by Michel Stone
“I didn’t know, man. I don’t know any of this. Yeah, my uncle died. But, oh God—why have you not come to me sooner?”
A new fury erupted in Héctor. “Come to you sooner? Do you think we haven’t tried? No one knew where you were. No one in Puerto Isadore. Last we heard you were in Oaxaca City. I’ve been there. I have walked the streets like a madman, sat in the square for hours searching for your face among the crowds, asking people if they knew you, had seen you. No one knew where you were, and then, just like nothing, Rosa tells us she spoke to you, that you’re living like a fat wealthy pig in Acapulco.”
At this Emanuel laughed. “Does that look to be true, Héctor? Do I appear to be rolling in the money here in this place? You see this strip of hotels and these tourists, but do you know what lies in those hills?” He looked beyond the bay toward the smoky hills where he lived. “You can’t possibly know, but I’ll tell you. Crime is everywhere. I’m here to make a living off the fat tourists, that’s true, but at the end of the day I go back into those hills and lock my door.”
For the first time Héctor’s eyes left Emanuel, and he stared down the street. A blue-and-white police truck passed by, its mounted guns at the ready. Emanuel followed Héctor’s gaze.
“That truck cruises up and down this street all day so the rich norteamericanos feel safe. Where I live, not a kilometer away, I never see those trucks. They don’t give a rat shit about the safety of the neighborhoods beyond the tourist district. What you’re telling me about your daughter is news to me, Héctor. I always believed that my uncle had safely delivered Lilia and your baby across the line. I assumed when he and that lady were killed in the car wreck that she was just some loose woman he’d picked up. Carlos liked women.”
“A woman was with him in the car? In the accident?” Héctor said, his eyes again locked with Emanuel’s.
“Yes, yes. That much I know. I was in Oaxaca City when I was contacted that my uncle had died in an accident. A woman and her child were with him, but I assured the authorities my uncle was not married and had no children. I always assumed she was just some woman, you know?” Emanuel said, trying to shake the specter of possibility now forming in his mind. “The authorities described her as being around forty years old, twice Lilia’s age, so I knew…you know…that the dead woman wasn’t Lilia.”
“Did the baby perish in the car?” Héctor said, his damp eyes glowing with intensity and a determination to see this interrogation through to a resolution that made sense to him.
Emanuel looked down at his hands and chose his words as if picking berries among thorns. “No. My uncle and the woman died, but authorities said the woman’s baby lived. Because I didn’t know the woman, I couldn’t help them find her family or get her baby to its father. Those were not my concerns.”
“This baby was a girl?” Héctor asked, his voice cracking.
“Yes,” Emanuel said. The realization of what menaced Héctor now burned in Emanuel’s mind with searing clarity. He understood what he’d set in motion the day he’d introduced Lilia to his uncle Carlos.
Héctor closed his eyes, his shoulders wilting as his mind and body worked various strands of information into something too heavy to bear standing upright. He leaned against a coconut palm that towered above them, and Emanuel was certain Héctor needed the tree’s full support to hold him there. He wanted to reach out to Héctor, to pat him on the back and say a word of apology or encouragement.
“You…” he started, unsure what to say. “You could keep searching. Keep asking questions.”
Héctor shook his head, his eyes still closed, his form heavy against the tree. “Where? How? That accident is long passed,” he said.
“But,” Emanuel said, “she has to be somewhere. I mean, doesn’t she?”
Héctor clenched and relaxed his jaw then clenched it again. He nodded a slight nod. “Somewhere, yeah,” he said, turning toward Emanuel.
“I’ll tell you what I know about the accident, if you decide you want to go there, to the place where the wreck happened.”
Héctor looked at Emanuel as if seeing him for the first time. His demeanor and expression so vastly changed that Emanuel took a step back.
“You didn’t know,” Héctor said. “You really didn’t know about my daughter, did you?”
Emanuel shook his head. “No, man. I always believed Lilia and you were living somewhere in el norte with children. I wrote Lilia off the day I last saw her. I wanted her, Héctor, but she only wanted you, and she made that clear to me.”
“Do you know what your uncle did to her?”
Emanuel looked at the busy traffic now rolling along the stretch of street beyond them. How did he answer Héctor? Carlos had always been slick, arrogant. When Lilia made her decision to leave Mexico, and Emanuel could provide the way, he’d washed his hands of whatever happened after that. No, he didn’t know what Carlos had done to Lilia, but he could guess. Maybe the price was worth paying if it meant Lilia arriving in el norte and reuniting with Héctor. Isn’t that practically what she’d said to Emanuel, that she’d pay whatever she could? Emanuel should not be taken to task for helping her gain what she so desperately wanted.
“No,” he said. “Lilia wanted a way to you, and I provided it. I spoke neither to her nor to my uncle after I delivered her to him and they departed.”
“Can you help me get to that place?” Héctor said. “To where my daughter is last known to have been?”
“Yeah, sure. Of course. The trip will take you a few days by bus. But why not try?” Emanuel said.
“I’ll need more money. For traveling that far north. For bus fare and God knows what else. My field labor in Puerto Isadore pays me centavos,” Héctor said, shaking his head as if this were all too much too fast.
Emanuel thought of Diego, of the offers for quick money he’d mentioned just that morning.
“I have a friend who may be able to help you,” Emanuel said. “My friend Diego the Magnificent.”
“His name?” Héctor said, raising his eyebrows. “He’s magnificent, is he? That’s a good start.”
“I’ll introduce you,” Emanuel said.
Chapter 10
Lilia
Lilia and Héctor sat on hard, wooden chairs across a cluttered desk from the village priest. Sitting, standing, and even lying flat was becoming increasingly burdensome, and Lilia suspected this child she carried would arrive larger than either of her others had come into this world. A metal fan, rusted and squeaking, oscillated from a high shelf, with each rotation rustling three disheveled stacks of papers, held in place on the desk by large conch shells that were bleached by sun and salt.
“What do you think could have happened to her after the accident, Father?” Héctor said.
Upon Lilia and Héctor’s return to Puerto Isadore from el norte, Lilia had visited the village priest and asked him for his wisdom and guidance. The priest was a good man and had always provided Lilia with just the right prayer to help her negotiate the difficult situations in her life. At her grandmother’s funeral, Lilia had wept with him, and he’d assured her that while the old woman had moved on to a place of deserved peace, her spirit and influence would remain a real part of Lilia forever. “Bones turn to dust,” he’d said, “but love endures forever.”
When she’d come to consult him after her return to Mexico, he’d been less comforting, saying only that he’d pray for Alejandra’s well-being and safe return. At the time Lilia had felt great disappointment, wishing the priest had provided some helpful insight. But then, what could he have possibly said that would have changed anything?
Now, because of their locating Emanuel, Lilia and Héctor had renewed hope and curiosity about the possibilities.
The priest pulled a tattered rectangular document from his desk drawer and unfolded the paper with slow certainty. He pushed aside a couple of the stacks on his desk, and, smoothing the paper flat across his desktop, said, “Here’s a map of our country. We know your Alejandra was last seen a
live. We can keep faith that she’s out there someplace. God heard our prayers, Lilia,” the priest said, smiling weakly, his gold-brown eyes tired but comforting.
“She has to be somewhere, Father, waiting for me to come to her. I want to believe that somehow Alejandra expects her mama and papa will be with her again, the way we always returned from the fields when she was a baby and Abuela kept her during our workdays.” Lilia looked down at a fat cockroach crawling along the cracked plaster wall beside them. “Is this foolish talk, Father?”
The priest shook his head, but before he could form an answer, Héctor said, “Just tell us the possibilities. Where might she be and how do we begin to locate her, to get her home?”
The priest took a sip of water from a pale blue clay cup on his desk. “Of course I can’t answer with certainty, but you ask for possibilities. Perhaps she was hospitalized or…who knows? I’m guessing.” He studied Héctor’s face a moment then looked at Lilia. “We can look into what orphanages are near where she was last seen.” He took a pair of wire-rimmed glasses from his breast pocket. After slipping them onto the bridge of his nose, he dragged a stubby finger across the map.
Lilia edged forward in her chair, tracing his finger’s invisible trail across Mexico.
“We were to meet in el norte in a place called Brownsville. For years I imagined Alejandra in that place. But now we know she never arrived there,” Lilia said.
“No,” Héctor said. “Emanuel said the accident was in a place called Matamoros.”
The priest wrinkled his brow and tapped a finger three times on the spot that was Brownsville. “Hmm. Matamoros,” he mumbled. “Yes.”
Lilia looked to Héctor for guidance, uncertain whether the priest had never heard of this place or if he possessed specific information about it.
“Emanuel said Matamoros is in the state of Tamaulipas,” he said.
“Yes,” the priest said again. “Yes, of course. Tamaulipas is a border state. Brownsville borders Tamaulipas. And there is your city of Matamoros.” He drummed the nail of his index finger on the map.
The three leaned in closer, examining the tiny word Matamoros as if the letters could reveal great secrets.
“We could contact the authorities in that area and ask what they would do with an unclaimed child.”
Héctor and Lilia nodded, but neither spoke. Héctor seemed to need the priest to keep talking, to put forth scenarios that made sense and fit with what pieces of information—few as they were—that he and Lilia already knew.
“So we can make those calls. I will help you with this. The path that lies before us turns in ways that make it impossible to predict, but, nonetheless, we have a path. Do you have photos of her? If we locate her she’ll have changed in looks since last you saw her. How old was your child when you lost her?” The priest leaned back in his chair, weaving his short thick fingers across his chest as if preparing to listen for a while.
“She was a baby,” Héctor said.
“Yes, I had to wean her before I crossed. I would’ve nursed her many more months, but in preparation for her crossing I had to introduce her to a bottle. She’s nearly four years old now,” Lilia said, crossing her arms across her chest, recalling those painful days of throbbing breasts full of milk that no baby would suckle.
“Then now she’s walking. She’s talking. Your little baby is a girl now. She’ll have changed in looks,” the priest said. “Do you recall any birthmarks, any distinguishing markings?”
Héctor looked at Lilia to answer this for them, but all she could see when she envisioned Alejandra was a beautiful baby girl with thick black hair. Her small body had no imperfections, no marks of distinction other than she smelled of lavender and her hair stuck out at all angles since birth, but even those characteristics, scent and baby hair, would have changed.
“I’ll know my baby when I see her,” Lilia said, looking the priest in the eye.
“And if we find her we’ll know by the circumstances,” Héctor said. “We’ll find her because someone will remember the parentless child of the car accident, and we’ll piece together the details.”
“And that woman and the evil coyote Carlos who died in the accident…I can describe every detail of them. He stunk of sweat and cinnamon, and she wore her nails and makeup in shades of purple. I’ll never forget every detail of those horrible people. I can tell any police officer these things.” Lilia sat straight in her chair, her confidence and hope finding buoyancy in this choppy sea of a situation. For once she had an answer, a factual answer, instead of guesses and unfulfilled wishes, regarding her missing child.
“And these names, Carlos and…Do you recall the woman’s name?” the priest said. “These are real names? These are the names on these people’s paperwork? On the papers they’d have had with them in the vehicle?”
“Yes. At least the man. Authorities contacted his nephew Emanuel, so his papers must have had the correct identifying information. I can’t answer about the woman,” Héctor said.
“My coyote called the woman Matilde. Who knows if that name was real,” Lilia said.
She had not thought on the details of that most horrific day since she’d drifted into a fitful sleep, drained and weary from physical exhaustion and mental anguish in the border shack where she’d collapsed that night, anticipating Alejandra’s arrival the following morning. But now, over three years later, back in her village, in the presence of the priest and Héctor, somehow the events filled her mind with such clarity she gasped, bringing both hands flat on the priest’s desk before her as if to steady herself.
“Ernesto,” she whispered.
The priest and Héctor stared at her.
“Ernesto,” she repeated. “Ernesto! Alejandra is Ernesto. My God, I just remembered. I don’t know that this will help. But that information has to help, doesn’t it, Father? Ernesto!”
“Ernesto?” the priest said, looking from Lilia to Héctor and back to Lilia.
Lilia had suffered these years to erase from her mind the day she’d handed Alejandra over to Matilde. Matilde, that strange woman in the musty house with unfamiliar music drifting on sour, suffocating air. Lilia shook her head now at the memory, an instinctive reaction to ward off the painful images that had been poisonous to any budding hope since the moment she’d walked with Carlos’s firm grip on her wrist from that woman’s house. Only now she had to think, to reach deep and summon whatever else she could recall that might help when pieced together with forthcoming clues to Alejandra’s whereabouts.
“The woman, Matilde, told me that the paper, the document she’d use at the border, would state that Alejandra was a boy. She told me not to worry, that to border patrol officers all babies look alike, and that they’d not remove Alejandra’s clothing to check. She said Alejandra’s name would be Ernesto during her crossing.”
“Why?” Héctor said.
The question surprised Lilia. What did Héctor mean why? He must have read in her eyes her thoughts because he added, “She’s a beautiful girl. Why couldn’t this woman let her remain a girl? Why not give her papers with a girl’s name?”
Lilia thought the answer obvious. “I suppose she had no papers for girls, but she had papers for a boy about Alejandra’s age,” she said. “Wouldn’t you assume that?” She wished as soon as she’d spoken that her words were tiny seeds she could sweep into her mouth and swallow whole.
“I wasn’t involved in your dealing with that woman or with Carlos, or with any of the decisions you made during your crossing. You chose to cross without telling me, without my blessing. Nothing is obvious to me about any of this.” His rising voice in the priest’s presence embarrassed Lilia, but if Héctor noticed he didn’t care.
“I wasn’t consulted then, though I would have assumed you’d consult me. I won’t assume anything again, Lilia.” His words, slow and deliberate, rolled like hot coals across her soul, burning additional, permanent, painful reminders of her bad choices. “If this Matilde was a professional coyote, one
to be entrusted with our most precious possession, the assumption I’d make is that she’d have papers for both boys and girls.”
The priest cleared his throat. Lilia shifted her gaze from her lap to the priest, though she felt Héctor’s eyes remaining on her.
“So this woman gave your child papers with the name Ernesto,” the priest said. “This is helpful information. Perhaps they were forged documents or maybe they were the papers from a real child named Ernesto. If we contact orphanages and authorities near the accident scene and provide this name, perhaps that will trigger a memory that will lead you to Alejandra.”
Lilia nodded, grateful for his encouragement.
“Let me get to work on this,” the priest said. “Give me a day or so to gather names of orphanages and the like in that area. How do you plan to proceed once you have those names?” He looked to Héctor now, and Lilia understood that even if the priest felt sympathy toward a young, expectant mother who’d lost her firstborn child, the business dealings regarding this issue would be made man to man, and Lilia would have no say in how the remainder of the process of recovering her child unfolded. This new baby was due in eight weeks, and Lilia considered how wonderful and ironic the timing if Alejandra and the little one came to her at the same time.
The cockroach emerged from behind a wooden crucifix mounted on the wall above the priest’s head. As the men discussed Héctor’s plan to travel north to find Alejandra, Lilia sat quietly with her hands clenched in her lap and watched the insect, his thin antennae quivering wildly as if searching for something unseen but important.
Chapter 11
The Village Priest
The village priest lit a cigarette and dropped the lighter into the top drawer of his desk. He’d been on hold with a police station in Matamoros for nearly a minute, and he considered hanging up. He sought information about the accident that had killed the coyotes Carlos and Matilde, but he feared no information awaited him on the other end of the line.
