Ileana moved into Andrés’ room. She slept in the bed that once belonged to Mando, the bed he’d slept in with Xochil. Andrés didn’t mind. Ileana was sweet, and she liked to ask him questions at night—questions about where feelings came from. Questions about the world. “You study the stars, don’t you, Andy?”
“I don’t really study them,” he said. “I count them.”
“Why?”
“To see how many there are.”
“How many are there?”
“I haven’t finished counting them yet.”
“How many do you think there are?”
“About one for every person who ever lived.”
“One for Mom and Dad?”
“Yeah, one for them, too.”
“What are they made out of, Andy, the stars?”
“Mostly hydrogen and helium. That’s what makes them burn. That’s what makes them light up the sky.”
“Is that why Jesus’ heart burns—because it’s made of hydrogen and helium?”
“Yes. That’s right.”
“I want a heart like that, Andy, a heart like a star’s.”
He fell in love with the things she said. So they were roommates, now, he and Ileana. And best friends—since his other friends didn’t like him that much. His other friends liked getting into trouble, stealing things, and picking on smaller kids. He didn’t like that. Anyway, having friends didn’t matter. Ileana mattered.
Yolie and the man whose name was Homero had their own room now. They sometimes groaned like Mando and Xochil, but Ileana never said anything about the groaning.
Yolie did everything for Homero. She washed his clothes and ironed for him. She cooked for him. Everything he asked her to do, she did.
They were like a family for a while. Everything was nice—except Andrés was bored, and he would complain, and Yolie said she might ask Homero to buy him a new typewriter, but Andrés told Yolie he didn’t want one. Not anymore. He was done with writing letters to Mrs. Fernandez. He was done with words and paper. Words on paper were dead. As dead as he was.
Yolie and Homero kept buying him more books, mostly paperbacks. In English and in Spanish, and Andrés would read them, but he was getting so tired of reading and reading and reading, and he didn’t care anymore. About anything.
The man told him maybe he should begin running. It would be good for him. So Homero bought him a pair of tennis shoes, special for running, and he got him a book about running and a book about stretching because stretching was important if you were going to be a runner, and Andrés read the books, and he decided it wouldn’t be a bad thing if he started running. So every morning, when he got up, he would stretch just like the drawings in the book, and he began to run. At first, he hated it. But it was better than staying at home all the time, and reading was okay, it passed the time, but it was hard to do nothing but read, and after a while he liked the feeling of running, how it hurt, but how it felt good, how his legs would ache and his lungs would ache, too—but it was good and he liked it. And so he ran and ran, one mile. And after a while, more than a mile, then two miles, then three. And when he ran, he thought of Mando, of how he was in prison, and he thought of him all caged up and he thought that maybe he had to run and be free for the both of them—for himself and for Mando. And he began to talk to Mando as he ran. He would tell him everything.
There’s something about Homero that’s not right. I don’t like the way he looks at Yolie. And I don’t like the way he looks at Ileana. And even me, he looks at me sometimes and it feels like there’s a worm crawling around in my shirt and I shiver and feel cold. But he’s nice to us, and I know he pays for everything because we don’t have any money except the money you had sent to us. Homero wasn’t home, and Yolie and I hid it, and I understood that she didn’t want Homero to know. Which is a very smart thing. He would talk and talk as he ran and never stopped until he couldn’t catch his breath, and after a while he learned to talk to Mando with his mind. He didn’t have to use his lips at all.
So he was a runner now. Running through the streets of Juárez. He found a route where there was less traffic because cars had no respect for the art he was cultivating. After a while, he knew just what streets to take and what streets to avoid. Yolie said he was running too much, that he was too young and that it wasn’t such a good idea for him to be running as much as he did, but he told her it was okay, that he liked it.
She could tell he was happier, now. So she didn’t fight him. Everyone needed to have something. He had his books and his running. Yolie had Homero.
I’m a runner now. And one day I’m going to run across the bridge, and no one is going to stop me.
“Did you stop running?”
“When I started living here again, I started. But I just—I don’t know. It reminded me of everything, and I didn’t want to think about it, so I just left it alone.” He realized just then why he’d gone to Juárez that night—because of the running. The running and Juárez, somehow they belonged together. And so he’d needed to go there. It was so odd, how the body remembered. “I ran the other night,” he confessed.
“Did you?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“It was my birthday. I wanted to celebrate. I thought I’d run.”
“Happy birthday. How was your run?”
“Okay. It’s kind of an insane thing to do.”
“A lot of people spend a lot of time doing it.”
“That and counting stars.”
“And smoking cigarettes.”
“It’s insane.”
“If everything was perfectly sane and ordered, what would the world look like, Andrés?”
“Like a computer.”
“Better to have a heart and all the chaos that comes with it.”
“Only a person with a perfectly ordered life could say something like that.”
“No one’s life is perfectly ordered.”
“Not even yours?”
“I’m the only exception.”
He laughed at her joke. She could be funny.
Everything was pretty good until after Christmas. At Christmas, they had special cookies and presents and lights—lights all over the courtyard and all over the kitchen. Yolie and Homero put them up, twinkling lights, red and blue and yellow and green. Yolie learned how to make mole—not the kind that came in a jar but the real kind that took all day with all different kinds of chiles, chipotle and chile pasilla and un-skinned almonds and cloves and tomatillos and peanuts and sesame seeds and garlic and Mexican cinnamon and a special kind of chocolate, and the house smelled as beautiful as it had ever smelled, and then they all made tamales because Yolie said it was what Mom would’ve wanted, and he thought of the time when Yolie had yelled at him and told him never, ever to tell her again about what their mother would’ve wanted. And he thought that people changed their minds about things all the time—but it was something they had to do on their own. When you tried to make someone change their mind, they wouldn’t. They just wouldn’t.
So they made tamales and Ileana mostly made a mess, but she laughed all day and she was so happy and beautiful and Andrés thought that whatever her heart was made of, it burned, and it was the only light in the house that mattered.
It was a good Christmas, and the house was warm, and they burned lots of candles so the whole house looked like the inside of a church, and Andrés thought that maybe there wouldn’t be any more sadness. There had been enough of troubles and enough crying, and maybe now all of that was over. But he knew that Yolie wasn’t happy. It was as if she was acting. Or maybe it was just him. Maybe he just couldn’t believe that everything was going to be okay. He was like a dog guarding a house, ready to leap at any intruder. A good guard dog never slept all night. And that’s what he was now, a good guard dog. And he hated himself. Because he couldn’t believe that they were at peace now. And maybe he was just making things up about what he saw on Yolie’s face because he didn’t like Homero. Deep down, he didn’t like him. But maybe that only meant that his heart was getting hard. Mando had said that every man’s heart had to get a little bit hard—because if it didn’t get hard, he would just stay a boy. So maybe he was becoming a man. Being a man, that was a good thing.
But right after Christmas, everything began to change. Homero began to stay out late. On New Year’s Eve, Yolie waited for him to come home. She was all dressed up. They were going to a dance, and she looked beautiful. And she was a woman now. And he thought that maybe Yolie could find a better man than Homero, someone younger, someone who would make her more alive. Homero made her into someone old. Yolie waited and waited, but finally she said she wasn’t going to spend the New Year waiting for a man who was never going to come, so she went out by herself.
Andrés told her he would go with her.
“No,” she said, “you stay here with Ileana.”
She gave them some firecrackers and told them they could go out at midnight and light them. And she left. She had this look. He knew that look. She was going out because she was determined to live.
At midnight he took Ileana outside, and they lit firecrackers. And there were lots of people out on the streets. Some were banging pots and other kids were lighting firecrackers and everyone was yelling and hugging each other and repeating over and over, “¡Feliz Año Nuevo!” And the streets were so full, and suddenly Andrés realized Ileana wasn’t next to him and he felt something inside and he started searching the crowded street, Ileana, Ileana, and then he saw her and he grabbed her and hugged her and they went inside.
Ileana fell asleep on his shoulder. But it didn’t matter, because he wasn’t sleepy. He just lay there, listening to his little sister breathe, and waiting for Yolie to come home. Like the guard dog he’d become.
It was very late when he heard Yolie come in. He could hear she was with someone. Homero, he thought. Yolie must have found him. He could hear them laughing and talking softly and he knew they were having sex and he didn’t want to hear. And when they were quiet, he fell asleep.
When he woke up, there was a man sleeping in Yolie’s bed. And the man wasn’t Homero. He hated that he had to walk through her room to get to the kitchen. He hated the thought of Ileana waking up and seeing their older sister in bed with a stranger.
He walked into the kitchen and sat there. He waited until Yolie and the man stirred. They said something to each other, then the man got dressed and left. He didn’t say anything to Andrés when he walked past him. Like he wasn’t even there. Andrés shook his head, then walked toward the doorway between Yolie’s room and the kitchen. He noticed that the man had left some money on the bed. He looked at Yolie and didn’t say anything.
She didn’t say anything either.
Homero came back a few days later. It went that way for a while. Homero would come and go. On the nights he didn’t come home, Ileana would say, “It’s not right, that he doesn’t come home.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Yolie didn’t seem concerned or worried. Almost like she didn’t care. “He helps us,” she said. “That’s all that matters.”
After that, Yolie started going out. She would get dressed up and go out and she wouldn’t say anything to them, just that she would be out late. And then it became every night. Every, every night. And Homero never spent the night anymore, though sometimes he would come over during the day and he and Yolie would talk, but they would talk in whispers and send Andrés and Ileana out to the market or on some errand so they could talk. And sometimes Homero would come by in the evenings when Yolie was getting ready to go out, and they would go out together, but it wasn’t like they were boyfriend and girlfriend, not like that. It was more like they were working together. More like that. And Andrés thought there was something very wrong—but he didn’t quite know what. But he was starting to make up stories in his head about what was happening.
One day, when Yolie was taking a shower, he found lots of money in her purse. Dollars—lots of ten-dollar bills. And he wondered where she was getting the money. So he decided to ask her what she did when she went out every night.
She smiled at him. “I got a job waiting tables at a bar. Homero found the job for me. I make good money on tips.” That’s what she said. “You know what tips are?”
Andrés nodded.
Maybe she was telling the truth.
It was hard to say, because he had become very suspicious. He was beginning to understand that no one ever told the truth.
One day in February, it snowed. It snowed and snowed. That was the day a man showed up at the door. A man he’d never seen before. He wasn’t old. Maybe a little older than Mando. Andrés answered the door. He wanted to talk to Yolie. Andrés let him in.
The man talked to Yolie, explained who he was. An old friend of Mando’s. He seemed nervous or scared or sad or confused or something. Something wasn’t right. And finally he just said, “Mando’s dead.”
“What?” Yolie had this look on her face. “What?”
“He was killed. In prison. He got in a fight with the wrong guy. He’s dead, Yolie.”
Yolie began wailing and wailing. He didn’t know anyone could cry like that. A wind was coming from inside her. Andrés didn’t know what to do, so he just held her, and rocked and rocked her as if she was a baby, but nothing could stop her from crying. For hours and hours, she wailed and wailed like a strong spring wind, and finally Andrés got scared, and he didn’t know what to do because Yolie couldn’t stop crying, so he went next door to ask the women who lived there to come over. Well, they weren’t really women, Andrés knew that, they were really men, and Yolie had told him they were called transvestites, and she said they were nice and they shouldn’t be afraid of them. She had told him and Ileana to go to them if anything ever happened, because they would help them. And he thought Yolie was right about them, the transvestites, because even though it was strange that they dressed and acted like women, they were very nice. So he went to their door and knocked. One of them who called herself Silvia answered the door.
“Yolie won’t stop crying,” Andrés explained. “My brother, Mando, he was killed in a fight in prison, and now Yolie won’t stop crying.”
So Silvia went with him to his house, and she held Yolie in her arms, and she took a pill from her purse and gave one to Yolie and made her drink it. And Yolie calmed down and fell asleep. So Silvia went next door and got her friend, Amanda, who looked more like a real woman than Silvia because he was smaller—not like Silvia, who had big hands and big feet and big shoulders. They both came over and decided to make a caldo de rez. Because it was freezing outside—and so they made soup, and the soup was delicious, and Silvia and Amanda told Ileana and Andrés that they should always go to them if they needed anything. And when Yolie woke up, Silvia made her take a shower, and they combed her hair real nice, and they made her eat soup.
Andrés was glad they were there. They knew exactly what to do. And he didn’t care if they were men pretending to be women. He liked them. And Ileana liked them, too.
That night, Yolie didn’t go out. It was too cold, and she was too sad. And she cried all night. But not like before. Not like howls. Just sobs. Ordinary sobs.
The next morning, she looked harder, like she was made of stone.
Ileana and Andrés didn’t say anything to her. They knew she didn’t want them to.
“Yolie was never the same.”
“What changed?”
“She was hollow after that. Empty. She just didn’t care. Not about us. Not about herself. Well, she still cared some for Ileana. I don’t know what she felt about me. Sometimes I thought she must have loved me very much. Other times, I think she hated me. Anyway, she didn’t give a damn about herself after that. She’d loved Mando so much. I understood that. Because that’s the way I felt about Ileana.”
“Did you ever mourn your brother?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“What do you mean?”
“Everyone mourns in different ways. Yolie cried all day. All night. Then she locked him away in a part of herself no one would ever touch.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I know you didn’t.”
He nodded. “When the snow melted, I ran. I ran and cried and cursed. That’s how I mourned him.” I’ve been mourning him all of my fucking life. He didn’t have to tell her that. She already knew.