You Should Have Been Nicer to My Mom, page 15
“. . . Wanda?”
Xiomara blinked and put the phone up to her ear. “What? What did you say?”
“Uh . . . how much do you know about Wanda?”
Maybe it was the grief of losing her grandfather, or the stress of trying to decipher his last request, or the fact that Marcus was not understanding boundaries—but all at once, Xiomara’s nerves were fizzing, a low flame consuming them fast like the wick of fireworks, and if she did not put out that fire fast, she would not be responsible for her actions.
She chewed on her tongue, but irritation got the better of her. “Are you really asking me what I know about my own cousin?”
“I’m just wondering—”
“Marcus, you have sent me”—she paused to check her notifications—“five text messages, presumably about Wanda, and then called me when I didn’t answer once. Is there a point to this phone call besides you being a patronizing fuck, or are you going to just tell me what you assume I already know?”
Her temple throbbed. There was a twinge of guilt almost as soon as Xiomara cursed at Marcus, but it was quickly overshadowed by more anger.
“When you didn’t answer, I got worried,” he mumbled.
Do I have to answer you immediately all the time? Oh God, he was not making this easy for himself. Or for her. Xiomara hit her head against the desk a few times, testing the strength of the wood. Next time she dated someone this clingy, she would block them.
“Good night, Marcus,” she said dryly.
“Wait!”
She hung up and quickly swiped to his texts.
The first two were just messages to ask if she was currently up. The third was about how he couldn’t sleep and wanted to know what she was doing.
It was the fourth message that made her jaw drop—a link to an article titled, Wanda Abreu, Discovered to Be the Assailant of a Cold Hit-and-Run Case.
The link opened up to a web page before Xiomara realized she’d clicked it. Every second she was forced to X out another ad felt like an eternity, but eventually the article itself was unobstructed.
Two years ago, an odd hit-and-run case captivated the true crime community due to the bizarre nature in which thirty-two-year-old Miley Jones was killed. Jones was a young mother on her way to pick up her child from day care, when a speeding Honda hit her at the intersection of Neely Street and Alwright Avenue. The driver initially stopped to check on Jones and help her up, and the two appeared to get into an altercation. The driver then pushed Jones down, got into their car, and backed up to hit Jones once more before speeding off.
A coroner’s report stated that Jones had suffered severe head trauma upon the first impact, and likely did not know she was fighting with the assailant initially. The second hit was what killed her.
Though the driver was partially obscured by a turtleneck and a hoodie they had pulled over their face, and the car’s license plate was concealed by roadside greenery, true crime YouTuber JalissaSolvesCrimes was able to make a connection between Jones and Wanda Abreu. The video of the hit-and-run showed a unique rearview mirror hanging decoration in the form of a carved wooden cross. While authorities focused on identifying what could be seen of the assailant’s face, the cross had Abreu’s initials carved on the back, which could be seen in the video.
JalissaSolvesCrimes was only able to make the connection when trying to solve an unrelated crime that occurred during a protest outside a Planned Parenthood on that same day. A photo showed Abreu leaving the clinic from a side entrance and quickly going to her car, which has the same hanging cross under the rearview mirror.
Xiomara gasped. The implication could not have been clearer if it were a ten-foot-tall neon sign. Were people already talking about this? The article was from a lesser-known news outlet, practically the tabloids. Maybe no one in her family had seen it yet.
“YOOOOO—” Yaritza was cut off by a sudden thud.
“Everything’s fine!” Marisa yelled. No one went rushing upstairs. No one seemed to find anything suspicious. That was fine, because Xiomara could already imagine what was happening in Marisa’s room, and it was only a matter of time before it spread like wildfire.
Xiomara peeked outside of the study before speeding out. Behind Marisa’s door, there were not-so-subtle signs of a struggle. One of her aunts hushing Yaritza, another not-so-subtle cry of pain, and the gentle thrash of a body against a bed. Xiomara waited until they quieted down.
“Hey . . .” She knocked. “It’s me, Xiomara.”
Aury cracked the door an inch. Her eyes darted from Xiomara to the hallway, quickly scanning for any threats. Meanwhile, Marisa had her full body weight on Yaritza, both legs pinning her arms to her side and a hand holding a pair of socks in the loud cousin’s mouth. Yaritza’s own legs continued to thrash, and she wriggled to get out of Marisa’s grasp.
The sight alone would’ve been hilarious to Xiomara if not for the fact that this was her family.
“Hurry up and get in!” Marisa yelled. Aury pulled her in, gripping her arm so quick, she was certain it would leave a bruise.
“What is going on here?” she asked.
“We’re trying to keep this little snitch from yelling your cousin’s business everywhere,” Aury explained. She gestured to Yaritza like she was backslapping the air. Though her makeup was still a mess, the younger aunt seemed to have pulled herself together for one purpose—to keep Manuel from finding out about his daughter’s supposed scandal.
We don’t even really know if that’s her. Xiomara thought of anything that would provide plausible deniability. Those initials could belong to anyone, could mean anything. Wallace Adams. Wendy Abbott. Will Armstrong. Willow Austin. The WA combinations were endless. Wanda was not the only person in the world who drove a Honda with a wooden cross hanging from the mirror.
Xiomara watched Aury angrily mutter warnings to Yaritza.
“What is your problem? You want Manuel to kill your cousin? Is that it?” Aury ripped the socks out of Yaritza’s mouth.
“He’s not going to do shit to her—he didn’t even do anything to Henry!” Yaritza whispered back. “How do we know he doesn’t already know about the abortion?”
“If he knows, then you don’t need to go yelling about it.” Marisa shifted, letting Yaritza sit up. The two older women stared her down, an unspoken threat hanging between them. Yaritza rolled her eyes but sheepishly looked away. “But if you think Manuel doesn’t think differently about Wanda and Henry, then you’ve never met a Domincan man.”
“Fine, I won’t say anything. Can I get my phone back?” She held her hand out and Marisa retrieved it from her back pocket.
“Who was it even with?” Aury asked the room. “Wanda doesn’t have a boyfriend.”
The three women formed a circle, discussing intimate details of Wanda’s hypothetical personal life. Was it the young man that she was always in pictures with? What was his name—Eric? Did Manuel ever talk about someone like him? How well did he know Eric? Wasn’t it funny how much Wanda liked to pretend she was above all the drama?
Their comments became like chirps, like singing, the way they discussed the cheap cliché.
The pastor’s daughter, it’s always the pastor’s daughter. Obviously, neither of the aunts would ever get an abortion, they wouldn’t need to, they were always careful, unlike church girls. This was karma, wasn’t it? A punishment from God, really. God didn’t like ugly, and Wanda was hiding her own ugliness underneath that ankle-length skirt.
The topic of Miley Jones never even registered in the conversation, not as an actual person really, just as evidence, proof of Christian hypocrisy, because they all knew what Manuel would think, what he would say. He’d make a vaguely neutral statement like he hoped that the woman (she wouldn’t have a name, not to Manuel) was capital-S Saved. Spared the fires of hell for daring to exist at a crosswalk at the wrong time. Wasn’t it kind of funny, they giggled, that Manuel’s entire family was caught up in crime, one way or another? Imagine that.
Go gossip with Yaritza like you always do.
Xiomara would’ve heard the knocking if it wasn’t for the high-pitched ringing that bounced around in her ears. Instead, she watched her aunts and cousin turn like deer to the door, alert and sensitive to any sign of danger. They continued their conversation when Naomi slowly entered.
She gave a cursory glance to the chatty women huddled on the bed before approaching Xiomara. With alarms still sounding in her head, Xiomara focused on reading Naomi’s lips, then handed the woman her cell phone. According to the brief look of gratitude, Xiomara figured that seemed to be what she’d wanted, and she watched the home aide leave while trying to figure out what was so funny about her cousin orphaning a four-year-old.
9:48 p.m.
There were two broken chairs, an overturned table, a displaced ottoman (hinges bent sideways), a slew of curses thrown like bombs in Spanish, and one inconsolable Wanda when her father finally found out. Xiomara’s back throbbed from being thrown into a wall, Yaritza pinched her bloody nose, and both their aunts yelled back in Spanish, defending the same niece whose inevitable demise they were reveling in not too long ago.
“She’s a grown woman!” Aury shouted. “She’s allowed to make her own decisions!”
“How could you do this to me!” screamed Manuel. It was a torpedo of anguish, the way he struggled against his brother and son. Rafael locked his arms under Manuel’s armpits, keeping him from swinging out against Henry, who picked both legs up and pinned them to his sides. The image alone could have fooled Xiomara into thinking he was the real victim of this scenario.
Chaos had bloomed and was flourishing in the house of the Abreus. Maybe it was the concussion she likely sustained, but Xiomara wondered, how did they get here? Her mind was foggy as she thought back to how it all started.
She was in Aury and Marisa’s room, watching the two of them and Yaritza take turns in their chisme session. They wondered aloud, the kind of thoughts that were going through Wanda’s mind when she did it, the in-hindsight hints that clued them in to the act (the sudden illnesses that had befallen her—didn’t she have to rain check from a family friend’s baby shower that one time?), and finally, what would Manuel do? Of course, he’d wail and yell about why she had committed such a grave sin (still the abortion, not the hit-and-run), but beyond that, would he disown her? As much as a man can disown his grown daughter, perhaps. She would be disciplined in the church for sure—unable to take part in any service and forced to sit in the very front row, as close to God (and the pastor) as one can be. For religious Latinos, this was the physical act of wearing a scarlet A on one’s chest.
Never mind the fact Wanda’s rash act had taken the life of another mother—no, the church was more concerned about the “life” of the unborn.
At some point, Naomi returned Xiomara’s cell phone, and she learned then that she had to borrow it because her own phone was dead and she needed to let her roommate know she would not return home until morning. That was fine, Xiomara concluded, and closed the door behind the home aide.
She sat on the other bed, leaning so purposefully against the wall as though her spine were trying to dig through it. She scoured the internet for more news about Wanda. Which news channels were weighing in? How bad was the public reception? For half a second, Xiomara believed that maybe Marisa was right to call for a confessional. Despite how slowly she breathed, in the presence of her gossiping female relatives, pressure built up in her lungs.
I should be looking for the demon, she thought. Not doing damage control.
“I’m going to go to the bathroom,” Xiomara announced, going to the door. The announcement went fully ignored, and once she had left, she dove right down a rabbit hole.
When Papi Ramon had mentioned being damned, Xiomara thought he meant the biblical kind, not having her family’s name dragged through the mud. Maybe he was being poetic. Maybe Papi Ramon knew, in detail, all of his children’s shortcomings and that they were coming to bite them in the ass.
No. Xiomara chewed the inside of her cheek. If that were the case, Papi Ramon wouldn’t have needed to specify the demon by name—el bacà. This was a real demon. And publicly exposing her family felt like a pretty human thing to do. Only someone with a long-standing grudge would bother to destroy Xiomara’s family, one by one. The only problem was, the Abreus seemed to have a lot of enemies.
Xiomara looked down the length of the hallway, all the way down to the glued window. She still couldn’t remember the story behind its permanent closure, couldn’t grasp it fully, but it beckoned her forward, tingling the space between the edge of her hair and the back of her neck. The mysterious scar. Her father still hadn’t responded with the story behind it. Xiomara checked her phone again—57 percent. Her battery would need a charge soon. Meanwhile, the window waited as if promising to answer all her burning questions. Xiomara itched to get closer, finally allowing her feet to reunite her with her reflection.
Outside, the storm continued. A drastic change from the moment of her arrival, where the rain only formed beads—but now those beads formed sheets. It reminded Xiomara of a car wash, the kind where she could stay in the car as it rolled through an automatic washer. The darkness outside made her reflection sharper, and she stared into her own eyes with a disquieted expression.
Do you want to fly? The voice was like a memory, a mimic of one she’d heard before. There was an ominous cloud over that memory. Every inch of her body tensed to remember, and when it released—she fell. Dropped harder than a stone, the sudden free fall ending with a pop at the base of her skull.
She was pretty sure her head had split. Xiomara wouldn’t move—couldn’t move, couldn’t talk, couldn’t feel beyond the gravity holding her down. Something sticky was pooling around her. She had one more jolt of fear as everything went black.
The world came back on the heels of smoke. Xiomara was still standing, body locked in front of the same window that she remembered opening.
Did I . . . die?
She weakly fell to her knees. Before she could steady herself, she heard trampling feet rumbling up the steps, followed by pleas for calm and mercy.
“Wait, Manuel, just calm down.” Rafael put a half-hearted grip on his brother’s shoulder.
Manuel threw it off with a snarl. “I don’t need to calm down.”
“Papi, chill.” Henry jumped in front of him. It was strange to hear him with so much concern in his voice.
Aury’s door flew open. Marisa’s and Yaritza’s heads poked out, crowding the door and watching Manuel push his son out of the way.
On the other end, Mami’s bedroom door opened and Wanda tentatively stepped out. The whites of her eyes were a subtle pink. She looked from Xiomara to the rest of the family with alarm, mouth hanging open, with the realization that it was much too late.
“Papi?” Wanda said.
It all went red. In seconds, Manuel rushed forward, slowed only by the men pulling him back and the women clearing the doorway to get in his way.
“Hold on, Manuel, let’s just talk about this,” Aury said, holding her hands out defensively.
“You have to remember, she’s a grown woman, Manito—” Marisa added.
“She is my daughter.” Manuel pulled his arm against Rafael’s grip. It almost went flying out, fist just an inch short of hitting Marisa across the temple.
“Hey!” she snapped. “Watch yourself!”
The older adults focused on keeping Manuel away from Wanda while Yaritza scurried to her side. Xiomara followed just as quickly, hoping to shield her cousin from the worst of it. She found it easier to grapple with her family drama now that she was sure she had once met death and somehow come back. Does the demon have something to do with it?
Xiomara wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer to that question, so she focused on Wanda. “Come on, let’s go downstairs.”
Wanda looked like she couldn’t breathe.
It continued like that for a while: Manuel yelling for everyone to let go of him and let him deal with his child, Yaritza coaxing Wanda toward the stairs, Xiomara somehow becoming the wall between the parties. Yaritza looked to her for help because there was only one set of stairs to the first floor and Manuel was blocking it.
For fuck’s sake.
“Take Manuel to Papi Ramon’s room,” Xiomara muttered to Aury, sidestepping to catch her eye. By some miracle, Aury heard her niece and repeated the order like an announcement.
“Let’s all go to Papi’s room!”
“You all go to Papi’s room!” Manuel mimicked. But even he seemed to be running out of steam. The combined forces of Rafael and Henry managed to inch him closer to Papi Ramon’s room. Marisa pushed the door open and ushered him inside while Xiomara helped keep part of the hallway clear for Wanda’s passage. Her cousin was already wheezing, snot bubbling out of her nose while she tried to keep her tears from spilling out. All they needed to do was get her to the stairs while the others sequestered Manuel until he calmed down.
“We’re almost there, okay, Wanda, just don’t look at him, just keep walking and look at me, you’re going to be fine. Just breathe in and out and we’ll be downstairs soon.” Yaritza chatted endlessly, a line of just do this, just do that, one right after another, like every just would make her take another step forward. It couldn’t be helped, with Wanda walking like her feet were made of concrete. Xiomara had always heard of the freeze response in fight-or-flight, but she had never actually seen it happen before.
Wanda was hesitant, shaking with every step, but once Manuel was in Papi Ramon’s room, she seemed to move much faster, giving more validity to Yaritza’s insistence on not looking at him.
“There we go, just keep going.”
Xiomara stood in front of Papi Ramon’s door. Marisa was still too much in the way to be able to close it, but at least she was also blocking Manuel from leaving. Xiomara kept her eyes on Wanda and Yaritza. They managed to cross the hall rather quickly and were just a few steps from the stairs.
