He tried to squeeze her hand back, but her balmy skin slipped from his grasp. Never would he have imagined needing distance between his own body and hers, but this was the cruelty of the desert: it could make you feel trapped when nothing but emptiness surrounded you.
“Toma,” he said, handing her the canteen of water.
“I’m not thirsty. You drink.”
“Please. If not for you, for our child.”
She took the warm metal container but rolled her eyes at him. “You won’t be able to use that forever, you know.”
“More reason to use it now.” He slowed and rested his hands on his knees, letting his head hang over them. When he looked up he saw her just a few feet ahead, waiting for him. For a moment he thought he would cry, but instead he gave out a parched sob that shook his body once, hard. He would never understand what his wife saw in him, but in moments like these he prayed that whatever it was, he would never lose it.
If Elda walked the rest of the way one step ahead of him, Omar could traverse the length of five deserts put in front of him. Didn’t she know he only lived to follow her? He willed himself to catch up and pulled her close again. For now, he could protect her and their child in one place and time. It was the only thing that kept him going.
CHAPTER 9
Life was reduced to waiting. Worse, Isabel didn’t know what for. Sometimes Martin’s phone would ring, and she would run to it as if that call could solve all their problems. The sound of Sabrina’s voice—though she had never spoken to her, only imagined it, sweet and polite with an undercurrent of irritation—would run through Isabel’s mind as she answered and tried to anticipate what she would say. Other times, she would come home from work to find the guest bedroom unoccupied, the bed tidily made, and think, He decided to leave. Having worked past her ten-hour shift, the realization felt logical; she was away for such long stretches that something drastic was bound to happen in her absence. Always, she would dig her cell phone out of her purse to alert Martin that Eduardo had gone, only to find a string of unanswered texts.
at the grocery store with eduardo. need anything?
picked up eduardo & went to get the car washed. home in 20.
On nights they went to bed together, Isabel and Martin exchanged stories and conversations, trying to piece together the bits of Eduardo’s past they had gathered. They pruned these anecdotes from him slowly, and never more than a few at a time.
“It was the gangs,” Martin said one night as he sank into his pillow. “That’s why he left.”
“He told you that?” Despite her exhaustion, she lay completely awake now.
“I asked if he wanted to call any of his friends. He said most of them are gone. One was beat so bad his family fled to California to live with his aunt. Another ended up selling drugs for the gangs so they wouldn’t kill him.”
Another evening, as they both took a shower: “He found that picture his mother sent you years ago, the one of him waiting tables at her restaurant.” It had been in a drawer with their old DVDs, and Isabel had told Eduardo to look for a movie when he had gotten bored watching Netflix. Martin and Sabrina had kept in touch over the years sporadically, on every other birthday or Christmas, ever since that one trip to Mexico.
“That’s the last one she sent. He must’ve been eleven or twelve,” Martin said, leaning his face into the steaming water.
“He said that’s about the time things got bad. Sabrina didn’t want people knowing they had family up north. They’d had neighbors get extorted by the gangs. Every month. Can you imagine?”
In this way, they began to get a better picture of him. When they were all together Isabel felt partly relieved and saddened, because she knew that Eduardo was safe but couldn’t help wondering at what cost.
Some evenings they would stream old reruns of Friends. (“I only ever saw them in Spanish,” Eduardo told them, and the novelty of the actors’ real voices made him laugh at the oddest parts.) She would hear the low rumble of the train billowing past, just a couple of miles from their home, and she would find herself staring at the back of Eduardo’s head, resting against the couch from his seat on the carpet, and she would try to place him there, sleeping and stirring on top of the train, but it was like coming up with a character and a situation for an improv show: too absurd to be believed.
At any given moment, she was either trying to heal his wounds, or worrying that they might pain him again in the future. The present seemed to pass through her like an aroma. Each night, she would think back to the day’s events and realize she could only grasp a faint whiff of them, unsure if they were real or imagined. She would forget things she tried to remember and remember things she would rather forget.
Martin, on the other hand, seemed alive with an insatiable desire to make everybody happy. It made him fretful and impatient, unwilling to leave anything for later. If they were cooking and realized they were out of rice, he would rush out to get some. One evening, Eduardo asked about his job, and within minutes they were all in the car, headed to his office, Martin insisting that he see the game room the company had set up for their lunch breaks.
It was as if the stillness had gone out of Martin’s life. Isabel often found herself struggling to catch up, exhausted yet grateful for the constant motion. Whatever she was feeling, she knew they couldn’t both sink into it. She suspected this was Martin’s attempt at buoying her.
“Do you think he’s liking it here? With us?” she said one night. She still spoke about him as if he were visiting. They were in their closet, she dressing for a late shift while Martin loosened his belt and took off his shoes. They had gotten into the habit of speaking about him without mentioning his name. The light bulb had died yesterday evening, so they stood in the dim light of the sconces that trickled in from the bedroom, the amber warmth barely reaching them.
“I think expecting someone to like a place they had to go to, but didn’t choose, is a lot to ask.”
“He misses home,” she said. “Of course.” She had been so obsessed with making him feel comfortable, welcome, and safe, it hadn’t occurred to her that what he longed for was already gone. Ever since she had found Eduardo in their backyard, she had convinced herself that this was where he wanted to be. “He seems to have fun with you, though.”
Martin gave her a sideways glance. “It always feels like I’m forcing him to. Like he’d rather be left alone.”
It wasn’t surprising. These last few days she had come home from work at ten in the morning and found Eduardo still sleeping. He got up an hour, maybe two after her arrival, and seemed relieved when Isabel apologized that she needed to sleep. When she woke, he was often still in bed, staring at the ceiling as if he had given up on what to do with himself.
There was a time when she had felt the same. She had been just a few years shy of Eduardo’s age when her father fell ill. At first he had asked Isabel not to tell her mother—he said he didn’t want to worry her until they got the test results, but she knew he had been afraid she would try to gain full custody if he got sick. The doctors had started by ruling things out. It was not a viral infection, or a thyroid issue, or diabetes. When they finally learned he had a tumor that was causing Cushing’s disease, they had rushed him into surgery. Isabel’s mom had refused to take her to the hospital, so Elda had driven her instead. Claudia had brought her homework assignments on the days that she missed school, and when the doctors released her father, Isabel had refused to be away from him, not even on the Wednesdays or weekends she was supposed to be at her mother’s.
“What are you going to do? Report it to the courts?”
Her mother hadn’t bothered arguing with her, and that was when it struck her that her father’s illness might not pass.
She had started taking the bus to school instead of having her father drive. In the afternoons, he would give her a hand with her homework while waiting for radiation treatments, quizzing her with flashcards or pretending to check her math problems. Two days before C
hristmas break, they learned the tumor was not gone. “And all those bills, taking a life of their own,” her mother had said when she heard the news. The next few months of Isabel taking care of her father were grueling; the only thing more difficult than the endless days and nights was when they suddenly stopped. Everything felt empty. There was nothing more she could do for him. There was nothing more she could do.
Isabel felt the piercing sadness of those days rush back at her. “He’s in mourning.” Of course.
“Probably, yeah. Think of all he left behind.”
“When’s the last time he asked you to try calling Sabrina again?”
Martin took a moment to think back. “A week, maybe a week and a half.”
There’d been a time when he asked and they tried calling every day, but the attempts had grown sparse as the weeks dragged on.
“He told me she would’ve called by now if she could,” Isabel said. “When he was looking at the pictures.”
“That’s probably true.”
“But it’s the way he said it: ‘If she could.’ And if she can’t, what does that mean? What could possibly keep his mother from calling all this time?”
They stood in the dark closet, afraid to acknowledge what was becoming clear.
“Then we’re all he’s got,” Martin finally said. She had heard him speak like this before, but it was the first time she truly believed it. She thought of that day at the beach, how she’d stood by the shore with her arms around Martin’s waist. It’d amused her then that her feet had sunk deeper into the sand with each passing wave. Now she thought, This is all we’ll have left of it, that sinking, paralyzing feeling.
He put his arms around her, and she curled into his chest, making herself small enough for him to rest his chin on top of her head. She felt him nod as he said, over and over, that they would be okay.
When she got back from work the next morning, she found a note from Martin next to her sink: a list of child psychologists he had narrowed down to two, and the name of an immigration lawyer a coworker had recommended. She stepped into the closet to change out of her scrubs and was startled by how bright it was now that Martin had replaced the bulb.
CHAPTER 10
MARCH 1981
“This isn’t a walk through Disneyland,” the coyote said. “Pick up the pace.” He looked at Elda when he said this, and she knew he hadn’t directed it at all of them. He passed her and Omar and began hurrying toward the migrants behind.
To the little boy and his overprotective father, she heard him say, “¡Ándale!” To the little girl and her mother trailing them, she heard him whistle as if they were cattle. The sky was not yet completely dark, but already the ground looked like a black sea. He called them over silently, urgently, with a flashlight that he waved over his head twice. From that distance the woman’s body was just a round figure that limped along; her daughter, by comparison, was spry. She was a ball of energy orbiting her mother.
Once they all caught up, the coyote didn’t stop walking. “See those lights?” He pointed at a lone shining beacon above the horizon. She thought it was an early evening star. “That’s the other side of the border.”
She squeezed Omar’s hand, letting the air empty out of her. For a moment she thought she would cry from the relief. It was so close. So close.
“That’s our checkpoint. If you can’t get there in the next two hours, the truck leaves you. It doesn’t wait for anybody. Understand?”
They all nodded, and she looked down at her feet, swollen in her once-blue shoes. They looked like a pair of sponges left to soak too long in the water—whether this was from the walking or the pregnancy, she couldn’t tell. Before they had left, Elda’s mother had tried to tell her everything she would need to know about bringing a child into the world, but they’d had so little time.
“You’ll grow slowly, and then all at once.”
“Remember how you used to blow bubbles into your drink through a straw? That’s how the first few kicks will feel.”
“After you give birth, every inch of you will be exhausted and in pain except for your heart.”
“When he cries, remember your body used to be his whole world. Cherish the moments he cries for you, but let him go a little more each day.”
She had felt like a child then—felt, for the first time in years, a longing to stay protected in her mother’s arms. But it was no longer safe there. Her mother admitted as much just hours after she had told her parents about the baby, and her father had stormed out of their house.
He hadn’t said where he was going, but her mother knew in the way only wives know about their men. “He’ll call the doctor and have him come in the dead of night.”
This gave them only a few days. The doctor was a couple of towns over, and he visited their town only once a month, always in the last week, and he saw patients in a back room of the town’s church. Mothers and children would stand in line overnight with bags of avocados or bunches of tomatoes to supplement their payment.
Elda couldn’t accept that her father did not want her to have this child.
“With this poor excuse of a man?” he had shouted, pointing at the only man who had ever stood by her side and stood up to her father. He told her he would never give them his blessing to be married. They had been planning to leave ever since, but not this soon. Not before she had had a chance to say goodbye to her friends, to the few cousins she knew she could trust, and to her mother, who would have wed them yesterday if she could.
Instead, they were married on the fifth day of their journey, in a town 250 miles north of their birthplace, at a church that offered rest, a few warm meals to travelers, and countless prayers from the nuns.
“May God always follow you, wherever you go.”
She looked again to the light. She no longer knew how much time had passed since the coyote had pointed at the horizon, nor how far they had come. There was no strength left inside her to walk faster.
No one spoke. Night had fallen, and the sky was pitch black; the moon, hiding behind dense clouds. They all followed the coyote’s flashlight, which he pointed at the ground. Its dim circle shook with each step.
She heard rustling behind her and didn’t know if it was someone in the group or an animal. She felt scratches at her ankles and wondered if she had brushed up against a plant or a rock. When the wind picked up, she turned and expected it to be a car coming after her.
Sometimes she heard the sound of running feet, and she knew they didn’t belong to anyone in their group.
Twice she thought she heard people’s voices, could sense the speakers were far away. She pretended not to hear them and hoped they were doing the same.
Finally, they reached the river. She sank into the cold water, quiet as a lone raindrop, until the ground disappeared beneath her, and all there was left to do was swim.
She could sense that this part of the journey was the most critical. It was in the way the coyote mimed to them, uttering not even a whisper when hours ago he would have shouted. In the way she could see nothing, and therefore felt like she was nothing, traveling through nowhere. There was no longer any going forward or back. Not to the home she had left. Not to the place she was headed. Yes, they were deep in the border now, a place so dangerous even maps had no names for it. She pictured them all then, tiny black dots blending into a thick-lined border.
Even crossing and reaching the first checkpoint—two large hatchbacks parked miles from the towering light that had been guiding them—did not assuage her fears, but rather confirmed them. She had not been cold for long (the air sucked her clothes and bones dry), but still her body trembled.
“In, everybody in. Three here and there,” the coyote said. He waved the little boy in the direction of the girl and her mother, and they squeezed into the trunk of an old four-door car.
The boy’s father didn’t protest, only mumbled something about the gorda taking up enough room for two grown-ups.
“You three in here,” t
he coyote said.
Up close, the trunk seemed too small for even one of them. She looked down at it, hesitating.
“What are you waiting for, tía? Room service?”
Omar pressed close to the coyote now. “Some respect, please.” But the man was too busy clearing out the space to listen.
She climbed in first, her husband behind her, and lay on her side. If she closed her eyes and let her body surrender to the exhaustion, she could pretend she was sleeping.
“It’s okay. The worst is behind us now.” His words landed warmly on her hair, but he had said them so many times now.
She felt the car dip abruptly with the added weight, felt the space around them constrict now that a third body had joined. Before she could even attempt to turn her head, a blanket fell over them. It was thick and itched her arms. It made her breath bounce back at her face.
Somebody slammed the door shut over their bodies, jolting them toward the ground and back up again. Outside, all sounds were muffled. Inside, their hearts and lungs pounded. The car started, and they began moving. The vibrations of the engine seeped into her body, aching like a million little needles.
It seemed useless to pray. Who protects the invisible?
CHAPTER 11
The trouble began in the fall. Summer was hazy; its heat evaporated any semblance of permanence. Even as Isabel and Martin tried to make Eduardo feel settled in, there was the illusion of him soon leaving.
The days became a perpetual trade-off of shifts. Eduardo was a teenage boy, but to them, he was a newborn. They took note of when and how much he ate, how often he slept, and how well. They tried to keep him entertained any time he so much as glanced in their direction. They rested only when he did.
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