Emilia couldn’t wait to see her new items in the classroom.
Once there, she displayed the shoes on a small table she’d found in a storage room in the cafeteria. She put them near the window, brushed them with some of the glitter paint. They transformed into art and made her smile just looking at them.
Then Emilia turned her attention to the art history book. She cut out pictures and tried to decide which ones she’d put together and where they would go.
Finally, on an old hook, she hung Sam the Squirrel.
“What do you think?” she asked him as she looked around. The room still felt a bit cold and the lighting was dim. But she could bring candles next time! And more items from home. Books that she could stack and use like tables. And maybe that blanket her grandmother had brought from Mexico. She imagined the room glowing with so many candles. She imagined wrapping herself in the colorful striped blanket.
That would be perfect! Emilia smiled just thinking of her project.
Again, she didn’t want to leave. But she didn’t want to risk Ma asking more questions of where she’d been, so she left way before Ma ever got home from work.
My room is beautiful, Emilia thought as she walked in the cold. Her stomach flipped with excitement and she was lost in the idea of that classroom when she turned the corner and spotted Ma’s car in the driveway.
Emilia started running. She’d made sure not to stay at the school too long today, and yet, there was her car. Ma was home.
Emilia ran faster, her mind racing with excuses. She hurried up the three stoop stairs and pushed open the heavy front door. The smell of cigarettes hit her right away. With a strange kind of sudden certainty, Emilia knew something was wrong.
She stood in the entryway for a moment, waiting for her mother to rush out and yell at her, because she felt something barreling toward her.
What’s my biggest fear? she thought. And suddenly Emilia just knew.
Her father was dead.
She could feel the cold, the freezing cold, seeping into her skin, stopping the flow of blood.
She knew a person could freeze to death, how it took over the entire body. First your mind got fuzzy. You couldn’t think or remember. She wondered if their names had briefly gone through her father’s mind before he’d forgotten them, before the fuzzy black set in around him and he lost consciousness. She saw him buried in mounds of snow.
Or was it freezing water?
Emilia felt it as if it were happening to her, the loud cracking of ice in her ear as it gave way underneath. She felt the shock of freezing water, the black and blue rushing in around her, as she caught one last glimpse of the world, the clouds and sky, at the end of a faraway tunnel.
She fell to her knees as the cold found its way to her heart and stopped it. She clutched her chest and cried.
“Emilia!” Her mother was crouched down next to her. “Emilia, what is it? What’s wrong? Tell me!” Her mother’s voice was frantic, tinged with anger, the way it always was when she was worried.
“Dad?” Emilia choked. “Is it Dad?”
Her mother held her. “How’d you know?” she said.
Emilia cried harder.
But then she heard his voice. She heard him calling her name, telling her to open her eyes.
Emilia did. And he was there. Her father, right in front of her, looking at her, holding her shoulders.
It was a blurry image of him through her tears, but it was him.
Alive! Here!
“Dad!” she yelled, hugging him. She felt like she had come up for air, as if she had reached the surface of the cold black water and pulled herself out.
Moments ago she’d felt like she couldn’t stand or walk, but she was on her feet now, hugging him, unable to believe he was really here. He led her to the couch, where they sat. And she stared at him.
Her father. It hardly made sense. The beard made him look older than she remembered. His hair was not neatly combed as it used to be. But his clothes were the same—khakis and a tucked-in button-down shirt.
“Dad,” she said, shaking her head. “Dad.”
Sam DeJesus looked at his daughter’s face and saw, somewhere, the child he left six years ago. But she was different now. He didn’t know why he was shocked that she hadn’t stayed ten. He didn’t know why all the times he pictured them here, without him, he never let them grow.
“Emilia,” he said. Yes, this was her.
“When did you get here? How . . . ?”
The questions. He was surprised by them even though the anticipation of those questions were what had kept him away day after day, any time he thought of returning.
When he’d left, he didn’t know he wouldn’t return. He’d gone to interview for the job in Seattle thinking he would move them all there if he got it. But then came that day when he sat on the hotel bed staring at the return ticket in his hand. The time came when he might still catch his flight if he rushed into action. He pictured the plane on the runway while he sat on the stiff hotel bed, staring at the return destination. And then the clock hit 7:45 PM and he knew the plane was taking off. He imagined it in the sky, his seat, 16B, empty.
He called Nina, told her he’d have to reschedule his flight because the dean just called to offer him the job and wanted him to start right away.
I’ll get everything settled here, then come home and we’ll figure out the move, he told her.
Each day he came up with new excuses. Until she knew. Until he knew. He was not coming back.
Each week he thought, I’ll go this week. At first, the pressure to go back was unbearable, but so was the idea of actually going back. To that life, to that reality, to his failure. Each month that passed filled him with dread and took him closer and closer to the point of no return. How could he explain himself after being gone for two months? How could he explain when two months turned into four, six . . . then a year. Two. And now, now six. He swallowed his shame.
Sam looked to his wife, but Nina stood at the window with her back to them.
“I got in this morning . . . ,” he told Emilia.
She was smiling at him.
My god, how can she smile at me this way? How can she bear to look at me?
“God, Dad!” she said suddenly, laughing and wiping away her tears. “You’re here!” Her laughter made him want to cry. “I can’t believe it!”
How can she still love me?
He swallowed the sobs, the joy, the fear he felt in his chest, and smiled back at her.
“How long did it take you? Did you have to take one of those super tiny planes first?”
He looked at her. “What?”
“Is it always cold? That’s how I imagine it, but doesn’t it warm up sometimes? Do you feel . . . better now?” She looked at him meaningfully.
“Emilia,” her father said.
“Forget it. Tell me what you did.”
“What do you mean?”
She smiled at him again. “Did you eat raw fish? What was it like?”
“What . . . what are you talking about?”
Emilia looked at her mother, but her mother would not turn around. She looked back at her father.
“You know . . . ,” Emilia said. “Alaska. Where you’ve been all this time.”
“Alaska?” Sam asked. He looked to Nina for help or an explanation, and while she glanced back briefly with a strange look on her face, she offered neither.
“Emilia . . .” Her father reached for her hand, but then couldn’t bear the thought of her pulling it away from him as he was sure she would do in a moment. So he folded his hands, his too-soft hands, which he had come to hate so much because they were fine and gentle and did not know how to fight, or punch. That did not dare to kill, not even his daughter’s attacker, though his mind had fantasized about it so many times. No, his hands only knew how to turn the pages of so many useless books and hold on to each other like they did now.
“Why do you think I’ve been in Alaska, Emilia?”
The room filled with silence. He closed his eyes. Waited.
“What do you mean?” she said, confused by his question.
“I haven’t been in Alaska,” he told her slowly. “I’ve been living in Seattle. That’s where I work. I . . . I’ve never been to Alaska.”
“What?”
“I haven’t been in Alaska, Emilia. Not at all.” He tightened his grip on his hands, hands that still couldn’t protect Emilia when she needed him most. Hands that even now refused to unclasp and reach for her because he was sure she would shrink away from him.
Emilia stood up, walked to the front door, and went outside.
Nina watched her from the window. “Go after her, Sam,” she said.
He looked at his hands.
Emilia’s mother grabbed her jacket, tugging at it hard from where Sam was half sitting on it, and walked out the door to follow her daughter.
An invisible umbilical cord seemed to connect Emilia and her mother. She could feel her mother walking behind her, not losing sight of her no matter which way she turned. Until finally, Emilia walked to the small diner on the main road and went inside.
An older, bearded man sitting by himself in a booth looked up as she came in, and she could feel the way his eyes fell on her body as she walked by. It made her angry and embarrassed, and she wanted to sink deeper into herself and disappear as she quickly slid into a booth near the back. Her mother came in and spotted her in the corner. She walked over and sat across from Emilia.
Emilia looked out the window. They sat like that for a long time until Ma placed her cold hands over Emilia’s. Emilia looked at her mother, her skin paler than Emilia’s, and remembered the time her mother translated the story her grandmother told about their family. About the Irish ancestor who fought for Mexico, then fell in love with and married a Mexican woman, and ever since, a fairer-skinned, auburn-haired baby was born into their family every few generations. Ma was one of those babies, and she often reminded Emilia, Mexican blood and Irish blood produce the strongest, most stubborn human beings in existence. Never forget you are part of that strong line, Emilia. That blood that runs in your veins.
Something in Ma’s eyes told Emilia she had to be strong now, even if Ma didn’t think Emilia was strong.
“So, he left us?” Emilia said.
Ma rubbed her forehead. “I didn’t know you still really believed he was in Alaska. I . . . I knew you wanted to believe it, wanted us to believe it. But I guess I thought somehow, deep down, you really knew the truth.” Ma shook her head, closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she looked deep into Emilia’s. “Didn’t you know? Somewhere in the back of your mind? Didn’t you know the truth?”
Emilia looked back out the window. Maybe. She couldn’t tell anymore if this story she told herself all these years was one she really believed or had come to believe over time. Obviously he’d left. She knew this. But she thought it was because her father couldn’t function anymore. She thought he’d had to go deep into the woods, into the cold. She thought he couldn’t be around anyone.
“I guess. I just thought . . .”
But all this time he’d been in civilization. All this time he was buying groceries, getting mail, working. All this time he’d been talking to people, laughing even . . . laughing with them. He wasn’t isolated in some cabin. He was living a normal life. Somewhere else. Somewhere far away from them. Had she known the truth the whole time?
“Is he married? Does he have . . . other kids?”
She saw her mother wince. “No,” she answered quickly. “I mean . . . I don’t think so . . .”
Who is he? Emilia wondered. She didn’t know her father anymore. Not the man he used to be. And not the man she’d made him out to be all these years. What had he really been doing when she imagined him walking through all that snow, when she imagined him chopping down trees, hanging hide, cooking small, sad, terrible portions of moose or rabbit?
“Does Tomás know? Has he seen him yet?”
If he hadn’t been in Alaska, why, then, did he write poems, Emilia wondered, about being alone? In his journal that she’d found and kept for herself for the times she missed him most. Why did he write about the cold? Why did he say that’s where I’d go, that’s where I’d go, if I wanted to feel nothing?
Her mother shook her head. “He’s still at work.” She looked at her watch. “But he’ll be home soon.”
Emilia thought of her brother walking into their house and seeing their father. She didn’t want Tomás walking into their living room unprepared.
“Let’s go,” she told her mother. She started to get out of the booth, but her mother wouldn’t let go of her hand and instead held on to it tighter.
“Emilia . . . wait . . . ,” her mother said. And in that moment, her heart filled with some inexplicable fear at the tone of her mother’s voice, at the grip of her hand on Emilia’s, at the sudden realization that something, something had brought her father back.
Why now? Why is Dad back now?
A coldness went through her body as she looked at her mother. At those green eyes that were warning Emilia to prepare herself, be strong.
Her mother took a deep breath. “There’s a reason he’s back.”
“Why . . . ? What is it?”
She saw the struggle on her mother’s face, the tightness in her body.
“Sit down,” she told Emilia.
Emilia did and her mother held both of Emilia’s hands in hers. It looked like they were praying.
“Emilia,” her mother said. Her name came out funny and her mother cleared her throat, tried again. “Emilia.”
This reminded her of something. Another time.
Ma held on tight to Emilia’s hands then, tighter with each attempt Emilia made to pull away because something was telling her to run. To fly. Instinctively, Emilia looked out the window to the sky. Something was wrong. And her mother was going to tell her. But all she could think was, No. Don’t. I don’t want to know, whatever it is.
She heard her crows even though she couldn’t see them; somewhere a thousand crows were cawing, warning her, screeching over her mother’s voice. She willed them to cry louder.
Emilia felt like she was floating. The booth seat disappeared from under her and she could feel her body wanting to go up.
Her mother squeezed down harder on her hands.
“Look at me,” she demanded. So Emilia looked at her mother’s lips, tuned into her voice, and listened as Ma told her about Carl Smith.