Why Visit America

by Matthew Baker

Claire sank onto the stage in a split. The thumping beat of the song was fading. Mariela stood.

  “But she’s not going to come to me for help. And you might as well take down those roadblocks. Knowing her, she’s already gone,” Mariela said.

  * * *

  Robbie had never met the fugitive, but she had seen all of the newscasts and heard all of the podcasts and read all of the articles online, and she had been following the story all week with a sense of pleasurable suspense, munching on popcorn at night while browsing the internet for the latest reports, the way she had used to eat popcorn while watching television shows about outlaws as a child. She was withered and wrinkled with an arthritic neck and hands atrophied from carpal tunnel, a retired psychologist who had been born in the time before nurseries and academies, back before family had meant nation, back when family had meant relatives, when people had still tended to get married more often than not, and when the people who wanted children had still had time to raise children at home. She had grown up in a modest colonial with finger paintings magneted to the fridge, raised by a pair of shy accountants, who had not been perfect, who had occasionally criticized her opinions without invitation, who had sometimes made jokes at her expense, who had often failed to change the burned-out light bulb in her bedroom in a timely fashion, who had habitually forgotten to schedule her checkups at the dentist and the optometrist and the pediatrician, who had routinely brought home bags of takeout for supper despite her many requests for homemade meals, who had worn clothing that had clearly embarrassed her to public events, but who had tried, who had genuinely tried, and who had always treated her with kindness and patience and love. She knew the statistics, knew how many psychological issues could be traced back to the parents, knew how many children in those years had suffered from abuse and neglect and malnutrition, but still, she had loved living with her parents, and to her the idea of being raised in an institution had always seemed horrible. She had never given birth to any children personally, and to her friends she pretended to support the childcare system without reservation, but in her heart she believed that a child belonged with its parents. Daniela Ndukwe was a heroic figure to her, like a benevolent hacker or a principled bandit. Robbie had been secretly thrilled by her crime. Robbie had been rooting for her to escape. And yet, when she found the baby blue sedan abandoned in the empty field down the road where she liked to walk sometimes on the weekend to clear her mind, and she realized that both the rust spot the shape of a star and the numbers on the license plate matched the description of the vehicle that the fugitive had been driving, she hesitated only a moment before calling the police. After hanging up she was overcome by a sickening sense of regret. She couldn’t explain why she had called the police instead of just walking away, pretending she had never seen it, pretending she had never been there. She had felt a sense of duty. She had never broken a law before. Or maybe that wasn’t the reason, when she thought about it honestly. Maybe she had just had an overwhelming urge to be part of the drama.

  A detective in a trench coat and horn-rimmed glasses soon arrived at the scene, escorted by an assistant and a pair of officers. The detective asked her some questions before ordering her to stand aside. Robbie watched with a sense of excitement, almost ashamed of how special she felt, getting to witness part of the investigation in person. The sedan had been abandoned deep in the field, in dewy grass that stood as high as the wheel wells. Snapping on a pair of disposable gloves, the detective searched the car, taking note of a thermos of cold coffee in the cupholder, a can of pepper spray in the glove compartment, a shopping bag full of rumpled clothing on the floor mat, a casino token lying on the dashboard, a squash racket sitting on the backseat, and an electric hair clipper in the trunk. The detective muttered. Then the detective stepped away from the car, glancing around the empty field, frowning now, looking perplexed.

  “I can feel how close we’re getting,” the assistant said, nodding with conviction.

  “Of all of the places, why leave the car here?” the detective murmured.

  The detective turned with a look of horror at the sound of a train blowing a whistle in the woods beyond the field.

  * * *

  She rode the train through Appalachia, past misty shacks, past foggy huts, watching damp mining towns blur past from the chilly depths of an empty boxcar, periodically feeding the baby, that perfect beautiful child, who loved to be held, who loved to be bounced, who never fussed or cried, just smiled and babbled happily, grasping at her cheeks with his tiny fingers. She played peekaboo with him as the train clattered past a granite quarry. She played pattycake with him as the train flew over a rusted bridge. As the train crawled past the clanging signals at a crossing, the child spit up all over her hoodie, and her heart burst with happiness. When darkness fell she drifted off to sleep with the child wrapped against her chest in the cotton sling she had taken from the nursery, and later that night the child awoke her with a hungry squeal, and waking to find the child there in her arms was the most glorious experience of her life. Afraid of being recognized, she had buzzed her hair before abandoning the sedan, and the air was frigid on her scalp as she fed the child in the moonlight, but when the sun rose in the morning the air turned so warm and humid that she zipped off her hoodie, cradling the child in her lap as viny trees flew past the doors. Next to her in the boxcar she had a canvas rucksack full of trail mix and granola bars and bottles of water, stolen diapers and pacifiers and formula and a baby bottle with a rubber nipple, a flashlight, and a roll of toilet paper for emergencies. She also had a navigator, a handheld digital device that had been designed for hiking, which she had bought with cash to avoid being tracked. She used the navigator to follow the progress of the train, watching the blinking icon travel south. As the train screeched to a halt in a rail yard in Miami, she climbed down from the boxcar, wearing a running shirt and jogging shorts and a brand-new pair of hiking boots. She had the child wrapped to her stomach with the sling, carrying him where she had carried him when she was pregnant, with her hoodie zipped over the bulge, the bulge making her look pregnant again. Crouching in the shadows of a shipping container at the edge of the rail yard, she fed the child some formula, got him sucking on a pacifier, waited until he had fallen asleep, zipped her hoodie to her throat, and slipped on a pair of shades, and then she walked into the city, strolling down the sidewalk with an expression of calm, feeling tense and alert. She hailed a taxi at a hotel, praying that the child wouldn’t babble or cry when he woke, but the child didn’t wake once, sleeping through the entire ride, sucking peacefully on the pacifier. The taxi dropped her off at the dilapidated headquarters of a company that rented watercraft on the edge of a swamp, where she bought an airboat from a leathery man in snakeskin boots and a straw fedora. She paid in cash. The airboat was a single-seater with a gleaming propeller and a shining hull. The child was stirring. She dropped the rucksack onto the deck, anxious to get moving, eyeing the components that she knew from instructional videos online, the battery and the ignition and the steering rod. As the man was loading an extra jerrican of fuel into the airboat the child suddenly spit out the pacifier and made a noise beneath the hoodie, a curious shriek, and the man heard, swiveling, and he looked at her, and she looked at him, and in that moment she understood that he had just realized who she was, and that after all of her planning now her fate was going to be up to him, a stranger, and if she was found, it would be because he had decided to report her, and if she wasn’t found, it would be because he had decided to help her. The expression on his face was blank and indecipherable. She zipped off the hoodie. The engine of the airboat came to life with a roar. She drove the airboat into the Everglades, where she had been told that there was a group of people in hiding, parents and children, living in secrecy.

  Daniela felt a sense of relief once she was alone with the child again, gliding across the water under a sunny sky. She used the navigator to travel deep into the wetlands, steering the airboat along rivers and across ponds, past
dragonflies flitting between lily pads, colorful orchids sprouting on oak trees, turtles clambering onto a log, otters floating in a creek, bobbing cattails, swaying rushes, a dark alligator with a round snout sunning on a rock, a beige crocodile with a pointed snout swimming in the sawgrass, bright pink flamingos soaring through the sky over a vast marsh. By twilight she and the child had reached the coordinates she had been given, a flooded grove of giant cypress trees with ghostly clumps of moss hanging from the branches. In every direction, that was all that she could see from the airboat, was water and sky and cypress trees. She had been instructed that the people who lived out there would meet her that night at those coordinates, so she waited, sitting there with her legs crossed, cradling the child in her lap. She had been told that she would know that an approaching boat was friendly if the people aboard held oil lanterns, but other than a crescent moon and the glittering stars above the canopy of the trees, all night the grove was dark, and no other boats appeared. She heard only chirping frogs, and the eerie shrieking of cranes nearby, and the frightening wails of distant loons. Water occasionally rippled against the hull of the airboat. Nobody came. At daybreak she fed the child and gave the child a change of diapers, taking some time to tickle him until he laughed, bouncing him on her knees, nuzzling him with her nose, trying to comfort the child, afraid he might somehow be able to sense her growing feeling of dread. That morning and the next she topped off the airboat with fuel from the jerrican, and then she drove the airboat out of the grove of cypress trees to explore the wetlands nearby, searching for some sign of the people who lived there. Both days she found nothing. Both nights she waited in the grove of cypress trees, at the exact coordinates she had been given, and no boats came, no oil lanterns appeared, and as the sun rose that next morning she realized finally that the people who lived out there must have never been told that she was coming, if there were truly any people living out there at all. She believed that there were, she needed to believe it, but now she understood the true situation. The commune wasn’t going to find her. She would have to find the commune. The battery in the navigator had died. With a sense of desperation she drove the airboat out of the grove of cypress trees to begin searching again, and the airboat immediately ran out of fuel, the engine sputtered into silence, the propeller gradually spun out, and the airboat glided to a standstill at the center of a shallow marsh. The jerrican was empty. For a full day she sat motionless on the airboat, in despair, just helpless, fighting the urge to cry, using her back to shade the child from the beating sun, until her neck was sunburned and her ears were sunburned and her arms were sunburned and she was so thirsty that her tongue was sticking to her mouth and her lips were cracking, and then she knew that she had to keep searching, or else she would die and the child would die.

  The water was black and warm and came to her knees, soaking her hiking boots. With the child wrapped tight against her chest, she waded to the shore of the nearest island as night fell across the scattered pine trees. Switching on the flashlight from the rucksack, she hiked across the island, keeping watch for some sign of human habitation, until finally the child began to fuss and she was too exhausted to keep walking, and then she sat against a stump, turning the flashlight off to conserve the battery. Her hiking boots were still wet. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness her heart leapt as she became aware of lights nearby, but then her heart fell again as she realized that the lights weren’t of human origin. Neon green foxfire, a ruffled fungus glowing faintly on the trunk of a toppled tree just ahead of her. Pale yellow fireflies, a twinkling cluster drifting through the reeds along the banks of a stream far beyond her. Those were the only lights she saw that night. She dozed off. She barely slept. Whenever a twig snapped in the darkness she jolted awake again, shining the flashlight at the sound, bracing for an alligator or a crocodile, but wherever she pointed the flashlight there was nothing there. When dawn came she kept walking, ducking glittering spiderwebs, maneuvering cautiously through dense thickets, squeezing carefully through thorny briars, using fallen branches to plumb the depth of murky water, wading across shallow brooks to cross between islands, laying the child onto a stump or some grass for a change of diapers, then swaddling the child in the sling again. The next two nights she saw no lights at all. By then she was out of trail mix and granola bars and was down to a single bottle of water, and the battery in the flashlight was dead. She fed the child in the darkness. Without a flashlight the darkness terrified her. She talked to the child. She sang to the child. The child grasped at her chin. She felt delirious. At sunrise after changing another diaper for the child she staggered off of the dirt and kept going. While she walked she remembered her life. She had been bathed every day in nursery, and had bathed once a day at academy, and all of her life had lived indoors, in tidy rooms with dusted furniture and vacuumed floors, wearing freshly clean clothing perfumed with scented detergents and fabric softeners. She had never been dirty before, not truly dirty, not like that, with her arms streaked with dust and her fingers spattered with mud, the rims of her nails crusted with soil, her shirt reeking of sweat, burs clinging to her shorts, her thighs scratched, her shins scraped, her hiking boots caked with muck. She was afraid to eat any of the flowers or berries she saw. Mosquitoes hummed around her in a swarm, and she swatted at the air around the child to protect his flesh, and let the mosquitoes bite her instead. Her stomach gurgled painfully. Her lips tasted like blood. That afternoon as she came to the tip of a grassy island she saw what looked like a bright red tub of coffee grounds caught in the roots of the mangrove trees across a lagoon.

  The sign that other humans had been there gave her a burst of hope, so intense that she actually grunted with relief, but the sight worried her, too. She was afraid that she might be hallucinating, because the coffee was the same brand that she drank back home. But no matter how long that she stared, the tub was still there, floating in the roots of the mangrove trees. Her arms felt weak. Her legs were quivering. The only way to get to the island with the mangrove trees would be to cross the lagoon. The water was bright and clear. She didn’t see any animals nearby, not even insects. The lagoon was strangely quiet. She took the child out of the sling, holding the child against her chest, and then she walked out into the water. Her hiking boots filled as the water reached her ankles. She waded deeper into the lagoon, and the water rose to her thighs, then soaked her shorts, then rose to her belly, then soaked her shirt, then rose to her shoulders, until finally she was holding the child above her head with the water lapping against her throat. The silty bottom of the lagoon shifted beneath her feet with every tentative step that she took, terrified of losing balance, terrified of tipping over, of dropping the child into the water. She heard the child gurgle happily in her hands. She kept her eyes focused on the mangrove trees. Sunlight flashed across the ripples in the water. She was halfway across the lagoon when she felt something powerful knock against her under the water, a massive animal, and she jerked away from the movement with her heart beating wildly, twisting around in fear, but when she looked down into the water instead of the scaly body of a crocodile or an alligator she saw a pair of manatees, a gigantic adult speckled with algae and a beautiful calf with smooth skin, flippers gently paddling, tails lightly pulsing, lolling in the water around her, gazing at her with beady eyes, and in that moment, holding her infant above her head in the middle of a lagoon in the wilderness as a pair of manatees circled her, a parent and a child, she felt such a kinship with every animal on the planet that she was nearly overcome. Then the manatees drifted off into the lagoon, and she and the child were alone again.

  The water around the mangrove trees was shallow enough that she could wrap the child in the sling again. The sun was setting. The tub was real. She peeled back the lid. The plastic still smelled like grounds, but all the coffee was gone. Dropping the tub back into the water, she squeezed through the mangrove trees onto the island in the lagoon, sloshing back onto land. She stood there. Water dripped from her fingertips. Water
trickled down her legs. She didn’t see any other signs of people. She swayed, feeling dizzy, and then she heard the child crying, and she looked down and saw the child smiling at her, and she realized that the child who was crying wasn’t hers. She glanced up. She looked around. Palm trees. Purple sky. She followed the sound of the crying, shuffling through the palm trees, but then the crying went silent, and after that the island was quiet again. Feeling faint, she stumbled, leaning against a tree, head bent, breathing hard. A breeze blew softly. Dusk was falling, and through the trunks of the trees ahead she saw a light like golden torches. She staggered into a clearing where a pair of oil lanterns sat in the windows of a couple of rickety houseboats, anchored in a swampy cove next to a weathered shanty on wooden stilts. She could smell melting butter. She collapsed into the dirt.

  She had never wanted a child. As an adult when she had seen children on outings standing in orderly lines at the entrances to museums and memorials, had passed the shining windows of nurseries where the staff were blowing bubbles with the children, had passed the fenced courtyards of academies where the staff were playing croquet with the children, she had never felt any form of desire. Getting pregnant had felt like a burden, like a misfortune, like growing a tumor, like having a tapeworm, being invaded by a foreign body that would leech the strength and the health and the nutrients from her body until finally getting removed. She had bought a customized wall calendar with landscape photos of her favorite beaches, counting down the days until her body would be hers again, when she could eat her favorite foods again, when she could wear her favorite outfits again, when she could have a normal workout routine again, when she could have a normal sex life again, when she could reach to shave her legs again, when she wouldn’t have to literally waddle into the conference room for meetings, when she could sleep through the night without having to get up to pee. All of the parties she’d missed because of nausea and hot flashes. All of the parties she’d missed because of cramps and swollen feet. The heartburn and the brain fog. Her friends had planned a celebration for her afterward, sangria and dancing at her favorite bar, once the birth was finally over. But instead of feeling happy as her friends had chatted around her, she had sat there feeling bewilderingly lonely. How to explain that moment at the hospital, drenched in sweat, wearing a gown, still panting from the final push, the moment that she had first caught a glimpse of the child, a chubby newborn with a dark shock of hair and the dorkiest smile imaginable, when she had suddenly been struck by a savage and terrible sense of love. She had wanted to rip the child from the arms of the doctor, but then the doctor had turned, and the child had been gone.