I watched him as he bounded up the steps. He moved with the grace of the swimmer that he was. There was no weight or worry in his step.
He turned around and waved, wearing that smile of his. I wondered if his smile would be enough.
God, let his smile be enough.
Four
I DIDN’T THINK I’D EVER felt this tired. I fell on my bed—but sleep didn’t feel like paying me a visit.
Legs jumped up beside me and licked my face. She nudged closer when she heard the storm outside. I wondered what Legs made up in her head about thunder or if dogs even thought about things like that. But me, I was happy that for the thunder. This year, such wondrous storms, the most wondrous storms I’d ever known. I must have nodded off to sleep because, when I woke, it was pouring outside.
I decided to have a cup of coffee. My mom was sitting at the kitchen table, cup of coffee in one hand, a letter in the other.
“Hi,” I whispered.
“Hi,” she said, that same smile on her face. “You got in late.”
“Or early—if you think about it.”
“For a mother, early is late.”
“Were you worried?
“It’s in my nature to worry.”
“So you’re like Mrs. Quintana.”
“It might surprise you to know that we have a lot of things in common.”
“Yeah,” I said, “you both think your sons are the most beautiful boys in the world. You don’t get out much, do you, Mom?”
She reached over and combed my hair with her fingers. And then she had that look that was waiting for an explanation.
“Dante and I fell asleep in the back of my pickup. We didn’t…” I stopped, and then I just shrugged. “We didn’t do anything.”
She nodded. “This is hard, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said. “Is it supposed to be hard, Mom?”
She nodded. “Love is easy and it’s hard. It was that way with me and your father. I wanted him to touch me so much. And I was so afraid.”
I nodded. “But at least—”
“At least I was a girl and he was a boy.”
“Yeah.” She just looked at me in that same kind of way that she had always looked at me. And I wondered if I could ever look at anybody like that, a look that held all the good things that existed in the known universe.
“Why, Mom? Why do I have to be this way? Maybe I’ll change and then like girls like I’m supposed to like them? I mean, maybe what me and Dante feel—it’s like a phase. I mean, I only feel this way about Dante. So what if I don’t really like boys—I only like Dante because he’s Dante.”
She almost smiled. “Don’t kid yourself, Ari. You can’t think your way out of this one.”
“How can you be so casual about this, Mom?”
“Casual? I’m anything but. I went through a lot of struggles with myself about your aunt Ophelia. But I loved her. I loved her more than I’d ever loved anyone outside of you and your sisters and your father.” She paused. “And your brother.”
“My brother, too?”
“Just because I don’t talk about him doesn’t mean that I don’t think about him. My love for him is silent. There are a thousand things living in that silence.”
I was going to have to give that some thought. I was beginning to see the world in a different way just by listening to her. To listen to her voice was to listen to her love.
“I guess you could say that this isn’t my first time at bat.” She had that fierce and stubborn look on her face. “You’re my son. And your father and I have decided that silence is not an option. Look at what the silence regarding your brother has done to us—not just to you, but to all of us. We’re not going to repeat that mistake.”
“Does that mean I have to talk about everything?”
I could see the tears welling up in her eyes and hear the softness in her voice as she said, “Not everything. But I don’t want you to feel that you’re living in exile. There’s a world out there that’s going to make you feel like that you don’t belong in this country—or any other country, for that matter. But in this house, Ari, there is only belonging. You belong to us. And we belong to you.”
“But isn’t it wrong to be gay? Everybody seems to think so.”
“Not everybody. That’s a cheap and mean morality. Your aunt Ophelia took the words I don’t belong and wrote them on her heart. It took her a long to time to take those words and throw them out of her body. She threw out those words one letter at a time. She wanted to know why. She wanted to change—but she couldn’t. She met a man. He loved her. Who wouldn’t love a woman like Ophelia? But she couldn’t do it, Ari. She wound up hurting him because she could never love him like she loved Franny. Her life was something of a secret. And that’s sad, Ari. Your aunt Ophelia was a beautiful person. She taught me so much about what really matters.”
“What am I gonna do, Mom?”
“Do you know what a cartographer is?”
“Of course I do. Dante taught me that word. It’s someone who creates maps. I mean, they don’t create what’s there, they just map it out and, well, show people what’s there.”
“That’s it, then,” she said. “You and Dante are going to map out a new world.”
“And we’re going to get a lot of things wrong and we’re going to have to keep it all a secret, aren’t we?”
“I’m sorry that the world is what it is. But you’ll learn how to survive—and you’ll have to create a space where you’re safe and learn to trust the right people. And you will find happiness. Even now, Ari, I see that Dante makes you happy. And that makes me happy—because I hate to see you be miserable. And you and Dante have us and Soledad and Sam. You have four people on your baseball team.”
“Well, we need nine.”
She laughed.
I wanted so much to lean into her and cry. Not because I was ashamed. But because I knew I was going to be a terrible cartographer.
And then I heard myself whisper, “Mom, why didn’t anybody tell me that love hurts so much?”
“If I had told you, would it have changed anything?”
Five
THERE WASN’T MUCH LEFT OF the summer. There seemed to be a few rainy days still to come before they went away and left us in our usual drought. While I was lifting weights in the basement, I wondered about picking up some kind of hobby. Maybe something to make me a better person or to just get me out of my head. I wasn’t good at anything, not really. Not like Dante, who was good at everything. I realized I didn’t have any hobbies. My hobby was thinking about Dante. My hobby was feeling my whole body tremble when I thought of him.
Maybe my real hobby would be having to keep my whole life a secret. Was that a hobby? Millions of boys in the world would want to kill me, would kill me if they knew what lived inside me. Knowing how to fight—that was no hobby. It was a gift I just might need to survive.
I took a shower and decided to make a list of things I wanted to do:
-Learn to play the guitar
I crossed out Learn to play the guitar because I knew I would never be good at it. I wasn’t cut out to be Andrés Segovia. Or Jimi Hendrix. So I just got on with my list.