by Laura Resau
Not long after Juan came to live with us, I woke up to strange sounds late one night. I padded into the kitchen, where a pot of beans was simmering. The back door was wide open. I peeked outside, into the darkness. Our yard was filling with people who streamed silently out of a truck. Juan shut the high wooden gate behind them, and stood whispering to a man in a cowboy hat.
At the back of our yard, a woman in a dress gazed at our muddy pond, a shallow puddle of sludge and leaves that shone in the moonlight. She knelt down as though she were praying, bowed her head, and drank, cupping the dirty water to her lips. The tip of her braid hung in the mud. Mom ran over, pulled her up, placed the hose in her hands. Then Mom turned on the spigot, and the woman drank and drank.
At the far corner of our yard, a man with a mustache was eyeing our chicken coop. He looked around to make sure no one was watching him, and didn’t see me half-hidden behind the back door. But I saw him. Feeling protective of our chickens, I slipped outside and headed toward the coop. The desperate look in his eyes scared me—gave me a vague fear that he might tear a live chicken apart with his teeth and drink its blood. I hid in the shadows behind our olive tree. The man crouched down, reached his arm through the mesh, picked up an egg. He cracked it open on a rock. He held it up and let the shiny slime fall into his mouth. Then he licked the inside of the shell.
I ran back inside the warm yellow light of our house and stood in the middle of the kitchen, my heart racing. What would taste really good if you were that hungry? I pulled out a brand-new pack of Oreos. I darted outside toward the chicken coop. He was leaning against the olive tree. I held out the package. After a stunned moment, he took it, tore it open, offered a cookie to me. I took one and twisted it apart. He placed three in his mouth at once. The rest he passed out to others who had gathered. No one else pried their cookies open and licked the icing as I did, not even the kids.
Mom appeared, her arms filled with boxes from our pantry. Instead of telling me to go back to bed, she handed me crinkly packages of crackers and peanuts. “Pass these out, Sophie. To tide them over till the beans are ready.”
They politely accepted the bags from me. “Gracias, señorita.”
Mom returned with our best blue towels and sheets, the ones only guests could use. She looked like an angel in her long white robe that trailed behind her like streamers. She distributed glasses and went around with a pitcher, pouring water like a gracious hostess. “¿Más agua, señora?” She breezed through the yard, touching women’s shoulders lightly, smoothing her hands over children’s hair. People lined up by the hose to wash the dust off their faces and legs and arms, and Mom made sure they each had a washcloth.
It was the deepest middle of night, no car headlights, not a sound beyond the low whispers, the light clink of glasses. A party, a secret middle-of-the-night party.
The next morning when I woke up, everyone was gone, not a trace except for a stack of clean dishes on the patio table, and bright white sheets on the clothesline. They had washed their own dishes and linens, Mom told me, after I’d asked her about the people, unsure whether it had been a dream. The women had requested buckets and soap and a sponge and a dish towel, and they scrubbed the dishes and washed the sheets and towels.
“Don’t tell anyone about last night, Sophie,” Juan warned me at breakfast.
“No one,” Mom added. “Not your friends. Not even Jasmín.”
After breakfast, I looked around by the chicken coop where the man had tossed the broken eggshell. Both halves were there, in the bushes. I saved them as a kind of souvenir. At first, they reminded me that the night wasn’t a dream. As I got older, they reminded me of what mattered in life.
We had about five or six midnight parties over the years. Only in emergencies, if the coyote’s other plans fell through. The coyote was the man the immigrants paid to lead them across the border. For hundreds of dollars per person, he was supposed to protect them from bandits, keep them from getting lost, show them holes in the fences to crawl through, tell them to hide when la migra—the Border Patrol—came close. And finally, after their journey—which sometimes wasn’t successful if la migra captured them and sent them back—the coyote had to make sure they had a ride from the U.S. side of the border to wherever they were going, like Chicago or New York or Denver. If the coyote and his helpers had a rough journey and ended up stuck with a truckload of hungry, thirsty, tired people, they called Juan.
On the night Pablo came, I couldn’t help wondering: If the seven people had survived, would they have spent the night in our yard? Pablo would have been just another scared kid clinging to his mother while I handed out glasses of water and plates of food.
Mom tried to mother Pablo. That summer, she took time off her waitressing job at the café and tried to interest him in Play-Doh and dried pasta mosaics and potato stamps. Juan read him books in Spanish, and on his days off, brought him to bilingual story time at the library. I took him to the park, made brownies and Jell-O with him. But none of us could eke out even a tiny smile. He swung if we put him on a swing, licked ice cream cones when we offered them, but without joy. At story hour, he clapped and stood up and sat down as commanded, but he let out none of the laughs and squeals that came naturally to the other children.
One afternoon in July, while we were baking cupcakes, I discovered a pack of candles in the kitchen junk drawer. “Pablito. Let’s put candles in our cupcakes to celebrate when I was supposed to be born. I came out two months early, you know. Which is probably why I’m messed up.”
Somehow, long ago, my little kid’s brain had pasted together pieces of overheard conversations: When Mom was a teenager, I started making her belly fat. And then my dad left. And then I was born too soon. And he came back to get us. But I was too skinny and ugly and sick. So he left. He left for good. So sometimes there was no money for cinnamon granola. Or sparkly heart stickers. Or the heating bill. Sometimes there was no one to pick me up from school on time. And there was no one to protect us from everything bad in the world.
I held out the bowl of batter for Pablo to lick. “You know, Pablo, today would have been my sixteenth birthday. July fifteenth. If I’d been born today, I might have turned out normal.”
And then, as he was licking the batter from his finger, he said something. A complete, perfect sentence in Spanish. Very softly, with his finger still in his mouth, he said, “Cumplo seis años en julio.”
For a moment, I just looked, stunned, at his face smeared with chocolate batter. I tried hard to act casual so that he’d keep talking. “Entonces, Pablito, you’re turning six this month?”
He nodded.
“Bueno, we’ll put candles in for you and we’ll have a party for you tonight, okay, principito?”
He nodded. “Sí.”
Nine months passed before he said another word.
By October, the nights were too cool to sleep outside. Pablo would drag his comforter into my room and sleep on the floor by my bed. I tried picking him up and laying him next to me, but he would always climb back down.
We enrolled him in full-day kindergarten. The teacher said he was well behaved and followed directions, but never talked. He spent recesses alone, watching the other children. He seemed to live more in the realm of spirits and shadows and night than in the daylight world of games and toys that most six-year-olds inhabited.
Sometimes, in the evenings, he slipped a book silently into my hands. Strangely enough, his favorites were books of poetry and The Little Prince. It wasn’t the meaning of the words that mattered to him, it was their music.
“As the little prince was falling asleep, I picked him up in my arms, and started walking again. I was moved. It was as if I was carrying a fragile treasure. It actually seemed to me that there was nothing more fragile on Earth. By the light of the moon, I gazed at that pale forehead, those closed eyes, those locks of hair trembling in the wind, and I said to myself, What I’m looking at is only a shell. What’s most important is invisible….”
In the early spring, he started sleeping outside again, sometimes with me, sometimes with Dika. One morning, after we woke up on the comforter, Pablo let the chickens out of their coop just like any other day, but one of them refused to budge.
“Look, Pablo. She’s feeling lazy today.”
He picked up the chicken and revealed a perfect white egg.
“Pablo! You made the chicken get better.” I wasn’t sure why I said that, but when he nodded solemnly, I wondered if maybe, somehow, it was true.
With two hands, he carried the egg inside and presented it to Mom.
“¡Gracias, mi amor!” She kissed the top of his head.
He smiled, just a little, not enough to see any teeth.
Mom made a big deal over the egg. She fried it the way he liked it, estrellado, star-shaped, broken right into the pan. She served it to him on a fancy plate with a gold-painted rim.
That night at dinner, Pablo spoke. He spoke in a burst of Spanish peppered with English. He spoke as though he were giving a school report, as though he’d been rehearsing the words in his head. “Tenemos chickens en mi town. Mi town se llama Santa María Nuquimi. Está por las mountains, y tenemos chickens allá….”
Juan found Santa María Nuquimi on a map. It was in the state of Oaxaca, deep in southern Mexico—far from Tucson, probably a week of traveling by car. He found the phone number. It turned out there was only one phone in the village. I imagined a lonely plastic phone booth in the middle of the town square, ringing, with no one around to answer it. Pablo told me later it was inside a store where they sold lollipops and beer and strips of palm for weaving hats.
The shopkeeper picked up immediately and instructed Juan to hang up and call back in ten minutes, while she announced the call over the village loudspeaker. Pablo sat on Dika’s heavy thighs, which protruded from sky blue shorts. He traced the purple rivers of veins under her skin, something that always seemed to calm him. Soon he grew restless and shifted from one leg to another. “¿Ya? ¿Podemos llamar?” And a minute later: “We call, yes?” Then, “¿Ya? ¿Son diez minutos?”
Finally, Juan dialed and we all held our breath. Juan introduced himself and explained how we ended up with Pablo. He listened and nodded for a few minutes, then passed the phone to Pablo.
Pablo talked with his uncle, mostly saying sí and no at first, and then, like a rush of water, telling him in Spanish how the chickens were laying eggs again and how many toys he had in the bathtub and how his teacher gave him a red star sticker, and how he got a strike when we went bowling last week and how we’d seen a movie about a pig who wanted his mom.
Afterward, Juan gave us the highlights: He had spoken with an uncle. Pablo’s aunts and uncles and grandmother had heard about the seven dead migrants. They prayed every night that Pablo and his parents weren’t part of that group. They were losing hope, as more time passed. Then they heard that one boy remained alive. They made some calls trying to get information, without success. The grandmother—who the uncle said “knows things”—assured everyone that if the boy was Pablo, he was safe and would call when he was ready. Finally, they decided to trust that if the boy was Pablo, he’d be in good hands.
In the days that followed, we called them three more times. Mom and Juan and Pablo spoke with his aunts, uncles, cousins, grandmother…I’d had no idea he was linked to all these people. Like the spearmint in our yard whose roots spread out, buried in the dirt. If you tried to pull out one plant, you’d end up following the root that led you, like a winding road, to another plant, and another, and another. Pablo had a whole network of hidden relatives who could take turns sleeping beside him and reading him stories.
During the fourth phone call, an aunt told Mom, “We have decided something. It would be good for Pablo to grow up in your rich country, with all the opportunities there. This is what his parents wanted for him. You see, here he will be no one. He will grow up poor. He will stop school at eighth grade to work in the fields and barely make enough to eat. We know you are good people. We hear this in his voice, in your voice. We know that you care for him well. If you want to keep Pablo,” the aunt concluded, crying, “and if Pablo wants to stay with you, that is all right with us.”
Mom and Juan weren’t sure it was best for him to stay in Tucson, but Dika insisted it was. For once, I agreed with Dika. If Pablo left, the chickens would probably stop laying eggs, and I’d mope along with them, feeling useless. In the end, we decided that Pablo should stay at least until the end of the school year, because, after all, he was just starting to talk and raise his hand in class. That way, Mom and Juan could save up money for plane tickets and afford time off work. Then they would take Pablo to visit his relatives and he could decide where he wanted to live.
“Too big decision for little boy!” Dika clucked, shaking her head.
Over the next week, we stood in lines and waited hours in plastic seats at government buildings to get permission to travel with Pablo. The CPS man said we could take Pablo to visit his village, and if he and his closest relatives decided he could live with us, we’d have to sign adoption papers.
I wanted to stretch out my time with Pablo. We all did. Now, when Mom came home from work, exhausted from being on her feet all day at the café, instead of lying in the hammock and having a beer, she sat cross-legged on the floor with Pablo and played Chinese checkers. Juan started spending his weekends building a playhouse in the far corner of the yard, letting Pablo bring him tools and hold the wood while he sawed. As they worked, he told Pablo the folktales he used to tell me when I was little. Usually, the star of the story was a scraggly little orphan who went on a quest somewhere—to the moon, or the bottom of the sea, or inside a deep cave—and ended up finding a treasure and turning into a world-famous hero.
Once in a while, Pablo talked about his relatives. He mentioned how good his cousin was at catching lizards, or how fast he could run down the big hill in his village. But mostly, he seemed wrapped up in life with us and the chickens. Every morning he brought a handful of eggs to Mom. The three other hens, too, had started laying them. He was so proud of those eggs. Even though I liked fruit and cereal for breakfast, I forced myself to get used to a daily star-shaped egg instead.
Dika’s Boyfriend
Back when Pablo first arrived, Dika decided he should learn to swim—or at least that was her excuse for sneaking into the pool at the apartment complex down the street. So, except for the cold months—November, December, and January—we spent every afternoon at the pool. Dika’s daily schedule was: collect broken pieces of colored glass at sunrise, work at the Salvation Army in the morning, and once Pablo and I got home from school, lounge at the pool. She wore a bright blue sarong over her turquoise bikini. She placed her bag by the lounge chair, slipped off her sarong seductively, and settled in the chair. There she lay, her legs like two whales, one bent coquettishly. She would examine her body and check her tan lines, pleased. If anyone else was there, she’d show off the tan lines to them, too.
“My friends in Germany should to see me now! There it is snowy and cold and gray. Look at this sky, so much blue.” Germany is where she had asylum after she left Bosnia and the war.
She spread baby oil on her legs, arm, stomach. It took forever, this process—there was so much flesh to cover, and she went over every area twice, three times if a man was there. She wore a blue headband that pushed back her orangish hair, which showed the gray roots. Then her eyes closed and a smile spread over her face. A woman of leisure. The only thing that set her apart from a lady of questionable taste on a resort vacation was the series of three thick, shiny scars on her left inner arm.
A relic from the war prison camp, Mom told me. All Dika had said about the camp was that she ate raw onions for three straight months, and that her only possession was a small shard of red glass that she’d salvaged from her bombed-out house. At the camp, she kept it hidden in a pocket, and planned on one day piercing the heart of a guard. She never did, as far as I knew.
When Mom first announced that her Bosnian war refugee great-aunt was coming to live with us, I’d pictured a skeletal woman in a shawl, deep half-moon shadows beneath haunted eyes. But Dika came with mounds of flesh and cheap jewelry, a wardrobe of tight turquoise shirts, white capri pants, peroxided hair. She inserted herself into our lives loudly. I wasn’t completely convinced she was even our relative.
I went to the pool with her, dragging my feet. I had nothing better to do. I hardly ever saw my only real friend, Jasmín, anymore. Jasmín was the reason I spoke Spanish. Her parents were Mexican, old friends of Juan. We’d hung out together since elementary school, and she’d stayed friends with me out of habit. Then, in ninth grade, when Jasmín got a scholarship to a private school and started working as a camp counselor in the summers, she might as well have moved to a different planet. She’d drifted away and found replacements for me, but I hadn’t found anyone who came close to replacing her.
At the pool, I mostly sat in the shade reading and watching Pablo splash around, worrying my skin would break out in a sun rash. Mom blamed my mysterious rashes on the fact that I had been a premature baby. I did feel sometimes that I wasn’t fully formed. Like that Native American story where white people weren’t fully baked in the ovens so their clay never reached the proper brown color. My body was more underbaked than most, and all the Tucson sun did for it was make it pink and bumpy.
My spirit felt underbaked too. Most people seemed to have a hard outer shell that protected them from mean people, insults, bad memories. I was not one of those people. I wore long sleeves and long skirts, and not just because of the sun. Mom’s friend from Saudi Arabia veiled and draped herself in black, only a slit for her eyes. She told me that her body was sacred and shouldn’t be exposed for all eyes to see. I liked the idea of living behind so much fabric. It would be a comfortable feeling.