by Hester Young
“The cops found her at her daughter’s place.” From her blasé delivery, you’d think my aunt was discussing an electric bill. “Somebody shot ’em both.”
“I didn’t even know Donna had a daughter. Besides me, I mean.” Without thinking, I take a mouthful of steaming coffee and burn my mouth. “That’s so . . . you’re saying somebody just came in and shot them?”
“The police think it’s drug related,” Suzie informs me. “No surprise there. A real shame Donna took her own kid down with her, though. I always said you were better off without her.”
“The daughter,” I begin, “did she—”
“They’re both dead. Pretty ugly business from what the officer told me.”
“Jesus. That’s crazy.” I’m not sure what to do with any of this information, how I’m supposed to feel about losing family members I never really had. In truth, I don’t feel much of anything, just detached recognition that in the contest for Most Dysfunctional Family History, Noah and I may now be running even. “So . . . are you going to fly out there? To Tucson?”
Suzie snorts. “I haven’t had a relationship with Donna in almost forty years. Too late now.”
“Yeah.” I’m relieved to hear this is just a courtesy call, not an appeal to explore a portion of my gene pool that I’d rather ignore. “Well . . . thanks for letting me know.”
“There’s one thing,” she says. “I probably shouldn’t even bring it up, not with you expecting, but . . .” She sighs. “There’s a kid. Donna’s granddaughter. She was in the house the night it happened.”
I have a sudden flash of the girl in the desert, the bloody footprints, the cries for Mama. And the blankets, dark hair spilling from white folds. My body goes cold.
“What happened to her? The little girl, is she alive?”
“She’s all right,” Suzie confirms. “Child Protective Services have got her in a foster home for now. But they always go chasing after the family in these situations, looking for someone to take the kid. And I guess there’s no dad in the picture, so . . .”
The image of that little girl, her bloody footprints, hangs over me, more awful now that I understand. She must have found her mother dead in that apartment. Found Donna, too. But why appear to me? What good could I possibly do, unless—
“You don’t think Child Protective Services will come to me, do you?” I ask.
“Oh yeah,” my aunt says. “They’re gonna be all over you. Just don’t let them guilt you into anything. You and me both know Donna was a piece of shit. You don’t owe her jack. But I figured, you know, better warn you what’s coming.”
“Thanks,” I mumble, and find some quick excuse to get off the phone.
I’m not your mama, I told the girl, and it’s true. But by some strange accident of blood, I’m her aunt. Does that matter?
Usually, when strange children whisper to me in dreams, I have no qualms about helping. That’s how I met Noah, in fact—rushing to the aid of some mystery boy. But this child is different. An echo of a life I never lived. Tangible proof of a woman I’d rather forget.
The urge to walk away is overwhelming.
Still processing it all, I drift down the hall in search of Noah. I find him in the bathroom, toweling off after his shower. His close-cropped dark hair sprays me with a few errant drops as I enter. I can smell the sandalwood soap he uses, a familiar, masculine odor, and suddenly I want to bury my face in his neck and promise him that house in Sidalie.
“What’s goin’ on?” Noah correctly deduces something’s amiss from my knit eyebrows.
“I don’t know,” I murmur. “I think . . .” I stare at the bathroom floor, trying to mentally work my way around this one, but there’s only one conclusion I can draw, no matter how I attack it. “I think we need to go to Tucson.”
PART II
Tucson, Arizona
August
2012
Three
For years, I have listened to people describe anything large as “the size of Texas.” I can’t wear skinny jeans, my friend Rae might moan. Can’t you see I’ve got an ass the size of Texas? In my mind, this made sense. Texas equals big, a simple equation. But only when Noah and I hit the highway, destination Tucson, do I understand the full extent of such hyperbole. Texas isn’t just big—it’s endless.
In the Northeast, you can drive eight hours and pass through almost as many states. The coast is littered with rest stops, major cities, tourist destinations. Texas, I quickly learn, is its own world. According to our GPS, the drive from Sidalie to Tucson clocks in at around fifteen hours, and Noah’s home state accounts for ten of them. You can drive all day and still find yourself in Texas.
Noah drives the first several hours, looking oddly relaxed as his SUV reaches speeds of ninety-five miles per hour.
“Would you slow down?” I beg, although the speed limit’s eighty out here, and we haven’t seen any state troopers.
“Mm.” He complies for about ten minutes before the pointer on the speedometer begins creeping up again.
I roll down the window a few inches, craving wind, a dash of fresh air, but the sudden blast of heat in my face feels more like cracking open an oven. Noah smirks at this rookie mistake and points to the temperature display in the center console. One hundred and two degrees. From then on, we travel windows up, hermetically sealed in our climate-controlled car.
Early in our journey, we see some encouraging signs of life—exits, towns, industry—but by the time we hit the western portion of the state, there is only highway. Rural desert. Skies you could drown in. Buttes rising up, flat and plodding. This is the Texas I always imagined, this hot and dangerous wasteland, not Sidalie, with its manicured, water-wasting lawns, its strip malls and chain stores, and the one enormous building I mistook for an athletic complex until Noah explained that it was a megachurch.
I watch the monotonous desert landscape roll by, fascinated by the people who choose to live in such a place. I have never seen land so empty and unforgiving: cracked dirt dotted with scraggly bits of green, the very occasional attempt at a town delineated only by a sign and a thin scattering of houses in the distance. Living out here, away from the safety net of neighbors and speedy emergency services, you’d have to learn to handle yourself. No wonder Noah keeps a nine-millimeter in the glove compartment. The Wild West is alive and well.
I wonder if Arizona will be more of the same, if Tucson possesses its own breed of culture. Apart from a girls’ weekend Rae and I once spent in New Mexico, I haven’t seen much of the Southwest.
“You’ve been to Tucson before, right?” I ask. “What’s it like?”
Noah shrugs. “Just another city in a desert. Nothin’ special.”
“This drive is long.”
“Yeah, Arizona’s a trek. You get used to it, I guess.”
“Used to it? What, were you a trucker in a former life?”
“I drove this route a lot when Carmen was in law school,” he says.
The mention of his ex-wife makes me a bit prickly, but I’m careful not to show it. Noah doesn’t usually mention her, and I’m curious. “Where’d she go to law school?”
“Arizona State. She got a scholarship.” Though he offers little in the way of detail, I can tell it must have been a source of contention for them, Carmen’s going away to school.
“Was that right after you got married?”
“Yep,” he says. “It was hard for a few years. My company was takin’ off, and I couldn’t just up and leave with her. So we did a lotta back-’n’-forth.”
“A long-distance marriage,” I marvel.
“Yeah,” he says. “I don’t recommend those.”
I want to ask more about her, this woman he spent so much of his life with, but part of me is afraid to know the details, afraid that Carmen’s ambition and intelligence will prove me inferior. Ultimately their r
elationship imploded because she didn’t want kids and Noah did. In my rawest, most insecure moments, I wonder if that’s the only leg up on Carmen that I have: my womb. My willingness to bear children.
I’d never tell Noah about these fears, of course. I don’t want to be a jealous stereotype.
I shift around in the passenger seat, too proud to complain about my physical discomfort, but inwardly cursing myself for attempting a car ride of this magnitude when I’m so far along in the pregnancy. We could’ve flown, of course, but it seemed easier to keep our travel plans flexible, to forgo the hassle of renting a car in Arizona. Unfortunately, I did not factor in my overactive bladder, which I’m currently managing through a combination of mild dehydration and frequent pit stops. I drive for a couple hours to let Noah nap, but driving is even more awkward than being a passenger; my belly bumps up against the steering wheel.
And my discomfort is not just physical. My mind races with questions, worries, and suppositions about the little girl we will soon meet. Michaela Ramos, my niece. According to her caseworker, she goes by Micky. Six years old. Old enough to understand something about death, to understand that neither her mother nor her grandmother is ever coming back. Old enough to understand that someone, or multiple someones, came into her home while she was sleeping and killed the two people she loved best.
And it was Micky who found them dead.
After an intense couple weeks of paperwork, background checks, and polite but persistent phone calls, Noah and I have secured visitation rights with my niece. Tomorrow, we meet with Micky’s caseworker, a man with a low, jaded voice named Daniel Quijada. He’ll bring us to a supervised visit with the child herself. From there, everything’s up in the air. Noah and I will be tasked with some difficult choices, choices with life-altering consequences for the two of us, our daughter, and Micky.
How does one make these decisions? I know nothing about my niece except that her bloodline is unimpressive and her parenting, in all probability, has been wildly inadequate. In my book, mothers and grandmas of quality do not become victims of gruesome drug-related double homicides. Who knows the caliber of screwed-up kid we’re about to encounter?
In the passenger seat, Noah awakens from his catnap. He blinks his eyes a few times and peers out the window to see where we are. “Still Texas?” he guesses.
We’ve been driving since five a.m. and it’s after noon now. “Yeah,” I say. “Still Texas.”
He yawns. “Gonna need lunch soon.”
I don’t answer, don’t shift my gaze from the road.
He studies me, my upturned chin and hands gripping the wheel at ten and two, in perfect driver’s ed formation. “You nervous?”
“Well, sure. I don’t know what we’re getting ourselves into.” It bothers me that he’s not more freaked out about everything, yet from the beginning, he’s approached the topic of Micky with an almost preternatural calm.
That girl needs somebody, he said when I explained the situation to him. Maybe it’s us. And maybe it is. But how will we know?
Noah touches my arm. “Hey. I know the timin’ is bad with the baby and all, but we’re doin’ the right thing.”
“Yeah.”
One can’t argue with “the right thing.” I don’t tell him that the prospect of coordinating an additional child’s housing, school, doctor visits, and the like leaves me overwhelmed. Don’t mention that inviting a traumatized child into our home precisely when our first child is born strikes me as reckless, arrogant even. I want to do the right thing, but unlike Noah, I’m guided by more than untested ideals. I’ve been a parent before. I know what it entails.
“Can you imagine where you ’n’ I would be today if we didn’t have grandparents to raise us?” He shakes his head. “I keep thinkin’ about that, how we gotta pay it forward. We have a responsibility to this kid.”
“Micky,” I say, trying her name on like an article of clothing I’m not so sure about.
“Micky,” Noah echoes, and then smiles. “Your family’s got somethin’ against girly-girl names, huh?”
“Her mom’s name was Jasmine,” I protest. “That’s pretty girly.” I wince. “Jasmine. Sounds like a Disney princess or a stripper, and I don’t know which is worse.”
“All right, then.” He chuckles. Squints into the searing sunshine. “Guess that’s a name we won’t be givin’ our daughter.”
• • •
FROM THE HIGHWAY SIGNS, you’d think El Paso was some kind of mecca. All morning, green road markers have tracked our distance from the city: EL PASO, 479. As if the city were so miraculous, one needs five hundred miles of anticipatory signage. Still, I watch the numbers dwindle, cheering internally when the mileage shrinks from triple to double digits. El Paso is near the state border, just a stone’s throw from New Mexico. El Paso means we’re getting closer.
With proximity to El Paso comes Mexico, and with Mexico, Border Patrol. We hit a checkpoint in Sierra Blanca, find our vehicle funneled into a lane alongside a green-uniformed agent who asks about our citizenship and destination, his left hand tight on the leash of a vigilant canine. Unlike the cars with brown-skinned occupants or California plates, we move through without much in the way of a real inspection. The unearned free pass makes me feel uncomfortable, a reluctant teacher’s pet.
“What does Border Patrol have against California?” I ask Noah, craning my neck to see what’s happening to an old Cali-plated station wagon.
“Medical marijuana,” he says. “It’s legal there, not here. Sierra Blanca’s always bustin’ folks for weed.” He doesn’t look back, and I gather that random stops and searches are a Texas quirk he has learned to live with, racial and geographic profiling notwithstanding.
As we speed toward the Franklin Mountains, Mexico looms ever larger in my consciousness. Signs crop up for Ciudad Juárez and the international border, and though I can’t see the dividing wall, I imagine it out there, demarcating the line between poverty and possibility. Or not. Maybe I’ve unfairly bought into stereotypes of an impoverished Mexico—the truth is I’ve never been to a border town before.
“Hey. Wanna make a pit stop in Juárez?” I don’t know if the suggestion is a noble attempt at consciousness-raising or simple morbid curiosity, but Noah shoots it down regardless.
“Nah. We don’t even have our passports.”
“Yes, we do,” I inform him. “I brought pretty much every form of ID imaginable, just in case. You never know what kind of paperwork Child Protective Services will come up with.”
Around us I can see the stirrings of a city: concrete structures, expanding lanes, increased traffic. As if sensing the potential for freedom, my right leg cramps up. Pain shoots up my calf in a series of wild spasms. If I don’t get out of this car soon, I’m going to lose it.
“Come on,” I urge him. “We need a break. You can get a beer.”
“We’re not crossin’ over,” Noah says. “I’ve spent enough time in Mexican border towns, trust me. They’ll hurt your soul.”
I imagine dirty barrooms, topless dancers, sketchy alleyways best avoided. Mexico, in my mind, is a bad Antonio Banderas movie. “You think I can’t handle a little sin?” I scoff.
“I can’t handle it. They see you’re a gringo, and they’re all over you.” He shudders. “I’ve had girls who couldn’t be more’n twelve try to sell themselves to me on the street. Nobody should have to live like that.”
“Oh.” I put a hand reflexively to my belly. “I guess we can skip that. Probably safer, anyway. Never know what kind of creepy bathrooms we might run into.”
We settle for El Paso, swooping in for a quick bite at some taco chain I’ve never heard of and then gassing up in a neighborhood that looks best avoided at night. Is Juárez really so much worse? I wonder, noting the run-down motel across the road, its offers of both hourly and weekly rates.
Despite having used the bat
hroom at the taco joint, I have to pee again. I scan the gas station—too rinky-dink for even a proper food mart—and see a small concrete structure with the word RESTROOM on its dented metal door. Sketchy as all get-out, but it’ll do. I scramble out of our SUV, turn sharply around the gas pump, and nearly crash into a young woman passing by.
She bobbles her bottle of Fanta and whirls on me in a flash of jangling bracelets and large hoop earrings.
“Jesus Christ, watch it!” She’s a brown-skinned woman with blond-streaked hair and plenty of cleavage, the kind of woman who could address a friend as homegirl without sounding ridiculous. She raises a finger as if preparing to cuss me out but stops when she notices I’m pregnant. The dirty look she’s been shooting me immediately turns to a big, chummy grin.
“Hey, mami, me too!” She gestures to her own belly, which is in that pudgy-but-not-obviously-expecting stage. “You about to drop yours, huh? When’re you due? I’m January.”
“Congratulations.” My armpits are already damp from the heat. “I’m due the end of September.” It’s an unlikely moment of sisterhood, but haul around new life in your body for a few months, and you feel a certain kinship with others in your situation. “Is this your first?”
She laughs, a low cackle. “Don’t I wish.” She slaps her gut. “Number five right here. My oldest is sixteen.”
I almost say, You look too young to have a teenager, but I don’t. Because chances are she was too young. I think suddenly of my mother, raised in the projects of Boston, just nineteen when she had me. I think of Jasmine, the half sister I never knew, a single mom gunned down in her home. And I think of Micky, facing the kind of hardships I put behind me many, many years ago. I’ve never dwelled upon my own losses, choosing instead to outrun them, and yet here I am, Micky’s present bringing me uncomfortably close.
“Sounds like you have your hands full,” I say. “Good luck.”
