“Do you feel it? Two quick kicks at a time. Boop boop.”
“Mm-hmm.” She heard his head rub against the car’s trunk and knew he was nodding. Closing her eyes, she tried to imagine they were anyplace else, and she remembered how, when she was a little girl, her mother had told her to think up her own paradise to ward off nightmares before bed.
It’d been an imaginary place back then—lush palm trees, a quiet beach—but today it was a simple memory. Still holding his hand in hers, Elda recalled the moment she had met Omar, how he had first introduced himself. Fearing the moment would pass too soon, she had pretended not to hear and asked him to repeat himself.
“Is it Omar or Mario?” she had said. He had become flustered at having to say his name a third time, and she decided right then that she liked him.
“It’s Omar.”
“Can I call you Mario?”
“But that’s not my name. That’s just the letters from my name mixed up, with an extra one added in.”
“For good measure,” Elda added. “So that I have something to call you that’s my own.”
She was mischievous like that. He told her his full name—Omar Roberto Caverso Bravo. “Bravo, like the river,” he added, as if that would make it final, something she’d not tamper with. She seemed to consider it. In that quick pause, she tried on his last name with her first. From then on, anytime she would introduce him to her friends she would say, “This is Mario. I mean, Omar,” and the two of them would giggle as if they alone had invented secrets.
The car sped up and then decelerated. Their bodies shifted, pulled toward the back as if they were magnets. She heard a heavy thump, and then the man in the trunk with them was cursing, something about his head and some piece-of-shit drivers who didn’t care if they lived or died.
“Hey. Please, man. They said to be quiet,” Omar said.
“What difference does it make? There’s no one to hear us for miles.”
“Do you have any space back there?”
“What the fuck do you think?”
“Please, man. My wife—”
“It’s fine.” Elda tried to stretch her leg. Her hip bones dug into the car, and when she tried to move, the surface rubbed against her appendages like a pumice stone. She wished she could turn her body, her head, anything, but the effort only exhausted her and brought her to the brink of tears.
“You’re right. We’re almost there,” Omar said.
She wanted to ask him, “How do you know? How can you be sure of anything?”
But she only nodded and said, “You’re right.” She moved his hand back to her belly. The baby was quiet now, and there was nothing else to do but wait for him to start again. She tried to think of this moment as nothing more than a pause between heartbeats, the stillness before movement. “If it’s a boy, we should call him Mario.”
“Don’t you mean Omar?”
She prodded him gently in the ribs with her elbow. “Mario.”
“I don’t know. Is it selfish of me to want to keep it to myself?”
“Maybe,” she teased. It felt odd to speak of a future when she couldn’t even see an inch in front her. “We’ll think of something.”
Elda closed her eyes again and wondered what Omar’s face looked like in that moment. She wanted to believe that if she looked into his eyes, she would find every bit of the hope she had lost still alive within him.
CHAPTER 15
Martin said that she had been exhausted, that she had been delirious the day of their anniversary. There was no other way to explain the nightmares and the crying, or the things his mother and Eduardo said she had yelled in her sleep. They couldn’t make sense of it either way; Isabel had yelled something about a dead man being trapped, another about him being forgotten. For days after, Elda insisted that she shouldn’t feel at all embarrassed.
“The things you must see in that ER. It was bound to get to you eventually,” she said. “Promise me you’ll take better care of yourself.”
Isabel worried it would always be like this—November would come, vivid and concrete, then fade into memories she couldn’t be sure she hadn’t imagined.
One thing she knew for certain: Sabrina was dead. It took Eduardo three days to tell them, but in that time, she recognized his suffering. On day one, they woke up to the sound of him dry heaving over the toilet, his stomach empty from a lack of appetite. On the second day, she found Martin tapping on his bedroom door when she got home from work. He gave her a look that said, “Check on him.” “Maybe that stomachache is actually food poisoning,” he said. Eduardo had barely eaten, or when he had, he hadn’t been able to keep his food down.
She handed Martin a glass of water. “Give him time and keep him hydrated.” What else could they do?
Finally, Eduardo told them he had reached a friend of the family. His mother’s body had been buried months ago.
“I should’ve been there to protect her. I should’ve gone back, instead of crossing,” he said, sobbing so hard Isabel forgot herself and held him. Their bodies curling into one another was too much for Martin. He left them alone, catching their breath in the dark as the tears subsided.
“You’re not crazy,” Eduardo finally said to her. “Omar really is trapped.”
“Sabrina told you, then?”
He nodded. The secret swelled between them, but they didn’t speak more of it for fear it would fade away.
When Martin asked who this family friend was, Eduardo claimed it was a neighbor whose phone number he had suddenly remembered.
“You don’t have to explain,” Isabel told him. “Stranger things have happened.”
The news of Sabrina’s death hit Elda hard, too. She offered to collect Eduardo’s books and assignments from his teachers, dropping them off and staying most afternoons to help him with his homework until he was ready to return to school. On days Isabel got home in time for dinner, she often found them red-eyed and sullen, having exchanged stories like they were trading cards. Elda had known Sabrina as a child, and Eduardo, as his mother, and Isabel imagined it was comforting for them to remember her so completely, as if each anecdote were a spark that revived her in those short moments of discovery.
Time felt muted in those days, and in the weeks that followed. Slowly, Eduardo began living the life his mother would have wanted. Small things became routine, became everyday, became normal. Untethered by false hope, he could finally take small steps to move on. Almost daily, Isabel found herself in awe of his resilience. It was spectacular to witness him change into a teenager so ordinary.
On Saturdays he watched college football with Martin and helped him adjust his fantasy bracket. They were always hunched over the coffee table, and it wasn’t long before Eduardo stopped asking if he could use Martin’s iPad and started taking it into his bedroom whenever he wished. He downloaded a comic-book app and another that gave him daily workouts he did in the yard, and so many new songs that if Isabel ever shuffled their playlist, she was deluged by teen pop. One day, an icon popped up for a 3-D driving school.
“It makes sense,” Martin said when she pointed it out. “Most kids in his grade already have their license, if not a car.”
She knew he might never be one of them. Even if he studied, even if he got all the answers right, this was a test he would never pass. License or no license, they agreed they couldn’t keep him from driving forever.
Secretly, Isabel made an appointment for an initial consult with one of the lawyers she had bookmarked months ago. Of all the websites she had saved, his was the only one that didn’t include a head shot on the home page. She found this endearing. They weren’t selling real estate, for God’s sake.
“It’s a good thing you got in touch now,” the lawyer said when she told him Eduardo would soon turn seventeen. “It’s pretty much out of our hands once he turns eighteen.”
“We’d been trying to give him his time. But I think he’s ready.”
Through the frosted glass on his office door,
silent silhouettes crept by. The waiting room had not been full when she arrived, but now everyone was restless, their bodies floating like atoms through the small space. The lawyer asked questions about Eduardo and took notes on a yellow pad. He had a big voice, the kind you can hear churning in a person’s throat even when he’s quiet, but he kept it low and monotone. She noticed he used the word “if” a lot:
“If he’s been here for a certain amount of time.”
“If the state considers him abandoned or neglected.”
“If it’s not in his best interest to return.”
“If he has family members who are citizens willing to become his legal guardian.”
“If he qualifies for a visa at all.”
She kept waiting for the “then.” She remembered Elda helping Eduardo with his homework last week, phrasing a list of statements with “if” and “then”:
“If the cafeteria is serving pizza, then it must be Thursday.”
“If George works overtime, then he will be paid time and a half.”
“If Anna gets a 4.0 GPA, then she will receive a scholarship.”
Eduardo had found the exercise frustrating and pointless, and Isabel hadn’t immediately disagreed.
Isabel told the lawyer that Eduardo’s mother was dead and that she didn’t know about his father. He said death does not necessarily qualify as abandonment.
“Seriously?”
“Legally, for these purposes, no. But if his father were abusive or neglectful, say an addict, then he might qualify for Special Immigrant Juvenile Status. We’d have to prove it, of course.”
“Of course,” she said, then, “I’m sorry,” though he probably didn’t realize she was mocking him. “It’s just that I don’t know the first thing about Eduardo’s father. I’d have to ask him.”
“Talk to him and try to be as specific as possible. We need to know what kind of case we can build, if any.”
She wanted to ask if quantifiable suffering was the only kind that counts. Instead she picked up her purse off the floor and checked the time on her phone. She had forty-five minutes to get to the hospital. “And if there’s nothing?”
“If he doesn’t qualify for anything, he’s better off not applying in the first place. He crossed the border scot-free. As far as ICE is concerned, he’s not even here. He never got detained, so he doesn’t have a deportation trial to contest. Why try his luck?”
When she got home at half past midnight, she was surprised to find Martin and Eduardo still awake. They were standing in the kitchen, leaning against the counters, eating ice cream out of a pint.
“What’s going on?”
“Tell her,” Martin said through a mouthful.
“We went for a drive.” Eduardo shrugged. No big deal.
“And?”
“And I didn’t crash.” A deep, nasal laugh escaped him. Isabel played along but she couldn’t stop staring at his elbows, how they bounced up and down against the counter like lanky springs as his body shook.
“It’s a bit late for all this, don’t you think?”
“He has to start learning at some point,” Martin said.
She had meant the ice cream. “I guess you’ll be borrowing someone’s car pretty soon.”
“You’d let me do that?” Eduardo said.
“Eventually. If we can trust you behind the wheel, I don’t see why not.”
Something flicked on and off in Eduardo’s eyes; he recovered so quickly, she might not have noticed if she hadn’t seen it before. It was that word, wrapped in too many assumptions. It was why Eduardo had eventually pushed his textbook away and called the whole if/then exercise stupid. People placed too much trust in things working out the way they should, and never enough on the chance that the most meaningless conditions could change everything.
CHAPTER 16
MARCH 1981
The car stopped. Omar listened for doors opening, for footsteps approaching the trunk and hands grasping at the lock to open it.
“¿Llegamos?” Elda said.
“In a little bit,” Omar said. The sounds outside had changed. The car stood still, but he could hear others around them. Leaky brakes whistling as they came to a standstill. A violent vacuum of traffic speeding past in the opposite direction, trucks so large they displaced the air, causing the car to shake.
Omar closed his eyes and listened for other city noises, too—the chorus of street vendors, women and children selling baseball caps and used clothes, the cacophony of impatient car horns—but they never came. Could this muted existence be their new home? In his search for peace, he had never considered that loneliness might tag along, too.
“It’s just that I have to go; I have to use the bathroom,” Elda said.
“You and everyone else in this car,” the other migrant replied.
“Oye, Miguel, please.” Omar had grown tired of trying to appeal to this man’s sense of decency. “We must be at a stop light. It probably won’t be long until . . .” He let his voice trail off. He didn’t know what came next.
The car started up again, then turned a corner. He could feel they were ascending, and the floor of the car jolted in regular intervals. Perhaps they were crossing a bridge, he thought. Perhaps they were approaching an immigration checkpoint.
For maybe three or four minutes, the road became smooth. Omar’s arm was folded beneath his head, his elbow pressed against the curved interior of the trunk that jutted in to make room for the car’s tires.
“Well, we’re definitely arriving somewhere,” Miguel said.
He couldn’t argue with that. They had slowed and turned left, then right, and right again. The car went into reverse for what was probably a few yards, and then it straightened out. When the engine died, they could still hear its parts rattling underneath the hood, like coins trapped in a turbine.
For all the time they had spent confined, it was this moment that seemed to stretch the longest. He felt the weight in the car shift, heard a side door open and slam shut. He counted the footsteps. Two sets, six or seven steps until they stopped. The trunk opened, and a dark silhouette stood over them. Air rushed in, warm and dry but with plenty of space to breathe.
“Let’s go, let’s go,” the dark figure said. He kept one hand on the open trunk and waved the other through the air, rushing them along. Miguel climbed out first and disappeared. Omar’s turn came next; he brought his legs out, letting them dangle over the car’s edge, then used his arms to catapult forward. As soon as he was out, he turned to help Elda, and that’s when he heard the screams.
“Help her, please! She won’t wake up!” They were coming from the car next to them, from the little girl still in the trunk, trapped behind her unmoving mother.
“Inside, now!” The coyote yelled at Omar and Elda to keep moving, but they wouldn’t. The house in front of them appeared to be floating on air. It was long, beige, and boxy, and it reminded Omar of train cars or truck trailers. The view to the front door was blocked by a giant green trash receptacle that made the air sting with its smell. The coyotes began yelling at one another as they pulled the boy and girl out of the trunk.
“Take them inside!” One of the coyotes grabbed the little girl by the arm and swung her to Omar, not even looking to see where she would land.
“In there?” Elda said.
“Over here!” The boy started toward Miguel, who was already climbing the few rickety steps into the home. The boy rushed back out to take Elda’s hand, and Omar nodded at him in gratitude as he ran to the second car to help pull the remaining woman from the trunk.
“¡Pinche gorda, she weighs a ton!” The coyote Omar didn’t recognize, the one who must’ve been driving the other car, looked like he might cry from the effort.
“Take her feet,” the other said to Omar. He was the one who had led them across the border, and now more than ever, Omar wanted to believe they hadn’t been wrong to follow. The man leaned half his body into the car and twisted his spine to the side so he could scoop
his arms under the woman’s. “On three!” As they began to drag her out, five or six inches for each time they counted and pulled in unison, her head swayed. Her eyes and mouth stayed shut.
“Into the house! ¡Apúrense!”
They carried her over the grass as if she were a hammock draped between two trees. The younger coyote closed the trunk and rejoined them, attempting to grab her by the knees, by the waist, then finally, by the hands. Omar had no idea in which direction he was going; he let himself be steered by the coyote pulling the woman, and with each step, he said a prayer. Her name somehow surfaced from his memory.
“Lord help Marisol. Lord help Marisol.”
The coyote told him to shut up as they made their way up the steps.
Lord help Marisol. Lord help Marisol, he thought.
They entered the house, and Omar saw the little boy rushing around, clearing a space on one of the mattresses on the floor. The little girl’s wails for her mother filled the air. He could hear Elda trying to comfort her, trying to shush her in the same way you would a child who scraped his knee.
“Is she dead?” The voice came from the corner of the room, from Miguel, who just hours ago had called Marisol fat and ugly.
Omar searched her neck for a pulse. Her skin was warm and slippery, soaked in sweat. He poked it with two fingers, moving up and down along the side of her throat, begging for it to push back. He climbed on top of her and began pumping at her chest.
“Vamos, Marisol. You’ve come too far to give up now.” Her body only answered in jolts, refusing to wake.
He looked at Elda, who was cradling the little girl. His arms burned the more he pushed against Marisol, and he didn’t know how much longer he could keep going.
“That’s enough.” He heard the coyote call to him, felt his hand press against his shoulder.
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