More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
You know, it was beautiful to be in that kitchen just then. I guess there are times of quiet beauty in life.
Right then I witnessed the world they lived in go completely silent. The world was flooding with their tears.
His smile was breaking my heart.
And then Fito sort of hung his head and he was blinking his eyes, like he was trying to blink away all the tears that he’d held inside all his life.
Her laugh was as fragile as the leaves she had raked when I was five.
Her fading voice was the one I heard the loudest.
I watched her hands as they worked the batter over with a wooden spoon. I wanted to kiss them.
Mima. No despair. She was dying, and there was not one sign of despair in her dancing eyes.
I wondered if that’s what death sounded like. Like a snowflake falling on the ground.
“If there’s no heaven, I don’t really care. Maybe people are heaven, Dad. Some people, anyway. You and Sam and Fito. Maybe you’re all heaven. Maybe everyone’s heaven, and we just don’t know it.”
And then I just couldn’t stand it anymore, and I took Fito’s fists and I was stronger than he was, and I held his arms and kept him from hitting himself. And then I just pulled him in to me, and I held him and he cried and he cried and he cried. And I couldn’t do anything about all the hurt, but I could hold him.
On the outside, he was back to his old self. Only, I knew there was a wound living inside him, and that wound wasn’t going away anytime soon.
In the distance, I can see a storm coming in, the dark clouds and the lightning on the horizon moving toward me. I wait and I wait and I wait for the storm. And then it comes, and the rains wash away the nightmares and the memories. And I’m not afraid.
Sam took my hand and looked at it. Then she whispered, “What would I do without this hand?”
The heart, yeah, sometimes I didn’t get it. But if we were making each other laugh and smile, maybe it was part of the way human beings loved each other.
She was staring at a picture of me and Sam when we were seven. No front teeth. We were standing in the front yard. It was summer and the leaves of her mulberry tree were behind us. The caption read: She was always my sister.
“Beautiful,” she said. I turned the page, and she smiled. It was a picture of the day when we built the human pyramid in my backyard, and I was at the top. The caption read: One day, all these Mexicans built a pyramid to the Sun. “You were my pyramid,” she whispered. “All of you.”
Mima was like the tree. In this desert where I’d grown up, Mima had shaded me from the sun. She was a tree. How would I live without that tree?
“Life can be hard. I know how hard it can be.” And then she said, “Déjate querer.” Let yourself be loved.
That was how she said goodbye to the world. To the people she loved. She was going to leave this earth the same way her mother had. With all the grace of the old world. The old, dying world.
I found myself on my knees. I was wordless and lost, and I had never known anything that felt like this, this, this hurt in the heart, this emptiness, and I wished right then I didn’t have a heart, but I knew I had one and I couldn’t wish it away. I couldn’t wish away the hurt or the tears. I don’t know how long I knelt there on the winter soil. But I felt myself taking a breath and let myself feel the cold air on my face.
“Sometimes, I see myself standing on a beach, my bare feet buried in the wet sand. And there’s no one on the beach, just me, but I don’t feel alone. What I feel is alive. And it seems like the whole world belongs to me. The cool breeze whistles through my hair, and something tells me I have heard that song all my life. I’m watching the waves hit the sand, the ebb and flow of the waves crashing against the distant cliffs. The ocean is ever moving—and yet there is a stillness that I envy. “In the distance, I can see a storm coming in, the dark clouds and the lightning on the horizon moving
...more
Life had its seasons, and the season of letting go would always come, but there was something very beautiful in that, in the letting go. Leaves were always graceful as they floated away from the tree.
I’d watched them in all their beautiful courage. I’d watched them as they struggled through their hurts and their wounds.
That’s the way it was when you loved someone. You took them everywhere you went—whether they were alive or not.
I take the sealed envelope from him—the one that holds the information about my biological father. I ask him for his cigarette lighter. He hands it to me. I look at Sam and Fito and say, “Word for the day.” Sam understands and says, “Nurture.” I take the unopened envelope. I am watching myself as I take the lighter and place it over the edge of the paper. I am watching the envelope burn. I am watching the ashes floating up to the heavens. I am hearing myself as I tell my father, “I know who my father is. I have always known.” And now I am laughing. And my dad is laughing. And Fito is smiling
...more
