Elda shook her head, but she let him lead her through the hallway and onto the nearest mattress. The rest of the group scooted down.
“You sure you’re okay?”
Again, she nodded his question away. It had been five hours since the house had awakened to Elda’s screams. Omar kissed her hand, rubbing her goose-bumped flesh. He turned it so her palm was facing the ceiling and inspected her skin.
“Did he hurt you?” It was the most specific he had been all morning. No one had bothered asking what happened. When they had come into the bathroom, Miguel’s pants had been lowered halfway down his thighs.
“Now’s not the time,” Elda said, repeating the words he’d used only minutes ago. She kept her eyes on the little boy and lowered her voice. “He didn’t, because I stopped him. Do you really need to know more than that?”
He didn’t need to, but he wanted to, if only because he felt useless to not have been there. Left to his own imagination, Omar kept trying to insert himself in time. If he had awakened when Elda did, if he had accompanied her to the bathroom and guarded the door, Miguel would have never dared come near her.
Or, if he hadn’t, if he’d only been stirred awake by the light slipping out of the bathroom as Miguel sneaked in to surprise her, he would’ve smashed his head into the tub, and it would’ve been Elda who held him back, Elda who pried the knife from Omar’s clenched fingers, Elda who would’ve whispered, “It’s not worth it, my love, I can’t let you do this.”
He would have waited for her voice to dissolve his anger. He would have let her wipe the sweat from his face and kiss it until he was convinced that she was right, that he would never forgive himself for killing a man, even if he had had no choice.
She would’ve told him the same thing she’d said when they had realized they had to leave home: “Just because you have no choice doesn’t mean you’ll be able to live with the decision.”
Her gaze continued to elude him. Her fingers shook as he squeezed them between his. It should have been his that were bloodied. “I should’ve been with you, I should’ve—”
“Don’t. Please. Blaming yourself won’t make me stop blaming myself.”
“But it’s not your fault.”
“I know, Omar, I know.” She rubbed her eyes and took a deep breath. Instead of an exhale came words, quick and heavy like sobs. “But why do I still feel like a monster?” She brought her hands to her mouth and stiffened. “Just, sit here,” she said, gesturing for him to move in front of her. “I don’t want him to see me like this.”
“What? Who?” Omar looked over his shoulder in time to see Tomás staring at them from the corner of the room. It made him want to go to the boy and tell him things would be all right. But he wasn’t convinced this was true.
“How does someone like me apologize to a child like him?” Elda said.
Omar considered this. Through the small window behind her, the sun was beaming directly into his eyes. When he tried looking at Elda, all he saw was a darkened silhouette.
He remembered how, when he was twelve, his father had been his hero. In the mornings, while his mother scrubbed their laundry, she would complain about him to no one in particular, to the soap bubbles that floated into the air. “A grown man, afraid of lizards, imagine!” she would say. “He snores and talks in his sleep about other women, and when he wakes he says it was just another nightmare.” “Look at that, he doesn’t even know how to wipe his own butt!” As proof, she would show Omar his father’s streaked underwear. He rationalized that his father must have simply sat on mud many, many times.
“Boys will always make excuses for their fathers,” he told Elda. “Maybe one day when he’s older he’ll understand, but right now . . .” He was too exhausted to complete the thought. How much longer would the coyotes be? How much longer would they have to take this?
“How’s our little man?” he asked Elda. “Is he moving much today?”
“Hmm?” She lifted her eyebrows, and he caught a flicker of confusion in her eyes. “Oh. Yes. He’s fine today. Just fine.”
Like it was habit, like it was the most ordinary thing in the world, Elda placed Omar’s hand on her belly. He felt it, stronger than it’d ever been. Life kicked.
CHAPTER 23
Omar, a murderer. It didn’t compute. The fresh grief of it washed over her, thick with unanswered questions. On her way home from work, when she finally had time to think about it, traffic lights turned fuzzy through her stubborn tears. They kept flooding her vision until Isabel blinked them back. She didn’t want to cry for him.
The house was dark and quiet when she entered. Not even the porch light or the small bulb of the microwave was on. Normally, Martin would have left some small corner of the house illuminated so Isabel could make her way to the bedroom, but not tonight.
She passed Eduardo’s room. The door was open, and she didn’t have to see his empty bed to know he had gone out with Diana. For weeks they had discussed giving him a curfew, but they had yet to agree on a time. The green numbers on the oven glowed “1:30.” Too late by Isabel’s standards. Not unreasonable by Martin’s.
She made no effort to keep quiet as she fixed herself some cereal. She reveled in the spoon’s light chime against the bowl, the buzz of her toothbrush in the bathroom, the toilet flushing. When she climbed into bed, she hoped the cold air climbed in with her. But Martin remained motionless, and after minutes of her lying with her eyes closed, exhausted and sleepless, she felt his arm twitch.
Just a jab was all it took. Her sobs came so fast they shook the bed. He sat up and turned on the lights, leaning over her curled body. His hand on her shoulder felt thoughtless and heavy. It was all instinct.
“What’s wrong?” he said through a yawn.
That he pretended not to know made it worse. “How could you not tell me?”
“I’m sorry.” He rubbed her shoulder in one slow, lazy gesture.
“And the way you said it. To hurt me.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry.”
“And then you just left, and everyone was watching me. Do you know how humiliating it is to be caught so off guard? By your own husband?”
“You have to understand, Isa. I never told anyone. And when we were dating, it was never the right time.”
“You didn’t trust me?”
“It’s not that. It was just too heavy.”
“And you were embarrassed.”
“No. Why should I be? But see, that’s the problem. You attach me to him. You think I’m somehow a reflection of him, when he was never even around. And if you knew what he’d done . . .”
“You thought I’d see you differently.”
“Don’t you?”
Her hair, caught under the weight of her shoulders, stung her scalp as she tried to shake her head. “We’re more than the actions of our parents.”
He sighed. “That’s all I’ve ever been saying.”
“So what happened? Why did he do it?”
“I don’t know all the details. Just that he stabbed a guy.”
She didn’t want to push him, but she was certain that wasn’t the whole story. “I just keep thinking about him. It doesn’t make sense.”
“Isa, he’s not worth this. You have to just let it go.”
Even as she agreed to it, she knew it was a lie. She could never forget Omar. Not with every year reminding her how he longed to be remembered. How all he wanted was to be redeemed.
They turned off the lights and remained still. Tree branches scratched against the window, and their shadows bounced against the bedroom wall. She thought about what Omar had told her the first night they met, and she tried to imagine what it must feel like to sense yourself being cast away. Maybe it stung, or worse, maybe it burned. Maybe it was more like drowning and watching the surface of the water rise.
Forgive me, she thought. And then to Martin, she said, “I’m sorry.”
He had not fallen asleep either. “Just promise me you won’t tell anyone. M
y mom never wanted us to find out. She told me and my sister that he left us. And everyone outside the family just assumed they divorced. Please don’t say anything.”
She rubbed his arm, pulling it closer over her waist, and promised. “I should at least apologize for bringing him up like that. I feel like such an ass.”
“You’ll only make it worse. Just forget it ever happened.”
“They must completely hate me.”
“They don’t hate you. Claudia will get over it. And my mom’s not the type to hold a grudge.”
“If she didn’t want you to know, how’d you find out?” In the dark, without facing each other, the conversation seemed to float over the bed. She tossed questions into the air, surprised when they didn’t fall back at her.
“It was stupid of me. I hired a private investigator when I graduated. The guy was an ex-cop, so the first thing he did was check police records. He gave me the name and address of the prison. He told me my dad had been there since ’89.”
“Did you go see him?”
“Yeah. But as soon as I got there, I wished I hadn’t. I saw him walking toward the phone with his cuffs and his jumper, and I got up to leave. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing I’d been looking for him. But he recognized me right away. As if ten years don’t even change a person. Like I was still a kid.”
“What’d you tell him?”
“That I had nothing to say to him. That it was all a mistake. And before I could hang up the receiver, he banged his fist against the glass and said, ‘Does your mother know you came?’ I said no, and he asked me never to tell her. Demanded it, really. Like he had any right to ask me anything. He started screaming it. ‘She can never know you know,’ until the guards pulled him away. But he was right. It’s her secret, not mine.”
“It must be so lonely for her. Keeping it all to herself.”
“She’s stronger than you realize, Isa. She was better off after he was gone. We all were.”
Isabel wasn’t sure she believed that. “That first day he came, how could you have been so calm?”
He spoke as if the answer were obvious. “I didn’t want to ruin our wedding.”
Outside, the faint rumble of an engine grew closer until it was parked right at their driveway. She checked her phone to gauge how long it took for Eduardo and Diana to say goodnight. Twelve minutes later, the truck door opened and shut, the lock turned, and Eduardo’s steps pressed softly across the hall. She knew this, too, would keep her up.
“Twelve minutes. That’s enough time to do all sorts of things,” she whispered, but Martin had already fallen asleep.
CHAPTER 24
MARCH 1981
Now that there were fewer of them, they only had to take one car. It was a dusty, white pickup truck with a hard-covered flatbed, and it was the first time Marisol had seen it. Aside from the van that had come to take away Miguel’s body that morning, she hadn’t seen a car return to the house more than once. There were the two cars the group had arrived in, and then a long, black four-door with angles so sharp she thought it would cut anyone who leaned on it. It had pulled up beside the house on their second day, but the driver had only climbed out to switch places with the young man keeping watch. The next day, the young man returned in a champagne-colored Toyota. Again he and the driver switched places, and so it went, twice more in the evening and the following morning, a carousel of cars.
The walls were so thin, Marisol constantly heard them mumbling as they handed over the keys. They all worried about the cars being clean. This, coming from slobs who spit tobacco out the window and never bothered showering, despite claiming they were the only ones allowed to do so. Marisol’s eyes and ears were everywhere. She was relieved to finally be leaving.
“You kids, squeeze on top of la gorda,” the coyote said, pulling the passenger’s seat forward so they could climb into the back. “You sit next to them,” he said to Omar. “And you, in the front,” to Elda.
Marisol had grown tired of taking orders, but she was glad to be close to the kids. It was only because she had been sleeping next to Josselyn that she had been able to keep her daughter from witnessing the morning’s tragedy. She’d had her stay in bed while she got up to see what all the screaming was about, and she regretted not asking Tomás to do the same. Now Josselyn thought the man who had been carried away had died of a heart attack, while the poor boy thought his father had been murdered.
“Things are never that simple with grown-ups,” she’d told him, but this had only upset him more.
“You’ll meet your aunt soon,” she said now as Tomás sat on her lap. Running two fingers through his hair, she placed a loose tendril behind his ear.
Tomás looked out the window. “She’s an ingrate,” he said, so low she almost didn’t catch it.
“What do you mean? You were so excited when you told me about her a few days ago.”
“My father said it never should’ve taken her this long to send for us, not after all he did to help her come over in the first place. He said she spends all her money trying to keep her boyfriends from leaving her, because no man would stay with a woman that ugly for free.”
“Well, she’s coming now, isn’t she? You have her number?”
Tomás nodded. “He made me memorize it.”
“Good. There’s no better place to keep something safe than in your mind.” Her cheer bubbled into a giggle that even she knew sounded obnoxious.
“Mom, pleeease,” Josselyn said.
“Okay, okay.”
Marisol caught Omar smiling at her as he squeezed his hand through the small space between the door and the seat to rub Elda’s shoulder. The car started, and she looked away, watching the road pass underneath them.
The sun was glaring, and she felt exposed. There were no blankets over them, no tarps covering the windows. The drive itself was shorter than she had expected; barely half an hour before they stopped at a gas station. It wasn’t a busy road, but it wasn’t desolate, either. The gas station had two pumps and a convenience store, with empty plots of land on both sides. In the distance Marisol could make out a huge, flat-looking building with a parking lot almost twice its size. A sign bearing a thick, red K towered over the entrance.
The coyote parked the truck next to the trash bin along the side of the convenience store. “Here.” He placed dimes in Marisol’s and Tomás’s palms and pointed at a pay phone just outside the entrance. “Call whoever you need to.”
“Do you want me to go with you?” she whispered to Tomás. He shook his head no.
They watched as the boy approached the telephone and dialed. Marisol prayed someone was home. She counted the seconds, wondering how many rings it was, until she saw Tomás’s mouth move and his eyes squint under the sunlight. When he turned away, she shifted in her seat to face Elda.
“He’s going to be all right, you know,” Marisol said.
Elda looked stunned by her frankness. “I don’t . . . I don’t see how you could know that.”
“I just do. It’s not an easy start, but it’ll be a new one. At the very least, he can say he got what he came for.”
Tomás hurried back to the truck, and Marisol patted her daughter on the back so she would let her through. She took one last look at the crumpled note where she had written her boss’s brother’s phone number. Like Tomás, she had memorized it long ago.
“Here. Take it. That’s where we’ll be, in case you ever want someone to talk to.”
Elda said nothing, but she took the number and smiled. Marisol felt sad for the couple; a baby on the way and no one to call for help. And yet, she envied the young woman—a man needed only attempt to hurt her, and she didn’t hesitate to stop him.
Marisol tried to think of a time when her husband’s fists came as a complete surprise, but a part of her believed what her father had said was true: it was her duty as a wife to take the beatings, to be strong for her daughter and her marriage. If only she had been more like Elda, if only th
e first time her husband had laid a hand on her had been the last. All she knew for sure was that she wouldn’t have Josselyn, and she wouldn’t trade the pain of the last six years if it meant not having her daughter.
Still, as she slid the small coin into the slot and dialed, she vowed that the future would be different. No one comes all this way to end up in the same place they started.
The call to her new employer was quicker than expected. She told him the crossroads the coyote had given her, and Sebastian (that was what he told her to call him, though it made her wince to use his first name) said he would only be forty minutes. She prayed that this man would be as kind-hearted as his sister, whose house she had cleaned these last several years.
“How long did your aunt say she’d take to get here?” she asked Tomás when they were back inside the truck.
“Half an hour.”
What a relief. She had hoped to see him off for the chance of looking into his aunt’s eyes.
“And it’s just her coming?”
“She’s bringing my cousin, too. He’s twelve.”
“How nice.” Family he could grow up with, ride bikes with, and walk to school with.
“He’s just a bastard,” Tomás said.
“¡Mijo! Who ever heard of a boy your age using that language? Dios mío! Promise me you’ll try to be friends with him. Promise.” She lifted his chin to make him look at her. Sitting this close to her, Tomás didn’t seem tough but afraid, and she let him crawl back onto her lap and rest his head on her shoulder, just as he had done that morning.
Cars came and went. She saw a pristine green minivan with a Tamaulipas license plate pull up and hoped it was one of theirs. She saw a dented four-door Chevy with a plastic bag for a rear windshield and prayed that it wasn’t.
In the end, it was a white van with a wooden panel along the side that parked beside them. Marisol waited for the driver to come out and embrace Tomás. She had pictured this so clearly. But the coyote took one glance into the van’s window and got out of the truck.
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