Red Glass (2 page)

Weeks passed without another word from him. More and more, I wanted to cup my hands around him like a shivering bird, breathe life into him, some kind of spiritual CPR. Dika and I took turns sleeping with him. On my nights, I brought a flashlight and book and read to him in English. He always stayed awake, watching my lips move. He seemed soothed by my voice, by the rhythms of words.

“First, you’ll sit down a little ways away from me, over there, in the grass. I’ll watch you out of the corner of my eye, and you won’t say anything. Language is the source of misunderstandings. But day by day, you’ll be able to sit a little closer….”

After I closed the book, I lay beside him and whispered to him in English and Spanish, saying anything that came into my head. “
Principito.
Know what? Our chickens used to lay eggs. Juan says they’re too depressed to lay eggs now.
Quién sabe porqué
.” Sometimes I found myself whispering things he couldn’t possibly understand, silly things. “Know what? I’m an amoeba, Pablito. Floating through life. Maybe you’re an amoeba, too. Maybe we’re two amoebas together.”

He watched me and listened and said nothing. And for some reason, I convinced myself that when he became a whole person one day—hopefully sooner than later—so would I.

Midnight Parties

Since I was seven, Juan has been my father. And since I met him, his shiny black braid has reached down to the small of his back, and snakes have rippled magically across his biceps. When he married Mom, she no longer had to juggle which of her friends would pick me up from school. Juan came to get me every day, always five minutes early, and we walked home together, hand in hand. Our phone stopped being disconnected and we could have our pick of food at Albertsons instead of what the food bank had in stock.

Juan is in the import business. He buys goods from Mexico—bottles of tequila, pottery, baskets, shirts—and distributes them to stores around the U.S. When you mention his name, people say,
Ah, Juan, es buena gente.
He’s a good person. And he is. People trust him, and his business connections sometimes ask for personal favors. Like using our fenced-in yard for a night to let immigrants rest before the next part of their journey north.

Not long after Juan came to live with us, I woke up to strange sounds late one night. I padded into the kitchen, where a pot of beans was simmering. The back door was wide open. I peeked outside, into the darkness. Our yard was filling with people who streamed silently out of a truck. Juan shut the high wooden gate behind them, and stood whispering to a man in a cowboy hat.

At the back of our yard, a woman in a dress gazed at our muddy pond, a shallow puddle of sludge and leaves that shone in the moonlight. She knelt down as though she were praying, bowed her head, and drank, cupping the dirty water to her lips. The tip of her braid hung in the mud. Mom ran over, pulled her up, placed the hose in her hands. Then Mom turned on the spigot, and the woman drank and drank.

At the far corner of our yard, a man with a mustache was eyeing our chicken coop. He looked around to make sure no one was watching him, and didn’t see me half-hidden behind the back door. But I saw him. Feeling protective of our chickens, I slipped outside and headed toward the coop. The desperate look in his eyes scared me—gave me a vague fear that he might tear a live chicken apart with his teeth and drink its blood. I hid in the shadows behind our olive tree. The man crouched down, reached his arm through the mesh, picked up an egg. He cracked it open on a rock. He held it up and let the shiny slime fall into his mouth. Then he licked the inside of the shell.

I ran back inside the warm yellow light of our house and stood in the middle of the kitchen, my heart racing. What would taste really good if you were that hungry? I pulled out a brand-new pack of Oreos. I darted outside toward the chicken coop. He was leaning against the olive tree. I held out the package. After a stunned moment, he took it, tore it open, offered a cookie to me. I took one and twisted it apart. He placed three in his mouth at once. The rest he passed out to others who had gathered. No one else pried their cookies open and licked the icing as I did, not even the kids.

Mom appeared, her arms filled with boxes from our pantry. Instead of telling me to go back to bed, she handed me crinkly packages of crackers and peanuts. “Pass these out, Sophie. To tide them over till the beans are ready.”

They politely accepted the bags from me.
“Gracias, señorita.”

Mom returned with our best blue towels and sheets, the ones only guests could use. She looked like an angel in her long white robe that trailed behind her like streamers. She distributed glasses and went around with a pitcher, pouring water like a gracious hostess.
“¿Más agua, señora?”
She breezed through the yard, touching women’s shoulders lightly, smoothing her hands over children’s hair. People lined up by the hose to wash the dust off their faces and legs and arms, and Mom made sure they each had a washcloth.

It was the deepest middle of night, no car headlights, not a sound beyond the low whispers, the light clink of glasses. A party, a secret middle-of-the-night party.

The next morning when I woke up, everyone was gone, not a trace except for a stack of clean dishes on the patio table, and bright white sheets on the clothesline. They had washed their own dishes and linens, Mom told me, after I’d asked her about the people, unsure whether it had been a dream. The women had requested buckets and soap and a sponge and a dish towel, and they scrubbed the dishes and washed the sheets and towels.

“Don’t tell anyone about last night, Sophie,” Juan warned me at breakfast.

“No one,” Mom added. “Not your friends. Not even Jasmín.”

After breakfast, I looked around by the chicken coop where the man had tossed the broken eggshell. Both halves were there, in the bushes. I saved them as a kind of souvenir. At first, they reminded me that the night wasn’t a dream. As I got older, they reminded me of what mattered in life.

We had about five or six midnight parties over the years. Only in emergencies, if the coyote’s other plans fell through. The coyote was the man the immigrants paid to lead them across the border. For hundreds of dollars per person, he was supposed to protect them from bandits, keep them from getting lost, show them holes in the fences to crawl through, tell them to hide when
la migra—
the Border Patrol—came close. And finally, after their journey—which sometimes wasn’t successful if
la migra
captured them and sent them back—the coyote had to make sure they had a ride from the U.S. side of the border to wherever they were going, like Chicago or New York or Denver. If the coyote and his helpers had a rough journey and ended up stuck with a truckload of hungry, thirsty, tired people, they called Juan.

On the night Pablo came, I couldn’t help wondering: If the seven people had survived, would they have spent the night in our yard? Pablo would have been just another scared kid clinging to his mother while I handed out glasses of water and plates of food.

Mom tried to mother Pablo. That summer, she took time off her waitressing job at the café and tried to interest him in Play-Doh and dried pasta mosaics and potato stamps. Juan read him books in Spanish, and on his days off, brought him to bilingual story time at the library. I took him to the park, made brownies and Jell-O with him. But none of us could eke out even a tiny smile. He swung if we put him on a swing, licked ice cream cones when we offered them, but without joy. At story hour, he clapped and stood up and sat down as commanded, but he let out none of the laughs and squeals that came naturally to the other children.

One afternoon in July, while we were baking cupcakes, I discovered a pack of candles in the kitchen junk drawer. “Pablito. Let’s put candles in our cupcakes to celebrate when I was supposed to be born. I came out two months early, you know. Which is probably why I’m messed up.”

Somehow, long ago, my little kid’s brain had pasted together pieces of overheard conversations: When Mom was a teenager, I started making her belly fat. And then my dad left. And then I was born too soon. And he came back to get us. But I was too skinny and ugly and sick. So he left. He left for good. So sometimes there was no money for cinnamon granola. Or sparkly heart stickers. Or the heating bill. Sometimes there was no one to pick me up from school on time. And there was no one to protect us from everything bad in the world.

I held out the bowl of batter for Pablo to lick. “You know, Pablo, today would have been my sixteenth birthday. July fifteenth. If I’d been born today, I might have turned out normal.”

And then, as he was licking the batter from his finger, he said something. A complete, perfect sentence in Spanish. Very softly, with his finger still in his mouth, he said,
“Cumplo seis años en julio
.”

For a moment, I just looked, stunned, at his face smeared with chocolate batter. I tried hard to act casual so that he’d keep talking. “
Entonces
, Pablito, you’re turning six this month?”

He nodded.

“
Bueno
, we’ll put candles in for you and we’ll have a party for you tonight, okay,
principito
?”

He nodded.
“Sí.”

Nine months passed before he said another word.

By October, the nights were too cool to sleep outside. Pablo would drag his comforter into my room and sleep on the floor by my bed. I tried picking him up and laying him next to me, but he would always climb back down.

We enrolled him in full-day kindergarten. The teacher said he was well behaved and followed directions, but never talked. He spent recesses alone, watching the other children. He seemed to live more in the realm of spirits and shadows and night than in the daylight world of games and toys that most six-year-olds inhabited.

Sometimes, in the evenings, he slipped a book silently into my hands. Strangely enough, his favorites were books of poetry and
The Little Prince
. It wasn’t the meaning of the words that mattered to him, it was their music.

“As the little prince was falling asleep, I picked him up in my arms, and started walking again. I was moved. It was as if I was carrying a fragile treasure. It actually seemed to me that there was nothing more fragile on Earth. By the light of the moon, I gazed at that pale forehead, those closed eyes, those locks of hair trembling in the wind, and I said to myself, What I’m looking at is only a shell. What’s most important is invisible….”

In the early spring, he started sleeping outside again, sometimes with me, sometimes with Dika. One morning, after we woke up on the comforter, Pablo let the chickens out of their coop just like any other day, but one of them refused to budge.

“Look, Pablo. She’s feeling lazy today.”

He picked up the chicken and revealed a perfect white egg.

“Pablo! You made the chicken get better.” I wasn’t sure why I said that, but when he nodded solemnly, I wondered if maybe, somehow, it was true.

With two hands, he carried the egg inside and presented it to Mom.

“¡Gracias, mi amor!”
She kissed the top of his head.

He smiled, just a little, not enough to see any teeth.

Mom made a big deal over the egg. She fried it the way he liked it,
estrellado
, star-shaped, broken right into the pan. She served it to him on a fancy plate with a gold-painted rim.

That night at dinner, Pablo spoke. He spoke in a burst of Spanish peppered with English. He spoke as though he were giving a school report, as though he’d been rehearsing the words in his head. “
Tenemos
chickens
en mi
town.
Mi
town
se llama
Santa María Nuquimi.
Está por las
mountains,
y tenemos
chickens
allá….”

Juan found Santa María Nuquimi on a map. It was in the state of Oaxaca, deep in southern Mexico—far from Tucson, probably a week of traveling by car. He found the phone number. It turned out there was only one phone in the village. I imagined a lonely plastic phone booth in the middle of the town square, ringing, with no one around to answer it. Pablo told me later it was inside a store where they sold lollipops and beer and strips of palm for weaving hats.

The shopkeeper picked up immediately and instructed Juan to hang up and call back in ten minutes, while she announced the call over the village loudspeaker. Pablo sat on Dika’s heavy thighs, which protruded from sky blue shorts. He traced the purple rivers of veins under her skin, something that always seemed to calm him. Soon he grew restless and shifted from one leg to another. “
¿Ya? ¿Podemos llamar?”
And a minute later: “We call, yes?” Then,
“¿Ya? ¿Son diez minutos?”

Finally, Juan dialed and we all held our breath. Juan introduced himself and explained how we ended up with Pablo. He listened and nodded for a few minutes, then passed the phone to Pablo.

Pablo talked with his uncle, mostly saying
sí
and
no
at first, and then, like a rush of water, telling him in Spanish how the chickens were laying eggs again and how many toys he had in the bathtub and how his teacher gave him a red star sticker, and how he got a strike when we went bowling last week and how we’d seen a movie about a pig who wanted his mom.

Afterward, Juan gave us the highlights: He had spoken with an uncle. Pablo’s aunts and uncles and grandmother had heard about the seven dead migrants. They prayed every night that Pablo and his parents weren’t part of that group. They were losing hope, as more time passed. Then they heard that one boy remained alive. They made some calls trying to get information, without success. The grandmother—who the uncle said “knows things”—assured everyone that if the boy was Pablo, he was safe and would call when he was ready. Finally, they decided to trust that if the boy was Pablo, he’d be in good hands.

In the days that followed, we called them three more times. Mom and Juan and Pablo spoke with his aunts, uncles, cousins, grandmother…I’d had no idea he was linked to all these people. Like the spearmint in our yard whose roots spread out, buried in the dirt. If you tried to pull out one plant, you’d end up following the root that led you, like a winding road, to another plant, and another, and another. Pablo had a whole network of hidden relatives who could take turns sleeping beside him and reading him stories.