Before I can even consider the possibility of taking off my sunglasses, Ma’s fingers coil around my wrist, and she pulls me away from Julieta. “I’ll take her,” she says, dragging me down the back hallway, deeper into the space.
I’ve barely glimpsed a small kitchen/lounge to my right when Ma pulls me through a door to my left and locks it behind us. I slide my sunglasses onto my head.
“I know you’re upset with me, and you have every right to be,” she says, and since I can’t stand to look at her yet, I scan the office. Black synthetic leather couch, L-shaped wooden desk, ominous six-foot safe in the corner.
“I will answer your questions, I promise.”
I glower at her. She looks like a stranger in those scrubs, and I can’t tell if her skin is paling, or if the blue is washing her out.
“But right now, I need you to stay here and wait for me.” She strides up to the huge safe and punches a code to unlock it.
I blink.
“What the fuck is going on?”
The words explode out of me, and I brace myself for Ma’s reaction.
“We can’t go back to Perla’s,” she says as she reaches into the safe and pulls out a duffel bag. “We’ll tell the others we’re spending the night on the couch.”
When she doesn’t yell at me for my language, fear frays the hard edges of my rage.
She sets the bag on the desk and rifles through its contents. “Then once they head home, we’ll go.” Ma zips the duffel shut again and pins me with one of her no-nonsense stares. “Everything we have left is in that bag. Stay in this room and guard it with your life. Do not leave this clinic for any reason. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
My breathing shallows as I try to process the speed at which everything in my life is changing. I feel like this morning I woke from a dream into a nightmare.
Ma reaches for the door, and I make to follow her out. “But we don’t even know how Perla is—”
She whirls to face me, blocking the exit with her body. “Let me finish with my patients, and I’ll figure out a plan. Don’t let anyone see you without your glasses.”
“Ma!”
I grab her arm, and I’m chilled by the terror glazing her eyes. Trying to infuse my voice with as much hope as I can muster, I say, “Maybe—maybe Perla’s fine by now—”
“Perla was attacked, Manu!” she shout-whispers.
I inhale sharply. “What do you—”
“Your father’s family found me.” Her voice is faint and fragile and foreign from the Ma I know. “Now we need to run, before they find out about you.”
The door slams in my face, narrowly missing my nose.
* * *
Ma left the office five hundred and thirty-three seconds ago. I know because there’s a loud clock over the couch, and I’ve been counting off its every tick.
Tick.
Ma thinks Perla was attacked.
Tick.
Ma works at an underground clinic.
Tick.
Ma thinks my dad’s people found us.
Tick.
We can never go home again.
Tick.
What happens if they catch us?
A tendril of red smoke floats across my field of vision, but I blink and it’s gone. This hallucination is really starting to get on my nerves. I leap off the couch and start pacing up and down the office.
To tune out the deafening ticking of time, I try to make sense of a senseless situation. It’s just like playing chinchón, I tell myself as I deepen my breathing. I’ve been dealt a hand of unrelated cards, and now I have to discern a pattern and sort them into groups.
I think of Leather Jacket and the woman on the rooftop. Maybe they were there looking for Ma. The woman sounded Argentine—she could be a scout sent by my dad’s family.
What if his people really did hurt Perla?
What if they followed me here?
My heart vaults into my throat, and I reach for the door—but I stop myself before opening it. Ma might not be thinking clearly right now, which means it’s important that I be the rational one. I have to consider the facts objectively, for both of us.
Perla is a ninety-year-old woman whose health is starting to fail, and it’s perfectly logical that she could have fallen on her own. Ma has been running from my father’s family my whole life, so it’s natural for her to be paranoid.
I sigh and bury my face in my hands. I can’t even trust what I know to be true anymore. Until ten minutes ago, I was beyond certain there were no secrets between Ma and me, and now it turns out all we’ve ever had are secrets.
If Doña Rosa isn’t real, Ma’s anecdotes about her multistory house and snotty little kids have all been fabrications. My entire life is made up of dreams and superstitions and lies—even the real parts aren’t real.
Tick.
So what if Ma’s lying about the only thing that matters?
The question surges up my throat like bile. Ma wouldn’t betray me like this. She knows our only chance of survival is with legal residency. She knows we desperately need a real home. She knows the hope of our papers coming through is all that’s keeping me going.
My eyes latch onto the duffel bag she left on the desk. I’ve searched Perla’s whole apartment for copies of the paperwork Ma filed, just to touch proof of that hope, to know it’s real, but I’ve yet to find it. I always assumed Ma must have a really good hiding place because I never found anything else either, like our savings or my birth certificate.
I dive for the bag.
Sitting at the desk, I rummage through wads of cash, new clothing, unopened toothbrushes and toiletries, a flashlight, power bars, water bottles … and at the very bottom, a pile of paperwork.
I pull out the stack and push the duffel away, resting the documents on the desktop to flip through them. The first thing I come across are sketches and photographs of a symbol that looks like a fancy Z and reminds me of an old television series Perla loves called El Zorro.
I recognize it as the same symbol etched onto the blue pills.
Next, there are maps of different sectors of Argentina. The city names have all been crossed out, like Ma’s searching for something. Or someone.
Behind the diagrams is a manila folder, and on the cover is a name, written in Ma’s slanted handwriting: Manuela Azul.
Me.
I open it up to find a series of magnified photographs of my eyeballs.
I can’t help cringing. Having never seen a photograph of myself, it’s jarring to be confronted with close-ups of my most-hated feature. I don’t remember posing for these, so they must have been taken when I was very young. The five-point stars of my pupils look like graphite, and my irises aren’t at all what I expected.
Woven into the yellow are flecks of copper and amber and burnt gold, and the longer I stare, the more shades I see. Flipping from one photo to the next, I notice the particles of color keep shifting shape and location, like my eyes are golden galaxies orbiting silver stars.
There’s text bleeding through the back of the last picture, and I turn it over to read what Ma wrote. One word, in Spanish.
Anormal.
Abnormal. Aberrant. Wrong.
I ignore the stab in my chest, and I shove the file aside to finish reading later. I keep digging through Ma’s papers, but all I find are newspaper clippings and pages filled with unintelligible scribbles that could be notes on anything from Ma’s patients to the blue pills she’s investigating to the location she’s trying to track down. By the time I reach the last page, there’s nothing at all about our visa application.