American Dirt : A Novel (2020) (46 page)

‘All good,’ the driver calls.

Luca pins himself in next to Mami in a small dark place. He curls into her even though there’s enough room, pressing against Mami as if his life depends on her proximity, because now that they’re here, now that it’s this close, now that they’re minutes away from starting their new life, he doesn’t want to. In some primal way, he knows that once they’re safe, the monsters he’s so far managed to repel will come crashing in, and now there will be new monsters with them. A horde. He can feel them clawing at the door. But not yet.

He squeezes into her. Mami folds her arm around him and tucks the fingers of her hand beneath his rump. She fits him in there and makes herself his shield once more. She pulls his small hand toward her in the darkness and uncurls his fingers. She slips the loose gold halo of Papi’s ring around his outstretched pinky. The road beneath them dips and rolls. They cross the startling rumble of a cattle guard, and Luca presses his head against her chest. She wraps her hand around his forehead and closes her eyes. One final jolt of the ungainly RV, and suddenly there’s the level promise of pavement beneath their tires.

The Border Patrol checkpoint is closed, as anticipated. They roll through without stopping, and the twin RVs gather speed as they strike north through the gathering dusk. Soledad and Rebeca nearby tip their heads together, and lace their fingers together, and cast their breath together. They are motionless and moving at once. They each have secrets now. And yet, despite everything they’ve suffered, at this moment together, they’re full of something bigger than hope.

Lydia can’t see it from the dark place where she is, but she can sense it. She knows it’s that perfect time of day out there in the desert. She imagines the colors making a show of themselves outside. The glittering gray pavement, the aching red land. The colors streaking flamboyantly across the sky. When she closes her eyes she can see them, the paint in the firmament. Dazzling. Purple, yellow, orange, pink, and blue. She can see those perfect colors, hot and bright, a feathered headdress. Beneath, the landscape stretches out its arms.

Epilogue

Fifty-three days, 2,645 miles from the site of the massacre.

It’s not the little adobe house in the desert Lydia imagined. But there
is the yellow school bus, and Luca does board it every morning with a clean backpack and a new pair of sneakers. He doesn’t wear Papi’s hat anymore because it’s too special. It’s taken on a museum quality. It stays on top of his blue dresser along with his other treasures: Abuela’s rosary and an eraser shaped like a dragon that Rebeca got him. Luca’s hair is neatly cut and shampooed to smell like Papi’s now, with a trace of mint. The bus comes to the end of their tree-lined block, and when Luca gets on it, he does so with two Honduran children, an Ecuadorian girl, a Somali boy, and three
estadounidenses
. Lydia slips her finger inside Sebasti
á
n’s ring every morning when that bus pulls away.
Today will not be the last day I ever see our child
.

She has work cleaning houses. Her mother would have thought this the greatest irony. Lydia, whose house was never quite clean enough. The money’s not good, but it’s a start. They live with the girls’ cousin C
é
sar and his girlfriend. The girlfriend’s
t
í
a
lives here, too, and everyone contributes what they can. They take turns shopping and cooking.

Lydia’s English is a help, but there are many different languages in
el norte
. There are codes Lydia hasn’t yet learned to decipher, subtle differences between words that mean almost, but not quite the same thing:
migrant, immigrant, illegal alien
. She learns that there are flags people use here, and those flags may be a warning or a welcome. She is learning. Bookstores, invariably, are a refuge. There’s one in the town where they live, and the first time Lydia ventures in, it takes her breath away. She has to steady herself against a shelf. The smell of coffee and paper and ink. It’s nothing like her little shop back home. It’s stocked mostly with religious books, and instead of calendars and toys, they carry rosaries, Buddha figurines, yarmulkes. Still, the upright spines of the books are bedrock. Steady. There’s an international poetry section. Hafiz. Heaney. Neruda. Lydia flips past the twenty love poems and reads ‘The Song of Despair’. She reads it desperately, hungrily, bent over the book in the aisle of the quiet shop. Her fingers ready the next page while she devours the words. The book is water in the desert. It costs twelve dollars, but Lydia buys it anyway. She keeps it tucked into the waistband of her pants where she can feel it against her skin.

Lydia tries not to feel jealous when they wake up together and Luca tells her, his eyes still sticky with sleep, that Papi visited him in his dreams again last night. Lydia curls around him as if she can absorb the visit with her body.

‘What did he say?’ she asks Luca.

‘He never says anything. He just sits with me. Or we walk together.’

Lydia’s body throbs with longing. ‘That’s good,
mijo
.’

It’s almost a mile to the library, and they walk there together on Saturday mornings. On their third visit, the librarian invites them to apply for library cards, and when Lydia declines, the woman switches to Spanish and tells her there’s no danger to them, that they’re entitled to them regardless of their immigration status. Lydia is dubious at first, but if you can’t trust a librarian, who can you trust? She and Luca both get cards, and it’s miraculous, restorative, life changing. Rebeca comes with them sometimes, but Soledad never does.

The sisters are enrolled in school now, too, and it’s difficult for them. Not because their English is so minimal, or even because their schooling at home was rudimentary. They’re both smart, quick to learn. But their lives have been so expansive, their traumas so adult. They are young women, and now they’re meant to clip themselves into a three-ring binder each day. They’re meant to hang their jackets in lockers and flirt with boys in the hallways. They’re supposed to regress into shapes that were never familiar to them. They don’t understand the teenage expectations of
el norte
.

Lydia is coming home from work one day when a boy seated in front of her stands up to pull the stop-cord on the bus. As he reaches overhead, his wrist emerges slightly from his sleeve and Lydia notes the presence of a tattoo there in the shape of an X: a sickle and spade. The stop-cord dings, the bus slows. Lydia quails in her seat. As the bus hisses and lurches, accelerating away from the boy, she watches through the window while he pulls his hoodie over his head. Most days Lydia struggles
to accept how peripheral her life has become; today, she’s grateful to feel invisible. It’s impossible not to wonder about Javier then. Usually she locks him out of her mind, but there are moments when he slips in through the keyhole. She wonders if he’s sorry for what he did to her. If he feels justified. She wonders if he feels anything now, or if he’s shut it all down, if Marta’s death was too much for him, so he found a loophole, a way to opt out of humanity. She is stronger than he is; she feels every molecule of her loss and she endures it. She is not diluted, but amplified. Her love for Luca is bigger, louder. Lydia is vivid with life.

At school, Lydia meets with the principal, who wants to talk about Luca’s aptitude for geography.

‘There’s an annual geography bee,’ the woman had said on the phone. ‘I think we should enroll him.’

Lydia goes to fill in the paperwork. She sits in a comfortable chair across the desk from the principal, a woman about her own age. In the distance she hears a bell ring, and suddenly the view from the window is filled with swarming children. They shriek and run and climb and swing, and all that beautiful, happy noise is a strange backdrop to what the principal is saying.

‘I didn’t realize your son was undocumented.’ The woman swivels the chair beneath her, straining to get the words out. Lydia can tell this is uncomfortable for her. ‘I’m sorry; he won’t be eligible to win the prize.’

It’s absurd, Lydia knows, to feel crushed over a geography bee. It should mean nothing when weighed against the meaningful recent traumas of their life. She gazes out the window at the squealing children. The principal joins her momentarily in her reverie, and then speaks quietly in the room, crossing a line she’s not supposed to cross. It’s a border she’s disregarded many times before.

‘My parents were undocumented immigrants from the Philippines,’ she says to Lydia. ‘They brought me here when I was younger than Luca.’

Lydia doesn’t know how to respond. Is this a kind of solidarity? Should she feel encouraged? What she feels is exhausted. Itchy. Her hands are chapped.

‘I know some good immigration attorneys if you need help.’

In the fenced back garden of their little home on the tree-lined street, they bury eighteen painted stones. Beto’s is sky blue. Adri
á
n’s is a
bal
ó
n de f
ú
tbol
. Luca visits Papi’s buried stone every day after school. He tells his father’s buried stone about his new life in Maryland, how much he likes sharing a room with Mami. How he loves Rebeca more than he loves Soledad, and sometimes he feels bad about that, but not too bad, because the whole rest of the world loves Soledad. She doesn’t need his love like Rebeca does. He tells Papi about his teacher and the games he plays with his new friend Eric at recess. Kickball. Four square. Luca cries often. But he also talks, he laughs, he reads. He lives. Soledad and Rebeca visit their father’s stone less frequently, but slowly they’re beginning to spend time out there. Last week when Lydia was weeding, she found a playing card, the king of hearts, leaning against the base of their father’s cross. Once in a while when Lydia stands at the kitchen window washing dishes, she sees one of the girls sitting quietly out there in the grass. Sometimes they move their lips as if in prayer.

They still sleep with the lights on, or Luca does. Lydia mostly doesn’t sleep. She sits up in bed beside him, Luca now occupying the space where Sebasti
á
n once slept. She rubs his hair with one hand and hopes he’s dreaming again of his
papi
. She hopes that one night soon, Sebasti
á
n might slip out of their son’s dream and into her own, as if he’s a physical presence, atoms and particles in the room that can migrate from Luca’s brain into hers, ear to ear.
Una frontera santificada.
Late into the night she reads, and the lamplight falls in a soft circle across her tented knees, across the warm blankets, across Luca’s casting breath. In their new home, Lydia rereads
Amor en los tiempos del c
ó
lera,
first in Spanish, then again in English. No one can take this from her. This book is hers alone.

Author’s Note

In 2017, a migrant died every twenty-one hours along the United States–Mexico border. That number does not include the many migrants who simply disappear each year. Worldwide in 2017, as I was finishing this novel, a migrant died every ninety minutes, in the Mediterranean, in Central America, in the horn of Africa. Every hour and a half. So sixteen migrant deaths for each night I tuck my children into bed. When I first began my research in 2013, these estimates were difficult to find because no one was keeping track. Even now, the International Organization for Migration warns that the available statistics are ‘likely only a fraction of the real number of deaths’ because so many migrants who vanish are never accounted for in the first place. So maybe the number is more like two hundred deaths for each load of laundry I do. There are currently around forty thousand people reported missing across Mexico, and investigators routinely find mass graves containing dozens, sometimes hundreds, of bodies.

It’s also true that in 2017, Mexico was the deadliest country in the world to be a journalist. The nationwide murder rate was the highest on record, and the overwhelming majority of those murders go unsolved, no matter if victims are migrants, priests, reporters, children, mayors, activists. The cartels operate with impunity. There’s no recourse for victims of violence.

I am a US citizen. Like many people in this country, I come from a family of mixed cultures and ethnicities. In 2005, I married an undocumented immigrant. We dated for five years before we got married, and one reason for our prolonged courtship was that he wanted to get his green card before he proposed. My husband is one of the smartest, hardest-working, most principled people I’ve ever met. He’s a college graduate who owns a successful business, pays taxes, and spends a fortune on health insurance. Yet, after years of trying, we found there was no legal route available for him to get his green card until we got married. All the years we were dating, we lived in fear that he could be deported at a moment’s notice. Once, on Route 70 outside Baltimore, a policeman pulled us over for driving with a broken taillight. The minutes that followed while we waited for that officer to return to our vehicle were some of the most excruciating of my life. We held hands in the dark front seat of the car. I thought I would lose him.

So you could say I have a dog in the fight.

But the truth of my personal interest in this story is more complicated than that.

There are two other factors that were probably more responsible than my husband’s immigration status in piquing my interest in this subject. The first is this: When I was sixteen, two of my cousins were brutally
raped by four strangers and thrown off a bridge in St Louis, Missouri. My brother was beaten and also forced off the bridge. I wrote about that horrible crime in my first book, my memoir,
A Rip in Heaven
. Because that crime and the subsequent writing of the book were both formative experiences in my life, I became a person who is always, automatically, more interested in stories about victims than perpetrators. I’m interested in characters who suffer inconceivable hardship, in people who manage to triumph over extraordinary trauma. Characters like Lydia and Soledad. I’m less interested in the violent, macho stories of gangsters and law enforcement. Or in any case, I think the world has enough stories like those. Some fiction set in the world of the cartels and
narcotraficantes
is compelling and important – I read much of it during my early research. Those novels provide readers with an understanding of the origins of some of the violence to our south. But the depiction of that violence can feed into the worst stereotypes about Mexico. So I saw an opening for a novel that would press a little more intimately into those stories, to imagine the people on the flip side of that prevailing narrative. Regular people like me. How would I manage if I lived in a place that began to collapse around me? If my children were in danger, how far would I go to save them? I wanted to write about women, whose stories are often overlooked.

Which brings me to the final, most significant factor that influenced
my decision to tackle this subject. It took me four years to research and write this novel, so I began long before talk about migrant caravans and building a wall entered the national zeitgeist. But even then I was frustrated by the tenor of the public discourse surrounding immigration in this country. The conversation always seemed to turn around policy issues, to the absolute exclusion of moral or humanitarian concerns. I was appalled at the way Latino migrants, even five years ago – and it has gotten exponentially worse since then – were characterized within that public discourse. At worst, we perceive them as an invading mob of resource-draining criminals, and, at best, a sort of helpless, impoverished, faceless brown mass, clamoring for help at our doorstep. We seldom think of them as our fellow human beings. People with the agency to make their own decisions, people who can contribute to their own bright futures, and to ours, as so many generations of oft-reviled immigrants have done before them.

When my grandmother came to the States from Puerto Rico in the 1940s, she was a beautiful, glamorous woman from a wealthy family in the capital city, and the young bride of a dashing naval officer. She expected to be received as such. Instead, she found that people here had a very reductionist view of what it meant to be Puerto Rican, of what it meant to be Latinx. Everything about her confused her new neighbors: her skin tone, her hair, her accent, her notions. She wasn’t what they expected a
boricua
to be.

My grandmother spent much of her adult life in the States but didn’t always feel welcome here. She resented the perpetual gringo
misconceptions about her. She never got past that resentment, and the echoes of her indignation still have some peculiar manifestations in my family today. One of the symptoms is me. Always raging against a perceived slight, always fighting against ignorance in mainstream ideas about ethnicity and culture. I’m acutely aware that the people coming to our southern border are not one faceless brown mass but singular individuals, with stories and backgrounds and reasons for coming that are unique. I feel this awareness in my spine, in my DNA.

So I hoped to present one of those unique personal stories – a work of fiction – as a way to honor the hundreds of thousands of stories we may never get to hear. And in so doing, I hope to create a pause where the reader may begin to individuate. When we see migrants on the news, we may remember: these people are people.

So those were my reasons. And yet, when I decided to write this book, I worried that my privilege would make me blind to certain truths, that I’d get things wrong, as I may well have. I worried that, as a nonmigrant and non-Mexican, I had no business writing a book set almost entirely in Mexico, set entirely among migrants. I wished someone slightly browner than me would write it. But then, I thought,
If you’re a person who has the capacity to be a bridge, why not be a bridge?
So I began.

In the early days of my research, before I’d fully convinced myself that I should undertake the telling of this story, I was interviewing a very generous scholar, a remarkable woman who was chair of the Chicana and Chicano Studies Department at San Diego State University. Her name is Norma Iglesias Prieto, and I mentioned my doubts to her. I told her I felt compelled, but unqualified, to write this book. She said, ‘Jeanine. We need as many voices as we can get, telling this story.’ Her encouragement
sustained me for the next four years.

I was careful and deliberate in my research. I traveled extensively on both sides of the border and learned as much as I could about Mexico and migrants, about people living throughout the borderlands. The statistics in this book are all true, and though I changed some names, most of the places are real, too. But the characters, while representative of the folks I met during my travels, are fictional. There is no cartel called Los Jardineros, nor is that fictional organization based on a specific cartel, though it does reflect the general nature and composition of the cartels I encountered in my research. La Lechuza is not a real person.

One thing I had to learn while doing research for this book was to strangle the word
American
out of my own vocabulary. Elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere there’s some exasperation that the United States has co-opted that word, when in fact the American continents contain multitudes of cultures and peoples who consider themselves American, without the hijacked cultural connotations. In my conversations with Mexican people, I seldom heard the word
American
used to describe a citizen of this country – instead they use a word we don’t even have in English:
estadounidense
,
United States–ian. As I traveled and researched, even the notion of the American dream began to feel proprietary. There’s a wonderful piece of graffiti on the border wall in Tijuana that became, for me, the engine of this whole endeavor. I photographed it and made it my computer wallpaper. Anytime I faltered or felt discouraged, I clicked back to my desktop and looked at it:
También de este lado hay sueñ
os
.

On this side, too, there are dreams.