The Lemon Orchard

by Luanne Rice

  Their parents who weren’t really Rosa’s parents were Marisol and Emilio Garcia. Marisol was a nurse at the Red Cross medical clinic, and Emilio drove a garbage truck. They cared a lot about their children doing well in school, so Emilio had gotten each child his or her own desk—old junked tables from stops he made along his route, repaired and repainted for the kids.

  Rosa kept hers very neat, while Lita’s was a complete mess. Lita was into politics and was always demonstrating against the police for not really investigating “femicides”—the killing of women—in Ciudad Juárez, where their aunt Bernarda worked, so her desk was always covered with flyers, which she would clear away to do her homework.

  Rosa’s desk was the opposite. She had made herself a blotter out of construction paper and cardboard. The family shared a computer in the kitchen, so Rosa sometimes did her homework there, leaving her blotter free for a notebook and a tray to hold pens and pencils.

  She had made the tray from a branch she found on the street. Emilio had helped her, using his knife to carve a smooth hollow. The only other thing on her desk was a small picture frame with her most treasured possession inside: a picture of herself, her father, and her great-grandmother, taken before she left Mexico.

  Rosa had lived with the Garcias for almost half her life. She kept track. She got lost in the desert when she was six, and by the time she turned twelve in just a few months she would have spent as much time with the Garcias as she had with her papá.

  When she got sent back to Mexico from the desert, she was very sick and spent a long time in hospitals—she had made it to the States, a little medical clinic, but her tías Ronnie and Bernarda had her transferred to Children’s Hospital in Ciudad Juárez.

  At first she did nothing but sleep, with tubes in her arms, bandages all over, and gauze on her eyes because the bright sun had burned her all over, even her eyes, and she was lucky she didn’t go blind. They told her that a long time later. When she woke up, she didn’t know where she was.

  That seemed so strange to her because even now she remembered dreaming in the hospital, seeing the shadows of doctors and nurses moving behind her bandages. Her dreams were vivid, and in them her father was with her.

  They were home, or sometimes they were walking in the desert, but always she could hear her name, Rosa, coming straight from her papá’s lips. Telling her he loved her, he was taking her to a better place. She dreamed of her abuela, her great-grandmother rocking her in her lap, singing a song about the little burro.

  In every dream she held Maria, the doll her abuela made for her before they left on the long journey, and sometimes in the dream she lost her father and Maria and she would cry in her sleep.

  The tías—Ronnie and Marisol—would come to see her in the hospital where Bernarda worked. They told her she never had to worry, that they would be her family until they could find her own. They were all nurses, and even though Rosa was Bernarda’s patient, the others would help change her dressings, read her stories, braid her hair.

  Each of them had a husband and children, and Rosa would hear the sisters bicker about whose family Rosa should live with. They all wanted to take care of her. Bernarda lived and worked in Ciudad Juárez, where the drug war made life dangerous. Ronnie worked at the medical center in Pais Grande in Arizona, and she had taken a big chance by spiriting Rosa across the border, and they didn’t want her to risk getting caught and being in trouble. By the time Rosa was well enough to leave the hospital, weeks later, Marisol took her home.

  She knew she was lucky. They treated her well. Sometimes Emilio talked about wanting to cross, to go live in the States, saying anything there would be better than trying to raise a family in Altar, where it was so hard to make enough to support his family. Rosa got scared when she heard that. She would have nightmares and scream in her sleep on the nights he talked about it.

  He said he wouldn’t care if they were all illegals, at least he wouldn’t have to worry about the cholos in the town square, the coyotes who could take his kids and sell them and they’d never be seen again.

  Lita got angry and snapped at him when she heard him say “illegals,” and told him the better phrase was “undocumented immigrants.” She was applying to colleges, and was trying to get a visa to study in the States at the best school she could get into.

  She knew she’d probably end up going to Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico in Mexico City. It was the country’s best, and she had the grades to get in. She wanted to study political science and then become a lawyer. She said her family lived surrounded by suffering and she was sick of it and wanted to help people.

  Rosa wanted to help people too, the way Susana had helped her. When she first woke up in Children’s Hospital, she was too sick and weak to talk, and she still couldn’t remember her name. That’s when she had first met Susana, her therapist. Even though Rosa couldn’t speak, Susana had sat by her side and “listened.” Without words, Rosa and Susana had started to communicate.

  During those weeks in the hospital, Rosa had needles in her body, tubes delivering fluids because without them she would have died. Her fever had been very high, and her heart stopped more than once. She had lost oxygen to her brain. It’s a miracle . . . she heard that many times: that she didn’t die, that she didn’t lose brain function, that she was “normal.”

  But Rosa wasn’t normal. She might look it on the outside, but even there she had doubts—she sometimes felt any stranger on the street could look right through her, see her broken heart and know her story.

  She told Rosa she was in a special hospital; the rooms were full of children who had been through experiences so awful they couldn’t bear to remember them. The hospital was known for helping children heal from wounds inside as well as outside.

  Susana had helped Rosa remember things she had forgotten: first name, last name, where she had lived in Mexico, the sights and smells of her everyday life, anything that might help the authorities and the tías—Bernarda, Ronnie, and Marisol—find her real family.

  Those days, even though the tías were so kind, and said she would always have a home with them, Susana became her most important person. She came to the hospital every day and helped her think about her father.

  Rosa was small for her age, the skinniest girl in her class, and she wore glasses with a special tint because the desert sun had burned her eyes and made them sensitive. When she looked at the picture of her family, she saw that her hair was the same as before: long, brown, and wavy. In fact, except for the glasses, she looked almost the same as she had in the photo.

  Yes, the girl in that photo was “normal,” even special. “Preciosa,” her father had called her. Precious girl. She held the picture close to her face and kissed her father and great-grandmother. They were not alive, Rosa thought during her worst moments. If they were, they would have found her. But her heart told her that somewhere they were alive. She felt they missed her as much as she ached for them.

  She’d had those feelings all along, even in the hospital. Closing her eyes, she went back there now: the bed with rails on the sides, tubes in her body, the constant taste of medicine on the back of her throat, the feeling she had to throw up. She had bandages all over: her feet, legs, hands, arms, and head. She had cracked ribs, sun poisoning, infected insect bites, and sores on nearly every part of her body.

  They had bandaged her eyes with cool gauze pads, and changed them every hour. After a while they put on a bandage that allowed a tiny bit of light in, just so she could see enough to not be so scared. With that bandage people looked like shadows.

  Susana had sat in a chair by the side of her bed. Her voice was warm and calm. “Dime . . . Tell me . . . ,” Susana always began. “Tell me about your house at home.”

  “It was beautiful,” Rosa would say. “I slept next to my great-grandmother. She prayed for us and I could hear her rosary beads clicking.
My father slept in the other room, but he always told me a story before I fell asleep.”

  “What could you see when you looked out the window?”

  “Other houses like ours. And Popo.”

  “Popo?”

  “With the snowy hair, always protecting the girl mountain.”

  “Popo is a mountain?”

  “Sí. Sometimes smoke comes out his head.”

  Susana and Rosa laughed at that, and Rosa heard Susana making scratching noises on her pad with her pen.

  “What could you smell?”

  That was easy and made Rosa smile—until she realized how much she missed it and then she started to cry.

  “Tell me,” Susana said softly.

  But at that time, Rosa could not. The memory was too beautiful to say out loud. It was her treasure, and she had to hold on to it, to let herself dream that she would smell the lemons again, stand at the foot of her father’s ladder while they talked and sang and he picked fruit from the tree.

  “What else?” Susana would say. “What did you eat?”

  “Beans and corn. Tamales for Navidad. Sometimes . . .” She stopped herself. She didn’t like to tell this part because she knew it would shame her father and abuela. “Sometimes they didn’t eat.”

  “Why?”

  “If it was too dry and there was a drought, there wouldn’t be any corn. And the orchard would not provide fruit to sell. At those times there wasn’t enough work for my father to make money.”

  “So you had nothing to eat?”

  “I always did,” Rosa said. Her eyes filled with tears, stinging behind the bandage. “But sometimes they didn’t. I tried to share my food but they wouldn’t take it.”

  “They loved you,” Susana said. Those words were the happiest words Rosa had heard since waking up in the hospital. She sobbed to hear them. “I love them, I love them, I want them . . .”

  “I know,” Susana said.

  Susana didn’t make empty promises about finding her father. She helped by listening and visiting every day, by slowly and surely helping Rosa get stronger. Soon she would be discharged, and go to live with Marisol and her family. Bernarda and Ronnie would visit all the time, and they promised her that if she needed Susana, they would take her to see her.

  Yes, Rosa wanted to do well in school and someday be like Susana. Help little girls remember the things that would help them, and not be so scared of the things too terrible to keep in their minds.

  She sat at her desk, listening to the family in another room. The boys were playing video games, Marisol was cooking dinner, and Emilio had just gotten home from work and was showing Marisol some things he found in the trash. They were a good family and she loved them, but they weren’t hers. She had only one papá.

  Some days after school she went to the square. It looked the same as it had the day she’d arrived in Altar with her papá. People bustled around, buses and vans pulling in and out, the same vendors selling backpacks, food, and water. Marisol said Rosa could only go to the plaza with Lita, and only if they stayed close to the Red Cross clinic.

  But sometimes Rosa slipped away and walked to the church. She would sit on the steps, scanning the crowd for a tall man with short dark hair and a neat moustache. She looked for Miguel, her father’s cousin, but he wasn’t there. The old coyotes sat in the same place, but Rosa wouldn’t go near them, not even to ask about her father. Then Lita would come running, grab her by the arm and shake her, ask if she really wanted to be abducted and sold for sex and never see the family again, because that’s what happened to her friend Monica.

  Rosa had homework and was supposed to write a story. It could be about anything. She knew it would be about her childhood, when she had lived with her real family and been happy. Because when she wrote stories about it, she could live in the world where she used to be her father’s preciosa, where the lemon trees were beautiful, and all the goodness of life was right there.

  chapter twenty-two

  Roberto

  At night the parking lot of the medical center at Pais Grande was nearly empty. When he and Julia pulled in, he stayed in the car while she went inside to talk to someone. He looked around for Leary’s SUV, but it wasn’t there. The night was pitch black, the way he remembered it being when he crossed. But when he looked up at the sky, even with the medical center lights, he saw stars burning—white swaths of stars, the constellations standing out so bright, reminding him of the myths his grandmother had taught him, and that he had passed on to Rosa.

  He glanced at the door. It killed him not to be inside, but he didn’t have long to wait. Julia walked out as soon as she’d gone in.

  “What did they say about Rosa?” he asked.

  “The woman at the desk said they have no record of her being here.”

  “And Leary?”

  “She said they had a big emergency here today—if he stopped by, she didn’t see him.”

  Roberto closed his eyes for a moment, trying to hold himself together.

  Julia dialed Leary’s number and put the call on the speaker.

  “I was about to call you,” Leary said.

  “We’re in Pais Grande.”

  “I thought you and Roberto were waiting in Malibu until I had real news.”

  “Roberto had other ideas. Where are you?”

  “In Mexico,” he said.

  “Why?” Julia asked.

  “Because that’s where Rosa is.”

  “Rosa?” Roberto asked.

  “She’s alive, Roberto. And she’s asking for you.”

  Roberto’s heart seized, and he started to cry.

  “Can you bring her here?” Julia asked, glancing at Roberto. She knew what he knew—their lives were about to change forever.

  “You know I can’t do that,” Leary said. “She’s Mexican, Julia. If he wants her, he has to cross the border and come back.”

  “But . . . ,” Julia began.

  Roberto took her hand. He held it as gently and lovingly as he could. He wanted all the love in his heart to flow into hers, so she would know and understand everything he was feeling for her as he said out loud, so both she and Leary would hear, “Yes. I am coming for her. Where is she?”

  “Have Julia drive to the checkpoint in Nogales. We’ll be waiting on the other side.”

  Julia

  This was everything she had wanted, to see Roberto and Rosa together again, but it felt like the end of her world. Driving to Nogales, she felt Roberto’s hand on her back, her shoulders, stroking her hair. His eyes glistened with tears that wouldn’t stop.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “I’m so happy for you,” she said.

  “Gracias, amor.”

  “Oh God, she’ll be so overjoyed to see you.”

  “This is all happening because of you,” he said.

  “Shh,” she said, because she couldn’t bear to hear it. Her bones ached inside, as if they might just give out. When they’d first met, Julia and Roberto both believed they would never see their daughters alive again. Being so close to finding Rosa made Julia ache for Jenny even more.

  To find Rosa, she had to lose Roberto. Why had she not known that? The road through the desert was pitch black.

  Signs for the Mexican border were everywhere. TEN MILES AHEAD. FIVE MILES AHEAD. LAST EXIT BEFORE LEAVING THE UNITED STATES. She saw a roadblock on the opposite side of the highway, stopping cars and vans to check for migrants hiding in the back or in the trunk. Her heart was breaking because they were about to say goodbye.

  “It’s happening so fast,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “We really found her.”

  Roberto didn’t answer. Traffic stopped because they were approaching the border. The area was crowded with
motels and businesses, and a freight line ran just alongside the highway. A moment later Julia saw the wall—a massive fence really, with thick steel bars twenty-five feet high. She could look through them, even from inside the car, and see Mexico. It was like looking into a jail cell.

  Surveillance towers equipped with cameras and a guard shack rose at intervals along the fence. She saw a sign advertising SECURE PARKING $5.00 and pulled into the lot.

  “Roberto, if you stay here . . .”

  “I can’t,” he said.

  “But if you cross, they won’t let you back. Let me go, talk to Jack, and see if I can bring her to you.”

  “Amor, you know I have to go to her now,” he said.

  Julia nodded. She and Roberto got out of the car with Rosa’s doll and started walking toward a gate in the wall. A U.S. border guard stood there, checking documents.

  Julia showed him her passport, and he stared from her to Roberto. He held out his hand for Roberto’s papers.

  “What is your purpose for crossing?” he asked.

  “To see . . . ,” Julia began, sweat breaking out because she noticed the guard watching Roberto carefully. He had one hand on his gun, and still holding Julia’s passport, he clicked a button on the radio hanging from his belt loop and spoke into a mouthpiece.

  “Victor, get over here,” the guard said, not taking his eyes off Roberto. “We have a situation.”

  “Hey, Dan,” came Jack’s voice through the fence.

  The border guard turned quickly and smiled. “Jack Leary! Holy shit—what are you doing on that side?”

  “Family business,” Jack said. “Let them through.”

  “We’re waiting for Tonk here to show us some documentation.”

  Tonk? Julia wondered.

  “I’ll take care of it,” Jack said. “They’re with me.”

  “Man, you’re putting me in a fucking bad position. I just called Vic.”