If Birds Fly Back Read online

  Álvaro mumbles over the sound of the waves, “You mean una entrevista? We should do an interview now, yes?”

  “That’s not what I—”

  “What is that saying? No time like now?”

  “The present,” I answer, heart plummeting.

  “Hmm?”

  “No time like the present.”

  Wisps of his hair flail in the breeze. “You are right, mijo! Seize the day!”

  Mijo. A combination of mi and hijo. My son.

  It’s an expression. Just an expression. He doesn’t mean anything by it. . . .

  Does he?

  Behind us, Linny’s sitting knees to chin on the sand, filming the waves as they roll in and out. Álvaro sees her. “Niña, with the camera. It would be good to get this down. . . . ¡Oye!” he shouts to Linny. “¡Trae su cámara!”

  She tilts her head at him, confused. Maybe she’s not fluent in Spanish? I point to her backpack and press cupped hands to my left eye, like I’m filming.

  She gets it. Whips her head back and forth between the sand and us. Oh, she probably doesn’t want to get the equipment wet. After a moment, she seems to make a decision, bouncing up and into the surf, camera in hand.

  “Take one,” she says, and then is silent for a century. When she speaks again, it’s sudden. “I’m just . . . establishing the shot! Getting my bearings.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Right.”

  I don’t add anything else. I’m busy looking at the dark curls that frame her face.

  BREAKTHROUGH CONJECTURE #2:

  The world change one originally hypothesizes may not be the world change that occurs in the course of human events. (See also: catastrophism; radical redirection theory)

  Then I’m looking at the freckles on her arms.

  At her jean shorts. Which are too short for me not to notice. But I hate myself for it anyway. I shouldn’t have any attention to spare. I should be focused entirely on Álvaro.

  Although Álvaro isn’t the one wearing short shorts . . .

  Oh, Jesus. The imagery.

  “Álvaro,” Linny says, “why don’t you fill us in on your disappearance?”

  I cock my head and mouth to her: Subtle.

  Unfazed by the question, Álvaro answers, “When I was growing up in Havana, mi padre took me to see a magician, Rolando the Great, who pulled me onto the stage. I went behind a curtain, and—gone!” When he stops, I assume he’s just taking a breath. That the story will continue. But it doesn’t. He grins at the camera like he’s just won Jeopardy!

  “Oh, okay,” Linny says. “Cool. What about the past couple of years, though? What have you been up to?”

  “Many things.”

  “Like what, exactly?”

  “My book—I write all the time. When I was younger, I wrote for many hours by the sea, near the Malecón in Havana.”

  “But you haven’t been in Cuba since the 1960s, right?”

  Álvaro jerks his shoulders slightly up, slightly down. “These places. No matter how long you are away, it doesn’t feel like you’re gone. These places, they stay with you.”

  “Hmmm.” Linny swishes her feet in the water. “What about Little Havana?”

  “Little Havana?”

  “Yeah, I mean, I used to go there as a kid. Look at all the mosaic-tile murals and stuff. You hung out there when you were younger, right?”

  “Sí.” He winks. “For the cigars.”

  “Have you been there lately?”

  “As I said, these places—time does not matter.”

  It proceeds like that. Linny: asking questions about his disappearance and return. Him: evading the questions like a greased dolphin. He tells us about a pet rabbit he had when he was five. About the inspiration for In the Hour of the Spring (his grandfather was a gardener). About his first love, a girl named Mirabelle. He was seventeen, like me. They would sneak off in the dead of night to kiss by the railroad tracks. (Top things I don’t want to talk about with my father: Kissing. Women other than my mom.)

  I tap my imaginary wristwatch. “Time to go soon.”

  “Uno momento,” Álvaro says. “You must ask me about movies.”

  “Yes!” Linny says. “Absolutely. What about movies?”

  He kind of leans back in the air. “It’s strange, no? Life on a small screen has no texture. Smooth as paper. All these little bumps, that is life. Dado el tiempo suficiente, todo se cura.” Given enough time, everything heals? I hope so. “And if you do not like your script,” he says, “you must write a new one. You must. You must.”

  He repeats it three or four more times. Like a mantra. “You must, you must.” It guts me, for some reason. It feels like he’s admitting something. It feels like we’re getting somewhere.

  But Marla interrupts his chant. “Mr. Herrera!” she calls from the shore where she’s rolling up the pant legs of her scrubs. Two male nurses are by her side, glaring at us. “Mr. Herrera, get out of the water!”

  Every time we get closer, something pulls us further apart.

  11.

  Linny

  WHO: Olympic swimmer Claudia Jones

  WHEN: Two months after she won the bronze in the 800-meter butterfly at the Sydney Olympics

  WHY: She disappeared during a charity event in Puget Sound. When a rescue crew found her eighteen hours later, she was floating on her back more than fifteen miles from the finish line. Apparently she said: “I never would have come back closer to shore, but the cramp in my left leg was something fierce. I would’ve just kept swimming. God, it felt so good to be free.”

  NOTES: Is this how Grace feels, like Álvaro at the beach? Free? (How on earth do I induce a leg cramp in another person? How insane do I sound right now?)

  Álvaro is beaming, illuminating the shot, the corners of his eyes crinkling against the sun. In Midnight in Miami, he makes a cameo halfway through—and completely steals the show. He only has two lines (“Where have you been? I didn’t expect to see you again.”), but it’s obvious that the camera adores him. Most actors—even superfamous ones—don’t have that gift, the ability to light up from the inside out.

  Behind him, the waves roll softly along the horizon, and a flock of seagulls dips and dances in circles off to the left. The blues are spectacular: the iridescent turquoise of the waves, the robin’s egg of Álvaro’s button-up, the cloudless Miami sky. I pick up a symphony of noises: my own breath, toddlers giggling as they kick down a sand castle, the flapping of beach tents in the gentle breeze.

  And then there’s Sebastian.

  Sebastian.

  Standing two feet from Álvaro, he’s ramming his hands into his pockets, head tilted down toward the surf, so I can see the length of his eyelashes—longer than a boy’s have a right to be. I zoom in, then zoom in further. It strikes me how much they look alike: the brown of their skin, similar smiles, gray eyes. Up close, Sebastian’s wild hair isn’t so wild. It has sort of a pattern, actually—twisting clockwise from the top of his head, fanning out like palm tree fronds. It’s cute.

  No, it isn’t, I tell myself. It isn’t cute. Once I start thinking he’s cute, it’s over.

  Focus.

  “I’m just . . . establishing the shot!” I blurt out. “Getting my bearings.”

  But for the rest of the interview, I keep one eye on Sebastian, until Marla starts screaming from the shore (“Mr. Herrera, get out of the water!”), and we are sucked out of a moment when I feel so suddenly happy and alive.

  Between Marla’s face and her hands on her hips, it is immediately obvious that we’re—what’s that horrible phrase Ray says? Oh yeah. Up shit creek without a paddle.

  Explaining that yes, Alvaro’s safe and no, we did not kidnap him takes fifteen minutes. Back at Silver Springs, Marla orders Sebastian and me to sit in the lobby as she towers over us. You’d think we were gone five days the way she steamrolls on, like we’re the villains in a Bond film. The only things missing are a polygraph machine and a hundred-watt bulb to shine into our pupils.

/>   In my mind, she grows steadily—first her hands, then feet; finally, her legs stretch like a hundred-year time-lapse of forest trees. The fraying hem of my jean shorts is still soaking, and I spend the first third of the interrogation praying that I’m not water-staining the pleather couch.

  “Do y’all have any idea what could have happened?” she screams.

  Sebastian says, “But we thought—”

  “No, you didn’t think. That’s your problem.” She stabs the air. “So let me enlighten you—this man is eighty-two years old, and under my care. My care, not yours. If he had wandered off into the ocean and drowned, that would’ve been on me. We don’t wanna see anybody get hurt.”

  Eyes firmly on my shoes, I say, “We weren’t trying to hurt him.”

  “Things happen, Miss Marilyn. Things out of our control.”

  “But he looked happy.”

  Marla sighs, and in my mind she shrinks a little. “What matters is his safety. That’s just the way it is. The way it’s got to be. I’m sorry . . . but one more stunt like this and y’all are gone.” Her general appearance resembles pulled taffy: all drawn out. “Just”—she wipes the air with her hand—“just go home for the day.”

  As she rounds the corner, I whisper to Sebastian, “Well, that was horrible.”

  Rubbing his face with his hands, he says, “That’s such bullshit.”

  “You don’t think it was horrible?”

  “No—it was. It’s just, what’s the point of him being safe if he isn’t happy?”

  I’m not sure if he expects an answer, or if there is a good answer, but I start thinking about what Álvaro said about having no choice, how sometimes I’m bitter about the same thing. Although Grace never confessed it, I think I know why she left, because sometimes I feel that way, too—like MomandDad are stuffing me into a container and sealing the lid, and I’d give anything for the space to uncrunch myself. Being trapped in a nursing home isn’t entirely different from being trapped at my house. A cage is a cage. “Some people think they know what’s best,” I offer, “even if they’ve never asked the person what she wants.”

  “She?” Sebastian peeks through his fingers.

  Biting my tongue to avoid another slip, I stay silent as Sebastian’s eyes flicker across my face. Usually when someone’s staring this hard in my direction, one of two things is happening: I’m with Cass or Grace, or there’s a camera in my hands. Without the technological barrier, I’m exposed. The look Sebastian’s giving me—truly giving me—makes me feel like it’s pep rally time in the school gym, and I’m standing at the half-court line in my underwear.

  “Go on,” he deadpans, straightening his back to attention. “Give me an example.”

  The whole butterfly population of the Amazon battles for space in my rib cage as I tug the neckline of my T-shirt. “Can we just forget I said that?”

  “If you want.”

  Although he says it sincerely, in the ensuing silence, I still blurt out: “If you really want to know, my shoes.”

  “Your shoes?”

  Idiotically, I stick out my Chuck Taylors for examination. “Well, one of my friends, she draws all these cool designs on her shoes. Like flowers and skulls and tic-tac-toe. One time my mom saw them and said how horrible they looked. How I should never do that with my shoes. . . . Maybe I’m not making sense.”

  Rambling. I’m rambling.

  I might as well have blurted out my whole life story. By the way, Sebastian, not only do I have footwear issues, but I also despise shiitake mushrooms and sometimes still sleep with my stuffed-animal giraffe. Maybe the soliloquy thing is catching.

  “I get it,” he says, standing up.

  My immediate thought is that I’ve just driven him away with my excessive verbiage, but then he walks over and grabs a black Sharpie from the front desk. Stooping down at my feet, he flicks the pen between his knuckles.

  “May I?”

  The whole scenario is so monumentally strange, but when he lifts my left shoe and sketches three little shooting stars on the white rubber, my first thought is, Even Cinderella didn’t have it this good.

  “There,” he says, and almost immediately adds, “if you hate it, you could probably white it out with some—um—Wite-Out or something. Oh . . .” My foot is still in his hand, and he drops it abruptly with a clunk. “Sorry, you probably want that back.”

  “Thanks,” I say, nose throbbing pink, pinker, pinkest. I’m sure my freckles are glowing like a million headlights in the dark.

  In the scope of things, maybe this is an insignificant moment—a simple exchange, the type of scene that gets edited out of movies. But for me? It’s like: kapow. If I could, I’d press Pause and Rewind over and over again. If I could, I’d run home and tell Grace.

  THE LEFT-BEHINDS (SCENE 6)

  CARSON FAMILY HOUSE

  GRACE (seventeen) is on the roof of the two-story house, sundress blooming in the breeze.

  LINNY (fifteen) yells at her from the ground.

  LINNY

  How’d you even get up there?

  GRACE

  (nervous)

  I need to tell you something.

  LINNY

  Just get down, okay?

  GRACE

  That’s just it.

  LINNY

  Grace, you’re kind of scaring me.

  GRACE

  Don’t—don’t freak out.

  LINNY

  What are you talking about?

  GRACE takes three steps to the edge of the roof—and jumps.

  LINNY

  (shrieking)

  Grace!

  Over LINNY’s scream is a thwwwt sound: GRACE’s beautiful yellow wings unfolding. They’re as wide as she is tall. With two flaps, she floats gently to the ground and looks at her sister.

  GRACE

  (half in awe, half petrified)

  They work.

  12.

  Sebastian

  “The topology of space remains a marvel. In the standard cosmological model (k = +1), space is spherical, and it is possible to argue—as did Wheeler—that the universe has no singular boundary.” A Brief Compendium of Astrophysical Curiosities, p. 78

  Shoe. I drew on her shoe?

  We’re at Books & Books on Lincoln Road. Linny’s perched on a stepladder, on her tiptoes. I get a good look at the stars.

  A TOPOLOGICAL THEORY FOR INTERACTIONS WITH GIRLS:

  If a girl lets you draw on her shoe, then the outer limits of the aforementioned relationship are yet to be reached.

  Grabbing a book on the top shelf, she passes it down to me with a “Here, hold this.” It’s Ten Years in Havana. The front cover is a bold green. “Looks like we’re in luck,” she says. “They’re having an Alvaro-has-miraculously-returned-from-the-dead special. Buy one get one free.”

  Her phone rings in her back pocket. Like it’s been doing for the last twenty minutes. Her ring tone is the theme from The Breakfast Club, which is an excellent song the first three times you hear it in an hour. Not so much after that.

  “You going to answer your phone?”

  She huffs. “I should.”

  I take a shot in the dark. “Is it your . . . boyfriend?”

  Stepping down the ladder—“Why would you say that?”

  I shrug. “Hot girls usually have boyfriends.”

  Oh no. Oh no. No. I did not just say that. No. I close my eyes and wait for the shit to hit the fan.

  “I am not hot,” she says. Something in her voice tells me she’s even more desperate to get away from this conversation than I am.

  Furiously backpedaling—“I just meant, I— Hey, I think we’ve left out a title.” Yes! Switching topics! I flip through the books in my hands. “We need Midnight in Miami.”

  Biting her bottom lip—“I know I have an old copy somewhere, but it wouldn’t hurt to buy another. There’s a display by the front door, I think.” She waves me around the corner, takes a few steps, and then jolts like she’s been electrocuted.


  “Err—are you all right?”

  Brushing a curl from her eyes, she says, “Yeah—I just thought I saw . . . My sister shops here.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah.”

  Why do I have the feeling she wants to say so much more?

  She seems sad. But I don’t press her on it because she mildly terrifies me. What’s even more terrifying is, I like that she terrifies me. The resting human heart rate is sixty to one hundred beats per minute. Right now, I feel more hummingbird than human. But I’m feeling . . . something.

  I used to think I was defective. That I wasn’t capable of normal feelings. (I’m supposed to like Paul. But I won’t grow a mustache for him. I’m supposed to love Louis. But I can’t stand watching his shitty soccer games. I’m supposed to still feel things for Savannah, my first and only girlfriend. But she thought that Cuba was a state, and there’s no getting past that ignorance.)

  I thought: What if there’s something’s missing inside me, because my dad’s gone? Because my mom and I can’t speak Spanish in the house? Because it’s impossible for me to wake up without Play-Doh in my hair?

  I thought: Maybe I’m more broken than I realize.

  But no more.

  Palms: sweating.

  Jugular: pulsing.

  I’m alive. I’m okay.

  I’m staring directly at Our Bodies, Ourselves on the third shelf of the Women’s Health section.

  Linny says, “Do you want to buy that or something?”

  “Oh,” I say. “Nah.”

  “You sure? Because you were eyeing it for a good thirty seconds.”

  “Let’s just check out, okay?”

  I buy the first three books. She buys the last two. And outside, just before I get on the bus and she hops on her bike, I ask, “Hey, on Monday can you show me the footage from the beach?”

  The sunlight is too harsh, I think, because she squints and backs away. “Um, maybe. But . . . probably not—the shots weren’t that great. Just read the books over the weekend, all right?” On her bike she gives a small wave and pedals away quickly, frantically, until she’s just a speck at the end of the road.