Where We Come From Read online

  Nina waited outside, as if she were the one visiting and the driver and Noemí and Briana were the ones who lived here. A couple of minutes later the three of them exited the house, the mother carrying the daughter and both their backpacks, and walked out to the car. Briana was wearing jeans and a pajama top and her head was tucked into the crook of her mother’s neck. The driver opened the passenger door and told Noemí to strap her daughter in the backseat and for her to take the front. They weren’t going very far and she wasn’t running a taxi service. Before they left, the driver put her hand out to shake Nina’s and pressed a folded fifty-dollar bill into her palm.

  “For your help.”

  Nina held the bill for the girl to take back. If she didn’t accept the money, they couldn’t say she had done anything wrong. “It was just a favor, to help a friend.”

  She felt the need to explain how this had come about, that it was nothing she planned or expected anything for in return. Until the words came out of her mouth she hadn’t considered Rumalda her friend; the woman worked for her and they were friendly but not friends. There was a difference. They both knew it without anyone ever having said it. Still, if she hadn’t done it for the money and they weren’t friends, then why was she doing it?

  The girl backed away, her hands held open in front of her chest.

  “Keep it,” she said. “There might be more friends who need favors, now that we know where you live.”

  2

  The entire exchange—the driver asking for a friend, Nina walking her back to the pink house, Noemí and her little girl getting into the car—hadn’t taken more than ten minutes and yet it was enough for Nina to immediately recognize the young woman’s voice when she called two nights later.

  “We need another favor?”

  “What do you mean, another favor? What I did wasn’t for you.”

  “The people I work for want to use the little house. They’ll pay you.”

  “It’s not for rent.”

  “One, maybe two months, that’s all.”

  “Already I said no.”

  The line went silent for a few seconds and Nina thought she’d gotten rid of her.

  “Mira, it’s that you don’t understand. If I tell them you said no, after you helped us the first time, these people might want to stop by to talk to you themselves.”

  “So now you’re doing me the favor?”

  “In a way, yes.”

  “And if I tell the police?”

  “Tell them what, that you did one favor, got paid for it, but now you don’t want to no more?”

  “You’re the one that took them.”

  “That’s right, but you don’t know where I live and these people I work for know where you and your mother are.”

  “You called my house to threaten me?”

  “No, señora, I only called to tell you what’s going to happen next.”

  * * *

  —

  She looked it up the next time she was at the Walgreens.

  Favor fa-ver n. 1a. friendly regard shown toward another person (2): approving consideration: b: AID, ASSISTANCE, KINDNESS…

  It was a pocket-sized dictionary, abridged, the letters in large print, and still it took a minute before her fingers helped her eyes find the entry she was looking for. As if locating the definition would somehow make it all right, because there it was in black and white, and who could argue with that?

  So maybe it had been a favor that first time, some kindness she extended to another person she felt friendly toward. The second time Nina barely saw their faces. All of them had jumped out of the camper and were led in a single row from the carport to the pink house, the backyard lights off, walking in the passing glimmer of what little moonlight there was. Shadows passing into shadows. Shadows with no outlines. Shadows from as far away as Panama and Honduras and El Salvador and Guatemala. Shadows prodded into her backyard, shadows locked inside, shadows that ate and slept and shat in the little house, shadows that moved about but in truth she didn’t want to see or be seen by.

  Los pollos, El Kobe called them, because like chickens they kept their heads down and followed the leader. El Kobe was as dark as his pollos but with a shaved head. He carried an aluminum bat with him everywhere, tapping the end on the heel of his boot as he walked, the clinking sometimes arriving before his shiny head came around the corner. The six men and two women, one of them with a small child sleeping inside his mother’s rebozo, came with no names, no pasts, no futures. None shared with her, at least.

  The driver from the first time, Sandra, had set things up and then the next day the Border Patrol pulled her over with a carload of crossers that had just made it to this side. From then on it had been El Kobe and Rigo, stockier and with the hazel eyes, who looked like he might be related to Sandra, a brother or cousin.

  El Kobe paid her up front, $50 a head, with the expectation they would be gone in a day or two. The fat wad of twenties that neither of them counted in front of the other amounted to more than the rent her mother used to charge for an entire month. She understood part of the money was for the house and the other part was for her to keep quiet about the house. El Kobe phoned her a day or two before they thought they would be arriving and then again when he was on his way. We stay only as long as we need to, you make the food, and then when we get the call we leave. He got to the house first, just to make sure it was still safe, and Rigo showed up later with the load. That he described these people as the load, la carga, like a shipment of vegetables or lumber, should’ve been her first clue that this wasn’t about doing favors.

  It was only supposed to be a night or two, until they got word and would pack them up again. El Kobe stayed inside the pink house watching the pollos, but he’d also attached a padlock to the door so he could lock it from the outside in case it turned out he and Rigo had to leave for a short while. The back door, facing the canal, they had sealed off with some old planks they found under the little house.

  Aside from providing the house, her other job was to prepare the meals and leave them outside their front door. The trouble of making some simple food, something easy to bag up and carry across the backyard, was better than her worrying that they might turn on the gas and accidentally set the little house on fire. In the morning, she brought them a dozen or so tacos de frijoles refritos, each half-moon wrapped in the foil left over from covering the windows. If she had extra time and was feeling generous, she might add some scrambled eggs. It was nothing she would’ve made for herself, store-bought flour tortillas and beans from a can, but she wasn’t spending half her morning making all the food by hand, not with her mother down the hall calling her every few minutes to bring her this or that, a cup of fresh water or find the TV remote that had fallen under the bed again. For dinner El Kobe told her to just make them sandwiches, baloney or ham or whatever she had available. Later he sent Rigo to Stars to bring hamburgers for the two of them. This was Thursday and the same for Friday.

  They left sometime early the next morning. She heard La Bronca let out a couple of dispassionate barks before retreating to her spot under the house. Nina managed to get to her window as the last two were climbing into the camper of Rigo’s truck, the chassis dipping as the others made room and they all crammed in before El Kobe shut the hatch on the camper shell. They left without stopping to close the gate behind them.

  She didn’t know what she had been expecting. A light knock on the back door to say good-bye and see you next time? For them to excuse themselves after being on her mother’s property for two nights? For it to matter to them what she was doing, the risk she was taking, and not just because it helped their business? She had to remind herself that these people were nothing to her, not family, not friends, not anything. Strangers that had moved in one night and then drifted away early one morning, unannounced. They weren’t going to all hug her in the driveway a
nd promise to call when they reached their destination. They weren’t going to pull away slowly as she made the sign of the cross and wished them a safe journey.

  No one else knew. Not even Rumalda, who had started her down this road and might have understood. She didn’t want to worry about word somehow getting out. If the crossers never saw her face, all the better. She was nothing to them and they were nothing to her. Nada y nada más. If someone reported her, she would claim she had rented the house to the young man and from there knew nothing about how he lived or who he chose to stay with him, to bring as his guests. The rent was the rent. Her family had been renting it for years—they could ask her brother—and never had any problems. Yes, maybe she heard noises, she wasn’t deaf, but she wasn’t the type to stick her nose in what her renters did. She had her own life, her own problems. Checking to see who was and wasn’t supposed to be here, in the country or anywhere else, that wasn’t her job.

  * * *

  —

  Rumalda noticed a padlock had been added to the door of the pink house, but she knew not to open her mouth about what she found or didn’t find in the houses she cleaned. The stories she could tell if someone paid her to sit around talking about other people. The paper bags stuffed with money she found in the bedroom closet of the restaurant manager’s house. The two guns, one with diamonds on the handle, in the underwear drawer of the dentist’s wife. The baggies full of pills in the teacher’s nightstand. She went on like she never saw these things, but she knew the lock wasn’t there when her daughter came to stay. Maybe la señora meant for the lock to say she should never ask for another favor, that the little house was no longer available. Last week when she was hanging the sheets to dry in the backyard she happened to look over her shoulder and la señora was watching her from the kitchen window, as if she were worried that Rumalda was too close to the other house. It was bad enough having to keep an eye on the menacing dog—now she was being spied on. The days of la señora inviting her to sit for coffee passed from one week to the next. After Noemí and Briana had arrived safely in Fort Worth, Rumalda shared with her the good news that they were with her son-in-law, Juan Pablo, but la señora only looked at her like she had mentioned some strangers she met one day on the bus. After that, Rumalda made it a point to simply do her work and not bring up her family, much less the pink house.

  * * *

  —

  Nina shouldn’t have been surprised with what she had found the morning after they left with the first load. There was no deposit, nothing El Kobe or Rigo had signed that said they would leave the place clean and in some reasonable order. The back cushions to the sofa were lined up in the bedroom, end to end, making a small bed in the center of the floor. The middle cushion looked damp from sweat or some other release. The material at the base of the sofa was ripped lengthwise, exposing the webbing and several of the springs. The coffee table stood upright in the corner, leaning against the wall near the air conditioner. One of the kitchen chairs lay on its side next to the sink. A used Kotex, its adhesive tabs curled like the clipped wings of a flightless bird, bloomed from beneath the cushionless sofa.

  But what she couldn’t even begin to figure out was the doorknobs. The bathroom and bedroom, even the closet, all of them missing their doorknobs. Who stole doorknobs? And why? Maybe there were some things she was better off not knowing. Besides, by then the stench had hit her. At first she assumed the rank odor was from the eleven bodies living in close quarters, all but El Kobe and Rigo having traveled for days if not weeks atop trains and wooden rafts and on third-class buses and offered rides and often simply on foot, in fields and across rivers and valleys, over and under fences. She wondered if she wasn’t to blame for not leaving them more than two towels and half a bottle of shampoo, the same as she had left for Noemí and her little girl. Then she pushed open the bathroom door and whatever guilt she felt faded. The wastebasket lay on its side, toppled like a gorged animal, crammed beyond capacity with smeared and yellow-crusted toilet paper. When the wads overflowed the container, they had tossed them on the other side of the toilet, on the floor next to the tub, leaving darkened streaks alongside the fiberglass.

  As upsetting as it was, she understood they had done this as a courtesy, perhaps their own favor to her, because in the ranchitos that many of them came from, flushing toilet paper might clog the sewer system. And it would take only the first one to do it before the rest followed. When she was still in high school she had visited her tía Manuela in Valle Hermoso and been scolded because she forgot to stick her used toilet paper in the wastebasket and instead kept flushing it. Her tío Efraín had to come with a borrowed plunger, complaining the whole time porque esta gringuita, as he called her, born north of the river, didn’t know any better and somehow couldn’t learn, already the third day in a row. Was she so delicate that no one could see what she left in the basket?

  But here they were on this side of the river and at least El Kobe or Rigo knew better and should have told the rest of the group that this commode wouldn’t back up. Later, after cleaning up the mess, she made a small cardboard sign telling them to throw the paper in the toilet and taped this above the tank. TIRA EL PAPEL EN EL ESCUSADO, she wrote in large block letters, at first wondering if she should include POR FAVOR or GRACIAS and then deciding to forgo the niceties, stick to her message, and hope they knew how to read.

  3

  It was the middle of the afternoon on Friday, a couple of days before Mother’s Day, when her nephew Eduardo called to ask if his son Orly could come stay with her for a few weeks that summer. Nina had been inviting her godson to come visit her for years, but more so since his mama had died, a year ago. Of course Orly could come stay with her. Of course. She wanted nothing more than to have her special boy come stay with her. Bringing him in a few weeks was fine, or sooner if he wanted. Whenever it was, she would be waiting for him.

  She had just set the phone back in its cradle when it rang again and she thought it was Eduardo calling to tell her something else about bringing Orly. Maybe he could bring him sooner.

  “Did you forget something?” she said.

  But there was no reply, no one breathing.

  “Hello?”

  She’d picked it up so fast she wondered if she had only imagined the ringing.

  “Bueno?” she said a little louder. “Is anybody there?” It was quiet except for a faint clinking sound.

  “We’re going to need the house again, tomorrow,” El Kobe said, then hung up.

  It felt like she had been slapped across the face, slapped because she needed to wake up from dreaming that she was free to invite people to the house. What was she thinking, saying a twelve-year-old boy could come stay with her? It had all happened so quickly. First, Eduardo’s call to say she was about to have a special guest, then El Kobe reminding her she’d already agreed to have another twelve or so other guests on the property. There was no chance to tell him that the pink house wouldn’t be available anymore, that she had made a mistake saying he could rent it. She barely had time to register the sound of El Kobe’s voice before the line went dead.

  It had been only two weeks, but Nina was exhausted from tending to her mother, from making tacos in the morning and sandwiches at night, from calling Beto for no good reason but to give him an update on their mother and make him feel like he could stay away for another week. From cleaning up after El Kobe left with each load, from gazing out the back window at night to make sure nothing looked unusual, though she wasn’t sure anymore what unusual might look like after weeks of seeing rows of men and women and sometimes children, once even a young man who looked to be from India, darker than any Mexicano she’d ever seen, and another time an older one with short kinky hair, shuffling through the yard. She was ready to go back to seeing nothing, same as it had been for the last eight years she’d been caring for her mother. She had no way of knowing whether any of these men and women made it to their d
estinations, to the wife or husband or child waiting for them somewhere up north who was praying that they arrived safely and could be reunited, and other times, if it seemed too risky or if they hadn’t heard from them in days, praying that they had been turned back before it was too late.

  * * *

  —

  The next evening she heard La Bronca barking and hurried out to the backyard. She found El Kobe as he was unlocking the little pink house, the aluminum bat tucked under his arm like a parasol. The sun was dipping beyond the canal and it would be dark within half an hour.

  “I need to talk to you,” she told him.

  He cocked his head, which meant talk already.

  “Things have changed. The little house is not available anymore.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since now.” The bat was down at his side now and she heard it thump against the doorframe.

  “And for why?”

  They were standing only a couple of feet from each other and she took half a step back. “Because I said.”

  “Because you said.”

  “Because I said.” She wasn’t about to bring her godson into this.

  “Somebody saw the truck, a neighbor?”

  “No.”

  “You sure? Not even the one that comes to clean?”

  “She hasn’t seen anything,” she said and hoped this was true.

  He looked at her as if he were weighing the truth in her voice.

  “If we go down, you go down, and you don’t want to go down. Remember that.”