Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1
“You’re my favorite scar.”
That’s what my dad says, patting his forearm where he has my name tattooed:
Á M B A R.
And two red hibiscus flowers, one on each side.
He says those were my favorite flowers when I was little. I don’t remember having a favorite flower. I don’t remember him being around much when I was little, either. And I definitely don’t remember being little.
He wears my name near his elbow, right where he rolls his sleeves up to, so it’s almost always hidden. They can use your tattoos to identify you, he’ll say, and then he’ll tell me a story about Furia Roldán, who got caught because of an eight ball on the back of his neck.
But what covers my name now is the blood dripping from a bullet hole in his chest, next to his shoulder. I hand him a towel. He wipes the tattoo off first and smiles at me. I give him a look that says get on with it and he finally starts cleaning the wound. The towel turns red, little by little.
“It went straight through,” he says and flops down on the couch, crushing the book I was reading when I saw the VW 1500’s high beams and then him, with no shirt, leaning on the doorframe just long enough to catch his breath and leave a puddle of blood.
I do everything from memory; he doesn’t have to ask. I pull aside the curtain of the window that looks out over the road to see if anyone’s coming. I can’t see the car, but he left the headlights on, and they’re crashing against the side of the house. As evening falls, they become more visible. I get out the tackle box we use as a first aid kit, give him a couple of pills and a glass of water, and set a bottle down next to him. Blood loss makes you thirsty. The muscles in his arms are shaking in a strange way.
“What were you wearing?”
“My shirt.”
Dad taught me how to remove bullets and sew up cuts when I was twelve. He taught me how to shoot at thirteen, and how to hotwire a car a few months later.
If the bullet went straight through, infection is the problem. Cloth or bits of the bullet that might be stuck inside. I pour hydrogen peroxide over it until there’s an eruption of pink foam. He swears, but I don’t care. I take a close look. The entry wound is round, the exit wound looks like a pothole. A medium caliber, 9mm for sure. A .45 would have taken out a chunk, a .22 wouldn’t have made it through. At one point I was surprised—or scared—that I knew all this. Now I know it the same way I can identify a bird by its feathers, tell a bill is fake just by touching it, or know the difference between a garden snake and a viper by the scales on its head.
Blood flows out like it doesn’t want to be inside him. I pour more peroxide on it so I can see the wound. Dad grits his teeth and holds his breath. All I find is torn flesh.
“It doesn’t look so bad.”
“Thanks, Freckles.”
I’m glad he calls me that, something other than his favorite scar.
Coming from almost any other man, that wouldn’t mean much. All most of them have is a little scar on their eyebrow from when they fell as a kid, or the reminder of when they had their appendix out, or a cut from some fight where the only thing hanging in the balance was their pride.
Dad carries his scars like medals. His whole body tells his story better than he could himself. Víctor Mondragón is a man who can be read in Braille better than he can be heard, but he can’t be truly understood in any language.
He might carry my name on his skin, but he never held me in his arms. He chose my name, but he was never around until he didn’t have any other choice. He became my father the way other people become survivors. It’s something that happens after an accident. For my parents, love was an accident they both managed to drag themselves away from, covered in scars. So I guess it does make sense that he says I’m his favorite scar.
I go to look for more gauze in the bathroom. When I come back, I can see through the open door that the car’s windshield is full of holes and shattered into a spiderweb, covered in blood. There’s a dead person in the front seat on the passenger side, but I can’t see who it is. I don’t care. There’s no one it would hurt for me to lose.
I soak a piece of gauze in disinfectant and press it against the wound.
“Hold that,” I tell him, and he does as I say.
I put another piece of gauze on the exit wound while I tear off a piece of tape with my teeth. I press down and watch my fingernails turn red.
“What are you laughing at?” he asks.
He hates when I paint my nails, but he doesn’t seem to mind painting them himself with his blood.
“Nothing.”
I continue wrapping up his chest and shoulder. I go around once, twice, three and a half times, and then the tape runs out. He touches the bandage and moves his shoulder.
“Leave it alone, will you?” I say, and he laughs.
Then his smile fades and finally disappears. He hangs his head, looking at the flowers in his tattoo, and scratches at the streaks of blood next to them. It looks like the petals fell off, like the hibiscus flowers have dried out, but no one’s decided to throw them out—yet.
“Get your stuff,” he says. Before I can reply, he adds, “Yeah, I know I promised.”
He heads to his room and comes out wearing an undershirt, doing up his button-down. He puts the guns from all the different rooms into a bag. You never know where they might find you. He goes from the bathroom to my bedroom, sees me standing still in the middle of the living room, and says, get moving, tells me again to get my things. He says not to forget the shotgun the way other fathers tell their daughters not to forget their jacket. But I just stand there, rubbing the blood off my fingernails, because everything’s already packed away in my bag, like always. Because Dad might make promises, but even if he doesn’t know it, his promises always have an expiration date.
I go into my room and pick up my bag. Back in the living room, I throw in my Walkman and book.
“Grab something warm, it’s getting cold out,” he says and stops in the doorway, his boot in the puddle of blood that used to be his and now belongs to no one. He looks at me, and I already know what he’s going to say. “Someday you’ll understand.”
I still don’t understand him, and I hope I never will.
I stand next to the window. Dad turns off the VW 1500’s headlights. He pulls the dead man around to the trunk using just his good arm. It’s a clumsy job because of his wound, but I’m not going to help him.
Not this time.
The evening lengthens his shadow until it stretches across the grass and climbs up the walls of the house. When I was a little girl, I liked to watch my shadow at this time of day. I would say to my dad that I was nine, but my shadow was already fifteen, and that’s how big my body was going to be when I grew up.
Far off, on the cusp of the land, the sun is a match that the wind finally blows out, and the shadows of everything, the car, the house, Dad, me, become one and sink into the grass. Now that I really am fifteen, I don’t have a shadow, just darkness.
