by Hester Young
I reach over to switch off the jets, both frightened and furious, and abruptly stop. Because there, rising up from the frothy water like a trick of sunlight, is a girl. Too bright to observe directly, but unmistakable in my peripheral vision, her head bent back and armpits hooked over the rim of the tub.
“Lety?”
She’s not the Lety that I’ve known in dreams, all world-weary attitude and toughness. There’s a lightness to her now, something playful, childlike.
La vida buena, eh? she says with a grand gesture of her hands. The good life.
I glance back at my house, try to imagine what my home must look like to a girl who spent her formative years in a garbage dump. Resist the urge to burst into tears remembering what I have. What Lety didn’t.
“Yeah,” I manage. “It’s good. It’s pretty damn good.”
Yulissa . . . she have this?
I don’t look at her, but I can sense her there in the space where light meets water. “I don’t think Vonda and Luis have a hot tub. But your sister will have a good life when she gets here.” I squint upward into the cloudless blue. “As good as she can make it.”
My wish, Lety says, wistful. Always my wish. La vida buena.
“You got it. What you always wanted.” I rest my elbows on the side of the tub. “Not for you, I know. Not for your baby. But you made it happen for Yulissa.”
She doesn’t answer, doesn’t state the obvious. That it’s not enough.
“It’s all that you could do, Lety. All I could do. I’m sorry.”
Suddenly the water jets shut off. The noise dies, and the water stills. A dramatic exit? But there’s nothing supernatural going on here, I soon realize. I’ve accidentally hit the switch with my forearm.
Whatever I thought I saw in the hot tub—hallucination, apparition, desert mirage—is gone.
I turn back to the house. Through the sliding glass door, I see my people: my fussy daughter, my stoic niece, the man I hope I’ll one day marry. And I see my friends, the odd assortment of folks who are a part of my life now because of Donna, a woman I came to know only after she was gone.
Lety is right. It’s a good life. And not just because of the hot tub.
As I reach for the handle, she leaves me with one parting word. Breath against my ear, so gentle it just might be a breeze; the whisper of a girl’s voice so faint, it just might be the mesquite trees.
Gracias, she says.
“You’re welcome,” I say, and then I go inside.
Author’s Note
Though the people and events of this novel are fictional, the community of recyclers at the Tirabichi garbage dump was, for decades, very real. Once a neighborhood consisting of some thirty families, the Tirabichi community was devastated by a suspicious fire in March of 2015, which claimed fifteen homes and the life of a recycler. In April, the Nogales municipal council ordered the closure of Tirabichi. The following month, another unexplained fire burned down six more homes, effectively driving out most of the residents who remained.
When I visited Tirabichi, the community was a ghost of its former self. Still, the longtime caretaker invited me into his home. His ingenious dwelling repurposed many items that others might have dismissed as trash, including a hollowed-out mattress that served as a porch overhang. A pair of residents who had not yet moved on showed me all the bottles they had been collecting for the recycling center. At the edge of the dump, overlooking the rich green valley below, a wooden cross marked the recent death of a resident.
Today, no one knows exactly where all the displaced members of the Tirabichi community have ended up. Resources in Nogales can be scarce and opportunities—legal ones, at least—hard to come by. I hope that, against the odds, these former recyclers and their children are healthy and safe.
Acknowledgments
Throughout my work on The Shimmering Road, I was fortunate to have the assistance of several knowledgeable individuals. Their advice improved the quality of my manuscript considerably; any factual errors or inaccuracies in the novel are entirely my own.
Thank you to the US Customs and Border Protection agency, which gave me clearance for a behind-the-scenes tour of its DeConcini port of entry into Nogales. Public Affairs Officer Marcia Armendariz was both personable and patient as she answered my procedural questions.
Attorney Thea Gilbert, who serves on the National Association of Counsel for Children and practices in Tucson, kindly answered legal questions that I had about the intricacies of adoption, and Sue Schmelz, from the Arizona Department of Child Safety, also provided valuable advice.
I am grateful to—and deeply impressed by—Scott Nicholson, an American charity worker living in Nogales, who led me through one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods and introduced me to the remaining residents of Tirabichi. Scott has an unimaginably huge heart, and I am truly in awe of the work he does for HEPAC, the Home of Hope and Peace, an organization that seeks “to create a healthy community in Nogales, Mexico, where citizens do not feel that their only choice for survival is to risk their lives in the desert in an attempt to immigrate to the United States.” To learn more about HEPAC, visit www.hepacnogales.org.
My fabulous team at Putnam has been such a pleasure to work with. Katie McKee, Stephanie Hargadon, Carrie Swetonic, Alexis Welby, Ashley McClay, Christine Ball, Sally Kim, and Ivan Held are all so very good at what they do. I am particularly lucky to have the feisty and tenacious Kerri Kolen as my editor. She does the work of seven, and she is, in large part, the reason I am living this multibook dream.
Interning at the Zachary Shuster Harmsworth agency at age nineteen and then becoming a client fifteen years later is one of the greatest plot twists of my life. I’m so glad to have Esmond Harmsworth representing my work.
To parent two young children while producing four-hundred-page novels under deadline is no easy task, and I could not accomplish it without the help and support of people like Deb Hoff, C. M. Brown, Jeff and Liz Wise, Rosaleigh Young, and Ellen Madigan.
Finally, love and gratitude to my husband, Spencer Wise, who gamely agreed to explore Tucson and Nogales in August, though he hates the heat; who listens as I talk through plot problems and provides tech support when I’m stumped; who tries to soft-sell my book to everyone he meets. Thank you for making it all possible, Spence.
About the Author
Hester Young is the author of the critically acclaimed The Gates of Evangeline. She holds a master’s degree in English with a concentration in creative writing from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, and her short stories have appeared in Hawai‘i Review and other magazines. Before turning to writing full-time, she worked as a teacher in Arizona and New Hampshire. Young lives in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, with her husband and their two children.
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