Inside is a sandwich, pretzels, a wax paper bag of carrot sticks, a hard-boiled egg. He’s never taken food from a stranger; what if it’s poisoned? First time ever on a Greyhound, he doesn’t know what kind of people ride buses across the state, departing from middle-of-nowhere stations. Whoever they are, he’s one of them (for now, anyway) and he’s packed no food of his own. He takes a small bite of the sandwich (ham and cheese) and chews slowly, making it last another two stops. Later, the pretzels get him from Los Angeles to Valencia, the carrots to a town called Solvang; the egg he saves for later, just in case. He finally sleeps, then wakes at the Greyhound station in downtown San Francisco, where he deboards and heads to Market Street, catches the final BART train to the Colma station. From there, he walks the two miles to the locked front gate of the La Villa Aurelia apartment complex then realizes: he has no keys.
He walks halfway down the block. Bags slung on his shoulders, he climbs the low wall of Old Hoy Sun Ning Yung cemetery. He zigzags around tombstones and graves until he reaches the far end, squeezes through a hole in the chain link fence into the complex. He goes to the back of the last building, climbs atop the Dumpster and onto the fire escape. His bedroom window is two floors up, but moving closer, he hears what sounds like weeping and sees the faint light in the open window next to his. He thinks: Of course.
He doesn’t move, waits for the conversation to end, then steps toward his window. It doesn’t budge, and when he peers into Maxima’s, he finds her standing with a hand held high, a switchblade aimed right at him.
“Stop,” he says, hands up like he’s surrendered. “It’s me.”
Maxima steps forward. Nine months have passed, their longest time apart, and though he didn’t think she’d look any different, he’s caught off guard by how much she resembles the way he often imagines her—weapon in hand, ready to strike.
She looks him up and down, like she can’t quite tell if he really is who he says he is, or someone else entirely. “You’re back,” she says.
“Yeah. Just arrived.” He lowers his hands. “Could you put that thing away?”
She closes the switchblade, tosses it onto her pillow. “I didn’t know you were coming.”
“I meant to call. Couldn’t get a signal in the desert. Couldn’t get one on the bus either.”
“Nine months, no signal? Ano ba, your phone’s from 1977?” She folds her arms, makes no gesture to welcome him back.
It’s pointless to apologize for his months of silence; she wouldn’t accept it, he wouldn’t mean it. “I don’t have my keys,” he says. “I meant to go through my window, but it won’t open.”
“I keep it locked these days.”
“Well, could you unlock it? I would’ve gone through yours, but you were”—he pauses, unsure of the word for what Maxima does.
“Working,” she says.
“Right,” he says. “Working.”
She takes Excel’s backpack and duffel bag, brings them inside. “I’ll unlock your window, you enter through there,” she says. “Gutom kaba? There’s Panda Express in the fridge.”
“Sure,” he says, then thanks her, tells her that he’s headed to the roof for a few minutes; after eighteen hours on a stuffy, stinky bus, he could use the air. “I’ll be back,” he says, “I promise,” but before he can go, Maxima takes his wrist, her grip so tight he feels her fingers against his bones.
“It’s good that you’re home, Excel. But next time”—she squeezes harder—“don’t spy on your mother.”
What she means by next time he doesn’t know. That he’ll lurk on the fire escape tomorrow night, and nights on after? That he’ll leave again to make a life, but automatically fail and inevitably return?
“I won’t,” he says, and she lets go.
He continues up the fire escape two more flights, steps onto the roof. He hasn’t been here in over a year and everything is the same: the never-working satellite dish wrapped in ivy that somehow sprouts from rooftop gravel; the washing machine on its side, a pile of yellow rubber gloves still inside it; the pair of ripped and rusted lawn chairs. As a kid, Excel would come here without telling anyone, stay for hours, sometimes until dark and well beyond. I’m hiding and hiding, he’d tell himself.
He pulls his cell phone from his pocket. Almost twenty hours before, when Sab dropped him off in front of the El Centro bus station, she’d said no calls, not for a while. Instead of kissing him good-bye, she just touched his face, a gesture that might have been tender had it not made him feel almost ghostly, like he wasn’t really there. So before her phone rings, he hangs up and decides to text her instead, but doesn’t know the right thing to say. Maybe he’ll just let her know he made it back, that he’s safe, and that he misses her. Maybe he’ll remind her to get some rest, for her sake and the sake of the baby. Or should he say our baby? Unborn baby? He knows he shouldn’t say the word baby at all: Sab made it clear—no decisions, not yet.
He puts his phone away. No call, no text.
He walks to the edge of the roof. Of La Villa Aurelia’s three buildings, his is the tallest, four stories high. From up here, the view is the 280 freeway on one side with Old Hoy Sun Ning Yung on another, and the rest is Colma, town of seventeen cemeteries, a handful of car dealerships (Lexus, BMW, Toyota, Dodge), and a cardroom called Lucky Wishes, where old Filipinos play and never win. To the north are two Targets, one on each side of the freeway (one in Colma, one in Serramonte), their signs a nightly red and white glow. Who needs two Targets so close together? Once, out of pure boredom, Excel walked from one front entrance to the other, counting his steps along the way—1,084, just to get to a place exactly the same as where you started.
It’s June. Colma is cold, the sky hazy and gray. Excel closes his eyes, remembers the desert at night. Clean and cold air. Silence. What you saw when you looked up.
He crosses back and descends the fire escape, pauses at the bright, wide-open windows of the third-floor apartment above Maxima’s and his. He’s never met the tenants, but from the nonstop Bed Bath & Beyond coupons left atop their mailbox, he knows their last name is Sharma, and their apartment is nothing like the one directly below: Instead of cramped side-by-side bedrooms separated by a thin wall, the two windows look into a spacious living room with shiny dark wood floors, white built-in shelves, and a corner fireplace framed in marble; the space is so large it fits two sofas, one on each side of a glass coffee table.
He pokes his head through the window, hears no sounds of movement, climbs in. He walks over to the shelves, notices that the books are leather bound but have no titles or authors, and the framed black-and-white photographs are all of the same scene—floral-patterned tapestries flapping in the wind beside a river. He goes to the mirror above the fireplace, thinks of what the man at the Greyhound station said—You look the same to me—takes out his high school ID. He was fifteen, small for his age (he’s caught up a bit, just shy of five feet six now), his face back then as round as a dinner plate. But in the mirror, he can see how nine months in the desert have hollowed out his cheeks and narrowed his face, and how almost forty-eight hours without real sleep has made his eyes bloodshot and murky.