American Dirt

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Lydia borrows a machete from one of the men to cut the onions and avocado, because there isn’t even a knife in the kitchen. There are paper plates in one of the drawers, but no forks, so they scoop the eggs into tortillas and eat them wrapped up. Lorenzo seems preoccupied.

‘You have to eat more than that,’ Lydia tells him when he returns his plate to the counter still half-full. ‘You need lots of calories if you expect to walk through the desert.’

He stands with one hand hanging loose by his side, and regards her. He seems at a loss. She takes the plate and adds another spoonful of eggs, a wedge of avocado.

‘Here.’ She pushes it back to him. ‘Want a banana?’

He leans his elbows on the counter, picks at one corner of the tortilla, and eventually takes a bite. He talks with his mouth full. ‘Why you being so nice?’

She gathers up the empty paper plates the other men left behind, and selects a banana from the bunch for herself. She snaps the top and starts to peel it. ‘I know what it’s like to run from them,’ she says simply. ‘I know what it’s like to be afraid.’

After the food, the day passes in excruciating eagerness. Lydia tries to engage the men in conversation, but they’re sullen, and they stick to their card games for most of the day. When they do speak, infrequently, Lydia strains to discern their accents, but eventually she releases herself from the effort. Because again: Why? If they are violent men, if they know her or recognize her, and decide to trade her life for a small fortune, she will find out soon enough.

They all go to sleep early, stocking up on rest while they can. Lydia, the sisters, and the two boys share the same bedroom where they slept last night. Marisol joins them, and they all stack their packs against the closed door. They curl up in corners or stretch out with their jeans rolled into makeshift pillows. Rebeca throws one arm over Luca like a teddy bear, and the two of them snore softly together. Beto sleeps sprawled out on his back in the shape of an X with his mouth wide open. The two quiet men share the other bedroom, and Lorenzo takes the couch.

Luca dreams of a deep stone well. At the bottom of the well are the sixteen bullet-riddled bodies of his family. He knows this not because he looks into the well – in fact, he takes care to give the well a wide berth anytime he has to pass it during his day – but because he hears them talking down there. He hears the echoey sounds of their laughter and lively conversation. He hears Papi telling jokes to Yénifer and Tía Yemi. He hears Tío Alex playing monster-tag-wrestling with Adrián, hears his cousin squealing and laughing while his father tickles him. Luca even hears Abuela lightly scolding them all, not because she actually disapproves, Luca realizes, but because a casual reprimand is Abuela’s way of participating, and that is the thing, really, that makes Luca understand that the dream is real. Because this insight about Abuela is new, a thing Luca didn’t perceive about her when she was alive. So they are still there, Luca knows. They are at the bottom of the well. And he wants to go to them. He wants to be with them. He knows that the holy water down there is life, that it’s essential, that it will satisfy his every need, that it has revived them all. So he goes, he goes to the well at last, without fear, without hesitation. But as he approaches, their voices and laughter cease. It’s only the plink and trickle of some unseen droplets that echo into the shadowy depths. So Luca pulls on the rope instead. He thinks to draw up the bucket, that maybe he can ride it to the bottom. They can all be reunited. But he knows by the smell that something’s wrong. Before the bucket is fully visible, he can tell. There’s a rottenness. He draws the bucket into the light, and it’s only a flash of gore. Fingers, eyeballs, teeth. Papi’s earlobe, a lock of Yénifer’s hair. All floating in the putrid bucket of blood.

Luca awakens from the nightmare with his heart pounding, but he’s not afraid. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that he’s no more afraid than he always is now. His prevailing emotion is irritation, because Beto is sleeping beside him, farting. He lets another one rip while Luca lies there, blinking in the stench. It was such a nice dream until the odor turned it. ‘Papi,’ Luca says out loud in the dark. He rolls over and covers his nose with his sleeve.

They’re all awakened at dawn to the sound of a key in the lock and a crush of heavy bootsteps on the wooden stairs. El Chacal has arrived with five more migrants – two brothers from Veracruz named Choncho and Slim, plus their two teenage sons, David and Ricardín. The brothers are big, strong men, and even their teenage sons are big, strong men, and it’s impossible to tell which son belongs to which father because they all look so much alike. They have big voices and thick forearms and solid necks. They all wear jeans and plaid button-up shirts and enormous work boots. They have to duck their heads when they reach the bottom step. The four of them fill the apartment beyond its capacity. But there is a fifth man as well, named Nicolás, who’s tiny in comparison with the others, average-size. Like Marisol, he’s a deportado, and he has amazing blunt eyebrows, which look like they’re drawn onto his face with a marker, Luca thinks. He wears an Arizona Wildcats T-shirt and thick-framed glasses. He’s a lapsed PhD student at the University of Arizona.

El Chacal tells everyone to sleep today, to rest as much as they can, and to hydrate themselves. ‘Make sure you have the supplies you need. A warm jacket for the nights, and decent shoes for walking. No bright colors. Only things that will blend in with the desert, camouflage. If you don’t have the right gear, you don’t make the journey,’ he says. Lydia hadn’t thought of the colors. She does a quick inventory of their clothing in her mind. She thinks they’ll be okay. The coyote continues. ‘I’ll provide water. We leave before sundown.’

The apartment is stifling now, crowded with bodies and anticipation. In the bedroom, Lydia and Marisol are both on their knees, unpacking and repacking their belongings for the trip ahead.

‘I don’t know why I told my daughters to send all these clothes,’ Marisol says, rummaging through a small black suitcase. ‘I’m going to end up leaving all this behind. Now I’ll have to go shopping in San Diego.’

The woman seems to have forgotten Lydia’s odd behavior on the street, or at least she’s pretending to be untroubled by it.

‘I’m sorry for yesterday.’ Lydia wants to explain, but there’s so little she can say without revealing herself. ‘I got spooked. I’ve seen, we’ve seen so much atrocity, sometimes I can’t tell what’s real. Who to trust—’

‘Please,’ Marisol interrupts her. ‘Don’t apologize. You’re right to be wary, I’m sure.’

Lydia takes a deep breath. ‘If you want to stay alive, you have to be.’

Marisol stops rolling the T-shirt she’d been packing and looks up at Lydia. She nods.

Marisol makes the trip to the grocery store alone this time, and when she returns, she stores half in the fridge for later, and then she and Lydia prepare the food together, a huge amount of food, they think. There are eggs again, and rice and beans and tortillas, and this time also some plantains and more avocado, and even a small bit of cheese and some nuts and some yogurt, all of which are expensive but dense with the protein their bodies will require for the journey. The large brothers and their sons are happy with the food, and chivalrous about making sure everyone has enough to eat, but when it’s clear that the others are finished and there’s food left, they devour every morsel. Soledad and Beto do the cleaning up, while the others sit talking on the couches and stools.

Luca sits on the floor between his mother’s legs and listens to the grown-ups telling stories. Even though it’s a bunch of strangers in the house, it has the atmosphere of a party. As such, it makes Luca feel very still and alert. The large brothers from Veracruz are gregarious. They tell stories and sing songs, and their voices boom out through the room regardless of their intended volume. They are demonstrating for their sons how to be in the world, how to fill up even more space than the bulk of your body demands, to leave no room for misconceptions, to put people around you at ease with your unusual size. They tell stories of their years working in el norte, picking corn and cauliflower in Indiana, working as line packers at a dairy plant in Vermont, sending every paycheck home to Veracruz. Slim’s son Ricardín carries an armónica in his breast pocket, and when he takes it out to play it, his father slaps his leg in time with the song, which draws Beto out of the kitchen and into the center of the room, where he pushes aside the small coffee table to make room for break dancing. Rebeca flits away to the bedroom to rest, and the two quiet men who arrived first disappear as well, but the rest remain there, talking and sipping instant coffee from paper cups. Luca is drawn mostly to Ricardín, because of his quick smile and the armónica. Ricardín notices Luca watching him, and holds the armónica up.

‘Want to try?’ he asks.

Luca nods and stands up. He looks at Mami to make sure it’s okay first, and then, with her encouragement, takes a step toward Ricardín to study how he plays the thing, how he uses it to draw music out of thin air. Even seated on the couch, Ricardín is taller than Luca, so Luca has to look up into his face. When he holds the armónica up to his mouth, his hand is so large, the instrument disappears behind it, like he’s concealing it beneath a baseball mitt. His fingers move up and down, up and down, showing glimpses of the flat metal beneath. Luca watches carefully, and then Ricardín hands the armónica to him.

‘Go ahead,’ he says. ‘Give it a try.’

Luca takes it and holds it up to his mouth. He blows. And he’s surprised that, right away, he can make such a lovely sound.

‘Hey!’ Ricardín grins at him. Luca smiles and tries to hand it back, but Ricardín pushes it toward him again. ‘Keep going. Again!’

He claps his giant hands while Luca runs the metal instrument up and down his lips, trying the different sounds it makes. It’s easy.

‘Chido, güey,’ Beto says. ‘Can I try?’

Luca hands him the armónica. While the boys pass the instrument around, Choncho asks Marisol about her family in California. She tells them she was arrested at a routine immigration check-in almost three months ago.

‘Wait, you actually go to those things?’ Nicolás, the PhD student, asks.

‘Of course!’ Marisol says. ‘I play by the rules!’

‘What is it?’ This is Lydia.

‘A routine immigration check-in?’ Marisol asks.

‘Yes.’

‘It’s an appointment, usually once a year, where I have to go and check in with an ICE officer,’ Marisol explains. ‘So they can review my case.’

‘But what for? So you can get your papers?’

‘No, just so they can keep tabs on me,’ Marisol says.

Lydia is confused. ‘And ICE is…?’

‘Immigration and Customs Enforcement.’ Nicolás fills in the acronym. ‘I never went to a single one of my check-ins.’

‘I guess it doesn’t matter now,’ Marisol says. ‘We both ended up in the same boat. To think of all that wasted bus fare.’

‘But I don’t understand,’ Lydia says. ‘They always knew you were there?’

‘Sure, for years,’ Marisol says. ‘After my husband died, and I didn’t leave before the deadline they gave me, I received a notice to come for a check-in. I went every year. Never missed one.’

‘And they didn’t deport you? Even though you were undocumented?’

‘Not until now.’

‘But why not?’

Marisol shrugs. ‘I never committed any offenses. I have a daughter who’s a citizen.’

‘They have discretion,’ Nicolás says. ‘They’re supposed to be able to use their discretion, so they can divert their resources to deporting bad guys. Gang members, criminals.’

‘But now suddenly they’re deporting people just for showing up at their check-ins,’ Marisol says.

‘And that’s what happened to you?’ Lydia asks.

Marisol nods. She’d been dressed in her dark red scrubs, planning to head straight to her job as a dialysis technician after her appointment. It was a Tuesday morning, and both her daughters were at school. They’d been worried about the upcoming check-in for months, of course. Everyone worried now. The appointments used to be just procedural, an easy way for the government to exert some control over an overburdened system, and an opportunity for the migrant to improve her legal status by demonstrating her cooperation. But now everyone was alarmed by the spike in arrests, and some people stopped going to the check-ins altogether. Not Marisol. She hadn’t been willing to demote her daughters to a life in the shadows. San Diego was the only home they’d ever known, so she never really believed they’d deport someone like her, a middle-class woman with perfect English who came here legally, a homeowner, a medical professional. Three months later, she’s still in a state of disbelief. Ricardín provides a bluesy riff on the armónica to conclude her story, which makes it funny instead of heartbreaking. They all laugh.

‘So you were in detention for two months?’ Nicolás asks.

Marisol nods.

‘What was that like?’

She pauses to consider the question, and as she remembers, she winces. ‘I mean…’ She gropes for a word to encompass her memories of that place, but she can’t find one substantial enough. ‘Horrible?’ she says. ‘Like you’d expect, I guess. I slept on a mat in a cold cell. It was freezing all the time, como una hielera. No blankets, no pillows, only those tinfoil things. I woke up stiff and sore every morning, with a kink in my neck. They wouldn’t replace my contact lens solution, so when that ran out, at least I didn’t have to look at the walls closing in.’

Nicolás cringes while she talks. ‘I couldn’t hack it. I’m claustrophobic.’

‘Yeah, it was utterly dehumanizing.’ Marisol sighs. ‘But my lawyer thought I had a good chance, so I told myself to be strong, that it would all be worth it.’

‘Good for you, sticking it out,’ Nicolás says. ‘I left after two days. They were going to transfer me to El Paso, so I did voluntary departure. I knew I’d rather walk through the desert than spend another day in that place.’

‘But it was such a waste of time!’ Marisol says. ‘Two months I sat in that cell without my daughters.’ She presses her eyes closed and then opens them again. ‘So many mothers in there without their daughters, without their children.’ Her eyes fall to the floor and her voice drops to a whisper, but they can all hear it in the hushed room. ‘Most of those women were separated from their children at the border,’ she says. ‘When they were caught coming in. Some had babies taken right out of their arms. I thought those women would lose their minds. They didn’t even know where their children were – some of them were too young to talk, too young to remember their names.’

Lydia leans forward over Luca, who’s sitting between her legs. She pinches his T-shirt between her finger and thumb. It’s too much. They all glance at her without meaning to. They don’t want her to think the same thoughts they’re thinking, so they quickly look away. Marisol tries to change the subject. Back to Nicolás. ‘Weren’t you eligible for a student visa? As a PhD candidate?’

‘I took a sabbatical for one semester.’ He shrugs. ‘Didn’t realize I had to file extra paperwork for that.’

‘So that was it?’ Marisol asks. ‘You got deported because of paperwork?’

‘Yep.’ He nods, straightens his spine, and spreads his hands wide, palms up, as if he’s the product of a magic trick. His deportation is a ludicrous feat of wonder.

Lydia will not think about any of it. Most especially, she won’t think about those families separated at the border. The children lifted straight out of their mothers’ arms. She absolutely cannot. It’s not possible, to have made it this far, and then to lose him. No. She runs her hands through Luca’s hair. She makes her fingers into the shapes of scissors and thinks about the haircut she’ll give him when they get to Arizona. This is what her brain can hold.

At midday, they take a siesta. They will sleep for the afternoon and get up in time to have one last meal in Mexico before tonight’s journey. They stretch their bodies out in the spaces they’ve claimed for sleep, Choncho and Slim joining the two quiet men in the back bedroom, their sons David and Ricardín finding space in the hallway and on the kitchen floor. Lorenzo and Nicolás take the leather couches. Only Soledad cannot rest. She returns to pacing the street outside. Lorenzo goes to the window while everyone else is asleep and watches her.

When she returns to the hot, quiet apartment, she’s startled to find Lorenzo sitting up on the couch looking at her. His shoes are off, but it doesn’t appear he’s been sleeping. She moves quickly past him and into the kitchen, where she fills her water bottle from the tap and takes a long drink. She can feel him looking at her back, but she doesn’t turn to intercept his gaze. She refills the bottle again, and then turns toward the bedroom where her sister and the others are sleeping.

‘Yo, what’s your hurry?’ His voice is quiet, careful not to wake Nicolás, who’s breathing heavily on the facing couch. Lorenzo’s attempt at a flirtatious tone comes out menacing instead.

But Soledad’s not afraid of him. There are a dozen other people in this apartment; there’s nothing he can do to her here. Besides, what Soledad has been through in these last months? She’s hard as nails. Almost nothing scares her anymore. She turns and narrows her eyes at him. She makes her voice unambiguous. ‘I’m in a hurry to get some rest. You should be, too.’

Lorenzo adjusts his position on the couch, stretches his torso out in front of him, and leans his head back against the cushions. ‘Yeah. Whatever,’ he says.

Soledad realizes then that he’s holding a cell phone in his hand. He leans forward and tosses it toward the arm of the couch by his feet. She freezes, turns her back on him again, and takes one step toward the bedroom before changing her mind. She turns back to face him. ‘That phone work?’

He picks his head up off the couch. ‘Pssh, yeah, what you think, it’s for decoration?’

She takes two steps back toward the living room, sets her water bottle on the counter, and hovers there for a moment. She doesn’t want to be indebted to a person like this, but it could be days before she has another opportunity. ‘Can I make a call?’

Lorenzo smirks at her. ‘What’s it worth to you?’

Soledad feels something sour swarm up in her mouth. She doesn’t answer but pretends with her face that the joke’s funny. Her smile is hollow, but she sees how it works on him – just that – a fake smile, and he goes all gooey and hopeful. In his mind, she’s already naked. What a scumbag, she thinks.

He holds the phone out to her. ‘Go ahead.’

She stretches so she can take the phone from a distance. ‘Thanks,’ she says. The door to the bedroom is already open for air circulation, and the lights are off inside. Rebeca and Luca sleep nearest the door, wrapped up together and dreaming, because Lydia’s initial objection to that kind of closeness is so far gone they hardly remember it now. Sole takes two steps into the room and squats down beside her sleeping sister. She hesitates to wake her.

‘Rebeca,’ she whispers, touching her sister’s shoulder lightly. Luca’s eyes pop open, but Rebeca is still asleep. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says to Luca, but he’s already fallen back asleep. ‘Rebeca,’ she says again, shaking her sister more roughly. Her sister breathes deeply and doesn’t move. Soledad stands and moves quietly through the apartment, up the stairs, and back out to the street.

She removes the tiny scrap of paper with the hospital’s phone number from where it’s folded into a tiny square in her pocket. She presses the numbers. It takes her two tries, but then the phone at the Hospital Nacional in San Pedro Sula is ringing.

‘Hello?’

There are several transfers before Soledad hears the familiar voice of the nurse Ángela on the line. She can feel adrenaline coursing through her shoulders, her neck. When Soledad looks back on this moment for the rest of her life, when she relives it, really, she will come to believe that she already knew what the nurse was going to say, she knew it well before the words emerged from her mouth and traveled into that faraway phone, before they bounced out across cell towers and satellites and reverberated back into this borrowed cell phone here on the border of the United States, and fell into her waiting ear. She will come to believe that she knew it from the moment Lorenzo handed her that phone, from before that even, from when she first stood on the pavement in Nogales and wrapped her fingers around the bars that demarcated the border of Estados Unidos, from when she sat on that cold, dirty toilet in Navolato while that unwanted but still loved baby fell out of her, from the first day she felt the thudding and thrumming of La Bestia beneath her bones, from the first time Iván raped her, from way before that even, before she ever set eyes on the city of San Pedro Sula, from the days when her father used to hoist her onto his shoulders and she’d wrap her tiny baby-arms around his sweaty forehead while he swiped a path for them through the cloud forest with his machete. She will come to believe that she knew this truth from the day she was born, when her father first held her in his arms and gazed upon her beautiful face with love and love and love.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Ángela says.

Alone in the street, Soledad bends in half, planting the palms of her hands hard against her knees. She doesn’t cry, but instead shakes and shakes. She paces but cannot find anywhere to escape her panic. She says the word no out loud more than a hundred times, tight through the garble of her seizing throat. She flaps her hands to try to shake the adrenaline out of her, but the grief has descended like a demon beast, and she realizes immediately that the burden of that grief must be hers alone to bear. Rebeca must survive the desert, and she might not survive the desert if she has to do it while carrying this monster on her back. She will not tell her sister. My fault. So she gets down on her two knees right there in the street and feels the sharp pebbles pressing up through her jeans. She prays and prays that God has taken Papi quickly into heaven, that somehow her father will forgive her for the death she has caused him.

‘I’m so sorry, Papi. Forgive me, Papi, please,’ she says over and over again.

Her legs feel shaky so she moves to sit on the curb, wondering vaguely how the news will travel up the mountain to the village. She wonders if Mami and Abuela already know. She wonders if she will ever see them or hear their voices again. Because Papi was the only hub connecting them, and now he’s gone. One of the other men from the mountain who works in the city will hear, she thinks, and in sorrow he will carry that unholy news on the bus, three hours up the narrow, disappearing roads into the clouds. He’ll deliver it to Mami and Abuela. She closes her eyes to that thought. She puts it away from her because Soledad has been through enough to know that she’s at her limit, that she can go no further into that anguish without vanishing forever. The only thing that matters now is Rebeca. She can still save Rebeca.

When she stands up from that curb, Soledad is already a ghost of herself. Perhaps very deep within her, there’s still some smoldering wick that was once the flame of her person, but she cannot feel it there. She opens the door of the apartment, and descends.