second, like a rabbit in a yard. The drawer in their bedroom that was locked. The time I asked to go with Yusra's family to Cancún for spring break, freshman year, and my mother said no so fast and so hard that Yusra's mom had called our house to ask if she had offended her somehow. The fact that I had never once seen a picture of myself as a newborn. Not one. Iker had a whole album, him red and furious in a plastic bassinet, him in a little striped cap from Danbury Hospital. I had started, in my pictures, at about two years old, already standing, already squinting suspiciously at the camera, on a stoop in Queens.
"There was a fire," I said. "You said there was a fire in Tía's building, and the baby pictures—"
"There was no fire," my mother said, and then she put her hand over her mouth and turned toward the window, and her shoulders started to shake.
My father looked at her for a long moment. Then he looked back at me, and I saw that he wasn't going to go to her, and that this was a decision too.
Upstairs Iker's Lego battle had gone quiet. Then the floor creaked, and there were his feet on the stairs, quick, bare, slapping, the way a nine-year-old comes down stairs on a Saturday when he smells that something is happening. He came around the corner in his pajama pants and a Yankees shirt that used to be mine and stopped dead.
"Why is Mami crying?"
"Iker," my father said. "Go next door. Go see if Mrs. Gwynne needs help with the pool."
"It's seven o'clock in the morning."
"Then she'll be very surprised. Go."
Iker looked at me. At the booklet. At my face. He was nine, but he wasn't stupid. He had been born at Danbury Hospital in a snowstorm while the heater in the Corolla was broken, and he had a birth certificate in that locked drawer upstairs that said so, and he had a little blue United States passport, too, I found out later, that my parents had gotten for him when he was four, just in case. Just in case of what, I didn't ask. Just in case they had to send him somewhere without us, I think. Just in case one day somebody came for the rest of us and somebody had to be able to get on a plane.
"Is Maya not going?" he said.
"Go, Iker," I said. I didn't recognize my voice. "Go on. I'll tell you later. I promise."
He went. The back door banged. Through the window I watched him cross the yard in his bare feet and stand uncertainly at the gap in the chain-link fence, and then squeeze through it.