During one of Julia’s visits to her eldest in Baltimore, we got an eviction notice. Father thought it best to leave discreetly in the middle of the night.
From the marble phone stand to the broken chair to wool blankets used as luggage, things got progressively worse.
We moved into a smaller but modern house in an upscale neighborhood near the beach. Without a penny to our name.
Then a cheap two-bedroom in a “commercial” area. It was in that building that Mila came home from school to find everything out in the hallway, the refrigerator, the only table, all of it on display for strangers to gawk at.
Julia returned, business as usual.
Not long after that, they moved into a large condominium in an elegant building: two units to a floor, servant’s entrance and exit, window walls.
“Just say we’re very selective about window treatments. It takes time when they’re coming from Europe…”
A glass house. You adapt.
One bright afternoon, Julia asked Mila, dryly: “And you, do you want to go to the United States?”
Dad, sitting nearby, said nothing.
“Yes, it’d be fine…” Mila answered nonchalantly, hiding her shock
It was, of course, her father who got the airplane tickets. Mila stayed with the older sister in Baltimore for just under two years. Julia visited at least once. On his dime.
Some documentation error, presumably, was the reason the girl was put on the next flight back south.
When Mila landed, no one was there waiting for her. She found a bus to a relative’s house, and from there called an aunt, who drove her to the street where she’d been told her parents and brothers lived.
“Look, my dear, I’d have to make too many turns to get to the house, you can just walk a straight line from here,” she said, pointing to a narrow, residential street.
“They live at the end of it, on this side.”
And off the girl went, in the new orange turtleneck she’d managed to buy with babysitting money, not expecting a thing. Soon she spotted two vaguely familiar figures walking toward her along the same side of the street.
“Mila? Oh wow, it is you!” Julia offered a shallow hug, as usual, then mumbled something about a miscommunication over the flight delay.
“You’ve turned into a young woman,” said Apophis, leering at the girl’s emerging breasts. He had not changed. Julia said nothing.
The orange mock turtleneck lingers somewhere in her mind to this day.
There was no one to tell her the sweater had nothing to do with it.
In the short time Mila had been away, they’d gone from the posh glass house into a series of progressively worse rented rooms. Mila found them in a corner house that had seen far better days.
It was a far cry from the days of drawn curtains.
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