by Michel Stone
“Yes, of course, I can’t consider otherwise. Though please, if I may add something, sir?”
“Certainly,” Eloy said.
“Mr. S., while you and I are in very different circumstances, elements of our situation are very similar. We both love this child and would do all in our power to protect her. I want you to know that Alicia and I promise to raise her knowing about you and her mother, and her village and your love for her. I beg of you to please reconsider fighting this adoption.” He paused as if waiting for Héctor to speak. When Héctor didn’t respond Mr. H. said, “Very well. I understand. But I want you to know, no matter what happens, I will be indebted to you and your wife for the rest of my life for this child, for your Alejandra. Because we love her, we must also love you. You and your wife are an undeniable part of who Esther, who Alejandra is and will be.”
Héctor was overtaken by a sensation much like that of being tossed about in the surf when he’d lose his footing as a boy. He felt the same panic of lost control, of not knowing up from down, and he was slammed by a vivid memory of salty seawater deep in his throat, in his nose, and of a thousand foamy bubbles in his face.
“Okay,” Karolina said, exhaling in what sounded like utter exhaustion. “Well, Mr. Castillo, do you have anything more to add?”
Eloy cleared his throat. “Mr. S. may indeed protest this adoption, and this little girl can possibly be repatriated back to Mexico, if Mr. S. can prove fraud. If any deceptions have occurred and they can be proved, the adoption can be nullified. If a gray area exists, he has the right to explore that. The courts would have to sort that out, of course.”
They sat in silence a few moments, no one seeming to know how to proceed. Then Karolina said, “Mr. H., thank you for agreeing to meet with us. Why don’t we break for now? Both these men, their families, have a lot to process, to think about.” She spoke a bit more but Héctor no longer listened. His mind reeled as if a fish were caught on the spool of his thoughts racing away from him faster and faster until his thoughts were irrevocably lost in the unexplored depths of the sea.
“Let’s break for lunch, okay?” Karolina said, her hand lightly on Héctor’s shoulder. “How about we meet back here in two hours, after we’ve had time to fill our bellies and clear our heads. See you both here at, say, three o’clock?”
A few minutes later, Héctor found himself walking the streets of Matamoros with no thoughts of eating or any idea or any cares about where he might wander. He feared then that he, like the man he’d seen dying near this spot only a few days earlier, could expire among strangers in this unfamiliar town. The depth of his despair could slam him down to the pavement and he’d be forever powerless to lift himself up, crippled by his grief and the torment weighing on his soul.
Chapter 38
Lilia
With each of her deliveries, Lilia’s milk had taken a couple of days to come in, and when it arrived she’d had no doubts about her ample supply. Her breasts swelled to hard melons, so thick with milk she ached to nurse, to relieve the pressure. She harbored no fears about her milk arriving on schedule with this baby. Still, Rosa forced her to drink potions concocted of ground fenugreek, alfalfa, and blessed thistle to stimulate her production of life-giving mother’s milk.
Lilia grumbled about the nasty-tasting elixir, but Rosa insisted. “Lilia, I’ve seen this too many times,” she said. “Elizabeth came early, and your body may not have been ready. Your milk could be delayed. The first days’ milk will give her strength and resistance to infection.”
Rosa could be tougher than an old iguana, but when the time came for her to tend to babies and their healing mothers, she knew more than anyone else in Puerto Isadore. She’d learned the art and science of midwifery from her mother and she from her mother before her.
Praise be to God, the Virgin Mother, all the saints, and to Rosa, too, for Elizabeth, at just eighteen hours old, suckled and cried and wet her diaper and did all she should do as a newborn. Lilia had not felt such lightness and relief in months. When the messenger boy arrived announcing a phone call at Armando’s, Lilia told Rosa she would take it.
“Are you sure, Lilia?” Rosa said, pouring herself a cup of mescal. “You’re bleeding and weak yet to make that walk.”
“No, I want to tell him about Elizabeth, and I want to hear what news he has for us,” Lilia said, already making her way toward the courtyard.
“Very well, you hardheaded old girl,” Rosa called after her.
The messenger boy, able to walk at a far more rapid pace than Lilia, darted down the lane. “Tell him I’m coming,” she called to him.
When she reached Armando’s she leaned against the door a moment to catch her breath. When she entered, Armando was speaking into the receiver, “Ah, and here she is now, Héctor.” He extended the phone to Lilia, who took it then turned her back to Armando.
“Hello, Héctor?”
“Lilia! I was expecting Rosa. You’re out of bed? Is everything all right?”
“Oh, Héctor. Yes, you’re a papa again, a papa of a tiny, beautiful baby girl. She’s so lovely and dainty and, oh, Héctor, she’s beautiful.”
“And you? Are you okay, my love? This baby came so early. Are you both doing well?”
She recognized the genuine concern, the worry in his voice and the tone that conveyed his love for her and their family better than the words themselves.
“Yes, I’m well. I’m tired and I’m sore and all those things a new mother is supposed to be, but this is far better than Fernando’s delivery when I couldn’t walk for a week. You know how that doctor at the clinic split me like a pea pod then. Héctor, maybe saying so is bad, but yesterday was the happiest day, or one of the happiest days of my life, even happier than when Alejandra was born or when Fernando was born, because with this pregnancy I had such fears about this baby’s well-being, about her survival because of my bleeding and fever and early labor, you know?”
“Yes, Lilia. Thank God. Thank God and Jesus and the Virgin Mother,” he said.
“But you! Tell me your news,” she said. “We’ve not heard from you this week. Have you arrived in Matamoros?”
“Yes,” he said. “I tried to call you.”
“Have you found the orphanage? Could the people there help you?”
He hesitated.
“Héctor, are you there?”
“Yes, Lilia,” he said, and she almost thought she detected a hitch in his voice, as if he were drunk.
“Well, do you have news? Is Alejandra at the orphanage?”
“No,” he said. “No, my love. She is not here, but—”
“Tell me what you’ve discovered,” she said, leaning against the shop counter, her back aching and her legs shaky. She’d prayed that by now he’d have more news. She’d expected something. Anything.
“Lilia, I need you to answer something for me. This is important,” he said, sober and serious.
“Yes, Héctor, of course. What?” The earnestness in his voice unsettled her further. What had he been doing since he’d left Acapulco?
“Tell me,” he said, “what are your hopes for our new baby? My God, I don’t even know her name,” he said, half laughing, half weeping.
“It’s Elizabeth. Do you like that? Elizabeth Esperanza. I hope that name suits you.”
“Yes, Elizabeth’s a lovely name,” he said. “Now, Lilia, I want you to think, and I want you to answer me, please. What are your hopes for baby Elizabeth? Your hopes and dreams for her life, for her whole life.”
Lilia and Héctor had discussed such thoughts of fancy many times late at night while newborn Alejandra and then newborn Fernando cooed or dozed beside them. She could only guess why Héctor would ask her such questions right at this moment. Héctor wanted to speak of Elizabeth because he’d missed her birth. Lilia understood that, but, oh, how she’d longed for news about Alejandra.
“I wish her always to have enough food and clean water to drink.” She paused, wondering if this answer sufficed.
“Go on, Lilia.”
His urgency and need to know these things disturbed her, and she pulled the stool at Armando’s cash register over to her and sat.
“I…I wish her good health and that she will know love. To be loved and to love others. I wish her to be safe always.” Lilia closed her eyes, understanding her answers somehow mattered to Héctor. Tiredness overwhelmed her, and thinking clearly suddenly became a struggle. She knew she should return to bed. If she could wish anything for baby Elizabeth what would she wish? What, besides the fulfillment of basic needs, did she dream of for her children? And the realization hit her then, that since their deportation from America, her dreams for them had been reduced to the fulfillment of basic needs. No longer had she harbored dreams of fanciful travels and university educations. Those were not her dreams to dream.
“Tell me more, Lilia. I need to know, please,” he said, and she could discern the sounds of automobile traffic near him. She envisioned him standing in a big city with people all around him, and she wondered what smells he smelled and if anyone were listening to his end of the conversation just as Armando surely listened to her end of it here in this quiet shop.
“My dreams for her? For all our children? I hope our children will know God and rely on Him in lean times and times of plenty, and I hope they’ll know many plentiful times and few lean times. I wish for them wisdom. Confidence. Strength. Years ago I dreamed of their education, that they would know far more than I ever knew. I suppose somewhere a grain of those grandiose dreams remains within me. I hope they know and appreciate beauty when they encounter it,” Lilia said, tears welling in her eyes though she could not say why.
“Lilia,” he said, “those are wonderful dreams. Without hope, without dreams, what’s life?”
His affirmation bolstered her, and she continued, “I hope my children know that if they ever become separated from us, as Alejandra has been, that they’ll grow knowing their mama and papa love them, that they were conceived in love, among our dreams, among our hopes.”
She could hear Héctor’s sniffling, but he did not speak for several seconds.
“Do you have anything more? Any other wishes? If God were to descend before you now to ask this question, to grant you these dreams for your children, would you have anything else to add, Lilia? Tell me.”
Something terribly wrong had happened. Héctor sounded frantic in his desire to know her thoughts, her answers, many answers, to this question.
“I don’t know, Héctor. I want my children to live a better life than I’ve had, for them not to suffer because of mistakes and poor judgments I’ve made. I want them to live a godly life, to respect nature and know how to survive in times of poor crops or bad fishing,” she said, wiping her nose on the back of her hand. “I don’t want my babies to know pain. Neither physical pain nor mental anguish, even though I know such suffering is part of life, for it makes us appreciate the lack of pain. I pray they never know suffering of the soul as we’ve known these past years. I want our children to have dreams of a future instead of dreading it. I…I don’t know what to add to this. I want my children to be well always.” She closed her eyes, weak and exhausted to her marrow.
“Good, Lilia. These are good wishes. I want these things, too. And if you knew that your children had a very good chance at having these things, would you be satisfied? Would you feel you had done your job as their mama, even if you were to die today, but you had secured such a future for your children, would your dreams have been fulfilled?”
Armando tapped Lilia on her shoulder and handed her a square handkerchief and pointed at her eyes. She nodded a thank-you and took the cloth, dabbing at her cheeks streaked with salty tears that rolled into her mouth as she spoke.
“Héctor, why? Why do you ask me these things?” She sensed the world beginning to crumble, but why? What had happened when only moments ago she’d felt such lightness. The realization struck her then that grief was an invincible beast, impossible to kill.
“Just answer me, please,” he said, his voice rising. “Would you feel you had done your job as their mama if you’d secured these things for your children?”
“Yes, Héctor. My God, yes. I would feel at peace if I could ensure such blessings would befall our children.”
The heat in Armando’s shop had become suffocating. Her throat burned and her head throbbed. She needed to lie down. She needed to nurse Elizabeth.
“I love you, Lilia,” he said, his tone calmer now. He sounded resolute, stronger than he had at the start of their talk, though she could not know why. “I thank God for our new daughter, that you and she are well. How is Fernando taking to being a big brother?”
“Fernando loves Elizabeth. He’s a good boy,” she said, feeling as if she were suddenly suspended from the rafters like a bat, disconnected from her body and looking down at her mouth moving far below her perch, speaking distant words to Héctor, words that sounded as if they’d traveled underwater to her ears.
“When are you coming home, Héctor?” Her determination to ask about Alejandra had slipped into vapor. She felt as if God Himself had pulled that thought from her heart and scattered it like a thousand seeds in a fallow field. She somehow knew not to ask him about Alejandra again, that he had nothing to tell her or that he would tell her in his own time.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll begin the journey home by bus tomorrow, Lilia. I have to go now. I love you, my Lilia.”
“I know you do,” her mouth said, far below where she floated among the dusty wooden beams of la farmacia, where spiders kept guard over their little gray eggs, far from the reach of anything that could harm them. “I love you, too, Héctor.”
Chapter 39
Héctor
When the bus reached its stop nearest Puerto Isadore, Héctor climbed down its dusty steps, glad to bid farewell to its groans, jolts, and screeching brakes and finally to be nearing Lilia, Fernando, and baby Elizabeth. The walk westward to his village would take him forty minutes if he kept a respectable pace, and he’d get home to them by sundown. He set off on the last leg of this trek, slinging his bag of meager belongings over his shoulder. He’d barely slept in three days, and his limbs felt tight after being cramped and jostled over nearly the entire length of his country.
He passed a hand-painted wooden sign noting a narrow but worn and rocky path to a beach he’d never visited. He couldn’t see the beach from where he passed because the path, which would have seemed nothing more than a burro or goat trail, curved and split a dense stand of cacti and scrub brush and disappeared in the thicket. He doubted many people other than those who lived in close proximity had ever visited such a remote beach. Nothing of importance stood in this area except for an occasional shack or patch of sugarcane or withering cornstalks.
At the outskirts of Puerto Isadore the burning stench of his village’s incinerated waste drifted on the cooling air, and he wondered for the first time in his life if breathing that scorched garbage and refuse every evening since his birth could be toxic. Perhaps at this very moment something poisonous sprouted deep in his lungs or bones or blood. He realized now that human blood carried invisible, life-changing mysteries, and he prayed that the bodily secrets lurking and blossoming within his marrow or veins would be benign and surmountable in their effects. He wondered, too, about his children, about Alejandra. Would her life in el norte free her from the potentially toxic effects of his village’s polluted night air, or had her brief time here been enough to infect her little body with impurities. Maybe the contaminants, invisible but noxious, had infiltrated her tiny vessels and organs, her pure heart and mushrooming brain, so that even though she’d left here at a young age, the damaging seeds had been planted. He shook his head and inhaled a deep, slow breath and told himself to abandon such ridiculous thoughts.
You’re an exhausted lunatic. Enough. Enough, he told himself, kicking a clod of dirt with his boot. It exploded in a little cloud of dust and flushed two brown birds from the knee-high, scr
aggly weeds growing beside the road.
Every time his life had shattered, he’d arranged the shards anew, praying his altered existence would suffice, that what he had left of himself would be enough. Enough to support his family, enough to be pleasing to God and the saints, enough to love his children and his wife, enough to be as a man should be. He wondered how many times a life could shatter and still be a life of any use. Could the fragments become too splintered? Too different from the being of which they’d once been a part so that God would toss the hopeless remnants of that person aside? Perhaps Héctor’s time of uselessness had come. And yet, he must walk. He must put one foot in front of the other along this dusty road until he got to his Lilia. And then what? What would he say to her? He stopped walking and looked to the vast sky.
“God, help me,” he said aloud. “The closer I get to her, to my Lilia, the weaker I am becoming, and I don’t…I just don’t know how to do this.”
As he stood there, unable to proceed, he was approached by a leathery, one-eyed farmer traveling home to his outlying shack and driving a donkey cart from which he sold produce several days a week in the village. Héctor bought two avocados and a mango from the man, who handed the fruit over with shaky hands and a toothless grin. He nodded farewell to Héctor and slowly resumed his journey down the road while Héctor continued on his path in the opposite direction, toward Puerto Isadore.
When Héctor reached Armando’s shop, he stopped and bought two cans of guava juice and some chocolates, just as Armando was closing for the day. Parched from his travels, Héctor finished his juice in two long swallows. The other can and the sweets were for Lilia.
“You’ve been away, eh, Héctor? Glad to see you. So glad to see you. Did you have pleasant travels?”
“Good to be home,” Héctor said.
“You have a new baby girl, I hear. Congratulations,” Armando said, peering over the rim of his glasses.
Héctor eased away from the counter and Armando, toward the door. “Thank you, Armando,” he mumbled, his mind on Lilia, but also always on Alejandra.
