My mother chews and swallows. She runs her tongue over her teeth, a habit when she’s nervous. One I can’t stand. Her lips are my own lips, naturally plump, slightly crooked when she smiles. We’ve been told, always, our smiles look fake. But even doubled over in genuine laughter, that crooked smile.
How are you? she says. Veins on her hands. I wonder if mine will look like that. If I will notice as they change or if I will just wake up one day, wondering when green lattice emerged from under my skin.
I want to cry again and I don’t even know why. I want to tell my mother to take me home. I want, again, to tell her about my father, but I won’t even tell myself about my father. I think about this often, about whether the past is real if we don’t bring it into the present. Tree falling in the forest and all that.
I’m okay, I say.
I don’t know if I am the tree or the no one who doesn’t hear it.
My mother searches my eyes. Runs her tongue over her teeth.
See me, I think. Just this once, see me, Mommy.
My mother opens her mouth like she’s going to say something, closes it again. Finally she speaks. Your skin looks so good, my mother says, and there is sadness on her face, I can see it. But I just feel so much relief.
Mario was supposed to get a Lortab script but the doctor wasn’t in and the other doctor was too busy. I should have jacked a script pad, he says. Bro, my boy at the clinic fucking sells them. He’s in such a bad mood. Calm down baby, I say. I offer him some of my coke, but he’s like nah, I’m already too on edge. You know what, he says, let’s see what all the hillbilly hype is about. He’s been avoiding the Oxy because (1) it’s stronger and more pure, and he isn’t trying to get super-hooked or anything, and (2) that’s where the money is and everyone knows that once you dip in your own supply, you’re screwing up. It’s cheaper here in Florida, but Mario’s been talking to his friend and they are planning the drive up to Virginia, see if they can set up something steady.
Fuck it, he says. It’s one time.
I give him my fifty-dollar tip. It’s like I paid for it, I say.
We hold each other that night and I want to simultaneously die, laugh.
The fan whirs above us and I watch a mosquito perched on the edge of a blade. How can it stay so still when everything is spinning? I wonder, but I wake up with bites all over my body.
My mother invites me to Versailles for the Sunday tamal en cazuela special. It’s our third weekend seeing each other in a row, it’s hard to believe. She knows tamal en cazuela is my favorite. I don’t like Versailles, its combination of “yellow rice with beans, please” tourist crowd and old guard prim-and-proper Cuban Americans. But the tamal en cazuela. I live for the salty mush—corn, lard, pork—burning my tongue. We end the meal with cortaditos, and my mother places a hand on mine. She is so uncomfortable showing emotion but then she cracks, and the crack then breaks me and I rush to put up the façade again. We do this dance over and over and over again, and it feels worse than not talking at all.
I know I have failed you in some way, she says. And I just wish I knew how. I just wish I knew how to fix whatever is broken between us.
I can’t look up. I can’t look up from my coffee, from the foam dissolving into the tiny cup. Tell her, I think, tell her.
But what would it do other than widen the gulf? We are already two continents; impossible to imagine a bridge could even exist. I wish to dissolve into my cup, I wish to dissolve on the tongue, to be sugar and not this bitter, watery substance in the shape of Girl.
It is easier to go further back, to deflect past with past. I ask about Cuba again.
My mother sighs.
There is nothing to say, she says. But I’ll tell you this: I was not rich like the other Cubans who came at that time.
It is more than she has ever said.
So how did you survive? I say, and what I really mean is how will I walk out of these gaudy gold-etched doors into the wet open mouth of a hot Miami afternoon and survive, and then the day after that, how will I survive, and then the day after that, how will I survive, and when will I stop feeling exhausted from all the surviving?
My mother laughs. Your father, she says. That’s how. Do you understand now why it’s been so hard for me to say no to that man all our life together?
See me, see me, I think. Just for this one moment, see me. I am sinking, I am screaming, Tell me how to live, Mommy.
I dip a finger into my cup, and she watches, perplexed, as I place it in my mouth.
I want to go, I say. To Cuba.
My mother laughs sarcastically. She rolls her eyes. It’s so good, my mother says. It’s so good to see you doing well. I mean, I think you are well. Are you well?
I nod. I can feel the sugar crystals dissolving on my tongue. Everything sweet. I run my tongue over my teeth.
The woman still comes alone during the week. But now I notice what I hadn’t noticed before. Her eyes are red-rimmed like my father’s last time I saw him, months and months ago. Cirrhosis had made him all blood vessel, bloat. But the
