­­­­­I was nine lying horizontally in the back of an SUV speeding faster than revenge. My sister was driving. Freshly twenty-two years old, yet at the helm of whatever the opposite of a getaway car is. I didn’t know where we were going, or why. All I knew was that five minutes before, I was squeezed into the comfiest corner of my bed when my sister crashed through the door of the bedroom we shared, commanding me to get up. I was ready to protest, but I stopped—her voice wasn’t angry, or urgent. It was sad. Like she didn’t want to leave her comfiest corner either, but something was forcing her forward. Within seconds, I slipped my shoes on and tucked my light pink Nintendo DS into my palm.

My mother was already in the car, sitting in the passenger seat, looking past the driveway as if she too was stuck in another something that I couldn’t understand. I climbed into the back and tried to mirror her position, to see what she was seeing. I squinted, I tilted, I clenched my jaw in all the same places, but no matter how hard I tried, there was just cracked pavement and the brick walls outside our duplex. Before turning the ignition, my sister turned to my mother and put her hand on top of hers.

“We’ll show that son-of-a-bitch,” she said.

Tears plopped into the cup holder between them. I couldn’t tell who they belonged to; I was looking at my own hands, wishing that someday I’d know what my mother and sister were feeling, that my own hurt could spill out and overflow. I laced my fingers together and repeated son-of-a-bitch over and over, like a prayer. Like a threat.

***

Eight years later, I was seventeen, sitting on the patio of my best friend’s beach house. My new boyfriend, Gus, reclined beside me. The wind dropped the Gulf of Mexico salt from the waves right onto our lips. He licked the rolling paper until it was sticky, until it was malleable, until he could wrap it around and around everything that mattered. I tucked the taste onto my tongue while I sucked at the end of the joint he passed me. This is where we hung out to escape the outside world, by which I mean my mother. She disapproved of this high school relationship, though the more she told me that Gus was good-for-nothing, the more I thought he was good-for-everything.

We met while working at the same nursing-home restaurant. I didn’t think he was particularly attractive or smart, but he was different from me in ways that piqued my teenage-rebellion interest. He went to school in the sticks and barely passed the easiest classes, probably because since middle school, he had spent every morning smoking or drinking with his friends before the bus scooped them at the corner. I was the total opposite: always waiting eagerly for the bus to take me to my highly ranked high school so that I could ace every class and exceed every expectation. I often wondered what it would be like to not care, to not worry about big dreams or the future.

Once, as I walked to my car after a shift, he pulled up beside me in his Nissan 240, a heap of battered metal that clanged against the road. I turned toward him.

“Wanna do donuts in the back?” he asked.

I didn’t know what donuts were. And my mother expected me home soon. But I heard myself saying yes. The inside of his car was even more questionable, go-cart-esque; a used Crown Royal sack covered the gear stick, the scent of smoke wrapped itself around me as I settled into the seat. I thought it was charming. I thought it was cool. He drove to the parking lot of a closed medical office and smiled at me before hitting the gas and cutting the wheel fast, the car immediately succumbing to a spin that made my skull clang. I glanced at the visor mirror and didn’t recognize myself, only a blur of a girl. As we spun, I felt my chest clutch with something more than fear; something like excitement; something like what I imagined to be love.

When it was over, I was impressed. Not with him, but with myself for sticking through it. I’d always hated rollercoasters. I didn’t think of the danger I was potentially putting myself in at the hands of a teenage boy trying to impress a teenage girl because none of that mattered. I took risks. I was acting like a real teenager. I was damn right dangerous. In the rearview, I saw the tire marks we left on the concrete, tattooed proof of my first rotation into rebellion. When he asked me out on a date, I said yes.

Five months later, the clutch in my chest hadn’t let loose. No one told me how tight love could feel. How it could tense with every hit. Everyone else was doing this wrong; I felt only the high; no pain, no hurt, not even a hint of it. I wanted to take a picture of the night on the beach for my mother, so I could hold it up to her, show what love really looks like. I’d say, look, Ma, at this joint, this view, this salt on our lips. Can you see it? Can you taste it?

***

After thirty minutes of driving, my sister pulled up to a house that I didn’t recognize, almost a half-hour away from home. But one thing was familiar: my stepfather’s truck. I looked at my mother, and I was afraid. I had seen the look on her face only once before in my life, when I was much younger.

Back then, she had probably been having a hard day as a single mother—cleaning the house, paying the bills, cooking the food, helping us survive. I remember tugging at her pants, asking for this or that, crying when I didn’t get what I wanted. She asked me to please, stop, over and over, but I kept coming back, needing. I tugged one more time, and I saw that look on her face for a split second before I felt the palm of her hand smack the gummy part of my cheek, so hard that I forgot how to breathe, so hard that blood pooled from my nose into the cupid’s bow above my lips. She had never hit me before. I didn’t like the taste. We both burst into tears at the same time. She apologized with fervor, mopping up my bloody face with her shirt. I forgave her, of course, and she never hit me again.

But there it was. That same look. Directed at the truck, parked in front of this house. Unbeknownst to me, my mother had suspected an affair for quite some time. My stepfather, Jose, worked at a construction company that often called him for shifts that lasted days at a time, Recently, he had been going away for far too long, far too often. On his short stint back home, my mother combed through his phone and found too many calls made to an unsaved number which she wrote down on the back of a napkin. I imagined she stuffed it into the back of her nightstand. His little secret now both of theirs. I imagined she kissed him goodnight.

***

A few days after the beach house, my mother followed me down the driveway, her voice straining. “He’s a criminal!” she said. “He didn’t do it!” I shouted repeatedly. We had been screaming for an hour, both of us chasing each other through every room of our house to get the last word.

I got in the car, slammed the door before she could reach me. Still, there was no way I could stop those last words from piercing through the thick glass.

“He’s lying to you. You don’t want to see it, but he’s not good for you. This isn’t who you are!”

I reversed without looking at her. A part of me wished I had rolled down my window, looked into her fury-filled eyes, and said who exactly am I, Mamá? I was not the model daughter standing beside her holding a perfect purse neatly packed with good choices, good grades, and good intentions.

Not anymore. And especially not while she accused my boyfriend of being a thief. My sister, a manager at a department store, said she had seen Gus and his friend stealing from the store earlier that day. They had been detained and would suffer serious consequences, my mother said. But that wasn’t true, because I’d asked him what he was doing, and even though he took hours to respond, he told me he had been under his car, fixing something. That made sense to me. He didn’t do it.

At practice, I smiled at my friends, at my coach, at the band director, and danced every routine as precisely as I would during a real performance. I didn’t talk. I tossed my flag so high into the air that for a moment, I wondered if the pole would impale me on the way down. I caught it. Everyone clapped, I curtsied.

Before heading home, I checked my phone. A video from my sister. Timestamped. Two idiots shoving phone accessories into their pockets. One of them I recognized as a friend from work. The other wore a black Ice Cube T-shirt, the rapper leaning on a classic Impala next to a “Parental Advisory” sign. The kind of shirt that makes a memorable Christmas gift. The kind of shirt that a girl would scour stores to find for her boyfriend that loves music and cars. The kind of shirt that is undeniable.

I called him, asked why he would lie to me. He hadn’t been under his car. He hadn’t been fixing anything. He was there, in the video, trapped in the truth.

“It was too embarrassing to admit,” he said. That his friend made him do it.

He didn’t want to. He didn’t mean to. He didn’t.

“What were you wearing?” I asked.

“Nothing special,” he answered.

***

My stepfather was a lanky Cuban man with an affinity for Marlboro Reds and Coronas. He always wore baseball caps and thick flip flops. His skin was perpetually brown and charred from his work in the sun. He ate white rice and black beans alongside every meal, no matter what. He and my mother had met through mutual friends, at a time when we needed him most. We had all heard the legends of how he escaped Cuba on a tugboat. His flip flop feet had jumped from the dock of dictatorship and landed on American soil. He told us he would never go back. He knew the value of being American. He knew it too well.

My family’s legal status was tenuous; we lived in fear of deportation. Years before, my parents had separated soon after we moved from Montevideo, Uruguay, to Naples, Florida. The drastic change of scenery had done nothing for their failing relationship. My father was too demanding, always complaining when the house wasn’t clean or dinner wasn’t ready as soon as he got home from his shifts as a handyman, even though my mother worked all day, too. She knew it was over because she dreaded hearing his keys in the door, just like she had in Uruguay. It wasn’t love. Much less the American Dream. The palm trees and promise of a better future were not enough to stop the inevitable. My father moved out, deciding instead to settle on the east coast of the state. For most of my childhood, I saw him sparingly, my definition of father shifting to thirty second phone calls and monthly weekend visits.

It seemed miraculous that Jose entered our lives when he did. He was our savior: my mother was in love, I had a new father figure, and if it all worked out, we might be allowed to stay in America. I liked him. Within a couple of years, they were married.

He always put down his cigarette to pick me up and spin me in slow circles, the top of my head so far off the ground that it felt like I was flying. We twirled. I pretended the smoke was a cloud and he was my father. My mother and sister watched, laughed. The three of us caught all his smoke in our open mouths. We were a family. I felt like he would never let me fall.

***

Still staring at the evidence of my stepfather’s truck, my mother asked my sister to drive around the block. I wanted to ask, “but aren’t we already here?” Instead, I chose silence. My Nintendo DS sat unused beside me. I had tried to play while on the highway, but any drama on the screen seemed pointless compared to the one unfolding in front of me. As we drove past house after house, I decided to play a different kind of game.

That house looks like ours, I thought. I wondered about the family within it: if they had collections of Corona caps inside of an ice bucket in their backyard, or big barbecue grills with space for every cut of cow, or ashtrays filled with two kinds of Marlboro butts accumulated during long conversations after dinners overflowing with rice and black beans.

We were back in front of the house we had come all this way for. My mother leaned her head back against the headrest and sighed, as if she had been wishing she imagined this.

“Okay,” she said, as if finally convinced. And my sister unlocked the doors.

I didn’t know what to say, so I kept playing my game. I scrutinized the house and decided with certainty. It didn’t look like ours, but it had something within it that belonged to us.

***

We lived in a house with a pool. My mother slept next to Jose every night. I spent hours mesmerized by the body of water that was all ours.

Naples is one of the wealthiest cities in the country, though I didn’t know that until I was much older. Most people don’t bat an eye when luxury cars drive past neighborhoods that are worth even more. I learned to measure suburban life based on material possessions.

I lay on my belly at the concrete edge of the water, as if frozen in dive. If I kept the water still, it looked clear enough to be glass. Somewhere inside the house two voices clashed loudly. I smelled burnt rice. But when I sank the crown of my head into the chlorine, I understood nothing. When I emerged again, I watched as the reflection of a child distorted into something like a woman.

Some nights, I squirmed between my mother and Jose to watch a soap opera before bedtime. He gave her massages with oil that he heated by rubbing his calloused hands together. He teased that if I got too close, I would get burned. It was the season finale, but I could only watch his hands. I finally asked: “How come it’s not hurting my mom?” And he laughed. He told me it was because she was so strong. When the protagonist found out about “the other woman,” I pretended not to know what she meant. Jose kept massaging. And my mother winced.

Weekends were for family. I’d wake up early in anticipation of hopping in the backseat of our family’s new Avalanche truck, pestering everyone by asking where we were going this time. We did it all: the zoo, the mall, farmers markets, parks, Disney World, Miami.

Our favorite and most recurring trip was to the city of Fort Myers, where we’d spend a long afternoon shopping at Burlington, polishing it off with a visit to a Chinese buffet. I remember us, each separating toward our preferred stations. My sister, my mother, and my stepdad packed steaming spoons full of beef, broccoli, and wontons, onto their plates. As I scooped up orange chicken, I watched them reunite at our usual corner table. I felt no sense of hurry. I knew that no matter how long I took, they would wait for me.

On the way home, my mother and Jose held hands. I stretched my legs onto my sister’s lap. My mouth still tasted like fortune cookie. A few days earlier, my mother told me that our green cards had been shipped. Things were almost good enough to forget that my mother could never pull out her cell phone in front of him, that she monitored where his eyes lingered when another woman walked past, that she spent most weekdays chain-smoking Marlboro Lights in the backyard. He always threatened not to sign the forms promising our freedom.

I ran my tongue along every tooth, searching for a crumb that would tell me about the future of my family. I tasted something bitter tucked between my molars, something violent, something like lying or hitting or pushing, back against the bar of glass cracking spilling bleeding moving out in out collapsing. I held it for a second in the back of my mouth––intrigued, disgusted––and then I swallowed anyway.

We lived in a house with a pool. My mother checked the mailbox every day.

***

I lost my virginity in silence. I was seventeen and soaring in Gus’s affection. Almost two months of denying his pleading hands on the waistband of my jeans ticked by before I decided I was sure, before I convinced myself to believe in him, before I texted, Wanna come over? For hours before, I stuck my ear to the wall and listened until, finally, my mother and her boyfriend’s snores rang in the room right beside mine. I waited another half hour to make sure they were in the deepest part of their sleep before I sent the signal. Within minutes, Gus was at my bedroom window. The room was dark except for a glint of moonlight, and as he crawled through, his shadow silhouette consumed the walls. Before meeting his lips, I thought, he could be anyone.

We whispered only a few words: can I, yes, do you, yes, ready, yes, love you, love you. The rest was breath and silent shadows. It was a careful affair. I had achieved womanhood, and yet, inside the intensity of the moment, I thought only of my mother, dreaming a few feet from me. If she woke up, would she take it away? I didn’t want to imagine her fury at the thought of her daughter’s purity taken from under her own roof like a goddamned robbery. And yet I couldn’t help it. I knew exactly what she would say: Te dije. I told you. I always know a thief when I see one.

***

Later, much later, my mother and I held hands in my grandmother’s room during our vacation to Uruguay. I was twenty-four years old, a seasoned daughter, far past relationship rebellions. Sixteen years earlier, we had sat in the same room, on the wine-red duvet, except Jose’s figure took up the spot where my sister now snored beside me. My mother remembered, too. Jose was long gone now.

He always watched me undress, she said. Not because he loved my body. Because he was inspecting it. He saw a bruise on my leg once and accused me of sneaking out the window and cheating with your grandmother’s neighbor. The window lined with unmovable iron rods to prevent robberies, the neighbor an old man in his eighties.

Our previous time in Uruguay made sense now; the reason my mother had dressed quickly in the guest room my sister and I shared. I was confused about why she chose that room– the armoire’s mirror had a long crack through the middle that split in half anyone that used it. Not ideal for seeing yourself whole. I told her it looked like she was two people: half mother, half wife. I couldn’t understand why she looked so sad.

Whenever I used the bathroom, I heard the keys on my phone clicking. He had to know everything. He had to be everywhere. I had to let him.

I asked if she had regrets. She glanced at our passports and green cards neatly resting on the dresser. I understood then about freedom sacrificed for freedom.

***

Jose wasn’t my first stake out. It was a couple years earlier, when the engine of my sister’s car hummed sneakily on the edge of the road beside her boyfriend’s house. I wore her sequined sunglasses, the rectangles drowning my eight-year-old eyes. She wore a baseball cap but kept her line of vision clear. It was important that she saw everything. I hung my head low, just like she told me to. From this angle, she could see his driveway, the gravel beneath his car, and most importantly, if he got in it. Tonight, he was supposedly staying home. She was there to make sure.

We spent our Friday night like this, staked out, eating potato chips, trying to guess the next song on the radio, smearing lip gloss on each other’s lips — one laughing like a sister that didn’t have every sense tuned in to the lying grumble of her boyfriend’s motor, the other laughing like a sister that did know the difference between devotion and deception, both laughing and laughing like sisters that didn’t have a mother so sick with anxiety that she stopped eating, stopped sleeping, stopped doing anything except smoking Marlboro Lights and wondering if her husband would ever return with their future.

I was far too young to understand why, but I knew that she had to do this. My sister was fifteen when we moved to America, and as we bounced from city to city, she learned to never get comfortable with a good thing. It didn’t help that our household taught us to distrust, to always expect trouble, to double-check everything, just in case.

“You can love them all you want,” she’d say. “But trust is different. Always do your research, no matter what.”

I moved to the back seat and fell asleep. Hours passed, and his car stayed obedient. When I woke again, my sister had her hands on the gearshift. My eyes met hers in the rearview mirror, asking if he passed her test.

“This time,” she said.

***

A few years into her marriage with Jose, my mother opened her nightstand drawer knowing the napkin with a phone number scrawled in the fold was the only way to survive. Days before, she’d collapsed in the kitchen and awakened to her daughters’ pressing grains of sugar to her tongue, holding perfume spritzed fingers up to her nose, trying anything to bring her back to consciousness. It was true that she had been floating within herself for months, spending days and nights staring into the smoke coming out of her cigarette, barely blinking when the ash burned a hole through the hem of her dress.

Jose came home when he pleased, his work in construction all over the state an excuse to cheat. But really, she didn’t care about the infidelity anymore. The legitimacy of their love stopped being real the first time he purposely missed their marriage-based green card interview because a male coworker made her laugh. The second time, their hands joined as husband and wife, felt as cold as legality.

My mother was awake now, gripping the slip of paper with an anger she was glad to feel again. She read the number out loud. My sister dialed. In the other room, I whispered secrets to my stuffed animals. A woman picked up; her voice ordinary, like she could be anyone. The sound of beer bottles clinked in the background. My sister pretended she worked with a credit card company and asked the woman to confirm her name and address. She did. Now, she was someone somewhere. And she wasn’t alone.

We didn’t stay long in the woman’s driveway. My mother blew air out of her nose and shook her head before opening the car door, as if this was a bad joke she could only pretend to laugh at. She walked up to Jose’s truck, the one they bought together, and stared. There would be no slashing of tires. Instead, she ran her fingers up the length of the truck’s antenna, and from her pocket placed something on top, though I couldn’t see what it was.

Soon, Jose would know there was no use keeping up the lie. He would knock on the door, cry, promise to never do it again. Once, she almost believed him until he pushed her up against the glass bar of our perfect pool home, the liquor bottles shattering on the floor as he accused her of being a better cheater than him. In the moments after, she stuffed every one of his belongings into trash bags and threw them onto the lawn. It would be the last time she saw him, his broad back bent over trying to separate his life from filth. She shut the blinds, uninterested in watching how long it would take.

We drove away from the house and his truck. I knew I would always remember this moment: my sister cackling at how smoothly their scheme went, my mother turning up the music so loud the car vibrated our bodies, a fresh breeze blowing in through open windows, and my mother turning her face toward it. I turned back to look at what she left behind, squinting, and I knew when the sunlight shone off a shiny gold box that there could only be one thing that proved she was here, that she knew everything, that she really was free — my mother’s Marlboro Lights.

***

Eventually, Gus slipped back out the window and into the night. Again, I listened to the darkness until I heard the Nissan’s engine roaring its victory run down the road. Months later, Gus’s ex-girlfriend would text me screenshots of their plans to meet up at the dead ends of their neighborhoods.

You can love them all you want.

It was happening for months, the girl said.

But trust is different.

Don’t blame yourself, the girl said.

Always do your research.

He’s good at sneaking around, the girl said.

No matter what.

Still, I would stay for another year, until his gaze on my body made me feel uncomfortably naked, until I heard his fingers tapping through my messages, until he pushed, and I pushed back.

But that night, I stood up, finally sure that we had gotten away with it. It was four in the morning, a reasonable time to use the bathroom in the middle of the night. I paused before opening my bedroom door, as if I could see her already, arms crossed, eyebrows creased, ready to impede an insurgence. Her soft snores pushed me forward, back into the light.

I thought maybe I’d look different, more mature, experienced, all-grown-up between my legs, but as I scrutinized myself in the bathroom mirror, I only saw my band-camp tan teenaged face, hair clumped like a pillow at the back of my head, eyebrows too separated by my own poor pluck. I lathered off the latex laced on my fingers, stealing glances at myself, as if the woman I became was hiding somewhere before, waiting for me to find her.

I brought a wet finger up to the glass, pointed like an accusation toward the middle of my forehead. A water droplet slipped off my fingertip, sliding down the mirror, like a crack in the glass. I kept staring, unable to look away as I slowly split in two.

 

 

 

Camila Cal Mello is a Uruguayan, first-generation, emerging creative nonfiction writer, and poet. She earned her MFA from the University of Central Florida, where she received a Provost Fellowship in nonfiction. She is currently a PhD student in English, Creative Writing Concentration at the University of Mississippi. Her work has been published in The Acentos Review, The Roadrunner Review, and others. Find her on social media @camivcal.