Her daughter insisted. Any excuse to leave, it seemed. She supposed she couldn’t blame her.
Do you want to watch anything? Martin said. They had had the TV on mute all day. He searched for the remote, not knowing it was the same one used to control the bed. She tried handing it to him but he didn’t see. She tried turning up the volume, and like some old sitcom, her bed went up, and then down, channel up, channel down.
It made her and Yessica laugh so hard her eyes welled.
Everything in here is hooked up to something else, Elda said. When will hospitals go wireless?
She was still smiling when she heard a light tap at the door, and Eduardo poked his head through. He waited. Did he think she would throw a shoe at him? Then she remembered the night before, and she understood everything.
Give us a moment, she told Martin.
You sure?
When did you start talking back to your mother like that?
He said nothing as he left the room. Yessica offered to get them coffee.
So. Eduardo. Those were some terrible, serious things you said last night. I don’t know what you hoped you’d accomplish.
He placed his hands on the beige bar that bordered her bed. A barricade.
I’m sorry, he said. It’s my fault that you’re here. I never meant to upset you. I thought you’d be relieved to know he didn’t do it.
Relieved? She let out a loud, deep ha! and he was so taken aback, she felt sorry. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not that, she said. How do you know it’s even true?
Eduardo looked like he wanted to hide. In all their time together, she had never seen him so vulnerable. Not even the first time she had held him, the day she offered Sabrina money to help them cross the border. Even as a baby, he had puffed up his chest, mimicking his mother’s defiance as she said, Why do you even care? After everything my brother did to you? All Elda could think to say was she couldn’t turn her back on family. As he had to all of them.
Well? How do you even know it’s true? she repeated.
He looked down at his hand and said, He told me.
When?
I don’t know.
You do.
I don’t want to talk about it!
She could understand, because her pain was fresh, too.
He regretted all of it, Eduardo said. Until his last days.
The room grew so quiet, all they could hear was the sound of Isabel’s voice outside the door. Eduardo moved closer, looking back at Elda like he expected her to stop him.
But suddenly she was very cold, and tired. She rubbed her arms and pinched her skin. She marveled at its elasticity, how it slowly breathed itself back into shape, like a ball of dented dough.
She slept again. She just wanted to go home.
How long have I been here? she asked the nurses and the doctors and anyone who would answer.
Five days.
Six.
Seven.
Once, she heard someone say that they would just have to be strong and patient.
She nodded and said, Yes. Patience is a process that births forgiveness.
Her body had begun to feel ephemeral, like a twitching light bulb that any second would grow tired, blink, and never turn back on.
The cruelty of it was, she didn’t feel ephemeral. Her thoughts were as young and robust as the day she first fell in love, as the day she held her first child. She was so aware, clinging to these moments, resenting their passing. Words ached inside her head, trying to break through, and when she opened her mouth, nothing came out, or something else came out, and she couldn’t always tell the difference.
I’m here, Martin kept saying.
I’m not blind, she wanted to shout.
Can you hear me? he said.
Yes, goddammit. I’m not deaf. Are you?
The nurses came in and changed the sheets with her still in them.
Goodness, where are your manners? she said.
They won’t see you anymore, but I do, a voice said.
Go away. I can’t talk to you right now.
He smiled as if she had said something kind. She felt warm, and calm, but a part of her was in pain, and she couldn’t understand why. A part of her sensed he knew the answer.
I’m not ready, she said.
I’ll wait, mi amor. For you, I’ll wait always.
CHAPTER 51
JULY 2016
Marisol could not have imagined it would come to this. All these years of sacrifice so her daughter could do anything and go anywhere she wanted, and they were back where they had started.
“Your abuela would never approve of this,” she told Josselyn as they walked up the stairs, each carrying the few boxes they could manage from the truck. She calculated the move would take all day; it’d be worse than the drive out of state had been. They knew no one they could ask for help, or at least, no one they could ask without Marisol dying of embarrassment. Thirty years of not calling could do that to a friend. There was no welcome committee for her in McAllen.
“What? My job? I think she would’ve been proud,” her daughter said.
“She had big dreams for you. A doctor. A lawyer. A mother, at least.”
They set the boxes down in front of a red door at the top of the stairs. Josselyn sighed as she slid the lone key she had picked up from the leasing office into the knob, stopping just short of opening it. “You promised.”
“I’m sorry, mija. Okay. I’m sorry.”
“You always say that, but I’m serious. If you can’t accept how I’m living my life, then maybe it’s time we stopped living together. You had a perfectly beautiful house back in Florida.”
“But you left it,” she wanted to say. Until Josselyn had children of her own, Marisol knew that she would never understand the pull that made her follow her daughter back to Texas. Back home, her little house had a mango tree in the backyard, and a pool that Marisol cleaned herself in exchange for lower rent. Her fingers were forever smelling of chlorine concentrate and pH tablets, but if it hadn’t been for their regular visits to the pool supply store, Josselyn would not have gotten her first job. She kept it all through college, becoming store, and then district, manager, and when she had gotten her business degree, Marisol was convinced no other student had as much experience as her daughter.
Now all these years later, she had gotten an even fancier graduate degree and quit. Marisol had been so supportive then. It made sense for her daughter to pursue bigger opportunities. Instead, she had traded it all in to be an assistant to some bureaucrat. Here, of all places.
“Yes, but, whoever heard of a mother being so far from her daughter? It’s not natural,” she said.
“You and Abuela did it.”
“That was different. We had no choice. You, of all people, should understand.” Her chest tightened as she tried to hold back a string of tears that came out of nowhere.
Josselyn took hold of her shoulders. “I know, Mom. I understand. Why else would I be here?”
She opened the door, and they carried their boxes into the new apartment. It smelled of fresh drywall and damp tile grout. The appliances were all shimmery steel and smooth glass surfaces, but the kitchen cabinets looked identical to the ones in their first studio efficiency. They had only recently been painted gray.
“They said this is the biggest of the two-bedroom floor plans,” Josselyn said. “What do you think?”
There was not even a balcony. They faced south, and she knew they would barely get any sunlight through the living-room window. “It’ll feel more like home when we finish unloading the truck,” Marisol said.
There was hardly time for them to settle in before Josselyn’s new job took over her life. The calls would come at dinner, at three in the morning, even when they were at church. She would sense her daughter fidgeting with the phone in her pocket before excusing herself to take it. They began sitting at the ends of the pews.
“Again?” she would say.
“If it was your child, you’d want to kn
ow.”
Then Josselyn would be gone for hours.
It was no place for a woman. Marisol stayed up evening after evening, imagining the worst. Why would her daughter choose to retrace those same steps through the desert, all to find nothing more than corpses they could no longer help? Sometimes, when they found migrants still alive, but barely, Josselyn would race to them, accompanied by Border Patrol. This only worried Marisol even more.
“You can’t trust anyone out there. It does something to people. It feels godless, like no one’s watching.”
By the end of the month, Josselyn had helped recover twenty-seven bodies. One had a phone number tattooed on the inside of his upper arm, and so contacting the family had been easy.
“Well, not easy. You know what I mean,” Josselyn said. The rest were catalogued in a database Josselyn’s group shared with Central American consulates. It was Josselyn’s job to document as many details and personal items as she could, to help families search for their missing. Most of her records were sparse: a case number, the date found, the person’s sex, and a clothing description were usually all the county sheriff’s office could glean from a body. On the rare occasion that she also found a name, Josselyn would come home and tell it to her mother.
“Ermenegildo Garcia-Paz. He was thirty-four. His mother answered the phone shouting his name. She must’ve seen the US phone number and thought it was finally him, calling after all these months.”
“I can’t hear this, mija.”
But the next night, Marisol would listen as Josselyn retold their stories, and she would hold her daughter close. Sometimes they would cry. Sometimes they would say nothing at all, because the border had left nothing behind but silence. Sometimes they would fall asleep on the couch, Marisol’s hands still holding her daughter’s head in her lap, until the phone startled them both, and Josselyn grabbed her keys and kissed her mother goodnight.
In those hours, a familiar loneliness crept back in. One night Marisol pushed aside her shame and called the one number she still knew by heart. A young man answered and told her his mother had passed weeks ago. She was too late.
“And your father?” she asked.
“Gone, too.”
“Did they die close together?” She remembered how the young couple had always seemed to be embracing, even when they weren’t. The young man said they hadn’t, that they had died years and miles apart. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “Omar once saved my life.”
“He did?”
The young man listened as she told him the story, never once interrupting, and Marisol knew she was no longer alone.
CHAPTER 52
JULY 2016
On the day they released Eduardo from the detention center, Isabel tried to arrange his room back to normal as best she could. It was hard to remember what it’d looked like before. It was hard to remember anything. There were seventy miles between the hospital and the detention center, and despite driving them countless times while Eduardo was detained, Isabel had few recollections of each trip. She had spent most of them staring out the window, not knowing what they were passing, how they were getting there, what they would do, why.
Diana had come with them on the first trip, the one where they were turned away. Visitation times for detainees with last names beginning with A through F were Saturdays between eight and noon, the officers had said. Isabel thought they’d had until four, but the officers explained those were the weekday hours. As if they all should have known. She and Martin had not slept since hearing of Eduardo’s arrest, torn between going to him and staying at Elda’s side. Isabel could not have kept track of the days and hours if she’d tried.
On the next trip she had brought Eduardo a sweater that the officers didn’t let him keep. It’d been just her and Martin that time—Diana had gone on her own—but they had driven mostly in silence. When she tried to say anything at all, Martin only begged her to let him think. “One problem at a time,” he kept saying. Except they had all blurred together in her mind.
She made Eduardo’s bed and cleared her toiletries from the top of his dresser. She took her work shoes and a set of scrubs from his closet and placed them on her bed to put away later. She had been careful not to use his nightstand or his drawers, hoping that the day would come when he would reclaim them. In the guest bathroom, she replaced the towels with fresh ones and took his toothbrush, body spray, and face wash from the cabinet, displaying them next to the soap and lotion meant for guests.
He and Martin would be home any minute now, followed by Claudia, Damian, and Diana, who had asked if they could be here to welcome him back. That was the word they kept using—“welcome”—as if they were convinced the worst was behind them, and the judge would allow him to stay.
They hadn’t seen each other since Elda’s funeral. The house was quieter now, and sterile, and she worried it would give her and Martin’s separation away. If anyone asked, she decided, she would say nothing had been the same with Elda and Eduardo gone. They were still adjusting to being alone again.
She made sandwiches and placed plastic cups and plates on the table. It reminded her of the first time she had met Eduardo; they had had sandwiches for him that day, too. Claudia had offered to bring chicken and grill some fajitas, but Isabel wanted to keep things simple. It didn’t feel right to celebrate yet. Lately, every happy moment was relative; they no longer stood on their own, but next to an overshadowing sense of despair that insisted on being there first. This was how she had tried explaining grief to Martin, now that she could recognize it. Grief is never really gone; it is just a darkness you eventually adjust to. It was the only thing they had really spoken about, because it was the only thing in their lives that felt uncomplicated. She held him when he needed to be held; she rubbed his back when he cried. Some nights he played old Spanish ballads that she knew reminded him of Elda, and Isabel sat next to him on the floor to listen. They mourned together, even when everything else was tearing them apart. Then they would go their separate ways to bed.
It wasn’t long after she had set the table that Eduardo and Martin arrived. He seemed taller to her—could he really have grown in just two weeks?—and when she hugged him, there was less hardness in his muscles, as if his body had been pulled a little, stretched. She looped her arm over his as they walked into the house.
“Don’t worry about anything. The important thing is, you’re home, and we’re going to take care of everything.”
Martin followed quietly behind them. Together they stepped into his room, and Isabel sighed.
Eduardo sat at the foot of the bed and bounced a little. He smoothed the comforter and looked around, taking in his surroundings as if they were new.
“We’ll give you some time to settle back in,” Martin said, tapping her on the elbow to indicate they should both leave.
“Isabel?” Eduardo poked his head through the door as she was making her way down the hall.
“Yes?”
He handed her a long, black cable and her cell phone. “I think someone’s texting you.”
“Right. Thanks.” She couldn’t believe she had just left it there, plugged into the outlet behind Eduardo’s desk.
After dinner he told them he would be sleeping over at Diana’s. Her parents had offered him a couch in their home until he sorted things out. When no one, not even Martin, seemed to object, Isabel asked to speak to them in private.
They left Claudia and Diana clearing the table, while Damian made the unfortunate mistake of asking Diana about their search for a new apartment. Martin and Eduardo shuffled into the master bedroom, looking bewildered.
“But you have a room and a home here,” she said, once the door was closed. She was fully aware of how whiny she sounded, but no longer certain that she cared.
“He knows that,” Martin said. “I’m sure he and Diana just want some time together, right?”
“I just thought, since we don’t know how the trial will go . . . maybe these next couple of months are all
we’ve got.”
“You can’t think like that,” Isabel said. “Everything’s going to work out. They let you out, didn’t they? That has to count for something.”
“I’ll pay you back for that. I promise.”
“Don’t worry about the money. That’s how a bond works,” Martin said. “We get it back after your court date.”
“And that’s not what I was getting at,” Isabel added. “What I’m saying is, we have to be reasonable. Why would they deport you for a traffic violation? They’re more interested in sending real criminals back.”
“To them, we’re all criminals. You saw what it was like in there.”
She wished she hadn’t. She’d been sure they had gotten the directions wrong when they pulled up to a building encircled not just once, but twice, with a chain-link fence and barbed wire. She’d been afraid to ask about the bloodstains on Eduardo’s blue jumpsuit. He had asked for soap, Eduardo told her, so the guard threw a bar at one of his cellmate’s head, pointed a finger at Eduardo, and turned his back while two guys in orange kicked him to the floor.
The colors of the jumpsuits were supposed to set the first-time offenders apart from those with more serious charges. But there was so much orange. On their way out, she had watched the men pacing the grounds. It was like seeing fire swallow drops of water.
“That’s exactly why you should be here. In your own bed,” she said.
“It’s fine, Tía. I don’t want to cause any more trouble.” He seemed anxious to get back to the living room.
“I didn’t mean what I said that day.” Her voice came out louder than necessary. “In the hospital.”
“I know. You already told me. But if I hadn’t showed Elda that report, she might still be alive. Diana didn’t even want to ask for it at the police station. I’m the one that insisted.”
“None of this is your fault. You understand?”
Eduardo looked around the room. The pile of clothes she had brought in earlier was still sprawled over the bed, a mixture of dresses, pants, and scrubs on their hangers. “I’m just trying to give everyone their space. Me and Diana, too.” He walked out and closed the door gently behind him.
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