Page 35 of Rooster's Remorse
"They found out about my mother," I say.
"I know."
"You don't know all of it."
"So tell me all of it."
Nothing's coming up my throat. I get the glass back and put the rest of it down. It doesn't touch me at all, doesn't even burn, might as well be water.
"In April they found out. By July they put her in the ditch." I'm looking at the burn ring in the table. "I sat in a hospital for two days while they put a plate in her wrist, stitched her up everywhere else, and had her on antibiotics and painkillers. There was a deputy outside the door because nobody knew if they were coming back. My dad was in the hallway the whole time and he couldn't look at me. Not once in two days."
She doesn't say anything.
"And I'm in that chair on the second day, and I'm thinking about you."
Her head comes up.
"That's what I need you to understand." Something's gone wrong in my voice, and I go straight through it. "My mother's in a bed with her arm in a cage, and I'm thinking about you, because I was terrified it would be you next."
"You expect me to understand that? That you pushed me away because you were afraid I’d be hurt?"
"They pulled herrecords." I look at her. "That's all it took, Mila. Nobody looks at my mother and sees anything. That's what I'm telling you. She's white. She's white to every single person who's ever met her, and it didn't matter, because one man went to a courthouse and read a name and a location in Mexico off a certificate. She's never said one word of Spanish in her life, and they put her in a ditch for it."
"I know what they are."
"You don't knowwhatthey are." It comes out of me too loud and I force my voice down. My hands won't stay still, so I put them on my knees. "You know what they did to her. That's not the same as knowing what they'd have done to you."
"Finn—"
"Her grandmother was born in Cananea." I'm forward on the couch now, elbows on my knees. "That's it. That's the whole crime. A woman nobody in that family ever met, born in a mining town in 1931. And you're across the street with your mother's face and Bacani on the mailbox, and you're at every dinner at that house, and so am I."
She's very still.
"They'd been in my house." My throat's shutting and I keep going through the hole in it. "They'd been in my school. You think they didn't know who lived across the road? You think there wasn't a picture of you in somebody's truck? I workedthose jobs for two years. Every man on those crews knew what my day-to-day looked like."
"So you left."
"So I left."
"That's it," she says. "That's the answer."
"That's the truth, Camila."
She's looking at me and there's still nothing on her face, and I want to put my hand through the window.
"You could've told me," she says.
"No."
"You could havetoldme, Finn?—"
"And then what?" I'm up. I don't remember standing. "You come with me? You're twenty-two, you're in school, your mom's got that garden, your dad's got the shop with your name on the paperwork, and you'd have come. That's the problem. You'd have come. And then it's the two of us in a motel outside Dayton for the rest of our lives, and they find us inside a year, because they found my father's first house inside a year and he had fucking Marshals protecting him!"
Her voice comes up for the first time since she’s been here and it goes through me like a nail. "Then let me decide that. It wasn’t your place to just take my choice away from me!"
I stop.
"I did it to keep you alive."
