Crimson Ties

The lock on my bedroom door is new. Brass, shiny, the kind you buy at the hardware store on Calle Hidalgo for eighty pesos. I know because I bought it myself last Tuesday, and I installed it myself, and I keep the only key on a string around my neck, under my shirt, where she can't see it.

She noticed anyway. She always notices.

"Fel," she said that night, standing in the hallway with her arms crossed, the light from the kitchen catching the silver in her hair. Forty years old and she still looks like the women in the telenovelas my father used to watch, the ones who cry beautifully and never smudge their eyeliner. "Why do you need a lock? Are you hiding something from me?"

"Privacy," I said. "I'm nineteen."

"Nineteen." She said it like a curse word. Like something you scrape off your shoe. "When I was nineteen I was already married to your father. When I was nineteen I had you in my arms."

She says this often. The math of her sacrifice. The ledger of what she gave up, which I am supposed to balance with obedience.

I didn't answer. I closed my door and turned the lock and stood there in the dark of my room, listening to her breathe on the other side. She stood there for a long time. Ten minutes. Maybe fifteen. Then her footsteps went away, soft on the tile, and I let myself breathe again.

That was four days ago.

Now it's Saturday morning and the sun is coming through my window in that angry way it does in April, and I can hear her in the kitchen, the rhythm of her knife on the cutting board. Onions, probably. She always starts with onions. I lie in bed and stare at the ceiling and think about Mariana.

Mariana works at the pharmacy on the corner. She has a laugh that sounds like it belongs to someone who has never been afraid of anything. I met her three weeks ago when I went to buy aspirin for my mother's headaches, the ones she gets when I stay out past nine. Mariana handed me the box and our fingers touched and she smiled and I forgot how to speak Spanish. Or any language. I just stood there like an idiot until she said, "Is that all?"

I went back the next day. And the day after that. I bought things we didn't need. Band-aids. Vitamins. A thermometer we already had two of. My mother started asking why I was going to the pharmacy so much.

"Headaches," I said. "Like yours."

She looked at me for a long time. Then she said, "You're lying."

I was. But I didn't say that.

The thing about my mother is that she's not stupid. She's the opposite of stupid. She knows things before they happen, the way animals know about earthquakes. She smells the shift in the air and she prepares. When I was fifteen and I had a friend named Diego who came over to study, she started making comments. Little ones. "Diego's mother doesn't work, did you know that? She stays home all day while her husband breaks his back." And "Diego got a C on his math test, I saw it on the table. You should be careful who you spend time with." Diego stopped coming over. I don't know if she said something to him or if he just felt the cold coming off her like I did. Either way, he stopped.

That's how she works. Not with yelling. With weather. She changes the temperature of the house until you can't breathe and you don't know why.

My father died two years ago. Heart attack. He was fifty-two and he dropped dead in the field behind our house, in the rows of corn he'd planted himself, and by the time we found him the sun had already started its work on him. My mother screamed for three days. I'm not exaggerating. Three days of screaming, on and off, like a siren that wouldn't stop. Then she stopped. Just like that. She got up, washed her face, and started cooking dinner. As if nothing had happened. As if she'd made a decision to put the grief in a box and lock it and never look at it again.

But she kept his money. That's the thing. He left it to me, in the will, everything he'd saved from twenty years of working. Not a fortune, but enough. Enough for a house of my own. Enough for school. Enough to leave.

She never gave it to me. I was seventeen when he died, so legally it went to her, to hold in trust. "Until you're ready," she said. "Until you're older."

I'm nineteen now. I've been ready. But every time I bring it up, she gets that look. The one that says I've wounded her. The one that says after everything she's done, after all the nights she stayed up with me when I was sick, after all the years she spent alone because my father was a good man but not an easy one, after all of that, I want to take the money and leave her.

"You want to abandon me," she says. Not a question.

"I want to go to school."

"School is here. You can study here."

"Not the kind of school I want."

She turns away. She starts chopping something. The conversation is over. It's always over when she decides it is.

I get out of bed and pull on my jeans and a t-shirt that used to be my father's. It's soft from years of washing. I wear it when I need to remember him. When I need to remember that there was a time when this house felt like a place where I was allowed to grow.

The kitchen smells like onions and garlic and something else. Cinnamon? No. She's making chilaquiles, my favorite. She only makes chilaquiles when she wants something.

I sit down at the table. She doesn't look at me. She's wearing a dress I haven't seen before, blue with little flowers, and it fits her in a way that makes me uncomfortable. She's always been beautiful. Everyone says so. The women at the market, the men at the hardware store, they all say the same thing. "Your mother is a queen, Fel. You're lucky." And I smile and nod and don't tell them what it's like to live with a queen. How small you feel in her shadow. How she takes up all the air.

"Good morning," I say.

She sets a plate in front of me. Chilaquiles, red sauce, a fried egg on top, queso fresco crumbled like snow. My stomach turns over with hunger and something else. Something that feels like guilt before I've done anything wrong.

"Where are you going today?" she asks. Casual. Too casual.

"Nowhere."

"You put on your shoes."

"I'm going to the market. We need tomatoes."

"We have tomatoes."

"Then we need something else."

She sits down across from me. She doesn't eat. She watches me eat. This is another thing she does. She watches me like I'm a painting she's thinking of selling.

"Mariana called," she says.

My fork stops halfway to my mouth. I don't move. I don't breathe.

"She called the house phone. She said she wanted to return a book you lent her." My mother's voice is flat. "You didn't tell me you lent her a book."

"I didn't. I don't know what she's talking about."

"Then why did she call?"

"I don't know."

She leans forward. Her eyes are dark and steady and they don't blink. "I told her you were busy. I told her you wouldn't be able to see her anymore. I told her you were moving."

The words hit me like a slap. "What?"

"To your aunt's house in Puebla. I told her you were leaving next week."

"I'm not leaving."

"You are now."

I stand up. The chair scrapes against the tile. "You can't do that. You can't just decide things for me."

"I'm your mother."

"I'm an adult."

She laughs. It's not a nice laugh. "You're a child. You have no idea what the world is like. You have no idea what people want from you."

"And what do you want from me?"

She stands up too. We're face to face. She's shorter than me by an inch, but it doesn't matter. She's always been taller in every way that counts.

"I want you to be safe," she says. "I want you to stay where I can protect you. I want you to stop sneaking around with that girl like a thief."

"I'm not sneaking."

"You are. You think I don't know? You think I don't see you counting your money, hiding your phone, lying about where you go? You think I'm blind?"

"I think you're scared."

She flinches. Just a tiny movement, a flicker at the corner of her mouth. But I see it. I've seen it before. It's the same look she had when my father died. The look of someone who's just realized the ground beneath her is not as solid as she thought.

"I'm not scared," she says. "I'm your mother. I know what's best."

"You don't know anything about what's best for me."

She raises her hand. For a second I think she's going to hit me. She's never hit me. Not once. But she raises her hand and I flinch and she sees me flinch and something breaks in her face.

She lowers her hand. She turns away. She walks to the sink and grips the edge of it with both hands, her back to me, her shoulders shaking.

"I'm going to see Mariana," I say. "And I'm going to get my money. And I'm going to decide what happens next."

She doesn't turn around. Her voice comes out small and cracked, like something that's been stepped on.

"If you walk out that door," she says, "don't come back."

The room goes quiet. The onions are burning on the stove. I can smell them, acrid and sharp, but neither of us moves to turn off the fire.

I stand there. My heart is beating so hard I can feel it in my throat. I think about my father. I think about the money. I think about Mariana's laugh and the way she looked at me like I was someone worth looking at.

I think about my mother, standing at the sink, her back to me, waiting.

And I don't know what I'm going to do.