Where We Come From Page 15
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Half an hour later she and Orly are in the car, driving home with the rest of the traffic leaving the bridge. They haven’t said a word since the last officer brought him to her. Nina waits until she’s a few blocks away from the bridge before she turns in at the first gas station she sees and pulls up next to the tire pressure gauge, then shuts off the car and gets into the backseat. The lights are bright enough here to see his face.
“Later on we can talk about what happened, why you left the house, but right now I need to know all the questions they asked you,” she says.
“They just wanted to know who I was traveling with and how long I had been in Mexico.”
“Orly, mijito, you need to tell me everything. No more playing around.”
“I’m telling you truth.”
“Por favor.” She extends her hand to touch his cheek, but he turns away. “Look at me, Orly.”
He looks at her but only long enough to say, “I didn’t tell them about the other night, okay, if that’s what you want to know.”
“Are you sure, not even that you were upset?”
“I wasn’t the one who was upset.”
“I meant that you surprised me so late at night.”
“I didn’t say anything about the pink house, okay?”
She wants to ask more—she knows how tricky these officers can be. If they manage to get information from adults, ones who make their living from hiding things and are trying to stay out of prison, how much easier would it be with a twelve-year-old boy? She stops herself from asking only because she worries he might run off again.
She opens the car door and returns to the front seat. They ride the rest of the way in silence. It’s dark now and almost time for her mother to be going to sleep. Nina hopes her mother hasn’t given Rumalda too much trouble or had an accident because she insisted on getting to the bathroom without her walker. When they get back Nina will need to call a taxi for Rumalda, pay her the extra money and whatever they charge to take her back home to Matamoros.
“I’m sorry,” Orly finally says when they’re close to the house. He waits, then repeats it when she doesn’t respond. He only says it because he knows if he doesn’t say it now that later they’ll have to talk about it longer.
She lowers the window, and after turning onto her street, she pulls over near the car wash.
“Tell me why,” she says, still looking forward as if she were driving down some unfamiliar road with the lights off.
“I’m sorry for running away, even if I meant to come back.”
“Not that.”
“I’m sorry for going across the bridge and then for everything after I came back. For you having to go get me.”
“I mean tell me why you left.” She keeps both hands on the wheel.
“Just because.”
“Just because why?”
“I was bored.”
“There were a lot of other things you could do if you were bored—go to the mall, go to the movies. Not to where you could get hurt.”
“I don’t want to go to the stupid movies.”
She turns toward him but now he’s the one looking out his window, staring off in the direction of the car wash.
“Your daddy says he can come to get you.”
“I don’t want to go home with him.”
“He got mad with me on the phone too,” she says, hoping this will make him look her way. “Give him time and it will pass.”
A small blue truck, low to the ground, eases into the parking lot of the car wash, then the first bay. A minute later the mist from the power washer rises into the light cast from the lamppost.
“I’m tired of everybody lying to me.”
She wants to ask who “everybody” is but lets it pass and looks back, waits for him to face her. “I should have told you that night, explained it to you, but the real truth is I didn’t want you to know.”
“But why, if I had already seen him?”
“Yes, but I didn’t want you to know how he got here. I wanted for it to be like you never saw him. I didn’t want for you to know about how some mean men had brought him and some other ones for me to hide because it was illegal the way they came here.” She pauses to see his reaction, if he’ll kick the seat or try to run off, but he only looks at her as he does when he doesn’t understand a Spanish word, confused but now also upset, as if she’d told him the meaning of the word but then changed it without telling him. “But not for long, and then they left and it was supposed to be the last time, except for the next day the police caught them after they left the house. I went to bed that night worried that the men who brought the people would say where they had been hiding them and then the police would come to my front door, knocking. But in the morning nothing, no knocks, and the next morning tampoco. But the knock came two nights later, at the back door. It was the boy, Daniel. He had run away when they caught the other ones. At first I wanted to send him away, tell him to leave or I would call the police. But how could I send him away, a young boy just a little older than you, out across the canal to find his way in the night?”
Orly looks at her now, waiting, like there might be more.
“Only until we find his family,” she says. “He lost the number to call his father.”
It makes him think of how his dad kept asking what the hell was wrong with him—as if he didn’t know at least part of the answer to his own question—and how he thought Nina would yell at him too, but when he saw her she hugged him for such a long time he could feel a sob rising in her chest, and then asked him if he was okay, if he’d had anything to eat and if he was hungry.
“At first, I thought I was keeping it a secret to protect you, but now I know it was to protect me.”
“Protect you from what?”
“From what you might think of your godmother.”
17
Two times is how Nina remembers it. She had heard of girls getting in trouble for doing less with their boyfriends. After the second time she swore to herself no more until she and Jorge were married, which they had talked about in roundabout ways that she accepted only because he was still in the service and who knew where he might be a year or even six months from now. She tried not to panic when she was two weeks late. It was the summer after she had graduated and started working at the Kress store, and each day on her way to work she took a small detour and stopped by the cathedral to say a prayer—to beg, really—that she wasn’t pregnant. She remembered hearing talk of a second cousin, a prima on her mother’s side of the family, who by then was married more than ten years and every December she and her husband made a pilgrimage from San Luis Potosí to the Basilica in Mexico City, to ask la Virgen for help in bringing them a child that in the end never came. And here she, Nina, was on this side of the river, asking God to do the opposite, to stop any child from coming into her life before it was time, and each day it didn’t happen she felt her faith struggling to catch its breath like the flickering candle she made sure to light on every visit. She wondered if her pleas would be met with the same indifference that her prima had received. She had been feeling nauseated in the morning but hadn’t thrown up the way her sister-in-law, Bea, had a few months earlier, just before she learned she and Raúl were expecting. This was 1970—it wasn’t like Nina could walk into a drugstore and buy a pregnancy test. Maybe Jorge would marry her. Maybe. Her days and nights had become filled with maybes. Maybe he would deny it was his or say it was her fault. Maybe he would accept it but still leave her back home to raise the baby on her own. Maybe Jorge would accept her and the baby, but her family would still reject her (that last one seemed like less of a maybe). Maybe she could just move away to San Antonio or Houston, try to make it on her own, at least until she had the baby and gave it up for adoption. Maybe she could give the baby to her prima and at least one of them w
ould have her prayers answered.
And then later it occurred to her that the baby inside her had been conceived in Matamoros at Jorge’s tío’s house and not in Brownsville, not that this made much of a difference as to what would happen next but maybe she should be praying closer to where it happened. Nina knew this was crazy, that there was no difference between a prayer said in one country and a prayer said across the border in another. There was no American God and no Mexican God, there was just God. But by then she was nine weeks late and crazy didn’t seem so crazy anymore.
She went on a Monday, her one day off from work, forcing herself not to think about the cramps that had kept her awake most of the night and made her want to stay curled up in bed. After crossing the bridge on foot and passing through Mexican customs, she took a taxi that dropped her off across the street from the church, ignoring the driver when he offered to wait and take her for a stroll in the plaza after she was done with her business inside. From the sidewalk, the pink hue of the Mexican cathedral seemed to pulsate in the noonday sun. The cramps were worse now and she fought the urge to go sit on a bench under the shade trees in the plaza. The church was empty except for some American tourists taking photos of the altar. Unable to lower herself all the way to the cushion without feeling the next spasm, she took a seat in the back and went through her ritual of saying an Ave María:
Santa María, Madre de Dios,
ruega por nostros, pecadores,
ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte.
By now she had said this last verse dozens of times and not fully seen herself as one of the pecadores, the sinners with a need to beg for forgiveness, now and in the hour of her death. All she wanted was for it not to be real and if it was real to know what to do next. Maybe the problem was more complicated. She promised then that she would never ask for anything ever again, nothing. She would lead her life giving and not taking. If she could have just this one favor.
This time she left without lighting a candle. She needed a bathroom. The cramps had her doubled over in pain. She passed a barbershop and one of the younger barbers rushed out to follow her down the sidewalk, hissing to get her attention. Around the corner, she found a shop where the seamstress had to leave a young bridesmaid atop a wooden box, her arms spread as if in flight, and show her to the modest facilities in the back. Almost as soon as she sat down, she felt her body expel some but not all of the guilt and worry she’d been carrying for the last nine weeks. She stayed seated, listening to the seamstress asking the young woman to stand straighter, like she would when they were taking photos. Then asking her how long she had been friends with the bride, and if she had met the groom, and if she thought they made a good couple, if he came from a nice family. Nina stayed exactly where she was for nearly half an hour, listening to the entire conversation because she couldn’t yet bear to stand up and look at the murky remains of the baby she had just lost.
Jorge happened to be back for a visit the following month, but she wasn’t ready to talk to him and didn’t return his three or four calls. She was better the next time he came to town later that year for the holidays, but now he didn’t call, and she waited by the phone, embarrassed for not having returned his calls, each day expecting it to ring, until she realized all the days of his leave had passed and he was gone.
She made herself call the next time she heard he was in town, but he never returned the call. After that, each time she heard he was back she wanted to go over and find a time for them to talk, if only so they could fight and have a proper breakup and not whatever this was, her waiting and him not ever calling. She wrote and rewrote letters, in a few of them even mentioning the baby, but she never mailed them. When she wasn’t consumed with what had happened or didn’t happen between them, she helped her sister in-law care for her baby boy, Eduardo, only a year old, wondering as she held him and gave him his bottle and changed his diaper if she would’ve had a boy or a girl, wondering if it really would’ve been so hard to do it on her own. Even then she knew she would always link this time of caring for her baby nephew with having lost her own baby.
Later, Nina heard from friends that they had seen Jorge dancing with some woman at the Mustang in Matamoros, but she told herself it probably wasn’t anything serious. Dancing wasn’t anything, lots of people danced and never spoke again. Maybe. Maybe not. It was another six years before she accepted that she was the only one waiting by the phone.
18
A silence fills the house. Not just at night, when he’s supposed to stay in his room until morning, but during the day, too, when he’s not supposed to ask about or mention the boy. He knows too much as it is.
The silence is the same as it was the morning after his parents told Orly and Alex about the separation, but different from the afternoon when they found out their mom had died. With their parents separating, the silence came from the question of why their mom couldn’t stay and everything be like it always was, which was a question that had an answer and at the same time didn’t have an answer because as soon as Orly thought he understood, he found out how little he really knew.
Maybe this is part of being an adult, not always having an answer. Knowing certain things but keeping them to yourself, hidden from everyone else. Maybe silence is where you go to figure out questions that don’t have answers. Even though Nina explained it to him, he still isn’t sure why she keeps the boy in the other house. She said it’s because of her mother and Tío Beto, because they won’t like it if they find out she’s hiding a boy and will call the police to come take him away. But he doesn’t understand why she can’t just explain it to them, make them understand that if the boy gets sent away it’ll solve the problem of his being here but not the other problem of how he finds his family.
One thing he knows to keep to himself is what happened on the street in Matamoros, which in a way was nothing—a bunch of Mexican cops blocking traffic for a couple of minutes, then leaving—but could’ve easily been something bad. He keeps it to himself especially after getting back and later that night online reading about a shooting a day earlier on the other end of Matamoros. Five people killed, four of them with one of the rival drug gangs and another one who was crossing the street with her little girl when it happened. The photos showed people strewn across the pavement in pools of blood, but without identifying the bad guys. When his father and Nina asked what happened when he crossed, he made his time over there sound as boring as it had been on this side of the bridge. They might have been right about not going across, but it didn’t mean he had to prove this to them. Some things are better left unsaid.
The one person he thinks he could tell who might understand and not go crazy is Mr. Domínguez. Orly e-mailed him a few days after he got here, just to say hi and tell him that he had his book with him, but he never heard back and wonders if he uses a different e-mail over the summer, when he isn’t always having to respond to his students and their parents.
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A couple of mornings after the final parent-teacher conference, Mr. Domínguez was leaving his apartment to go for a run at Memorial Park when four heavily armed officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement surrounded him before he could get into his car. Did he know where they could find Julián Montenegro? Julian was his partner. My boyfriend, he said when the ICE officer looked at him funny. Ex-boyfriend. They had lived together for a little more than a year but had been fighting for the last few months, more when Julián lost his job at the health club where he worked. Last he’d heard, Julián had decided to return to Mexico. So, he self-deported? The lead officer wasn’t buying it, especially not with the boyfriend having a warrant out for his arrest for an unresolved DWI charge. Where in Mexico? But Mr. Domínguez wasn’t entirely sure. Julián was from Guanajuato, so perhaps there. He wanted to give him some space before reaching out to him. Space before reaching out? The lead officer—she looked Latina but with blue
eyes, so who knows—seemed amused with his choice of words. Then she asked to see some identification, which he provided in the form of a driver’s license. The problem was, his work visa had expired ten months earlier, the renewal of which he said was pending, but which in fact had already been renewed once and had reached its limit. It was enough for them to take him. In another two weeks Mr. Domínguez will be deported back to Veracruz, still without knowing where Julian might be.
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The silence in his godmother’s house ends two nights later. It happens early in the morning when the trash truck that has been lumbering down the street then has to back up the whole way, the beep-beep-beep-beep signal going off, because there’s no place to make a U-turn. Orly wakes up to take a sip of water—which he now serves himself in a short glass, then covers the opening with his iPhone—and before he can fall back asleep he feels a heavy thud shake the floor beneath his bed.
At first he thinks something tipped over in the kitchen. A chair? The table? The refrigerator? Then the first sound is followed by a wail that rattles him enough to sit up and do away with whatever sleep he had left in him. He wants to crack the door open, but he’s afraid Nina might scold him for coming out in the middle of the night even if the middle of the night has already happened. The light seems brighter now at the bottom of the door. He drops to the floor and rushes forward on all fours until he reaches the door, the side of his face on the shag carpet, the tip of his nose edging into the sliver of light.
A minute later Nina’s standing at the wall phone just outside the door. First her scaly heels, then she turns and it’s the front of her plump toes staring him in the face. He can’t see the phone, but he knows it’s yellow because the long rubbery yellow cord is dangling in front of him. She uses the wall phone as much as the cordless phone in the living room. The extra-long cord, at first hopelessly tangled in knots, grows taut and then rises and disappears as she walks in the direction of her mother’s room. She says to the person on the phone that she needs an ambulance, for her mother, ninety-four years old. There’s another moan and Nina asks the dispatcher to hold on. Her voice dissolves to a murmur in the distance. A minute later she’s back at the receiver. Yes, ninety-four, she repeats in Spanish. She fell.