American Dirt : A Novel (2020) (25 page)

So when, after their showers, the director of the
casa
asks them if they’d like to use the communications room to email or call anyone, the girls’ excitement is almost too much to articulate. Finally, they can call Papi. Rebeca has never used a phone before, never lifted a device to her ear and heard the familiar voice of a faraway loved one. Soledad has never initiated a call. It’s an ordinary modern convenience that, for the sisters, still carries the full weight of the miraculous.

‘How do we do it?’ Rebeca asks her sister after the director has shown them into the quiet room and closed the door behind them.

Soledad frowns. ‘Get Luca.’

The room is small, and it contains a desk with a glowing computer, one rolling office chair, and a small, floral-print couch. The phone sits on the desk beside the monitor. Rebeca returns quickly with Luca, who sits down at the computer, asks the sisters for the name of the hotel where their father works, and finds the phone number within seconds. He writes it down on the lone yellow notepad, but when he stands to go, Soledad asks him to dial it, too.

‘What’s your father’s name?’ he asks, covering the mouthpiece as the line rings in his ear.

‘Elmer,’ Soledad says. ‘Ask for Elmer Abarca Lobo in the main
kitchen.’

So Luca does, but as he prepares to immediately hand the phone over to Soledad, the receptionist says, ‘I’m sorry, but Elmer isn’t working today. Hold on.’

Luca hears the sound of her voice, muffled for a moment before she returns to speaking clearly.

‘Can I ask who’s calling?’ she says.

‘I’m here with his daughters. I was just putting in the call for them.’

‘I see,’ she says.

‘Hold on, I’ll put Soledad on,’ Luca says.

He hands the phone to Soledad, who takes his seat, her face brightening in nervous anticipation. She hopes Papi won’t be angry with them. She hopes he’ll understand why they had to leave the way they did, without warning, without a proper goodbye. She’s been haunted, these last weeks, by the thought of him coming home alone to the dark apartment, exhausted from a double shift, and finding her note. She’s tried not to think about the anguish it might’ve caused him. She bites her lip.

‘Hello?’ she says.

‘Hello,’ a woman’s voice on the line – still the receptionist. ‘You’re calling for Elmer? Is this Elmer’s daughter?’

‘Yes, it’s Soledad. Is he there? May we speak with him?’

‘I’m afraid Elmer’s not working right now, Soledad.’

Soledad’s shoulders slump, and she leans back in the chair. ‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Can we leave a message for him? It’s an important message and I don’t know when we’ll have an opportunity to use a telephone again. I’m here with my sister, Rebeca, and we want to tell him we’re okay.’

‘Soledad,’ the woman says.

Just that, just her name.
Soledad.
But something about the hesitation in those three syllables makes Soledad’s stomach drop. She straightens up in the chair.

‘I’m sorry, but your father won’t be back to work for quite some time.’

Soledad grabs the edge of the desk, and turns her back to her sister. Luca reaches for the doorknob, but Soledad puts a hand on his shoulder. Her mouth is open, but she refuses to ask the questions that will lead to her enlightenment. She doesn’t want to know.

‘I’m sorry, Soledad, but your father had an accident. Not an accident. Your father, he – he’s in the hospital.’

Soledad clamps her knees together and stands up, sending the chair rolling away behind her. ‘Why? What happened?’

Rebeca stands up then, too, and Luca moves next to her.

‘Is he okay?’ Soledad asks.

The woman’s voice is low. ‘I think he’s stable, that was the last we heard.’

Soledad takes one breath.
Stable.
‘But what happened?’

‘He was attacked coming into work last week.’

She moves to collapse into the chair again, but the chair is no longer behind her, and she almost falls to the floor. Luca grabs the chair and rolls it over. She sits.

‘He was stabbed,’ the woman is saying. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Which hospital?’

‘
El
Nacional. I’m sorry, Soledad.’

Soledad hangs up the phone, and it takes Luca less than one minute to find the number for the Hospital Nacional in San Pedro Sula. Again, he dials for them, but this time he hits the speakerphone button so they can all hear. And 1,360 miles away, in the ICU unit in a six-story green-and-blue building, a nurse wearing clean white scrubs and a blue stethoscope darts into the nurses’ station and tosses a chart onto the cluttered desk. Luca, Rebeca, and Soledad all hear her pick up the phone. They lean forward.

‘I think my father is there,’ Soledad says. Her voice sounds swollen and cobwebby in her ears. ‘My father, Elmer Abarca Lobo. The woman at his work told us he was there since last week?’

They can hear things clicking and beeping in the background. Voices. A child crying. The nurse does not immediately reply.

‘Hello?’ Rebeca says.

‘I’m looking,’ the nurse replies. There are folders, charts. She’s flipping through them.

Soledad’s hand darts over and grabs her sister’s across the desk. Together, their knuckles turn hard and shiny.

‘A woman at his work told us he was stabbed.’

‘Oh,’ as if the nurse suddenly remembers. ‘Yes, Elmer,’ she says. ‘He’s here. Not in great shape, I’m afraid, but he’s stable now. He lost a lot of blood.’

Rebeca clamps her free hand over her mouth. Soledad digs her fingers into the skin of her face, her lower jaw. ‘Can we speak with him?’

‘No, he’s not conscious,’ the nurse says. ‘Can you come in?’

Rebeca shakes her head, but Soledad answers out loud. ‘We’re not in Honduras,’ she explains. ‘We’re in Mexico.’

Rebeca is stuck on a different detail. ‘What do you mean he’s not conscious? What does that mean?’

‘It means we have him sleeping right now because of the damage to his brain. He needs to sleep until the swelling and trauma are under control.’

Soledad pitches forward, curling her body over her knees.

‘Damage to his brain?’ Rebeca says. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Yes,’ the nurse says. ‘He was stabbed in the face.’

‘Oh my God.’ Both girls begin to cry.

Luca is shifting his weight ever more rapidly from foot to foot. He backs away from the phone until he’s leaning against the wall beside the door.

‘He was stabbed once in the stomach and twice in the face.’ The nurse keeps talking. She’s not oblivious to the sisters’ pain, but she knows
she has to impart this information, and it’s better to do it quickly, like ripping off a Band-Aid, so they can move on to the next part, where they already know all the awful information and can begin to process it. ‘The stab wound that did the most damage was to the right-hand side of his infraorbital region—’

‘Infraorbital? What is that?’ asks Soledad. ‘Please speak simply.’

Even the most hardened trauma nurse in the most violent city in the world would have difficulty conveying this detail to the family.

‘His eye,’ she explains.

‘They stabbed him in the eye?’ Soledad asks.

‘Yes,’ the nurse says.

‘Oh my God,’ Rebeca says again.

‘Yes,’ the nurse says.

She tells them he’s resting comfortably, that he’s stable, that they will keep him in the medically induced coma until the doctor feels it’s safe to wake him up. She doesn’t know how long that will be. She warns them that the stab wounds were significant, and that there may be lasting damage to his brain. She explains that there’s no way to assess that damage until the initial period of rest and healing has concluded.

‘Girls,’ the nurse says quietly, and they hear a door close on her end of the line, followed by a peripheral silence. ‘Do you know who did this to your father?’

Soledad lets out a sob and then answers, ‘Yes, I think yes. I do.’

Rebeca’s black eyes grow even larger and darker. A storm in her face.

‘Listen to me,’ the nurse says then. ‘I need you to listen carefully.’

Both girls breathe raggedly. They are shaking.

‘Don’t you dare come back here,’ the nurse says. ‘Don’t even think about it. Do you hear me?’

Their faces are wet, their noses filled with snot and tears. Rebeca sniffs loudly and lets a small cry loose into the room.

‘He’s getting the best care possible, okay?’ the nurse says. There’s a catch in her voice, too. ‘We are doing everything we can to make him well again. And if you come back here just to sit in our waiting room and wring your hands and cry and get yourselves both stabbed in the eye, too, well, it’s not going to do him one bit of good, you understand?’

They do not answer.

‘How old are you girls?’

‘Fifteen,’ Soledad says.

‘Fourteen,’ says Rebeca.

‘Good. Your
papi
wants you to live until you are one hundred years old, okay? You cannot do that if you come back here. Keep going.’

In San Pedro Sula, at the Hospital Nacional
,
they can hear the nurse blowing her nose.

‘My name’s
Á
ngela. Call me again next time you get to a phone, and I’ll give you an update.’

‘Thank you,’ Rebeca says.

The nurse clears her throat. ‘I’ll tell your father you called.’

After they hang up, they stay in the room without speaking. Soledad stands up and sits down and stands up again at least ten times. Rebeca sits on the edge of the couch and shreds a Kleenex into pulp. Luca does not move. He hopes the sisters will forget he’s there. He hopes they won’t speak to him or ask anything of him. He needs to get out of this room but cannot move. His
papi
is dead. Luca lifts a hand to touch the red brim of his dead father’s hat. He pictures Papi on the back patio of Abuela’s house without nurses or blankets or beeping machines that might save him. He pictures the silence of pooling blood. Luca stands there and blends into the wall.

Soon, there’s a knock on the door. Soledad is grateful for the knock, as it gives her something outside her body to attend to. She opens the door.

‘About finished?’ A staff counselor stands in the hallway with another migrant. ‘There’s a fifteen-minute time limit when people are waiting.’

‘Yes, sorry,’ Soledad says. ‘We’ll be right out.’

Luca slips out just before the counselor closes the door.

Inside, Soledad whispers, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘What?’ Rebeca looks up from her tormented Kleenex.

‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It’s my fault, Rebeca. Forgive me.’

Rebeca moves swiftly across the small space and throws her arms around Soledad so her rainbow wristband presses against the still-wet blackness of her sister’s hair.

‘Sh,’ she says.

‘It’s all my fault,’ Soledad says over and over again, until finally Rebeca pushes back from her and shakes her roughly by her two shoulders.

‘Don’t be ridiculous. It’s no one’s fault. Only
ese hijo de puta
.’

Soledad crumples even smaller into her sister’s arms. ‘But I had to make a horrible choice,’ she cries. ‘It was you or Papi, I knew that. I knew we were putting him in danger if we left. Iv
á
n warned me. I just, I didn’t really think he’d go through with it. I thought if we left, he
.
.
.’

She doesn’t bother finishing the sentence because it doesn’t matter what she thought. She was wrong. The sisters take two shaky breaths together, and Rebeca wipes Soledad’s tears with her thumbs.

‘Stop,’ Rebeca says. ‘Stop it, Sole. Papi would’ve made the same choice. When he’s better he’ll be so proud of you. You’ll see.’

Soledad dries her face with a fresh Kleenex. She blows her nose. ‘You’re right.’

‘He’ll be okay,’ Rebeca says.

‘He has to.’

Into the clicking, beeping silence of Papi’s hospital room in San Pedro Sula, the nurse Ángela enters solemnly in her white sneakers. She had known his name, of course, because of the identification they found in his wallet. But there had been no visitors, no inquiries, until today. Sometimes it’s easier that way – you can provide the care the patient needs, manage his pain, and administer to his broken body without the weight of additional sorrow. Ángela has been a nurse in this city long enough to know that the pain of the family often eclipses the pain of the patient.

It’s relatively quiet in the ward this evening, so after she checks his vitals and changes his waste bag, Ángela has time to sit with him. It’s still light out, but she turns on the table lamp anyway because she finds its soft glow comforting. She closes her eyes briefly before she speaks to him. Her colleagues don’t do this anymore because it’s too taxing. Too heavy. Ángela is the only one. The violence is overwhelming in this place now. It’s become a gang pageant of blood and grisly one-upmanship. The ICU is always busy, but it’s not as overcrowded as the morgue. The other nurses use irreverent humor to cope. They use a secret rating system of smiley faces to forecast their patients’ chances of survival. Ángela doesn’t judge them for it. They have to go home to their children at the end of their shifts. They want to stay married. They want to eat dinner and drink a beer in the yard with the neighbors. But after twenty years on the job, Ángela still can’t shut it off. She doesn’t even want to.