by Roger Bruner
At least I would have a legal name and identity once Tomás married me. Señora Tomás del Mundo. I would prefer being like the married women of the village, who added the surnames of their husbands to the end of their birth family names.
But that would be impossible. I couldn’t use a name I didn’t know.
~*~
As I was growing up, I had tried talking to each of my successive keepers about my family background.
“Who are my parents?” I begged. “Where are they? Please tell me. I really want to know.”
“It is not right for you to ask,” one said. Her laughter made her words difficult to hear, much less understand.
“Why should I tell you that?” a second one told me. Her scornful look made me take several steps backward.
“Hush! We do not talk about such things,” a third said in a scolding voice.
“No one here will tell you that,” a fourth one said as she picked up a stick to beat me for asking.
They all responded the same way. Only the individual words varied. They all meant, We’re not telling you, so quit asking.
~*~
Now the village women would say, “You should be thrilled to become Señora Rosa del Mundo.”
I wasn’t. I started fretting. Would Tomás bother to carry me to San Diego?
Now that we were many miles from Santa María, he was safe. He could dump me at the roadside and leave my unborn daughter and me to die. Nobody in Santa María would know the difference.
He could tell the villagers I had wandered off when he stopped to let me relieve myself and—after days of searching—he couldn’t find me. He would explain that he hadn’t been able to go to the police for help because I was an illegal alien and he had a small amount of marijuana hidden in the van.
The villagers wouldn’t expect him to prove a reasonable story like that, and his life and livelihood would continue as before.
He did not throw me from the van, however. He had paid to get me across the border, so he probably wouldn’t. Why didn’t that give me the assurance I needed?
“Tomás, you resent having to marry me, don’t you?”
“Resent, yes. Marriage is only a technicality. Whenever I return to the village, I must bring a current photograph of you and your baby. I must prove you are both alive and well provided for. That is all.”
No, I wouldn’t mention the tale I had imagined him telling the villagers. He might find it useful.
Too useful.
I hadn’t yet learned the word lucrative or the extremes evil men go to in order to get and keep what they want. If I had, I would have better understood Tomás’s determination to keep doing business with the villagers.
“Santa María is a bottomless gold mine,” he said. “The supplies I bring to the village cost almost nothing compared to what I sell their special produce for.”
~*~
“Growing marijuana for Tomás del Mundo to smuggle into the United States could land him—all of us—in prison for many years,” Señora Valdes had said when cautioning me to be careful with my knowledge. “The authorities won’t care that drugs have been our sole source of income longer than anyone remembers. They won’t care that we would die without it.”
I understood what won’t care meant. All too well. And necessity as well.
Tomás would marry me out of necessity. In America, Señora Valdes had said, a court of law cannot make a woman speak against her husband. While I was still single, however, my knowledge could be dangerous.
I hadn’t been able to comprehend most of what Señora Valdes told me, however. I had never seen a policeman, although I imagined him to be like a father who’s just caught his daughter doing something wrong. A judge must be like a mother meting out punishment, and being in prison would be like being stuck for a very long time in the darkness of my cave.
Tomás would do whatever he had to do to avoid punishment. Despite his muscles and his tough exterior, I had seen the coward inside. He would not survive prison.
To save his skin, he might make me Señora Rosa del Mundo. He would never treat me as a real wife, however.
From what Señora Valdes had told me, I knew my daughter was due shortly. And now that I understood how women become pregnant, I would make certain Tomás never fathered another child by me. I would be firm. Stubborn.
He would never come near me again.
So what if my obstinance makes him angry? Would he be able to hurt me any more than he already has?
~*~
Traffic was light. I didn’t hear any other cars while I alternated between sleep and wakefulness.
When we came closer to San Diego, I found myself in the midst of a living nightmare. We were moving so fast I couldn’t focus on the blurry scenery, and I was more terrified of Tomás’s driving than I had been the first time I rode with him. The time he took me to that place among the trees.
He held the steering wheel with several fingers of his left hand while resting his right hand on his leg.
A light blue convertible sped around us and then slowed down almost immediately, making Tomás push so hard on the brakes that the belt cut into my abdomen and made the baby kick. The van swerved this way and that with a mind of its own as Tomás fought to regain control. The tires screamed like the wind through my cave at night, and he came within inches of a ditch at the side of the road before stopping completely.
The blue car kept going as if nothing had happened.
I’d never seen Tomás’s face so tight. Before I knew what was happening, he reached into the glove compartment in front of me and pulled out a pistol. I’d seen pictures of them in magazines. He pulled back out onto the road and sped up beside the other car—no other traffic was in sight. He then pointed the gun at the driver and forced him off the road into the ditch we had just avoided.
The blue car lay almost on its side. I couldn’t tell whether anyone was hurt, but at least the occupants were able to climb out.
Tomás backed up until we were parallel to the blue car. Then he leaned across me—the baby kicked, making him fumble awkwardly to keep from dropping the gun—and pushed a button to lower my window. He waved the gun through the opening. “Do not mess with me!” He fired several shots over the heads of the male driver and his two female passengers. He watched them duck behind the car. “I do not miss unless I mean to.”
Then he fired once at the car itself.
The last thing I saw was the convertible’s three occupants scrambling to escape before the car exploded in a ball of flames, the likes of which I had never seen before.
Never had I felt so terrified. Tomás just laughed at the sight of my right hand tightly clutching the arm rest as he sped away from the burning convertible and rocketed into the left lane. He couldn’t see what he was doing to my insides.
A gurgling moved from my stomach toward my throat. Within seconds, I would start retching.
“Do you need me to pull off the road?”
Yes, I nodded weakly.
“Put your hands in front of your mouth.” Protecting the interior of his precious van took precedence over my well-being.
Before he could maneuver to the right-hand lane and onto the shoulder, I began throwing up. I could only imagine how much worse it would have been if I had eaten anything that day.
Tomás seemed satisfied—relieved would be a better description—that I hadn’t vomited on the plush interior of his van. The only place for the mess to fall on was my rotund stomach. The stench made me sicker.
“There’s a cloth in the glove compartment. Clean yourself off.”
I obeyed, thankful for the chance to wipe the mess off of my clothes.
“We couldn’t have your puke running down on the seat. And throw that cloth out the window. That stink will ruin the smell of these custom leather seat covers.”
After I complied, he accelerated with a screech from the shoulder of the road into the slow lane.
“We’ll soon turn off this highway to a less h
ectic street. I don’t have any more cloths. If you vomit again, use your raggedy blanket. Maybe it will prove useful after all. We’ll throw it away before anyone sees it.”
I shocked myself by talking back. “I am done with vomiting, Tomás. I will clean the blanket if need be and hide it where it cannot embarrass you, but I am keeping it.”
I didn’t realize until moments later that I had just discovered how to deal with a bully. Don’t give in to him.
Tomás looked agitated. Tight. Tense. I feared that he might argue. Or stop the car and wring my neck. Had I pushed too hard?
He didn’t do anything. Not even respond. Perhaps he had learned something, too—that I had a mind of my own.
More important, I had discovered that for myself.
~*~
I was still queasy, but not like before. I closed my eyes and didn’t open them again until I felt the van slow down and turn onto another road, where traffic, although heavy, moved slowly.
We stayed on that street for many blocks, stopping only when the traffic lights turned red. I had seen photographs of large cities in the magazines the village girls threw on the junk pile after wearing the pages thin with curious fingers.
I could not have read the articles even though they were in Spanish. Neither could the other girls, for illiteracy made us equals. The photographs were magnets that drew our attention and matches that fired our imaginations.
Looking at magazine pictures of big city life was one thing; but seeing those sights in person was indescribably different and equally overwhelming.
I had never imagined that anyone could build something as tall as those skyscrapers. Cars and trucks were everywhere, along with motorcycles and bicycles and skates and skateboards; Tomás laughed at me for asking what they all were. Horns blared, sirens screamed, and people rushed in all directions on the sidewalks and almost dared drivers to hit them as they crossed the streets.
Nothing had prepared me for such realities and nothing could have.
My face must have revealed complete incredulity, for Tomás glanced at me periodically and laughed as if he had never seen anything funnier. Not gently, the way he used to laugh when we laughed together.
Now he seemed unconcerned about making me feel foolish.
“You thought Santa María was the center of the universe, huh, Señorita Rosa No-Name?”
Overwhelmed by a sense of my own ignorance, I couldn’t respond. I didn’t have any concept of “the universe,” and Tomás would have found that even more hilarious.
I felt overwhelmed and frightened. And what frightened me most was the way Tomás could almost read my mind.
“Don’t worry. You won’t have to drive or find your way around San Diego. You will stay at home where you are safe—where the baby will be safe. If you need to go somewhere, Nikki will drive you. You will need help. A maid…or perhaps a babysitter. For both the baby and you.”
He had spoken that last sentence under his breath.
Despite my naiveté, I knew he meant, “You will stay at home where you and the baby won’t embarrass me or interfere with my accustomed lifestyle.”
I didn’t know what a maid was. No one in Santa María had one. I assumed this Nikki he’d mentioned was his maid.
How wrong I was.
5
A few minutes later, we stopped at the gated entrance to an apartment complex near the waterfront. Tomás greeted the uniformed guard. After a brief discussion in what I later learned was English, Inglés, the language of this new place where I would be living, the guard opened the gate to let us through.
We drove to the second building. It was tall. Not like the skyscrapers I had seen moments earlier, but unspeakably taller than the buildings of Santa María.
Tomás told me his apartment building was fifteen stories high. Because I didn’t know what the stories of a building were, that information meant nothing. He parked the van between the red sports car and the large truck he used to transport marijuana.
After climbing down from the van, I had to shade my eyes with my hands—just as I had done to look at Tomás’s face the day before—to see the top of the building without being blinded.
“Get back in the van for a few minutes.” Tomás’s tone sounded more apprehensive than bossy. “I’ll prepare the apartment for your arrival. I hadn’t expected to have a third person living here.”
The day was sweltering, although the temperature felt cooler than in Santa María. He left the van running so the baby and I could benefit from something he called an air conditioner.
I laughed to myself at that act of kindness. I wouldn’t count on Tomás being that thoughtful on a regular basis.
I mused about his reference to “a third person.” If he didn’t live by himself, I couldn’t imagine who else did. Not unless it was this Nikki he had referred to in passing. If she was his maid, perhaps she lived there.
His apartment must be huge.
After what seemed an extremely long time, he led me to an elevator. I almost panicked when the door closed behind us and started moving. Tomás just laughed. We got out on what he said was the third floor. When he opened his apartment door, I discovered what he had come upstairs beforehand to do.
“Rosa, this is Nikki. She lives here. With me in this apartment, I mean.”
A maid? I do not call a woman who looks like that a maid. Ha! Ha!
So he had a girlfriend living with him? One he had needed to warn about me? How I wished I could have eavesdropped on that conversation. Had the cowardly Tomás del Mundo actually found the courage to tell his girlfriend that his bride-to-be would be moving in with them?
As much of a weasel as Tomás was, he might just as easily have told Nikki I was his kid sister. She didn’t look stupid enough to believe a tale like that.
She eyed me with a mixture of curiosity and resentment and I understood why. I probably looked at her the same way. Tomás must have told her the truth. Or—knowing him—only the least amount of truth he could get away with.
Encountering Nikki as she waited to meet the “other woman” almost made me turn on my heels and run back out as fast as I could.
Was this the same Nikki who would drive me if I needed to go somewhere? Would jealousy prompt her to “forget” to bring me home again?
I didn’t see myself as someone to be jealous of—and certainly not a threat to Nikki’s relationship with Tomás. Nonetheless, meeting an unwanted fiancée who would not only share their apartment but totally disrupt their lives must have been a shock. One Nikki wasn’t apt to recover from easily.
She must not have had any more to say about this arrangement than I did. And she would probably resent me as much as the villagers had.
I would describe Nikki as drop-dead gorgeous—wasn’t that the way they said it in America?—and she didn’t look Mexican at all. She had long, sunshiny blonde hair—natural, not dyed like so many American women—and brilliant blue eyes. I had never seen such a perfect, unblemished face.
Even her ears and nose, usually the ugliest features of the most attractive of human faces, were beautiful.
She was many inches taller than me, and her stunning figure would have made me look misshapen even before I got pregnant. Although my Mexican heritage had given me a slightly darkened complexion, her tan apparently resulted from leisurely hours at the pool or beach. Her natural, paler skin showed several places beneath her loose-fitting clothes.
Nikki looked into my eyes. “Buenos días, Rosa.” Her quivering-but-neutral voice told me, “I’m struggling hard to remain calm.” I didn’t have to see the chilling glances Tomás gave Nikki to know what was happening.
I had to exert extra effort to be polite, too. “Buenas tardes, Señorita Nikki.”
“Nikki knows practically no Spanish,” Tomás said quietly. “And that’s how it will remain. I will not have you learning how to speak to her in her language, Inglés, either, Rosa. Your life in America will not require a knowledge of how Americans speak.”
<
br /> I nodded. The events of the last twenty-four hours had been too much, and I couldn’t take in the significance of the order he had just issued. “I—my baby and I—need to lie down and rest now, Tomás.”
“Here…” He led me down the hall. “This room is yours—yours and the baby’s when he is born…”
“She,” I corrected him. “Señora Valdes said my baby would be a girl.”
He ignored me. Just as I’d expected.
“You are fortunate to have Nikki living here, Tomás. I will not be intimate with you again—not ever—and this baby girl will be the only child I bear for you. You and Nikki can continue to ‘do what boyfriends and girlfriends do together.’”
Apparently forgetful that he had once used that line to justify having his way with me, he nodded and closed the door behind him.
Now that Nikki had met me, she would undoubtedly have some bitter words to say to Tomás. Would he take her concerns any more seriously than he took mine? Not likely.
I giggled slightly. As long as it had taken him to tell Nikki that his fiancée was moving in with them, she must have had some unpleasant things to say to him. Like a woman who doesn’t tolerate bullying. Or sits back and accepts a situation she finds distasteful.
How right I was…
Their discussion would have awakened the dead, and it lasted for what seemed like hours. They must have finally worked things out, for I eventually heard the door to their bedroom open and close behind them. I fell asleep soon after that. Why should I care what the two of them did behind closed doors?
~*~
I hadn’t eaten all day. Tomás must not have been hungry. He hadn’t stopped to buy food along the way. Although I was used to never having quite enough to eat, I didn’t realize how famished I was until a quiet knock on the door awakened me.
