Red Glass (18 page)

I started aimlessly weaving through the exhaust and yellow buses, scanning their roofs. That was when a young guy in a threadbare T-shirt and flip-flops worn down to the paper-thin soles jogged toward me. He held out my red backpack. “
Gringa
, is this yours?”

I felt like hugging him. “Thank you!”

“No problem,” he said, and before I could say anything else, he disappeared into the chaos of smells and sounds and colors.

I wondered what it would be like to live here. It seemed very random that I ended up born in Tucson instead of here, instead of anywhere for that matter. And very random that my clothes were brand-new while the guy’s shirt had looked about fifteen years old. If I lived here, he could be my friend. Marta could easily be my aunt. Dika could be Rodrigo’s great-aunt. Anyone could be anyone else.

“Ahorita, gringuita.”
Any minute now, little
gringa.
That was the answer all the vendors gave me when I asked what time the next bus to San Juan would leave.

I waited a few minutes and ate another banana and watched two little kids chasing each other around the market stands, squealing and slipping on mango peels. They wore filthy clothes about three sizes too big for them.
WORLD’S GREATEST GRANDMA
, one of the T-shirts said. The other had dancing pigs on it and said
I LIVE
4
AEROBICS
.

Ten minutes passed, but no bus. I had to pee badly.

I asked another vendor, “When will the bus to San Juan leave?”

“Ahorita, gringuita,”
the woman answered.

“Do you know when exactly? Five minutes? Forty-five minutes?”

“Yes,
señorita.
” She smiled reassuringly.

“But which one—five or forty-five?”

“Ahorita viene.”
Any minute now.

A half hour later, still no bus.

I peeked over into a ditch to see about peeing there, but there was a drunk guy passed out by a tree.

I returned to the woman’s fruit stand. “Is there a bathroom here?” I asked her. With an apologetic shrug, she pointed to a cement building with
BAÑOS
spray-painted on the side.

I opened the door and walked inside. In seconds, my eyes adjusted to the darkness. Mounds of crap were piled up inside the toilets, on the toilet seats, on the floor next to the toilets. Thick clouds of flies buzzed everywhere. The stench was horrible. For a germ freak like me, this was straight out of a nightmare. I froze, afraid to breathe. I looked down and saw, on the floor, brown liquid that could have been mud or worse. And it was all over the soles of my sandals.

I couldn’t move. My heart stopped.

I opened my mouth, but instead of a scream, a laugh sputtered out. And another. Uncontrollable belly laughter overtook me. I was doubled over, laughing and laughing until tears streamed down my cheeks. I’d spent my whole life worrying about germs, and here I was in the mother lode. And, well, I wasn’t dead. I tiptoed out, careful not to splatter the puddles.

Still laughing, out in the sunshine, I gasped the sweet air and ran down to the ditch past the drunk guy. I hoped he wouldn’t regain consciousness any time soon. I peed in the midst of dirty diapers and plastic bottles and cans faded from the sun. I peed, then laughed some more while I examined the brown stuff on my shoes. I thought of Dika with her head thrown back, shrieking with laughter, because what else could she do? Because she was alive.

“No, no, of course the bus is fine,” the driver reassured passengers while sipping his beer. The hood was up and two guys were peering into the engine. People streamed onto the bus—women clutching the tiny hands of their children, some children with babies strapped to their backs, guys in baggy jeans and T-shirts and baseball caps, older men in once-white oxford shirts with graying collars and woven palm hats.

Once we were all settled in our seats, a man in grease-stained clothes told us to get off again. We watched the men tinker underneath the hood for a while until they shrugged and declared it okay. I wondered if it really was okay. Then I smiled because of course if a crash was going to happen, it would happen in an ancient secondhand school bus speeding along dirt roads with a beer-drinking driver. No, it was not an ideal situation, but the best option at the moment.

A boy on a ladder tossed my bag up top, and then I got on the bus. This time, more passengers rushed onto the bus, packing the seats. I had to stand in the aisle, my feet apart, bracing my hands on the seat-back and the bar overhead. A few men offered me their seats, but I said no thanks. Plenty of other people were standing, and if they could do it, so could I.

I felt glad I was standing, because I felt taller, as if my whole life, I’d let fear cram me into a small box, a space so tiny I was always curled over, my shoulders hunched, my back bent. That box had seemed too strong to break through, so I hadn’t tried before. But maybe, all along, the box was just flimsy cardboard, and all I had to do was stand up, punch through the top, and climb out.

Kindness of Strangers

It rained on and off during the bus ride. The flat landscape wrinkled itself into hills, with mountains poking up in the distance. We bumped along valleys as showers pattered the windows, then around a curve, up into brilliant sunshine. I needed to figure out where exactly to get off the bus, so I looked around, trying to pick out the most trustworthy face. Most people were staring right at me. A woman in a matching flowered skirt and top at the back of the bus waved. “
Gringuita!
I’m getting off the bus at the next stop. Take my seat.” I scooted into her place, next to a woman with two girls.

The woman was an explosion of color, draped in a thick, boxy cotton blouse with thin rainbow stripes, tucked into a wraparound skirt. Two little girls, about six and eight years old, were dressed like her, their hair braided with ribbons. The sour scent of woodsmoke clung to them, an ancient, warm smell that made me think of Ñola and Abuelita. The girls were eyeing me, their hands cupped over their mouths, giggling and whispering together in another language—a Mayan dialect, I guessed. Mr. Lorenzo had told me there were lots of Mayan groups, each with their own way of speaking and dressing.

The mother lowered her eyes and gave me a timid smile. Here was someone even shyer than me, someone I could trust. I gushed to her about how cute the girls were, and asked where they were going. The mother spoke softly in accented Spanish—short, choppy syllables. She said they were headed home, to San Juan.

“That’s where I’m going too!”

She looked at me with surprise and seemed about to say something, but then closed her mouth. We chatted about the food and weather and plants in Tucson, and soon the girls warmed up to me. Each girl took one of my hands and sang an English song they’d learned in school: “
Pollito
chicken,
ventana
window.” And on and on, rhythmically translating a strange collection of words.

Finally the mother, whose name was Juliana, looked at me and lowered her voice. “What are you doing all the way out here,
señorita
?”

“Visiting a friend.”

“What time is he expecting you?” Juliana asked.

“He’s not.”

She gave me a strange look. “How will you know where to go?”

“I have the address.”

Her voice lowered to a whisper. “Our town is not safe. People with money are kidnapped and held for ransom. There are gangs, bandits. If they see a
gringa
alone, they will see a victim. Do you understand me?”

“Well, I’m just bringing something to my boyfriend and then coming right back with his father. And maybe with him, too.” I looked closely at her face. Her lips were full, with a beauty mark hanging above the corner of her mouth, just like a model’s. Her eyebrows were wrinkled in concern. “It’s all right,” I said. “People have been nice to me, helping me out.”

“True, but it only takes a few bad people.” Juliana moved closer. “The gangs recruit boys, and the boys can’t say no. You’re with them or against them.” She had a lot to say, once she got started. But her voice dropped even lower now. She didn’t want anyone else to hear, that was obvious. “That’s how it was, too, when I was a girl, only then it was the army and the guerrillas.”

“Who were they?” I moved my head closer, trying to hear her whispers over the rumble of the bus.

“The guerrillas were revolutionaries who fought for rights of poor people. At first poor people were happy about this. Then came the army. They tried to stop the guerrilla movement. In the end it was the people—like my family and neighbors—who suffered. Guerrillas forced us to give them food, and then the army came and punished us for helping the guerrillas. They killed people. They burned our houses and our crops and stole our animals. And even though the government tells us the fighting is over,
la violencia
has stayed in the hearts of some people.”

Had Ángel seen
la violencia
? Was that why Ángel’s mom disappeared?

“
Señorita
,” Juliana said. “It is dangerous for you to be here alone.”

But it was too late to go back. I was so close to seeing Ángel, only an hour away. “
Señora
, I need to see my friend.”

“Well, if you must go, we will take you to him,” she said.

When the bus let us off at the roadside, we walked along a road littered with plastic bottles and broken glass. Under branches of flowering trees, the girls found small mangoes scattered on the ground, inspected them for bruises, and handed the best ones to me until my backpack overflowed.

“Our town is not beautiful,” Juliana laughed, “but it does have a lot of mangoes.”

Ángel had fed me a mango early in the trip. I’d been asleep and felt the van pull over at the roadside. I heard Dika say something about buying sodas. A short time later, still half asleep, I felt Ángel’s hands, warm and sticky over my eyes. “Smell what I found on the roadside,” he said, and I breathed in the scent of paradise—flowers, tropical beaches, hidden islands, the ocean, palm trees, pure pleasure. “Open your mouth.” I did. “Take a bite.” I sank my teeth in, let them slide off, and mango juice ran down my throat, my chin, my neck. All of this as I was still half asleep, this taste that felt like diving into a dream flower and coming out on the other side, into the startling sweetness of reality.

Soon we were walking past houses, low houses of cement or wood, some painted pastels, some left raw, capped with flat roofs of tin or cement. People walked along the street in small groups, most in regular clothes like mine, only more worn. Some women wore colorful woven blouses and long skirts like Juliana. Almost everyone stopped in their tracks to stare at me. I was very grateful not to be alone.

Juliana and the girls led me to the hospital, a one-story building painted a dull yellow and coated with dirt and graffiti. It was small for a hospital, more like a health clinic, about a quarter the size of my high school. A few dogs lay at the entrance, and people dozed on palm mats outside—women with shawls on their heads, girls with disheveled braids.

“If you can’t find your friend, come to our house,” Juliana said, pointing down the road to a shack with walls of blue plastic.

I took off my coconut bracelet and necklace and handed them to the girls. Their faces lit up.

“No,” Juliana said. “You don’t need to give us anything.”

“I insist,” I said. The girls flashed wide, toothy smiles at their mother, and in the end, she let them keep the presents.

“Come to our house if he’s not there,” she urged. “And be careful.”

We shook hands lightly, and the girls kissed me on the cheek. Off they went. I was touched by this kindness from people who had little to give but kindness. I thought of the folktales Juan had told me when I was little. In my favorites, there was always a journey. And there was always a heroine (I made Juan change all heroes to heroines) who was either timid or poor or sickly or had something else wrong with her, just like me. And there were always guides that the heroine met along the way, animals or people or spirits who helped her overcome obstacles to find her treasure.

I stepped around the people and dogs, through the hospital doors. To the left was a counter with no one behind it. I walked down a short corridor and, when I turned the corner, stopped short at a big room with patients waiting in rows of orange plastic seats. The place had the feel of a dingy bus station that desperately needed renovating. At the far end of the room, a nurse was weighing a patient as everyone watched.

I plastered a smile on my face and walked to the front of the room as every pair of eyes followed me. When I opened my mouth to ask the nurse how I could find a patient’s room, everyone’s chattering stopped. I was onstage. I hated being the center of attention, but I forced myself to go on. “I’m looking for a patient.”

“Which patient?” the nurse asked, trying to act casual. She wore a white skirt and blouse, and her hair was slicked back into a bun. She was stout, with stumpy legs and thick ankles, and on her chin, a mole with a long black hair sticking out, which I tried not to stare at.

“Ángel Reyes,” I whispered. I prayed he was still here.

She looked at me blankly. “Ángel Reyes,” she repeated, wrinkling her eyebrows. Then she looked at me with a stern expression and leaned in close. “Are you from the North,
gringuita
? Did you come here alone?”

I nodded.

“It’s not safe—”

I cut her off. “Look, I need to see Ángel. A guy my age. He got beat up and…” I couldn’t finish my sentence.

“Ah, yes, of course. Ángel. Down that hall, fourth door on the left.”

I walked to the back of the room and felt heads turning to follow me, the murmur of whispers and speculations. I headed down a narrow corridor, dark except for shafts of light that poured from the half-open doors. My sandals’ rubber soles squeaked on the tile floor. Nervous sweat trickled from my armpits to my waist. I hoped Ángel wouldn’t notice the damp spots under the armholes of my dress.

In the first room, I glimpsed a hugely pregnant woman, her belly a steep hill under the sheets. The second and third rooms each held three beds with older people snoring softly or awake and looking bored.

I stopped outside the fourth door. It was closed. My heart was about to leap out of my chest. I took a deep breath and knocked lightly. No answer. I opened the door.