"It's coming," I had told her. "My mom says it's coming."
"I'm sure it is," she had said. "I'll be watching for it, Maya."
So I had crossed off everything else, and I had packed, and I had set two alarms, and I had lain awake until almost two listening to my parents talk in their bedroom on the other side of the wall. They talked the way they always talked when they didn't want Iker or me to hear, in a low fast Spanish so tangled together that it came through the plaster like water through a pipe, no words, only pressure. It wasn't unusual. My parents had been having that kind of conversation as long as I could remember. What was unusual was that at some point, around one in the morning, my father raised his voice, which he never did, and I heard one sentence perfectly clearly.
"Ya no, Rocío. Ya no más."
Not anymore. No more.
And then a door, and his heavy steps on the stairs going down, and then nothing, and then sometime after that, I guess, I fell asleep.
I looked at the list one last time. Then I put on my sneakers, not the boots, because I wanted to save the boots, and picked up the orange pack by its top handle, which was harder than it looked, and carried it down the hall past Iker's door, where I could hear him talking to himself in the voice he used for narrating his Lego battles, and down the stairs, bumping it on every step.
My mother was in the kitchen.
She was standing at the counter with her back to me, the way she had been standing in April, but she wasn't cutting flowers. She wasn't doing anything. She had a mug of coffee in her hand and she was looking out the window over the sink at our little yard, at the chain-link fence and the Gwynnes' above-ground pool on the other side of it and the garage that leaned a few degrees to the left, and the coffee wasn't steaming anymore. She was dressed, which was strange for a Saturday. Jeans, and the blue blouse she wore to parent-teacher conferences, and her hair pulled back tight. She hadn't heard me. Or she had, and she wasn't turning around.
"Mami," I said.
I set the pack down by the back door, where I had planned all week to set it down, so that when Dad came out with the truck keys at one o'clock I could just pick it up and go.
"Did it come? Did Papi get the mail last night? Because Dr. Brindle said noon, and it's not even seven, so if it's here I can scan it right now on your phone and upload it and we're fine, we're totally fine."