“Ayelén Sofía Abad...” The words sounded like a blessing. “You have been accepted to Brigham Young University for our Spring semester starting on April 29th...”
Applause and cheers erupted before she could finish the first sentence. Even the little cousins who didn’t know what the words meant celebrated the victory, which had been generations in the making. Even Malón, the aging husky, barked like he did whenever Rosario Central, the family’s favorite soccer team, scored a goal. All her life, Ayelén knew that family was above everything, and that a victory for one was a victory for all.
After hugs and kisses, Madrina María Laura clapped and the women got busy frying empanadas, making the chimichurri, and setting the table, while Helena, Ayelén’s mom, boasted about her daughter. The men drifted toward the parrilla, the bricked-walled grill, where the fire had been waiting for el asado. Ayelén hesitated, unsure if her place was with the women making the meal or the men discussing politics and fútbol while they drank máte and beer.
On the back patio, her cousins jumped rope. They chanted the same song Ayelén and Daiana had sung on the patio years and years ago. At seventeen, she still knew all the words.
“Arroz con leche, me quiero casar...”
In the past, before she got her letter, before Daiana had her baby, her cousin had been Ayelén’s refuge, her companion on adventures and in dreaming. She was the only one who understood the weight of so many expectations. Now Ayelén was alone, severed from her people, far from them already.
Throughout the afternoon, she read the letter time after time to anyone who asked her to, and she tried to explain where the university was (nestled in the mountains in the Western United States, where the church her family went to was established), and who she was going to live with (she had no idea). The only one who didn’t ask for more details was her padrino, Tío Alí. He gazed at her with such sadness that Ayelén had the urge to turn back time to the night before, when she was still a girl dreaming and not the chosen one expected to save them all.
In January, the sun went down late, and after another meal of homemade pizzas and leftover asado, as the frogs sang their nightly song and the bats circled the sky under the silver moon, visitors trickled back to their homes and lives. Soon the only ones left were Ayelén, her parents, and her brothers, Lautaro and Francisco. They slept on the couch protected by the mosquito repellent coil’s smoke while the little cousins tried to catch lightning bugs and crickets.
Madrina María Laura called them in and ushered them to bed. It was time to go, and Daiana had never left the room she now shared with her baby.
“We better go,” Ayelén’s dad said, just when she’d gathered the courage to walk toward her cousin’s closed door. “We have to work tomorrow. There’s so much to do before April.”
In the US, school usually started in September, but her English teacher had encouraged her to apply for Spring term, when there were fewer incoming students. Ayelén was grateful she’d followed the advice, but April was just around the corner.
Madrina helped Ayelén’s mom herd the boys into their old car, a Renault 12 held together by prayers and miracles.
“Felicidades, Farid. You won,” Padrino said, as if he’d hoped to end with the last word.
She winced at the bitterness lacing Padrino’s voice, and worse, his words. Her dad had won?
After a few seconds of charged silence, Padrino added, “You proved she could do it, but sending her by herself is too dangerous. You can’t let her go.”
The unspoken words were, If you let her go and anything bad happens to her, it will be your fault. If you let her go, it will mean you’re a bad father.
Ayelén had never meant to leave on her own. The family’s shared dream had been for her and Daiana to go together.
Ayelén looked at her father, afraid that all her work had been for nothing. It wouldn’t be the first time her father’s mind had changed after a word from his brother.
Ayelén had literally burned her eyelashes in candlelight to keep studying when the power went off in their cinderblock apartment, located in a neighborhood of government housing. Her mom cleaned houses after she came home from cashiering at the supermarket. Her little brothers made do with hand-me-downs and no birthday parties. And her dad spent backbreaking hours in a taxi, risking his life during the hours when taxi drivers were most vulnerable to the rampant crime in the city, to earn another one-hundred-peso note that could salvage the night.
A teacher, Mrs. Orán, had told Ayelén that such dedication was commendable, but had she considered the need for moderation?
The teacher didn’t understand, but Padrino did. Now he wanted to take all that away because his ego was wounded.
Her father glanced at Ayelén, and as if they’d rehearsed the next step, she grabbed her father’s hand.
Padrino’s face hardened. The spark of struggle in his eyes intensified.
“Farid, think about it,” he pleaded. “Our abuelo Amir arrived in this country with a hand in front and another behind. He didn’t speak a word of Spanish, and he built this house with his own hands. Did he do all that for nothing? For your daughter to run away when things get hard here? The country needs all of us. La patria se hace trabajando. And the United States isn’t a place to send a girl like her alone. Believe me. I watch the movies and the news, Farid. In the United States, everyone is on their own.”
Her father’s voice was strong when he said, “Ayelén will never be on her own. She will always have us. At least she will have Helena, the boys, and me.” He looked at Ayelén. “Let’s go, hija.”
The little cousins, Nadia and Selena, stood quiet by the door, their eyes like wet river stones, shiny and dark. Ayelén knelt to hug them, hoping this wouldn’t be the last time.
* * *
In the months that followed, Ayelén and the whole family threw themselves into preparations for her trip. Her ancestors, Abuelo Amir and Abuela Elizabeta, and all the others whose names had been lost, had crossed the oceans in ships for which they sometimes had a ticket but most times did not. She’d fly in an airplane, with the cheapest ticket they could find, the one that stopped in every country in Latin America, slowly inching its way north.
“Keep la yerba in the original package at all times in case the police think it’s something else,” Helena reminded Ayelén when they were repacking her backpack the night before the trip.
Ayelén nodded and wrapped the yerba package in the plastic wrap her family had never dared splurge on before. Unlike her ancestors, who’d arrived with only the clothes on their backs, Ayelén had a small suitcase and a backpack into which she stuffed as many of her belongings as possible. But although she asked her departed abuelos for instructions, they wouldn’t tell her how to pack the memory of jasmín del Paraguay and fireworks exploding on Noche Buena, or the taste of Helena’s canelones with red sauce that she made on special occasions like farewells. She didn’t know how to bottle the scent of Lautaro’s hair after playing fútbol in the rain. Or the touch of Francisco’s tiny five-year-old hand on her face.