‘So that was it?’ Marisol asks. ‘You got deported because of paperwork?’
‘Yep.’ He nods, straightens his spine, and spreads his hands wide, palms up, as if he’s the product of a magic trick. His deportation is a ludicrous feat of wonder.
Lydia will not think about any of it. Most especially, she won’t think about those families separated at the border. The children lifted straight out of their mothers’ arms. She absolutely cannot. It’s not possible, to have made it this far, and then to lose him. No. She runs her hands through Luca’s hair. She makes her fingers into the shapes of scissors and thinks about the haircut she’ll give him when they get to Arizona. This is what her brain can hold.
At midday, they take a siesta. They will sleep for the afternoon and get up in time to have one last meal in Mexico before tonight’s journey. They stretch their bodies out in the spaces they’ve claimed for sleep, Choncho and Slim joining the two quiet men in the back bedroom, their sons David and Ricardín finding space in the hallway and on the kitchen floor. Lorenzo and Nicolás take the leather couches. Only Soledad cannot rest. She returns to pacing the street outside. Lorenzo goes to the window while everyone else is asleep and watches her.
When she returns to the hot, quiet apartment, she’s startled to find Lorenzo sitting up on the couch looking at her. His shoes are off, but it doesn’t appear he’s been sleeping. She moves quickly past him and into the kitchen, where she fills her water bottle from the tap and takes a long drink. She can feel him looking at her back, but she doesn’t turn to intercept his gaze. She refills the bottle again, and then turns toward the bedroom where her sister and the others are sleeping.
‘Yo, what’s your hurry?’ His voice is quiet, careful not to wake Nicolás, who’s breathing heavily on the facing couch. Lorenzo’s attempt at a flirtatious tone comes out menacing instead.
But Soledad’s not afraid of him. There are a dozen other people in this apartment; there’s nothing he can do to her here. Besides, what Soledad has been through in these last months? She’s hard as nails. Almost nothing scares her anymore. She turns and narrows her eyes at him. She makes her voice unambiguous. ‘I’m in a hurry to get some rest. You should be, too.’
Lorenzo adjusts his position on the couch, stretches his torso out in front of him, and leans his head back against the cushions. ‘Yeah. Whatever,’ he says.
Soledad realizes then that he’s holding a cell phone in his hand. He leans forward and tosses it toward the arm of the couch by his feet. She freezes, turns her back on him again, and takes one step toward the bedroom before changing her mind. She turns back to face him. ‘That phone work?’
He picks his head up off the couch. ‘Pssh, yeah, what you think, it’s for decoration?’
She takes two steps back toward the living room, sets her water bottle on the counter, and hovers there for a moment. She doesn’t want to be indebted to a person like this, but it could be days before she has another opportunity. ‘Can I make a call?’
Lorenzo smirks at her. ‘What’s it worth to you?’
Soledad feels something sour swarm up in her mouth. She doesn’t answer but pretends with her face that the joke’s funny. Her smile is hollow, but she sees how it works on him – just that – a fake smile, and he goes all gooey and hopeful. In his mind, she’s already naked. What a scumbag, she thinks.
He holds the phone out to her. ‘Go ahead.’
She stretches so she can take the phone from a distance. ‘Thanks,’ she says. The door to the bedroom is already open for air circulation, and the lights are off inside. Rebeca and Luca sleep nearest the door, wrapped up together and dreaming, because Lydia’s initial objection to that kind of closeness is so far gone they hardly remember it now. Sole takes two steps into the room and squats down beside her sleeping sister. She hesitates to wake her.
‘Rebeca,’ she whispers, touching her sister’s shoulder lightly. Luca’s eyes pop open, but Rebeca is still asleep. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says to Luca, but he’s already fallen back asleep. ‘Rebeca,’ she says again, shaking her sister more roughly. Her sister breathes deeply and doesn’t move. Soledad stands and moves quietly through the apartment, up the stairs, and back out to the street.
She removes the tiny scrap of paper with the hospital’s phone number from where it’s folded into a tiny square in her pocket. She presses the numbers. It takes her two tries, but then the phone at the Hospital Nacional in San Pedro Sula is ringing.
‘Hello?’
There are several transfers before Soledad hears the familiar voice of the nurse Ángela on the line. She can feel adrenaline coursing through her shoulders, her neck. When Soledad looks back on this moment for the rest of her life, when she relives it, really, she will come to believe that she already knew what the nurse was going to say, she knew it well before the words emerged from her mouth and traveled into that faraway phone, before they bounced out across cell towers and satellites and reverberated back into this borrowed cell phone here on the border of the United States, and fell into her waiting ear. She will come to believe that she knew it from the moment Lorenzo handed her that phone, from before that even, from when she first stood on the pavement in Nogales and wrapped her fingers around the bars that demarcated the border of Estados Unidos, from when she sat on that cold, dirty toilet in Navolato while that unwanted but still loved baby fell out of her, from the first day she felt the thudding and thrumming of La Bestia beneath her bones, from the first time Iván raped her, from way before that even, before she ever set eyes on the city of San Pedro Sula, from the days when her father used to hoist her onto his shoulders and she’d wrap her tiny baby-arms around his sweaty forehead while he swiped a path for them through the cloud forest with his machete. She will come to believe that she knew this truth from the day she was born, when her father first held her in his arms and gazed upon her beautiful face with love and love and love.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Ángela says.
Alone in the street, Soledad bends in half, planting the palms of her hands hard against her knees. She doesn’t cry, but instead shakes and shakes. She paces but cannot find anywhere to escape her panic. She says the word no out loud more than a hundred times, tight through the garble of her seizing throat. She flaps her hands to try to shake the adrenaline out of her, but the grief has descended like a demon beast, and she realizes immediately that the burden of that grief must be hers alone to bear. Rebeca must survive the desert, and she might not survive the desert if she has to do it while carrying this monster on her back. She will not tell her sister. My fault. So she gets down on her two knees right there in the street and feels the sharp pebbles pressing up through her jeans. She prays and prays that God has taken Papi quickly into heaven, that somehow her father will forgive her for the death she has caused him.