We Are Not from Here

by Jenny Torres Sanchez

  Why are you leaving? How can you leave?

  I could run back to the shelter now, let her get on the train by herself, stay with Chico’s grave. Except I don’t have the energy to go back. And I know he wouldn’t want me to. So I sit here and wait with Pequeña, who is eating bread and staring at that train like the world has not just ended.

  “Do you even care? That he’s dead?” The words come out before I even realize I’ve thought them. And my hand grabs the bread out of hers, throws it on the ground.

  I tell my heart, Stop! But it’s too late. It’s spilled anger and sadness all over the place and I expect Pequeña to shout back, to be hurt, to insult or yell at me.

  But she just picks up the bread, continues eating it, dirt and all. She looks at me for a long time, until I turn away from her face that holds too much compassion, too much understanding, and makes my heart want to weep.

  “No matter how long we stay here, no matter how long we wait, he’s not coming back here,” she says.

  Tears flood my eyes and I watch as they drop, seeping into and darkening the concrete.

  Stop! Stop! Stop!

  But they don’t.

  * * *

  ~~~

  All afternoon, we sit and stare at that train, waiting for it to come to life. Waiting for the fourteen-hour ride ahead that will take us out of Lecheria to Guadalajara. But only when night falls does that beast wake up, rumbling and clanking.

  We grab our backpacks and hurry toward it, before it begins moving, before it pulls away. There are only a few of us that I recognize from the shelter, and only a few others who were already here waiting when we arrived.

  Maybe by this point people just need to rest longer at the shelters. Or maybe they’ve changed their minds. Or given up. Or died.

  Like Chico.

  The train pulls away, gaining speed, and Pequeña looks over at me, her face sad and worried. I think she’s sorry she’s making me go on. I think she knows that if she didn’t, I’d just stay here.

  I put my head down as we leave, because I am tired of the view from the top of this train. Tired of holding on for dear life. I’m tired of so much dirt and earth all around us, under our feet and on top of our loved ones. I put my head down because I can’t look, I can’t bear to look at this land where my best friend died. Where the earth will eat his flesh, turn his bones to dust.

  I don’t want to remember this moment of leaving him behind.

  I close my eyes, but I don’t sleep. And suddenly I hear my father’s voice in my ears. We’re gonna make it.

  I stare at my backpack. I don’t know if I want to hear the tape, but I’m tired of the sound of wind in my ears, of the clanking of the tracks. So I reach in, pull out my Walkman. I put on the headphones and press play. I wait for a song to finish, to hear his voice.

  Someday, Consuelo, the band’s gonna make it, baby. I swear, we’re gonna make it. And I’m going to give you everything you want. Everything you’ve ever wanted. There’s only you. You and me. Now check this one out, right here. Listen to that bass.

  I listen to his words again.

  And again.

  But my mind begins to wander, and thoughts about the stupid dreams my father had, and the dreams Mamá had, and the ones I latched on to roll in before I can push them back out. And I wonder if my father had lived, if he really would have made it as a big-time musician. I used to think, man, how the world missed out on him. On his music. How death robbed him of more than just his life. But now it makes no sense. Why did I ever believe that? Because not many people make it big. Hardly anyone makes it. And probably, my papá never would have made it. And maybe that would have made him angry, and maybe he would have blamed Mamá and me, and maybe he would have broken Mamá’s heart just like Pequeña’s papi broke Tía’s. And maybe all the dreams I ever thought could’ve been real were always, always destined to be crushed.

  I rewind and listen to his voice again.

  All I hear are lies.

  Like the lies I told Don Felicio about Gallo coming to see him soon. Like the lies I told Chico as he lay bleeding. And the ones I told Mamá when I insisted everything was okay.

  Like the lies I’ve told myself, about the future I would have.

  Maybe my dreams were always meant to be crushed, too. Maybe I wasn’t meant to dream.

  I’ll play bass for a kick-ass band, man, I told Chico. Cruising up the West Coast, in a car just like my papá had, headed to gigs at night with the guys.

  What guys?

  The other guys in my band.

  Oh, right, Chico said with that stupid smile.

  They’re out there right now, walking around somewhere in the States, not even knowing how great we’re gonna be. How I’m that missing piece of the puzzle. But wait, you just wait. Someday.

  Me too. Right?

  Hell yeah, Chico. You too. You’re gonna be right there with me.

  I never even asked him to be part of my stupid imaginary band. He was my best fucking friend, and I never even asked him what instrument he’d play. And those dreams were my stupid dreams, stupid dreams that I fed him, that I dreamed for him and made him believe. I don’t know what dreams he had for himself. Because I never bothered to ask him.

  I’m sorry, I tell him. I close my eyes tighter, shame and selfishness flooding through me. I hold on to the train tighter as it begins to rain.

  It comes down slowly at first, a few plops. But then it comes stronger, sharper, whipping at our bodies. It stings my arms and saturates my clothes. I watch as people turn their faces upward, open their mouths.

  Soon the rain changes directions with the wind and comes at us sideways, then whips around and comes at us from the other side, attacking us from wherever it can. Spraying us with needles. Pequeña inches closer to me, both of us holding on as tight as possible to the top of the train, trying not to slip as the sky fills with lightning.

  I don’t know, but I think I’m crying. I can’t tell because of the rain. I can’t tell because I’ve cried so much for Chico that maybe I haven’t stopped, maybe I will be crying forever. Maybe even when there are no more tears for my body to shed, I will still be crying.

  We slip with the rocking of the train, this way and that. Thunder cracks the night, like it wants to split the world in half, and La Bestia cries over it, reminding us of her strength, reminding us of the steel blades underneath, ready to slice us if we fall. Pequeña and I hold on.

  It feels like the end of the world.

  Maybe it is. I almost wish it were.

  My hands feel like they won’t work from holding on so hard, and my body goes numb from the rain and cold. And I wonder if it’s Chico in all that fury, in that rain and wind and electricity, so angry that we left him behind.

  Don’t be angry at me, I want to tell him.

  But he has every reason to be mad. Me, who made him believe, who told him we would be okay, who made him save me from a schoolyard fight and then brought him to his death.

  The beast squeals, like scared little pigs being led to the slaughter.

  I killed him. I killed Chico.

  It’s my fault.

  I’m sorry.

  I keep my eyes closed.

  Finally, I give in to sleep.

  I give in to darkness.

  The storm rages on. La Bestia does, too.

  Pequeña

  The mother and father sit with their little girl between them again, all of us atop the same boxcar. I can see their silhouette against the glow of the sky, and every now and then their faces, as lightning flashes.

  And then, in one of those flashes, I think I see God.

  He is a brown hand cupped to a child’s chin, where rainwater is gathering so she can drink from it.

  He is riding through the desert on a journey known as the hell route.

  Hot tears b
urn my eyes. White light fills the sky, so bright, I’m almost blinded. And then my tears are mixing with the cold rain that falls on us, and I am turning my head upward, drinking from glowing skies.

  It’s not that I didn’t believe in Him before this moment. It’s just hard to see Him in the world I’ve known—a world where madrecitas tell their children to walk fast and keep their gaze on the ground. Where viejos and viejas walk with crooked backs and survive only because other poor people take pity on them. Where the young die younger and younger each day.

  No. It’s not that I didn’t believe in Him.

  It’s just that anytime people have asked God to be with us, to go with us, to shelter us, I never believed He was listening.

  I turn to look at Pulga; he rides with his eyes shut tight, those headphones on his ears. I shake his shoulder, try to get him to look at me, to drink the rain, but he ignores me. I take out my empty water bottles, and his, and fill them with rain.

  All night we ride, wet and freezing cold. The rain falls like small ice picks on my back and the wind grows colder and colder each hour. I huddle next to Pulga, force myself to think of warmth, to picture the blazing sun. I think of it in the sky, its heat on my skin.

  I think of the sun.

  Only the sun.

  It becomes an orange portal that swallows me up, that surrounds me with warmth and fire. I feel my body relax as I travel through the heat of it. Then, suddenly, I am falling from the sun, I am drifting down to a street lined with houses.

  My bare feet land on the black pavement. And I walk right down the middle, looking at the sidewalks on either side, at small trees with branches weighed down by heavy pink and white blooms. Sunlight reflecting off parked cars.

  I walk slowly, taking in the houses one by one. A white house, a gray house, a small blue house with red rosebushes.

  Then I come to a pale yellow house. Three stairs lead to a porch where an old woman sits on a wooden chair, staring at me, walking down the street.

  Her hair is long, peppered with gray strands that seem to glow. Her eyes are dark but they glimmer. She wears a white dress. She is watching me.

  As I come closer, she stands, comes to the very edge of the porch but does not take another step. She gestures for me to come to her, but my feet are unmovable stones.

  The door to the house is closed, but from a slightly opened window come voices and laughter. Voices and laughter I recognize but can’t place. I know I love them, whomever they belong to, even if I don’t know who they are.

  The old woman is trying to say something, yell something to me. Her lips move, and her face is full of love and pity, and the desperate want to tell me something, but no voice comes out.

  I want to run up those stairs and look at her up close; I need to know what she is trying to say.

  I want to open the door and see those inside.

  I want to hear her voice.

  But instead the world grows brighter, and when I look at the sky, the sun is growing larger and larger. It grows so large it is filling up the whole sky, and I can feel everything I just saw disappearing below. But even as I rise, I feel myself back on that porch.

  Someone’s phantom hand in mine.

  I think it’s the hand of someone I love. Or someone I might love. Someone who doesn’t exist but might. Someday.

  And I wonder if that house is full of ghosts.

  * * *

  ~~~

  The sun swallows me up and delivers me back onto the train where I can still feel the echo of someone’s hand in mine. I open my eyes and see Pulga next to me, staring out at the land blurring by. The sun’s morning rays are warm; they dry what the wind has not of my wet clothes from the night’s storm.

  But then the sun intensifies, growing hotter and hotter by the minute. It burns our backs, our necks, our heads, until we are made of fire.

  For hours, after so much rain and cold, we ride engulfed by light.

  “I’m tired,” Pulga says. His head is turned toward me, his eyes barely opened against the heat and brightness. He looks tired. He looks more than tired.

  He looks like he is giving up. Like he’s becoming the kind of mummy everyone says you become on this trip. One whose soul is dying, bit by bit, whose heart is losing faith.

  “I know,” I tell him.

  I hand him the water I collected, and he takes a sip, winces at how hot it is. “It’s starting to not make sense, all of this,” he says, the hot wind blowing on our faces, howling in our ears so I can barely hear him.

  I see the way he looks out at the world, at the mother and father hovering over their daughter, whose face, even in sleep, looks worn-out and in pain.

  He’s right. It’s doesn’t make sense.

  “It never made sense,” I tell him. Staring at the little girl who, even in this heat, is shivering.

  He looks at me for a second, like he understands, but then his eyes go dull and he looks away.

  I stare at the little girl, shivering more violently with each passing hour, her mother holding her so tight now to make the shivering stop. And I worry about her.

  I worry about Pulga.

  I worry that even if we make it, nothing will be left of him.

  Pulga

  We wait for another train in a small town near the tracks that looks made up of lost souls—of people on the streets sleeping with arms over their faces. People in fetal positions, their backs against dirty, graffitied concrete walls. People who stare endlessly at the darkness of the world from a town that doesn’t seem to have a name.

  This is the hell route, I remind myself. My notes flash in my mind.

  And this must be purgatory.

  I suddenly wonder if we have died, too. Pequeña and I.

  “Are we alive?” I ask her, sitting next to me on the dirty ground. Her eyes are wide as she stares out at all those lost souls.

  “Yes,” she tells me. “We’re alive. We’re going to make it.”

  The family that was at the shelter, that was with us on the train, is nowhere to be seen. I don’t know where they disappeared to, but they’re gone and when I ask Pequeña if they were real, she says yes.

  “They’re taking the little girl to a hospital,” she says. And I remember now, that we watched them walk away when we got off the train, our bodies numb and our minds thick. They headed to the hospital and we stumbled here, where we wait for another train.

  “You think she’ll be okay?” I ask Pequeña, but she just closes her eyes and shrugs.

  “Your notes kind of stop here,” she tells me, taking out my notebook from her jacket.

  I look at my notes in her hand and shrug. I reach for them and glance through the pages. I look at the little stick figures I drew in the margins, Chico and me, on top of a train. I remember thinking those notes would be enough. I remember sitting by my bed, studying those notes the night before we left with a flashlight under the covers as Chico kept watch, and believing in them like the bible.

  The name Lecheria stares back at me. It’s circled in black ink, as if the future was already marked even back then. If I had a pen, I’d draw a stick figure on the ground. Black x’s for eyes. I’d write, This is where my best friend died.

  I give the small notepad back to Pequeña.

  “We’ll get on this next train, and then there should be another one that leads us to Altar. That’s where the little girl’s father said they were headed before they had to get off. I guess migrants can rest there and get supplies for crossing the desert. Does that sound right?” she asks.

  Altar.

  I shrug. I don’t remember. I don’t care.

  I stare out at the darkness.

  I retreat back into my own.

  Pequeña

  We wait for the train.

  Suddenly a faraway whine breaks through the eerie silence of the night.

>   “¡Aquí viene!” someone yells, then a chorus of people yelling that the train is here, the train is here. People run to the train tracks, staring at the barely visible headlight that shines small from far away.

  People tighten their backpacks. They double-check shoelaces. They untie shirts and sweaters wrapped around waists and shove them into backpacks so they won’t get caught in the wheels of the train. So they won’t be dragged under.

  The light gets brighter as the train hurtles toward us. My stomach flip-flops, my legs quiver with fear and adrenaline, and it shrieks and screams and cries as I grab on to Pulga and pull him toward the tracks.

  “We have to run soon, Pulga. Corre, okay? When it gets closer, run as fast as you can! Grab on to something as soon as you can!” I yell. But he stands there, looking at the train coming toward us, and doesn’t move an inch.

  “Okay, Pulga?”

  He doesn’t answer and then my words are cut off by the rumbling of the train, the clanking and roar.

  “It’s not slowing down at all!” a voice shouts, barely audible as the first cars race by. I grab Pulga by his thin arm, so skinny and fragile that I worry if I grab it too hard, it will break. But I pull him with me as I start running, and he has no choice but to keep up. And then we’re running, trying not to bump into anyone else, praying not to trip on anything in the darkness, as the wind created by the train’s speed whips hot and strong around us.

  I’m pulling Pulga beside me, but the train is going so fast, like it wants to kill us. Like it wants to remind us that it is a beast, a demon, a thing that passes through hell.

  I see others running ahead of us, running as fast as they can, barely able to reach out for the train. It is a black blur. Going past us so fast, it is gone before we realize it, leaving us with nothing but fumes and dust.

  And then we are just shadows, catching our breath, looking out in the direction it went, doubled over, falling on the ground.

  “It still goes through here too fast,” an old man says, shaking his head. A younger man is with him. They both make me nervous, but the old man looks at the younger man and says, “Come on, hijo, we gotta keep going. About an hour up ahead, there’s a bend. It slows down there. We’ll go there and wait for the next one that comes through.”