Chapter Auggie
Auggie
WHEN WE’VE SAT DOWN AT THE TABLE WITH CLAIRE, I CANNOT TAKE MY eyes off the photos of Aida. I’ve read a bit about her in the essays, heard what Mayte had to say, but I had never actually seen what she looked like.
I don’t think Aida looks like Mayte at all. Her hair is thick and almost jet black compared to Mayte’s shoulder-length hair, which is a few shades lighter. She has bright green eyes to Mayte’s dark brown. No one would’ve known they were sisters.
“How are they?” I whisper to Claire.
She shrugs and nods toward the front of the room, where I’m able to catch a quick glimpse of Leo and Janko in a crowd of people. I assume Mayte’s somewhere among them. “I haven’t had a chance to talk to them at all.” Claire glances at my parents and Kate and gives them a soft smile.
“Sorry,” I say. I motion to my family. “These are my parents and my sister, Kate. This is Janko’s girlfriend’s friend, Claire.”
Claire grins at me and then comes around the table to shake my family’s hands. “I’d go so far as to say I’m Auggie’s friend, but yeah, I’m also Leo’s friend.”
“I didn’t want to make assumptions,” I say.
“I’m sorry my brother’s a loser,” Kate says.
“Katherine,” my parents both snap.
Claire sits back down beside me. “You clean up nice,” she says. “I didn’t think you owned anything other than polo shirts.”
“It’s my dad’s,” Kate says.
“So maybe you don’t own anything other than polo shirts,” Claire says. “Do you even play golf?”
“I mean, I’ve, like, gone mini-golfing with my family before.”
Claire tries and fails to swallow a smile.
“We’re going to go give our condolences before the service starts, Augustine,” my mom says. “Are you going to join us?”
“Sure,” I say, standing up. “You wanna come?” I ask Claire.
She nods and follows.
There’s a long line of people waiting to speak to the family, but as we move closer, Janko notices us and taps Leo’s shoulder, who taps Mayte’s shoulder. Janko and Leo squeeze out of their places to join us in line.
“How is she?” Claire asks.
“Surprisingly fine,” Janko says. “One might say, cheery.”
“Cheery?” I say.
“She hasn’t cried all day,” says Leo.
As we’re making our way forward, Janko introduces Leo to my family, and I watch Mayte.
She’s smiling, sweet, one hand on her father and the other on her mother, sometimes enveloping the one who’s crying the hardest in both of her arms. She’s wearing a black dress, a tiny braid in her hair that only reaches to the back of her neck, and looks perfectly put together, but somehow ten years younger.
When we get to the front, my parents introduce themselves, and everyone hugs everyone. Then it’s my turn to speak to Mayte. My mouth feels dry and wordless and I stand there for a moment before she pulls me into her arms.
“How are you?” I manage to whisper into her hair.
“I’m good,” she says, pulling back. “How are you?”
“Um, I’m fine.”
“I think the service is about to start,” she says. “I’ll talk to you guys a little later.” Before Claire or I can say anything else, she has turned her attention to the condolence wishers behind us.
“She was… cheery,” Mom says as we sit back down at our table.
“Poor girl’s probably still in shock,” Dad says.
A priest appears at the front of the room beside the casket and begins to speak in fast Spanish.
I cannot make out a single word despite my three years of Spanish classes, which I’d say is not my fault because I can conjugate exactly fifteen verbs, count to one thousand, and recite all my colors, but never learned the word for funeral.
Or honestly how to ask someone’s name, though I can tell you my name. Me llamo Auggie. ?Perro sin la… p?
I look over at Mayte. She’s sitting between her parents, hands on their shoulders, back straight.
And honestly, I’m super confused. I know she’s not okay.
I know she’s not “cheery” or whatever. I know her phone is broken and her knees are scraped and she couldn’t even speak or breathe while she sat there in the cold, and while I drove her home in my car, and while she held onto my arm on the couch so tightly that I thought she was going to snap it in half.
When I got home and told my parents what happened, we all cried on the couch.
It was a terrifying experience, and my emotions were running so high.
Being the one who got the news first, holding a screaming, sobbing Mayte on the floor when I was the one who had to deliver it.
Meeting her parents, who walked through the door like empty shells, thanked me, and then sent me home.
My parents want me to go to therapy, but I told them I already have my writing, which is basically free therapy.
The service ends and slowly the room begins to empty. My parents ask if I’m ready to go and I’m not.
“I can drive him home,” Claire says. “I don’t mind.”
“Are you okay with that, Augustine?” my mom asks. She grabs my hands. “Do you need us to stay here?”
“Mom, I’m fine,” I say, pulling away. “I’m sure.”
My family leaves, and Claire and I are silent as we watch the room in front of us. I look at the casket and my stomach does a flip. I’ve never seen a dead person before. I’m not a hundred percent sure I want to.
“Did you ever meet her?” I ask Claire.
“Aida?”
“Yeah.”
“Once, when we were a lot younger. At a family party they had. Colombians get real wild.” She smiles. “But I met her there. I guess. It didn’t really feel like actually meeting because she didn’t talk at all and just sat in a chair in a corner the entire time.”
I nod and we’re quiet for a moment. “Do you want to go see her?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” Claire says.
“Me neither.”
“I guess we could do it together,” she says, turning and smiling at me. “You and Janko’s girlfriend’s friend.”
I put my face in my hands. “Yeah, that was rough, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah, it was.” She laughs. “If I tell you I think we’re friends, it doesn’t have to be an assumption anymore. How’s that?”
“That sounds… less confusing,” I say.
She grabs my hands and pulls me up. “Good. It sounds good, Auggie.”
When we first got here, there was a crowd at the casket, but I think almost everyone has seen her now, so the space in front of it is empty. Claire and I walk up and look at Aida.
Her black hair falls down her face. Her eyes are closed, so you can’t see the bright shade of green that you can in all the photos.
Her hands are crossed over each other, but one is all curled up in a strange way and I wonder if that had something to do with how she died.
If she fell and broke it and hit her head or something.
I don’t like thinking about that and push those images as far out of my head as I can get them.
“And now you’ve met her,” Mayte says, and Claire and I both startle, turning around.
Mayte steps between us and looks down at her sister.
“Or seen her, I guess. I guess you can’t really meet someone when they’re dead.
” The way she says it feels harsh and cold and uncomfortable, especially when we’re standing over Aida’s body.
“She looks beautiful,” Claire says.
Mayte nods. “I’m jealous of her hair.”
“Right?” Claire says. “I swear, mine is literally straw.”
“Well, not literally,” I say. They both turn to me. “I mean, if it was literally straw, you’d have actual straw coming out of your head, which you don’t. Your hair is figuratively straw because—”
They’ve already both turned away from me.
“Also, did you see her nail polish?” Claire asks.
“Yeah,” Mayte says. Her voice gets soft and drifts far away. “Sometimes, after school, I would…” She drags off as she reaches into the casket and grabs the curled-up, deformed hand, peeling the fingers harshly back from the palm. “They didn’t paint her nails,” she says.
“Yeah, they did,” Claire says. “We were just looking at—”
“No,” Mayte says. “They didn’t paint her seashell hand.”
“That’s okay,” Claire says.
“You can’t even really see those nails,” I say.
Which apparently I should not have said.
Mayte comes undone, falling to the floor and sobbing.
“They need to paint her nails!” she screams. Janko and Leo come running over and the four of us fall to the floor with her.
Leo tries to take Mayte in her arms, but Mayte fights her touch away.
“They have to paint them! She can’t be in there with only one hand done.
It doesn’t matter that they’re hard to see.
No one would just want one hand painted and she shouldn’t have to have just one hand painted because it’s not her fucking fault that her hand looks like that and—”
A woman who works at the funeral parlor kneels with us.
“?Qué es the problema?” she asks, in a very unaccented Spanish that sounds almost worse than mine.
“She speaks English!” Leo yells at the woman. “Did you not hear her screaming in English?”
Janko reaches for Leo and holds her to his chest as she begins to sob.
I am such a disaster. I am the world’s biggest disaster. Why did I say that?
“Is there a problem, ma’am?” the funeral parlor woman asks.
“You didn’t paint her nails. You didn’t—” I reach for her arm and she pulls it away. “Get off me, Auggie!”
“I didn’t… I wasn’t—”
“You didn’t do anything wrong, Auggie. Just let her be,” Claire says.
The woman stands up and looks into the casket. “Sweetheart, look. She has a beautiful red polish on—”
Mayte jumps up and grabs Aida’s polish-less hand. “Look! They didn’t paint her nails. They didn’t paint the nails on her seashell hand and—”
“There should be polish in the other room,” the funeral parlor woman says. “Just give me one moment and I’ll—” She rushes off in the middle of her sentence.
Claire and I stand up but keep our distance from Mayte.
Janko is still on the floor holding Leo as she cries.
I glance over at the table where Mayte was sitting with her family.
Her dad is nowhere to be found. Her mom, on the other hand, is sobbing, surrounded by other women who are hugging her, holding her, crying with her.
None of them even glance at Mayte sobbing.
“Here,” the funeral parlor woman says. She shows Mayte a nail polish color that matches Aida’s other hand. “How’s this?”
Mayte catches her breath and smooths her dress. “That looks fine.”
The woman gently takes Aida’s hand, unfurls the fingers, and begins to paint the red polish onto her nails. We’re all silent as we watch. When she’s finished, she smiles and lets Aida’s hand go. The nail polish smears against the inside of her palm.
Once the woman has left, Mayte reaches in and grabs Aida’s hand, splaying the fingers again, and blows on the wet polish.
“She hated this,” Mayte says. “When the polish would get all over her hands.”
“Who wouldn’t?” Claire says.
“Right?” says Mayte. She turns to us, her eyes still red and puffy. “I’m sorry about that.”
“About what?” Claire asks.
“About that meltdown. I was acting like a baby over nothing. I’m sorry.” She nods at me. “To both of you. To everyone, really.”
“I don’t think it was over nothing,” I say. “It’s okay to be sad about—”
“About your half sister dying? One you never even lived with? One you only spent, like, two months with, truly?” She blows on Aida’s nails and then gives a half laugh. “I’d say it’s a bit of an overreaction.”
Claire and I look at each other and then down at Leo and Janko, who have both calmed since hearing Mayte’s absolutely bizarre words.
“I don’t think it’s an overreaction,” Claire says.
“Well, I do,” Mayte says. “And it’s my reaction. And my sister.” She blows on the nails again. “Half sister. I guess.”
None of us say anything to her, but we stay beside her, and my mind begins to spin.
Here is one of my first friendships I wasn’t born into, a friend I somehow made myself despite being an actual—a figurative asshole to her.
Being around most people makes me want to jump out a window.
But Mayte is a person I genuinely like, and I keep thinking about what Mr. Ashwood said: Why do you write?
What does language mean to you? What do stories mean to you?
I write because I want to be seen.
Language is the only way to find out what I mean.
Stories are how humans learn the truth about themselves.
Looking at Mayte, I want her to be seen.
This black dress, perfect hair, straight-backed apology is not her.
Somewhere inside is a Mayte with emotions and dreams. I saw a glimpse of that Mayte the night Aida died.
But she hides those parts behind her roles as a good daughter and a good granddaughter and a good friend.
I want her to find out what she means. She is sobbing over her desire to honor her sister while at the same time denying that Aida is her sister.
Mayte just seems so tied up in her head.
Her emotions are all muddled and her thoughts are all tangled and I want her to be free.
I want Mayte to learn the truth about herself.
I want to write Mayte’s story.