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“Guess she hated me too cuz one day she just didn’t come home. At first I was really scared. I thought something had happened to her. She got mugged a couple times, and I thought maybe this time something worse had happened. But she was fine. She just didn’t want our shitty life anymore. Didn’t want a life with me.”
Rhys already knew this part but I said it again in this new context.
“Every day, I sat on the stoop waiting for her to come home from work. I didn’t like being in the apartment.”
It was cramped and loud and dirty and I was scared of the roaches that seemed to sneak out whenever I wasn’t looking. My cousins would stomp on them, but the crunch of their bodies giving way upset me more than just leaving.
“My mom would get off the 1 train at 181st and I’d watch the corner she’d always come around. She’d roll her eyes at me, but not unkindly. She’d run her hand over my head. She’d ask why I didn’t play with the other kids. When I shrugged she’d say I could play with her instead, even if playing really meant cleaning the kitchen or folding laundry.”
I swallowed hard.
“Then one day, she didn’t come.
“I sat, and I watched the corner, but she didn’t come around it. It got dark, and my aunt tried to get me to come inside for dinner. I ate, then came back outside to wait. Sometimes she had to stay late at work. Then it was bedtime, and my aunt told me to come inside. But she looked worried. I refused to leave. I kicked her when she tried to drag me inside.”
But my mom didn’t come.
She didn’t come the next day either, or the next.
“She was just gone.”
“How old were you?”
“Seven. I thought she’d been . . . kidnapped or killed or— But I heard my cousins talk about her being deported so that’s what I thought too.”
It had been a deep fear of hers, so it had always filled me with dread too. I imagined her locked up somewhere, kept away from me. I imagined how scared she’d be, in a cell, in the dark, alone.
Then one night a few months after she disappeared, I heard my aunt on the phone. She had gone out onto the fire escape to talk, but I heard every word through the window.
Arianna, she’d said. You can’t just leave him here and take off. When are you coming back? You’re fucking where?! You went back to Italy and left your fucking son waiting for you on the steps, you selfish bitch. What were you thinking? A pause. My mother’s lilting voice through the phone. When would I hear it again. Yeah? Well, I feel that way too, but I don’t run away because I have people depending on me. My mother again, quieter now. You selfish child. I can’t believe you did this.
Not kidnapped. Not killed. Not stolen from me. Fled. Fled, happy to be rid of me.
“That’s why I let you think that. For a little while, I really . . . I really thought it was true.” I bit my lip. “But she left. Went back to Italy. She was from this town in the south. Cosenza. But she didn’t go there, she went to Rome. She started a whole new life, probably.”
“Do you know where she is now?”
I shook my head. “She left me there. I never heard from her again. I, uh, I thought she’d come back for a long time. Stupid kid.”
Stupid stupid stupid stupid. That’s what they’d said at St. Jerome’s. Stupid kids. They think mommy and daddy are coming back. Stupid.
“Don’t say that about my husband,” Rhys said, moving to cup my shoulders.
“I was. I waited for her for so long. Like one day she might turn that corner again wearing that stupid skirt, with that stupid flower in her hair. I waited every day.”
My cousins had tried to distract me. Two of our neighbors who were a few years older called me a crybaby and a pussy and would make sobbing faces when they saw me.
“Then, my aunt had this family friend die—you already know this part.”
“Tell me anyway,” he said. “Tell me again.”
“Okay. Um, I guess they said she could move into their house in the Bronx. She said we’d have more space and maybe we could get a dog and my cousins were all excited. I begged her not to go. Finally I pissed her off so much she said I was just lucky she was taking me with her at all.”
Rhys snarled, eyes bright with fury on my behalf.
“I thought if we left . . . how would my mom find me? I told my aunt we had to call her or send her a letter, but she didn’t have an address or a phone number for her. I said we had to leave her a note. I even wrote one. I put it in a sandwich bag and taped it to the railing. I’m sure it was gone within a day.”
