American Dirt : A Novel (2020)

by Cummins, Jeanine

  ‘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 Ángela. 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. Iván 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.

  She pulls the chair closer to Elmer’s bedside and lifts his hand, careful not to disturb his IV line. She rubs the back of his hand with her thumb. ‘Elmer, your daughters called today,’ she says quietly. ‘Soledad and Rebeca called from Mexico, and they’re doing well, Elmer. Your daughters are okay. They’re on their way to el norte.’

  Chapter Twenty

  Later that night, when the initial wash of shock has lost its bite and the sisters are beginning to feel calm beneath the new distress of the terrible news, Lorenzo shows up at the shelter. Lydia is helping in the kitchen, stirring a huge pot of beans on the cooktop, when she sees him through the open door to the large dining room. From a distance, he’s not as menacing as he’d appeared on the train. He’s not as tall, not as bulky as his first impression would’ve suggested. Like every other migrant here, he looks bone-weary, and relieved to be indoors where the aroma of a hot meal greets him. Still, Lydia instinctively moves her body out of his line of vision and accidentally drops the long wooden spoon into the vat of beans.

  ‘¡Carajo!’ she says out loud.

  She presses her eyes and mouth closed for just a moment, and when the woman who runs the kitchen notices, she tells Lydia not to worry, and hands her a pair of tongs so she can fish the wooden spoon out of the beans.

  Lydia helps serve the dinner, too, on paper plates, and the migrants have to line up cafeteria-style for their food. When Lorenzo comes through, and Lydia ladles a spoonful of beans onto his plate, he nods at her without making eye contact, without further comment, and that strange behavior makes Lydia even more afraid. Has she offended him, provoked him to change his mind about letting them be?

  ‘Would you like a little more?’ she asks him, but he’s already moved along to the rice station.

  The sisters and Luca are behind him in line, and while they’re waiting, Soledad feels a hand slip beneath her arm and grope her breast. It’s so fast, like a sparrow. Her whole body recoils from that hand, but when she whips her head around to confront her offender, there are three migrant men all standing there facing one another. They’re so deep in conversation, and so oblivious to her presence, that there’s no way to determine who it was that grabbed her. Their disinterest is so convincing that Soledad finds herself wondering if she imagined the violation. No, she tells herself. I am not crazy. She grinds her teeth and clamps her arms in front of her. She keeps her body hunched into a warning.

  After dinner, everyone gathers in la sala to watch television, but not Lorenzo. Lydia doesn’t know if she’s relieved or concerned about his absence. It’s both. She wants to keep an eye on him and hopes to never see him, ever again.

  On TV, no one wants to watch the news because it’s all too familiar, so they put on Los Simpson. At home, Mami doesn’t like Luca watching Los Simpson because she thinks Bart is rude, and she doesn’t want Luca to start saying things like cómete mis calzoncillos, but what Mami doesn’t know is that Luca and Papi used to watch it together all the time when she wasn’t home, and Papi would stretch out on the couch with his shoes off and his toes wiggling in his socks, and Luca would drape himself across Papi’s chest like a blanket, and Papi would rub Luca’s back while they watched. It was their secret ceremony. They’d imitate the voices, and Papi would keep the remote control close by so, if Mami came in unexpectedly, he could change the channel to Arte Ninja real quick. Luca doesn’t like watching Los Simpson here in this tiled room with its fluorescent lights and everyone sitting on folding chairs with their arms crossed and their shoes on. He endures it by unlacing and relacing his sneakers three times, and when it’s over, Mami suggests to Soledad and Rebeca that they might all say a rosary together, for the full restoration of their father’s health. Also, she knows the practice will serve to calm her nerves, to soothe her agitation before she attempts to sleep. They retreat to the corner of the room where the tables are, and several other women join them. The sisters are grateful, and it’s the first time in Luca’s life that the rosary doesn’t feel like a chore. He listens to the chanting voices of the gathered women, first his mother’s lone cadence.

  Blessed are you among women.

  And then the chorus of response.

  Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.

  Amen.

  Otra vez.

  Luca holds his abuela’s blue stone rosary in both hands and he counts out the prayers. He squeezes the stones between his
fingers so hard their shapes are temporarily etched into the press of his skin. He wonders if Abuela ever did that, wonders how many times she passed these stones through the grasp of her aged hands, and when that thought occurs to him, he can nearly hear Abuela’s voice among the chorus, Santa María, Madre de Dios. There’s a catch in his throat, so he can’t speak, can’t add his own voice to the prayer, but it’s okay, because listening is its own kind of reverence, and in any case, he feels an energy flowing out of the beads and into his fingertips like a throb, like a heartbeat. The rosary is a kind of tether, and if he clings to it tightly enough, it will preserve his connection to Abuela and Adrián, to all of them. To Acapulco, his little bedroom with the balón de fútbol lamp and the blanket with the race cars on it. To home. Luca closes his eyes and listens to the chain of prayers that binds him to Papi.

  All the while there’s a new posture about the sisters that slouches them into a diminished curl. When Luca opens his eyes and emerges from his own thoughts, he recognizes that posture because it’s familiar to him. It’s relatively new to Mami, too, and Luca thinks of it as a grief-curl. He feels truly sorry for the sisters’ anguish and for Mami’s, so he asks God to alleviate their suffering.

  That night, Luca sleeps the best kind of sleep; he sleeps without dreaming.

  That Lydia and Luca will travel with Soledad and Rebeca for as long as possible has not been detailed aloud, yet it’s an arrangement all four of them intuitively understand. So much has happened that each hour of this journey feels like a year, but there’s something more than that. It’s the bond of trauma, the bond of sharing an indescribable experience together. Whatever happens, no one else in their lives will ever fully comprehend the ordeal of this pilgrimage, the characters they’ve met, the fear that travels with them, the grief and fatigue that eat at them. Their collective determination to keep pressing north. It solders them together so they feel like an almost-family now. It’s also true that selfishly, strategically, Lydia hopes the addition of two extra people to their traveling party might serve as an extra layer of camouflage, might confuse anyone who, at first glance, suspects she might be the dead reporter’s missing widow. Before sleep, Lydia closes the ugliest box in her mind, and instead allows herself to think forward, to Estados Unidos. Instead of Denver she thinks of a little white house in the desert with thick adobe walls. She’s seen pictures of Arizona: cactuses and lizards, the ruddy red landscape and hot blue sky. She pictures Luca with a clean backpack and a haircut, getting on a big yellow school bus and waving at her from the window. And then she conjures a third bedroom in that house for the sisters. Soledad’s new baby, perhaps a girl. The smell of diapers. A bath in the kitchen sink.