Martin pulled her close, rubbing her shoulders as he looked down into her tear-stung eyes. “You have a room and a home here, too. You should take our bed tonight. I’ll sleep on the couch if you want.”
She didn’t know how to respond.
Martin sighed. “That day at the hospital. What you said about my father? You’re right. I should’ve trusted you.” He took a step back and sat on the edge of the bed, his hands pressed together between his knees. When he looked up at her, his forehead squeezed into grooves that stretched all the way to the corners of his eyes. “It’s just that you’ve always had these amazing memories of your father, and I can barely count my good ones on one hand. I didn’t tell you, because I was afraid you’d think he was a horrible person and think less of me. Then he shows up on our wedding day, and I just thought, he’s gonna ruin this, too. All the best things in my life, he fucked them up. So I blocked him out. I never meant to block you out, too. You’ve done nothing but try to keep our family together. My crazy, fucked-up family that you never asked to be dragged into. And I just made things harder for you. I’m so sorry, Isa. I don’t know what else to say. You had every right to be upset with me.”
She sat next to him, and together they stared at the blank television against the wall. The dresser was covered in unmatched socks, pieces of junk mail, and receipts emptied from Martin’s pockets, but along the edge lay a single dried rose from Elda’s funeral. He must’ve kept it when he went to place roses over his mother’s coffin.
She wondered if, like Omar, Elda could feel what she was feeling now. If she could understand this aching hesitation that made love burn and run scared in circles, because the only place that could cradle all her hurt was the same place that was causing it.
In her last days, so little of what Elda said made sense, but it didn’t seem to matter so long as she was heard. She spoke of plans for her children and their future, and arrangements for her own. She spoke of trips home, and bags that needed to be packed, and sometimes she spoke without vowels, without sound, with just breathing.
Isabel had clung to all of it. There was the illusion that if she held on to her hand tighter, or if she listened harder, she could make their time last a little longer. It felt futile, until Martin left them alone for a short moment. The doctor had come in to check on her, but Elda only looked away. With a clarity and volume they hadn’t heard in days, she had looked at the empty chair across the room and said, “Yes. Patience is a process that births forgiveness.”
And then she had called Omar’s name. Just once and so low, Isabel wasn’t sure if she had imagined it.
Isabel placed her hand on Martin’s. She couldn’t look at him yet, but she told him the only thing that felt true. “Give us time.”
CHAPTER 53
NOVEMBER 2, 2016
YEAR FOUR: FRUIT AND FLOWERS
It was almost a normal day: four years exactly since they were wed. In preparation for Day of the Dead, Martin had built an altar for his mother using a chest of drawers he had found in her closet before they sold her house. It was the one he had had in the family’s first apartment, back when he and Claudia still shared a room. He told Isabel how he had climbed it, pretending to be the president of the United States delivering a speech. Omar had walked in just as Martin was raising his arms and losing his balance. “You could’ve died!” he said. “If I ever find you up there again, te mato.”
The chest was just four wooden drawers, stained and stacked, one on top of the other. Instead of knobs, it had handles carved into the edge of each drawer, like a half-moon cuts into the sky. Isabel used these slots to hold flowers she had made out of tissue paper. She hung a banner of Elda’s pictures over the wall and draped the top of the wooden surface with her silk scarves. Next to it, she had converted one of the living-room side tables into an altar for her father.
She was alone now. Martin had taken the day off, but this morning he had gotten an email on his phone and said he had to rush out for a quick surprise. An hour passed, and there was still no sign of anyone. Isabel played one of Elda’s old records, lit a few candles, and waited with her eyes closed.
It felt silly. She knew better. She knew it never worked like this.
The strum of guitar strings faded as the record player sent crackles into the silence.
“Sorry to take so long.”
She smiled, opening her eyes to see Martin, hands full of bags, unloading them onto the kitchen counter. The next track began before she could say anything. It filled the room with the sob-filled voice of a singer mourning his lost love and strength. Isabel turned down the volume and joined Martin in the kitchen. “What’s all this?”
“You’ll see.” He took a couple loaves of pan de muerto out of a plastic bag. “Took me almost half an hour to get these. The bakery was packed.” He moved between the cabinets and drawers, pulling out plates of different sizes and a knife. “Then I went to H-E-B for some of these”—he showed her a bag of oranges and began slicing them down the center—“and I went by the games section, thinking I’d kill two birds with one stone, but everything there was so new and unused. It didn’t feel right. So I stopped by the flea market and got this.”
He held up a blue-and-yellow tin, not much bigger than a phone. It was dented and rusty along the edges.
“What is it?”
Martin gave it a shake, and she heard a deep, quick rumble, like dozens of pieces with not enough room to move. He tucked the box under his arm and grabbed the plates of pan de muerto and orange slices, signaling for Isabel to follow him to the living room.
“This,” he said, placing the plates and box on the altar, “was one of my father’s favorite pastimes.” The tin popped as he opened it, revealing a set of black-and-white dominoes. The plastic tiles had been stacked perfectly, with their yellowing faces looking up, their dots like eyes that hadn’t seen light in years.
Isabel ran her fingers over the ridges. “I don’t get it. Are these his?”
“Well, no. But they could be.” He took out a few and placed them in a short line. “Ever since Eduardo left, I’ve been thinking about all the questions I never asked him. All the things I assumed would be too hard for him to talk about.” A look of sadness came over him, when only a moment ago he had been smiling, and Isabel understood, because this was how they had both felt it. Eduardo’s deportation had been like a flood coming in from under them. They had prepared for everything but its force, how quickly it left them with nothing.
“I realized that I never asked Eduardo about the good stuff,” Martin said. “The memories he probably wanted to share. All I really know is that he loved my father. He says he was innocent. And he spent a lot more time with him than I ever did.”
She was beginning to understand. “So this is all Eduardo?”
Martin nodded. “I called him last week . . .”
“But his phone keeps going to voicemail.” She had been trying to reach him for weeks, imagining the worst, leaving message after message, begging him to call back. She didn’t even know if he had received the money they’d wired.
“So I emailed him. It turns out he couldn’t pay his cell phone bill this month.”
“But I told him—”
“I know. And he’s grateful for it. He says he wouldn’t have been able to move to DF without it.”
She couldn’t bear to think about him alone on a bus, navigating the capital. They had tried to visit him when he first arrived, but with the amount of time they had taken off of work for Elda, they couldn’t afford to leave. It was the worst kind of helplessness, sending nothing but money every couple of weeks. Isabel worried it would make him a target of the gangs all over again.
“So he’s settled in okay? What part of town is he in?”
“I don’t know. But he has a roommate, and he just got a job.”
“A job? Where?”
Martin smiled and picked up another domino. “I promise I’ll get to that. My point is, I emailed him to ask about my father
’s altar. What he’d put on it, if it was him. He said he and Omar used to play dominoes and eat oranges outside Sabrina’s restaurant. That’s how they spent their breaks.”
The tiles clinked together as she shuffled them over Elda’s green-and-yellow scarf. She couldn’t remember the last time she had played dominoes, and she was surprised by how light and fragile each piece felt in her hands.
“You wanna play?” Martin said.
She shook her head. It was enough for her to just leave them here. Something told her that Omar would appreciate it, but that he wouldn’t make it today, or ever.
She thought of him and Eduardo playing dominoes, sharing a few oranges on a warm day. It made her feel like she might drift to somewhere peaceful, but like always, her sorrow sank, and then buoyed her with each breath. Her and Martin’s happiness would be wholly theirs, but it would always be incomplete. As long as Eduardo was far away, they would be floating to him in the backs of their minds, carrying this emptiness together.
“I’ll be right back,” Martin said. He kissed her forehead and disappeared into the garage. When he came back, he held a large gift-wrapped box. She shot him a stern look as he placed it in her lap; they had agreed not to do big gifts.
“It’s not what you think,” he said, helping her tear away the paper. It was a Blu-ray player, just like the one they had, except the box said that it connected to Wi-Fi in big, gold letters. Isabel tried to hold a convincing smile as Martin dug into the box.
“Happy anniversary,” he said, handing her the instruction manual.
“I don’t get it.”
“Listen.” He took out his phone and dialed the number on the bottom of the manual, putting the call on speaker. A machine answered, and before it could run through the call menu, Martin pressed zero and told the operator he had just been disconnected from a call with Eddy.
The connection came and went as they were transferred. A machine reminded them that the call would be recorded for quality assurance purposes.
Then a voice came on the line:
“Thank you for your call, this is Eddy. How can I help you today?”
She felt it in her chest before her mind put the sounds together: that same English he had learned from Omar and nearly perfected with them over dinners and drives and days and days in school. His accent, of course, lingered. It was in the vowels, in the way the sounds tucked themselves underneath his tongue, like a mother tucks her child into bed.
“Hello?” Eduardo said. “Are you there?”
Martin mimed for Isabel to say something. She covered her mouth and uncovered it, trying to keep calm, even as her hands and voice began shaking. “I’m here,” she finally said. “My name’s Isabel. My husband, Martin, just bought me a DVD-player for our anniversary, and we don’t know how to connect it. We’re a total mess lately. I can’t tell you how happy I am to hear your voice.”
CHAPTER 54
OCTOBER 2012
He called out Eduardo’s name into the jungle and heard nothing but the mocking hiss of the cicadas in return. Omar followed the dirt path carved by the feet of so many migrants before him back to the shelter. It’d be nightfall soon, and he and Eduardo had been resting since the previous morning, but now Eduardo was nowhere to be found. Maybe the boy had finally gotten the energy and the gumption to do it. He had been threatening to go back for his mother ever since they had left her doorstep. But that was weeks and hundreds of miles ago.
He scanned the faces of those who still remained outside the blue-stuccoed building. Most had either gone inside for the night or headed out for the railroad, but a few sat with their backs against the wall, legs stretched and feet bare, holding plates of rice and beans against their chests. A young man lay under a tree, his face covered with the corner of the same towel he had propped under his head for support. Omar kicked his foot lightly.
“Eduardo?”
The boy startled awake. There was always fear at the corner of every restful moment. Omar apologized for confusing him with someone else.
He could feel the panic start to swell in his chest, as row after row of beds he checked turned up nothing but unfamiliar faces. The only thing he recognized was the braced alertness in their eyes, how quickly it shot out of them at any sound.
“I’m looking for my boy,” he told anyone who would listen. “About my height, dark, straight hair to his ears. Ojos claritos.”
“You really don’t know the color of my eyes, Tío?” From behind the portable toilets, he heard a cheerful voice. It belonged to a different place from this.
Eduardo stepped over a set of cinder blocks and metal weights, rubbing his palms against his jeans. Omar didn’t know what to make of the slack expression on his face. Eduardo had always looked up to him. Then, just this past summer, out of nowhere, the boy grew taller, and his body began tracing the outline of a teen, and he had been clumsy in his attempts to fill it ever since. In his disbelief, Omar had told his sister it had never happened that quickly when he was Eduardo’s age. She had only laughed and said, “You know how it goes. It’s different when it’s your son.”
But he hadn’t known at all. What was worse, he and Sabrina were not the only ones taken by surprise. Suddenly Eduardo was fair game for the Zetas in their neighborhood, no longer an innocent boy they had no use for, but a moldable recruit. After three of their younger members had threatened him with guns made out of PVC pipes on his way home from school, Sabrina made Eduardo begin working at the restaurant. She asked Omar to tutor him with books checked out from the library. Eduardo was insolent at first, arrogant and unconvinced that Omar knew what he was talking about.
“You spend ten years dodging Maras and 18s in prison, you learn to love every book in the library.” He never told Eduardo much more about prison than that, not even when he begged, claiming it would help him stay out of trouble. But Omar knew better. The only way to stay out of trouble was to get the hell out.
“We gotta go,” he said, handing Eduardo his bag and a fresh bottle of water. He looked at the exercise equipment scattered across the ground. Ever since they had seen a boy his age get pulled under as he had stood straddling two cars, Eduardo worried he would be too weak to hold on to The Beast. “How many did you get this time?” Omar asked.
“Twenty reps with the twenties. Ten with the thirties. Stronger, but not tired.”
Omar laughed like he always did whenever Eduardo echoed one of his made-up expressions. It was nice to know that he listened. But the boy didn’t seem amused. He grew quiet and morose, the closer they got to the tracks. Like every night before this one, they had no idea when the train might pass, or if it’d pass at all. They simply waited in the dark brush with the others.
“Remember, just commit. No hesitating.”
Nearly three hours passed before they heard the horn, and soon after, like lightning, they saw its lights. Even from afar, it was a giant, and it seemed to only accelerate, indifferent to them as it approached.
“This is insane,” Eduardo said.
“Stop thinking. Just go.”
They started running. The ground vibrated and grumbled beneath them. The train rocked side to side, so loud Omar thought it’d explode. Its wheels turned in fierce rhythm, and he tried to time it, tried to feel its pulls and jolts in his limbs. It was a deadly dance, and they had only seconds before he knew it’d be too late.
He saw Eduardo’s arm stretch. It flailed in the air and then it latched on. Omar followed and jumped. He took hold of something sharp and cold, then felt the wind trying to pull him under. Everything was speeding past, but his body was slipping slowly. He cried out and didn’t hear his own voice. He felt something grab at his arms, like it might rip them out of his shoulders. In an instant, he was inside. Four men and Eduardo breathed over him.
The train shuddered with the massive force of steel railing against steel, its thirty tons of cargo now so much heavier with the souls of those it carried. One by one, the migrants drifted off to sleep. Some hugged the
side of the car as they switched to another, or climbed onto the top.
Eduardo sat in a corner, shaking. Three times now they had jumped onto this line, only to flee when the police or cartel came to raid it. They could never get used to the shock of the ground hitting them, or of the train leaving them behind. But he knew that so far they had been lucky. There were those who had tried seven, eight times. They were beaten and robbed and left in the bloody grass without a cent to buy food or water. Somehow they still found the strength to climb back on.
“Here. Drink,” he said, handing his water to Eduardo.
He took a sip and looked him straight in the eyes. “You almost died.”
“You saved me.”
“I don’t want to do this anymore. I want to go back.”
“There’s no back, Eduardo.”
“There is. There’s my mother. How could we just leave her?”
That was exactly what Omar had said to Sabrina when he had learned of her plan. He had insisted she come with them, but she wouldn’t hear of it.
“You know what they do to women on the trail,” she said. “Like it’s some sick tax they have to pay with their bodies. Here, at least, without the restaurant and Eduardo, there’s nothing more they can take from me.”
“There’s your life,” he said.
“That’s worth nothing to them.”
They both knew this wasn’t true. The only excuse the Zetas needed was that she would bleed.
“Please come. Eduardo and I will protect you.”
“You’d die trying.”
After that, he knew there was no changing her mind.
“This is what your mother wanted,” Omar said now, for what felt like the hundredth time.
Eduardo shook his head. “I’m not jumping next time.”
“You don’t mean that. You’ve come too far.”
“Right. All this way, and we’re still here. This kid at the shelter? He’s been trying for a year and a half. But he says his mom’s in Tennessee, and he’s going to find her. At least he has something that keeps him going.”
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