There was a call from the distance that sounded like stillness, a moment codified in Luis's bones, and seared into his soul. Some familiarity in the overlapping accents, both from the North and South, that his heart deciphered long before he could understand what the people around him were saying. As though, the moment his feet hit the ground and the dry heat of Mexico welcomed him, he was home. Though his tongue got tied in the vowels and consonants, as he tried to reconcile two languages, Luis knew that the way he breathed easier, there, did not replace the sense of unease that he carried.

No matter how much at home he might have felt when his mother winked at him, and their cab driver called him guero, he understood that something in the air rejected him. He was other there, just as he was other at home in the United States. In Mexico, because his shoes were too new, his shirts were too neat, and his skin was too light. At home, because his shoes weren't right, his shirts were too simple, and his skin was just a shade too dark to be light.

There was no guero in New York City. But when Luis sat on the steps leading up to his apartment on Stratford, that was home in a way that Mexican heat would never provide. He was Bronx, born and raised, and no kids with their suits and entitlement would ever convince him otherwise.





Abuelito Julio once told Luis that he had the heart of a hero.

"Un hijo de dios," Abuelito Julio had said. "He has a noble heart."

So, Luis, for as long as he could remember, vowed that he would be a son of God. Which would have been fine, except then, Abuelito Julio died gasping for breath on a white, antiseptic hospital bed, with his kids standing around his bed, and his thirty grandkids spread out in a waiting room made for ten. The nurses knew what was happening that day, even if Luis didn't. They gave the kids juices in small plastic containers, sealed with aluminum, like the stiff jello that none of them ate. See, Luis, who was eight at the time, might not have known what was happening all the way, but he understood enough to know that it wasn't the time for jello.

"Grandpa loved you," his mother told him afterwards. "He always said good things about you."

Which, again, might have been fine, except Luis never heard them one last time. All he had of that day was a little plastic container covered in aluminum, and the sounds of thirty grandkids who didn't know what to do.





Heat in Mexico City was nothing like the airiness of heat from el pueblo. The air smelled different in Chila, heavy like a freshly burned piece of paper, but warm like the heat off a flowing river. Even the sharp scent of chickens and dogs flowed through Luis, easy and safe. Grandpa Julio had lived there, had grown there, had raised twelve kids there, and Luis could smell it in the air.

The pueblo streets had come a long way since Luis had buried Abuelito Julio. There was pavement, where there had been dirt, meager WiFi, twenty pesos a day, where before there had been nothing. There was still no cell service, and even fewer houses with their own landlines, but the pueblo had done well in his absence. The kids hung out in the streets, men and women mingling like friends, when before he'd have to be out in the middle of the night to catch anyone together without supervision.

There was defiance there now, from the twenty-four-year-old women who said marriage wasn't for them, to the one teenage kid Luis had played with back in the day, who cooked for his mother. But where Luis saw it most, where it really sank in that he was in a different time, even if the air was still the same, was in the two guys, kids more than anything, who sat next to each other, not touching, but close enough. He saw it in the way their heads bent together over one of their cellphones, in the way their feet touched, the tension on their shoulders, the quick darting eyes whenever anyone walked too close.

Luis felt it, like a brush of lips against his face. Terror was nothing new, but there was something about the two guys that was hard to watch. As though, the way they clearly loved each other, was more a burden than he could ever hope to carry. As though, for some reason, they didn't deserve that happiness. Not that day.





Funerals, Luis had found, were nothing compared to what came after. The initial loss was nothing compared to twelve months of grief, to the reminders in the form of black bows on everyone's door. Twelve months of fear, for reasons he couldn't understand, as though everyone around him had suddenly become dangerous. No amount of singing, no amount of remembering, could take the fear away. Him, a small eight year old kid, running down his own hallways, racing against something in the dark. He had no way of telling anyone what he felt, because he didn't want anyone to think he was afraid of Abuelito Julio. Not the man who sat him on his knee and told him he was meant to change the world some day.

"I'm proud of you, because you're not afraid of anything," Abuelito Julio had told him, on the day Luis fell off his bike and scraped most of the skin off his knee.

So Luis was afraid of nothing, even if the smallest whisper set his heart racing.





Tia Estela was not meant to die. Not in the same way that Abuelito Julio went. Not when the air was heavy with burnt paper and warm heat from the flowing river. Not when she had looked Luis in the eyes and smiled, wide and wonderful, as she told him that she could see everything grandpa had seen in him.

"You won't disappoint," she'd said. "You never do."

Which would have been fine. Except by then, Luis was twenty-three, not eight, and he'd been fucking guys since he turned eighteen. He didn't go to church by then, didn't even stop when the ladies on the train stuck their pamphlets out for him to take. Not when his mother asked him to "please, be more like Julia," because Julia was gay, but she loved God more than she loved herself, and it showed.

Luis was twenty-three when Tia Estela died, and the air didn't smell any different, and the Mexico City heat was nothing compared to the warmth of Chila. And the two guys sitting next each other, didn't deserve their happiness when Luis hadn't felt the warmth of the day since Tia Estela died in the middle of their prayer.

Mourning at twenty-three, in the heat of the summer, was different than mourning when he was eight. The bows that hung on the house doors meant something now. They meant that Tia Estela was loved, that her family felt her loss in every action, in every sip of their coffees, in every missed phone call, and every rush of air. The quiet songs had to be sung, because Tia Estela liked it when she was lying on a hospital bed and her family sang them for her. The prayers were for her, just in case her life hadn't been shitty enough to grant her access to heaven. Luis sat in the front row, sang his hymns, prayed his prayers, because there was no door for him to heaven, but Tia Estela deserved it more than anyone he had ever known.

Twelve months was nothing this time around. It was not enough to encompass the life she'd had. Not enough time for Luis to fully express what it'd meant to him that she believed in him. That Tia Estela believed in the heart that Abuelito Julio had seen. That even at that point in Luis's life, when he'd stopped knowing what he wanted above a man to come home to, Tia Estela still believed he had been born to be a son of God.

So, he prayed, because Tia Estela deserved at least that from him.





When Luis was eight, he didn't know what it meant to have a noble heart.

When Luis was ten, he didn't know what it meant to have a noble heart.

When Luis was twenty-three, he didn't know what it meant to have a noble heart, but at least he knew, by then, what it meant that other people believed he did.





Tia Estela and Abuelito Julio, and Luis's mother, and his thirty cousins and ten other aunts and uncles, had all believed that Luis was going to be a doctor, one day. Julia, the other gay cousin, had even bought Luis a stethoscope for his eighteenth birthday.

"To the future Dr. Martinez," she'd said when she'd given it to him.

It was all the "noble heart" bullshit, Julia had told him. They'd seen something in him, in the way his little cousins swarmed him the minute he walked through their door. Something about how he always held doors open, always pushed in his chair, always had something nice to say, even to the assholes they went to school with. Something about how everyone had missed the amount of pot he smoked, and how much he hated church.

At eighteen, Luis had just discovered that the way Manuel filled out a suit, and the way his hands looked holding a Bible, meant very different things to Luis than they did to the other guys they hung out with. At eighteen, Tia Estela was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis. At eighteen, it was more the end of the world that he wanted to suck Manuel's dick, than it was that Tia Estela would be dead in five years. At eighteen, Luis had no idea what the hell he wanted to do with his life. He knew only that home were the steps leading to 1134 Stratford, and that home was the scent of baked bread in Tia Estela's kitchen.

At eighteen, Luis was never going to be a doctor.





At twenty-three, in Chila, where the air smelled like burnt paper and wet dirt, Luis understood what it meant to be home. When the last of the dirt had been piled on Tia Estela's coffin, and he'd sat on Abuelito's grave, exhausted and sad, he understood why his feet recognized the ground the minute he set foot in Mexico. He understood why his heart settled, even as he felt the weight on his shoulders. Mexico, the air in Chila, the overlapping accents at the airport terminal, the slight twang of his grandmother's own pueblo accent, it all meant home to him.

It was the people, the same way it had been the people back in the Bronx, on the steps leading up to 1134 Stratford. It was the people he craved, the people who made it home there in Chila, and back in the Bronx. It was the people who believed in him, the people who didn't, and even the people who didn't know him. It was Manuel, in his fitted suits, and Abuelito Julio, and Tia Estela.

So part of his home was dead and buried, and part of his home was alive. And Luis might never be ready to be a doctor, but he might be ready to understand that Tia Estela and Abuelito Julio, and Julia with her symbolic gifting, and his mother, and his thirty cousins, and his ten aunts and uncles, had only ever meant to love him. So he didn't fit, might never fit, in Chila or in the Bronx, in his family, or with the two guys who sat next to each other looking at a cellphone. But, at least, that day, he finally understood, that what he'd been feeling since Abuelito Julio had died, was his family, calling him home.





There was a call from the distance that sounded like stillness, and when Luis finally listened to it, he knew it was home.