by Hester Young
“Charlie?” Noah asks. “What’s goin’ on?”
I stare at my half-frozen hands, helpless. “That dream I’ve been having,” I whisper. “About the shower.” My heart aches for Lety. For the baby that never was. “She’s been showing me, Noah, over and over again.”
“Are you sayin’—?”
“It wasn’t about me. It was never about me.” My voice cracks as I say the words. “Lety wants me to know who killed her.”
Eighteen
It should feel better than it does, knowing that my daughter and I are not in imminent danger, knowing that the violence I’ve dreamed of again and again is not my fate. And yet, it doesn’t. Doesn’t feel better at all. When the dream was mine, at least there was hope, hope that I was wrong, hope that the future was not fixed, that my own free will might somehow change the outcome. Now there is nothing I can do for Lety or her baby. Their deaths are written in stone, irrevocable and unspeakably cruel.
“Maybe you’re wrong,” Noah says. He wants to believe me, wants to cast aside this shadow that’s been hanging over us, but he’s cautious, too. Doesn’t want to let down his defenses prematurely.
“I’m not wrong,” I murmur. “That girl said Lety was shot in the stomach and the chest. That’s what I’ve been seeing. That’s what I’ve been dreaming. All this time, she’s been showing me, and I didn’t get it. I thought it was me.”
“Still . . .” Noah takes my hand, gallantly helping me leap over a puddle of sludge on the sidewalk. “You can’t take that one dancer’s opinion as proof. Sometimes people kill themselves in violent ways. We don’t know.”
“How does somebody shoot herself more than once in the chest? And what are the chances that Lety would even have a gun?” I can’t rid myself of the tearful lump in my throat. “Of all the ways to die, why would a fifteen-year-old girl go to the trouble of getting a firearm?”
“Maybe she already had one,” he says. “For protection.”
“If she really wanted to end her life, there’s a farmacia on every corner. She had better options, Noah. It didn’t have to be bloody. Didn’t have to be painful. And you said yourself, she had people who wanted to help her. She had Sonora Hope. If she was going to kill herself, it would’ve been in April when she lost her job. But in June? She had things to live for.”
“You’d think.” He bites his lip, and I can see the emotions warring within him: relief that we no longer have this grim vision hanging over us, fear of what we could be getting ourselves into. “What about Yulissa?” he says at last. “If Lety wants you to find out who gunned her down, why’d she send you after her sister?”
“I don’t know. Maybe Yulissa knows who did it. Maybe she’s in danger, too.”
“Don’t pregnant women usually get killed by their baby daddies?” Noah asks.
“Statistically, yes. But if Lety was prostituting herself, she may not have known who the father was. We should find out if there was a boyfriend. Or a pimp.”
Noah looks about to say something and then catches himself. Takes a deep breath. “Right now, the best thing we can do is go home.”
I stop walking. A nearby vendor takes this as a sign of encouragement and begins waving sunglasses in my direction, assuring me of his excellent deals.
“That’s it? You want to go home and pretend this never happened?”
“We’ll go back to Tucson first. Wrap things up over there. Get the ball rollin’ with Micky.”
This is in no way a satisfying answer. “What the hell, Noah? Yesterday you said God was calling on me. Now you’re all, Aw, let it go to voice mail. I thought you wanted to help.”
“I did help. We found out what happened to Lety, didn’t we? Maybe that’s enough.” He searches for a compromise, something to pacify me. “We can . . . go to the police. Let them figure out who did what.”
But I won’t settle for that, not after what Pam told me about Mexican law enforcement. Not after what happened to Ruben. “The Nogales police were happy to write Lety off as a suicide,” I point out. “And I have nothing but my dreams and an angry stripper to say otherwise. You think the police are going to lift a finger on my say-so?”
“Probably not,” he concedes. “But I still think we should leave. We can’t change it, so let’s . . . focus on what’s ahead.”
I’m caught between fury and bewilderment. “Are you saying it’s ethically permissible to bow out? That we should let some psycho who shot a fifteen-year-old girl and her unborn child—a viable child—just walk away? Leave the sister to fend for herself because, hey, it’s not our problem?”
“It’s not our problem,” Noah says.
Tears spring to my eyes. “I don’t think you’d be saying that if Lety were a white girl from some middle-class American family.”
The accusation hits Noah hard. He seems to weigh my words, asking himself if I’m right. Finally, he takes me by the elbow and removes me from the line of foot traffic. “We don’t have the resources to fix this now, Charlie. Our responsibility to our own livin’ baby is bigger than our responsibility to one who’s dead.”
I know he wants me to absolve him, but I won’t do it.
“Yulissa is alive,” I say. “That’s why Lety came to me.”
I look around us, at these dirty streets. Behind us, a little girl peddling gum attacks another pair of white tourists, her face twisting into a look of practiced destitution. I know that she is playing them, preying upon their guilt and pity, and yet I also know she needs that money. I know that someone, probably her mother, sent that child out to sell chicle because they could not provide for her. My child will have everything. But this child? What will she have?
For a moment, I understand Teresa and the burden she must carry, having risen from this kind of poverty. It’s survivor’s guilt, pure and simple. She flourished, and others did not.
“I love your big heart,” Noah says, stroking my belly as if to remind me of my little passenger. “But someone’s gotta care for our baby. Right now, that’s you.”
I stare down at the broken sidewalk. I’m alone in this, I realize. It’s between me and Lety now.
Noah misinterprets my silence as agreement. “Come on.” He kisses my head, and though the gesture is almost certainly meant to be tender, it strikes me as patronizing. “We’ll get some food and then head back to Tucson. You can do all the investigatin’ you want once we’re on the right side a the border.”
• • •
WE SPEAK VERY LITTLE AT LUNCH. The restaurant is nicer than one would expect from the exterior, clean, colorful, and air-conditioned. I nibble on an avocado salad and take a few halfhearted bites of a bean and cheese burrito. Noah inhales his food with his usual efficiency and kicks back with a beer.
A mariachi band drifts from table to table, taking requests. I wonder if they like their work or if parading around in giant hats and traditional black suits loses its charm when you have to play “La Bamba” for the five hundredth time. This must be a popular spot for tourists; I recognize the man in the Hawaiian pineapple shirt I saw at Marilena’s hotel, dining alone.
My mind, of course, is with Lety. I can’t shake all that she’s shown me of her life. Because it wasn’t just images, some silent film of another person’s existence that I viewed passively from the sidelines. I know how it felt to be Lety. I know the club, the men, the way she lost herself in the music, left her body behind when they reached for her. And I remember her final minutes. That feeling of hope as she stood in the shower, smiling at the kicks of her baby, looking forward to a future that seemed so close, so possible, just seconds before it was torn from her.
How can I separate myself from Lety, ignore her brutal death, having seen what I have seen? I thought it was me. I thought it was my baby. I can’t simply set aside her pain, decide that as long as it’s not mine, it doesn’t matter.
Take away my American cit
izenship, and do you know what the difference is between me and the women I help? Teresa asked.
I didn’t know. I still don’t. But I can’t help feeling that my purpose in coming to Arizona is tied to Yulissa. And tied, through Lety, to my mother.
It’s what your mother would’ve wanted, Lety said of my visit to Nogales. Now I wonder what, exactly, she meant by it. A fifteen-year-old expectant mother shot in late June. Donna and her daughter shot just one month later. Can these murders really be a coincidence?
“Would you like me to box your food, señora?”
I look up, see our genial server awaiting my response. I don’t particularly feel like lugging around a doggie bag the rest of the day, but letting food go to waste in this city seems like an unforgivable display of wealth. “Sure,” I mumble. “Please.”
With the skill of a consummate professional, the waiter slides all our plates into the crook of his arm, loads up with glasses and silverware, and heads for the kitchen. I watch him move, admiring his dexterity in some vague way, though my thoughts are elsewhere.
“We gotta schedule our home inspection for Ten Mawith Drive,” Noah says, trying to bring me back. “You excited?”
“Excited?”
It bothers me that he has already moved on, pushed the violence from his mind. If anything, he’s happy. Giddy with relief that the bloody death we’ve so dreaded belongs to someone else. It feels like the worst kind of schadenfreude, but I swallow my opinions. Starting in on Noah won’t solve anything right now, and we’ll have plenty to argue over soon enough. Because after I talk to Albert, to Teresa, to anybody else at Sonora Hope who might know something of Lety and her sister—after that, I will have to return to Nogales.
Noah pays for our lunch in US dollars and leaves the waiter a fat tip. He grabs my plastic bag of leftovers as if half a burrito in a styrofoam container might be more than I can manage to carry. “Got your passport?” he asks.
I finger through my purse a few seconds before producing the slim, navy rectangle. “Got it.”
My ticket out. Worth more than I’ll ever know.
• • •
THE LINES TO REENTER the United States on foot aren’t overly long, and they move quickly. We wait outside a grubby building where a couple of lanes lead up to uniformed Customs and Border Protection agents. Once we’re inside, the ceilings and floors are an institutional tile, and with the waist-high turnstiles, it’s not unlike a metro stop, though the lighting here is better.
Noah, in good spirits, has given up engaging me in conversation and now focuses his efforts on the retired couple behind us. They’re considerably more receptive to his chatty remarks than I am, and in no time, the woman is opening her bags and narrating for him the details of their shopping exploits in Nogales, explaining which child or grandchild will receive each purchase and why.
I glance over at the other line of folks waiting to gain entry, a quiet crew with papers or passports ready and, in most cases, little in the way of luggage. Amidst the line of tired, patient faces, I notice one that is familiar to me: the man in the Hawaiian shirt I saw at the Hotel del Viajero and later at our restaurant. I study the splashy print of his shirt. Pineapples. Brown pineapples with streaky green crowns. An Arizona resident, I figure. A shirt that tacky strikes me as a distinctly American tourist feature, like Germans wearing socks with sandals.
The CBP agent, a young woman with a lot of eyeliner, seems to know the Pineapple Guy. They greet each other warmly, friendly smiles and a joke about the weather. His voice, I note, has a slight accent, and when he produces his passport, I see that he’s a Mexican citizen, after all.
Before passing through, he leans toward the female officer and speaks confidentially into her ear. She nods, smile vanishing. Her eyes scan the other lines, and then she looks directly at me. Pauses. Looks back at Noah. Pineapple Guy offers her a cheerful salute and continues merrily on his way.
Something about this whole exchange makes me uneasy.
“Ma’am?”
I look up, startled, and find the customs agent in my own line—bald, with milky-blue eyes—watching me with a look of profound boredom.
“Citizenship?”
I hold out my passport. “American.”
He glances at my photo, an unflattering shot taken for a trip to Hong Kong my ex-husband and I made years ago. Back then, I wore my hair short and bobbed, and it must have been humid out that day because my flustered half smile is framed by a halo of frizz.
“Did you do any shopping today?” the bald agent asks.
“No, just visiting,” I tell him. “I’m a journalist.”
My answer does not interest him in the slightest. “Have a nice day.”
Behind me, Noah finally stops gabbing with the retired couple and steps up to the desk. I see the young female agent gesture to her bald coworker, an abrupt cutting motion with her hand. He snaps to attention, suddenly awake.
“What’s in the bag?” he asks Noah, pointing at my leftover lunch.
“Food,” Noah says.
“Can you open that, please?”
Noah removes the Styrofoam container and obediently unhooks the fasteners. When he lifts the lid, his mouth falls open. My breath catches. There are no avocado slices, no remnants of my burrito inside. Just leaves, dried and green.
Even from several feet away, it looks like marijuana.
“That’s not mine,” Noah says helplessly. “There must have been a mix-up at the restaurant.”
“Please place your hands against the wall,” the bald agent announces, and the female officer waves in another agent for backup.
This is not good.
“But that’s not mine!” Noah repeats, and suddenly everyone is looking at him, all the bored faces lighting up with curiosity. Behind him, the woman Noah’s been blabbing with shares a look with her husband. He seemed so nice, it says.
“Hands against the wall, sir.” Although the bald officer remains polite, there’s a warning in his voice now. “I need to give you a pat-down.”
Grudgingly, Noah submits to this little bit of humiliation. I wait, hoping this will somehow get cleared up, that they’ll discover it’s just someone’s bag of oregano, but before I know what’s happened, they have him in handcuffs.
“This way, sir.” Baldy directs him away from the line of pedestrian traffic and points Noah toward a room with an imposing metal door. “I’m going to have to place you under arrest.”
As they’re leading him off, Noah shoots me a final glance. He’s afraid, I see, but not for himself. It’s me he’s worrying over, me hanging around this dusty border town, alone.
I watch him mouth one single, urgent word.
Go.
Nineteen
We never should have come to Nogales. The thought cycles through my head over and over again, an endless loop of self-recrimination. Noah said it was too dangerous. He warned me. And now here we are.
I don’t know who the man in the pineapple shirt is or how we ended up on his bad side, but he clearly knew what Customs and Border Protection would find in that container. He was at the restaurant. He must’ve had a hand in putting it there. But why? What was he doing at the Hotel del Viajero? What did we unknowingly stumble on?
I should be scared. Scared for Noah, scared for me, scared for our daughter. That would be the normal reaction. Instead, I’m furious. If that asshole thinks setting up Noah is going to make me mind my own business like a good little girl, he’s got another think coming.
First things first: I need to get Noah out of there.
I head straight for the CBP administrative building. After waiting in line for ages and getting passed around a handful of office workers, I finally find a woman who takes pity on me. She listens to my story, and though it’s clear she thinks I’m one of those totally-in-denial stand-by-your-man chicks, she at least explains
the process. They’ll collect Noah’s personal effects, she says, and field-test the leaves. If it’s really marijuana, he’ll be placed in a holding cell for US citizens until an agent from Homeland Security Investigations comes to handle his case. That agent will determine whether or not they have enough evidence to charge him.
“Will they let him call me?” I ask.
“Sure,” she says. “Usually takes a few hours, but you’ll hear from him. And if it’s all a big mistake like you say, they’ll release him right away.”
Fingers crossed for a quick release, I settle into a twenty-four-hour McDonald’s on the American side of the border and wait. For three and a half hours, I stare at my tray of fries, check that my phone is operational, and chase my own circuitous thoughts with the panting stupidity of a dog going after its own tail.
Is Pineapple Guy a drug smuggler? Why was he following us? What’s his business with Marilena’s hotel? Did he know that we were asking about Lety?
When Noah finally does call, he has no interest in discussing my theories. “I want you to get outta there,” he tells me. “Catch a flight to New York. Go visit your grandmother or Rae. I want you to be safe. Somebody was messin’ with us, and I don’t want them goin’ after you.”
I ignore his instructions. “Have they charged you with something? Do you have a court date?”
“Right now it’s simple possession. But it’s Friday. I probably can’t get before a judge until Monday.”
“They can’t put you in jail all weekend!” I protest. “Can’t you post bail or something?”
“Not until a judge sets it.” He sounds tired. “I’ll get this taken care of, okay? I’ll find a good lawyer. But you need to leave Arizona. Promise? I want you safe.”
“I’ll keep the baby and me safe, I promise.” I make no commitment to leave Arizona. Now that we know my visions of fatal showers aren’t a personal threat, I’m not worried about my own well-being. “You’re sure you’re all right?”
