Tuesday, July 11: 41 days until I go home
“¡CHELO!” A scream awakens me at dawn. I was half-asleep, imagining Frankie’s body pressed against mine, and it takes me a while to recognize my aunt’s voice.
She keeps shouting my father’s nickname, but I get downstairs before Papá does. Tía Ileana stands in the middle of the front yard in her bathrobe, holding the newspaper. At her feet is a bloody bird—a parrot—its head twisted at an acute angle.
Sour liquid fills my mouth. I turn away from the carcass and swallow hard.
My father limps outside, wearing his pajamas and leaning on his cane. His hair sticks up, and his glasses are askew. He takes one look at the dead bird, mutters, “Mierda,” and lurches into the house. Tía Ileana and I follow him to the backyard. In the pale sunlight, Víctor flutters from branch to branch. Pablo walks upside down along the wire roof of the giant cage. Usually, I love watching Pablo do that trick—I imagine him clowning around just for me—but this morning I ignore him. Papá pounds the side of his fist against the stucco wall.
“Fascist sons of whores,” he spits.
I don’t understand. His birds are fine. “What’s going on?” I ask.
Tía Ileana shakes her head. “Maybe you shouldn’t speak at that demonstration today, Chelo. Let someone else—”
“They can’t stop me,” Papá snaps. In the kitchen, he hunts under the sink for a plastic bag. Then he goes outside again, scoops up the dead parrot, and dumps it into the large trash bag in the garage. “There. It’s gone. Now you can stop worrying.”
Maybe Papá thinks we can forget about the dead bird and what it means, but I can’t. By the time Frankie picks me up at ten, I’ve already had three hours to think about it.
As soon as we get to the apartment, I tell Frankie.
“A hawk probably got it.” Frankie lights a cigarette. Tobacco, and I wonder if he managed to get the other stuff.
“Its throat was sliced, almost all the way through. It was disgusting.”
“It could have been a super hungry hawk. Or a falcon.” His other hand slips my top button from its hole.
“But wouldn’t a hawk carry it away? To eat it?” I scoot away from him. “My aunt said it was some kind of death threat.”
He inches closer to me again. His warm fingers slide from my collarbone toward my breast. My heart speeds up. “Tina, love, if every dead bird in front of a house was a death threat, there wouldn’t be any people left in this country.” He sets the cigarette in the small copper ashtray and leans into me for a smoky kiss. Afterward, he says, “Let’s say a hawk grabs the parrot and is taking it to his nest. To feed his family, you know? Another lazy-ass hawk wants what he has and attacks him. Well, he’s going to fight for what’s his. Even if it means dropping the parrot and picking it up later.”
“I suppose.” I snuggle against Frankie.
He kisses me again, and then says quietly, “I hope I didn’t make a mistake.” My insides squeeze tight. He seems nervous—like he’s planned something huge but isn’t telling me.
I guess at what it might be. “Did you find more weed?”
He shakes his head. “I took back the other stuff. The cocaine. He gave me some pills, but I don’t want to try them. Maybe you?” Frankie digs into his back pocket and takes out a small black cardboard box, the kind that holds those velvet jewelry boxes. He opens the top. Inside are eight white tablets. I have no idea what they are.
“Why would I take something if I don’t know what it is?” I’ve heard about guys slipping tablets into girls’ drinks in bars so the girl falls asleep and the guy can do anything he wants with her. But Frankie isn’t that kind of guy.
Frankie picks up his cigarette and takes a long drag. “My uncle says that’s what the gringos do.”
His uncle? The drug dealer? Who also goes to church to pray for Frankie’s father?
“I don’t think your uncle knows much about the United States.”
“Probably not. He’s never been there.” Frankie flicks ashes into the tray.
I grab the open box from the coffee table and march into the bathroom, where I shake the pills into the toilet. I don’t bother flushing. “So what is this uncle like?” I ask upon returning to the living room. I want the truth, even if the guy deals drugs. After all, Frankie’s not into drugs, and if he likes that his uncle has money, there are other ways of getting money where I can help. “Is he the one that got you the pills?”
“No,” Frankie answers quickly. Maybe too quickly. “That was a guy from the neighborhood. My uncle hates drugs. Alcohol, too, because of what it’s done to my father. They used to be close when I was really little, like two or three, and then something happened.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. It had to do with my father’s drinking.” Frankie stabs out his cigarette and nestles his head against my shoulder. When he speaks again, his warm breath tickles my skin where he’s unbuttoned my shirt. “How would you feel if your father died?”
I gasp. “I’d be sad. Even though he’s a jerk a lot of the time, I don’t want him to die.”
“But you hardly know your father. It’s not like you grew up with him. Or he spends any time with you now,” Frankie says.
I run my fingers along the bridge of Frankie’s nose, try to understand the hatred he feels for the man who shares his name, wonder if he really does want his father dead. I clear my throat. “Do you remember yours ever being different from what he is now?”
Frankie shakes his head and lights another cigarette. When he moves away from me, my neck and shoulder go cold.
“Were there any good times with him?”
“We used to rebuild stuff together,” Frankie says. “Bikes, cars. He had this motor scooter he used to take me out on until one night he rode it drunk into someone’s home.” He blows out a stream of smoke and sets the cigarette down. “Every good thing with him eventually went rotten.”
“And if he dies, he’ll never be able to make it right?”
Frankie clasps my hand and doesn’t let me go. “I love you, Tina.”
I throw my arms around him. “I love you, too, Frankie.”
He returns to snuggling against me. His short hair scrubs my neck and chest. I run my fingers through the hair on the other side of his head, pushing it backward and feeling the sharp ends. After a while, he says, “Remember when you talked about Romeo and Juliet, chucking it all and running away?”
“Yeah, but you didn’t read it.” He doesn’t know how badly it ends for them.
“I want to do it for real.”
“How?” I squeeze his shoulders. “You don’t mean it?”
The weird thing is—I think he does. And I don’t, at least not since Mamá and Evan got back from their honeymoon. Now I dream of convincing them to send Frankie a ticket to the United States. I’ve already worked it out in my mind. He goes into the army for two years. I finish high school in two years. We go to university together.
Frankie kisses my breastbone. “I told your aunt I’d bring you back at eight thirty tonight. And tomorrow I have to go away to help my uncle. But sit by the phone after that, and I’ll have a surprise for you.”
“No way!” I pull away from him and rub my skin where he kissed me. This is more than talk about running away. Frankie has a plan.
I start to shake my head, but Frankie says, “We can have an adventure. Like a camping trip.”
My old papá loved camping. For a week every summer we used to drive to a place five hours south of Santiago, where we slept in a tent, caught and cooked our own fish, and drank lake water that we boiled. Papá taught me how to skip stones on the water and gave me books as prizes when my stones skipped more times than Daniel’s.
Could I convince him and Tía Ileana to let me go with Frankie? Maybe they’d want to come with us. Tío Claudio told me Papá needed to get moving, that it would be good for him.
“Camping. What a great idea!” I imagine that once Papá gets out in the woods, he won’t need to drink. He’ll be my old papá who loved me.
Frankie grins and says, “Perfect.” He scoots upright and kisses me for real. His hand slips under my bra strap, to my breast, and this time I don’t stop him.
“So what do you want to do now?” His voice is breathless.
“You want to see the Minus World?” I ask him.
“The Minus World?”
I turn on the television and Nintendo. “It’s a secret level of Super Mario Brothers, underneath the regular world.”
“Like here.” Frankie points to the floor. “Underneath the regular world.”
He puts on his new CD of Ride the Lightning and hits the MUTE button for the TV. At the end of World 1-2, I break the blocks at the pipe that leads to the flag, jump backward, and go through the wall. “Okay, I’m in the Minus World. It’s not supposed to be part of the game but it got left in by mistake.” I scroll through the hidden underwater level to the rhythm of Metallica until a school of evil jellyfish ices me. Then I hand him the controller.
“That’s it?” he asks as soon as his unscathed Mario scrambles into a green pipe at the edge of the screen—and right back into the same world. “Just a bunch of stupid fish? And how do you get out of this thing?”
“You don’t. Either you get killed or time runs out.”
“That’s stupid.” He tosses the controller to the end of the sofa and turns off the machine.
My stomach growls. I’d skipped breakfast because of the disgusting dead parrot, but now I’m famished. I check my watch. One fifteen already. “Maybe we should go out somewhere, like McDonald’s.” I fan myself with my hand. Our warm bodies and an overenthusiastic heating system have made the apartment stuffy.
“I can’t,” Frankie says. “In case something happens with my father, again.”
“Then why don’t we go close by?” I ask, thinking, camping trip—the way I’ll save Papá from the same end.