It was an accident, of course. A broken condom. Sofía and Ernesto had had sex only a few times. They planned to buy the morning-after pill, which they’d learned about in school, but they hadn’t made it to the drugstore—they didn’t have enough money on hand, and she had no time to slip out of the house unnoticed—until two days later. She took the pill, and they figured it would still work.
During the December holiday break, the twins slept in, relishing the absence of school demands. Some mornings Sofía could sneak out of her house, her family thinking she was still in her room in teenage can’t-rouse-me sleep. Those days Ernesto was happy to wake up early. He met up with her in the Fruitvale, and they got food, Ernesto always footing the bill, and walked around the neighborhood holding hands. When they had enough time before he was due at work or she needed to slip back home, he’d take her back to his apartment. She was the first girlfriend with whom he’d had an ongoing intimate relationship, and though he knew their age difference made sex against the law, he couldn’t turn down the opportunity. He loved her.
Ernesto and Raúl had taken on more hours at work, and in the final days of 2015, they made a new plan to deal with the debt: every two-week pay period they would each lay away $250 and wouldn’t touch it, so that by the end of the month, they would have saved a thousand dollars to send home. Even better was the news that Oakland’s minimum wage was going up again: when the clock struck midnight on December 31, they’d be making $12.55 an hour, a thirty-cent increase. That could add up.
“For real?” Maricela wrote when they told her that a large sum was coming their way. Right before the new year, they sent $1,100 back to El Salvador. If they stuck with the plan—difficult but not impossible—they could unburden the family of the whole debt within a couple years.
In mid-January they had five hundred dollars laid away from their January 1 paychecks. School was back in session.
But Sofía wasn’t feeling that well. “I think I’m pregnant,” she told Ernesto.
She seemed serious. He bought her a test. The pill hadn’t worked; Sofía was pregnant.
They didn’t talk about their options—they didn’t see any other choice but the obvious. “I would never give my baby away to anyone else,” Sofía said. And neither of them considered abortion—it was a sin and illegal in El Salvador, something they just wouldn’t do. They’d be keeping it.
“We’re not stupid,” said Ernesto.
“Sofía’s pregnant,” he told Raúl a few days after finding out, with a tremor in his voice.
Raúl didn’t respond at first. “You’re a fucking idiot.”
Ernesto nodded. He was so overwhelmed, he could do nothing else.
“What the fuck were you thinking?” Raúl laid into Ernesto just as Ernesto had laid into Maricela. Didn’t Ernesto know how much harder he had just made everything? “Why didn’t you think?”
Back home, still buoyant from the twins’ recent payment and blissfully in the dark about her soon-to-be niece or nephew, Maricela began to develop some suspicions about Cesar. He was growing distant. She knew he was tired at work, that all those hours putting machine parts together over and over and over again at the factory were wearing him down. Still, he used to call her to complain because he knew she’d make him feel better. But he wasn’t calling much, wasn’t coming to visit.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing. I’m tired. I work, okay? I work hard.”
“Where were you last night?”
He always had some excuse.
One day he told her he’d left his parents’ house—he’d been fighting with them, she knew, and they’d forced him to pay rent in spite of his challenging financial circumstances. He had moved out.
“Where are you living?”
“With a friend.”
What she considered her female intuition wouldn’t let it go. Something was up.
Finally he told her. “I’m staying with someone else,” he said. A woman.
Cesar had been back in touch with an old girlfriend from long before the day he saw “Daniella’s” number on the TV screen. He met up with her one night after work in town, and one thing led to another. She lived on her own, and he stayed over there more often until he decided, lovesick and wanting to get out of his parents’ house, to move in with her. That was that. One day he was a devoted father and loving husband-to-be to Maricela, and the next he was shacking up with this bitch from his past.
“I’m in love with her,” he said.
Maricela got a message on Facebook from a girl she didn’t know—the girl Cesar was very likely leaving her for—calling her a puta, telling her that he doubted the baby was even his, just as Sebastian’s girls had done when she was pregnant with Lupita. Things were meant to be different this time around, and yet here she was again. The news of the affair knocked the wind out of her, and stuck in La Colonia, she had no way to intervene or to stop them. When she tried to contact Cesar, he either blocked the call or was curt and rushed.
Things happen. People fall in love with other people. A man could vanish from his commitments in a heartbeat, take on a new life. For men, the world was always open. Not so, thought Maricela, for women.
Who would love her now? She was barren, after all, since they’d opted—as a duo, a family—for the sterilization procedure at the hospital. What man would take her with two kids from two different men and no chance of having another? She walked around the dark house in La Colonia slumped with heartbreak, checking her phone constantly in hopes that it might offer a reversal of fate.
The phone didn’t ring. He’d blocked her online. He didn’t respond to her calls, her pleading text messages. It was over.
After a few nights of fitful sleep, she came to the conclusion that this girl must be working witchcraft on Cesar. Brujería. How else could a man change like that, on a dime?
She posted an anime image of a man and a woman holding hands, heads cocked askew, hanging from nooses on two separate trees. A photo of Angelina Jolie with a gun resting against her head. Then a photo of a knife slicing into an arm. She changed her profile picture to a stylized image of an eye, set into a dark backdrop of dark clouds, dropping a tear into a vast blue lake.
Cesar’s mom was on Maricela’s side. “Come down here and we’ll talk about it,” she said. They’d find a way to get Cesar back in his right mind. Perhaps, she said, they needed to do some witchcraft of their own. Maricela felt reassured as she listened, but as soon as she hung up the phone, the doubt settled in like old dust.
Ernesto hadn’t even asked Sofía’s mom and stepdad for permission to date her, and now they had to tell them about the pregnancy.
Sofía didn’t want to do it alone. “You’re the dad, and you need to be there when I tell them,” she said.
Ernesto knew she was right. He hadn’t told anyone about the baby besides Raúl.
“We have to do it tomorrow,” Sofía texted.
Ernesto agreed. “Will you come with me?” he asked Raúl.
Raúl looked at him like he was crazy.
“Please?” Ernesto said, his tone uncharacteristically pleading.
Raúl was touched but feigned indifference. “Okay,” he agreed with a shrug.
Ever since that night Ernesto had laid into him, he had stopped cutting his arms and ditching school, though his fog of depression hadn’t lifted. But now that Ernesto had his own personal emergency, Raúl rose to the occasion.
The only time Ernesto had come face-to-face with Sofía’s mother before was at the quinceañera, which Ernesto had made it to after all. Sofía had been dressed like a cake-top princess, and Ernesto showed up in a flaming red shirt and red Nikes, piercings all over his face. Puro marero, the mom had told Sofía after the party. Total gangster.
“He’s not!” Sofía had said. “He’s a really good person, really responsible.” But not responsible enough, it seemed.
The twins took the bus together and followed Sofía through the door. She motioned for them to sit on the couch across from her mother, Katerine, who had been waiting for them.
“Mom,” she said, “this is my boyfriend.” Ernesto forced himself to look up at Sofía’s mother. “And his brother.”
“Hello,” Ernesto said.
Katerine, sensing something was coming, didn’t respond.
“I’m pregnant.”
Katerine heaved a throaty sigh and dropped her head into her lap.
Sofía began to cry. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m sorry.”
Ernesto couldn’t bring himself to say anything, not a word.
Katerine also began to cry, shaking her head. “You did this,” she said, pointing a shaking finger at Ernesto. “You have to take responsibility for what you’ve done, for this baby, and for your baby’s mother.”
Ernesto nodded miserably as Katerine shouted her lecture. She had given birth to Sofía at fifteen and had always wanted a different life for her. Sofía’s father had abandoned them, and she’d managed to get them to the United States. And now, in spite of all her efforts, the cycle was repeating.
“This is your problem now,” Katerine spat at Ernesto. They were in her living room, the TV turned low, an army of stuffed animals looking down from a high shelf. She pointed at Sofía’s belly. “You are responsible for her and for your baby.”
“I know,” he said in a near-whisper. Raúl just sat there, quiet.
Soon Ernesto and Raúl picked themselves up off the couch. Ernesto muttered thin words of apology and followed Raúl out the door.
Once outside, he realized he hadn’t even told Katerine his name.
He texted with Sofía during the whole bus ride to work. Her mom was still referring to Ernesto as a gangster, citing his piercings, his clothes, and his clear lack of manners—he hadn’t even introduced himself. She had called him maleducado, Sofía said. Badly brought up.
This infuriated Raúl. That lady didn’t know the Flores family; she couldn’t talk that way about his twin. But Ernesto took the hit. He’d made a mistake, and now he had to pay. He straightened in his seat. It was time to grow up, to get down to business, to accept responsibility for what had happened, and to face their uncertain future.
At school, Sofía told Ernesto that her mom was livid, alternating between shouting at her and ignoring her entirely, speaking to her only about logistics like watching her little brother or attending the prenatal appointment she’d booked.
“She told me she wasn’t going to support the baby. That I’d have to get a job, and you’d have to pay for everything.”
“I will,” Ernesto said. “I will, I promise. I’ll take care of everything.”
He feared her mother would kick her out any minute; but the shit-box room he shared with his twin brother was no place for a girl like Sofía, let alone a baby. He’d need to find a new place. But who would rent to two kids about to have a baby?
His commitment emboldened Sofía, who dug deeper into her feud with her mother. If she wasn’t going to help, who needed her? Sofía was full of the delusions of a young woman both in crisis and in love. She concocted a fantasy in which she and her older, employed boyfriend could live together, support a newborn, and create a family without hardship.
“I can cook, I can clean, and I’ll learn to take care of my baby,” she said confidently. She just wanted a space in which to set up her imagined home.
Ernesto wanted to be swept up in her bright scenario, too, but, as someone who actually lived on his own, he knew it wasn’t so easy.
“I don’t need much,” she insisted. “Not a big house or anything. Just a studio is fine.” The average price for a studio at the time in Oakland was over twelve hundred dollars a month, about the entirety of Ernesto’s salary. And plus, if they got a studio, where would Raúl go?
“You have to do right by this baby,” her mother had said. “It’s not the baby’s fault that you two are irresponsible, and the baby can’t suffer because of it.”
It wasn’t his baby’s fault.
“I have to be responsible,” Ernesto repeated to Raúl and to Sofía, like a mantra.
Raúl watched his brother mull over the mess of possibilities and obstacles. His brother had been so stupid, so, so stupid, to add another responsibility, another set of circumstances in which he owed something to someone else. And Sofía was so young. But his fury subsided into concern as he saw how the stress of it all weighed on his twin.
“I’ll help you find a place,” Raúl told him. “Whatever you do is fine with me.”
The twins sent only four hundred dollars home in January. In February they sent nothing.
Wilber Sr. lay in bed and felt himself floating away from his body. All of a sudden he was in the field, his field, surrounded by lilies: the flowers he’d most often seen decorating coffins and the houses of death. The flowers were arranged in a big arc, like a bridge for him to walk under, and the most exquisite soft, white light filtered down from the sky.
“Are you seeing this beautiful field?” he asked out loud to Esperanza, who was lying next to him in bed.
She was startled. “What field?”
Hearing her voice, he knew he could not yet walk through that bridge of flowers to the other side. You have to go back, he told himself. He reentered his body, back in his room in La Colonia.
Earlier that day the creditors had told the Flores family that, the following week, they’d put one of the parcels of land up for sale unless they brought in some cash.
Wilber Sr. had made it through chikungunya, but he was still achy and had low energy, and the instability of the land weakened him further. The whole family worried that any minute, he would die from the very idea of losing it. The debt was likely to eat the Flores family, to cover them like dirt and roots surround a coffin.
The twins couldn’t tell their parents about the baby—not yet.
Maricela hadn’t received child support from Cesar in two months—he’d abandoned not only her but their daughter, too. She went to file a report so that he would be ordered to resume payments. As a matter of procedure, she had to go to his workplace to get paperwork signed by his employers. She had the jitters as she rode the bus there, terrified at the thought of running into him, masochistically hopeful that she would. She knew the odds were practically none that she’d see him. And yet there, as she walked in the gate, was Cesar.
They both stopped. He stared at her with a wistful, lost expression.
She mustered control of her emotions. She wasn’t going to be the first one to talk.
“Aren’t you going to hug me?” he asked.
“Why would I do that?” He approached her and opened his arms into an embrace.
She kept her body tight, not reciprocating the hug. Nevertheless, the feel of him destabilized her resolve.
“I’m sorry,” he said, letting her go.
She said nothing.
“Forgive me?” he pleaded. “I don’t know what I was thinking. Forgive me. I love you. Take me back.”
The other woman was now long gone. He regretted everything, he insisted. He’d only really left because he was confused and needed to get out of his parents’ house. Maricela—faithful, loving, kind, a good mother—was the only woman in the world for him. It was as though he’d been bucked out of a trance.
“I have to think about it,” she said. “How can I ever trust you again?” If she took him back—and though it was hard to admit, she had no doubt in her mind that she’d take him back eventually if he let her, and take him back again and again—she knew it would never be the same.
“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
She was proud of how stoic she stayed as he told her all the things she’d wanted to hear. She repeated that she’d think it over.
“I’ll call you,” he said, and she turned and walked away, back toward the bus. She didn’t go in for the child support signature after all.
Back home, she took to Facebook.
What an unforgettable day with my love. There will be a wedding soon.
She did it just to see what people might say, to get a reaction, as if crowdsourcing her dilemma. Dozens of people liked her post. “Congratulations!” “You gonna invite me?”
After a few days of that post hanging in the ether, masquerading her pain as joy, she agreed.
They went to San Salvador together to get a promise ring—not an engagement ring, but a pre-engagement ring, a symbol of commitment that, she thought, would help wipe away the shame of having been walked out on. Cesar liked the one she picked; he likely would have bought any one of them for her. It cost ninety dollars, or twenty more than he had sent each month for diapers and milk.
They walked out of the store happy. She couldn’t stop stealing glances at her hand: the hand of a loved woman, of an almost wife.
“Thank you,” she told him. He kissed her there in the street.
In Oakland, Sofía and Ernesto went to visit a school for teen moms, where Sofía might transfer once she had the baby—or earlier, even, for summer school. The school, run by the County of Alameda’s Office of Education, partnered with Head Start to offer free childcare so that the young mothers could earn their high school credits more quickly while also learning parenting skills. At any one time, the school was home to a dozen or so students from throughout the county. The campus was on the basement level of a commercial building just north of Fruitvale, but in spite of its dim lighting and almost hidden location, it had computers and teachers and kind staff. Two trailers stood behind the main building of the school, which held the daycare center where the babies and toddlers spent their days while their mothers studied. The childcare rooms were full of light and laughter and burbling babies. The staff, Ernesto noted, seemed to really love the little ones, and each kid was being minded. A few of the childcare workers spoke Spanish. Ernesto spotted a boy and a girl dressed the same and holding hands.
“Twins!” one of the ladies told him, laughing.
A good enough sign for Ernesto.
“I like it here,” Sofía said. She’d start in the summer session.
On TV at work, and in videos online, they saw seas of white people chanting “Build the wall,” over and over again. Wasn’t a big wall, they thought, already built? People held up signs: NO AMNESTY FOR ILLEGALS. NO LEGAL = NO JOBS. THE SILENT MAJORITY IS WITH TRUMP. THANK YOU, LORD JESUS, FOR PRESIDENT TRUMP. I’M READY TO WORK ON THE WALL. CLOSE BORDERS NOW. DEPORT ILLEGAL ALIENS. He saw a video from the year before about a homeless Latino man in Boston who was beaten up and pissed on by two brothers. “Trump was right,” the alleged perpetrator said. “All these illegals need to be deported.”
Wilber had come to the United States when George Bush was president and watched as Obama—the guy who’d campaigned on hope—ramped up his deportations. And now Trump. Wilber told his brothers he wasn’t all that surprised that a guy like this was making headlines. To him, Trump represented the dark but very real side of the United States, filled with subtleties of racism and classism and xenophobia that often only immigrants could see. It wasn’t so much him but his rallies: those seas of people chanting to build the wall, cheering when he said he would deport millions. Wilber knew he might very well be included in those millions.
The craziest part, to all of them, was that some Latinos were rallying and campaigning for him. He saw a picture of one lady with a shirt that read LATINOS FOR THE WALL.
At least, Ernesto considered, his baby would be born here. His adopted, not-quite-yet home was a better place to start from scratch than El Salvador. And his child would fuse him to the United States for real and for good. His baby would be a citizen, would speak English, would even vote. He’d vote too, one day, if he ever became a citizen—if he got that chance.
Ernesto skipped classes on Friday to pick up an extra shift at work. He didn’t get to see Sofía that day and hold her belly, whisper to the baby. That weekend Sofía avoided his calls and sent only curt texts. What was going on? When he finally got hold of her, she was vague about her whereabouts and distracted, as though she weren’t even listening.
“What’s up?” he said.
“Nothing,” she said. “See you tomorrow.”
That afternoon he got a message from a friend of a friend. Sofía had been making out with a kid named Mario, a tenth grader from El Salvador, right in the middle of the courtyard on Friday. Everyone, the snitch assured Ernesto, had seen.
With his child inside her growing belly, she’d cheated on him.
Fuming, he texted her: “You’re a cheat, you’re a liar.”
“What?” she said.
“You know what you did.”
They texted furiously until he decided to turn his phone off. He’d avoid her altogether, make her suffer. He’d never, ever forgive her. He’d never take her back.
The next day she confronted him and begged for his forgiveness. “I’m sorry!” she said. “I don’t know what I was thinking! I’m just overwhelmed. I’m so sorry. I made a mistake. You have to forgive me.”
Holding back tears, he shook his head. “I’m going to talk to your mom and let her know that I’ll support the baby,” he said with a quivering voice. “But I won’t support you.” His responsibilities to Sofía beyond the baby were, as far as he was concerned, over.
He couldn’t look at her. He stormed past her and sat on the curb outside school, the same place where his brother had sat dumb-drunk last year, and put his head between his knees. He wailed like a little boy.
He reported to work that night and then went home, phone turned off, refusing to talk to her. He avoided her at school the next day and the next.
“I didn’t mean it!” she said, cornering him one day in the office. “I’m so sorry!”
He’d calmed down somewhat and could see that he had the power back in the situation. “I’ll talk to you,” he said. “It’s the right thing for the baby.” He’d take her back into his life, but not as his girlfriend.
By that afternoon they were nuzzling each other in the courtyard, holding hands.
From then on Ernesto and Sofía were on-again-off-again. One day Ernesto would post:
Today King Ernest & Queen Sofía LOVE FOR EVER EVER.
Soon afterward he’d post a picture of a homeboy giving a middle finger:
Fuck Relationships, I’m Single.
Tomorrow is the day everything becomes clear: my last day with you.
It was hard for any of their friends to keep track. It was hard for them to keep track, too.
“The relationship changes,” Ernesto explained. “Once that trust has been broken, it’s hard to put it back together.” His heart, too.
But Sofía and his baby needed him, he knew, and this trumped their day-to-day drama. If it was hard for him, he could muster the maturity to see that it was a thousand times worse for her: fifteen years old, carrying a baby. He would never walk away from his child, but he would always have the option to do so. She never would.
At first Ernesto and Sofía were convinced it was a boy, because Sofía had gained weight in her face. But then she started craving lemons and grapes; sour things like that were definitely the mark of a girl. But if it was a girl, Ernesto would be gaining weight—and he was as skinny as ever, all muscle and bones. He hardly ate a solid meal most days, surviving mostly on chips and Monster drinks.
One day Ernesto was walking down International Boulevard on his way to the restaurant when he saw, in the middle of the sidewalk, a tiny sock. His heart skipped, and he knelt to pick it up. The sock was navy blue with a pink fringe, speckled with little pink hearts. A little girl’s sock. It fit neatly in the palm of his hand.
He placed it in his backpack, where he would keep it as a lucky charm.
“We’re having a girl,” he declared to Sofía. “Definitely.”
Though their relationship was more off than on, Ernesto was still devoted to Sofía’s well-being as well as to their baby.
“Are you eating enough?” he’d asked. “You sleeping? What does the baby feel like, what’s it doing?” He took her to the lake, to get ice cream, and to San Francisco to buy miniature clothes.
Raúl dismissed Ernesto’s sidewalk sign—it was just a sock, after all—and soon convinced Ernesto that the baby was a boy. On the bus and at home before sleep, the twins talked about their nephew-son—what they could name him, what he’d look like, what they’d do together—until he became real. Seven years after they’d stopped dressing alike, the twins talked excitedly about buying matching clothes for the three of them, the Flores brothers and their tiny triplet.
Ernesto decided he wasn’t going to go back to school in the fall. Outwardly, he was confident about his choice. He and Raúl had failed several classes because, between the late nights working and the ups and downs of depression, it had been hard to make it to school on time—and sometimes even at all. They each felt ashamed of their failures in their separate ways. Raúl was sure he could make a change, but Ernesto, for his part, knew that things would only get more complicated once the baby came. What was the point of being in school if they weren’t getting any closer to graduation? But his decision was a loss. By giving up his boyhood dream of a U.S. education, he was both accepting the reality of his circumstances and falling on his sword. “I have to be responsible,” he repeated. Clean hands.
The school counselor helped him enroll in the publicly funded adult school in nearby Alameda. He was an adult, after all. There he could take classes part time to earn credits toward his high school diploma. He’d have more time to work, and he’d be able to pick up another job.
“We need to send money home,” said Raúl.
“I have to focus on my family,” he said. Sofía, he meant, and the baby.
“What about our family?”
“We just didn’t know how hard it was going to be. We thought it was easier to make money.” He was almost cavalier, Raúl felt, about abandoning his plans, his promises.
Raúl didn’t have that kind of luxury. Now with Ernesto, like Wilber, focusing on his own small world, he’d have to assume the burden of the debt. Of saving the family.
At the baby shower, Raúl sat in the corner, silent. How much had this cost, he wondered, these games, these decorations, all this food? They’d even made special invitations for everyone. How much had Ernesto contributed? People placed bets on the date the baby would be born, and as they opened their presents, Ernesto and Sofía had to guess who had brought which gift. Each time they were wrong, the gift giver got to draw something with marker on their faces. Ernesto was aware that all these people were Sofía’s people, that he didn’t know anyone except Raúl. And Raúl wondered if anyone would notice if he disappeared.
With Ernesto spending so much time with Sofía, Raúl reached out to Wilber. They hadn’t spent much time with Wilber since the fall, and when they did hang out, he made clear that they’d have to pay for their own food or chip in for gas—even though he always paid for Gabby or friends of his who tagged along. The twins didn’t mind paying, but it seemed like Wilber was trying to make a point, which made everything feel strained. Raúl called anyway.
“Want to come running?” Wilber asked.
Wilber now ran every day. It calmed him, he said. His new dog came with him and waited in the car. He ran by where he and Gabby had buried Nicky One. Raúl had a hard time keeping up, but he admired his brother’s discipline. He, too, had been working out: one hundred push-ups each night, one hundred sit-ups. Running through the hills like that was relaxing, Wilber insisted. His anxiety had built of late: he was working a lot, growing tired of the commute, back in the packed house, fighting with Gabby, worried about what he was hearing on the news.
Ernesto hadn’t told Wilber about the baby, and Raúl kept the secret.
When it came time for the four-month ultrasound where they’d find out the sex of the baby, the doctor told Sofía and Ernesto that they could invite people for support.
“Wanna come?” Ernesto asked Raúl. It would be just a couple of days after the twins’ twentieth birthday.
The ultrasound room turned out to be too small to let in more than one observer. When Ernesto arrived, right on time, Sofía’s mother Katerine left the room to give him her place. She had grown more accepting of the situation and of Ernesto’s commitment to becoming a good father. She wanted them to have the moment together. While the monitor skated across the surface of Sofía’s growing belly, pictures began to pulse into focus on the screen.
Out in the hallway, Raúl leaned over his phone, not talking to Katerine or her friend who’d come for moral support. They had a bet going on the sex: whoever lost would buy the other lunch. “Who’s going to win?” Katerine asked Raúl, trying to engage him.
“It’s a boy,” he said. “I’m sure of it.” He went back to fiddling with his phone.
Sofía and Ernesto burst out of the door, holding the ultrasound copy.
“So, who’s betting what? What do you think?” Sofía said, laughing at everyone’s hungry faces. Ernesto was silent, shaking slightly.
“Don’t mess around!” Katerine scolded her daughter. “Just tell us!”
Sofía smiled and raised her eyebrow.
“Boy!” Katerine said.
“Girl!” Sofía shouted.
Ernesto shook his head, smiling, and then began to cry. Knowing the sex had somehow made everything more real.
“Girl?” said Raúl. “Wow.”
Sofía unfurled a long scroll-like sheet of images of the baby in utero. The group gathered around, admiring the little foot, the head, what appeared to be an elbow: a series of pictures from all different angles, like a cubist study of the baby-to-be.
Ernesto stood off to the side, breathless. He could hardly speak as they walked out of the hospital. His body had become light, too light, and feeble—he struggled to push open the door.
They walked Sofía to her mother’s car.
“You’re buying lunch!” their family friend said, gleeful.
“We won’t know for sure until the baby comes out!” said Katerine. They cackled.
“We’re going to take the bus,” Ernesto said, referring to himself and Raúl, when they got to the car. Katerine shrugged. He gave Sofía a kiss goodbye and rubbed her stomach.
“Guess we won’t all be dressing the same,” Raúl said as they reclined against either side of the bus stop pole.
“Yeah.” Ernesto shook his head and smiled. He watched Sofía and her mom pull out of the hospital driveway. His baby was in that car: his little girl. How crazy, those ten pictures, printed out like a long receipt. Me, me this way, me this other way, me again, his daughter announced from each one. He wanted to tell his parents but was still afraid. It would mean announcing one more financial obstacle. It would also, he felt deeply, renew their sense of loss—the thought of their sons living so far away and now making a new family they might never know.
The twins stared into the distance, waiting for the bus, dragging their cigarettes in near rhythm with each other. They had nothing to say, and that was fine. Here on the sidewalk, no one knew them, no one wanted to smash their heads in with rocks, no one loved them—people just passed them by. And though there was something forlorn about Oakland’s sea of anonymity, being alone together, just the two of them, had a refreshing weightlessness: no one quite yet a father, no new tragedy having yet struck. They soaked in the sunlight and nicotine, hoping the bus would take a little longer to come.
Later that week Ernesto got up the guts to call home. “My girlfriend is having a baby,” he said to his mother. “A baby girl.”
“Oh,” Esperanza said. She began to cry, then collected herself.
“Just make sure you bring the baby home someday so I can meet it,” she said.
“Okay,” he promised. “I will.”