“What did you say?” Sara says from behind him.
“I’m just talking to myself.”
Sara skips a couple of steps ahead and joins Emiliano. She smiles when he looks at her apprehensively.
“What?” Emiliano asks.
“I need to talk periodically, otherwise I’ll explode.”
“You need to be very quiet. Sounds—”
“Travel far in the desert, I know. But I’m going batty listening to my thoughts, which are very loud out here. Do you ever get any happy thoughts in the desert? I’m still waiting for one to come.”
“It’s getting hot,” Emiliano says, looking up. “In a couple of hours, we’ll have to pull off the road for a while.”
“A couple of hours?” Sara asks, deflated.
They march on side by side.
“I’m sorry I never got to write that article about the Jiparis. It would have been good for people to know about them.”
Emiliano looks straight ahead and makes no sign that he is listening, but he doesn’t tell her to stop talking either. Sara proceeds carefully. “I loved that pledge the Jiparis take. I will be honest with myself and others. That’s so beautiful, that an explorer group would have its members make that pledge about honesty. I mean, what does it have to do with exploring, you know?”
Emiliano doesn’t respond. He looks as if he’s somewhere deep inside himself. Then, just before he pulls ahead of her, he speaks softly.
“It’s not possible to live without some kind of lying. It can’t be done. If you think it’s possible, then you’re fooling yourself.”
Sara lets Emiliano move in front of her. His words don’t jibe with the Emiliano she’s always known—the brother who was lied to by a father and who, after that, despised lying more than anything. Emiliano’s wrong. Maybe most people can’t live without some kind of lying. But that doesn’t apply to Emiliano. If there’s one thing Sara knows without a doubt, it’s that for her brother, it is not possible to live with lying.
The Emiliano who came back from Perla Rubi’s party is different from the Emiliano who went there. Maybe he was reading Papá’s letters to tell himself that people lie. Papá promised him he’d come back and didn’t. If Papá could lie, so can he. Is that it? Something happened to him back home that made him say that it’s not possible to live without lying. What lying did he have to do or feel he has to do?
When the sun is directly in front of him, Emiliano slows down and waits for Sara to catch up. He can tell that she is tired because her feet barely lift off the ground. There were times during the past twelve miles when he thought about walking next to her and letting her do all the talking and questioning he knows she is itching to do. That will still come, but he decided it would be better if he let her talk when they were resting.
“You look exhausted,” he tells her.
“A little. My legs feel heavy.” She reaches down and touches her thighs. “Like they’ve got molasses circulating in there instead of blood.”
Emiliano looks in the direction of the mountains. “There’s a canyon about half a mile from here where we can find shade. Or we can put the tarp up over a couple of bushes and rest underneath it. It will be more comfortable in the canyon, but it means a mile or so of extra walking. It’s up to you.”
“Tarp sounds good, for some reason.”
Emiliano finds two creosote bushes about ten feet apart from each other. He kneels in the space between them and takes off his backpack. He unlaces the tarp from the top of the aluminum frame and ties it to the two bushes with leather straps. The shade is enough for them to sit with their legs stretched out, their heads almost touching the tarp. They eat a chocolate bar in silence and then Emiliano arranges his backpack so he can use it as a pillow. He lies down but keeps his eyes open.
Sara takes off her shoes and socks. “How long will we rest?”
“Three or four hours, until the sun starts going down. Then we’ll walk through the night until we get to the east-west road.”
“How many miles per hour were we walking back there?”
“We started off at a good clip. Maybe three miles an hour. Then, after about a mile of that, we slowed down. You started falling back. All told, we walked about fifteen miles.”
“That’s all?”
“It’s a good start.”
“Whoever thought walking could be so painful?”
Emiliano turns on his side and watches Sara touch the blister on the big toe of her right foot. He sits up and finds the first aid kit. He hands her a tube of disinfectant and a small square of gauze. “Put a little bit of the ointment on so it won’t get infected, and when we’re ready to start again, wrap the toe in the gauze.”
“This is not good, is it?” She examines the middle toe on her left foot. “I got another one coming over here.” She lifts her foot so Emiliano can see the red spot.
“You should have told us the shoes were too tight.”
“It’s okay. They’ll stretch out. Should I put my shoes back on?”
“You can leave them off.”
“What about scorpions?”
“They’re resting in a cool place. Under a rock somewhere.”
Sara takes a notebook and pen from her backpack. She places her backpack against a bush and leans against it. She crosses her legs and begins to write in the open notebook in her lap.
“What are you doing?” Emiliano says with one eye open and one closed.
“Writing,” Sara answers, not looking up. She bites the plastic pen thoughtfully.
“Writing?”
“I want to write down everything that happened since I got the threatening e-mail about Linda.”
“Why?”
“I’ve been thinking that maybe asylum is our best option after all. We can do that after we get to Chicago. Writing it all down will help me remember all the details. What if the story of why we came to the United States was published in a newspaper? It would help us if we had the press behind us. When I was researching the asylum process, I found out that it was more likely to be granted to people who were well known—writers and poets from Mexico who were persecuted for their writings. So it will definitely be a help if our story gets known.”
Emiliano smiles, shakes his head.
“What?”
“Why don’t you go ahead and get it out of your system? Then we can get some rest.”
“Get what out of my system?”
“You just said that asylum is our best option and something we can do when we get to Chicago. Look, let’s do this. You can try to convince me to live with our dear father for the next hour. I promise I will listen to what you have to say, and you can give it your best shot. But after that hour, if you’re not able to convince me, we won’t talk about it anymore and you won’t waste precious mental energy thinking about it. What do you say?”
“You really will listen? I mean really listen. You’ll be honestly open to the possibility? Can you do that?”
“Hold on.” Emiliano shuts his eyes. Ten seconds later, he opens them again. “Okay, my mind is honestly open to the possibility of living with the man who told Mami and us to go to hell.”