It was three in the morning when they left the club. Jeanette had her cell phone but nobody had called. She imagined her mother puffy from the surgery, fuzzy on whatever painkillers the plastic surgeon had given her. Asleep. She probably wouldn’t notice how late Jeanette got home.
The high had started to fade. Now Jeanette felt panicky, watching the euphoria leak out of her, desperate with the knowledge that her confidence hadn’t been real, just a chemical trick. She couldn’t remember where Johnson had parked but he was leading her by the arm toward the ocean, they were crossing the boulevard toward the dunes.
“Where are you taking me?”
Johnson also seemed depleted. He seemed angry now. At the club, he’d stopped dancing and nearly punched a guy who looked at Jeanette from head to toe. A bouncer had intervened, and Johnson said they were leaving.
“Let’s go look at the water,” he said, not even turning to see Jeanette as he led her by the arm.
“Why?”
He didn’t answer. Jeanette was so tired. She just wanted to go home.
The beach was dark enough that no one would see them unless they walked down the stairs toward the shore and right up to them. But it wasn’t so dark that she couldn’t see Johnson’s eyes. The Miami Beach skyline formed a lighted wreath around them. Jeanette took a breath of salt air and felt the airy rumble of a wave. Okay, do what you’re going to do. The water shone black, pure black, the boats in the distance shiny bobbing dots when he held her down.
It was the dead body that saved her. Later, she would think of this moment and know that nothing else would have stopped Johnson’s hands digging all over her skin and into her brain, implanting the sound of skin on skin that she’d retrieve with shame the rest of her life. Later, standing on the shore, watching water bob around the lifeless woman, only then would she feel a deep sorrow for this body that saved her own.
“I’ll call the cops. About the body,” she said, and Johnson responded, “You crazy? We’re high as fuck. You’re like twelve years old. Shit. Shit.”
“I’m fifteen!” she said.
At their right a locked pile of beach recliners wrapped in metal twine leaned precariously. An empty lifeguard booth cast shadows over its dirty plastic bands.
“Jesus Christ,” Johnson yelled at her. “Jesus Christ. Jail time—that’s what it fucking is.”
Jeanette stared at the tower of beach loungers. She wanted to climb its rungs and go to sleep on top, a disgraced version of the princess and the pea.
“Well, we can’t just leave her here,” she said. “Can we just leave her here?”
Jeanette wasn’t used to a grown man without an answer. The world felt so much more dangerous, so much more uncertain than it had just a day ago. Tendrils of the dead woman’s hair pulsed like jellyfish with the tide. She had hair the color of Jeanette’s, hair the color of her mother’s.
Johnson had cast off his sneakers earlier, and his socked feet left little oval nests in the wet sand along the shore as he paced. Jeanette placed a foot in one of the little foot pools and marveled at the empty space.
“We gotta go,” Johnson said, grabbing her by the arm and pushing her toward his shoes and damp T-shirt that lay in a pile. “Come on. Get yourself together.”
“What about—?”
“They’ll find it. Someone will find the body in the morning.”
Johnson sprinted toward Ocean Drive, holding his pants up and wobbling like a duck. Jeanette followed, thinking their footprints that led up to the body were a bad idea. She wondered if she could call the cops from the car. But how would she explain why they had fled? Why she’d been at the beach after dark in the first place?
The street was empty, illuminated by the glow of art deco hotel fronts like the whole place was as real as a lit-up plastic Christmas tree. They ran two blocks inland, a few trickles of bleary-eyed clubbers meeting their path, unimpressed by their half-dressed, panicky race toward nowhere. They ran past closed tourist shops full of mannequins, balloon-breasted women in bikinis, blank-faced men in silly T-shirts that said things like FBI: FEMALE BODY INSPECTOR. Rows of shot glasses, crystal dolphins, bleached sand dollars. Johnson with a hand holding his pants up, Johnson running with the wobble of a toddler taking its first clumsy steps.
It had happened like this: Johnson thrusting her into the sand and pinning her by the shoulders. Like this: a tiny crab scurrying inches from Jeanette’s sideways-turned head, minute legs like fingers running over a piano. She didn’t yell or protest. She didn’t say no. She felt the futility of language, that it couldn’t capture the knowledge that what was happening was exactly what she’d expected could happen, that she was disappointed that once again the unexpected hadn’t won out. That strange men in cars were exactly what everyone had warned they were. That sex was just sex and not something that would clean her from the inside out, deliver her new to the world.
As Johnson undid her shorts, as he tugged at her tank top, she wanted to yell that he should stop—not because she wanted him to but because why would he want to be exactly what everyone expected? Didn’t he know how exhausting it was? She couldn’t find her voice, but it didn’t matter. Jeanette knew it then: harder girls weren’t happy. Probably, nobody was.
Jeanette followed until she didn’t. She followed until Johnson no longer looked back. Then she stopped along an empty street and curled onto a bench. She wondered if Johnson would come back looking for her. She wondered what a sunrise would look like on this particular street, what a body would look like coming into the light.
5
FIND YOUR WAY HOME
Gloria
Mexico, 2016
When you first got there, to the detention center, I was afraid you would forget: the feel of bathwater (that feeling of calming suspension, like in a womb!), the way Miami smells of salt, what it feels like to run for miles and never hit a wall or fence. I was afraid captivity would shape you into something new and unrecognizable. I was afraid I would bear witness to a turning point, look back and think, That was the moment that shaped your life into disaster, or worse, I was the one who caused disaster.
But you were resilient, and I guess it’s no surprise. I’ve watched mewling kittens fight for life, the mother flattened into bone and fur by a careless car, and why should a human child be any different? I like to think you need me but I know now—that the feeling is more about my own survival than yours.
When you first got there, I wasn’t moved to another room. Our room had already swelled with more people than beds even though they said that wasn’t allowed. So you slept on the plastic cot with the scratchy blanket with me, and we both tried to will ourselves smaller to make space for the other. You asked me only once where we were and why. I told you it was only temporary, but by then, weeks had passed. You seemed to sense my struggle to answer so you stopped asking. But I could see you swallow the question and it pained me.
You didn’t like your new “school.” You complained that you were in the second grade but had to take a class with first graders and kindergarteners. You called them babies and I wanted you to stop growing, to remain in this moment. You said some of the kids couldn’t speak English but that when you tried to speak to them in Spanish, the teacher said you weren’t allowed. You complained that you already knew everything they tried to teach you. I was miserable and proud at the same time.
You didn’t like the food either but this was easier to get used to. It was hard, watching you no longer savor, lose that pleasure. I watched how eating became mundane. But there were bigger losses to mourn. I couldn’t think about food.
It’s funny, how a place can look so different when you crop the edges. I’d watch you play with the other kids in the industrial-looking playground, all that laughter, all that running and jumping. Except for the wall and chicken wire looming beyond, this could be any multicultural playground in any multicultural city full of happy, thriving kids. It reminded me of when I was young, long before you, in Sonsonate. A group of
Christian missionaries came to our town and they built a school and a church. We watched them from behind our porches and favorite trees, how they delighted in everything we eschewed, favored the grubbiest clothes and the simplest food despite the rolls of bills in their lanyard wallets.
One day, as I played with two school friends, one of the Christian missionaries approached and spoke in Spanish to me. “Despite having so little,” she said, “you are so happy. You could teach the children in my country so much about what’s really important in life.”
I hadn’t known until that moment that I had so little. Even as an adult, when I had experienced enough to place my own life in comparison, I marveled at the woman’s comment. I wondered what she had expected: sad poor people being sad and poor at every sad, poor moment of their lives? She mistook happiness for what it was—how we survive and build lives out of the strings we hold. But she must have known, deep down, that she was lying to herself. She had said I knew the secret, what was really important in life, what made a person happy. If that was true, it didn’t make sense when she went back home and left all that “happiness” behind.
What I am trying to say is that we told jokes back then, at the detention center. We laughed in our little cot until the other women shushed us. We told jokes about our situation that were funny enough to muffle the dread inside.
Almost a month. That’s how long you laughed in an industrial playground, how long you sat bored in a class full of “babies,” how long you forgot the taste of your mother’s cooking. You can count yourself lucky because on the television now they talk about all these kids locked up in cages. Like it wasn’t bad enough they separated adult family members, sent them to opposite sides of the country. I didn’t think it could get worse. You have childhood memories that are not policed by a guard standing just off the frame. For this, I am grateful.
I don’t know what you remember, but they didn’t tell us where they were taking us. I thought we were going before a judge finally. I thought I could argue my case, my credible fear. I had practiced. Instead they boarded us onto a bus with bars on the windows and dropped us off in Mexico. We were Salvadoran by nationality but Mexico was just a few hours away, and that’s where we’d come from, so there they left us. Said, Find your way home. We were supposed to be turned over to Mexican immigration officials, but I guess they didn’t show up. Or they thought we were Mexican. It was all very disorganized. I don’t know how to reach the nuns of the center for deported migrants that fed us that night and gave us a place to sleep beside all the other dazed faces. If I could reach them, I would say simply: Thank you. If only for one night, you kept us safe.
There are three choices for people like us in Mexico. We make our way back across the border and risk even harsher punishment if we are caught, because then we are “repeat offenders,” for us, a second time. We make our way back to our original homes, places we fled once because hunger shadowed, death shadowed. Or we stay with the others like us here, a hard choice too: here, where we’ll be chased and harassed, cash out for yet another outstretched hand in uniform to escape yet another van to yet another unknown. And I just kept thinking of how much harder crossing had become, kept thinking of all those bodies turned skeleton in the desert, all those bodies stacked atop one another in the morgues; so many bodies, too many bodies. Bodies washed ashore. Names we’d never know.
I opted for the last choice, to stay in Mexico, and I hope you will understand someday why I did so.
I know it was hard for you. You couldn’t even write in Spanish since you’d spent nearly all your life studying in English. The water made you sick because your stomach wasn’t used to it. You cried for your old life every day. You begged to go back to Florida and how could I explain it to you, you so small and full of hope still? That the place you called home had never considered you hers, had always held you at arm’s length like an ugly reflection?
I realize someday you may ask why we embarked on any of this in the first place, why I didn’t keep you breathing mountain air in your first home, water the color of a peacock feather, the sound of a guitar in a cathedral plaza, why I didn’t keep you in a place that never called you foreign. I guess the time has come to tell you about my pregnancy, though I have avoided it all these years.
I don’t know his name, Ana. I don’t even know his face. I remember, most, his hands, cracked and dry. How his nails were long and underlined with muck. How he tasted of stale smoke, smelled of grass. I knew he was a marero because of the 13 on his forearm. There was a portrait of the Virgin Mary extending up from the numbers, and I kept my eyes on hers, pleading up; they seemed to know there was little worth seeing in the earthly realm. He was just a teenager, Ana. This fact made it easier to forgive or at least spread blame. The war made a family out of orphaned boys. So did a country that didn’t want them either. Deportation. Mara, 18th Street, these were the parents who wanted them. If this makes you think to hate the country that birthed you, to hate yourself, remember that the guns bore US seals. That the last man your grandfather saw before a bullet to the face had just returned from a Georgia training camp.
The man who made you, and undid me, came as a warning. Your uncle, my brother, had a little store and he paid dues. But then there were some rough months. There was no money. He’d missed two months of payment. When they came the third month, they beat him up. I was the only warning left.
You are not of the man who raped me. I decided this as soon as I knew I was pregnant. I don’t believe a person is a person until they’ve arrived, announced themselves as such. I believe family is whoever we point to. I did not just have you. You did not simply happen to me. I chose. I saw the possibilities and I chose and I would not judge the woman who chooses differently. I decided I would be your mother and family, and you would be of me. I tell you this story but I do not call him your father.
Did I tell you about the day you were born? You were a month early, not too early for the doctors to consider you premature but early enough that you looked frail and tiny, smaller than all the other babies in the hospital. To me, you were a speck, a feather, and I was afraid you would die. It’s a horrible thought, I know. But probably the first thought in every mother’s mind: So many ways I could fail at this. I was afraid to hold you, even. I was alone in the hospital and the nurse must have thought me tragic because she prayed a rosary over me. Out of politeness I didn’t ask her to stop. But I remember I thought, for the first time, My God. Nobody asked you either, Mary. Nobody asked if God could build a temple out of you, if you wanted to turn your life into an offering.
They killed your uncle six months later, you still latched to my chest, you still sleeping in a bundle by my side. I will spare you the details and say only this: I made a choice again, for you. And I am sorry I had nothing else to offer, Ana. That there are no real rules that govern why some are born in turmoil and others never know a single day in which the next seems an ill-considered bet. It’s all lottery, Ana, all chance. It’s the flick of a coin, and we are born.
6
PREY
Carmen
Miami, 2016
Carmen was setting a bird-of-paradise centerpiece among the linen place mats when she heard the guttural growl, a persistent rumble that sharpened into an alarm. It sounded almost like Linda—her blue Siamese—when a bird in flight mocked the cat’s predatory wiggles from the safer side of the sliding glass door. But this shriek went far beyond a pitch Linda could emit. This shriek had the unmistakable texture of wildness.
Not that Carmen would have known. In Coral Gables, the wildest residents were peacocks, lazy pageant queens traversing between parked Aston Martins on hedge-hidden driveways. Carmen had been to a zoo exactly once, some twenty years ago, as a chaperone for one of Jeanette’s elementary school classes. As far as she could remember, none of the lions had growled. Neither had the cheetahs or the white tigers. She’d found, on a whole, the zoo an entirely forgettable experience. But she must have seen a nature show at least o
nce in her sixty-odd years (who could even remember their own age anymore?) because somewhere in her mind’s gathered archives an immediate connection formed: the noise came from a wild beast, a beast that didn’t belong in the civilized world.
She’d told guests to arrive at 7 p.m. It was three o’clock. The turkey glowed beneath the oven’s lights, crisping. She’d set all fifteen places. Carmen had chosen a hybrid décor, the usual Thanksgiving stand-ins with some tropical flourishes: a cornucopia filled with cascading autumn vegetables nestled among marble figurines on a hallway table, single lipstick-red hibiscus blooms in crystal vases throughout the living room.
Still clutching a few stray petals that had drifted from the centerpiece, she left the house in yoga pants and house slippers to investigate. Carmen looked up and down the street and the scene was as always—the street empty and quiet and grandiose, the banyan trees arched in a canopy like kissing lovers, her neighbors tucked safely in their own houses or out already for early dinners. Ever since her husband’s death—she felt ill even thinking of him, the pervert—she’d thought Coral Gables the loveliest and loneliest neighborhood in the whole world. Its faux-Spanish street markers, its vine-laden fences and stone gateways: all flourish, all enamel, hiding nothing, just persistent nothing beneath.
She was about to turn back when she heard it again, another growl. It came, definitively, from the house across the street. How strange, she thought. Perhaps the single woman who lived in the house watched a loud movie. But not likely. She couldn’t shake the weirdness as she showered, as she dressed in her dark blue Ralph Lauren suit (a suit she hadn’t worn since retirement). And after she’d placed seltzer in an ice bucket to chill, after she’d laid out chips and cornichons beside her homemade paté, she crossed the street.
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