PHILOMEL BOOKS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York
First published in the United States of America by Philomel,
an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2020.
Copyright © 2020 by Jenny Torres Sanchez
Map copyright © 2020 by Katrina Damkoehler
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2020934990
Ebook ISBN 9781984812278
Edited by Liza Kaplan
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
pid_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0
For
Mariee Juarez
Jakelin Caal Maquin
Felipe Gómez Alonzo
Juan de León Gutiérrez
Wilmer Josué Ramirez Vásquez
Carlos Gregorio Hernández Vásquez
Darlyn Cristabel Cordova-Valle
And all the children whose names we do not know, whose existence and demise have been hidden. And the children whose names will come after the publication of this book, who also suffered and died in United States custody while seeking refuge. For the children lost along the journey, the ones caught in between, guided only by their fragile hope, whose ghosts roam the borders and deserts of countries that failed them.
You deserved so much more. You deserved help.
You deserved to dream. You deserved to live.
Y para toda mi gente; que luchan tanto, que son pura vida, esperanza, y belleza.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Map
Epigraph
From “Exiles” by Juan Felipe Herrera
Prologue
Part One: Mi TierraPulga
Pequeña
Pulga
Pequeña
Pulga
Pequeña
Pulga
Pequeña
Pulga
Pequeña
Pulga
Pequeña
Pulga
Pequeña
Pulga
Pequeña
Pulga
Part Two: Donde Vive La BestiaPequeña
Pulga
Pequeña
Pulga
Pequeña
Pulga
Pequeña
Part Three: El ViajePulga
Pequeña
Pulga
Pequeña
Pulga
Pequeña
Pulga
Pequeña
Pulga
Part Four: DespedidasPequeña
Pulga
Pequeña
Pulga
Pequeña
Pulga
Pequeña
Pulga
Part 5: Al Borde de Tantas CosasPequeña
Pulga
Pequeña
Pulga
Pequeña
Pulga
Pequeña
Pulga
Pequeña
Pulga
Pequeña
Pulga
Pequeña
Pulga
Author’s Note
Research and Select Sources
Acknowledgments
About the Author
¿Si no peleamos por los niños, que será de nosotros?
If we don’t fight for the children, what will become of us?
—Lila Downs
From “Exiles” by Juan Felipe Herrera
and I heard an unending scream piercing nature.
—from the diary of Edvard Munch, 1892
At the greyhound bus stations, at airports, at silent wharfs
the bodies exit the crafts. Women, men, children; cast out
from the new paradise.
They are not there in the homeland, in Argentina, not there
in Santiago, Chile; never there in Montevideo, Uruguay,
and they are not here
in America
They are in exile: a slow scream across a yellow bridge
the jaws stretched, widening, the eyes multiplied into blood
orbits, torn, whirling, spilling between two slopes; the sea, black,
swallowing all prayers, shadeless. Only tall faceless figures
of pain flutter across the bridge. They pace in charred suits,
the hands lift, point and ache and fly at sunset as cold dark
birds. They will hover over the dead ones: a family shattered
by military, buried by hunger, asleep now with the eyes burning
echoes calling Joaquín, María, Andrea, Joaquín, Joaquín, Andrea
en exilio
PROLOGUE
When you live in a place like this, you’re always planning your escape. Even if you don’t know when you’ll go. Even if you stare out your kitchen window, looking for reasons to stay—you stare at the red Coca-Cola sign on the faded turquoise wall of Don Felicio’s store that serves the coldest Coca-Colas you’ve ever tasted. The gauzy orange of the earth—both on the ground and swirling in the air—that has seeped into every one of your happiest memories. The green palms of the tree you climbed one time to pick and crack the ripest coconut that held the sweetest water you gave your mother. And the deep blue of the sky you tell yourself is only this blue here.
You can look at all this and still be planning your escape.
Because you’ve also seen how blood turns brown as it seeps into concrete. As it mixes with dirt and the excrements and innards of leaking dead bodies. You’ve stared at those dark places with your friends on the way to school, the places people have died. The places they disappeared from. The places they reappeared one morning months later, sometimes alive, sometimes dead, but mostly in fragments. You’ve watched dogs piss in those places. On those bodies that once cried with life.
You plan your escape because no matter how much color there is or how much color you make yourself see, you’ve watched every beautiful thing disappear from here. Made murky by night and darkness and shadow.
You plan your escape because you’ve seen your world turn black.
You plan your escape.
But you’re never really ready to go.
PART ONE
Mi Tierra
M
y Land
Pulga
Mamá tells me I have an artist’s heart. She’s told me this ever since I can remember, usually out of nowhere. I’ll feel her gaze on me and I’ll look over at her and she’ll say, You have an artist’s heart, Pulga. I didn’t know what she meant when I was younger, but I didn’t care because she always smiled with this kind of smile that was happy and proud and sad all at the same time, and it made me feel like this thing, this artist’s heart she was talking about, was something big.
When she first said this, I pictured myself with a little mustache and beret like Tom and Jerry wear in the cartoons when they whip up a masterpiece in, no kidding, five seconds flat before they’re chased by each other or that bulldog or a broom. Five seconds—that kind of illusion probably isn’t good for little kids. But then again, getting chased is life, right? So maybe those cartoons did teach me something.
Anyway, the truth is that’s not the kind of artist I want to be. I want to be the kind of artist my father was—a musician who made cool-ass music and dreamed big dreams.
Maybe that’s what having an artist’s heart means. Dreaming.
Or maybe it means seeing color in the world, noticing and searching for it everywhere, in everything, because the world can be such a dark place.
Or maybe it means you feel things you wish you didn’t. Maybe it means that when you see blood on concrete, you can’t stop wondering who it belonged to. Maybe it means a part of you wants to cry and run.
All I know is an artist’s heart is the worst kind of thing to have around here. An artist’s heart doesn’t help you survive. It makes you soft, breaks you from the inside out. Little by little.
I don’t want to be broken. I don’t want to be in pieces. There’s too much of that around us already.
What I need is a heart of steel, a heart that is cold and hard and numb to the thorny pricks of pain, the slashes of tragedy.
Chico flicks something at my face, and I shoot a tiny piece of tortilla back at him, straight into his eye. He rubs at it and laughs. He’s sitting across the table from me, wearing his stupid powder-blue shirt again, when we hear Mamá’s cell phone ring.
“Man, don’t you have any other shirts? That tiny thing barely fits you. You look like a damn belly dancer or something.” I laugh, pointing at the visible fleshy rolls around his middle.
“Shut the hell up, man. It’s my favorite one, okay?” he says. “You see what it says here? American Eagle, okay. I’m an American Eagle . . . so . . . go fuck yourself,” he adds quietly.
He looks over at me, waiting to see my reaction.
“No, not like that, man. Remember what I told you, you gotta put some force behind your words. Stick out your chin. Lunge forward a little, like a dog being held back by a chain.”
I demonstrate, but Chico shrugs and pulls at his shirt. I’ve tried to teach Chico how to curse and insult properly, especially since he has the size to pull off the whole threatening thing. But Chico is too timid when he curses. Chico is too timid with everything. He broadcasts his weaknesses to the world without meaning to. Like even now, he pulls at his shirt self-consciously across his round belly so I know my comment cut right to his insecurities. If I were the kind of guy who wanted to break him, I’d just keep bothering him about it. But I love Chico, so I don’t. And I remind myself to lay off him a little.
He launches a fat tortilla crumb back my way and it lands in my hair. I shake it loose as Mamá’s cell phone rings again in the next room. We hear her answer, and then her voice goes from calm to frantic.
“Lucia, cálmate! I’ll call Doña Agostina but you just stay calm . . . you need to stay calm. I’ll be there in a few minutes. It’ll be okay. I promise.”
Chico looks at me, his left eye still red and teary, his finger mid-flick as worry creeps onto his face. “What happened?” he whispers.
I go to the open arch that separates our small kitchen from our only slightly larger living room, crowded with the oversized red velvet couches Mamá got for a good price before I was born. Mamá was proud she’d haggled the guy for an hour, asking him, “Who wants to sit on velvet in one-hundred-degree humid weather?” Turns out, Mamá did. Because she thought those couches looked like they belonged to royalty. And she prized them, even if it meant we had to get up every five minutes to cool off.
Mamá is pacing by our older-than-dirt television, cell phone pressed to her ear.
“What’s going on? Everything okay?” I ask. I brace myself for the news that someone has died. Or been killed. Or kidnapped.
“El bebé, Pulga! El bebé is coming!” she says. A big smile spreads across her face and her eyes go wide with happiness, erasing the worry for a moment. Before I can ask any more questions, she’s on another call, explaining to Doña Agostina that my cousin Pequeña has gone into labor at home, and that Tía Lucia can’t move her or get her to the hospital and to please, please hurry over there.
Pequeña is seventeen, two years older than me, and she’s my cousin, but not by blood. Just like Tía Lucia is my aunt, but not by blood. And Chico is my brother, but not by blood. Blood doesn’t matter to us unless it’s spilling. We’re family—there for each other no matter what. And so a moment later, Mamá is shouting at us to lock up the house, over the sound of her motor scooter starting up and zooming out of our front patio as she rushes to Tía Lucia and Pequeña.
“Come on!” Chico yells as he pushes past me in the kitchen. Chico’s been dying to meet Pequeña’s baby, constantly staring at her belly and asking her how she feels whenever we’re all together. At first I thought this was just Chico being his usual self, someone who worries about others, who thinks babies and puppies and kittens are cute. But then, one night in our room not too long after we found out Pequeña was pregnant, he told me about how he believes we come back to Earth after we die. That we’re reborn and find our way back to those we left behind.
And I realized then that Chico believes a part of his mamita is coming back to him. Maybe he thinks that when he finally sees Pequeña’s baby, he will recognize in it some bit of his mother and see her once more.
Mamá and I don’t really believe in that stuff. But who knows. Maybe Chico’s right.
I grab my key and lock up. I run in the direction of Tía Lucia’s house, following the dust of Mamá’s scooter through the streets of our barrio, and catch up with Chico easily because I’m small and a fast runner—a good thing around here. We’re about halfway there when Chico remembers he’s no Olympian and slows down to a jog, then to a walk.
“Damn,” he says, leaning over and holding his stomach. “I can’t breathe. Let’s just walk. These things take time anyway, right?”
I figure he has a point and we slow down. He takes huffs of the thick, humid air and his face is flushed a deep burnt orange.
“Man, why’d Pequeña wait so long anyway?” he says. “I mean, shouldn’t she be having the baby in a hospital? You think this is safe? Her having the baby at home like this, like we’re in the dark ages or something? You think she’ll be okay?” He wipes tiny drops and streaks of sweat from his hairline and squints against the bright white of the burning sun.
“Yeah, of course she’ll be all right. Women have babies every day, right? And you know Pequeña, man. No little baby is going to take her out.” I laugh, hoping to convince Chico, but he just shrugs.
I can tell his worry is starting to eat away at him. He’s getting nervous like he always does, especially when it has to do with Pequeña or me or our mothers. Like, he worries if Mamá is late coming home from work, even if it’s just a few minutes, because she might get caught in the dark. No one wants to get caught in the dark around here. And then there was the time Tía Lucia was getting threatening phone calls for a week straight demanding money. Chico’s gut gushed and creaked and moaned with worry like it was eating him up inside until the calls suddenly stopped, even though Mamá and Tía said they�
��d heard of those kinds of calls happening to others, too. Just small-time criminals pretending to be the really bad guys to see if they could extort some easy money. If someone doesn’t take the bait, they just move on. I gotta admit—even I was a little freaked out by it. And I could tell it made Tía Lucia a little on edge, too. That’s another thing about life around here—you can never be completely sure what’s a real threat and what’s fake.
“It’s wild, you know?” Chico says next to me now. “Pequeña having a baby.”
I pick up a rock from the road and pitch it as far as I can, watching it land and send up a little puff of dust. Yeah, it’s wild. And of course Pequeña should be having her baby in a hospital. Of course she shouldn’t have waited so long, so that she got to the point where she couldn’t walk or move and Tía Lucia was in a panic, calling on Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and Mamá to help her.
Up ahead I see Doña Agostina hurrying to Tía’s house and I feel a little better since the old woman was a midwife when she was younger. Maybe everything will be okay. And Pequeña will be okay. Even if Pequeña hasn’t seemed okay for months.
The truth is, Pequeña probably waited too long because she didn’t want anything to do with this baby. She refused to acknowledge its existence. She didn’t talk about it. Or prepare for it. And I think a part of Pequeña probably thought she could make it go away if she ignored it. It made me feel sorrier for her than ever before, more than when her father left.
More than when he never came back.
I don’t think she was ever going to tell Tía Lucia or Mamá or Chico or me about the pregnancy. And I wonder if we hadn’t accidentally found out, what Pequeña would have done when this day finally came. Would she have had the baby secretly in her room one night? Emerged with it the next morning, carrying it in one arm, still refusing to acknowledge it? Ignoring all the questions that would be asked?
The only reason we found out she was pregnant was because months ago, Pequeña fell from the white bus that takes us back and forth from the open market in the center of town and ended up bruised, bloodied, and broken at the town clinic. Mamá and I got there just in time to hear Pequeña trying to explain to the doctor what had happened. She mumbled that it’d been too hot and crowded. That she’d gotten dizzy and lost her grip as someone shoved into her. That’s all, she insisted. That’s how she slipped out of the open bus and onto all those rocks just as the bus had begun to descend from the highest hill in our barrio.
We Are Not from Here Page 1
