Not a Chance Read online

  “What about Canada?” Dad asks. “She was excited about that idea last year.”

  I shrug. “She’d rather get married. She wants to stay close to her family.”

  Mom sighs and looks at me like I’m a hurt toddler she can cure with a hug. “I’m sorry, Di. This must be a shock for you.”

  Only for me? “She’s fourteen, Mom! The guy’s nineteen, and she could have five kids by the time she’s twenty. You’d have a fit if I were getting married next year to a guy old enough to be in university.”

  “You’re not getting married.” She’s in Patient Parent Mode, speaking slowly. “And of course he’s older. Another fourteen-year-old couldn’t support her. Women—girls—marry young here, Dian. You know that.”

  “It’s economic,” Dad says.

  Mom glares at him. “It’s not economic, Todd. It’s cultural. You don’t see people marrying off their fifteen-year-old sons to the first person who asks.”

  Dad raises his hands like she’s turned a gun on him. “It’s not my fault, you know. I did try to help.”

  Mom purses her lips. “No matter what the cause, it’s not our place to try to change this one.”

  I blink at her. “You’re just going to let her get married? After years of ranting about women’s rights, you’re just going to shrug and let this happen?”

  “Who are we to tell them their culture is wrong?” Mom asks, as if she could never imagine going against tradition.

  “But it is! Even the United Nations says so. We read about it at school. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child says no one should get married this young.” I can’t believe I have to explain this to my parents, of all people. Where do they get off suddenly picking and choosing which human rights they believe in?

  “United Nations,” Mom says, “is working to change the situation on a large scale, not to break up engagements one at a time. It sounds like Aracely doesn’t want us to interfere, Dian.”

  “Since when has that kind of thing stopped you?” I shout. “This is Aracely we’re talking about!”

  Dad shoots me a look that means the whole of Cucubano can hear me and I’d better watch my mouth. I clench my teeth and stab my spoon into my rice, but I refuse to stay quiet. How could anyone stay quiet about this?

  “She had a way out,” I hiss, barely above a whisper. “You offered her one, but now you’re just as happy to let her become another baby machine, like all the other women in this village.”

  “How dare you, Dian Grace?” Mom’s the one shouting now, and for once, she switches to English. “How dare you judge the people here like that, talking about them as if they’re no more than animals? Just because you don’t want what Aracely wants doesn’t make her wrong.”

  “So if she wanted to jump off a bridge, you wouldn’t have a problem with that either?” I push my food away. “Don’t you get it? She’s only doing this because going to Canada terrifies her. She’s never even been to a city before, never mind a completely different country. Of course she’s scared. But that’s no excuse to throw her life away.”

  Dad looks pained. Bringing her to Canada was his idea, after all. “She told you she’s scared?”

  I look away. “Not exactly, but I know her well enough.”

  Mom takes a few deep breaths and returns to Spanish to ask if I’m sure. “Estás segura? Maybe you have different definitions of what’s important. Do you really know what her life would be like if she left Cucubano behind? Once she goes away and gets an education, she won’t be coming back, Dian—not as the same person anyway. The minute she leaves here, she leaves for good, and no one can guarantee her that leaving will make her happier.”

  For a moment, I hesitate, imagining how Aracely might see Cucubano after living in Canada. I bet she’d think of it as smaller than before, with less to do, with fewer opportunities…

  No. I’m not going to think about that. Mom’s twisting everything, and I know why she’s doing it too. “No matter what I want, you go for the opposite, don’t you?” I shout. “If I say I’m against the marriage, then you’re all for it.”

  I jump to my feet and head for the door, but when I get there, I stop. Might as well give them one more thing to chew on before I go. “Did I mention that Vin’s working for the mine you’ve been protesting against for the past two years?”

  Dad winces, Mom closes her eyes again, and I know I’ve hit my mark. I’m sure Vin’s mine is the one owned by a Canadian company. My parents have written letters, held marches and organized petitions against it for ages because it pours toxic waste into the rivers, which poisons the people who live nearby. I was tempted to mention all this to Aracely, but what would I say? Don’t marry a guy who works at a mine my parents don’t like? I would sound like some sort of political puppet, and that’s exactly the person I’m trying not to be.

  No reason to hide the mine from my parents though. If they want me to stop caring about Aracely’s right to a decent future, then they’ll have to stop caring about the mine they’ve fought against for years. Satisfied, I yank open the door to step outside, but then Dad turns to Mom. “Maybe it’s a good sign. Maybe that means people who live close to the mine are refusing to work there. They have to import workers from a few hours away now.”

  His reaction is so weird that it takes me a few seconds to realize he’s missing the point entirely. “We’re not talking about the mine, Dad. We’re talking about my friend’s life.”

  “You were the one who brought it up,” Mom snaps. “And I’ll ask you to change your tone when you’re talking to us.”

  “You guys are hopeless.” I slam out, not caring if the whole of Cucubano is talking about my bad behavior tomorrow.

  I want to tear off down the hill. If I were at home, I would. I’d run until I was exhausted, and then I’d let myself into Grandma’s backyard, climb her apple tree and just hang out there until I felt like going home. Sometimes, Grandma sees me up there and pretends not to, unless I wave. If I wave, she comes out to talk, but otherwise she lets me be. She calls my parents to tell them I’m okay, but she doesn’t let them come over. She says everyone needs a quiet thinking place, and the apple tree’s mine.

  Here in Cucubano, I don’t have anywhere to go. Sure, there are tons of trees, but getting to them means wandering along the road, and I don’t have the guts for that. The settlement is safe enough by day—everyone knows me, I can never go anywhere without three or four children coming along, and being invited here by the priest means that people are extra careful around me and my parents—but nighttime is different. No one is out at night unless they’re coming back from the colmado, drunk. And there’s no telling what drunken guys might do if it’s too dark for anyone to see them.

  I sit behind the school, rest my head on my knees and cover my ears, but I can still hear my parents debating whether to run after me and demand more respect. I jab my fingers in my ears and hum.

  I don’t go back in until the lights are out. My parents pretend to be asleep, but I know they’re not because they’re not snoring like they always do. They’re still quiet when I finally fall asleep.

  * * *

  “What you said isn’t true, you know,” Dad says over breakfast the next morning. It’s Canada Day, and if we were back home, we’d be celebrating all things Canadian, including laws against fifteen-year-olds getting married. Instead, we’re here in the Dominican Republic, and my parents are still trying to convince me that it’s perfectly reasonable for Aracely to throw her life away. “We haven’t given up on her,” Dad’s saying. “I think we have to respect her decision.”

  “How can you respect a decision made for all the wrong reasons?” As soon as the words fly out of my mouth, I want to bite them back. They’re my parents’ words, and they use them for just about everything they believe in: if everyone knew all the facts about global warming, no one woul
d drive cars anymore, et cetera, et cetera. They figure it’s our family’s mission to educate people to make the “right” decisions.

  If Mom recognizes the words, she doesn’t say anything. She bites down hard on her toast instead.

  “Just keep talking to Aracely,” Dad says. “Find out more before you pass judgment.”

  How am I supposed to find out more when we’re barely on speaking terms?

  We eat the rest of our breakfast in silence, and we’re cleaning up when Mom announces how I’m going to spend my day. Apparently, I’ll be doing all the chores that Aracely’s mom used to do for us. “The veggie patch needs serious weeding, and we need more washing powder from the colmado. Get some more bread too, while you’re at it, please. After lunch, I want you to run down to María’s place to drop off a cream I promised her yesterday.”

  I don’t know whether these chores are necessities or punishment or both. Mom doesn’t say, although she does raise her eyebrows at me like she’s waiting for me to protest. But why would I bother? I’m not going to pretend to spend the day with Aracely’s mom like my parents assume I usually do. And I’m relieved to have something to do. Any of the neighbors’ kids that I see on the road will come with me, distracting me with their chatter. It’s better than sitting around here, wishing I were anywhere else.

  Or worrying about Aracely, which I’ve been doing pretty much every spare moment. When she’s old, will she think back to this summer as the moment when everything changed? Will she imagine herself dividing in two, one that married and one that didn’t? And will her married self miss the person she could have been?

  The images in my head have gotten worse. Now when I picture her at age twenty-five, she glares back at me, like I should have done something to save her.

  Five

  Clouds roll in, and rain pours down like it’ll never stop. Most of Cucubano goes to sleep because the aguacero on metal roofs is the only thing that drowns out Rafael’s donkey, pigs and roosters.

  In summer—rainy season—the weather and its patterns are always the same. The morning is sunny and warm. We finish lunch, the skies open, it pours, we go to sleep, and we wake up a few hours later when the sky is blue again and the sun has baked the muddied road hard. Today my mother wakes me up from my siesta. She stands by my bed, holding out a tube of cream that I’m supposed to take to María. Mom’s smiling, but only barely. I know she’s still mad about my baby-machine comment, and she’ll only get madder if I try to explain. I don’t think girls are stupid for staying here and having lots of kids. I just hate that it feels like the only option.

  “I wrote the instructions on this piece of paper,” Mom says. “Read them to María.”

  I squint at her scrawly writing the way I always do. “I’ll try.”

  Mom laughs and folds her arms across her chest, but we’re both smiling a bit more now.

  Mom’s eyes scan mine, and she hesitates before she speaks. “We’re not trying to go against everything you think, Dian. We’re honestly not sure that stepping in would be the right thing to do here. It’s nothing against you, you know.”

  Part of me wants that pitying hug she almost gave me last night, and the rest of me wants to yell at her again. Instead, I mumble something about getting the cream to María and head out the door. Behind me, I imagine the hurt expression on Mom’s face, but what does she expect? Would it really kill her to consider my opinion for once?

  I’m usually still napping at this time. The road is solid but springy under my feet. A few meters downhill, two little kids in jeans and T-shirts are slapping the only surviving mud puddle with sticks. They shriek each time one of them gets splashed, and they remind me of my first summer here. I was fascinated by the rain and the muddy road, and I dragged Aracely out for walks as soon as the rain stopped, before the earth had even dried. We marched all over Cucubano, adding an inch of orange mud to the bottoms of our feet with each step. We always came home half a head taller, orange mud spattered to our knees and grinning.

  I smile and wave at the kids. They charge over and hug me—big, full-bodied hugs that hold nothing back—and they tell me they’re going to stay up late tonight to look for cucuyos. I wish I were seven again and could race along with them, trapping fireflies. I picture careful fingers slipping the lid onto a jar, beautiful light dancing inside. Another Aracely memory threatens to flood my brain, but I push it back and grab the outstretched hands of the two nearest kids, and together we head down the hill.

  When I round the corner where Aracely lives, I pretend not to see her house, and if the kids notice how hard I’m pretending, they don’t say anything. Aracely’s house is like most others in Cucubano: a one-room wooden hut with a roof made of thick grass. Most of the building is painted peach, but a few boards have no paint at all. Around the outside, orange and yellow flowers grow as high as my waist.

  The door is closed, and the house has no windows. I wonder if Aracely’s in there, or if she’s out collecting herbs with her abuela. Maybe she’s gone to visit a relative. (Or the house of the people who will soon be her relatives. Ugh.) And I wonder if she misses me, or if she’s still too angry. Maybe she barely notices that we’re not spending time together. She’s used to living here without me, after all. For the first time, I wonder if it bothers her that I go away all the time, leaving her behind to live her same old life.

  But she says she’s happy here. The memory of Mom’s voice invades my thoughts. Her twisted arguments have messed with my thinking. If I keep listening to her and Dad, I’ll be helping out at the wedding feast, throwing flowers and shouting encouragement, or whatever people do at weddings here.

  I’ve got to get Aracely back, the old Aracely who sat on the floor of our hideout asking me about Canada. That Aracely had the guts to want to travel and run after her dreams. She was ready to come to Canada for high school and university, and she was excited about all the stuff we would do together. I’d said I would teach her to ride a bicycle, and we’d work on her English together, and we’d go to school dances and blow people away with our moves. I’d have a sister for the first time in my life.

  But maybe I had freaked her out. Maybe I’d described a world so different that she felt like she’d be moving to Jupiter. New language. New customs. New food. She’d have to learn how to take a bus, and how to get to places according to street signs instead of landmarks that she’d seen every day for her entire life. She’d have to choose food at supermarkets hundreds of times bigger than the colmado here, with twenty varieties of milk, dozens of kinds of bread and all sorts of stuff that she’d never seen before. She’d go from knowing everyone to knowing hardly anyone, and she’d go for weeks, maybe months, without news from her family.

  Of course she was terrified. I shouldn’t have told her so much, but it was too late now to take it back.

  The kids and I are halfway to María’s house when someone comes pelting around the corner toward us. He’s a few years older than me, and he’s running like someone’s life depends on it.

  “Your papá there?” he shouts as he passes.

  It’s Nerick, who lives in the shack at the bottom of the hill. He looks desperate. Someone in his family needs a doctor. Fast.

  “Sí,” I call back. “Both my parents are there.” I don’t ask what happened. This is no time to chat, and news will be all over the village within hours anyway.

  We don’t get many medical emergencies. People are so used to living without a doctor that it takes a lot for them to come running for one. When María Castillo almost died giving birth that time, it took hours for her to agree to let my mother come see her. I wish I knew what’s happened in Nerick’s family, and I wish I could help.

  But instead I stand there watching him race up the hill and cross my fingers that everything will be all right.

  Nerick and I used to be friends. Not as close as Aracely and I, but on days when
Aracely couldn’t play, he seemed to show up out of nowhere. He showed me his favorite spots—the beet field on the hill where we could see the entire valley, the meadow behind the coffee warehouse where the grass was tall enough for us to hide in, the tops of the tallest trees along the road. He always won the race up to those treetops, but he never rubbed it in, just flashed me a grin and joked about throwing things at people down below. He never seemed to care that I was a girl. And I never really cared that all the other kids—except for Aracely—didn’t like him much. I noticed it and didn’t understand it, but didn’t care.

  I was seven when I overheard adults warning my parents not to let me play with the Haitian kid. (Nerick was born here, but his parents are from the country next door. They’re black and so is he, so everyone calls him Haitian, even though he’s never even been to Haiti.) He might put spells on me, they said. My parents said that was nonsense and told me to keep on playing with Nerick for as long as I wanted to. So I did, right up until two years ago, when he stopped showing up at the clinic.

  It turned out Nerick’s father had taken off, and that meant Nerick had to work, doing odd jobs for anyone who would hire a twelve-year-old. I should have gone to visit, to say hello, at least, when he didn’t come around anymore, but what could I say to someone who’d lost his dad and had had to quit school to help feed the family? I said nothing, and now it’s been years since we’ve talked. I hate that he’s sprinting up the hill to get medical help and I’m just standing here, wondering what to do.

  I turn and walk quickly down the hill to María’s.

  I’m not going to make the same mistake with Aracely that I did with Nerick. I’m not going to pretend nothing’s happening. I won’t stay quiet until it’s too late. I’ll find a way to change Aracely’s future, and next year, when I’ve convinced my parents to let me stay in Canada, I’ll think back to this summer and know I did the right thing.