they’d looked four years ago, furious brothers who had to tick off the years until the eldest could get a driver’s license and exact revenge.
She worked hard to avoid thinking about her mother during her final moments and instead burrowed into other people’s tragedies: the abductions, tortures, the gut-based screams unheard by potential saviors—and sometimes heard but disregarded.
When she’s done unpacking, she opens her laptop and pulls up her Facebook account. Her profile picture is the default egg, but once inside her page, the cover photo is one of her and her mother, arms slung around each other, standing at the shores of Lake Havasu. Just the two of them, none of the spring break hordes.
Her mother, Magdalena, had been able to afford a week only in the off-season—their rental, though, still reeked of beer, tequila, and the dim but unmistakable scent of vomit. “A good cleaning could get rid of that smell,” her mother had said, and with a smile at Brooke, shrugged. The maid on vacation doesn’t clean.
Brooke’s thirteen years old in the photo, wearing a bikini whose flimsy top pieces meet with a large silver ring. “A keyhole,” the cashier had said when she rang it up. All that summer, Brooke had struggled with whether she invited the mental image of exactly what key might fit that hole. It was a summer that felt like sex still lingered on the beach, discarded by the spring break kids for any teenager to pick up like a sand dollar.
She’d looked critically at her mother’s figure in her own bikini that summer, a sky blue color that made her skin glow. Her Mexican skin was pre-tanned by God, Brooke had thought . . . and therefore so was hers—although one shade lighter. Her mother’s body was slim, muscular, curvy, all at once and in the right places. With perfect posture and a graceful stride, her mother walked the distance from their beach towels to the waves over and over. That summer, Brooke had looked at bodies hungrily, surveyingly, trying to understand her own place in the hierarchy of physiology.
As she looks below the photo, she sees a message waiting on her wall for her. Miguel had typed, “How’s the new place?
Miguel’s profile picture’s a joke, a detail of a large mural painted on a taqueria wall. It shows an Aztec warrior spiriting off a woman, breasts spilling out of her animal-skin dress. Miguel had chosen the warrior’s face to represent his own.
It’s okay, Brooke comments in the thread he’s started. I just kind of wish it had a soul.
You don’t want a place with soul, mija. That’s how you get a hotel like in The Shining.
So he’s online, or at least ready to jump on in response to his phone’s alert.
True. I’ll dial back my expectations.
Wish you didn’t have to keep moving.
I know. She pauses. Miguel understands; she had told him the story all those years ago when the two of them were co-prisoners at the GHAC, the “group home for abandoned children”—their nickname designed to find humor in their own scarred existences.
It’d be cool if someday you end up moving right into my city.
She starts to type something snarky, but her fingers stall on the keyboard. She’s wished this many times, that she was the sort of person who was free to live a normal life, who could renew an acquaintance with an old friend from her troubled teen years. She remembers all those hushed conversations on the back porch of the group home, her fingernails pulling paint shreds off the peeling floorboards and making a little pile of the results as they shared war stories in the battle of growing up. Who isn’t a survivor from the wreckage of childhood?
She types, Someday, I’ll do it.
I’ll put out the red carpet, baby.
No paparazzi, please, she types. You must know all the media attention is painful to me.
You just want to live your life, right?!
She snorts, and writes, Gotta log off now. Need some sleep.
Night, mija.
She closes Facebook and sits thinking. A joke about media attention, but she’s always felt the unwanted attention focused on her, keen and intent.
Furious, even.
When Brooke first met Miguel, she was fourteen, bewildered at the loss of her mother and the apparent dearth of relatives to take her in. She’d known her mom had come from a large family in Mexico, but her physical move to the United States had also been an emotional one. As far back as Brooke could remember, there were no phone calls, no packages, no sign that her mother had family she cared about. Brooke’s father had been a fling, and she hadn’t been permitted to know his name. The birth certificate, she saw when she had first studied it, reported his name as “Dirtbag”; someone had crosshatched it out but she could still discern it.
Brooke became a ward of the state and entered the foster care system, awaiting adoption along with Miguel. Some of the kids were orphans like her, while others—like Miguel—had parents, but worthless ones. Still a third group of residents was there for behavioral issues, rejected by their parents whether worthless or not.
It was hard not to think of the home as a sort of prison since they weren’t allowed to come and go as they pleased. Brooke had been a latchkey kid pretty much all her life; it was startling to be denied the right to step out for a Popsicle on a warm summer evening.
And summers were the worst.
When school didn’t dissolve a major portion of the day, the group home became a lame summer camp: the city pool twice a week, all day, so she was fried and sunblind by the end; stupid “matinees” on the smelly carpet of the home’s living room, each kid with a coffee filter full of popcorn, watching oldies on the VCR, itself an archaic electronic that somehow wouldn’t die and lay to rest its compatriot library of forgotten Hollywood goofs.
The upside, in her second year, was the arrival of Miguel. He’d been waiting for his parents to come home and make dinner, but they’d pulled to the side of the road for a fentanyl/heroin snack and overdosed. In the ambulance, the medical personnel found Miguel’s school photo in his mom’s wallet and dispatched police to ring the doorbell. His parents were alive but not going to be able to resume their parental duties for quite some time, so Miguel wound up sitting next to Brooke at his first dinner at the home, sticky spaghetti with mealy-textured meatballs.
“Is this really meat?” he’d cocked his head and asked her.
“It’s brown and ball-shaped, and that’s all I can say,” she’d answered.
They’d been close friends since then, not just because of their good behavior in the midst of proto-juvenile delinquents, but also because of their Mexican heritage and the lilt in their voices that informed the world so.
“I’m trying to train myself out of it,” she’d confided once when he caught her imitating the flat tones of the NBC anchor.
“Mija, never,” he’d said. “Your voice is too pretty.”
She and Miguel had aged out around the same time, she a few months earlier than him. They’d both taken the jobs and living situations offered them without thinking of refusing, he in Baltimore and she in Houston.
