A Dream Called Home Read online

  I had discovered this restaurant over a year and a half earlier. Marta brought me here to celebrate Thanksgiving. I think she felt sorry for me when she found out that unlike most students, who had gone home for the holidays, I stayed in Santa Cruz. I told Marta I had no home to go to, and that I was used to it by now. She must have not believed me—or she must have seen past my lie—because it was then that she asked me if I would let her treat me to lunch. That day, as I sat there with Marta, I hadn’t stopped thinking about how much I wanted to be home, how much I missed my father. Not the alcoholic and abusive one, but the other father. The one who taught me to be a big dreamer. I had pictured all of us—Mago, Carlos, Betty—under our father’s roof, making tamales and baking a turkey together.

  And now here we were, my father and I.

  “This is a nice town,” he said. “So different from Los Angeles.”

  I nodded. “I’ve been happy here.”

  He looked at me for a moment, and I wondered if perhaps he had heard, woven into that statement, that I hadn’t been happy at his house in Los Angeles.

  “Then you should stay,” he said. “Why would you leave then?”

  I didn’t know how to answer his question. I wanted to stay, but Santa Cruz isn’t an easy place to live when you’re poor. As a college student, I didn’t mind the low-paying jobs that I had found at the Capitola Mall or selling hot dogs and ice-cream cones at the Boardwalk. Those jobs were okay when I was a student and had loans and grants to help me with my expenses. Once I graduated, I would have none of that support.

  “My friends who are staying can’t find work,” I told him. “They’re taking jobs in whatever they can find. There are no good jobs here. And I didn’t work so hard to get through college to end up at a coffee shop.” Maybe I was being arrogant, or perhaps I had unrealistic expectations of what it meant to have a college degree, but I wasn’t about to put up with low-paying jobs. “Maybe in L.A. I’ll have better luck.”

  I didn’t tell him that Eddie, the guy I had a crush on and had recently started spending my time with, was also from Los Angeles. “Plus, I’ll be closer to you,” I said. “To Mago, Carlos.”

  He didn’t say I could stay with him if I came back to L.A., and I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to live with Mila, especially after she had been the reason my father kept us out of his life.

  The food arrived and I watched him dig in, observing his face for a clue about whether or not he liked the Tom Kha Goong. After a few spoonfuls in silence I couldn’t wait any longer. “How do you like the soup?”

  “It tastes like armpit,” he said, but he ate it all.

  UCSC has an essay-writing competition for graduating seniors. The topic of the essay is to write about a teacher who impacted their lives. The winner gets to read this essay at the commencement ceremony, and the inspirational teacher is presented with the Distinguished Teacher Award. I jumped at the opportunity. Ever since Diana had taken me in and encouraged me to keep pursuing my education, I had made a vow to one day repay her for her kindness. This was the perfect way to do that—to have my beloved university give her an award, to recognize her as a teacher who changes lives. I had never worked so hard on an essay. A few weeks after I turned it in, I received the news that my essay had won!

  UCSC paid Diana’s airfare and hotel so she could attend my graduation. I hadn’t seen her in the three years since I moved to Santa Cruz, and when she arrived, I was filled with pride to show her that everything she had done for me had paid off. I had honored her in every way I could as her former student and mentee.

  At the ceremony, I was invited to read my essay before Diana was presented with the Distinguished Teacher Award. I spoke about the circumstances that had brought her into my life.

  “As I was growing up with my father, my siblings and I had to deal with his alcoholism and physical abuse. It got out of control and one day he was arrested for domestic violence. That day, I watched my father being handcuffed by the police and taken away to jail. I didn’t know what to do. I felt that my life was falling apart. When I told my teacher, Diana, about what had happened, she offered to take me in. She opened the doors of her house to me and provided me with something my own father had not been able to give me—a safe and loving home.” As I spoke about my father’s alcoholism, the abuse I had experienced at home, and the lack of support, what mattered most to me was honoring Diana. This was my first time thanking her publicly, and I thought I couldn’t speak about the impact she had had on me without sharing the situation that led to her rescuing me. I did not consider how it would affect my father, who despite his broken English, knew perfectly well what I was saying about him to the hundreds of strangers at the ceremony. “She was my hero. She saved me,” I said in my speech, not realizing the mistake I had made.

  After the ceremony, my father retreated once again into his stoicism, his curtness, his indifference. The man I had had lunch with the day before, who had laughed with me and eaten my soup even though it tasted like armpit, was gone.

  He gave me a quick hug and seemed unwilling to be in the pictures we took. He had withdrawn into himself, and I could see how much he yearned to leave. If he hadn’t come up with Carlos and his family, he would have taken off.

  My father was a private man. Through the years, whenever I asked him about the past, he would rarely share anything about himself. He would say, “The past is past. Just let it go, Chata. Move on with your life.” He didn’t understand that only by knowing about it, and writing about it, could I come to understand it. Only then could I let it go.

  “Reynita, I’m so proud of you!” Diana said, joined by Carlos and Mago, my mother and Betty, along with Eddie, some friends, and Marta, Micah, and Robin.

  My sisters, my teachers, my boss—these were the women who had been part of my education and were here to see me end this journey and begin a new one.

  I looked at my father, waiting—hoping—for the words I had always longed to hear from him. That he was proud of me, that he wanted the best for me and from this moment on would never lose faith in me again. What he said was: “You told everyone I’m an alcoholic. That I beat you.” I realized then that despite the fact that I had finally broken the cycle my family had been stuck in for generations—making history by becoming the first in my family to graduate from college—that speech was what my father would always remember about that day.

  I opened my mouth to explain, to defend myself, but at seeing the pain so openly displayed on his face, a vulnerability I rarely got to see, I stopped wanting to justify my words and instead I wanted to apologize for what I had done, for the hurt I inflicted by sharing my truth with the world. But I said nothing. Like him, I didn’t know how to say I was sorry.

  Though he didn’t forgive me, my father managed to push his wounded pride aside and did something that deeply touched me. I didn’t witness it, but Diana later told me that before heading back to Los Angeles, my father had approached her, shook her hand, and said, “Thank you for what you did for my family.”

  That day at my graduation, despite what happened between me and my father, I felt elated, relieved, and immensely proud. The three years of working hard—of pushing past my fears, of clutching tightly to my dream with sheer tenacity—had brought me here. I was now a university graduate, a recipient of a bachelor of arts degree. No one could take that from me.

  I returned to Porter Meadow, where I had walked on my first day in Santa Cruz, and looked out at the ocean before me and the redwood trees behind me. I breathed long and deep, filling my body, my spirit, with the sweet scent of Santa Cruz, and as the fog slowly rolled over the campus, I said goodbye to my home.

  Reyna at her graduation with her family and Diana, 1999

  Book Two

  THE HOME I CARRY

  19

  MY BUDDING ROMANCE with Eddie helped soothe the sting of my new estrangement from my father after my graduation. Once again, my father and I were back to not speaking to each other, and this made me cl
ing to Eddie in a way I shouldn’t have. It made me desperate for Eddie’s love and approval to replace the hurt I had felt when my father returned to Los Angeles without saying goodbye.

  I had met Eddie the year before when I joined Los Mejicas. He was one of the best dancers in the group. Not only could he seduce an audience with his charisma onstage, but offstage he was even more charming. He was very popular, especially with the girls, since he was a great listener and had a wonderful sense of humor. Unlike other guys, he didn’t intimidate me or try to dominate me with his machismo. I had had too many disappointments from the Latino guys on campus who only wanted one-night stands and treated me like just another girl to add to their list of college conquests.

  We had become good friends from the moment we met, and though I harbored a suspicion that Eddie might be gay, I never asked and he never said. Besides, you couldn’t live in Santa Cruz without ever questioning your sexuality. This is where I had met my first lesbian, gay, and bisexual friends after all. The year before, I’d had my first crush on a girl, but after one kiss with a girl, it was clear to me that when it came to members of my own sex, I just wanted to be friends with them. I liked guys too much, especially Eddie.

  When my final quarter had begun three months earlier, I couldn’t believe I was graduating without ever once having had a college boyfriend at UCSC to talk to about our future dreams. I wanted someone who was on the same journey as me, who understood me. I was ready for a different kind of love—a guy who didn’t remind me of my father for a change. I thought that guy would be Eddie. I felt safe with him, his tenderness and sweet smile; the vulnerable sensibility he openly and unabashedly displayed was something I had yet to see in a man.

  One day, a few weeks before my graduation, he and I found ourselves messing around in his room. We did everything but have sex, since he didn’t want to go “all the way.” He claimed to be old-fashioned and wanted to save himself for marriage. I thought he was a guy like no other, and I was actually glad that he didn’t want sex from me.

  “Sex just complicates things,” Eddie said. He was a big fan of the Mexican writer Carlos Cuauhtémoc Sánchez, and gave me a copy of Juventud en Éxtasis (“Youth in Sexual Ecstasy”), about the perils of premarital sex and the purity of marriage and love. Unlike my high school boyfriend, who had harassed me about having sex with him until I consented and lost my virginity under pressure, Eddie spouted the ideals of only giving yourself to someone out of love. At twenty-two, he was still a virgin, whereas I had already slept with a number of guys and felt ashamed of my sexual history. The books Eddie gave me made me even more ashamed.

  I wanted to experience that celibate love that he seemed to believe in. Being with him made me want to be pure and innocent the way he was.

  Eddie was born in the coastal state of Nayarit, in the west-central part of Mexico, and came to the U.S. as a child. Some of his sisters still lived in Nayarit, and he was planning to visit them as soon as school ended. I told him I had never been anywhere in Mexico except for my state of Guerrero. “Why don’t you come with me to my hometown?” he asked me a few weeks before graduation.

  “You serious?” I said. He was taking me to his place of birth? That could only mean one thing—things between us were getting serious. He hadn’t asked me to be his girlfriend yet, but I assumed that was just a matter of time, or otherwise he wouldn’t be taking me home.

  “It’ll be fun,” he said. “So, what do you say?”

  Ever since I joined Los Mejicas, I had been fantasizing about traveling through Mexico to visit the states, besides Guerrero, where my favorite dances originated: Veracruz, Jalisco, Michoacán, and Nayarit.

  So, after graduation, when my siblings and my parents returned to Los Angeles, I eagerly headed to Mexico with Eddie, planning to spend part of my summer in his hometown. Then I would return to Los Angeles and begin my new life as a university graduate.

  We arrived in Guadalajara and took a bus to Eddie’s hometown in Nayarit, which was a few hours to the north. I was excited to get a chance to see a new part of Mexico and to share this experience with Eddie. I still couldn’t believe he had taken an interest in me, because in my experience popular guys like him never looked at me twice. I wasn’t beautiful or remarkably intelligent, just an ordinary girl with extraordinary dreams, which usually wasn’t enough to impress the guys I wanted to impress.

  Now I was in Mexico with the boy I was falling in love with. As the bus made its way along the highway, I rested my head on his chest, thinking about the wonderful time we were going to have. I hoped we would finally take our relationship to the next level.

  As we got closer to our destination, he told me about his sisters, his nieces and nephew, and his hometown. I couldn’t wait to meet his family and to explore his home. Then Eddie stopped talking and became serious. His ever-present smile disappeared. He looked at me and said, “Reyna, there’s something I want to tell you.”

  I sat up on my seat to face him. “What is it?”

  “Look, don’t take this the wrong way, okay? Well, I really like you a lot, and I have fun hanging out with you, but I just want to be friends.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. His black hair, as usual, fell over his forehead and partially covered his brown eyes. I wanted to reach over and brush it back, like I had done many times before.

  Eddie looked out the window as he said, “I mean, let’s just be friends, okay? I know you care about me a lot, and I care about you, too, but I’m not ready for a relationship.”

  “Why are you doing this? Why here, on this bus? And in Mexico no less?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to hurt you,” he said, looking down at his hands. “It’s just that I’m not ready for a commitment, and well, I feel bad that you seem to be expecting more from this trip than I can give you. I don’t want to hurt you, Reyna. Believe me.” He finally looked at me, his eyes pleading with me to not make a scandal. “Can’t we just be friends?”

  I didn’t know what to say, what to do. How was I supposed to react? I was on a bus heading to a state I had never been to, where I knew no one, going to the home of the boy I adored who had just broken my heart. I knew he was trying, in the best way he could, to make clear what his intentions were with me and to do away with all those fantasies in my head that I had created, but why the hell couldn’t he have ended things with me before I got on the plane with him?

  I looked at my hands, feeling like a coward for remaining silent.

  “Let’s just enjoy our time together,” he said. “Okay?”

  The bus driver announced our arrival. I took a deep breath, forced myself to swallow my tears, and followed Eddie off the bus. I looked at the ticket office, wondering if I should buy a return ticket to Guadalajara and go back to the U.S. I had to get out of here. I couldn’t stay here with him. Not like this.

  But Eddie’s older sister and nieces and nephew were there, and I had to turn my eyes away from the ticket office and resign myself to the fact that there would be no running away.

  “This is my friend, Reyna,” Eddie said as an introduction. I winced at the way he emphasized the word “friend.”

  “Nice to meet you,” I told his sister, shaking her hand. And with a big sigh, I went to collect my luggage, swallowing back my tears.

  Throughout the following days, I discovered a new level of hurt. Being trapped with him in his sister’s house was torture. Eddie, with his jokes and his laughter, brought his beautiful energy into the house. Everyone loved being with him. His nieces and nephew clung to him, and so did his sister. We would swim in the river, explore the cornfields, climb the rocks along the riverbank. We explored the city center, the marketplace, the ruins of the temples built by the indigenous tribes of long ago. His hometown was so beautiful, just like Eddie had said. The earth was a deep crimson, and it was used by the locals for making ceramics. I had never seen anything like it. Even the river was red, like liquid terra-cotta. The town was so different from Iguala. Even though the
homes were made of cinder block, simple and humble, this town didn’t have the grinding poverty that my hometown did. There was color everywhere: houses painted in bright green, yellow, and hot pink; the redness of the earth; the electric blue of the Nayarit sky. It was idyllic. The perfect place for falling in love.

  The beauty of the town only made my pain worse. From that first night on, I would cry myself to sleep, trying to keep quiet and not wake up Eddie’s nieces, whose room I shared. With Eddie, I wanted to have a relationship without the turmoil, drama, and psychological trauma of my abusive upbringing getting in the way. I wanted to be an important part of his life, just the way he was in mine.

  In the mornings, I would wake up with my eyelids swollen and my eyes red. Eddie’s sister took pity on me and gave me fresh potato slices to get the swelling to go down so I wouldn’t look like a fool all day.

  “I don’t know why he did this,” I told her as she applied the slices over my eyes. “He brought me to his hometown just to break my heart.”

  “It’s a cruel thing to do to someone. It’s so unlike him,” she said. “I’ve never known anyone as sweet as my brother. I really hope you can forgive him.”

  As the days passed, I kept hoping he would reconsider. You just don’t break a girl’s heart in a place where she doesn’t know a soul, where she has nowhere to go, where she has no one to give her love and help her heal.

  Then I realized that I did have a place to go. That I did have someone. “I’m leaving,” I told him the next day. “I’m going to Iguala.”

  “I’m sorry, Reyna,” he said. “De verdad. Can you please call me when you get there so I know you’re safe?”

  I nodded and walked out of the door with my suitcase and made my way south to my grandmother.

  It took me thirteen hours to get to my hometown, and I cried most of the way. I was terrified to be traveling alone on a bus at night. The times I had gone to Iguala, I traveled during the day and my bus ride had only been three hours from Mexico City. Nayarit was far to the north, and I had to cross three states to get to Guerrero. I didn’t know the route at all. I felt lost in more ways than I could count, a vagabond in a country that felt more bewildering to me than ever before.