Where We Come From Page 6
Nina heard the barking before she knew they had a visitor. The sun barely up and there he was in the backyard again, two days in a row, walking toward the other house but also trying to avoid the lunging dog.
“First you show up late for Mother’s Day and now you show up when people are just waking up.” She pinched the neckline of her housecoat into a knot.
“I told you, I don’t need to call to come to the house.” He spoke in the direction of the dog and not his sister, who was coming up behind him. She had rushed outside barefoot and could feel the dew between her toes.
“Did the boys drop something in the grass?”
But he wasn’t paying attention to her. He was trying to figure out how to get himself from point A, where he stood, to point B, the front door of the pink house. When he reached the house he faked going right and then rushed left, toward the steps, but there discovered the chain was long enough for the dog to block his path, her snarl that much more menacing when she realized he was trying to trick her.
“I don’t know why this dog has to keep barking and barking,” he said. “You should train it. I used to live in the other house. This was my backyard, where we used to play.”
“That was before she came to live here. Maybe if you came around more the dog wouldn’t think you were a stranger.”
She waited for her brother to back away from the wooden steps and face her before calling the dog off. Today he was wearing blue-jean shorts that covered his knees and a khaki work shirt, the tail untucked and billowing in the breeze.
“It’s funny how the weather changes.” He gazed up at the sky and then over to his sister. “They say it’s supposed to rain later, close to noon, but last night it was clear with a full moon.”
“You came to give me the weather report?”
“Yesterday when we left I kept asking myself, ‘Why does she have that animal back there, if she’s not trying to protect something and doesn’t want people to get close?’ ”
She fought her impulse to turn and look at the driveway. She had parked on the street so the truck and then the van could back up all the way to the gate.
“So last night I came back just after dark and stayed watching,” he said. “I wanted to make sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. I counted eight or nine of them getting up into the back of a truck with a camper shell and then another bunch of them into a van. There might have been more—it was hard to see anything but shapes.”
Other than the first time with Rumalda’s daughter, this was the one night she had come out of the house. It helped that they had left early, when she was still watching the last of the ten o’clock news. She remembered seeing a car parked across the street, but thought it was someone else working for them.
“I said, ‘What are so many men and two women, one of them a gordita who needed help climbing in, and some kid behind her, what are they doing in my mother’s backyard so late on a Sunday night? What business could they have there?’ I was going to call 9-1-1. But then I saw they were carrying backpacks and water jugs, but nothing you would steal from a house. And who brings so many people to break into a house? They were coming from somewhere behind the house and there’s only one place to come from in the backyard. And then I saw you come close the gate.”
“Y qué, you want a prize, a medal for spying on my house?”
“Not yours.”
She thought about arguing back that it was her house as long as she was here to take care of their mother, something no one else was willing to do, but instead she only glanced over her shoulder at the back door. For the last three weeks she had gone out of her way to avoid the chances of his stopping by unannounced—calling him just before the weekend and having him speak to their mother so he wouldn’t feel obligated to come visit, pretending that she and her mother had a busy schedule running errands, anything to keep him away—but her brother was about as metiche as they came, always wanting to know her business, always putting in his opinion, always thinking his way was the best way, as long as his way didn’t mean any extra work or money from him.
“Go home to your family and leave us alone, like you do most of the time anyway.”
“How long?”
“You should be more interested with what happens in the other house, with your mother, and not what you think is happening behind it.”
“Hiding mojados.”
“I wasn’t hiding anybody,” she said, not stirring from her place in the yard. “It was something for a friend.”
“And then you want to take care of Eduardo’s boy.” He shook his head. He couldn’t imagine what would have made her do this. “You think he’s going want to bring him, with all this trouble you made here?”
“You let me worry about my godson. You stay out of it, Beto.”
“I followed the van a little ways, thinking I was going to call the police, but then I got worried you were going to land in trouble if your friends talked.”
“I have to go inside now, Beto,” she said. “To make the breakfast for our mother.”
“¿Y eso?” He cocked his head toward the foil on the windows of the little house. “It looks like you’re making a baked potato.”
“I can have the windows how I want. You don’t tell me the way things are going to be. Go be the boss at home.” She hadn’t liked it either when she first saw what El Kobe had done to all the windows, including the small glass panels on the front door. He claimed it would keep the house cooler, so they wouldn’t have to turn on the air conditioner, but she suspected it was just to keep what they were doing a secret, no one looking in, no one looking out.
“You need to stop it already with these mojados.” He motioned back over his shoulder as if they were all standing there at the front door. “How many more you got in there?”
“I just have what you see inside the other house, no secrets, no other life. Like you and everybody else. What other life do you see?” She was in his face now, close enough to smell the VO5 in his hair. “And now you come to tell me how I have to live the way you say, who I can help and who I have to send away, because you tell me to, because you think your words matter.”
“Don’t be getting all mad at me for saying the truth. You’re just mad because you got stuck taking care of Mom. But what’d you think was going to happen, if you were the only girl and didn’t have no family? The rest of the boys are gone, and me, what do I know? And even if I did know how to take care of her, how would I do it? With those two mocosos at home. I’ll be working until I’m seventy-five. Eighty if she makes me give her another one. Already I told her que ya, párale, no more.” He stretched his arm out in front of him with his palm raised like he was standing in the middle of an intersection directing traffic after an accident. “And who takes the chinga for all this? You don’t see me crying. I accept it.”
“That was a choice you made. Who told you to find one still young enough to have babies? That’s what you get for not looking for one your age.”
“The ones my age are grandmas,” he said. “And anyway, I told you to rent the house to make some extra money for the bills, not this trouble you went and found.”
“You never can be happy, that’s your problem.”
“For what, if they catch you. Doing something illegal, and you know it.” He stretched out the eeee sound as if her illegal was much worse than someone else’s illegal.
“For wanting to help,” she said.
“And what, you think they’re going to let Sister Teresa go free? Les vale madre, you trying to save all the hungry ones.” He flicked his hand at her. “Let somebody else save them wherever they’re going to, Houston or Dallas, New York. They didn’t come across to eat fried chicken behind our house.”
“Mother Teresa, not Sister Teresa. Shows how much you know,” she said. “And giving them something to eat is not saving them.”
“And then?”
“And then they take them away, and you with them, lock you up with all the other people who say they didn’t do nothing wrong.”
“And you look after her.”
It took him a few seconds to respond; he looked like she’d just told him Melba was pregnant again.
“We hire somebody, lots of people looking for work.”
“With or without papers?”
“What’s it matter, as long as they do what we pay them to do?”
“And so now you don’t care if they’re mojados or not?”
“Not if it looks like they work hard and save us some money.”
“But ones you can trust? You don’t think I would’ve hired somebody if it was so easy to find people? You think I couldn’t use the help, that I don’t like to sleep the whole night like everybody else? Let’s see who you find that is going to be patient with her and brings her all she needs and helps her to take a shower. Let’s see how you pay for them.”
“Then we take her to the nursing home, y ya.”
She stared at him a long while to make sure she’d heard him right, if he was serious or just moving his mouth.
“When she had her accident you said she had to stay in the house, that you would never send her to one of those places.”
“That was before.”
“A place full of people just waiting to die. That’s what you want for your mother?”
“I’m not the one who opened a hotel for mojados in her backyard.” He jabbed his finger in her direction and held it there. “You should’ve thought about those things before saying yes to them.”
* * *
—
That night, after her mother was asleep, Nina sat in the living room with the television on. She stayed watching a singing competition and then a cop show, anything to take her mind off her brother and the fact that she now had only nine days before Orly would be here. Later, she flipped through the channels, then landed on Primer Impacto, where they had a report on another mass grave uncovered somewhere in Mexico, and finally she switched over to the local news. She was waiting for the weather report when they announced there was a NEWS UPDATE. She wasn’t interested in hearing more sad stories right before she went to sleep, but she stayed watching because the news had happened last night at Las Brisas, a run-down motel close to the flea market where she sometimes took her mother on Sundays to pass the afternoon if the weather wasn’t too hot. Men and women were sitting in a motel room with their backs up against the wall, against the beds, against the dresser, against window and curtains. So many of them crammed together, almost sitting on top of one another. Like a dream, the faces were cloudy so nobody could recognize them, not how they showed their faces on the other channel, where it wasn’t news unless you could see the people who were suffering. At first it was hard to make them out, but then there they were, El Kobe and Rigo in their mug shots, like bad high school photos no mother would ever want to carry in her purse.
She called Beto. “Turn your TV to the news on channel four. It’s over,” she said and hung up.
* * *
—
It was two nights later, close to midnight, when she heard the back door rattle. She was in the kitchen, putting away the last of the dishes, and heard something that sounded more like a tap than a knock, faint enough to be taken for the wind shaking the screen door that led to the back steps. The temperature had dropped to almost sixty, but with the gusting wind the air felt colder. Whether or not she was imagining the noise at the back door, there was no mistaking the dog’s incessant barking. La Bronca wasn’t the type of dog to bark at nothing, to bark because she heard a police siren blaring somewhere across Brownsville or because some other dog decided to bark for no real reason except that was what dogs did in the middle of the night. La Bronca was too old and tired to waste her energy on anything except what entered her backyard.
Nina peered into the river of darkness that separated the blue and pink houses. The glow coming from the kitchen window barely reached the back steps. She turned on the outside light, but it didn’t help and in fact seemed to make it harder to see what she sensed was lurking out there. It had been a couple of days since El Kobe and Rigo were caught. She couldn’t imagine they would have been released so soon and come back here.
“¿Quién es?” she shouted over the barks. “¿Quién es?” She stepped onto the small enclosed landing, but stayed this side of the security door, still far enough away where no one could reach her between the black iron bars extending from the top to the bottom of the threshold. But with no response, as if she and the dog were crazy to be crying out in the middle of the night.
“Come out now, o si no I’ll call the police.” Then she repeated herself in Spanish, her voice now quivering less than it had the first time.
She turned off the outside light and suddenly he appeared before her, first as a shadow and then as a boy. He couldn’t be more than twelve or thirteen years old. Too young to be out at this time of night, knocking on people’s back doors. He reminded her of Orly and how he would be here in another week.
This boy was shorter and not as filled out. It looked like he hadn’t eaten since she’d seen him in the other house, in line for the fried chicken. Even with the cap, his hair was still long enough to cover part of his forehead and ears, the same as her Orly’s.
Without his saying it, Nina knew there had to be a story behind what had brought him back to this place. But the story would have to wait until after she fed him and later took him across the yard to the other house, where he could turn into a shadow again.
II
De camino
6
This is the year after Orly’s parents had made plans to separate and then his mother died unexpectedly, but not from a broken heart or anything like that because he’s pretty sure the separation, or the almost-separation, was her idea, though this isn’t the sort of detail his father is going to share with him or Alex.
The other bit of information his dad is keeping to himself is why Alex gets to go again to Camp Armadillo for three weeks this summer, but Orly instead is going to spend that time with Nina in Brownsville. His dad said he had missed the deadline for Orly at Camp Dry Springs, that he had meant to send in the deposit sooner and it was something their mom had always taken care of and now all the spots were filled at the camp.
At first, Orly thought not going to camp meant he could just hang out at home for those three weeks, but then his dad said he had to be in San Francisco to shoot a commercial for one of the agency’s new clients. Last year, Orly had tagged along to a shoot in Houston and spent most of the time grazing at craft service, munching on bagels and M&M’s and ordering smoothies, so he figured he would do the same in San Francisco, but his dad said this time he’d be too busy with the pre-production meetings and client dinners. Orly would be bored waiting for him in the hotel room. Besides, afterward he was planning to take a little downtime and do some traveling with Kayla, who used to be an intern at the agency but was taking some time off to figure out if she really wanted to go to graduate school. He said it like this was still part of her internship, this downtime he was planning.
Anyway, his dad thought it’d be better if Orly just went to stay a few weeks in Brownsville, where his family was from. His dad told him that this way he’d get to spend part of the summer growing up on the border, the way he himself had, and Orly would see things he never would come across if he was at camp with a bunch of other twelve-year-olds just like him. But Orly doesn’t think being around a bunch of other kids who go to the same kind of school and live in the same kind of neighborhood and go on the same kind of vacations is the problem. He know
s the real reason for sending him to Brownsville is because his dad wants him to grow up more like he did and less like a boy who was always closer to his mother. His dad tried to do the same thing with Alex a few years ago, but by the time his mom got wind of it, she had already scheduled every minute of his summer vacation with one camp or another. It was something their parents had argued about often—their dad saying both his boys were growing up soft, with everything handed to them and without knowing where they came from, and their mom saying that their boys weren’t actually from Brownsville, only he was. The “soft” part came up when Orly didn’t want to sign up again for tae kwon do, which his dad thought he needed to stick with, not be a quitter, and his mom said not wanting to hit another boy in the face didn’t make him a quitter. Alex was actually working at his summer camp this year; otherwise his dad might be sending them both to stay with Nina. In Brownsville, Orly would toughen up some and learn to be more independent, while still being with someone who loved him and would take special care of him.
Nina is Orly’s great-aunt and his godmother, but of the two he prefers to think of her as his godmother, especially since his grandmother passed away before he was born. Nina is also close to his dad and helped raise him. She and his tío Beto are the only ones of his father’s family still living in Brownsville, the rest of the Diaz and the Hinojosa sides of the family having died or moved as far away as Fresno and Chicago and Grand Rapids, looking for work or love and staying when one or the other kept them long enough that it would have cost more to leave again and come back home.