A rare breeze blows in through the third-story window, wafting her almond scent toward me, and I flash back to my younger days, when curling into her neck could make anything better. Something hard dislodges from my chest.
“Even if we get our residency,” I hear myself say, “what’s going to change? Between my eyes and lunaritis, I’ll never fit in.”
Ma knits her brow, and she stares at me for a long moment. Undeterred, I stare back.
She used to be beautiful. There are still hints of that beauty in her plump lips and high cheekbones and long lashes. But the past few years have stolen most of her youth away. Her skin has lost its glow, her hair has gotten thin, and her curves have deflated with her shrinking frame.
“Didn’t you tell me Harry Potter has a scar on his forehead?” she asks, and the stunned expression on my face must be pretty comical because hers splits into a small smirk. “Your eyes are your lightning mark—be proud of them.”
“How can I be proud of them when they put a target on us?”
“In that case, we’ll just have to get healthcare so we can afford your surgery!” I love when she’s in a good mood because she becomes an obstinate optimist. “And take it from me, there are worse chronic conditions to have than lunaritis. When you see a real doctor, they’ll give you an actual diagnosis and a cure—”
“You could be a real doctor, Ma,” I can’t help pointing out. “When we’re legal, you could get certified as a nurse again and go to medical school.”
“Sí,” she says distantly, but she doesn’t sound like she believes it. Then she breaks our gaze to take her turn.
Conversación over.
Her eyes light up when she sees her new card, and I fear what’s coming next—
“¿Cortaste?” I ask incredulously as she slaps a card facedown, ending the round.
She triumphantly bares her full hand to me. She’s holding the four of hearts and the seven of clubs, so I was never getting the cards I was waiting on.
“¡Menos diez!” She announces her score and starts shuffling the deck for me to deal the next hand. I pull the notepad toward me and write −10 in her column and 1 in mine, my gaze lingering on my score.
I am that leftover ace of diamonds.
I don’t fit into any of the groupings around me, and the things that make me different always seem to count against me.
For the millionth time, I wonder about the person I might have become if we hadn’t left Argentina. If my dad’s parents and profession had been normal, and I could have been raised with my family, would my differences still alienate me? Ma sets the deck down, and I ask, “What’s Buenos Aires like?”
I was only five when we left, so I don’t remember much of my homeland. Just impressions that feel more like paintings I saw once in a museum.
“The old-world architecture is breathtaking,” she begins, and I ask her this question often enough that I could mouth her answer along with her. “Assuming you can manage to appreciate it under all the graffiti. The sidewalks change from brick to cement to cobblestone for no particular reason, and they’re covered in every variety of dog poop that Argentines wouldn’t dream of picking up—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I say, interrupting her. “You always give the same answer.”
“You always ask the same question.”
I roll my eyes. “What does it feel like to be in Buenos Aires?”
“It’s the most alive city in the world … Days start late and nights are never-ending. You sleep so little that life begins to feel like a waking dream—”
“Okay,” I say, cutting her off again. She’s said this before too, so just to stump her with something unexpected, I ask, “What’s it smell like?”
“Coffee and leather,” she answers without missing a beat. “I used to like visiting high-end stores just to sniff the jackets and handbags. And … paper,” she adds, her voice growing distant like she’s not seeing Perla’s apartment anymore. “Buenos Aires has more bookstores per person than any city in the world.”
I sit at attention. It’s the first new bit of information she’s given me in a while, and I thread the detail into the tapestry in my head. “What are the people like?”
“Warm.” Her voice dips a few decibels, and I lean forward in anticipation. “Even if it’s your first time there, you’re not a stranger because everyone treats you like they’ve always known you, with smiles and hugs and kisses. The salesperson, the cab driver, the hair stylist—with one conversation, they’re instant friends.”
She must be burnt out because I haven’t heard her this unguarded in a long time. So I chance a question that usually shuts her down, in hopes that today she’ll give something up.
“What was Dad like?”
The light dims in Ma’s brown eyes as the glaze of nostalgia melts into that dark, faraway look she gets whenever I mention him. All I’ve managed to work out is that he was probably white, since my skin is a lighter shade of brown than Ma’s.
I’m not even sure she’s told me his real name because when I looked up Martín Fierro on a computer at the library, a fictional gaucho from classic Argentine literature came up. She’s so terrified of me finding out anything about him that sometimes it feels like he’s still around.
“He was … passionate,” she says, her voice uncharacteristically tender. “Unpredictable. Charming,” she adds with the ghost of a smile. “Hopeful. He was determined to leave his mark on the world. Sometimes when we went out together, he would carve an F somewhere—a table, a door, a tree. He said he wanted to make sure the place was changed by our presence.”
She meets my gaze and her face softens, but I know I’m not the person she’s seeing.
Ma says I have my father’s eyes.
It’s the only thing about him I know for sure.
She claims they’re the reason she fell in love with him, yet she’s always making me hide mine. I know it’s just a precaution we need to take, but it makes me feel like they’re shameful or repulsive or wrong.
It’s only natural to be drawn to the unnatural, Ma always tells me—but attention breeds scrutiny, which is dangerous for us because:
Visibility = Deportation.
This equation—plus Ma’s fear of my father’s family discovering I exist—is why she makes me wear my sunglasses everywhere. Why she won’t take me to see a doctor for my lunaritis. Why I’m no longer allowed to have friends …
Because you can’t be invisible when your irises are yellow suns and your pupils are silver stars.
5
When I was little, Ma used to call me Solcito. Little sun.
Since her name is Soledad, I assumed the moniker was meant to make me sound like a diminutive version of her. But once I pieced together that she was always hiding me, I began to believe I was a real drop of sunlight that fell from the sky.
So when she told me I have my dad’s eyes, I imagined him as the actual sun, and I made up a story about how the brightest star in the sky fell so in love with Ma that he literally fell to Earth to be with her. And now he watches over us, waiting for me to become an astronaut so I can launch into the stars and find him.