You Should Have Been Nicer to My Mom, page 17
“I don’t know? Maybe?” Naomi’s face furrowed. As she delved into thought, she leaned against the wall and looked past Xiomara. “I remember putting a box of electronics down in storage. I think it was mostly HDMI wires and old chargers, though.”
Xiomara quickly turned heel and sped down the stairs as she pocketed the tape. She could feel Naomi at her back, footsteps both raining down behind her and propelling her forward.
“Who is—Xiomara? What are you—?”
Xiomara pushed through the door and through Rafael.
The storage room was similar to the library in that it was a tower of boxes—but because it was much longer, the room was also a grid of boxes. Large and small, each row seemed to differ in size, and it wasn’t until Rafael jumped in front of Xiomara that she stopped dumping the third load of clothes mixed with books.
“Whoa, at least put things back!” Rafael organized the mess at Xiomara’s feet. He threw sweaters into a lazy fold before dumping them into a cardboard box, hiding his frustration when the top wouldn’t close over cotton and tweed.
“Sorry.” Naomi tried to catch her breath. “I think she’s trying to find something that . . .” The home aide’s voice faded as Xiomara continued on. She worked through piles of sweaters and blouses, trousers, shorts, and underpants before she came upon boxes labeled tech nonsense. That seemed like Papi Ramon. If there was something he didn’t understand, it would be labeled nonsense.
Xiomara turned over the box and let wires spill out. They were all tangled, with one end leading to actual earbuds and the other end with a stereo plug. She growled under her breath, aggravated by the knotted plastic that obscured her goal. She threw them aside and tried again with a new box.
Unlike the others, this box felt heavy.
“She’s making a mess!” Rafael shouted before grabbing Xiomara’s upper arms. She threw her full force against him, bringing down her weight as she kicked her feet. She wasn’t done searching.
“Get off me!” she yelled.
“What’s going on?” Aury asked, suddenly at the door. “Rafael, what are you doing?!”
The shout of frustration was paired with an extra set of arms, trying to pry the two apart. Xiomara welcomed it, her knees finally hitting the floor with a pained thud, just a few feet away from the next box she had yet to search. Her hands went for it without a second thought.
“She’s just trying to look for something!” Naomi explained. “A tape player.”
“What for?”
“. . . She found a tape. With Josefina’s name on it.” Naomi’s voice faded in the background while Xiomara tore through the box. More wires, both black and white, some chewed through enough to expose thin copper threads braided over one another. Xiomara tossed them out quickly, searching for something rectangular and yellow.
At the very bottom of the box sat an old DVD player. Xiomara pushed it aside and went for the next box.
“You see!” Rafael’s voice cut through her frantic emotions. When she looked up, she realized all the other women in the family had come to the door, each at varying levels of interest and concern. Aury was at the forefront of the group, focusing intently on Rafael, disapproval puckering her face until he was too annoyed to look back. Frustration wafted off his frame like fumes, thickening closely around him in such a way that Marisa and Yaritza seemed to steer clear of him. Instead, Marisa’s eyes skirted between him and Xiomara, as if still deciding who was more of a threat to the other.
“Jesus, was Papi Ramon a hoarder or something?” Yaritza glanced around the room, taking in every square foot and box and mess with mild disgust. She wriggled in through the door behind Marisa and ignored the way her father made a sound between a groan and a scoff.
Xiomara looked up, eyeing Rafael with a question that was more like a demand.
“While you were in here,” she began, “did you see a yellow Walkman?”
His answer came in the form of a blank look.
“Did you?” she pressed, desperation clawing at her.
“Watch who you’re yelling at,” he scolded. “And no, I haven’t seen one.”
Xiomara went back to searching. There were two boxes left in the tower of tech nonsense, and she would be damned if she didn’t thoroughly investigate them.
“Just leave her,” Aury murmured softly. From the corner of her eye, Xiomara could see Rafael taking a few steps toward her. If he thought he could grab her again, she was going to do something much worse than kicking. But instead, he stopped next to her and held a hand out.
“Can I see it?” He was frowning, and something in his eyes deepened. It was like they went from emotionless marble to an ocean of unsaid feelings. “The cassette tape. The one with Josefina’s name on it.”
Xiomara steeled herself. She made no movement to get the tape—she didn’t want him to know where it was, and even if he knew, she would fight Rafael if he tried to wrest the tape from her.
“Please?” he asked, softening his voice. It stirred up a tornado of emotions in her, and before she knew it, she slowly retrieved the tape from her pocket and placed it in his palm.
He studied it, tracing a finger around the Scotch tape and pursing his lips in a line.
“April sixth . . . ?” His face wrinkled. Rafael’s finger lingered on 4/6.
At the door, Xiomara’s aunts chatted.
“Do you think there’s more?” Marisa asked. “Like more tapes with our names on them?”
Xiomara blinked back tears. A new kind of clarity hit her like a wall.
Why did she think there was only one tape? Just because there was only one torn Bible page? What if it was just to lead her to the next set of clues? She wanted to deny it, assume that there was just the one tape and eschew the idea of there being any others. But then she looked to her aunts and uncle. The pit in her stomach deepened, making room for doubt even when the tape was shared with Aury.
Her aunt held it in her hands the way someone held a menu. She flipped it over quickly until she saw the name. She held it back to Xiomara, as if trying to get rid of it before it stained her fingers.
“Xiomara, where did you find this?”
Xiomara tried not to bristle from the action.
“It was in Papi Ramon’s room.” She sniffled, holding the tape to her chest. “I found it after Henry was attacked.”
Yaritza gasped. Marisa and Aury shared a look.
“You shouldn’t have gone into that room,” Rafael said gravely.
“Even if we find more tapes . . .” Xiomara said. “They’re useless until we find something to play them on.”
That seemed to get them. Marisa came to Xiomara’s side and squinted over the open boxes. “So is there something we can use here? Something that can play cassettes?”
Rafael ran a hand over his hair. “Can we at least not make a mess while we search?”
“Wait, Naomi . . .” Marisa turned to the home aide. She stopped her immediately with a raised palm.
“I already told Xiomara, Ramon had me box up everything he owned in this room.”
“But clearly not everything,” Xiomara said, eyes widening when something dawned on her. “Because I still found a drawer of his watches upstairs. This tape behind it.”
The same realization rolled over the room, starting with Yaritza and ending with Rafael. If not every little thing could be packed and placed in a storage room (and really, how could it be?), then that mean the rest of the house would still have to be meticulously searched to find not only something as small as a tape but the Walkman with it.
For a moment, the house once again felt as large to Xiomara now as it had been when she’d been small enough to sit on her grandfather’s lap. It loomed around her, breathing and groaning, with a mocking air about it.
But Xiomara was no longer a child—and even more than that, there were four other people in that very room with an interest in searching with her. Whatever they were personally dealing with would have to be pushed aside if they were going to figure this out quickly. Bickering, after all, only produced wasted time. Static zipped between them, strengthening when they looked to one another. It was an agreement, then.
Rafael was the first one to respond. He let out a grievous sigh and rubbed his eyes. “I’ll search the rest of this room for a tape or a tape recorder—”
“A Walkman,” Xiomara said. “It’s yellow.”
“I’ll go talk to Manuel.” Aury walked to the door. “Maybe he or Chico saw it somewhere inside Papi’s room.”
Marisa looked thoughtful for a moment, then announced she would be searching the bathrooms. “Honestly, it could be anywhere . . .” she mumbled as she left. Xiomara and Yaritza went to the living room, splitting to each half of the room. Though Xiomara had already opened the ottoman once for the remote, she wondered if she had completely missed another tape the first time. Her mother’s tape burned in her hand, as if desperate to be played.
“Xiomara, I’m going back upstairs,” Naomi shouted from the stairs. Xiomara’s head snapped back, unaware that the home aide hadn’t followed them. “I need to check on Henry.”
“Oh, okay,” Xiomara answered, trying to drown her disappointment in understanding. Naomi was the most qualified among the family to look over the wounded—she couldn’t let the sting of urgency blind her to that fact.
When her cousin made a noise that sounded like she’d stepped in dog shit, Xiomara shot a look over her shoulder. Yaritza seemed fine, and seemed to have only been reacting to the sound of Naomi’s voice. What the hell was her problem with the home aide? The question almost came out until Yaritza pulled a cushion up from the couch.
The same urgency then pushed Xiomara to say, “We already looked through there before, remember?”
“No, we were checking between the cushions.” Yaritza turned it on its side to reveal a zipper. “But what if there’s something inside a cushion?”
That was something Xiomara hadn’t considered. Her eyebrows twitched, telling her cousin so, and she watched as Yaritza fished into the cushion with a gleam in her eye. That gleam dimmed and the smirk on her face flattened into a line when she retrieved nothing short of loose lint and foam.
“Well, that was a bust. I’m bored.” Yaritza dropped the cushion and fell into the couch behind her. She propped her feet up into the empty slot where the other cushion was removed.
“You barely looked!” Xiomara said, incensed. She watched Yaritza happily pull out her phone and begin texting. The woman looked so carefree, unbothered by the chaos that enveloped their family. It almost made Xiomara envious.
The corners of Yaritza’s lips twitched. “What?” she asked, with a tone that seemed to sour and slightly downturned eyebrows. She wasn’t even looking at Xiomara, and Xiomara still felt like that expression was for her. “I can feel you staring at me.”
Xiomara had to be sure. She asked, “Are you sure you’re not the one pulling the strings?”
“We’ve already been over this.” Yaritza didn’t bother looking up from her phone. Whatever other conversation she was engaged in seemed to demand more attention. “I’m not smart enough to pull something like that off.”
“I never said that.” Xiomara frowned.
“You know it’s true, though. It’s why I failed out of college.” She muttered that last part, though her fingers texted faster, as if she was trying to outrun the truth of her words.
Xiomara gawked at her. “You failed out of college?”
Yaritza scowled and finally looked up, first sending daggers to her cousin and then softening. “You didn’t know?”
“How was I supposed to know? When did this happen?” It sank in then—the downside of being purposefully distant with her family was that she would be fully blindsided by any old news that came her way.
“Like a month ago. It’s why Papi’s acting like it’s the end of the world,” she said, finally answering Xiomara’s unasked question.
No wonder the two were fighting at Papi Ramon’s funeral. She had failed out recently.
“Honestly, I’m surprised you didn’t know. I thought the whole family knew already.” Yaritza seemed to relax, or at least sink into the couch and shift to make herself more comfortable.
Xiomara made a half twist back to her search, but a newly formed question forced her to turn again.
“Wait, you’re older than me.”
“Yeah, I took a gap year before college.” Yaritza’s eyes fluttered. Try as she might, she couldn’t hide the way embarrassment tinged her cheeks pink.
“You’re two years older than me,” Xiomara pointed out, less to her cousin and more to herself.
“Oh my God!” Yaritza jumped off the couch, curving around the dining table and escaping down the hall. “If you’re going to keep making me feel bad about myself, you can look for the damn tapes yourself.”
“Wait!”
Yaritza did not turn back. Xiomara let out a regretful sigh and shuffled over to fix the couch while thinking about how much she’d missed out in the last few years. How was she supposed to know that Yaritza failed out of college? Was that something the family talked about at length in the group chats? No, Xiomara couldn’t imagine that. If anything, the truth of Yaritza’s failing spread through the family like a parasitic vine, eager to twist and tangle from hand to hand, wrapping around wrists to elbows until it crawled up to the ear and whispered, did you hear about Yaritza?
Yeah, that seemed more like the Abreus’ style. No one was supposed to know about it, yet everyone knew anyway. Xiomara pressed the cushion into the couch. She wandered around the dining room, checking under the table and each chair (no matter how broken), inside and under and around the ottoman, and even behind the mounted television. It was all incredibly devoid of not just extra tapes but also a Walkman.
Xiomara gripped her mother’s cassette.
Is this worse? she thought miserably. Or is it better that I don’t hear Mami’s voice?
If she really wanted to, she could pull up Mami’s old Instagram account and click on any on of the dozens of Reels her mother had posted. That was the good thing about the internet being forever—it extended to people as well.
Xiomara rubbed the tears out of her eyes and continued searching. If Papi Ramon had hidden a bunch of tapes around the house, where would he have hidden the one thing they needed to listen to the tapes?
Where would I hide the Walkman? she wondered, trailing down the hallway to the study. A huge part of Xiomara doubted she would find it there—she had already been there twice earlier and found nothing but a Bible and a drawer full of pills. But the only person who had ever used the Walkman was her—so where did she last put it? Yaritza mentioned Xiomara being scared of Papi Ramon’s stories. She remembered being afraid of the entire second floor. One of the very few good memories she had was of playing with the Walkman’s buttons, clicking them without any concern for what action it took.
Xiomara’s left hand curled as she imagined it again, the feel of plastic against her palm and rubber against her fingertips. One finger coiled inward.
Click! It stayed down. Then the next. Clack! She turned away from the study, muscle memory guiding her with each imaginary press of a button. Click! Clack! Click!
She found herself beside the staircase. Not quite on it, just next to where the stairs began. With the next curling finger, Xiomara bent down and pressed her other hand against the base. The floorboard leaned inward, and she narrowed her eyes at the glistening screw. It looked fairly brand-new. Xiomara stood up, thinking about where Papi Ramon kept his toolbox. She found herself going into the kitchen, straight to the back, where the door of the pantry stood. She frowned as she slid the doors open and picked up the toolbox underneath the lowest shelf.
Why would he put it there? Xiomara wondered before returning to the bottom of the steps. She pulled out a screwdriver and got to work. At first, the screw wouldn’t budge. The screwdriver slipped over a handful of times, making Xiomara’s forehead bead with sweat.
After, it finally caught, and she used a lot more force to work the screw loose. She repeated the process on the other side, then switched to the hammer. Digging the claw into the floorboard, she pulled it halfway up, just enough to stick her hand in and rummage through what felt like tufts of torn sheets of paper and fiberglass before her fingertips scraped against something smooth. Xiomara forced herself farther to grab it. The moment it came out, her eyes widened.
Take the first step.
Written into the will was the exact thing he wanted her to do to find the yellow Walkman. It had been hidden right inside the first step. Xiomara sucked in a deep breath, just as she heard a hurricane of footsteps running down the hall to the stairs. Panicking, she kicked the toolbox aside and covered the loose floorboard with her leg. She quickly shoved the Walkman into her other cardigan pocket, half a second before Yaritza appeared, skidding to a stop at the bottom of the steps.
“Xiomara!” She doubled over as she wheezed from excitement. “There’s more! Marisa found three more tapes!”
10:27 p.m.
Yaritza pulled Xiomara into Rafael’s old bedroom. Henry lay peacefully asleep, his injured arm propped up on several pillows. Black and red ballooned through the towels that wrapped his wounds, but at the very least, it was no longer spreading. Manuel and Aury faced each other, both wielding sour expressions that matched so well they might have been identical.
Xiomara felt the weight of the Walkman in her pocket. Every time someone looked at her, her heart sped up. To keep herself from jumping, she watched Henry’s chest rise and fall by centimeters. He was thankfully still alive, but just barely hanging on. Xiomara felt a pinch of desperation for the storm to let up—the sooner it did, the sooner an ambulance could reach them.
But then everyone would leave. And the chances of her figuring out who was the supposed demon would drop tremendously. The truth of it settled in the back of Xiomara’s mouth like bitter medicine. She swallowed it, accepting that the storm was both an opportunity and a barrier. She would just have to work faster.
