The Distance Between Us: Book One: Chapters 7–13

But back then, as our little mother, Mago’s job was to take care of us and to shelter us from the reality that only she could fully grasp. I had her as a buffer, but she had no one but herself.

Besides, as he would later tell me, my father had helped his parents pay for the mortgage on their property with the wages he had earned since he was nine years old.

The workers returned the next day and the day after and the day after and began to lay the foundation, and after that, the walls.

At night we couldn’t sleep from being so sore, but every day we put all of our energy into building our house, and when our fingers hurt too much, or our knees wanted to buckle under the weight of the buckets of wet mortar we carried to the bricklayers, we would tell ourselves that the faster we worked, the faster we would have a family again.

For privacy, she’d hung a curtain from the rafters.

While my aunt and I waited by the dirt road for a taxi, I couldn’t stop thinking about my grandmother’s conviction that my parents were not coming back.

I know now what she had wanted me to see back then: the banks of the canal lined with trash and debris floating in the water, the crumbling adobe houses, the shacks made of sticks, the children with worm-pregnant bellies running around with bare feet, the piles of drying horse dung littering the dirt road, the flea-bitten stray dogs lying under the shade of trees, flies hovering above them.

When we entered her classroom, Mago’s classmates and teacher looked at Tía Emperatriz with admiration. She looked so elegant in her red high heels, pretty blue dress, and stylish haircut.

Abuela Evila never approved of any of my aunt’s suitors, so my aunt was already considered a spinster.

I hesitantly wrapped my arms around her waist, feeling as if this were a dream and she would disappear any minute.

It was covered with cardboard soaked in tar on the outside, and the roof was made of corrugated metal.

The bamboo sticks of my grandmother’s shack rattled like maracas when the train passed by.

But this little girl, who was born in that special, beautiful place, was almost as dark as the Nahuas, the indigenous people who came down from the hills to sell clay pots at the train station.

She was making green salsa, and as she talked she smashed the roasted green tomatoes with the pestle so hard the juice splattered on her dress.

As I looked at her in the doorway, beckoning us to come in, I knew why the emptiness and the yearning were still there.

Out of all of us, Mago was the only one who harbored any hope that Papi would not forsake us.

My mother’s broken promise—that she’d be gone only a year—had caused a rift between them, so Mago’s loyalty to my father remained strong.

I didn’t have a single memory of him and Mami together—of all of us together—and I felt cheated out of the family I yearned to have.

Although it has now deteriorated and is no longer the fancy place it once was, back in its day it was frequented by wealthy people.

Abuelita Chinta scolded Mami as if she were a little girl, saying that it was the night’s dampness that had made Betty sick, and what would we do if she came down with pneumonia?

Mago was too mesmerized by the girl who seemed to be floating in a pink cloud to get mad that she lost the bet.

Once in a while we would see lightning flashing over the Mountain That Has a Headache. Mami paid no heed to the weather.

I turned to look at her, expecting her to be angry at Mago and me for leaving the stand unattended.

She was running away from the glittering pool and its blue tiles, from the memory of my father and her wading in the water, arms intertwined, from the pain of knowing that even though he had held onto her in the pool of La Quinta Castrejón, he eventually had let go of her, in a place just as beautiful and frightening.

What was it about her he liked? my mother had wondered. Was it that she was educated and was a nursing assistant, unlike my mother, who was only allowed a sixth-grade education? Or was it the fact that this woman was a naturalized U.S. citizen and could speak English, unlike my mother, who as hard as she tried, couldn't seem to make sense of the strange words that rolled off the tongues of Americans?

She wanted to go back to Mexico, back to the place she knew, back to her mother, back to us—her children—away from my father, but she couldn’t leave like this, with no money and no daughter. Everyone would scorn her for coming back worse off than when she left.

The events culminated with something so horrible that even now, I still can’t fully believe it.

Within a week, he had managed to sneak across the border and resumed his life in the United States as if nothing had ever happened.

Mami was distant with us, indifferent in many ways.

Women would sit outside their homes on wicker chairs, embroidering cloth napkins or reading a magazine while listening to boleros on the radio.

Some came from the cornfields covered with sweat and dirt, with their machetes hanging at their sides from strings of rawhide.

My hot-blooded Scorpio sister would never succumb to something as silly as sadness.

Abuelita Chinta, Betty, and I watched my uncle maneuver his way down the dirt road with his black dog at his side and my brother standing on the pegs.

He stumbled into the house, talking nonsense, his skin burning hot. He had hallucinations, and Abuelita Chinta spent all night by his side, trying different remedies to counteract the poison.

Back then I had never heard of schizophrenia, and so I had believed, without question, that my uncle’s life had been ruined by witchcraft.