You Should Have Been Nicer to My Mom, page 16
But something prickled the back of Wanda’s neck. A great sense of foreboding and calamity, the strength of which matched what she imagined God’s judgment would be like. She couldn’t help it—Wanda looked. Her eyes darted inside Papi Ramon’s room, and in the brief moment that Manuel caught her stare, he threw his shoulders down and let his siblings turn him away from the door.
They sighed with relief, removing their hands and taking half a step back, but still circling him warily. That was fine, he decided. It was just enough space for him to burst past them and shove Xiomara into the wall. Her back radiated with pain before she realized Wanda was screaming. Adrenaline finally kicked her cousin’s freeze response to flight, and she sprinted down the stairs, followed closely by Yaritza and less closely by Manuel and the three other adults.
Xiomara took her time going downstairs. Stiff discomfort made it hard for her to roll her shoulder blades, and even though she heard the sound of furniture being thrown into walls, alarmed shouting, and on several occasions, a cry of anguish, she was in no hurry to join the chaos below.
In hindsight, it was silly to pray at all. If God cared even a little bit, Xiomara wouldn’t be in this mess. Papi Ramon wouldn’t have left her such a confusing message, the storm wouldn’t have caged them in, and whoever had left that letter wouldn’t have been targeting the family to such a degree.
And yet, there they were, family split to gendered sides. Henry and Rafael still holding Manuel back. Aury and Marisa huddling around Wanda. Yaritza sitting next to her cousin, wracked by choking sobs. Xiomara was sure she would eventually hear the story of how Yaritza got a bloody nose. She wondered if it had to do with the furniture, or maybe she was pushed into the wall too. At some point in the debacle, two holes had been drilled into the wall shared by the dining room and the pantry. Paint chipped, curving outward from the depressions like spiderwebs.
“Are you done?” Aury shouted. Her lips curled back to reveal bright pink gums. “Look at what you did!”
“What I did? What about what she did?” He pointed an accusatory finger to Wanda. “Do you know what people are going to say about her? The pastor’s daughter, committing a big sin like that?”
“Which sin—the abortion or the manslaughter?” Yaritza muttered in a nasally voice. Xiomara sent a jab into her side. She shot Xiomara a dirty look in return.
“You want to know what they’re going to say? They’re going to say, wow, what an amazing family. The brother’s a rapist, the father’s a thief, and the daughter killed someone!”
“I didn’t know . . . !” Wanda cried. She swallowed big gulps of air and hiccupped before she continued. “I didn’t know she was dead. When I came out of the car”—hiccup—“and, and she came at me, I thought she was just pretending to be hit so she could rob me!”
Xiomara rubbed her fingers against her temples. A headache bloomed faster than she could mitigate it.
“First of all, I didn’t rape anyone. Those women made their own decisions—” Henry’s defense was quickly drowned out by everyone’s groans. He threw his hands up. “I’m just saying! But you don’t wanna hear my mouth? Fine. Deal with this yourself.”
“Henry, don’t,” Rafael said, but it was too late. Henry was already backing out of the room, leaving Rafael to deal with the full force of Manuel’s rage.
“I should beat you like I did when you were small—that’s what you need!” Manuel started, gaining an extra step toward Wanda. Rafael gritted his teeth as he pushed back. Wanda curled into herself and sobbed.
Xiomara took her chance to leave, desperately needing to be away from all the noise if she was going to find Papi Ramon’s next clue. Her stomach grumbled, reminding her that fear burned a lot of calories just as well as working out. She decided to go to the kitchen.
* * *
Was that a trick of the demon? Xiomara wondered about that free-fall memory. She couldn’t tell. It was an interesting coincidence that the memory ended right when the smell of smoke did. Like a thumbprint, the demon’s mark. It made her wonder if this was a true memory, one that brain damage hid away. Can the demon plant false memories? Or just manipulate the ones already there?
Xiomara sat with Naomi at the kitchen counter, sharing a bag of plantain chips. They crunched, salt dissolving on her tongue and easing her troubled stomach.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Naomi asked. Xiomara didn’t have the energy to look up.
“Talk about what?” she murmured between bites.
Naomi swallowed before she answered. “Whatever’s got you all twisted up.”
Xiomara closed her eyes. If Yaritza didn’t know the story about the scar, then she wouldn’t have known there was an accident—a death. Hers. What were the chances of Naomi knowing exactly what happened?
Fuck it—she wanted to find out. “I have this . . . scar on the back of my head, and I don’t remember what happened.” Anticipation soaring, Xiomara held her breath.
“Hm. I heard you had a nasty fall once, but the next time I saw you, you seemed fine,” Naomi admitted. “So I thought everyone was just exaggerating.”
“Exaggerating how?”
“Like . . . you died.”
Xiomara felt herself hollow. Was she right? Did she actually die? Or did the demon plant a false memory to make her think she did?
Why is it always Naomi that remembers? None of her family members remembered the same things she did, and they were actually related to her. She hadn’t spoken to Naomi in years! What made her special?
Xiomara let out a long breath. Well, at least she had one person that could fill in the gaps.
“Remember how I told you Papi Ramon left me the Bible?” Xiomara’s eyes darted to the kitchen doorway. She could still hear her relatives through the adjoining wall, switching from English to Spanish and back while they discussed what to do. It was mostly Rafael and her aunts. Xiomara imagined that Yaritza was back on her phone, scouring the web for more Abreu-centered scandals. Wanda seemed to have stopped crying. At the very least, they were too engrossed in their conversation to eavesdrop on Xiomara’s.
Still, she dropped her voice to a whisper. “I think it’s because he wants me to find the demon.”
Naomi gave Xiomara such a blank stare that she wondered if she heard her at all. The home aide continued to snack, each chip cracking audibly between her teeth.
“You’re serious. You’re serious? You’re serious.” Naomi said it in such quick succession, going from realizing the insanity of the statement, to questioning it (because she didn’t know if she heard that right), and then accepting it all in the same second. And just for added measure, she ended the statement with “Huh.”
“Is that all you have to say?”
“Well, you don’t have a cousin named Jude, so you rule that out.”
“I know you don’t believe me.” Xiomara crossed her arms.
“Has that ever been my job?” Naomi asked pointedly. “The only reason anyone in your family talks to me is so they can get me to do something for them, anyway. Or to pretend like they haven’t avoided me the last couple of years.”
Xiomara’s shoulders dropped. “I . . . I’m sorry. I didn’t know how to . . .” She looked down at her hands, squirrelly and fidgeting, but the truth was hard enough without trying to put words to it. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have . . . I’m sorry,” Xiomara repeated, squeezing her eyes tight like she was wishing on a star. With what’s been happening so far, she wasn’t above it. “But please—I need your help. And it’s not because of your job or anything—I need someone on my side.”
“Your family isn’t on your side?” Naomi raised an eyebrow.
“My family can’t even—”
Her skin nearly ran off when an abrupt howl and crunching wood shook the house. The family yelped in surprise as the ceiling thumped repeatedly above them, lights flickering and storm raging; a crack of lightning snapped them to attention, and a grip on Xiomara’s arm made her realize Naomi had jumped out of her seat.
But the howling didn’t stop. Instead, Rafael and Manuel ran up the stairs.
“That’s Henry!”
It sank in thirty seconds later.
That wasn’t howling. That was Henry screaming.
Xiomara and Naomi went running, nearly tripping over themselves on the steps. By the time they got to the second floor, Manuel’s thunderous voice filled the hall.
“Call an ambulance!” he repeated, throat getting hoarse with every shout. “Someone call an ambulance!”
Xiomara was inside Papi Ramon’s room before the smell hit her. Burning wood, a putrid sulfur undertone—more of the same stench from the study, but with a layer of rotten pus-filled flesh. She retched until bile touched the back of her throat. Her eyes stung and vision blurred, but even she recognized Manuel, who had dropped to his knees and spread his hands over a misshapen lump that shifted and groaned painfully with every touch.
“Call an ambulance!” he shouted once more.
Rafael snapped at him with a phone to his ear, “I’m calling already, shut up! Hello—we need an ambulance. We don’t know what happened, but my nephew is bleeding and . . .”
Bleeding? Xiomara’s vision cleared. Manuel’s hands were covered in a sleeve of slick crimson. Henry slumped in his arms, barely speaking and barely coherent. Half his face had already swelled, and his shirt looked like it had been run through a shredder, held together by the coagulation of his own blood.
Xiomara could only imagine how upset Henry would be when he came to. If there was anything he was particular about, it was his clothes, how expensive they were and how recognizable the brand name would be.
It’s not even recognizable as a shirt, she thought as Naomi pushed pass her.
“Move!” the home aide said. She was fast, kneeling beside Manuel and analyzing Henry’s body. “We have to stop the bleeding, first. Get me more towels. Manuel, you have to let go of him. Go get towels. Go!”
“Aah!” Aury’s voice rang like a bell. “What happened to Henry?”
Chaos painted the room, and all the colors blurred into one another. Xiomara pressed her hands against her ears, blocking out as much of the screaming as she could. Then she waited. Xiomara waited until the yelling had stopped, until the blood stopped running—until everyone evacuated the room, afraid that whatever had happened to Henry would happen again to someone else. Henry was stabilized, thank God, but the storm made it difficult for any ambulance to make it through the roads. It was either they drive him to an ER or they wait out the storm.
Like Xiomara, they all decided to wait. Henry was moved to Rafael’s old room, where Naomi monitored him as best as she could. He was wounded on his chest and arms—but the worst of it was his left arm. Naomi turned an old T-shirt into a makeshift tourniquet and tied it just above his elbow to stop the persistent bleeding.
“He’ll be okay for about two hours,” she said, “but we should really take him to an actual ER as soon as we can.”
As if with mocking laughter, thunder shook the house.
While most of the family had split to various corners of the house—Rafael in the storage room, Manuel and Aury in the dining room, Wanda and Yaritza together in Marisa’s room, and Naomi with Henry—Xiomara returned to Papi Ramon’s room. She hadn’t fully taken stock of the entire room while it was still filled with bodies and noise, pumping her full of adrenaline and vibrations from her head to her fingertips. It was a wonder how she remembered to breathe.
Naomi caught Xiomara before she opened Papi Ramon’s door.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m trying to find the demon,” Xiomara blurted. “The one from Papi Ramon’s will. I know you probably don’t believe me—I wouldn’t either if I were you, but look—first Aury was attacked, now Henry. I don’t think these attacks will be stopping anytime soon, so I really need you to have my back, because at least with you, I know you’ll actually have my back.”
Xiomara hoped her earnest tone came across as that—earnest, and not desperate. (And to be fair, she was desperate, but it was more important to her that she was received as earnest.)
“I . . .” Naomi’s lips remained parted, as she searched for words. On failure, she shook her head. “I’ll keep watch,” she instead offered meekly.
Xiomara nodded. It was a start. The knob turned easily in her hand, allowing her entrance into the room. Everywhere she looked, there were claw marks and scorched lines carving through floor and wall and bed and clothes. Mattress foam had been exposed, and broken glass glittered over the floor around the dresser mirror. A great force had split the dresser in two, but that’s not what caught her attention. Out of the five drawers it contained, only one was overturned on the floor.
Old watches spilled out when Xiomara picked it up. Most seemed broken from the struggle—there was no shortage of cracked glass and bent hands curling outward. A pile of gold and silver watches stared up at her, and Xiomara sniffled when she remembered the way they’d hung on Papi Ramon’s bony wrists. He’d been buried with one of his favorites, that much she knew. But unlike glasses, which he wore only out of necessity, his set of watches were a collection. Xiomara wondered who might have gotten them in the will. It was likely Henry, knowing how much he adored luxury wear.
Xiomara put the loose drawer aside—and stopped. A wisp of white poked out behind it, and when she turned it around, adrenaline jump-started her heart. She didn’t need to open the taped paper to know what it was—she could already read the Bible verses folded over themselves in a square.
The Book of Jude.
And there was a weight to it. Just light enough that Scotch tape fastened the package to the drawer. Xiomara carefully removed it and unwrapped the delicately packaged cassette tape. She stared at the label for a long time, feeling slapped not by Papi Ramon’s familiar handwriting but by what he had written.
Because for some reason, Papi Ramon had labeled the tape Josefina 4/6.
10:02 p.m.
Do you want to know how your mother really died?
The question was more pronounced, and suddenly, Xiomara remembered. Not the entire content of that unpleasant dream–slash–possible nightmare, but she remembered how it ended—with that question. The person asking it had a deep and raspy voice, like his vocal cords were made of wood and had themselves been clawed through and through by some devilish creature.
But she remembered who it was. The voice belonged to Papi Ramon.
Why would he ask me that, though?
Tears fell onto the Bible page, still curling around the cassette tape. Xiomara reached backward, trying to smooth the end of the dream that faded toward the center, like unraveling a scroll. But the act of recollection fought her, dimming the light on her memories until she was left in the dark and grasping at nothing.
Xiomara stared down at the tape labeled with her dead mother’s name. What was on it? What would she do if it were her mother’s voice? After Mami passed and Xiomara thought she had processed it, she made the mistake of accidentally happening upon an Instagram Reel of her mother a few days before she went into surgery. Sometimes Instagram did that, showed people things completely out of order; something from way back months ago could pop up the next day as if it had just happened—Xiomara knew that her feed was not necessarily chronological, but she hadn’t expected to be haunted by her mother’s online permanence while she was waiting for her next class to start.
In the reel, Mami was reading. Her eyes were lightly sunken from the chronic pain she always experienced. She seemed to be unaware that she was being watched, until her eyes flitted upward, meeting the camera and then whoever was behind it.
“What are you doing?” She laughed, so light and carefree that for a moment, Xiomara almost thought she was still alive. What a tremendously heartbreaking truth to experience twice. Grief attacked her like a wolf clamping its snarling mouth around her throat. She had fully broken down in that moment, sobbing with the force of entire tropical storms while her classmates ran for the counselor’s help.
And now, here was Xiomara with this cassette tape.
Do you want to know how your mother really died?
Did she?
“Xiomara?”
Mami’s death had caught her off guard, of course, but she didn’t want to imagine, for one second, that it wasn’t purely accidental. The tired truck driver had hit her mother fast and hard. Xiomara had read the coroner’s report—severe internal bleeding, head trauma, it was unlikely Mami was alive for five minutes after that initial hit. Best-case scenario was that she was so out of it, that she didn’t even realize she was dying, much less that she would be dead soon. Xiomara hoped the painkillers dulled her mother’s senses until the moment she was gone.
“Xiomara!” Naomi shouted, shaking her back to the present. “What are you doing? Get up! You said you wouldn’t be in here long.”
Xiomara was dragged to her feet and then out of the room. Naomi closed the door with a huff, curious eyes darting to what Xiomara held in her hands.
“What’s that?” the home aide asked.
“It’s . . .” Xiomara didn’t get a chance to explain before Naomi cocked her head to the side, reading the label. “Yeah . . .”
“Wow.” Naomi’s eyes widened. “Is that from your mom, or . . . ?”
“I don’t know.” She swallowed. “But I don’t have anything to play it on anyway, so . . .” Xiomara turned the cassette over in her hands, noticed how glossy new the plastic appeared. When did Papi Ramon make this?
In a strange, roundabout way, Xiomara finally felt herself stumble over a glimmer of hope. This had to be the next clue, she was sure of it. Look, it was wrapped in the same page torn out of the brand-new Bible from Papi Ramon’s study. What the hell else could it be?
At the same time, Xiomara tried not to bask in that hope. Hope was just a precursor to disappointment. “Did Papi Ramon keep anything that could play cassette tapes?” Even as she asked the question, she felt silly. Why else keep tapes if he had nothing to play them on—no, if he had nothing to record them on?
