Where We Come From Read online

  She turned from her mother and took a deep breath and released it. This was a technique she had taught herself to do when she first started teaching second grade. After more than thirty years of working at Canales Elementary she had had her share of misbehaving kids who spent a couple of days at the principal’s office every week just so she could focus on the other twenty or so students she had to teach. She was better than most teachers and teacher aides who didn’t particularly like kids and did it only because they couldn’t find another major and knew that this way they would always have a job.

  “If you’re mad we should talk later, when you feel better.”

  When she turned to walk out, her mother threw the plastic cup at her, missing altogether but stopping her all the same.

  “You don’t tell me when I can open my mouth to talk,” she yelled at her. “You forget who is the mother and who’s living here for free.”

  “Only to take care of you.”

  “That’s what daughters do, and more the ones that stayed alone and have no one else to take care of.” She looked away again. “And now she wants to go after the doctor, offer herself to him.”

  Nina turned to leave and bumped into Rumalda standing in the doorway. She wasn’t done with the cleaning, but right then Nina wanted to pay her so she would go away and Nina wouldn’t have to see her face or anyone else’s for another seven days. The woman must have overheard at least some of their exchange, and she looked at Nina now as if she was the one in need of a favor, the one to be hidden and smuggled off to some more forgiving place.

  * * *

  —

  After things had ended with Jorge, she became more careful with her money, saving all she could after giving her mother most of what little she earned working as a cashier and at the same time taking classes at the college. It took her close to a year to save enough to pay her part of the deposit on an apartment for her and two friends. It was nothing fancy, this first apartment near the airport, but she was on her own, and most importantly she was away from her family, who thought she was making a big mistake, trying to support herself while living with these two other girls she hardly knew. Her mother let her go, convinced she’d be back soon enough, if not to ask for money, then to move her things back into her old room. But she preferred to work extra shifts or find part-time jobs rather than go back home and ask for help. It took her more than ten years to get her degree and do her student teaching. By then she had her own place, a tiny studio apartment, off Boca Chica, and was saving up to buy a house.

  Her kids, as she called her students, were mainly from the neighborhood but she suspected that a few of them were from Matamoros and walking across the bridge every morning to attend school in Brownsville. By law, the school wasn’t permitted to ask about their or their parents’ citizenship. Not that it had mattered to her—where they were born, where they slept at night, where they celebrated their birthdays didn’t change the fact that they needed an education just as much, if not more, than the students born on this side of the river. Occasionally she would hear or read about one of her kids from one side or the other, all grown up—an accountant, an RN, an attorney, an engineer, a pilot, a police officer—and know that she had played some small role in their success. She had cared for them like they were her own.

  This wasn’t why she started teaching, but after the first few years it made her wonder if it wasn’t meant to be some consolation for passing up that experience when she was young enough to have a family. She’d dated other men after Jorge, but in one way or other she never let them get close enough for it to last more than a few months.

  The house she bought was tiny, in ways smaller than some of the apartments she’d lived in, but then again it was just for her. She had a small yard and a driveway, and wasn’t sharing a wall with strangers who were up at all hours of the night. It was a yellow clapboard house with an off-white trim, close enough to work but also not so far from her mother’s house. She wasn’t sure about the color, but thought she could live with it for the time being.

  She had been in the house six years when Beto asked her the question that eventually led her back to the house she had grown up in: Will you do me a favor and check on Mom on your way home from work? Just stop by for five or ten minutes, make sure she’s eating and taking her medicines. Nina was tired after work, but it seemed like a small sacrifice to make for the family. But then later it was also her summers and school holidays, when she wasn’t doing much but running errands, and why not take their mother to the cardiologist’s office or the urologist or to get her hair fixed if her birthday was coming up. Until one afternoon she walked in the back door and found her mother lying on her side in the kitchen, unable to get up and the burner on the stove still on, the kettle screeching above her cries for help. She hadn’t broken anything, but the scare was enough to tell them that from now on their mother shouldn’t be living alone. And right then Nina knew there’d be no question who should be living with her mother and no question that Beto had had this in mind when he asked her for a little favor.

  And now another favor, this one for Rumalda. Nina didn’t know when it was that she became the person everyone thought they could come ask to do this and that, as if she didn’t have her own life, as if her life only came after theirs. Can you do me a favor and check on Mom on your way home from work? Can you do me a favor and take her so they can check her feet, make sure they’re not swollen again? Can you do me a favor and just retire a couple of years earlier than you were planning? Can you do me a favor and just sell the house you saved up for years to buy and go live with Mom? Can you do me a favor and give up your life for her life? Can you do me a favor and never sleep the whole night because she’s always calling you to bring her water or calling you to go to the bathroom because thirty minutes earlier you got up to give her water? Can you try to help Mom and then let her say ugly things and throw a cup at you? Can you? Can you? Can you?

  * * *

  —

  The following Friday, Rumalda arrived with her daughter and granddaughter in tow. Noemí helped her mother where she could with the cleaning, mainly in the kitchen and hanging the laundry to dry, but made sure she and Briana stayed away from the front of the house where la señora’s mother might see them. Then later that afternoon, after bringing in the last of the towels from the clothesline, Rumalda, Noemí, and Briana walked out the back door carrying clean sheets and the small backpacks they had arrived with in the morning. La Bronca was still chained to a tree in the front yard, so it was easy for the three of them to slip into the pink house unnoticed. Less than twenty minutes later, Rumalda walked back to the main house alone.

  * * *

  —

  Five hundred and forty miles to the north, Juan Pablo, the husband of Noemí, was helping load the jackhammer and pickax into the bed of the work truck. He had received a text from her at noon letting him know she and Briana had crossed the bridge that morning with her mother and would be waiting for their ride. Juan Pablo barely had time to reply with one of those heart emojis Noemí liked to send him, the ones he never knew how to respond to, but in the moment, it was easier than trying to tap out a message. He and the four other men in his crew had spent the day digging out a seventy-five-foot-long trench to replace a corroded sewer pipe, continuing to work while the owner of the house came outside to observe their progress. The man claimed his mother’s side of the family was from Mexico—he couldn’t remember from where exactly—and he knew just enough Spanish to try to start a conversation each time he came outside in his short pants and T-shirt and then make at least one of the men feel like he had to put down his shovel to respond, when in reality it was their boss he should be asking his questions to. They were already behind schedule. Horacio, one of the other workers, hadn’t shown up for work again that morning. They had hired a day laborer to take his place, but the man seemed to spend more time drinking water than he did working
. Horacio had gone back to Michoacán to see his family for the first time since leaving seven years earlier. After all the equipment was loaded and they were inside the truck, one of the workers wondered out loud if he had been turned back or if something worse may have happened. Horacio had left his car keys with Juan Pablo to hold until he returned, which he had said would be a week earlier. Horacio was supposed to have contacted the same coyote who had brought him across the first time. Though no one was asking him, the day laborer mentioned that he was from Honduras and last year his cousin had it bad because first one of the gangs had killed her husband and she had escaped with her fourteen-year-old girl, but then, after the coyote got them to this side, the ones hiding them in the mobile home wanted more money before they would release them to the next one, who was supposed to get them to Houston. The day laborer hadn’t said as much, but Juan Pablo wondered if the cousin and her daughter might have been violated. Most of the women and girls crossing alone were. People knew it but preferred not to mention it, as if the omission might somehow prevent the memory itself from crossing to this side of the border. Juan Pablo hadn’t come out and told Noemí this was the other reason she and Briana had to wait as long as they had, that it was so he could save more money to pay the extra cost for them to be brought up north by people who had come recommended to him, and so later he could worry just a little less about what might or might not happen to them on their way here.

  * * *

  —

  If she didn’t already know better, Nina wouldn’t have guessed anyone was staying in the other house. The weather was cool enough this early in the year that they didn’t need to turn on the air conditioner. They didn’t so much as open the door or raise the vinyl blinds or turn on a light or open a window—at least not where Nina would have seen from her kitchen. She had promised herself not to step into the backyard, much less go up to the little house and check on her visitors. On the news, she had seen what happened when the immigration authorities found people hiding in a house or apartment or trailer home. Twenty or thirty of them, sometimes over fifty of them, all sitting on the floor with their backs against the wall. And these were just the poor ones who had paid to be taken. The other ones who took their money and sometimes were also smuggling drugs, those ones covered their faces when they got arrested, like they didn’t want their families to see what they had been doing all along for their money and cars. Those were the people who would be coming to her mother’s house.

  The next night the phone rang close to eleven o’clock. At first she thought it might be Beto. Her brother liked to call at the most random hours, like she was operating a twenty-four-hour phone line for whenever it occurred to him to check on his mother. She sat up in bed without answering, letting it ring a second time to make sure she wasn’t dreaming. Nothing good came from calls at this hour. This was the time of night when people called to inform you of car accidents and people who had died long before their time. Eight months earlier, Eduardo had let her know the afternoon after his wife died suddenly, but in her mind her nephew had called in the middle of the night. What was true was that she hadn’t been able to sleep the next two nights because she was thinking of the boys without their mother, especially her godson, Orly.

  She let it ring a third time. She wished she had a phone that showed her who was calling. She grabbed the receiver just before the fourth ring.

  “¿Bueno?”

  The line was silent.

  “Hello?”

  And then the line went dead.

  Rumalda must have given them the address. This made sense, but Nina hadn’t thought to ask if she would be sharing her phone number with these people. Somehow sharing her number seemed worse, as if these arrangements were premeditated and not something that simply occurred in the moment.

  Half an hour passed without anything else happening. She could hear the chatter of the young men who hung out at the twenty-four-hour car wash down the street, no more than four houses and an empty lot between them and her front door. Starting late in the afternoon they leaned against their shiny cars and trucks, cocking their chins to those they knew, giving mean-faced looks to those they didn’t. What little traffic there was on the street at this hour was usually because of them.

  She thought it might be one of them when the car dimmed its lights and parked across the street, idling just beyond the glow of the streetlight. She left the house lights off so she could watch the driver without his knowing. A blue flame flared close to the driver’s face until it bit the end of a waiting cigarette. Barely audible over the sound of the engine, La Bronca grunted as if she was annoyed that someone had disturbed her sleep but still wasn’t sure whether this called for lifting her anvil-sized head and rising from her place in the dirt.

  She wished Rumalda had told her what to do: When the phone rings but the caller doesn’t say anything, do X. When he parks his car across the street and is waiting, like he has nothing else to do, then do Y. She hadn’t said anything other than thank Nina repeatedly, as if her appreciation made the rest of the details clear enough. La Bronca was sitting on her rump, her front legs kneading the dirt until she could engage the back ones. All Nina needed was for the dog to start barking and wake people. She stepped outside and just as swiftly the car drifted away, its lights still dimmed.

  * * *

  —

  The next night the same car. Instead of opening the front door and scaring the driver off, this time Nina walked out the back and down to the carport, passing into and out of the shadows in her housecoat and chanclas. That afternoon, to keep the dog from barking and calling attention to anyone pulling up to the house, she’d moved her to the backyard and chained her to a foundation block under the little house.

  By the time she opened the driveway gate, the driver had lowered the passenger window and angled the front tires toward the driveway.

  “Maybe you can help me,” the driver said, leaning against the armrest. “I’m looking for a friend.”

  Three weeks from now, this is the moment Nina will remember and wonder why she ever got involved with these people, why she didn’t just say no, that she didn’t know anything about any friend, and leave it at that. Why she couldn’t figure out another way of helping Rumalda’s family, a way that didn’t involve her own family. But right then Nina was trying to make sense of the driver being female. Her dark hair was tucked into a hooded sweatshirt. She had on French nails and was scratching at the leather on the steering wheel. There had been no Buenas tardes. No I’m so-and-so, even if so-and-so was probably a made-up name. Maybe it was best this way, as strangers.

  “This friend is expecting you?”

  The girl looked at her like it might be a trick question. She seemed barely old enough to be out of high school. Young enough to be Nina’s granddaughter.

  “Two friends,” she corrected herself. “And if not, then maybe I’m in the wrong place. They just told me it was the blue one at the dead end of the street. But then the light isn’t so good.”

  “It looks more blue in the day,” she said. “And this is the only one with people at the very end.”

  She stepped aside for the girl to pull into the driveway, then the carport.

  “Wait here,” she said when the girl was getting out of the car. In the halo of the light from the back door they could see the shape of the little house in the distance.

  “First I have to see them. To know if these are the right friends.”

  “How many friends could there be waiting for you, already at this hour?”

  The girl stood to one side, looking over her shoulder at the street and then back at the gate for Nina to open it. She was shorter and heavier than it had seemed she might be when she was slouched inside the car.

  As soon as the gate creaked open, La Bronca came tearing out from under the pink house, snarling like she had been waiting all day only for this, saving up the e
nergy and swiftness she possessed in her dreams when her paws and hind legs twitched her younger self back to life.

  “Kind of a mean one, no?”

  “She’s not there to make friends.” Nina blocked the dog’s passage so the girl could climb the steps. “We like to know when somebody comes into the yard.”

  “We?”

  “I take care of my mother,” she said. “She stays inside, resting.”

  The girl pursed her lips, nodding. She seemed to be doing the math inside her head, calculating how old an old woman’s mother could actually be.

  “The dog belongs to her, but I am the one who feeds it.” La Bronca strained against the chain, struggling to move forward as if she might dislodge the little house from its foundation blocks and drag it with her. Nina shushed her, but this only seemed to infuriate the dog more, and she finally had to threaten to fling one of her chanclas at the animal before it relented.

  “Looks like a dollhouse.”

  Nina stared at her, unsure what she meant, if it mattered.

  “I say because of the color.” She tapped on the door with her nails, like she was dropping by a neighbor’s apartment to borrow a cup of sugar.

  “My mother used to rent it,” Nina said, wondering why she kept bringing up her poor mother. What did it matter, the history of the little house or that she lived with her mother? What did it matter now that this wouldn’t be happening if she’d listened to Beto and just rented the house?

  She needed to be done with the girl already.

  When there was no answer, she rapped on the door. This time the little girl, Briana, cried somewhere inside the house, from the bedroom or the living room, wherever they had decided to bed down. A few seconds later the blinds crinkled and Noemí peeked out. She and Briana had been inside for two days, and it took a while for her to figure out how to release the dead bolt. Finally the door unsealed itself from the frame like an abandoned refrigerator taking its first gasp of fresh air.