At school, Lydia meets with the principal, who wants to talk about Luca’s aptitude for geography.
‘There’s an annual geography bee,’ the woman had said on the phone. ‘I think we should enroll him.’
Lydia goes to fill in the paperwork. She sits in a comfortable chair across the desk from the principal, a woman about her own age. In the distance she hears a bell ring, and suddenly the view from the window is filled with swarming children. They shriek and run and climb and swing, and all that beautiful, happy noise is a strange backdrop to what the principal is saying.
‘I didn’t realize your son was undocumented.’ The woman swivels the chair beneath her, straining to get the words out. Lydia can tell this is uncomfortable for her. ‘I’m sorry; he won’t be eligible to win the prize.’
It’s absurd, Lydia knows, to feel crushed over a geography bee. It should mean nothing when weighed against the meaningful recent traumas of their life. She gazes out the window at the squealing children. The principal joins her momentarily in her reverie, and then speaks quietly in the room, crossing a line she’s not supposed to cross. It’s a border she’s disregarded many times before.
‘My parents were undocumented immigrants from the Philippines,’ she says to Lydia. ‘They brought me here when I was younger than Luca.’
Lydia doesn’t know how to respond. Is this a kind of solidarity? Should she feel encouraged? What she feels is exhausted. Itchy. Her hands are chapped.
‘I know some good immigration attorneys if you need help.’
In the fenced back garden of their little home on the tree-lined street, they bury eighteen painted stones. Beto’s is sky blue. Adrián’s is a balón de fútbol. Luca visits Papi’s buried stone every day after school. He tells his father’s buried stone about his new life in Maryland, how much he likes sharing a room with Mami. How he loves Rebeca more than he loves Soledad, and sometimes he feels bad about that, but not too bad, because the whole rest of the world loves Soledad. She doesn’t need his love like Rebeca does. He tells Papi about his teacher and the games he plays with his new friend Eric at recess. Kickball. Four square. Luca cries often. But he also talks, he laughs, he reads. He lives. Soledad and Rebeca visit their father’s stone less frequently, but slowly they’re beginning to spend time out there. Last week when Lydia was weeding, she found a playing card, the king of hearts, leaning against the base of their father’s cross. Once in a while when Lydia stands at the kitchen window washing dishes, she sees one of the girls sitting quietly out there in the grass. Sometimes they move their lips as if in prayer.
They still sleep with the lights on, or Luca does. Lydia mostly doesn’t sleep. She sits up in bed beside him, Luca now occupying the space where Sebastián once slept. She rubs his hair with one hand and hopes he’s dreaming again of his papi. She hopes that one night soon, Sebastián might slip out of their son’s dream and into her own, as if he’s a physical presence, atoms and particles in the room that can migrate from Luca’s brain into hers, ear to ear. Una frontera santificada. Late into the night she reads, and the lamplight falls in a soft circle across her tented knees, across the warm blankets, across Luca’s casting breath. In their new home, Lydia rereads Amor en los tiempos del cólera, first in Spanish, then again in English. No one can take this from her. This book is hers alone.
Author’s Note
In 2017, a migrant died every twenty-one hours along the United States–Mexico border. That number does not include the many migrants who simply disappear each year. Worldwide in 2017, as I was finishing this novel, a migrant died every ninety minutes, in the Mediterranean, in Central America, in the horn of Africa. Every hour and a half. So sixteen migrant deaths for each night I tuck my children into bed. When I first began my research in 2013, these estimates were difficult to find because no one was keeping track. Even now, the International Organization for Migration warns that the available statistics are ‘likely only a fraction of the real number of deaths’ because so many migrants who vanish are never accounted for in the first place. So maybe the number is more like two hundred deaths for each load of laundry I do. There are currently around forty thousand people reported missing across Mexico, and investigators routinely find mass graves containing dozens, sometimes hundreds, of bodies.
It’s also true that in 2017, Mexico was the deadliest country in the world to be a journalist. The nationwide murder rate was the highest on record, and the overwhelming majority of those murders go unsolved, no matter if victims are migrants, priests, reporters, children, mayors, activists. The cartels operate with impunity. There’s no recourse for victims of violence.
I am a US citizen. Like many people in this country, I come from a family of mixed cultures and ethnicities. In 2005, I married an undocumented immigrant. We dated for five years before we got married, and one reason for our prolonged courtship was that he wanted to get his green card before he proposed. My husband is one of the smartest, hardest-working, most principled people I’ve ever met. He’s a college graduate who owns a successful business, pays taxes, and spends a fortune on health insurance. Yet, after years of trying, we found there was no legal route available for him to get his green card until we got married. All the years we were dating, we lived in fear that he could be deported at a moment’s notice. Once, on Route 70 outside Baltimore, a policeman pulled us over for driving with a broken taillight. The minutes that followed while we waited for that officer to return to our vehicle were some of the most excruciating of my life. We held hands in the dark front seat of the car. I thought I would lose him.
So you could say I have a dog in the fight.
But the truth of my personal interest in this story is more complicated than that.
There are two other factors that were probably more responsible than my husband’s immigration status in piquing my interest in this subject. The first is this: When I was sixteen, two of my cousins were brutally raped by four strangers and thrown off a bridge in St Louis, Missouri. My brother was beaten and also forced off the bridge. I wrote about that horrible crime in my first book, my memoir, A Rip in Heaven. Because that crime and the subsequent writing of the book were both formative experiences in my life, I became a person who is always, automatically, more interested in stories about victims than perpetrators. I’m interested in characters who suffer inconceivable hardship, in people who manage to triumph over extraordinary trauma. Characters like Lydia and Soledad. I’m less interested in the violent, macho stories of gangsters and law enforcement. Or in any case, I think the world has enough stories like those. Some fiction set in the world of the cartels and narcotraficantes is compelling and important – I read much of it during my early research. Those novels provide readers with an understanding of the origins of some of the violence to our south. But the depiction of that violence can feed into the worst stereotypes about Mexico. So I saw an opening for a novel that would press a little more intimately into those stories, to imagine the people on the flip side of that prevailing narrative. Regular people like me. How would I manage if I lived in a place that began to collapse around me? If my children were in danger, how far would I go to save them? I wanted to write about women, whose stories are often overlooked.