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Where We Come From Page 14


  * * *

  —

  Passing through the Mexican customs checkpoint, travelers have to walk up to a short traffic signal and press the crossing button before they are allowed to continue forward. If the traffic light comes up green, they are free to enter the country y Bienvenidos a México. If it comes up red, the traveler must pass through extra security. The jokester’s wife wonders aloud why the heck the airport security people don’t do this back home and save passengers the trouble of showing their feet in public. These people may be onto something, says the husband. Everyone nods in agreement until the other old man happens to get a red light and has to undo his fanny pack and place it on the conveyor belt so it can pass through the X-ray machine. Then one of the guards unzips the fanny pack to look inside but doesn’t find anything other than traveler’s checks, loose coins, a tiny pill case, and his and his wife’s passports. He has his cash in another pouch hanging from his neck and tucked inside his shirt, but he shows the guard only what he asked for. Orly gets a green light and passes through without having to open his backpack. There’s nothing in it besides the book Mr. Domínguez gave him to read over the summer, and half a bottle of water; he brought his backpack out of habit, of wanting to hold on to something of his own.

  The tourists ignore the calls of the taxistas offering their services. To the mercado, mister. Very safe inside taxi. Good shopping, better prices for you and your beautiful wife. Do not believe what the people say, it is very safe for you. The best prices in all of Matamoros. But across the street they already see the signage for the only place they want to go. García’s Restaurant & Bar. They wait for a pesero loaded with passengers and then its stream of noxious fumes to pass so they can hurry across to the median, barely noticing that the young boy is still behind them, tagging along for the trip as though he were an unclaimed grandson. The parking garage attendant rushes over to open the door for the group, hoping this might result in a tip, but they pass through like the door might have opened on its own.

  * * *

  —

  And here she is on the other side of the river, chasing down bus after bus through the streets of Brownsville, like some crazy woman. She hasn’t shopped downtown in years. She stopped coming sometime after things ended with Jorge. Every restaurant or movie theater used to remind her of how her older brother, Luis, would follow them and park outside. She and Jorge became experts on the alleyways and corners of downtown, on how to escape through the service door of Fisher’s Café or slip into the lobby of El Jardín Hotel and wait until it was safe and then hurry the three short blocks to the bridge and across to Jorge’s tío’s place where they could be alone. But when she spots a bus, she pushes aside these memories, off into the back of her mind. She speeds ahead and waits at the next stop for the driver to pull over. She asks four different drivers before the fifth one tells her he dropped off a boy like that in front of the old movie theater, across from the old courthouse. But he says that was a couple of hours ago. The boy could be back on the other side of town by now.

  * * *

  —

  He follows the tourists up the marble steps to the second floor and through another set of doors. The blast of air-conditioning feels good after sweltering outside most of the afternoon. The two American couples head into the bar to cool off. To his left, Orly finds a gift shop, brightly lit and filled with more American tourists. Most are browsing at the jewelry case, asking to see silver rings or bracelets, trying to haggle a better price from the clerk, who apologizes in near-perfect English that the prices are already set. Each display has a neon-orange index card indicating the price of the decorative sombreros, of the festive Mexican dresses and guayaberas, with long and short sleeves, of the various bottles of tequila and mezcal and rum, of the leather whips and bandoliers with shot glasses, of the Talavera plates and pottery, of the Aztec calendars and wooden chess sets, of the stuffed frogs playing the guitarrón or acordeón, everything with prices clearly marked in American dollars.

  He doesn’t know what his dad and Nina and Tío Beto are so scared of that they won’t even cross the bridge. If it’s really that bad, why would the old people he followed come across? Next time he talks to his dad he’ll tell him that he came over by himself and even walked down the street and it was totally safe. Maybe that’ll prove to him that he isn’t soft, isn’t a baby and can take care of himself and from now on he’ll let him stay home alone, not send him to his Nina’s just to show him how different things are down here, so he’ll see how much tougher his dad’s life was growing up.

  “Looking for a gift, a souvenir for a friend?” asks the lady behind the jewelry case.

  “Just looking,” he answers, relieved to not have to respond in Spanish, as he did at the stores on the other side of the river. She has dark hair and wears it in a ponytail. Her thick eyebrows stand out against her light skin.

  “You would like to see the necklaces?” She slides open the glass panel.

  “My mom used to have one like that.” He points to a square-shaped pendant with tiny diamonds along the edges.

  “And she lost it?”

  He nods. “I think she misplaced it,” he says, not wanting to explain what really happened, how he ended up down here for the summer.

  “Well, now here it is again,” she says and smiles like she might have resolved all his worries. She pulls it from the case, holds it up to her neck and chest to show him how it looks on her, then lays it out for him on a black felt tray. He never held his mother’s necklace, but this one feels heavier than he had imagined it being. He remembers her wearing it sometimes when she and his father used to go out at night.

  “I can save it here for you, behind the counter, if you want to go bring your mother to show her what you found.”

  Orly nods again and drifts away like he might go look for her in the restaurant, but instead he heads down the marble steps.

  The sidewalk in front of García’s is empty, but the traffic is backed up from the bridge for several blocks; on the opposite side of the avenue, heading toward downtown and the mercado, the cars trickle by after passing through the Customs checkpoint. He wants to buy something small to remind him of his trip into Mexico. He’ll go just far enough to find another gift store or curio shop and then head back so he can be on the other side of the bridge before it gets dark. He has taken only a few steps when two black trucks surge around the corner across the street, their hoods and doors marked POLICÍA FEDERAL. Aside from the driver, each truck has four heavily armed men in the back, leaning against the cab rack. They wear dark blue uniforms and what look like bulletproof vests, their assault rifles up and ready at their shoulders. The first truck stops directly across from him; the second one cuts off all traffic coming from the bridge. Orly has just enough time to ease back into the garage, where the guard has already taken cover behind a gray Jetta. The men’s black balaclavas and tactical goggles get Orly’s attention, remind him of a dream he had in the days before his mother was supposed to move out. And now he hears his father’s voice saying it was too bad they couldn’t cross over anymore. Nina saying it wasn’t worth the risk anymore. Tío Beto saying it wasn’t worth the risk even when there was less risk. But none of that matters at this very instant when he feels himself paralyzed to move in any direction. He feels that sensation that he feels when he’s playing soccer and knows he’s about to fall hard but there’s nothing he can do to stop himself, to remain suspended between his reality and the pain that awaits him. On the street, the vendor grilling corn pushes his two kids to the pavement behind his cart, the paletero rolls his icebox several feet in the other direction, the women waiting for the late-afternoon bus crowd behind the taxista stand, all of them watching the federales’ eyes and then turning in every direction to see what it is the federales might be looking for that they don’t yet see. Close to two minutes pass before one of the men standing in back lowers his rifle and taps twice o
n the roof of the first truck and the driver pulls away, followed by the other vehicle, the tires squelching on the pavement. And then Orly takes off for the bridge.

  * * *

  —

  Nina pulls out a school photo from last year to show the attendant. The man wipes his hands and the corners of his mouth with an already balled-up napkin. She caught him eating his dinner. Orly’s tie in the photo is the same dark blue as the man’s tie, though the bottom half of his is tucked between the buttons of his uniform shirt. He leans in, then picks up the photo for a closer look. But no, no güeritos like that leaving town on one of his buses, he would remember him if he came through. Nina doesn’t think of her godson as so light-skinned, but looking again at the photo and then back at everyone else in the bus station, including the two Border Patrol agents lingering near the exit, maybe the man has a point. Ask to the other counters, he says, but she has, even in the sandwich shop. Then maybe the police can help you, if the boy is lost. He picks up his plastic fork, takes another bite of his carne con papas. Everybody with ideas for her, nobody with answers.

  In the car, she flips open her phone. Seven different bus counters, half of them said she should call the police. But she can already imagine their questions. Was your godson mad or upset about something? Has anything happened at your house in the last week that would make him want to leave? She can feel her blood pressure rising with each question. And if they come around to the house to ask more questions, to look for clues? She might as well just drive over to the police station and turn herself in, confess to them she lost one young boy and has another one, without papers, hiding behind her mother’s house.

  Now almost four hours since she left her mother with Rumalda, promising to pay her extra to wait until she got back. Telling her not to say anything if her brother Beto calls or comes by. She still has her cell phone open when the screen suddenly lights up. Orly’s father has called only once or twice since he left him. And now of all times to be checking on the boy. She lets it ring and ring, ten, twelve, fifteen times. Then it stops, but a few seconds later it begins to ring again.

  “Hello?”

  “Tía, they just called me from the bridge.”

  16

  Nina sits on the hard plastic chair in the waiting area, her ankles crossed under the seat. She waits in a room full of people they didn’t let enter the country. A little boy crawling under the row of chairs trying to scare his younger sister, who’s sitting on their mother’s lap. The older man at the other end of the row dressed in a dark suit and white socks with no elastic. Two men, younger, with thick beards, speaking quietly in a language that sounds like nothing she’s ever heard.

  There’s the story of what’s happening at this very moment, which amounts to nothing more than waiting to be called in so they can ask her a few questions about her godson and how he ended up in Matamoros. And there’s the other story that she imagines unfolding. Some people might call it a worst-case scenario; she calls it the only thing left to happen. In this second story, Orly lets it slip about the other boy he saw in her kitchen, that he’s from Veracruz but stays hidden in the little house behind his great-grandmother’s house. That, or Nina herself just breaks down and tells them everything, about the boy she’s hiding, about El Kobe and Rigo, about Noemí and Briana. She tells them about the money she accepted and how she hid this from her family, how it started as a favor and then one day it wasn’t a favor anymore, how she couldn’t make herself turn the boy away, all of it. She imagines the immigration officer reading her her rights, asking her if she has a lawyer. Then she gets handcuffed and taken away without even saying good-bye to Orly. And Orly having to stay with her brother until Eduardo can come get him and take him back to Houston. And then when they find her guilty and send her away to the penitentiary, her mother gets sent to the nursing home, where she stays the rest of her days with no visitors except for when Beto remembers he still has a mother. And worse things, like how Orly will never speak to her again.

  She can see him sitting in one of the offices, but they haven’t let her talk to him. When the Customs officer pulled him out of the line because he couldn’t enter the United States without proof of citizenship, Orly gave them his father’s number. His dad received the message an hour later on the tarmac at LAX and had to wait until he could get to the United Airlines lounge before he could return the officer’s call. The second call he made was to Nina.

  “How, Tía, how does a twelve-year-old end up in Matamoros?”

  “He took the bus downtown and from there walked across.”

  “No, I mean, how did he even get the idea?”

  “He was reading when I left to run my errands.” She didn’t know what he wanted her to say. She was telling him all she knew. “But he’s okay now. He’s safe.”

  “But you left him alone?”

  “He didn’t want to go, and he wasn’t alone. My mother and the woman who cleans the house were here with him.”

  “If they were there watching him, then how’d he get out? Tell me how that happens, if they’re watching him.”

  “He just left, he walked out the door when they weren’t watching. I don’t have him locked up. He just wandered off when they weren’t looking. You used to wander off when you were his age.”

  “Not to Mexico, not to Matamoros.”

  His third call is to Kayla, who has to drive across town to the house, find and scan Orly’s birth certificate, and e-mail it to his dad so he can then forward it to the Customs and Border Protection office. All this before they will even talk to Nina.

  * * *

  —

  “Do you have some identification, Mrs. Diaz?” The room has only a desk and three chairs, nothing on the desk, nothing on the walls, no lamp, no plants.

  She thinks about correcting her that she’s a Miss, not a Mrs., but at this point she just wants to get her godson and leave. “I already showed them my driver’s license.”

  “I mean a passport or passport card.”

  “For what, if this is my country?”

  The officer looks at her without acknowledging her words. Nina wonders if the woman would’ve asked her that question even a few months ago, if this is how it’s going to be from now on.

  “Your godson did something dangerous, crossing alone into another country,” she says. “People get kidnapped and shot just for being in the wrong place.”

  “Yes, but not because I let him. He went without permission.”

  “He was upset?”

  “Not that I know.” But she wonders if this isn’t the reason for the questions and if the boy told them about the pink house. She remembers when she still used to go across and on the way back how they could be with their needling questions, just waiting for you to get mad or say something you never intended that they could then use against you. She feels her heart pounding in her chest the same as when Eduardo called her about Orly. She was just down the street from the bridge but had to sit in her car another twenty minutes to calm herself enough to where she wouldn’t break down as soon as she walked inside the Customs office for him. Her hands would be shaking now if she didn’t have them tucked under her legs.

  “He said he was bored.”

  “That he was bored does not mean that anything bad happened to him.”

  “Then you are saying that he just ran away on his own, for no reason?”

  “Who said he ran away? Because he went across and came back is not running away. Since when do boys have to have a good reason for doing what they do?”

  “You’re upset, Mrs. Diaz.”

  “He’s my only godson, I don’t have any children of my own. His father brought him to me so I could take care of him, so he could be safe with me at the house. He scared me. You think I don’t know what could have happened to him?”

  “But you left him alone.”

  “No, not alo
ne. He stayed with my mother.”

  “But earlier you said you took care of your mother. So how was she going to watch the boy if somebody needs to be watching her?”

  “But not just with her. I would never leave them both alone.”

  “Who then? Who did you feel comfortable leaving your mother and godson with?”

  She is still sitting on her hands but now feels a tremor in her leg as if she might suddenly kick the desk. Here she was worried about Orly revealing something, and now she’s the one who almost landed them in trouble. If she says her maid was also at the house, the next question will probably be about whether the maid has permission to be working on this side. And of course she doesn’t. Whose maid does? Every morning there’s a long line of women on the bridge coming over to work, and then at night they go back across to their families in Matamoros. Right or wrong, legal or illegal, seen or ignored, that’s how things work here.

  “A family friend, that’s who. She comes to visit and stay with my mother when I have errands to run.”

  The first time she’d called Rumalda a friend, it was to try to explain why she had helped her; this time Nina was calling her a friend because it was the only way to get herself out of this mess. She had done a small favor for the woman, which led her to doing other favors that weren’t really favors, which led to another favor for a boy who knocked on her back door late one night, which was more like a favor but which she doubts her godson or his father or the officer sitting across from her would ever understand.