The Delivery (17 page)

Chapter 25

M
ozey

“We came across when I was six. My baby sister, Brisa, was only eighteen months old. My father had come to the States years before. He left the first time when I was a year. My parents got together young. Where they came from there were no jobs. You either eked out a living from the earth or you moved. I grew up in a neighborhood called
La Neza
. It was on the northern outskirts of Mexico City; it’s a shantytown really. It grew out of nothing, poor people arriving looking for work in the city who couldn’t afford rent, so they flocked there and built homes for themselves out of whatever they could find. They didn’t have electricity or any running water. My dad still had to pay rent for the two room cinder-block structure they lived in. Just because it was a ghetto, doesn’t mean there weren’t landlords.

Then I came along. They couldn’t afford to take care of a kid, so my dad went to work in Los Angeles. He found a job as a waiter. It was a long time before he contacted us. He was supposed to be sending his money back to support us. But I think once he started his new life, he really just forgot about us.

My mom was young and didn’t have any skills. She ended up taking in laundry and scrubbing other people’s dirty underwear from dusk to dawn. There were always tubs of water all around us. To me the whole world smelled like that blue block of laundry soap. I remember when her fingers would split open and bleed. I knew she was unhappy and missed him. I knew she was scared all of the time. So scared that sometimes I still hear her crying in my dreams.

A couple of times she got threatened, and once they came in and robbed the place. She took us on a bus all the way back to her hometown. Some rural farmland in the middle of nowhere. Her parents, my grandparents, sent her back after just a few days. They said that my dad would eventually send for her and that we had to wait. But the years went by, and he came and went a few times, but he never thought we could make it across the border alive. Every once in a blue moon he’d send money. We’d watch it go out as quick as it came. I thought that money was magic. Fucking mystical dollars, the weavers of our destiny.

I was probably five when she started taking in “dates.” She only broke down and did it after she was raped. I sat on the other side of the wall and listened to it and not because I wanted to. I listened to her cry and softly call my father’s name while anonymous assholes had their way.

You can’t protect your mother from men when you’re only five years old—no matter how bad you might want to.

Brisa was born not long after. My mom delivered at home, and I was scared shitless. She screamed and cursed at her midwife, scratched her arms and pulled her hair. Brisa was yellow when she came out, totally jaundiced. There wasn’t a doctor we could afford, and the midwife promised the yellow-color would eventually go away. We took her to a neighborhood healer who reluctantly passed an egg over her in exchange for the chicken it came from. She burned incense and chanted a prayer. Either it worked, or Brisa naturally grew out of it.

My sister could have been fathered by anybody, even the landlord. He came pretty regularly to collect ‘the rent’ from my mom. But my mom was convinced Brisa was my father’s daughter. Maybe she was delusional. She had to hang onto something. “All you have to do is look at her nose,” she would say. And Brisa did look just like the picture my mom had hanging on the wall of me when I was in diapers.

I loved my baby sister whether she was full blood or not. Taking care of her gave me something else to think about. I looked forward to her growing up—to a time when we could actually play together. I was the one who watched Brisa while my mom turned “dates.” I learned how to change her and how to rock her to sleep in my arms, how to quiet her when she was hungry by letting her suck on my finger.

The way we were wasn’t any way to live, and one day, my mom decided she’d had enough. One night she just didn’t go to sleep, and she stayed up sewing our names into our clothes. I don’t know how she was so fearless or where she found the resolve. She got money from her family and some from my dad’s. She wrapped Brisa to her body, and we only carried one bag. We road
La Bestia
North and the trip nearly killed us. It was cold. It was evil. The trip was fucking torture. I think that what saved us again and again was Brisa and how she was tied to my mom’s body. It kept away the men and kept all of them from robbing us.

I swear my mother didn’t sleep, not a single minute during the four days it took us to get to the border. She clung to us and she clung to the train. She was so determined and stared death right in its face. She was so brave—was the same age that I am now. The trip terrified me but I was happy because I thought we were going to be reunited with my dad. I believed that in America we’d finally find safety. That men wouldn’t hurt my mom there and that we’d be protected by my father. That we’d all smile around the breakfast table like they did in the television commercials.

That mural in TJ on the side of the strip club wasn’t just a coincidence. What I drew there happened in real life. My mom had to pick up a few jobs to raise the money for the coyote. I remember her whispering over and over, “Don’t let Brisa cry, Moisés. They won’t give me the job if they know you’re here.” I did my best to hide both of our sobs.

The coyote we ended up contracting was probably dirty. He had to be considering what little she could pay him. The ones that aren’t just fucking you over charge more for a real crossing.

We were thirteen thick in the back of a van. Old people, kids, babies and parents. All of us scared shitless, already ruined from the journey. But we were willing to risk death to change our luck. She gave him every last cent we had, and then he took more in a gas-station bathroom while I held Brisa in the corner and cried, and he called me a pussy.

I wanted to die after a day in the van. The heat was unbearable and somehow worse in the dark. Everybody was crying and praying, and we were all eating dust that blew up through the rusted holes in the floor. We kept waiting for it to stop so we could get out, but it kept on going forever until it felt like days had passed. Probably fucking driving us in circles.

Then all of the sudden it stopped, and we all went flying into one another, banging our heads. When they jerked open the doors, the light hurt our eyes, and everybody was blinking, trying to adjust. We were so fucking helpless and scared. That’s when I knew that our fate was completely out of our own hands.

We all wanted to see America, but it looked like we were still in Mexico pulled off to the side of some forgotten highway. There were a few guys with rifles, and one fat guy in a maroon colored button up shirt with sweat stains under the armpits. He was wearing aviator glasses. They looked in at us, and we all squinted back, wondering what the fuck was happening. Were they just going to shoot us? Would they let us out to stretch our legs or would that be the end of us? A pile of dead bodies in the back of a truck, or left on the road to be eaten by vultures?

But it was worse than that. When they pulled my mom out of the van, I screamed. I was sitting between her legs. I tried to hang onto her but they pulled me off like a bug and threw me back into the van. I thought they were pulling her clothes off to rape her again, but what they were going for wasn’t her body. They were after my baby sister.

See my mom had good genes that made her always stand out. She was tall, she was beautiful, and she had something regal about her—something all those predators wanted to take and destroy. They didn’t think she deserved it, and they wanted her to know they had absolute power. Remind her of her place. They tore Brisa from her body, and my mom turned into a raving beast. She was a wild animal.

I thought they would kill her for how she was screaming and clawing. But they took my baby sister over to a black sedan that was waiting, and they opened the door, set her in the lap of some lady. All I saw was her profile, her blonde hair and her high-heeled shoes. She looked like a telenovela star to me, she grabbed Brisa and closed the car door. The windows were tinted. That was the last I ever saw of her.

I tried to help. I tried to get to my mom, but some lady held me back—thinking back on it, she probably saved my life. I’m sure they would have shot me without a moment’s hesitation. Nobody knew what they were doing, if they would take other kids, if they would shoot my mother for screaming. Then they shoved her back in, and she fought with everything she had. She scraped her fingers along the door until they bled and were broken. I sat close to her hip, and I was afraid to touch her. She finally fell asleep, but even asleep, she still moaned and lamented.

That wasn’t the end because we would spend another twenty-four hours in the back of the van. No food, no water, no toilet. Not even light or air. Just dust, hundred degree heat and some soul snuffing terror. We ran out of water in the first couple of hours. Some people got sick, and it started to stink, but you couldn’t see who, because it was as black as night except for some rays of light coming up through the rusted floor. They looked like laser beams filled with dust, and I ran my hands through them for hours while she slept.

Sometime that night I thought I would die of thirst. I started to get lethargic, to drift in and out. Everything seemed really fuzzy. My vision was grainy. I kept hallucinating thinking I could see Brisa, that she was back with us.

Then my mom saved my life. No matter how many wrong turns she took later, I could never hate her. I knew that she loved me even though she couldn’t always show it.”

“What did she do? How did it end?” This is my first and only interruption of Mozey’s telling. I am all at once gripped and shattered by his story.

“You really want me to keep going?”

“You have to tell me, Mozey.”

He shifts and moves his hands on the wheel, then looks off into the horizon. He focuses on the road and then begins to speak again.

“Somebody did die. An older man. The adults moved him to the back as best they could. We put our stuff on top of him to try to temper the smell. Doesn’t take long at all in that kind of heat. We tried not to cry because we would dehydrate ourselves even more.

“It was probably only twenty-four hours, but those hours lasted an eternity, and they were the darkest days on earth. It was a never ending journey. Eventually she woke up, and like I said, I was fading. I knew I had to try hang on. I wanted to stay alive, if only to protect her. I remember I kept tugging on her skirt. At some point I lost consciousness, then my mother pulled me to her breast. See Brisa was still nursing. Mostly at night and probably for comfort, but we were poor and my mom knew it would make her strong and resilient—that it was the best food she could get. She was falling apart back then, but she had good intentions. She always wanted what was best for us.

“The breast milk revived me. When I woke up all the way and realized what I was doing, I felt so ashamed that I pulled away from her. She whispered in my ear in Spanish, ‘God gave me milk to feed my children.’

“Thing is, I wasn’t ashamed to be six and nursing. I wasn’t embarrassed to be breastfeeding in the back of a van crammed with twenty other refugees. My shame came from stealing my sister’s milk. The milk belonged to Brisa, and I felt so awful that it was meant to sustain her and not me. It was the worst feeling in the world, to drink from my mother’s breast and know that my baby sister was somewhere—crying and hungry for what I was taking. Knowing all along that my mother was dying inside thinking the same thing and that I was taking that bond between them, taking what wasn’t mine, stealing it from both of them.

“And that’s the story of how I survived and Brisa didn’t—or at least not as Brisa. The story of how we climbed on board, joining the American dream. It’s how my mom fell and could never quite get back up on her feet. The story of how Moisés Robles de la Cruz stole his baby sister’s milk and became such a fuck-up.”

Chapter 26

T
he car seat is soaked from the drench of my steady tears. I’m keeping my crying silent because it wouldn’t be fair to him to make him stop his telling and try to comfort my discomfort with his history. Mozey’s reality. A sadder story, I’ve never known. The bravery it took to tell it—I’ll probably never encounter again. I loved Mozey before, but now I’m in awe of him. How did he turn out so incredible when his journey wasn’t only painful, it was torturous?

“Thank you for telling me that,” I say, wiping the snot from my nose on the back of my sleeve. “It’s a truly remarkable story.”

“You sound like a social worker, Lana. Tell me what you really think? Disgusted by how pathetic it is? Does it make you see me as weak?”

“Don’t get angry for telling me, Mozey. You chose to share it with me. It’s a story of great strength not a show of weakness. Everyone has a tale of origin and not all of them are pretty. Thing is, it’s your starting point, and it doesn’t have to define all of you. It
is
a remarkable story and you turned into a remarkable person. ”

We pull off of the highway into a rest area offering gas and bathrooms and something to eat. We’re suddenly back in civilization after so many miles covered with only the two of us. Mozey exits the car and slams the door without sharing a plan of why we stopped or of what we’re going to do here. He hates that he made himself vulnerable. He wants me to see him as strong.

I know from my training in social work and all the years in the field, Mozey hates his own beginning and that means he hates himself. It’s something I can relate to—of course nowhere near as extreme as his own. But I too often feel tainted by the shadow of my beginning. It’s the unshakeable feeling of wanting to shake off your own history and rewrite yourself.

I drag my feet over to the bathrooms on the side of the gas station. They stink from the outside so I’m sure it’s not going to be pretty. There are no stalls, only a row of toilets and none of them have seats. Since we started this trip, I feel like every bathroom in Mexico was left in a state of being incomplete. Where are all the toilet seats? Don’t they come with the toilets? I drag myself over to the darkest corner and reluctantly pull down my pants. At least I can’t understand what people are saying; it gives me a false sense of cover. There is no toilet paper, of course. There’s an attendant, but I forgot my pesos in the car. I try to decide what’s more humiliating: flagging her down from the pot or not wiping in front of everyone and pulling my pants up despite the drips. I go with the latter. I don’t care if I’m dirty.

I trudge over to the car, and Mozey is nowhere in sight. He must have gone to get food and felt like I didn’t need an invite. In other words, he expects me to pull away and confirm the worthlessness that he feels. I’m trained in this shit. I know how to deal with it.

I’m being pulled into the undertow of his sea of grief. The sadness I feel is here for two reasons. The first is that the man I love has had it really rough. He hates himself, he feels unworthy. He is deeply, deeply scarred. He thinks his sister deserves to be here and the whole incident was his fault.

The second reason is more personal. Today, more than ever, Mozey has shown me that it’s not a good idea to get involved with him. He needs professional help, and I’m a professional. His seeking attention and approval from me is symptomatic of the trauma, not a sign he’s in love with me. I can’t add myself onto the list of people who have hurt him. I can’t do that to him. I care about him too much.

He’s on a payphone by the entrance of the restaurant, and I can tell from the slump of his shoulders and how his hand grips the box that the conversation isn’t a good one. His strong body looks as if it could be close to breaking down in sobs.

I buy weird looking Mexican chips and candy in the small convenience story by the phones. I can’t peel my eyes off him and the toll the conversation is taking—his whole frame is caving. I pay for the junk food and make my way closer. It sounds like he’s speaking a bit in Spanish. My guess is that he’s talking to his wife. Thinking about Brisa probably makes him think about his son. I don’t want to intrude, so I sit on the side of a huge ceramic potted plant. I tear open a bag of chips still not taking my eyes from him. Of course they’re as hot as lava, all mashed into some cornmeal. My throat constricts, my eyes water, and I start to cough. Mosey turns around at my choking and brings the phone to his chest.

“You okay, baby?” he asks.

Oh, for the love of God, DO NOT, call me baby! Especially not in this moment.

I nod my head yes and pound on my chest with my fist. How does this whole country consume fire food? Don’t they get ulcers from eating like this? I watch Mozey’s mouth form the words, “gotta go,” and he hangs up the phone. He’s coming to save me from my Scoville scale emergency that’s my own stupid fault.

“Want some lava lamp chips? They taste like Mount Saint Helens,” I ask lamely. I’ve just about given up on this trip. I’m acting dumb to avoid the tension between us.

He says nothing but grabs my hand and pulls me to standing.

“Did you get to the bathroom?” he asks, picking up stride through the parking lot.

“Yeah. I peed like a champ and then didn’t wipe in front of everyone.”

“Nice,” he replies, looking both ways for cars in the parking lot. We rush across the lot to our car by the bathrooms. There doesn’t seem to be any organized rhyme or reason to the coming and going of vehicles. Without signs or traffic signals, the parking lot is mayhem. We’re trying to pass through a jumble of cars that are all stuck in the stalemate of parking lot gridlock. Mozey pulls my hand, and we attempt to cross, just as a car sees an opening and whizzes right past us, dousing us in dirty puddle water and almost taking my foot off.

Mozey roars with misdirected anger and lunges at the car, which is now stuck in a new spot fifteen feet from where it was before. He kicks the frame on the underside of the driver’s side door. It probably hurts his foot a lot more than it hurts the car. He swears loudly in Spanish and offers a spew of insults that make me blush even though I’m not sure what he’s saying. I get the gist of it. I’m pretty fluent in anger. I always understood my mother’s perfectly.

But I’m not quite fluent in treating it. If that were the case, I would have cured myself years ago.

“Mo, just leave it!” I shout, with visions of narcos and crooked cops and general lawlessness taking over. He has no idea who he’s kicking, and we should always be careful. Especially here. With the both of us, foreigners, no one to look after us or worry if we go missing.

“Mo, you want to paint? I saw a good spot over here,” I say, nodding in the direction of the pretend spot that I didn’t see.

He perks up like a wolf catching a scent in the breeze.

“Yeah, the side of the bathrooms? I was thinking the same thing.”

“Let’s do it!” I say, grasping at strings. Mozey shrugs at the driver who is exiting the car. His attention has been captured, and his mind is already there, creating the outlines, filling in the color with long and even strokes.

He grabs his backpack from the trunk, and I hear the telltale clanking of full cans of spray paint being jostled and banging. He’s already got the idea, I can tell from looking at him. His eyes are full of glitter, and his chest is panting. This man was born to create, and when he does, he’s in his element. I sit in the grass and cool my tongue down with some terrible chocolate and gummy things. Wouldn’t you just know it, most of the Mexican candy even has hot stuff in it. I finally figured it out. That’s how they do it. They train their kids young. Mozey takes a lollipop dipped in chili powder and pops it in his mouth. I lean back on my arms and decide that this is how I’ll always remember him: beanie on his head, barely holding back his hair, brow furrowed in concentration, sucker in his mouth. I thought he would paint the van or maybe Brisa being taken, but Mozey is painting flowers. He must have been inspired by Paradise. There is so much color that it’s making me dizzy. I take out another chili-dipped sucker, tentatively lick it and hold my breath as I stick it in my mouth. I can’t believe I didn’t buy water. I know in a few hours I’m going to regret eating this.

When he comes to the end, after a field full of warm colored flowers, he paints a tall and proud looking Mexican woman who can only be his mother. She has his Indian features, sharp brow and strong jaw, the same expression of intelligence and defiance that she passed onto her son. She is holding two giant, tropical orange-red flowers. In the center of one, is curled a small baby girl. In the center of the other, Mozey paints his own face. It takes him so few swipes of the can to create his own likeness to perfection, that I gawk with my jaw open, feeling like I’m watching some kind of magician. He signs his name in the corner and wipes the sweat from his brow. He finished a masterpiece before he finished his lollipop.

He pulls me to standing and I brush the dried grass from my butt.

“You are so talented, Mo,” I say, looking up at him in awe.

“Save it, Doc. I’m not going to paint you or kiss you.”

It’s funny how you can go from being overwhelmed with compassion and emotion in one second to angry frustration from one stupid sentence. From a little chain of words unleashed as a joke from the lips of the man that you are helplessly in love with.

I ball my fists and go to charge away from him. He grabs my arm and yanks me back forcefully, and his expression is pained.

“Were you talking to your wife?” I demand, sounding jealous and so, so immature, even to myself. I don’t want to be like this. I know better. We aren’t even having a relationship. I’m going to drop him off in Mexico.

“Don’t be mad, Lana. I was talking to my mom.”

“You’re in touch with her?” I asked surprised.

“It’s hard not to be when she’s always searching me down looking for money.”

“Oh, I thought you were estranged.” I say, jamming my hands in my pockets. “We should get driving,” I say vacantly but my face is now covered in tears.

“I shouldn’t have told you that story. It’s too much to hear. Thanks for this,” he says, motioning to the painting. “Helped get me out of my head.”

We walk a few steps and then Mozey stops again.

“Lana? I love it when you watch me paint.”

He’s so earnest, and he’s holding my fingers but gently pulling me toward him.

I sob out loud, and it sounds strange and foreign, like an animal dying or some strangled foghorn; a ship’s warning.

How can I get you out of my head? I shouldn’t be holding you. I shouldn’t be craving your touch with every single part of me.

“Want me to drive?” I ask, straightening my shoulders.

“You drive me crazy. I want to see you. Can you be your true self?” Mozey smashes me into a hug, and my body goes limp. He kneads the back of my neck and breathes in my scent. I can feel his heart beating against mine. I know that I frustrate him. I know that it’s sick to want to both fuck him and save him.

“Thanks for listening to the world’s saddest and most awkward story. Don’t let it affect you. Try not to get lost in it, it’s over—for the most part.”

“I know it is. But I can’t help but want to save that part of you. I want to go back in time and protect you from everything bad you ever had to go through.”

“Without those experiences, Lana, I wouldn’t be standing here in front of you. I was only messing with you before. I’ve been dying to kiss you. Watching your mouth while you sleep is the worst kind of torture.”

Mo walks me backward and presses me up against the wet paint. I can feel that it’s still wet from how my shirt and pants stick to it.

“Be careful. We’ll ruin it.”

“I’ll ruin you, if you let me.”

Do you think that from a kiss you might see the rest of your future? That a kiss can dissolve all the fears you’ve held onto your entire life? Or that it could assure you that no mistakes were made in solidifying your destiny? That now was meant to be now and everything will turn out fine?

No? Well, then you’ve never kissed Mozey. His sweet tongue has never slid between your lips and opened up your whole universe, flooding it with color and emotion. He’s never grabbed the back of your neck and pushed you harder into the wall, pressing the entire length of his body up along yours, letting you feel it all. All of the sorrow and the pain and the beauty and the desire, a rainstorm of emotion packaged tightly into

one

perfect

person.

It’s funny how perfection can completely change its definition. How
perfect
can become the man whose arms are holding you up. How
perfect,
perfectly describes this man whose entire life has been ravaged by imperfections.

My body flushes with heat in response to his desire.

Lana? The one they call Doc. The social worker? Well, that lady can go fuck herself. There is no one here to judge us. It’s just him and me, pressed up against a rest stop bathroom, lost on a long highway, on an involuntary road trip to Mexico.

Mozey has his hands against the wall as he greedily consumes my mouth. When he moves his hand down to touch my body, the bright smears of paint leave stains on my shirt. I love that his touch leaves a mark on me. I want to be marked by him, taken and possessed. I pull him in tighter to focus on really kissing him for the very first time.

After ten minutes of kissing we get back into the car. My lips are swollen and they hurt in the very best possible way. I drive this time so Mozey can rest. I’m not sure how this changes things. All I can think is that it will lead to sex. Maybe even tonight if we get a hotel room. I can’t stop thinking about it and glancing over at his crotch. I’m like a junior high school boy, fixated with his body, especially with his penis. My brain is on a repeat loop fantasy of touching and undressing him. And some little part of me feels like a child molester. Like we just finished a therapy session and I still want to fuck him. Get him to let his guard down and open up then go in for the kill. I should write the fucking manual on effective social work with juvenile delinquents.