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Somewhere in the night sky there is a constellation

Years later, you wonder if there was a certain year or week or minute when you realize you’d
forgotten what your grandmother’s voice sounds like.

There are moments when it comes back in whispers. Half a memory, a phrase, an instant.
Almost enough to rebuild it in your head, just a little bit more. A record player struggling to read
the lines, jumping too much to catch the melody.

When she yells at your mom for walking too damn fast, which makes you laugh from the bottom
of your stomach, because there wasn’t a person on earth who could keep up with that woman in
her prime. You wonder for a moment if it ever even really happened. But you remember how bad
it was. Because even she, the woman who could tear the world in two and stitch it back together
in a way you’d never seen, couldn’t make a wheelchair go faster simply by sheer force of will.
She always tried, though. Some days, it seemed like it was working.

When she sings to you in Russian, lullabies from another lifetime, before the war, Peter and the
Wolf playing quietly in the background. She hums with a grin, in her frilly pink nightgown,
almost dancing, or maybe it’s just the breeze.

When she grumbles in the backseat after they took her car away because the cancer had picked at
her, piece by piece, and even she knew it was time to stop driving. But she still knew Mexico
City better than any cab driver and she’d make it known, guffawing at his mistakes from the
back.

When she’s taking your mom and uncle on a rowboat fifty years ago and it goes directly into the
main current and the tanker is getting a little too close and she says nothing but ‘row’ as she pulls
on the oars with two children until the horn stops blaring and her breathing catches up with her.
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It might not have been your memory, but it was a story that got passed around at the table enough
times that you can hear her say every detail, laughing as she passes you a plateful of food, your
mom laughing nervously, your uncle wincing.

When she asks the gas station attendant to fill up her gas tank and he stares blankly. Are you
from New Jersey? She doesn’t understand. It’s illegal to pump your own gas in Mexico. You
chuckle in the backseat. She says HwHat like she learned English from a Brit, and twenty years
later you find out that it’s true, she did.

When she loses her temper the only time and screams at you and your brother for playing soccer
inside her apartment and breaking a lamp and it’s 1997 and Abuelito hasn’t been dead more than
six months and you hide in the room with the pull-out bed and you don’t hear anything else for
hours. You sneak out at midnight to steal bananas from the kitchen anyways.

When she spends hours guiding you around her museum of an apartment, letting you cradle
every trinket she’s ever taken home from her travels. Every time you visit when you’re young,
and you ask if you can have it, she mulls it over. This fucking kid. Wants all the beautiful
things I’ve collected.

After Abuelito is gone and you’ve spent seven years alive on this earth, she wants to share more
of them with you. Maybe the memories in them are painful now. You’re excited, of course. You
take more of her home with you and your shelves are stocked with mismatched paraphernalia
from more places than you can name. Years later you learn to give those trinkets your own
memories. Softer ones.

When she’s sicker than you remember and it’s her that’s asking you to keep taking more and
more and more and you realize she’s cleaning house and you don’t want to take anything at all.
Maybe if you pile it all up into a corner against the window like a barricade against time and age
and disease you’d have more time to ask about the photos on the wall and the paintings in her
room and all of the stories you remember hearing about but never had time to ask and now
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there’s not enough time for anything but a hug that says enough because a single question might
make her fall. You stop opening the windows for the same reason.

But you take the things she offers anyways. You’d been chipping away at the apartment, book
by book, piece by piece for years, so maybe she was used to it when sickness came for the rest of
her. You knew where everything was, sometimes more than even she remembered, and it made
her eyes gleam that you knew enough of her stories to tell them yourself, even if the only person
you tell them to is yourself, and only in your head, and only when you’re sitting in her chair that
you’re not allowed to sit in. Danuchito, traeme la but you’re already off running down the hall,
you know the shelf, you can barely hear her but you know la cosita she’s looking for.

When she visits you while you’re living abroad and part of her nose is gone and her voice is
muffled and ragged and her eye droops enough to make you bite your lip and the woman who
was a hurricane has to lean on your aunt to make sure she doesn’t crack in two and she tells you
with the same matter of factness and sharp eyes that you remember glowing like hot coals

If I don’t go
this time,
I’ll never go

There was more conviction in it than spite, but it was both. A woman who couldn’t be stopped
from going anywhere. Who went to Siberia on a whim to find a cousin she lost in the war. And
found her, mind you. Her body giving way but still the strongest kindest beautifully stubborn
woman who put the energy of a thousand suns into fighting, and she’d never lost a fight in her
life. But she was losing this one.

It was pouring that weekend. Rain kept her indoors, on the wrong side of the border, picking at
crumbs during dinner.

When your mom calls you as you’re walking to the activities fair your freshman year of college
and she’s crying and she puts your Abuelita on the phone and all that’s left of her is a crackle of
a voice and you tell her that you love her and you’re not sure if she heard you and you say it
again
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and your mom grabs the phone back and says te quiero chiquito and that’s the last time you
hear her say anything. And you walk to the activities fair anyways, talking to strangers, your
mind numb, because you’re not sure what else to do. You sit down on your dorm room bed with
fifty flyers you don’t remember taking.

Years later you find the recording of her answering machine message, sounding exasperated, like
she has a hundred other more important things left to do.

Hola, dejame
tu recado por favor,
gracias!

You play it on repeat for an hour, picking apart each syllable, each sound, aching for the way
her voice could dance staccato in the ebbs and flows of every sentence. Parsing out a
Frankenstein version of her voice in your head. Every so often you feel like it’s so close to
getting there and you can almost hear her, another one of her tongue twisters.

But then it’s from the next room over. And then it’s too far to hear at all.

And then it ends, and all you can hear is the breeze drifting through the window, and you hope it
won’t crack you in two.
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Tourist season

Maybe the reason so many people post pictures of themselves sitting by the pool is because
sitting by the pool is boring. It’s dirty and it’s cracked and it’s full of leaves and it’s full of
everything but water, and when it’s filled with water it’s filled with swamp, and swamp smell,
and the dead possums that somehow always decide to hari-kari at the bottom. Twice I’ve had the
distinct pleasure of snorkeling my way down to the soggy bottom landing of a possum’s final
resting place and drag that rigor mortis rodent out by a leg. Once the leg broke, and I threw up in
my snorkel.

I tried to imagine someone who goes by Timmy, and that it was his leg that had broken, and that
it was cute, or a growing experience, like losing a tooth. But it was roadkill with black eyes and
three and one-half legs and I was holding the rest of it in my hand, and its sagging pink toes had
begun to rot from the sunshine. The other time there was no water and no snorkel, just dead
leaves on the dirty ground of an empty concrete swimming pool, bits of everything drifting in
ankle-deep muck. The big dead rat was laying in the sludge like a king, teeth bared like it would
curse me in the afterlife.

Maybe it was just playing dead.

They do that sometimes, you know.

Lots of us do.
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Pisa y corre

Y, pues, bueno. And that’s the end, even if you put it right at the beginning. You turn your palms
up to the cloudy sky and you sigh and there is nothing left to do but wonder if the next story will
have a softer ending, or a real ending, or if the dead you still remember will sing to you in your
dreams, or if the living you’ve never met will give you the stranger’s nod on the street that says
yes hello I see you even in the anonymity of a quiet road broken up under streetlights. Or the next
one will be a lighter sigh, at least. The truth is, good stories don’t demand good endings.

And this one? Pues, bueno.

I am seven years old and barefoot on the bottom floor of my grandmother’s house, cavernous and
creaking, sounds of tropical birds and my father’s whispers and an oxygen machine’s electric
hum. I am ringing in the year with a downpour that floods everything I’ve ever known, water up
to my neck, lives beginning and lives ending.

Te acuerdas? He is telling my grandfather stories in the dim light of that room, and I am
listening, and my grandfather, I’m not sure. His eyes look full of questions and it’s hard to say if
he’s fighting back the dozen strokes of brain damage to say yes yes yes of course I remember you
fool I was there I took you it was us, or if that fight isn’t one he’s up for today, but, in case he’s
still listening, we are a houseful of tales for every occasion and in this moment the occasion is
that as long as you are still here we will remind you that yes you are still here and your eyes full
of questions will be tempted with all the answers we could possibly imagine in this marathon of a
life on the chance that one might be right.

We were playing baseball, he says. Watching baseball, he corrects himself, memories swaying
back and forth like flimsy tree branches. Andres Galarraga still played for the Leones de Caracas
in the winter months and he was our king, te acuerdas?
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The oxygen machine drones along, voices drifting in from the next room. This place has become
an operation, nurses in and out, bedpans clanging noisily. But there are moments where the sun
hangs low in the windows, moving with the mango tree leaves in the backyard, black and white
photos of better years and better moments, and there is nothing but the sounds of our breathing.

We were sitting on the dusty cement stands and there are drunks dancing and throwing tequeños
at each other and there is a foul ball that almost kills one of them, but he doesn’t even know.

Asi, he says, cradling his father’s hand, showing how close this errant baseball came to ruining
that man’s day. He chuckles, the sound bouncing around a quiet room. He always carried a ball
with him in this house, long as his father was alive. They’d play catch in that room, my dad
placing the ball in my grandfather’s hand, wrapping both of their fingers closed around it. I never
asked if he could feel that hand squeeze shut, but I always hoped, or imagined. He’d keep his
other hand open below, and the ball would fall like ripe fruit, and my grandfather’s eyes would
stay full of questions, and they’d play like that for hours, knowing somewhere in the depth of
those bones was a younger man who could still throw a baseball fast as lightning, who could still
hear stories from an aging beisbolero.

We were playing baseball and everyone was there and you weren’t the best pitcher we’d ever
seen but you were the only one that could pitch consistently because that’s what fathers are born
knowing how to do. You were teaching me how to hold my arms, bend my knees, straighten my
back, feet planted.

Always, the feet planted.

The ball drops. My dad puts it back. Versión mini de pisa y corre, he turns to me, not looking
at anything in particular.

This is a game I know. Pisa y corre. Pickle, in baseball. Pí-col, me decían. Pisa y corre, in the
terminologia santa del beisbol caribeño. Running back and forth and back and forth with the
two
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ends you’re running towards feeling simultaneously too close and too far and you almost make it
safely to each one but always tagged out at the last moment and this is what the last year has
been.

Pisa

This is the year we move into a new house. We have our own yard. We trade the lemon trees
for a pool that is not shared. We lose the community park along with the looks of concern when
I mention where we live. Oh, they always said, and nothing more. It was fine. I liked it there.
I’d made friends with the lizards.

Y corre

One grandfather is sick in Venezuela and another grandfather is sick in Austria, or Mexico, or
somewhere in between that I don’t understand and my parents are shuttling back and forth across
countries and places that used to be home and I am in my house waiting alone in my new room
that is all mine, just mine, not shared, for the first time in my life. But it’s too big. The house is
empty, my parents out chasing minutes that are wavering in the cloudless sun.

Pisa

I could never keep my feet planted, truthfully. Under the shady embrace of a fig tree, my father is
holding my shoulders straight and my brother is holding my ankles straight and I am trying to
swing a bat and the only thing I can do is stumble.

Y corre

I want to play anything but baseball. Roller hockey, with the american white kids who
understood what roler joqui was and required and it wasn’t 2x2 skates and I wanted to run away
from whatever home was for a place where my friends didn’t ask if we had anything not weird to
eat at the house and I want to spend at least one year of school home, sick, on the holiday they
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called Grandparents’ Day so I can stop bringing nobody. My mom never lets me, no matter how
good my fake fever act gets over the years.

Pisa

There are things in that house that have been collecting dust for what might as well be centuries,
things I am too afraid to touch that they might crumble. They are a shaky foundation to start on,
but they’ve always been there, and I am no longer willing to prod at them out of fear the house
might collapse. This is the year too many things are crumbling and even the iron safe in the
garage suddenly feels brittle. But the house holds. There is a mask hanging in a closet that my
uncle was given when he was working at a clinic in a tiny village on the Amazon along with the
promise of a home and a wife and he could have had a life there. He came back to the city, in the
end. But he could have stayed. The mask was a thank you, and it hangs in that room for years,
until everyone is leaving, the house emptied, the mask falling apart. Some of the things the house
inherited stayed there, after all, home for good.
Y corre

I was born into this world in shambles, a ghost in a body that wasn’t ready for me. Long before I
came to Venezuela, my grandfather had run to Florida, for me, hurriedly, a doctor rushing to a
hospital where he could do nothing but stare with eyes full of questions. I almost didn’t make it,
you know. Four days old with a hole in my back from the spinal tap, laying on a bag of ice to try
to take the fever down and a red blotch splashed across my face that kept my parents from
sleeping for the first weeks I spent on this earth.

It was me with eyes full of questions then, wondering who these people who had come so far for
me were, wondering where I would be next, in this world or another. I had no words to offer
then, and on this day, even with all the ones I’d inherited from him, I was quiet, wondering
where he or I or any of us would go next. Eyes full of questions in a house full of answers that
weren’t quite right.
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Pisa

There was a pair of beautiful macaws that had been given to my grandparents as gifts, brilliant
reds and blues in a cage that took up half the yard. Shared the place with a giant tortoise and a
few cats. My grandparents didn’t know what to do with them, whether to let them free, but the
birds stayed for years while they decided. Raucous, joyous animals in a too-small box. The last
memory I have of them, they’d both gone blind, their colors faded to nothing but gray and white,
horrid creatures screeching into the black, waiting for a finger to bite at. The next time I’d gone
to visit, the cage was gone, the yard enormous again, littered with fresh mangos right off the tree.

Y corre

“Parker.” A ragged whisper. My dad had asked a throwaway question about a player they’d
watched on TV together, half talking to himself, half telling stories, and the old man I’d only
ever known bedridden, with the sheets up to his chest and his thick glasses slipping down his
nose, had spent the better part of an hour trying to goad his body in letting the name slip out his
lungs. Dave Parker. Magallanes. Right fielder. The Cobra. My dad was so proud. I wondered
how a body could simply snap shut like a bear trap, a century of memories held down by
anchors, fighting to be spoken back into existence. Like spite and love alone might change the
world.

Pisa y corre. Step and go. Back and forth and back and forth eternal. We swing and sway from
place to place like the world might have been our oyster but in the end it’s the world that drags us
along, aquí pa’ya. These days I am ready for a place that stops moving me, a worn ball falling
from hand to withered hand, aching for a dusty closet to crumble to pieces in. But it is not a place
I have found quite yet.

Y, pues, bueno. Aquí, todavía corriendo.