ALL THAT'S LEFT

I was four years old the night the world ended. That is how I have always framed it not as the night my parents died, not as the night a man came to our house with quiet shoes and a loud gun, but as the end of the world. Because that is what it felt like to a child crouching behind the curtain in the living room of our small house in Matamoros, watching through the gap where the fabric did not quite reach the wall, watching a man I did not yet know the name of take everything from me in the space of three heartbeats. Seth was beside me. My twin. My mirror. He had his hand in mine, fingers so tight they hurt, and I did not ask him to loosen his grip because I needed it, that pain, something real to hold onto while the world unmade itself in front of us. There are things I remember with a clarity that frightens me, even now. The way my mother's dress was the color of yellow marigolds. The glass of water on the table that trembled when the first shot came and then was still. The sound my father made not a scream, not a cry, something smaller and more final than either of those things, a sound like a door closing forever. The way the man who had done it straightened his jacket afterward, unhurried, as though he had simply finished a chore. And his arm. The left one. When he reached to adjust his collar, his sleeve rode up, and I saw it a tattoo on his elbow, dark ink in the shape of something I could not name then, a creature coiled around itself, eating its own tail. An ouroboros, I would learn years later it was called. A serpent consuming itself. I did not know the word that night, but I burned the image into the back of my eyes with the desperation of a child who understood, somehow, that this image was the most important thing she would ever see. He said a name before he left. He said it the way men say grace before a meal practiced, ritualistic, without real feeling. He said it to my father's body, which I thought was strange, speaking to someone who could no longer hear. But now I think it was not for my father at all. It was for himself. A signature. An acknowledgment of authorship. He said: "El Patrón sends his regards, Carlos." Then he left, and the door closed, and Seth began to cry, and I did not. I have been trying to understand that silence in myself ever since. * * * They say twins share a soul. Seth and I shared everything else, a womb, a bedroom, a grief so large it had no bottom but that night drove a wedge between us that was not made of cruelty, only of difference. Seth cried for years. I watched. He felt everything on the surface of his skin; I folded everything inward, pressed it flat, stored it somewhere deep where it would keep. Uncle Luis was the one who found us. He came three hours after it happened, when he could not reach my father by phone, and he stood in the doorway of the living room for a long time before he moved. I watched his face do things faces are not meant to do. He was a big man, Uncle Luis: wide-shouldered, thick-necked, a man who looked like he had been made to carry things and watching him crumple was its own kind of horror, a second ending stacked on top of the first. He took us in without question. He was not married. He had a two-bedroom apartment on the east side of Matamoros that smelled of motor oil and instant coffee, and he gave us his bedroom and slept on the pull-out sofa for thirteen years without a single complaint that I ever heard. There were nights I lay in the dark and listened to the sounds of him moving around the apartment, the refrigerator opening, the low murmur of the television he kept at a volume meant not to wake us, and I understood even then that love is mostly made of small, invisible things like that. A man choosing discomfort so that children can sleep. He worked at Auto Electrica Border Logistics. He had worked there since before I was born, since before my father had worked there, a fact that would become significant in ways I could not yet imagine. He told us it was an automation company, and as a child I accepted this without curiosity, the way children accept the shape of the world they are given. He went to work in the mornings and came home in the evenings and brought us food and paid our school fees and took Seth to his hospital appointments, and the name of the place he worked was simply a sound, a collection of syllables that meant: the place where Uncle Luis goes so we can eat. I did not ask questions. I was too busy keeping the other things alive inside me; the image of the tattoo, the sound of that name, the yellow of my mother's dress, too busy making sure they did not fade or blur with the passing years. Some people would call that an obsession. I called it the only thing I had left. * * * Seth got sick when we were seven. The sickle cell had always been there, lurking in his blood like a sleeping threat, but that winter it woke up and it never fully went back to sleep. I learned the language of his illness before I learned algebra crisis, vaso-occlusive, hemoglobin, hydroxyurea. I learned to read his face the way a sailor reads the sky, for the particular quality of gray that meant we needed to go to the hospital, for the thinning around his eyes that meant the pain had moved into his bones again. He never complained either. We were alike in that, Seth and I, though we expressed it differently. I swallowed everything and turned it to stone; he made everything into a joke, lightened it until it was almost weightless. He would lie in his hospital bed with his arm taped to an IV drip and make me laugh until the nurses came to shush us. He had a gift for that: for finding the seam in a terrible thing and pulling at it until it gave way to something almost bearable. "You worry too much, Beth," he used to tell me. "You carry the whole world on your face." "Someone has to," I would answer. And he would laugh, and I would watch him laugh, and think: I would burn down everything to keep this person alive. I would burn down the sky itself. I did not yet understand that I would one day be tested on that.