by Laura Resau
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Part 1 The Desert
1 Sleeping with the Chickens
2 Midnight Parties
3 Dika’s Boyfriend
4 Jewel Errands
5 My Feet Are Nice
Part 2 Crossing the Border
6 Silent Fireworks
7 Escaping Death
8 Picnic with a Cop
Part 3 Into the Unknown
9 Sparkles in the Virgin’s Hair
10 The White Dress
11 Explosions
Part 4 Inside the Whale
12 Heeheeheeheehee
13 The Box
14 Mi Amor Is Gone
15 Heavy Things, Sharp Things, Blood
Part 5 Path to the Moon
16 Unforeseen Journey
17 Following the Moon
18 Kindness of Strangers
Part 6 The Jewels
19 Stairway to Heaven
20 Remedios
21 Your Heart in My Heart
Part 7 The Return
22 Proposals
Epilogue
23 Laughing Stars
About the Author
Also by Laura Resau
Copyright
For my mother and father, who planted the seeds years ago and have offered plenty of sunshine and water ever since
Acknowledgments
This book exists thanks to friends who have shared their stories with me—Rahima, Don Otón, and Johnny. Muchísimas gracias to Doña Epifania, Doña Maria Chiquita, Doña Dicio, and other friends in Oaxaca who have made this novel—and my life—richer and brighter.
Deep gratitude to the advisors and friends who have helped me along the way—Baruc, Don Fermín, the López Salazar family, Alex, María Virginia, Sergio, and Javier; and to those who took the time to answer my many research questions—Katica Terzic and Charles Griffin. Thanks to my fabulous agent, Erin Murphy, and friends from Old Town Writing Group who made sure I finished this book—Leslie, Joan, Kim, Sarah, Laura, and Carrie—and to my friends in Slow Sand Writers’ Society for plenty of warm encouragement. I’ve been thrilled to work again with my insightful editor, Stephanie Lane, as well as the other dedicated people at Delacorte Press, whose hard work I value immensely.
My mother, Chris, has been essential to the creation of this book, reading every word of every draft many times, and offering brilliant suggestions. My father, Jim, gives me endless support, and serves as my model for hard work, wisdom, and generosity. My brother, Mike—who appeared in my life when he was two—has shown me that tender, sisterly love can spring up fast. My husband, Ian, lets me hole up in my writing room for hours on end, and when I emerge, greets me with homemade soup and heaps of love.
Rumi said, Hear blessings dropping their blossoms around you.
I am swimming in blossoms!
I’ve always loved the desert. You sit down on a sand dune. You see nothing. You hear nothing. And yet something shines, something sings in that silence…
“What makes the desert beautiful,” the little prince said, “is that it hides a well somewhere.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry,
—THE LITTLE PRINCE
Sleeping with the Chickens
Even before the boy appeared, I thought about the people crossing the desert. I imagined how scrub brush scratched their legs as they walked at night, how the sun dried out their eyes during the day, how their hearts pounded when they threw their bodies to the ground, hiding from la migra. I imagined them pressing their cheeks against the dust, thinking about the happy lives they would have if only they reached the end of this desert.
After I got my license the May I turned sixteen, I started driving to the desert outside of Tucson, an hour’s drive from the Mexican border. I’d park the Volkswagen, then walk alone in the oven heat. I let my thoughts wander around the cacti and agave, along dried riverbeds. Within five minutes, I’d get thirsty and gulp down water from the huge bottle I carried. As long as I had water, I could forget about everything, imagine I was the only person on the planet, a stranger dropped into the desert.
One night in June, at midnight, I was in bed reading The Little Prince, a book I’d already read once and underlined for world lit class. I was lost in the story, right there with the pilot alone in the sand dunes when the little boy appears out of nowhere.
Right then, the phone rang. I walked into the kitchen in my nightgown, my bare feet slapping the clay tile, my mind still in the sand dunes of another planet.
I picked up the phone. “Hello?”
“Officer Douglas here, Border Patrol. I need to speak with Juan Gutiérrez.”
My stomach tightened. I knocked on Mom and Juan’s door. “Juan. Border Patrol’s on the phone.”
During the phone call, Juan listened and nodded gravely. “Yes, yes, I see. Seven dead?” His voice cracked. “I have no idea how my business card got in this kid’s pocket.”
I sat at the kitchen table, tracing the deep, worn scratches in the wood, trying not to stare at the tears leaking out of Juan’s eyes.
Mom disappeared into the bedroom, and a few minutes later, calmly reemerged, her keys jangling. She’d already changed into a gauzy dress and turquoise necklace. She carried herself in a European-model way, her neck long, never slouching, not even in the middle of the night under the weight of bad news. Only two delicate furrows on her forehead betrayed her worry. That, and her British accent grew a bit more pronounced, as it did whenever she got emotional.
Just as Juan was hanging up the phone, Great-aunt Dika thudded into the kitchen, her eyes wide and alarmed. “What is it?” she cried. “What is it?” For Dika, being woken in the middle of the night meant bombings and attacks. She came from Bosnia and she’d materialized in our lives six months earlier. Dee-ka is how she said her name. Trying to understand Dika was like deciphering a code: vs were really ws, ds were ths, rolling rrrs were rs. Her words pierced the air, loud and shrill, as if she were perpetually in the middle of a big, rowdy party. Be patient with her, Sophie, Mom kept telling me, the woman barely survived a war. But I suspected she was a naturally hyper person.
Juan rubbed his face. The muscles in his arms flexed, moving the snake tattoos. “Seven Mexicans died crossing the desert.” He spoke in Spanish, as he always did when he felt deeply about something. “One boy survived. They found my business card in his pocket.”
On the way to the hospital in the puttering Volkswagen bus, Mom clutched the wheel and came up with possible scenarios. Juan, meanwhile, sat hunched in the passenger seat, his head in his hands.
He’d come from Mexico in the eighties, illegally, across the desert. He got residency after he married my mom nine years ago. Since then, when people crossed the desert to Tucson, Juan sometimes put them up for a night. He gave them food and water and always refused payment. His motives were good, but what he did was against the law. Mom finally put her foot down about it. Only in absolute emergencies, she said, could these people stay at our place.
Mom sped down First Avenue, her eyes flicking nervously from the rearview to the side-view mirror. I knew she was wondering if we’d get in trouble, if the Border Patrol had discovered we’d been helping immigrants. “You know, Juan,” she said in Spanish, “maybe you did business with someone who knew this family. Who knows, maybe the card was passed around a lot. The boy could’ve found it on the street.”
Dika, meanwhile, muttered in the background. “This poor boy. Poor, poor boy.” She spoke her own strange version of English. Her accent moved from Slavic to Spanish to German. She was an onion, layers of language peeling off here and there, exposing bits of her sixty years of life, not much, just enough to make you wonder.
The
hospital was a surreal place at one in the morning, a maze of fluorescent corridors. A man in a wrinkled orange shirt and braces met us outside the boy’s room. He shook hands with each of us, and said he was with CPS, Child Protective Services.
“The kid’s a foundling,” the man said. “That’s what the law calls them. A young child, found alone.” He mumbled, trying to hide his braces. “We’re pretty sure his parents died crossing the desert. He looks at least five years old, but he won’t talk. When the sheriff asked him about his parents, he pointed out their bodies. Problem is, we can’t ID the bodies and we don’t know the kid’s name.”
“He’s probably in shock,” Mom said. “His parents dead. Three days in a desert.”
“Three days in desert!” Dika cried. “That boy is hungry now!” She barreled down the bright hallway toward the vending machines.
The CPS man swung open the door and we entered the room. There was a tiny life on the bed, lost in a hospital gown spotted with hippos and giraffes. His eyes were open but lifeless. A tube was taped to the back of his hand.
Foundling. What a strange word. It made me think of the fairy tales that Juan used to tell me—didn’t they start with foundlings in the wilderness who turned out to be magical?
“Hola, amigo,” Juan whispered.
Mom touched the boy’s thin wrist. “¿Cómo estás, mi amor?”
No answer.
“Sure you don’t know this child?” the CPS man asked.
Juan shook his head.
The man sighed. “I was hoping you might.” He explained what would happen to the boy. If no relatives claimed him, he would become an American citizen, under the care of CPS.
I looked at the boy. A dark-skinned Little Prince, a lonely apparition from the desert. Around his neck hung a tangle of strings attached to square bits of leather imprinted with saints. On his cheek, a pinkish spot of skin, the color of a conch shell’s spiral. Maybe a wound healing, maybe a birthmark.
“Then what would happen to the little guy?” Juan asked.
“Foster care, adoption.”
Dika appeared at the doorway with a pack of Fig Newtons. “We take him!” She ripped open the plastic with her yellowed teeth, shoved a cookie in her mouth, and passed the package around the room. The man took one politely.
“We take him, Sophie. Yes?” Dika looked at me. She was always trying to make me an accomplice in her plans.
I shrugged and glanced at Mom and Juan. They were ignoring her and talking in low voices. I thought about it, the possibility of taking him. A little brother might be cute. But this boy on the hospital bed wasn’t exactly cute. To tell the truth, he scared me. He was living proof of one of my worst fears: Your parents really could die and leave you alone in the world. For the first seven years of my life, it was just Mom and me. No father, no grandparents, no aunts or uncles. Early on, I figured out that if anything happened to Mom, I would be alone on this planet. Then, when Juan came along, you’d think I’d have felt safer, but my fears of a parent dying were just multiplied by two.
Dika sat her wide hips on the bed, half-smushing the boy, and pulled out a cookie. “Aquí, for you, mi amor.” You wouldn’t expect a Bosnian refugee to speak nearly perfect Spanish, but Dika boasted that she spoke a dozen languages.
She half-reclined on the hospital bed and smiled proudly, watching him munch on the Fig Newton.
“That’s the first he’s eaten,” the CPS man said.
Dika handed the boy another Fig Newton. “Of course we take him,” she said again.
“Well, if no next of kin claim him, you could certainly apply to be his foster family.” He gave each of us a sticky handshake. “We’ll be in touch then,” he mumbled, and escorted us out of the room, past a few sleepy-eyed reporters in the corridor.
I always thought of myself as a free-floating one-celled amoeba, minding my own business. The other kids at school were all parts of a larger organism. The soccer girls made up one organ—a set of coordinated, interdependent cells. They always dated the soccer guys, another organ, connected to them by veins and arteries. The speech team, student government, animal rights club—everything was part of the whole. Even the hoodlums’ gold chains and graffiti tags added sparkle to the organism. Me, I was a shapeless amoeba, something that didn’t belong. Not particularly noticed, definitely not appreciated, just an amoeba swimming around aimlessly.
Back in middle school I’d hung out with a group of girls. My longtime friend Jasmín was the glue holding us all together, but when she abandoned us for Catholic school, we scattered. Loneliness was tricky: a cup filled at one moment with freedom, and the next, with emptiness. Maybe the emptiness part is what made me want to connect, at least a little, with the foundling.
In the week after the hospital visit, some families who’d heard about the orphan on Latino radio stations tried to claim him, but no one could describe his distinguishing characteristic, the pink birthmark on his face. By the time the CPS man called us to ask if we wanted to be the boy’s foster family, Dika had convinced us by forever moaning, “Oh, this poor, poor boy!” We said yes.
We gave the boy a futon on the living room floor next to the fish tank. Since we weren’t sure how long he’d stay, we didn’t get him a real bed. From my room, through the cracked door, I watched him watching the fish, his face bathed in the purple glow of the aquarium light.
In the middle of his first night with us, I woke up to pee, and he was gone.
I panicked, checked all the rooms in the house, and finally ran outside. Three-quarters of a moon shone bright in the sky. Into the yard I ran, barefoot, calling him: “¡Niño!” I wove around the giant agave, past the gnarled mesquite tree, ignoring the spines in my feet. There, at the end of the yard, behind the crates of old bottles, he lay, sprawled out in the moonlight, next to the wire-mesh chicken coop. His mouth hung open inches from the dirt.
I went back to the house for an old down comforter and spread it out, then moved his fragile body onto it. I settled down beside him, wrapping my body around his. My pale arms around his brown ones. “Principito,” I whispered. Little Prince.
He turned onto his other side, facing me now, his eyes open, a patch of dirt on his cheek just above the birthmark. How had he survived in the desert? They must have saved water for him, rationed it out, drop by drop.
“Why did you come outside?” I asked in Spanish.
Nothing.
“Will you come back inside?”
A slight shake of the head.
He had seen his parents die. I’d never seen anyone die, never even seen a dead person. I’d imagined it plenty, though. When I was little, something as small as Mom picking me up ten minutes late threw me into a wild panic. Was she killed in a crash? Was she murdered? Worries wore down a familiar path inside me. And anything could send me running down that path.
I studied the foundling’s face, inches from mine, and tried to enter his mind. What had his parents looked like when they died? What do heat exhaustion and dehydration do to a body at the end? His breath smelled faintly of milk. His body seemed both solid and ethereal, composed of soil and moonlight. Maybe he was hoping to dissolve into the night, become a shadow, a spirit, join his parents. Did he imagine his mother and father floating around in the sky? Did he hope that outside in the moonlight, they might find him so far from home?
The second night, it was Dika who slept outside with him. Maybe she, too, tried to lure him in, or maybe, knowing it was hopeless, she simply settled her giant body next to his. Dika was a murky pool of unanswered questions herself. Twenty years ago, she’d supposedly bounced around Europe with my great-uncle doing who-knew-what. They’d lived in Madrid for three years, which is where she picked up Spanish. But how she split with him and ended up back in Bosnia in the middle of a war was anyone’s guess.
On the boy’s third day with us, over a plate of steaming quesadillas, Dika leaned over to him and said in Spanish, “¡Ya! Enough! Tell us your name, niño!”
Without a
pause, he said, “Soy Pablo.” But he stopped there and ignored the onslaught of questions: What’s your last name, Pablo? Your town’s name? Your address?
Weeks passed without another word from him. More and more, I wanted to cup my hands around him like a shivering bird, breathe life into him, some kind of spiritual CPR. Dika and I took turns sleeping with him. On my nights, I brought a flashlight and book and read to him in English. He always stayed awake, watching my lips move. He seemed soothed by my voice, by the rhythms of words.
“First, you’ll sit down a little ways away from me, over there, in the grass. I’ll watch you out of the corner of my eye, and you won’t say anything. Language is the source of misunderstandings. But day by day, you’ll be able to sit a little closer….”
After I closed the book, I lay beside him and whispered to him in English and Spanish, saying anything that came into my head. “Principito. Know what? Our chickens used to lay eggs. Juan says they’re too depressed to lay eggs now. Quién sabe porqué.” Sometimes I found myself whispering things he couldn’t possibly understand, silly things. “Know what? I’m an amoeba, Pablito. Floating through life. Maybe you’re an amoeba, too. Maybe we’re two amoebas together.”
He watched me and listened and said nothing. And for some reason, I convinced myself that when he became a whole person one day—hopefully sooner than later—so would I.
Midnight Parties
Since I was seven, Juan has been my father. And since I met him, his shiny black braid has reached down to the small of his back, and snakes have rippled magically across his biceps. When he married Mom, she no longer had to juggle which of her friends would pick me up from school. Juan came to get me every day, always five minutes early, and we walked home together, hand in hand. Our phone stopped being disconnected and we could have our pick of food at Albertsons instead of what the food bank had in stock.
Juan is in the import business. He buys goods from Mexico—bottles of tequila, pottery, baskets, shirts—and distributes them to stores around the U.S. When you mention his name, people say, Ah, Juan, es buena gente. He’s a good person. And he is. People trust him, and his business connections sometimes ask for personal favors. Like using our fenced-in yard for a night to let immigrants rest before the next part of their journey north.