FICTION
RAFI
By: Jenine Arteaga
For Angel
I remember Rafael Sosa with his slightly crooked, definitely pointed nose, heavy eyebrows with even darker eyes beneath them and a broad forehead with lazy hair that always fell over his temple. He was a good kid, you know. We would sit on the front steps of school, sometimes leaning against the cool red bricks when it was hot out. He would wait for my ride to pick me up and wave goodbye, setting out to a destination he never spoke about. But while we sat there we’d talk about all the things nobody would ever figure were important, like the sound of the trees and how it reminded him of the ocean in Puerto Rico. He’d put his finger to his mouth and the both of us would fall silent, listening to the rustling, me imagining what the ocean looked like and asking him because I’d never seen it.
Then he’d cock his head to the side waiting for me to share something and I’d go into the scent of spring. The story of how I stuck my head out the window during class and said to Luther, “It smells like last year.” And Luther just looked at me saying, “Don’t be stupid it doesn’t smell like last year because it’s not last year.” I turned to Rafi and put my hand out into the air. “You know what I mean, that smell that tells you yesterday wasn’t too long ago.” Rafi nodded, tilting his head up and closing his eyes, inhaling slowly and deeply. Then he opened them like he was just waking up and said, “Like childhood.” He paused and stared across the street, watching a woman get her mail from the rusted box screwed into the doorframe, shuffling them with a long disinterested face. “I think the smell means something different for everyone. See for me it makes me remember this one day when my mom took me to the park while she was still pregnant with my sister.
I think I was five and there was this red swing, the big kid swing and I’m pointing with this huge smile on my face, so she picks me up from under my armpits and sits me on it. She says, “Ready, Rafi hold on.” A couple of seconds into the swinging I hear her say, “Oh!” and she lets go of my shoulders and I fall backwards but instead of crying I’m just lying there staring up at her. She gets to her knees and starts kissing me all over, my head, my hands. “I’m sorry baby, I sorry..” There were almost tears in her eyes, just for the simple fact that she let me go. “Your little sister kicked.. I’m sorry, I’m sorry...” I started laughing and put my hand on her belly she pushed my head on her shoulder kissing my forehead. I just remember staying there, feeling my sister kick my hand like she was jealous.”
He shifted his eyes to the cement and this kind of silent heaviness crept into his shoulders like iron pulling them towards the ground. I knew he was thinking of his mother, the way she was now, so I forced a laugh and said, “That sounds like something Jasmine would do.” He smiled. “Yeah… that little girls spoiled but I love her to death.” A dark van pulled up to the curb and honked its horn, we both looked up and I could tell that Rafi wasn’t filled with as much metal as he had been, so I grinned and told him to come over tomorrow. I got into the car and watched him walk in the opposite direction from the side mirror wishing there was some way I could get him to smile more often.
It happened somewhere during our last year of grammar school. They let us out early that day. I can’t remember why. We sat in front of the Nintendo 64 playing Mario Kart. He pushed me because I got ahead of him in the race, and I dropped the control and crashed into a palm tree. “No Cheating!” He got up and did a victory dance and shouted, “Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do to be number one.” He stuck out a finger, “That’s right, NUMBER ONE in case you missed it you might want to watch the replay.” I waved my hand, “Whatever Rafi, let’s play some Mortal Combat and we’ll see what happens.” My kitten rubbed himself against Rafi’s legs and looking up, meowed. “You know you’re supposed to hold them like this so you don’t hurt their backs.”
“Sure get distracted by my cat just so you don’t have to play me,” I said.
Rafi looked at his watch, “Actually I should be heading out.” He handed me the cat. “I’ll call you when I get there.”
It was about eight thirty when he decided to walk home from my house. He found her there on the much too crooked pavement in front of their apartment, a pool of blood surrounding her upper torso. I didn’t have the heart to ask him whether or not she was still alive when he got there and I suppose he never had the heart to tell me. His mother was a good woman as much as other people say she wasn’t. Yeah, sure she was an addict but there wasn’t anyone in this world she loved more than her children.
You could tell by the way she would hold them, pushing their hair back and kissing their foreheads, or by the way she cried when she looked at them saying they were too good for her. She treated me like her own every time I visited, always saying “I’m really glad you’re Rafi’s friend… I’m really glad.” Telling me stories and making me promise I’d never be like her. “This isn’t the kind of life you want,” she’d say, repeating it like she was really thinking. “This isn’t the kind of life you want...” Rafi, as much as he wanted to resent her, as much as he hated what he and his little sister had to go through, he understood whole-heartedly wishing she would change.
We were sitting on the little porch in front, eating freeze pops with his little sister when his mom came out. She had her hair tied back in a pony tail shorts on and a light pink shirt. “It feels good to be free!” she yelled out into the traffic on the street. “I promised you I would and look four months clean. See Rafi believe in your old lady cause she’ll do anything and everything for you.” Rafi kept his eyes on the floor while he nodded, his mom wrapped her arms around Jasmine and picked her up dancing to the music that spilled out from upstairs. She was really trying this time but I guess she still owed a lot of money from her last drug episode. They just showed up on her front steps while she stood their smoking. Slit her throat a few seconds into the argument. I don’t think anyone called the police until they heard Rafi yelling and crying and I’m not sure how long it took them to get there. How long he had to hold her dead or dying body.
He didn’t even call me. I had to hear about it through school the next day. Our principal came into the class. Folding her hands over and over flattening the wrinkles out of her black skirt. She said Rafi’s mom had an accident. Slowly correcting herself and stumbling over the word. Murdered. I didn’t know what to do. I just sat there too numb to realize I was shaking. I think I stood up and knocked over the chair because I felt my teacher’s hands on my shoulder trying to sit me back down. Murmuring that it’d be okay but what the hell did he know. When I ran out of the room no one came after me not until a couple of minutes later when I tried walking out of the building.
The secretary said she couldn’t let me go home without my parent’s permission but that if I wanted to I could call and ask them to pick me up. So that’s what I did except I couldn’t work up the nerve to dial the office. Instead I called my cousin and had him pretend to be my dad over the phone. A couple of minutes later he came and picked me up without saying a word. The whole ride over he sat there with his hands on the steering wheel letting the music play, but with this look that knew the last thing I needed was him talking. I slept for hours in his room, waking up at about five. I pulled the covers off my head and stared into the fish tank across from me, trying to drown myself in the blue light that radiated from it. I shifted to the slightly open door. I could see my parents in the living room whispering something about the funeral and how they didn’t want to disturb me at school when they found out. I stopped listening for a while and buried myself under pillows and blankets waiting for the tears, trying to force them but no matter how hard I tried nothing came. I just lay there my brain too together, letting me process everything that had happened as much as I wished crying would jumble my emotions.
I tried calling him but he never answered the phone. I didn’t push it anymore than that I knew he needed time besides I’d get to see him at the funeral as much as I wished it could’ve been under any other circumstance. The second we walked in the door he was the first thing we saw. Dressed in a dark navy blue suit because it was his moms’ favorite color. I never saw a more solemn look on his face than at that moment, his fingers intertwined in front of him, back straight and bowed head. Staring at the reflection of the round lights in his shined shoes. “Rafi,” I whispered. He looked up and smiled warmly but his eyes they seemed so broken. I held him for a good five minutes until he finally mustered. “I’m glad you came.”
Something must have happened, something really deep because we both started crying at the same time. For the first time. I can barely remember the rest of the night but after that kids started treating him weird. They just looked at him from across the room, turning away the second he looked up. He stopped waiting with me after school, never came by my house or talked to me during breaks. On graduation day while we stood there in front of everyone that had come to see us, he was the only one that was hurting; keeping his eyes stuck on the door all the way in the back, blinking often, biting the inside of his mouth whenever it trembled. Even at the end he was the only one that didn’t throw his hat up in the air. I guess he was keeping it for his mom, I imagined him standing next to her grave, resting it on top of her tombstone, kissing his hand and touching it to her name.
He didn’t say much but before he left I got him to sign my book, asking him to please call me and to invite me over for his birthday and holidays. I barely finished my sentence when he was already getting into the car and waving goodbye. After they turned the corner and sped away, I opened my book to page seventeen. The only thing he wrote was, “Thank-you.”