When I Was Puerto Rican - Esmeralda Santiago [50]
“Fine, if you want to ride on that stupid bike, then go ahead. But when Mami gets home ...”
“I want to ride on the bike too,” Raymond wailed beside me, wriggling his hand out of mine. “I want a ride!”
And he ran to Jenny, who scooped him up and tried to balance him on the handlebars.
“Jenny, he’s too little to do that.”
“He’s all right.... You sit on the seat,” she said to him, “and I’ll ride standing up.”
“Stop it, Jenny. He’ll fall off. Raymond, get off that bike.”
“Leave us alone. I know what I’m doing.” She stood up on the pedals and pushed off slowly. Raymond giggled. “See, he’s having a good time.”
“Well, if you don’t care,” I yelled back, “then I don’t care either. Go ahead and ride the stupid bike!” I glared at Delsa and Norma, who, as the next oldest, should have known better. “You two are in trouble.... You’re supposed to obey me when Mami’s not around. She left me in charge.”
They laughed and chased after Jenny, who was riding the bike faster, with Raymond gripping the seat underneath him. My face was hot, and tears tickled my eyes, but I wasn’t about to let them see me cry. I turned toward home, dejected and abandoned by my sisters and brothers who wouldn’t stand by me against this spoiled brat.
As I reached our yard I heard a scream. Raymond, Jenny, and the bike had fallen over. “Serves them right,” I thought and continued into the yard. But the screams were loud and frightened, more than I would have expected from a simple fall. They were screams of terror, of pain. I ran, and as I did, it seemed that the whole barrio was converging in a circle around the bicycle, around Raymond whose toes were caught in the chain, his foot twisted on itself, mangled into a mess of blood, grease, and dirt.
Doña Zena and Doña Ana shooed us away. I gathered my sisters and brothers, like a hen her chicks, and stood by the side of the road as someone pulled the bicycle apart and took Raymond’s foot out. His shrieks cut into me, and I wanted to run to him, but the adults surrounded him and wouldn’t let anyone through. Someone wrapped his foot, and someone else took him to the emergency room in Bayamón. Mami was found at her job and brought there, and Papi too, somehow. I was left to care for my sisters and brothers. We ate the rice and beans that Gloria made for us, and in silence we bathed and dressed for bed, crawled under the mosquito netting, tucked ourselves in, and listened, listened for Papi to come home, or Mami to come home, or Raymond to come bouncing in with his goofy grin. But they didn’t, and he didn’t, and I fell asleep dreading what Mami would do to me when she found out that I had walked away and let Raymond get hurt.
But Mami didn’t do a thing. Somehow Raymond’s accident became Jenny’s fault. Mami, Meri, Tio Cándido, and Papi talked, and every neighbor who had seen what happened talked, and it was agreed that Jenny was to blame. Even though no one said so, it had been my responsibility to watch the kids, especially Raymond, who was the youngest. But no one yelled at me or called me names or beat me because I hadn’t watched my sisters and brothers. Jenny was accountable. I was furious that she was getting all the attention for something that was my fault.
Mami had to quit her job to care for Raymond. For many months she ran from one doctor to another because Raymond’s foot wouldn’t heal. The doctors told her that so much bicycle grease had got into the wound that they couldn’t be sure if they’d cleaned it all out. Raymond, Mami told Papi, would be plagued by all sorts of problems with his foot for the rest of his life, and she went on to list diseases the doctors had told her he was likely to develop. Diseases that all ended with -itis.
But the more frantic Mami became in her search for the right treatment for Raymond, the more distant Papi became, as if we were all wounded in some way that he couldn’t help. There were more fights, more arguments, more yelling