better.

On our drive up to Santa Cruz, Edwin said, “Your father is very proud of you, you know. He told me so.”

I didn’t say anything. I looked out the window, saw the fields stretch out before us as we drove up the 5 North. I thought about my
father, about how eighteen years before he had been working in the fields near here, sleeping in an abandoned car in order to save money to build us a house.

“Try to understand him,” Edwin said. “He knew you were leaving at the end of the summer. He didn’t want to be alone once you left.”

“I could have stayed with him,” I said.

“For how long? One day, you’ll grow up and get married. Have your own family. You wouldn’t stay with him forever. He knew that. Besides, he didn’t want to hold you back.”

When Edwin and I got to UCSC, many students were already there moving in. Because I was transferring as a junior, I got to stay at the student apartments at Kresge East, not the dorms. I sat in the car with Edwin while I watched students and their parents, grandparents, brothers, and sisters carrying boxes. I saw fathers patting their sons on the back, mothers crying while clinging to their daughters. “Do you need anything else?” I heard them ask their children. “We’ll miss you,” they said.

I thought about my father. I thought about my mother. I thought about Mago, Carlos, and Betty. I wished they were here now, sharing this special day with me. But we were three hundred miles apart, and this time, it was I who had left.

Edwin helped me take my few belongings to my apartment. It only took a couple of trips. “Are you going to be okay?”

“Yeah,” I said, although I wasn’t sure.

He pulled out of the parking lot and waved goodbye, promising to come back every weekend to visit me. It made me feel good that he wouldn’t be too far. I watched him drive away, and as soon as he was out of sight, I began to walk. It was late afternoon, the sun would be going down, and I wanted to see as much of the campus as I could before it got too dark. I walked and immersed myself in the redwood trees, smelling the pungent scent of their needles. The sky here was the bluest I’d ever seen. The air the purest I’d ever inhaled. I felt all the tension in my body begin to fade. There was a beauty here I had never imagined. I heard the wind rustling the trees. I spotted a family of deer, and I stopped and looked at them as they foraged for food.
I couldn’t believe there were deer here! At the sight of them, I knew I’d made a good choice to leave Los Angeles and come here. I felt like Anne of Green Gables and her Avonlea. Like her, I had found my place of beauty.

I continued my walk and ended up by Porter College, at the meadow where I could see the ocean shining blue and streaked with orange. I thought about the first time I had seen the ocean in Santa Monica. I thought about my father holding my hand, about how afraid I had been that he would let go of me.

I looked at the ocean, and I realized there was no need to be afraid. I had gotten this far, despite everything. Now, all I had to do was focus on why I was there—to make my dreams a reality. I closed my eyes, and I saw myself at the water’s edge, holding tightly to my father’s callused hand.

And I let it go.

Epilogue

I
N
J
UNE OF
1999, I became the first person in my family to graduate from college. At UCSC I earned my BA in creative writing and in film and video and graduated with college honors, honors in the major, and Phi Beta Kappa. My family was there to celebrate that accomplishment with me: Mago, Victor, and their two children; Carlos, his wife, and their daughter; my mother and my brother Leonardo; Betty, her boyfriend Omar, and their son—and my father.

UCSC has a tradition that seniors are asked to write about a teacher who most inspired them. I wrote about Diana. My essay was chosen as the winner, and Diana was flown up to Santa Cruz so that she could be at my graduation. I gave a speech about her at the
ceremony, and that was the first time I ever thanked her publicly for what she had done for me. I haven’t stopped talking about her since.

In 2000, I became an ESL teacher for the Los Angeles Unified School District, where I hoped to be like Diana, an inspirational teacher. I taught immigrant children in grades six through eight for four years, and that was when I learned that my story wasn’t unique. Like me, all the children who walked into my classroom had spent time apart from their parents. In fact, studies show that 80 percent of Latin American children in U.S. schools have been separated from a parent in the process of migration. I’ve also gotten to see the other side of that experience. In 2003, I taught adult school for the LAUSD, where many of my students were mothers and fathers who had left their children behind. In them, I saw my parents.

The cycle of leaving children behind has not ended. Nor will it end, as long as there is poverty, as long as parents feel that the only way to provide something better for their children is by leaving.

In 2002, I became a citizen of the United States. I have now been in this country for twenty-seven years. The United States is my home; it is the place that allowed me to dream, and later, to make those dreams into realities. But my umbilical cord was buried in Iguala, and I have never forgotten where I came from. I consider myself Mexican American because I am from both places. Both countries are within me. They coexist within me. And my writing is the bridge that connects them both.