Where We Come From Read online

  Using the fork of the crowbar, Beto flicks aside the shirt and shorts, even the baseball cap, and finds a pair of tennies worn down along the heels and the outer edges. Then he steps closer and puts his work boot next to one of the tennies, close enough to see that it’s much smaller than his own and closer in size to what his boys wear. And for the briefest moment he imagines Rudy and Roberto Jr. wearing these shoes, and not the two or three pairs they own because their mother keeps buying them more than they need. And once he lets himself imagine Rudy and Roberto Jr. wearing the tennies it isn’t so difficult for him to imagine how crazed with worry he would be if his little boys were hiding in some place like this.

  But a few seconds later he’s angry at his sister for causing all of this, for making him feel things he doesn’t understand or want to understand.

  “What kind of trouble did you bring to my mother’s house?”

  “Let me explain, Beto.”

  “Move,” he says when she stands in front of the closet door.

  “You don’t have to do this.”

  “Move.” And this time he nudges her aside. He yanks open the closet door and sees exactly what he’s supposed to see—nothing but dark space, a void with no past, present, or future. He lets go and the door swings closed.

  “I don’t want to hear it, Tencha,” he says, using her real name because he wants her to snap out of it, whatever dream she’s been having. “No more with your excuses. However you do it, all I know is that this, what you have going on here, it needs to be gone by the time Mom comes back home next week. I didn’t cause problems before only because you said it was over and then after that I didn’t have the proof. But now I do.”

  “It’s not that easy.”

  “Easy or hard, it’s not our problem,” he says. “Fix it for good or I will.” He stares at her a few seconds, so she knows he’s serious this time, and goes out the front door, stopping only to grab his half-empty bag of pan dulce.

  * * *

  —

  After her brother pulls out of the driveway, Nina goes back to the other house to find Orly. He tells her everything but leaves out the part about going to get raspas without her permission. He explains about the trapdoor and how Daniel found it when he was sweeping inside the closet, that he didn’t make the hole, only used it a couple of times, but was afraid to tell her because she might be upset. She unlocks the door and makes him show her where.

  “Here,” he says, pulling out the plywood cover from the closet floor. She can barely make out the edges of the hole where the laminate was cut into with something jagged and the floor was stomped on until it gave way and fell into the moist dirt beneath them. It’s not really her house, but the damage to it angers her more than anything else El Kobe and Rigo did while they were here, more than her brother breaking the lock on the door. It feels like each of them has taken something from her that can’t be replaced or made to look and feel right again, like it was before. Even in the dark corner of a bedroom where no one can see it.

  “He wanted to feel the sun again.”

  “He could have asked me.”

  “He thought you would say no.”

  She grows quiet, wondering if it’s worth arguing about.

  “And what else?”

  “That’s all.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “He called it his cage, he said that now he lived in a pink cage.”

  Orly looks toward the front and then down at the hole in the floor, anywhere but his godmother’s face. She wonders how many more ways there may be to remind her that she did something wrong.

  “But to where, mijito? To where was he going after you saw him leave the yard? You need to tell me. Something bad could happen to him.”

  She holds his chin so he’ll look her in the eye and know how serious this is.

  “I tried to ask him, but he just ran away without telling me where he was going. I was afraid Tío Beto was going to hear me calling him to come back.”

  She notices the blush of his tongue and knows that he and the boy must have gone for raspas. At first she wants to get mad that he was trying to fool her, this after the bridge. But when he lowers his head she lets him stay this way and walks back to the other house. She needs to go lie down, rest from dealing with her brother, from hiding so many parts of her life, from what to do next.

  25

  It’s all true, what Orly told her. How could it not be? Close to five weeks of living inside the little house with no hopes of where it might lead to or if it would lead to anywhere other than someone coming to break down the door and drag him away. All this was true. She knew it before she heard it. She had her own cage. Stuck inside and not able to leave for days at a time unless it was to take her mother to one specialist or another, to stop by the Walgreens for more medicines, more bandages for her scrapes, more bottles of Ensure, more overnight protectors for the bed. But at least in her case she wouldn’t have minded if years ago someone had broken down the door and dragged her away from this.

  She lies on her bed and closes her eyes, meaning to sleep if she can, but there’s a tap on her door.

  “¿Qué fue?”

  Orly cracks open the door. “Are you okay?”

  “Just resting.”

  He’s never seen his godmother curled up in bed, especially not during the middle of the day, and he doesn’t know what to do now, wishes he hadn’t knocked.

  “Come here, mijito.” She moves over to make room for him, but he stays put.

  At home, he wasn’t supposed to go near the bed when his mom was resting. Sometimes he couldn’t help it and went to her anyway, but it always felt like she was on her bed floating so high above him, beyond the roof and trees, up in the clouds, and there he was on the ground connected to her with only a frayed rope he had to cling to so she wouldn’t slip away.

  “Please.” Nina holds out her hand to him.

  He sits on the edge of the bed and she takes his hand in hers. They watch the fan oscillating from one corner of the room to the other, as if the next gust of air will bring some change to their situation.

  “Sometimes grown-ups, people who should know better, they make mistakes. More than we like to say. We think we are doing good, but it turns out bad in the end.”

  “It’s because Tío Beto had to come ruin everything.”

  “He should not have broken the lock, but I was already doing wrong.”

  “You were just trying to help Daniel so he could find his father.”

  For a second she looks as sad as his mother did sometimes, but Nina does it without turning away from him and instead looks him clearly in the eyes. She wants him to see her, all there is she can show him, all there ever was, the tears in her eyes, the quiver in her lower lip, the sorrow and regret on her face, and know that she needs him to stay and hold on to her hand.

  “At first I hated that he was here, that he came back and made me have to decide what to do with him. I would open the door in the morning and wish that I had been dreaming the day before and the day before that, wish that I hadn’t let him hide here. Who would do such a thing? Open the door to let trouble into their house? It was different than before, because now nobody had said he would leave on such and such date. Each night we were having no luck calling. I began to lose hope, more than even he was, and when people get that way, desperate like there is no other way, they begin to tell themselves stories just to get to the next day. And the ones who are really desperate begin to believe these stories. I was afraid of who might be out there that I was sending him to, if it turned out not to be his daddy. I told myself that if we couldn’t find him then it was better that Daniel stayed with me, that he would be happy and safe here, if I was his family. Here, he would have food and a school to go to and I would never leave him behind. I would buy him clothes for school and the room where you sleep could be his.” />
  She looks up at Orly’s face for some proof that she is making sense.

  “If he stayed, he would see it was better. I told myself I had to find a way of making him stay. So I began to not call the numbers he told me. I pretended to call when really I was not pushing all the numbers and then I would say it was not ringing. That the number was no good. I would tell him there was no sound and he would go to the next number. One or two numbers I would dial all the way and then the next two I would only pretend to call.”

  “But you still wanted to help him.”

  “That was the first story, but there was another story I knew but didn’t want to believe, because it was more true. That I was not doing it for him, but for me. Because I wanted him here with me and didn’t want him to leave and for me to be alone again.”

  Now he’s the one who looks at her for some proof she means what she’s saying, searching for her face in the fleeting shadows.

  “Being older doesn’t mean you stop making mistakes, it only means your mistakes can hurt more people.”

  26

  There under the bridge for two hours, maybe three, maybe longer— enough for the voices of people waiting in line at the raspa stand to grow faint. Daniel knows it is late because the sun has gone down and earlier there was more traffic passing above him, the rhythmic thumping of tires rolling over one crack and then another before reaching the smooth pavement, city buses going to and from town, fathers and mothers heading home for dinner. He imagines one of those sets of tires must belong to la migra they saw earlier when they were buying the raspas. Daniel still can’t believe he and Orly waved. ¡Qué locura! He imagines the agent driving back and forth, trying to spot the boy from earlier who looked like he didn’t belong. If he hadn’t been with la señora’s godson, who looked like he could belong anywhere, it might have ended there and not here, however it’ll turn out in the end. If he concentrates and listens to nothing else, he believes he can tell if it’s a car or a truck or a green-and-white Suburban passing overhead, if the vehicle is moving closer to the raspa stand or away from it.

  The trunk they had stuffed him into was darker, but the trunk also felt safer. He could have died in the trunk if the ride had lasted much longer and they kept inhaling the fumes, but at least then he knew how it would happen and after a while he wouldn’t feel anything and just go to sleep. Under the bridge the list of bad things seems endless. Maybe it’s worse for there to be some light and be able to see around, imagine all the ways it might happen. Earlier he found a syringe in the grass, near where the embankment connects to the underside of the bridge. At the very top, crammed into a crevice above one of the cement blocks buttressing the bridge, there’s a T-shirt stiff as a ruler from dried spray paint. He hasn’t crossed to the opposite side because he saw something zigzagging in the waist-high grass and thought it might be a stray dog or a snake.

  He sits in the middle, equal distance from either side of the bridge, so he has a chance to run one way or the other depending on which direction they come after him. He doesn’t know what he’ll do if they come from both sides at the same time. His hands are filthy from scrambling through the dirt when they were still sticky from the raspa and he wishes he had stopped to wash them in the bathroom, that having clean hands would somehow make a difference in his getting away. Dipping them in the canal only made them feel grimier. He wants to go back and, if la señora’s brother has left, sneak inside the house to wash his hands and face, to change out of the clothes she bought him and put on the ones he came here with. Then he would leave again and know things would turn out okay.

  He doesn’t know why he didn’t just stay in the motel. He wonders what story he would be telling now. Yesterday on ¡Despierta América!, during the news portion of the program, they showed a house where la migra had found forty people being hidden in a garage with no water, no toilet, nothing but forty bodies sitting or squatting across the floor. This morning he kept turning between Univision and Telemundo to see what happened next, if they were locked up or sent back to their home countries, but there was no mention of it, as if it didn’t happen or it happens so often that it isn’t worth mentioning more than once and then moving on to the next story.

  If he had stayed in the motel, by now he would’ve been back in Veracruz and his father would have found a better way to bring him or he would have stayed with his mother and little sister. Here he can’t go back and he can’t go be with his father. If he had known the choice was between being sent back home and waiting, for what he doesn’t feel like he knows anymore, he might not have run. He was stupid to come again to la señora’s house, to stay locked in her little house, night after night calling numbers for nothing.

  He’ll wait along the canal and just before it gets dark crawl back inside the pink house and take whatever food and water he can carry with him. He wants his family to be together, but maybe together is no longer possible and he has to choose between one and the other, between what he can and can’t reach the easiest. He doesn’t know which way he’ll go, if north or south. All he knows is that here is not there.

  * * *

  —

  Nina finds him just as he opens the back gate and is about to slip under the little house. She hadn’t been sure if she would see him again. There’s no shortage of things they can talk about, but she tells him only that after dinner they will call to see if they can locate his father.

  “Ya no,” Daniel says, shaking off the idea. “I need to go.”

  “But leave to where, mijito?” she says, surprised that she called him something she reserved for her godson. He shrugs, but looks up when he hears the tenderness in her voice.

  “Listen to me,” she says and kneels before him to keep his attention. “You can’t lose your faith. You can be tired, you can be afraid, you can miss your family, but if you keep hold of your faith, then everything is going to be okay.”

  “I had faith, like you told me,” he says to her face, “and nothing happened.”

  It takes her a moment to realize he’s crying. And she does something then she hasn’t done before—she touches him. For the last month there hasn’t been as much as a handshake or a pat on the back or a tousle of his shaggy hair. At first she means to only rub his shoulder, let him know it’s going to be okay. But her touch, instead of soothing him, only brings more tears that turn to sobs and now she’s hugging him not just to calm him but also to keep him from falling there in the dirt. Minutes pass this way, with nothing but his crying softly in her arms as she rubs his back in big circles and later tiny and tinier circles until he’s better and can look at her.

  “Mijito, our faith does not run out because things don’t turn out the way we want, when we want. You think your mama or your daddy has given up that they will see you again? No, every night they go to sleep thinking of you, every morning they wake up thinking of you. It doesn’t matter the distance or how difficult it becomes, whatever stands in our way our faith only gets deeper. In there,” she says and taps him on the chest. “Remember, in there no one can take it from you.”

  27

  She buys pizza because this is one of their last nights all together. She doesn’t need to tell them things will be changing soon. Orly’s father will be here in four days, and today wasn’t the last time her brother will come around.

  She serves herself one slice of the pepperoni and another of the sausage and leaves the rest for the boys, both of them eating like she hasn’t fed them in a week.

  “Bien rica la pizza,” Daniel says. “Delicious.”

  “Muy rica,” Orly agrees.

  She’s glad she bought a kind they both like, but reminds them to not be talking with their mouths full.

  After dinner Orly takes the pizza box out to the trash can and washes the dishes. Daniel brings out his notebook with all the numbers they’ve called these last five weeks. The numbers are marked with an X for a wrong number, a q
uestion mark for no answer, and a line crossing it out if it was a non-working number. Tonight she wants to try the ones where no one answered, some of which they’ve called more than once. Maybe they were on the other line and couldn’t answer. Maybe they were working and now their hours have changed.

  “¿En serio?” Daniel says and looks at her as if she just told him they should throw away the notebook and start all over again.

  It’s worth a try, she tells him. She tells Orly he has better eyes than she does and maybe he should sit closer to make sure she’s dialing the right number. He smiles and pulls his chair up next to her, then nods when he’s ready.

  She dials the area code and then asks for the prefix and finally the last four digits. It takes longer because she mumbles each number back to herself like she’s playing bingo.

  Just as he thought, the first five numbers are still not working and the next four keep ringing and ringing. She ignores Daniel rolling his eyes, a bad habit he must have picked up from Orly, and goes on to the next number. If the number is working, she lets it ring at least fifteen times before she hangs up. Daniel’s job is to keep his index finger on the number until it’s time for him to lower his finger to the next one. When someone does happen to answer, he holds the pen ready to mark another X across the listing.

  “Bueno, ¿puedo hablar con el señor Daniel Mendoza?”

  From there she asks her usual questions of where he is from and if he has a young son traveling to meet him. Even when he’s not named Daniel Mendoza these calls always go on longer than necessary, with her asking the person if he knows anyone else who goes by that name, a father who might be missing a son, who was traveling to be with him but never showed up and hasn’t contacted him to say what happened. Then she spends another minute apologizing for the bother of her phone call, explaining she’s just trying to help the young boy and his father.