Then I would venture in and sit with some of the children playing the guitar in the Commons; actually it wasn't. If they saw me on the street (which they never would), they should call her immediately. In addition, the court documents stated that my father had full custody of me, an agreement that required many years of court and debt.
I remember replacing "Liza" with "Valarie" (my biological mother's name); the argument between my father and his wife provoked by my rebellion lasted until four in the morning that night, and the next day I got new lines to write a thousand more times. I jumped, splashing water on the cover of my second copy of Twilight as I read it in the boiling water. The dying pine tree in the corner of the living room bent under the weight of hundreds of disgustingly hand-painted ornaments, and babies chewed on dried needles that fell to the floor.
It was four in the morning when he came down to punish me; without a word, I handed him my letter. When he ran upstairs to yell at his wife, I ran to the attic to listen. She put my younger siblings' beds in the middle of their rooms, as far away from the plugs as possible, because they had the same effect.
He asked me if I understood that calling the cops and being in the hospital meant it had to be very serious.
THE FUNERAL
Bending her neck against the cold metal of the upper bed, her body sinks into the mattress. There's a baby monitor in the corner of the room and if there's ever a noise, Dad storms into the bedroom with a belt as angry as his red eyes. The girl has her nose pressed against the cow net in the living room and Felicia's hand pushes her aside.
Dad turns his chair, raises his hand to strike as he turns and yells, "Would you shut up!" She hugs Felicio and glares hard at her father before running towards the stairs and tripping over the first step. Halfway down the stairs, he lands on his shoulders and slides all the way down. A fence separates the end of the cul-de-sac and a small, dirty cow pasture - she towers over it.
Her step into the pasture is slow at first, but her pace quickens with every sip of honeyed air until she suddenly runs into a forest on the edge of the pasture. She knows she will find a railroad that cuts through the dense pine trees of the Washington forest. Slowly her bare toes pressed against the cold metal of the rail on the ground.
I became fixated on a table in the corner of the room under the window, where two straight-faced teenagers, mourning the death of their grandfather, sat staring at their laps. I'm so glad you could come all the way from Gulfport.” She kept her eyes wide open and dried the tears before she dared to slip any more. You are such a beautiful young woman." She ruffled my hair and hugged me again as I thanked her.
With one last careful hug from the grandmother of my younger siblings, I continued my nervous walk to the corner of the room, feet counting with each step. As the middle-aged children of the lost father stood behind the podium, clasping hands and tearing through their individual speeches, I lost my eyes in the changing photos on the projection screen to the left. I was first on the edge of the couch, purple backpack at my feet in anticipation of my first day of middle school.
LA CASA AMARILLA
It's cute in the way that cute handmade things are, so is a cute birdhouse made by a five-year-old, and with the same uneven structure. Recovery is in the head not the heart and sometimes decisions about love have to be made with the head and that's how you progress. My temper, which during the first few months I spent in Mississippi would flare up at every little thing, calmed down and instead of angry outbursts I was experiencing panic and anxiety attacks every week.
My personal thoughts and feelings, my reactions to things around me, these are constructs of the soul. Driving up the gravel mountain, it felt as if the van itself existed and was doing the things its headlights revealed in the dark. The trees—the only objects between the van and the edge of the mountains—looked like hands reaching from the edge of a cliff.
Yellow dances in the house of a fat woman like the dough we fold in our hands. Then she blows hot air into the cup of her skirt and the rich daka-daka is cool again. I had walked blindly through the station, lingering longer than necessary in the food court, looking for two words I would recognize as landmarks: the name of the bus ticket kiosk where the Brazilian guy told me we would meet .
He stops in the middle of the station, between the travelers rushing on either side with their stumbling suitcases, and stares up at the sign as if he knows as little Portuguese as I do. We stood in the middle of that station laughing nervously, and he looked down and pinched in his fingers the face of his rosary hanging between my breasts (which was only half hidden by my loose tank top, something I considered while I'm picking out an outfit for our reunion). The Brazilian boy lived for a year and a year in the small university town of Oxford, Mississippi.
The only room in the house with air conditioning was his parents', so we all slept on individual mattresses on the floor next to their bed on 100 degree nights. Your love is like a leather cylinder lock. Your kiss could make wrinkles in the rain.” A day of bleaching your toes and putting your shoes in the freezers becomes bearable enough within reach of the Atlanta sunset.
In the same vein, Javier has found his way to support my panic and anxiety episodes. He describes this anxiety as a hyper-ability to think too many things at once, and in the middle of an impending wave of negative thoughts, he says, “Uh oh.
REUNION
I stopped in the space in front of the locked wire gate that separated the driveway from their fifteen-acre property, got out of the still running car and pushed it open. They had chosen this property because of the potential of the land and the number of rooms in the house, but they had difficulty with the fact that it was so close to my mother's. He stayed to help them move, and I took advantage of the time, knowing that I wouldn't get another invitation for another six months while my father was away.
My dad got out of the U-Haul and gave me a side hug like I was coming for a regular weekly family barbecue. Not a single sniff of the air in my direction, for which, I assumed, would be a pleasant understanding to pretend the other did not exist for the sake of peace. Dad let me go and asked me how I was doing as nonchalantly as if he had been asking me every weekend for the last four years, and I escaped when I saw Felicia running out of the house like a little peanut with long skinny legs.
I shook her sweet hand and introduced myself before the rest of the kids came out from behind the house and from inside the truck, as if they had been waiting for me. The dining area, kitchen and living room make up the open floor plan of the first floor when you walk in through the back doors. I put the bottle of polish back in my purse and look around the living room, still empty except for piles of blankets in front of the mounted television.
The brain was sitting on the brick elevation of the fireplace reading the Guinness Book of World Records: 2013, so I crossed the room with feet damp from the almost dry carpet and sat down next to him. He had a concentrated interest in these great world records and the world's most interesting books with the brightly colored, reflective covers, and he could listen to an advertisement once and would re-script it for the rest of the week. The frustration of the moment lumped in my throat so I couldn't open my mouth to say "She's not talking" or "What's wrong with you?" I sat there speechless as Kimberly unknowingly tasted her tortilla and cheddar cheese.
His wife turned on him and burst into their bedroom, which was attached to the back wall of the living room, my father following her. They didn't close the door all the way, so I went in too, closed the door, and said to them with a lump in my throat, "It's time to get out of this!" My father and his wife were arguing on the bed while I continued. I had to stop at the end of the drive to open the wire gate, maneuver the car back onto the gravel driveway, and turn to lock it behind me so the snarling dogs wouldn't get away before I could.
