American Dirt : A Novel (2020) (26 page)

She pulls the chair closer to Elmer’s bedside and lifts his hand, careful not to disturb his IV line. She rubs the back of his hand with her thumb. ‘Elmer, your daughters called today,’ she says quietly. ‘Soledad and Rebeca called from Mexico, and they’re doing well, Elmer. Your daughters are okay. They’re on their way to
el norte
.’

Chapter Twenty

Later that night, when the initial wash of shock has lost
its bite and the sisters are beginning to feel calm beneath the new distress of the terrible news, Lorenzo shows up at the shelter. Lydia is helping in the kitchen, stirring a huge pot of beans on the cooktop, when she sees him through the open door to the large dining room. From a distance, he’s not as menacing as he’d appeared on the train. He’s not as tall, not as bulky as his first impression would’ve suggested. Like every other migrant here, he looks bone-weary, and relieved to be indoors where the aroma of a hot meal greets him. Still, Lydia instinctively moves her body out of his line of vision and accidentally drops the long wooden spoon into the vat of beans.

‘
¡Carajo!
’ she says out loud.

She presses her eyes and mouth closed for just a moment, and when the woman who runs the kitchen notices, she tells Lydia not to worry, and hands her a pair of tongs so she can fish the wooden spoon out of the beans.

Lydia helps serve the dinner, too, on paper plates, and the migrants have to line up cafeteria-style for their food. When Lorenzo comes through, and Lydia ladles a spoonful of beans onto his plate, he nods at her without making eye contact, without further comment, and that strange behavior makes Lydia even more afraid. Has she offended him, provoked him to change his mind about letting them be?

‘Would you like a little more?’ she asks him, but he’s already moved along to the rice station.

The sisters and Luca are behind him in line, and while they’re waiting, Soledad feels a hand slip beneath her arm and grope her breast. It’s so fast, like a sparrow. Her whole body recoils from that hand, but when she whips her head around to confront her offender, there are three migrant men all standing there facing one another. They’re so deep in conversation, and so oblivious to her presence, that there’s no way to determine who it was that grabbed her. Their disinterest is so convincing that Soledad finds herself wondering if she imagined the violation.
No
,
she tells herself.
I am not crazy
. She grinds her teeth and clamps her arms in front of her. She keeps her body hunched into a warning.

After dinner, everyone gathers in
la sala
to watch television, but not Lorenzo. Lydia doesn’t know if she’s relieved or concerned about his absence. It’s both. She wants to keep an eye on him and hopes to never see him, ever again.

On TV, no one wants to watch the news because it’s all too familiar, so they put on
Los Simpson
. At home, Mami doesn’t like Luca watching
Los Simpson
because she thinks Bart is rude, and she doesn’t want Luca to start saying things like
c
ó
mete mis calzoncillos,
but what Mami doesn’t know is that Luca and Papi used to watch it together all the time when she wasn’t home, and Papi would stretch out on the couch with his shoes off and his toes wiggling in his socks, and Luca would drape himself across Papi’s chest like a blanket, and Papi would rub Luca’s back while they watched. It was their secret ceremony. They’d imitate the voices, and Papi would keep the remote control close by so, if Mami came in unexpectedly, he could change the channel to
Arte Ninja
real quick. Luca doesn’t like watching
Los Simpson
here in this tiled room with its fluorescent lights and everyone sitting on folding chairs with their arms crossed and their shoes on. He endures it by unlacing and relacing his sneakers three times, and when it’s over, Mami suggests to Soledad and Rebeca that they might all say a rosary together, for the full restoration of their father’s health. Also, she knows the practice will serve to calm her nerves, to soothe her agitation before she attempts to sleep. They retreat to the corner of the room where the tables are, and several other women join them. The sisters are grateful, and it’s the first time in Luca’s life that the rosary doesn’t feel like a chore. He listens to the chanting voices of the gathered women, first his mother’s lone cadence.

Blessed are you among women.

And then the chorus of response.

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.

Amen.

Otra vez.

Luca holds his
abuela
’s blue stone rosary in both hands and he counts out the prayers. He squeezes the stones between his fingers so hard their shapes are temporarily etched into the press of his skin. He wonders if Abuela ever did that, wonders how many times she passed these stones through the grasp of her aged hands, and when that thought occurs to him, he can nearly hear Abuela’s voice among the chorus,
Santa Mar
í
a, Madre de Dios
. There’s a catch in his throat, so he can’t speak, can’t add his own voice to the prayer, but it’s okay, because listening is its own kind of reverence, and in any case, he feels an energy flowing out of the beads and into his fingertips like a throb, like a heartbeat. The rosary is a kind of tether, and if he clings to it tightly enough, it will preserve his connection to Abuela and Adri
á
n, to all of them. To Acapulco, his little bedroom with the
bal
ó
n de f
ú
tbol
lamp and the blanket with the race cars on it. To home. Luca closes his eyes and listens to the chain of prayers that binds him to Papi.

All the while there’s a new posture about the sisters that slouches them into a diminished curl. When Luca opens his eyes and emerges from his own thoughts, he recognizes that posture because it’s familiar to him. It’s relatively new to Mami, too, and Luca thinks of it as a grief-curl. He feels truly sorry for the sisters’ anguish and for Mami’s, so he asks God to alleviate their suffering.

That night, Luca sleeps the best kind of sleep; he sleeps without dreaming.

That Lydia and Luca will travel with Soledad and Rebeca for as long as possible has not been detailed aloud, yet it’s an arrangement all four of them intuitively understand. So much has happened that each hour of this journey feels like a year, but there’s something more than that. It’s the bond of trauma, the bond of sharing an indescribable experience together. Whatever happens, no one else in their lives will ever fully comprehend the ordeal of this pilgrimage, the characters they’ve met, the fear that travels with them, the grief and fatigue that eat at them. Their collective determination to keep pressing north. It solders them together so they feel like an almost-family now. It’s also true that selfishly, strategically, Lydia hopes the addition of two extra people to their traveling party might serve as an extra layer of camouflage, might confuse anyone who, at first glance, suspects she might be the dead reporter’s missing widow. Before sleep, Lydia closes the ugliest box in her mind, and instead allows herself to think forward, to Estados Unidos. Instead of Denver she thinks of a little white house in the desert with thick adobe walls. She’s seen pictures of Arizona: cactuses and lizards, the ruddy red landscape and hot blue sky. She pictures Luca with a clean backpack and a haircut, getting on a big yellow school bus and waving at her from the window. And then she conjures a third bedroom in that house for the sisters. Soledad’s new baby, perhaps a girl. The smell of diapers. A bath in the kitchen sink.

They’re all eager to get clear of Lorenzo – Lydia, most of all. So even though the shelter is comfortable and they are weary and, were he not here, it would be tempting to stay another night or two, in the morning, Luca, Lydia, Soledad, and Rebeca rouse themselves while it’s still dark out. They are careful to creep past the men’s bunk room without making a sound. They leave before dawn.

Lydia feels a tremendous sense of urgency about getting out of Guadalajara, and it’s not only because of Lorenzo. This city is a Venus flytrap, and she sees evidence all around as they rush through the indigo predawn streets. Migrants come here with momentum, on their way to
el norte,
and they may find a welcome, a slice of comfort, some relative safety away from the rails, so they stay an extra day to catch their breath. Then three more. Then a hundred. Look there, sleeping stretched out on a piece of cardboard in a disused corner of a parking lot, a shoeless mother and toddler in dirty clothing. There, with his eyes glazed and a brown paper bag of God-knows-what clutched tightly in his fist, a skinny teenage boy, track-marked and bruised. There, there, and there, so many young girls tottering on heels in shadowy places, the whites of their eyes glowing brightly against the gloom. Lydia hustles Luca and the sisters away from the shelter and toward the tracks while the light around them grows toward sunrise.

For Soledad and Rebeca, on the other hand, there’s some increased measure of reluctance about this leg of their journey, because they learned from a woman at the shelter last night that they will soon cross into the state of Sinaloa, a place that’s famous among migrants for two things: its expertise at disappearing girls and the vigor of its cartel. Still, there’s no way to get to
el norte
without passing through someplace that’s famous for those things, and they chose the Pacific Route specifically because it’s the most secure. So this is perhaps the most dangerous leg of the safest route, and in any case, the sooner they set out, the sooner they’ll be past it. Soledad also has a new, increased sense of determination: what happened to Papi will not have been in vain. She is desperate to get
to
el norte
now, to make a life there that is good and golden, a life that will honor her family’s sacrifices. So there’s an urgent sense of disquiet among them as they move northwest along the tracks, listening all the time for the hopeful sound of a train at their backs. Lydia looks over her shoulder compulsively now, and when at length the train approaches, they board easily, without even much forethought or communication. That fact startles Lydia when she reflects on it.

‘We didn’t even think about it,’ she says to Soledad, once she has Luca safely belted onto the grating.

‘We’re becoming professionals,’ Soledad answers.

But Lydia shakes her head. ‘No, we’re becoming apathetic.’

Soledad frowns. ‘It’s natural to get used to it, though, right? We adapt.’

Lydia touches a thick strand of Luca’s hair that sticks out from beneath his father’s baseball cap. It’s too long, this hair. She coils one of the thick black curls around her finger, and in the tenderness of that act, she’s momentarily transported back to her mother’s garden. Leaning over Sebasti
á
n’s lifeless body, the handle of the bent spatula digging into her knee. She had touched her husband’s forehead, and the coarseness of his hair, still growing from its follicles, had tickled her wrist. Sebasti
á
n used shampoo with a scent of mint. A solitary sob rises up from Lydia’s bones and is lost in the rumble of the train beneath her. She turns her eyes from Luca and looks at Soledad.

‘From now on, when we board, each time we board, I will remind you to be terrified,’ she says. ‘And you remind me, too: this is not normal.’

‘This is not normal.’ Soledad nods.

The sky begins to brighten above them, and a ribbon of pale orange ex
pands on the horizon, but it’s still twilight where the tracks meet the earth. There’s a handful of other migrants on top of the train, but it’s not nearly as crowded as yesterday, and although that fact might be explained by the earliness of the hour, it serves to underscore Lydia’s sense that Guadalajara has siphoned off some of their numbers. She feels her chest opening with something like relief as the train moves away from the city. A half hour north, the landscape is commandeered by miles of squat, spiky plants. They stretch into the distance along both sides of the tracks, their gray-green fronds like a million waving hands, and the train slows slightly at the outskirts of a town where the buildings are quaint and well kept. Lydia notes the sweet, sticky aroma of fermenting agave plants. Tequila. On the car behind them, two migrants climb down a side ladder and wait for a safe place to jump off. Luca tries to watch them, but the train turns, and the men disappear, and Luca has to content himself without proof that they landed safely. He has to create that truth with only the determination of his mind.

The train thunders on toward Tepic, toward Acaponeta, toward El Rosario. For a long time then, they pass nothing at all. Just grass and dirt and trees and sky. The occasional building, a rare cow. It’s pastoral, beautiful, and the morning air is fresh. Lydia feels a treacherous pang of smothered delight, a bewilderment of migrant as fleeting tourist, as if they’re on vacation looking out across some exotic landscape. It’s brief.

Despite the growing distance between herself and Lorenzo, the pique of his presence remains. It’s alarming that he found them so easily, so accidentally. He hadn’t even been looking. But Javier is looking, with all his considerable resources, with all his connections. Lydia turns her face to the south, ridiculously, as if she’ll see him standing there atop the train. As if he’ll push his glasses up the bridge of his nose and approach her. It won’t happen like that, she knows. When he comes for them, it won’t be him, wearing a smile and a cardigan, clutching a volume of poetry to his chest. It will be some faceless assassin, some boy in a hoodie, cold in the dispatch of her death.
El sicario
won’t feel anything when he delivers the bullet that murders her son. Lydia might be a hamster on a wheel. She knows their executioner might already be on this train, but she wills it to move faster regardless, that they might outrun that selfie of Lydia with Javier, as it pings its way from phone to phone, all the way across Mexico. Lydia shrinks between the sisters. She slips her finger inside Sebasti
á
n’s ring.