American Dirt : A Novel (2020) (36 page)

But the existence of this electronic money is a miracle. A one-shot parachute. She writes her mother’s name in a binder on the counter, and then waits in a chair until the branch manager calls her into a private cubicle. Lydia sits, setting her backpack on the empty chair beside her. It’s a woman who sits in the chair facing her, so that feels like a bit of luck. The woman wears a navy blazer and has a single streak of gray in her hair. Her face is kind. Lydia studies the woman’s features for a moment and makes a snap decision. She will tell her everything. All of it. She will throw herself on the mercy of this stranger’s kind face.

It’s only the third time Lydia has told her story. The first was to Carlos in the office above the church in Chilpancingo and the second was to the nun, Hermana Cecilia, at the first Casa del Migrante in Huehuetoca. Both times, the telling had taken a toll on Lydia, but both times, she’d received in return something that felt like salvation.

‘What can I do for you today?’ the branch manager asks, folding her hands in front of her on the desk. She doesn’t lean away, or eye the backpack suspiciously. She is gracious, and her name is Paola, according to her square, brown name tag.

‘I—’ Lydia begins, but then her nostrils flare and all the words catch in her throat. Lydia presses her eyes closed once, slowly, and begins again. ‘I need to close my mother’s account.’

‘Okay,’ Paola says. ‘I can help you with that. Is your mother
.
.
. can she come with you to do that, or
.
.
.’

‘She’s deceased,’ Lydia says.

‘Oh, I’m so sorry for your loss.’ Paola says this not unkindly, but mechanically, and only because it’s the thing people say.

This isn’t at all how Lydia wanted to begin, so formal, so cold. She shakes her head, inches her chair closer to the desk. Paola does not back away.

‘I need your help,’ Lydia says.

Paola nods. ‘Of course,’ she says, reaching out to pat Lydia’s hand before clasping her own hands together on the desk again. ‘All we need, then, is her death certificate and a copy of her will, if you have it—’

Lydia stops the woman from talking by clearing her throat. She looks not at Paola’s face but at the knot of her hands on the desk between them, at the simple gold wedding band. She speaks without looking up.

‘My mother was murdered. My whole family was murdered by the cartel in Acapulco. My husband, my sister. Sixteen of my family members.’ She is speaking very quietly now, leaning toward Paola across the desk, and she can hear that Paola’s breathing has changed – no – has stopped, actually. She glances up at the woman’s face and sees the same stillness there. It’s a paralysis born of empathy, so Lydia chases the rest of the words out of her mouth quickly, before she loses her nerve or her track, before she begins to cry. ‘My son and I escaped. He’s there, just outside. We had money, but we were kidnapped in Sinaloa and now it’s gone. And we need my mother’s money to pay the coyote now. To get across. I’m my mother’s only remaining child.’

There’s only one hand left on the desk now, the one with the wedding ring. The other has gone up to Paola’s face, to Paola’s mouth, where its presence might prevent the escape of some of Paola’s informal reac
tion. ‘Oh my God,’ Paola says. Because what else could she possibly say? She opens a lower drawer and withdraws a box of tissues, which she places on the desk between them. ‘That birthday party massacre in Acapulco, I read about you. Your family, oh my God. I’m so sorry.’

‘Thank you,’ Lydia says. ‘It was my niece’s
quincea
ñ
era
. Y
é
nifer.’

Paola crumples a tissue from the box and holds it beneath her
nose. Lydia takes one, too. Then they look each other in the eye. Lydia whispers.

‘Do you have children?’

Paola nods. ‘Three.’

‘I’m afraid we’re going to die. This money is the only way to save my son.’

Paola pushes her rolling chair back from the desk. ‘Wait here,’ she says.

She’s gone for what feels like a very long time, and when she returns, she’s carrying a folder stacked with documents. She sits back into the chair, and Lydia straightens her posture. Paola opens the folder and, using the mouse, clicks the computer monitor to life. ‘Do you have any identification?’

‘Yes.’ Lydia digs into her backpack and finds her voter ID card. She hands it to Paola, who studies it for a moment, looks more closely at Lydia’s face, and then sets it on the folder.

‘Bank card?’

‘Yes.’ She produces this as well.

‘Are you a custodian on your mother’s account?’

‘No.’

‘And you don’t have a death certificate for her, I’m sure,’ Paola says.

‘No.’

‘Or a copy of her will?’

‘No.’ Lydia tries not to panic. Surely this woman is going to try
to help her. She understands. She knows that Lydia has none of these documents, has no way of obtaining any of these documents without returning to Guerrero and getting herself killed. But what if it’s simply impossible? What if Paola is trying to help Lydia find a loophole, but all she’s really doing is confirming the
inevitable bad news that Lydia has no legal right to this money? Lydia tries to breathe deeply, but everything shakes.

‘What is your line of work?’ Paola asks.

‘I own a bookstore in Acapulco. Or I did. I guess I still do.’

Paola types into the computer. ‘Name of the business?’

‘Palabras y P
á
ginas.’

She types some more, and then twists the monitor so Lydia can see. She’s not filling in forms, Lydia realizes. She’s googling her. Verifying her story. Making sure this is not a con job. ‘This is you?’

She’s opened the website Lydia’s been meaning to update. There is her picture on the ‘contact’ page. She’s wearing black leggings and an oversize sweater. It’s an outfit she’ll never wear again. It’s in her dirty clothes hamper in Acapulco. Lydia’s unremarkable happiness in the photograph takes her breath away, and a sob cuts loose into the cubicle. Lydia wishes the walls stretched all the way to the ceiling. Her eyes are two lines, her mouth, a line. She nods her head at Paola, who reaches across the desk and squeezes Lydia’s hand. Then she stands and steps around the desk. She removes Lydia’s backpack from the chair and sits down beside her.

‘My nephew disappeared last August,’ Paola whispers. ‘He was missing for three days. When they found him, his head
.
.
.’ She pauses for a long moment, so Lydia thinks she might not continue. But she’s only gathering strength. ‘His head was separated from his body.’ Her hand trembles in Lydia’s. They squeeze each other tightly. ‘He was a beautiful boy,’ she says.

And now it’s Lydia’s turn to experience that empathy-paralysis. The depth of her feeling surprises her, because how can she have any leftover grief available for other people, for Paola’s murdered nephew? But there it is – an anguish that makes her feel hollow in the bones, despair for a beautiful boy Lydia never met. For the innumerable griefs of all those stolen boys, stretching from family to family like one of Luca’s connect-the-dots. It’s so big, the pain. It’s exponential. Each violent death amplifies itself a hundred times, a thousand times. Everyone in this bank knows some small or large portion of that grief. Everyone in Nogales. Everyone who lives in a place that’s been carved up into
plazas
and parceled out for governance by men like Javier.
For what?

Lydia lets go. All the torrent of emotion she’s been corralling for weeks, it all tries to squeeze through at once. She curls into a tight ball in the wooden chair and she sobs quietly, and her body is a knot of grief,
and Paola is a stranger, but her hands on Lydia’s back are the hands of God. They are Sebasti
á
n’s and Yemi’s and Y
é
nifer’s. They are her mother’s hands. Lydia weeps into Paola’s lap, and Paola weeps with her. They weep for themselves and for each other. And when they’re finished, they clean themselves up using only the Kleenex on Paola’s desk.

Paola rubs Lydia’s knee roughly and then honks her nose into a tissue. She tosses it like a three-pointer into the wastebasket on the far side of the little cubicle. And then, ‘I might lose my job,’ she says quietly. ‘But I will get you that money.’

Lydia’s head pounds. She closes her eyes in grateful disbelief. The aftermath is like a jackhammer in her sinuses.

It takes a few minutes, but soon there’s an envelope fat with cash, and then Paola produces her own purse from a locked drawer in the bottom of her filing cabinet, and hands Lydia an extra 500-peso note. ‘For your son,’ she says.

Lydia hugs her, and there’s no way to thank her. It’s impossible.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

The apartment is weirdly nice, if impersonal and
sparsely furnished. It’s the lower level of a house that’s built into a hill, so it’s half a flight down from the street. It has four large rooms: a living room (with two black leather couches, a flat-screen television, and some grim artwork), a kitchen (whose refrigerator contains only a jar of mayonnaise and two eggs), and the two bedrooms (which are entirely empty, save a lone wire hanger on the tile floor in one, and an aerosol can of Raid on the high windowsill in the other). At the sleek kitchen counter, Lydia hands over their money. The price El Chacal demanded was $11,000. She gives it to him half in pesos and half in dollars because the bank didn’t have enough cash to give her all one currency. The two stacks of bills she hands him include all the money from her mother’s account, the 500-peso note Paola gave her, and every penny she had left in her wallet. The exchange rate has been dismal, so the total sum of her money is roughly $10,628. A few weeks ago, when the peso was stronger, it would’ve been enough. Today, she’s $372 short. The coyote counts the money, works out the exchange on his cell phone, and when he realizes she’s short, pushes the cash back at her, shaking his head.

‘No es suficiente.’

‘But we’re only a little short. Maybe I can pay you when we get to the other side. When I get a job, I can make up the difference.’

‘That’s not how it works.’

It’s inconceivable that it might come down to this. $372.

‘We had more, but we got robbed on the way.’ She hears the desperation in her voice.

‘Everyone gets robbed on the way,’ he says, unmoved.

‘No,’ Soledad says. ‘She paid to ransom us.’

‘She saved our lives with that money.’ Rebeca turns to her sister. ‘We can ask C
é
sar. We have to.’

Soledad looks worried about asking their cousin for even more money, but she nods. There’s a note of hysteria in the room, hopping from face to face. Only the coyote is immune to it.

‘We won’t be leaving for at least a day or two,’ he says. ‘You can stay here with your son. You come up with the cash before then, you can come.’

Two days,
Lydia thinks. They’d lived frugally in Acapulco, never touching their savings, taking a packed lunch to work most days, buying new clothes only when the old ones could no longer be repaired. The rare dinner out, an occasional movie. This is how they splurged. For their anniversary last year, Sebasti
á
n bought her a vial of lavender oil, so she could put a drop on her pillow each night before bed. What a luxury that had been! But when she thinks now of their small, sunny two-bedroom apartment, filled with shoes and books gathering dust, its kitchen pantry stocked with uneaten maize, dry beans, and cereal, the linens folded in the hall closet, two bubble-shaped wineglasses drying in the rack beside the sink, it all feels like extravagance. She has nothing now. What can she sell? How can she possibly get $400 in two days? Her mind searches for people she can ask for money.
Dead. All dead.
If she had her uncle’s number in Denver she might call. She thinks wildly, shamefully, of her body. How much could she get for sex? It’s sickening and obscene,
and she’s grateful when she manages to discard the thought without real analysis. She will find a way.

Beto and Luca are sitting on one of the black leather couches behind them, playing some game about cars, but they can feel the strange tremor of agitation in the room, and they are drawn to it. They appear magnetically, one on each side of Lydia.

‘What’s wrong, Mami?’ Luca asks.

‘Nothing,
amorcito, no te preocupes
.’

But Beto, who’s accustomed to having to work things out without people explaining them to him, looks at the stacks of money on the counter, and then at Lydia’s face, and then at El Chacal, and says, ‘How much is she short?’

El Chacal lifts his phone from the counter and reads from the screen – ‘Three hundred and seventy-two dollars’ – and then sets the phone back down.

‘How much is that in pesos?’ Beto asks.

The coyote does the math. ‘About seven thousand five hundred.’

Beto goes into his pocket and flicks out his wad of cash while Lydia watches. He already paid for his crossing and still has money to burn.
We just met this kid this morning,
she thinks.
He doesn’t even understand how much money this is.
She rejects her misgivings instantly. He covers it.

She draws him in and hugs him. ‘Thank you.’

El Chacal tells them they’ll cross when the other
pollitos
arrive, and they should make themselves comfortable while they wait. He leaves them with almost no instruction, and after he’s gone, Lydia wonders if he’ll ever come back. They’ve given him everything, their very last chance of escaping to
el norte.
He doesn’t seem like a thief, but what if he is? Or what if he gets hit by a bus? She balls her hands into fists and tells herself to shut up.
Don’t think
.

They all take their shoes off as soon as the coyote is gone, and it’s incredible what a pleasure it is to be barefoot. To wiggle your toes freely without constraint.
Con un olor a queso
. Luca and Beto run up and down the hallway between the kitchen and the bedrooms, feeling the cool tiles beneath their sticky feet, and making tiny footprints of phantom condensation along the floor. Soledad tucks in her T-shirt and shows them a trick she can do: a handstand against the wall, her arms strong beneath her. The boys applaud. When they try to watch TV, they discover that the flat screen doesn’t work. Lydia finds a dog-eared paperback in one of the kitchen drawers and reads while the boys and sisters nap. It’s an older novel, a Stephen King book Lydia read many years ago, and slipping back into it is briefly transporting, like she can reach back through time and commune with the person she was when she first read it. That act of communion feels both lucky and holy. When the others awaken, she abandons the book with some reluctance, leaves it facedown on the couch, cracked open at the spine to page 73. They all look forward to taking showers, and are disappointed to find there’s no hot water. There’s also no food or pots, and only one frying pan in the kitchen, but Lydia heats up what little water she can in that, so they can sponge the dust and the sweat from their skin. They eat nothing, contenting themselves with the relatively recent memory of the
birria,
and fall asleep as the sun sets.

Early the next morning, just as they’re discussing how and what to eat, the door opens, and Lydia buckles with relief when El Chacal descends the four steps, followed by two men and an older woman. He’s still here. He hasn’t abandoned them. This relief is soon followed by fear: Who are these people? Lydia watches them for clues, for recognition. The men seem to know each other. They are young and wear their baseball caps low over their eyes, talking quietly together while ignoring the others. Long sleeves and jeans hide any possible tattoos. Lydia experiences a trigger-wash of nausea, but it’s chased off by her hunger.

‘Don’t go far,’ the coyote says. ‘If you’re not here when it’s time to go, we won’t wait.’

It’s tense in the apartment after El Chacal leaves. The sisters and Luca retreat to the bedroom where they slept last night, and the new woman locks herself in the bathroom. Lydia wants to find out all she can about the newcomers, but she also wants to keep her distance, to remain imperceptible and vague. And anyway, she’s hungry. Luca is hungry.

‘Are you hungry?’ she asks the new men, who are seated on the couch.

They are.

‘I will cook, if you have money for food.’

She will make omelets. A warm morsel of familiarity for Luca. The men give her some pesos, and she and Luca set out to find a grocery store.

‘Wear your new boots,’ she tells him. ‘Let’s break them in.’

They’re only a half a block from the apartment when they hear someone calling out behind them.

‘¡Hola! Perd
ó
n, se
ñ
ora, ¡disculpe!’

Lydia turns with trepidation and finds the new woman from the apartment hurrying toward them. ‘I thought I might come with you if you don’t mind,’ the woman says. ‘I need to get a few things myself.’ She carries a purple handbag and is dressed as if going out for a nice meal: black trousers, an oversize blouse, and wedge sandals. She’s slim and dark-skinned with short-cropped hair, black with sparks of silver. A gold bracelet on one wrist is too understated to be fake. She looks nothing like a migrant, Lydia thinks, and then remembers that neither does she. Or at least she didn’t when first they embarked on this journey.

‘I’m Marisol.’ The bracelet dangles when the woman extends her hand for Lydia to shake.

‘Lydia.’

‘Mucho gusto.’

‘And this is my son, Luca.’

‘Hello, Luca!’

At the corner, an elderly gentleman sits in his doorway, and Lydia asks him to point the way to the nearest shop. He does.

‘I need to buy fruit,’ Marisol says as they walk. ‘I’m used to eating salad every day, and my stomach has been all messed up since I got back.’

‘Back?’ Lydia asks.

‘From California.’

‘Oh! You were in California already?’

‘Yes, sixteen years,’ she says. ‘I’m practically a
gabacha
now.’

They both laugh.

‘But then why did you come back?’ Lydia asks.

‘Not by choice.’

Lydia winces.

‘My daughters are still there, in San Diego.’ She reaches into a side pocket of her purse and draws out an iPhone with a shiny case. She unlocks it with her thumb and scrolls to a photograph of two beautiful young girls, perhaps close in age to Soledad and Rebeca. She shows them to Lydia proudly. The younger one is wearing a
quincea
ñ
era
dress.

‘That’s my Daisy,’ she says. ‘She wanted to wear a Chiapas dress for her birthday, even though she was born in San Diego. She doesn’t even speak Spanish!’ She closes the phone and returns it to her purse. ‘And my older one, Am
é
rica, she’s in college now, trying to take care of her younger sister, trying to take care of the house.’ Marisol’s voice sounds thick and tired.

‘How long have you been gone?’

‘Almost three weeks,’ Marisol says. ‘But I was in a detention center for more than two months before that.’ She shakes her head and presses her lips together in a gesture Lydia recognizes. It’s the one when you’re resolute about keeping your shit together despite the fact that your voice is quivering, and your chest feels cleaved with sorrow. Luca doesn’t seem to be listening, but Lydia knows better. He’s always listening now, walking a few steps ahead of them and watching the cars come and go.

‘What happened?’ Lydia asks.

Marisol takes a big breath before answering. ‘We went legally, when Am
é
rica was only four years old. My husband was an engineer – he had work there, so we got visas. And then Daisy was born, and years and years went by, you don’t even notice the time going by.’

Lydia finds herself instinctively drawing close to Marisol as they walk, up and down the sunny hillside streets, around corners, and through quiet intersections. Luca strides heavily in his new boots.

‘Then five years ago, Rogelio was killed, my husband was killed.’ Marisol blesses herself and Lydia gasps involuntarily.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Lydia says.

Marisol nods. ‘It was very sudden. A car accident as he was returning home from work.’

Something treacherous and unkind lurches up in Lydia – a jeal
ousy almost, of that kind of widowing. A normal, ungruesome death. But then she follows it: Rogelio is no less dead than Sebasti
á
n. By the time she squeezes Marisol’s arm, her compassion is genuine again.

‘Our visas lapsed when he died. We were supposed to return home to Oaxaca. Only Daisy was permitted to stay because she’s a citizen.’

‘But that’s absurd,’ Lydia says. ‘She’s how old?’

‘Fifteen.’

‘Ay.’
She’s heard the stories, of course. But it’s different talking to a mother who’s actually living it. Lydia can’t imagine being separated from Luca, on top of all the other griefs. He’s there, walking just ahead of them, but Lydia has to fight the urge to lunge for him, to crush him to her chest.

Lydia’s always been a devoted mother, but she’s never been the codependent kind who misses her child when he goes to school or to sleep. She’s always treasured that time to herself, to inhabit her own thoughts, to have a break from the nonstop emotional clamoring of motherhood. There were even times in Acapulco when she’d experienced a sliver of
resentment at the way he barged into her heart and mind whenever he was around, how Luca’s energy usurped everything else in the room. She loved that boy with her whole heart, but my God, there were days when she couldn’t fully breathe until she’d left him at the schoolyard gate. That’s all over now; she would staple him to her, sew him into her skin, affix her body permanently to his now, if she could. She’d grow her hair into his scalp, would become his conjoined twin-mother. She would forgo a private thought in her head for the rest of her life, if she could keep him safe. Luca waits at the corner, and Lydia looks beyond him, across the street, where the side of a building is painted with graffiti. A giant question mark. No. No, it’s not a question mark. Lydia stops cold. She puts her hand out for Luca.