The house was dark as Tomás approached. He walked up the three stoop stairs and opened the door. In the time it took him to reach for the light switch and click it on, he wondered where Emilia was. Why was the door unlocked? His mind suddenly registered that the car parked in front of their house was one he’d never seen before, and he assumed it belonged to someone visiting a neighbor.
“Hello?” he called, not expecting an answer, but trying to calm his nerves with his own voice.
“Tomás.”
Tomás stood still, trying to understand what he was seeing. His father, in their living room. He’d been sitting in the dark. In their house.
“What are you doing here?” Tomás asked, still standing in the open doorway.
His father didn’t answer. “My god, look at you,” he said instead. “You’re a man.”
“What are you doing here?” Tomás repeated.
His father hesitated. “I just . . . I had to see all of you,” he said finally.
Tomás stared at his father. He was lying. Tomás knew why he was here. He just hadn’t thought he would come.
“We don’t need you,” Tomás whispered. His father looked down at his hands. They were shaking. He looked embarrassed and ashamed.
“Where are Ma and Emilia?”
“They left.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. They just . . . left.”
Tomás wondered if it was true. For a strange moment, he wondered if his father had done something to them. He didn’t know the man sitting in their living room anymore. He didn’t trust him.
Tomás looked around.
His father stood up, grabbed his jacket. “I’ll leave,” he told Tomás.
Tomás wanted to say something more to him. He wanted to make him answer questions, listen to his anger. He wanted to make him stay there and suffer discomfort and judgment. But Tomás could hardly stand to look at him.
When his father walked past him, out the front door, Tomás had the strangest urge to both push him out faster and hug him.
He watched him get in the car. And drive away.
His heart exploded in a million pieces.
But then he rushed through the house, looking for his mother and his sister. And when he didn’t find them, he sat wondering where they would have gone. If their father was back, then maybe Emilia knew. Maybe he and Ma had told her about Jeremy Lance’s release, about the real attacker.
Tomás’s heart beat faster as he thought back to the day he picked up the phone and listened in on a conversation between Ma and a man he eventually figured out was a detective who had worked Emilia’s case.
He noticed how Ma had started acting so strangely after that call in the middle of the night, and then again when the phone rang the next morning, how she raced to answer the phone in her room whenever it rang. So he started picking up the line in the kitchen, holding his hand over the mouthpiece as he listened. Some of the calls were from bill collectors, a few from telemarketers. But then one day he heard a man tell Ma that Jeremy Lance had been released. It took Tomás a moment to realize what had happened, to piece it all together. But he did, and he wouldn’t forget how strange his mother had sounded, how she choked back tears but spoke with such anger in her voice.
Tomás sat on the couch, trying to decide what to do, when the front door opened and Ma and Emilia walked in.
He took one look at Emilia’s face, stunned and shocked and drained, and knew their mother had told her. Oh god, she knew. He knew it was best, that she needed to know. But the look on her face now, it was exactly why he hadn’t told her himself. This look, what she was feeling now, was exactly what he’d wanted to protect her from, too.
The million pieces of his heart shattered into a million more.
Emilia immediately ran upstairs to her room and their mother stood at the bottom of the stairs, helpless, and watched her go. Ma’s face looked a thousand years old.
“Does she know the truth about Jeremy Lance?” Tomás asked.
Ma stared at him, stunned.
“I . . . I picked up the line and heard you on the phone,” he admitted. “When the detective called and told you about his release.”
Ma closed her eyes. She shook her head and fresh tears slid down her face. “So you know about Carl Smith, too?” she asked.
Tomás nodded. “I heard his name. And enough to figure it out.”
“Oh god,” Ma said, shaking her head. “What if Emilia had found out like that?” He could see his mother shaking.
“Go, check on her. Please,” Ma said, looking at him. “She won’t . . . say anything to me. Make her say something, please.”
Tomás stood outside Emilia’s bedroom and knocked on the door, gently calling her name. She wouldn’t answer. He tried to open it, but the door was locked.
“Emilia,” he said. “Let me in, please.”
He kept calling to her softly, waiting, and after what seemed like forever, he finally heard the gentle click of the door unlocking. He turned the knob slowly and carefully entered her room.
“Emilia?”
She was sitting on her bed, leaning against the wall with her legs drawn up, her arms around her knees, her head down. Tears filled his eyes. She looked so small, her hair hanging around her. Sitting just as she used to back then, when she didn’t want any of us to come near her.
The memory of Emilia in this exact pose when she was little came upon Tomás so fast, so suddenly, that he felt disoriented. She’d had so many ways to shut out the world back then. How could he have forgotten?
Tomás took a deep breath and went to his sister. He wouldn’t let her shut him out this time. Gently, he sat next to her. “God, Emilia. I’m so sorry,” he said.
She wouldn’t look up at him, but he heard her saying something over and over, and it took him a while to understand what she was saying. Finally, he made sense of the words.
“What have I done?”
“Emilia, you didn’t do anything. Nothing.”
“I ruined his life. All those years in jail.” Her voice was choked. “Because of me.”
“It’s not your fault,” he told her.
“People will find out. Think I’m horrible,” she said through sobs. “They’ll think . . . I’m a horrible person. A liar. Worse.”
Tomás hadn’t thought of what others would think. All he’d thought of since he found out was that someone out there hadn’t paid for what he’d done to Emilia. That all this time, her attacker had still been out there.
“Don’t worry about other people. You don’t need to worry about other people. They have no idea what—”
“Exactly. They have no idea! All they’ll know is I named him. That Jeremy Lance was arrested because of me. Everyone will know. And . . . the real attacker . . .” His sister clutched her arms tighter around her knees, made herself even smaller as she cried. “He’s been out there this whole time. This whole time . . . What if . . . what if he’s been watching me?”
“Emilia . . .”
“All this time.” She cried harder. Her voice was muffled and her back shook with sobs, but she wouldn’t look at him. “How can I . . . go out there . . . in the world with everyone knowing what I did?”
“You didn’t do anything,” Tomás said, louder than he’d meant.
He saw her jump, but she just kept saying, “I did. I did.”
Tomás was almost afraid to touch her, but he put his hand gently on her arm and then pulled her close to him. “It’ll be okay,” he told her. “We’ll handle it. I’ll be with you.”
Tomás held his sister and didn’t let go. He held her like that, until her crying became less and less. Until she was exhausted and slowly fell asleep. Tomás covered her with a blanket. Then he lay next to her, on the floor, so she wouldn’t be alone or scared if she woke up in the middle of the night.
I won’t leave you alone, he thought as he listened to her breathing, an occasional soft sob bubbling up even in her sleep.
I won’t, Tomás thought as he finally let himself drift off to sleep. I won’t.
Neither of them heard when their mother came in, or how she cried when she saw them together that way. Neither of them knew she sat on the floor all night, too, watching over them, until they woke and saw her there the following morning.