The Radius of Us

by Marie Marquardt

  Patriotic.

  I don’t know how long we wait. I’m flipping through the frayed pages of a magazine, but I don’t really see them. I don’t even know whether I’m looking at Us Weekly or House Beautiful. I guess I’m starting to get anxious about all of this, because all I see is that boy standing in front of me.

  The door we’re not supposed to knock on flings open, and a woman about my mom’s age steps out in a black suit with a pink scarf. My parents stand, and the woman holds out her hand to introduce herself. Next to my mom, she looks short. She tells us to call her Karen.

  “Thanks so much for coming today, Gretchen,” she says, reaching out to shake my hand. “I wish we could have met somewhere else—somewhere more comfortable—but things are just so busy right now.”

  I guess when your job is to investigate “major crimes,” you get busy.

  We follow Karen down a long empty hall and then stop at a red door. She types something into a keypad and the door opens, revealing another long, empty hall.

  “Welcome to our glamorous offices,” she says. “You know, we Federal employees really get to live the good life.”

  We walk into her office, and I head straight for the window. I think all of those interior halls and windowless waiting areas were making me feel claustrophobic.

  “You have a nice view,” my mom says absently.

  It doesn’t look all that nice to me. Her office overlooks an abandoned train track, a bunch of graffiti everywhere.

  The prosecutor laughs. “True story,” she says. “A few months ago a film crew went out there to film some zombie movie and they actually had to clean it up before they started.”

  My dad laughs and I decide I like this woman. She seems kind. I wonder how a kind person can end up in her line of work. Or maybe what I mean is: How can a person stay kind after doing this sort of work for a while?

  My mom did a little research after Karen called us. She told me Karen investigates stuff like human trafficking, child pornography rings, gangs. Which makes us all wonder: What are we doing here?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  PHOENIX

  “WHO KNEW MY LITTLE pissant brother was such an artist?”

  I’m sitting on my bed—well, not really my bed, but the bed I’ve been sleeping in for three weeks in Amanda and Sally’s basement.

  “And he’s still just sending pictures?” Sister Mary Margaret asks.

  Even though she’s all the way in San Salvador, she sounds so close. I forget sometimes, how far away I am from her. She was sort of like my boss, or maybe more like my mom. It’s complicated. I call her every morning, from the phone that Sally and Amanda gave me. It’s expensive, but I don’t really have anyone else to call, especially since my stupid little brother doesn’t want to talk to me.

  I’ll never be able to repay Sister Mary Margaret for all that she’s done, so the least I can do is call her to check in.

  “Have you tried to talk to him again?” she asks.

  “Yeah, like, every day. I call and he just sits there on the other end of the line. It totally sucks, Sister. I can’t keep doing this.”

  “Well, you don’t have much of a choice now, do you, Phoenix?”

  I keep my mouth shut. I know Sister Mary Margaret well enough to get that it wasn’t really a question.

  “You’re just gonna have to hacerse güevos and keep trying.”

  Hacerse güevos roughly translates as “suck it up” in English. I guess that’s not the sort of thing that nuns typically say, but Sister Mary Margaret isn’t exactly a typical nun.

  “Yeah, okay,” I tell her. “I will.”

  “Well, keep your chin up,” she says. “And call me tomorrow.”

  “All right,” I say.

  “And watch your language around Sally and Amanda, Phoenix. You can’t go around telling your hosts that things ‘suck.’ Do you understand?”

  This, coming from the nun who just told me to suck it up.

  “Got it,” I say.

  I hang up the phone and look down at the drawing my brother, Ari, mailed to me.

  It’s all tropical—palm trees, ocean, dolphins jumping out. He drew it with a pen, on a piece of white paper, but I can sort-of see the red sunset, even without any color there. It looks good—especially the palm trees. They’ve even got coconuts hanging from them. I’m guessing central Texas doesn’t have a whole lot of coconut palms, so I figure this is Ari’s way of telling me he misses home.

  Which makes me want to break his scrawny little neck, since it’s kind of his fault we’re in this situation in the first place. If he hadn’t decided to go all badass, I’d be sitting in my sociology class right now, and he would be doing whatever kids back in Ilopango do these days to stay out of trouble.

  But who am I kidding? The truth is, it’s not really Ari’s fault; it’s mine. After our grandmother died, I was the only one he had to watch out for him. And then, when the head of my colegio told me I could go to the UCA—the university in San Salvador, and somebody else was gonna pay for it—all I could think of was how crazy the world is, how completely insane it was that I, Phoenix Flores Flores, who never knew his dad; whose mom took off to take care of somebody else’s kids in Arizona; who lived the first thirteen years of his life with his grandmother in a concrete block house with no windows, that this same Phoenix Flores Flores was going to university? Even after all the stupid mistakes I made when I was Ari’s age?

  So I went. Of course I went. Who wouldn’t go?

  But Ari didn’t go. He stayed back and had to fend for himself in our barrio. Sister Mary Margaret promised me that she would watch out for him, just like she had always watched out for me and the other guys who worked for her, but I guess she was getting too old or something. Maybe her eyesight was going, because a month into my little fantasy life, the one where I got to pretend I was the kind of person who went to university, she called to tell me that she had run into Ari at the community center, that he was sporting a big black eye and a broken wrist and telling anybody who asked how he was wasn’t going down without a fight.

  Stupid Ari thought he was gonna fight back. He thought he was a hero.

  I knew what would come next, and I was not going to let that happen. So I went back there, and I got him. Kidnapped him, basically—my own brother—and we headed north. Ari fought me the whole way, telling me I should live my own stupid life, telling me that the federales were all over the neighborhood these days—that they would protect him. But I knew too much about the so-called protection offered by the federal police, and I wasn’t gonna live with that on my conscience. So I dragged his scrawny ass all the way through Mexico. Ari punched me in the gut, like, twice a day the entire time I was hauling him toward the border. Kid’s got a temper.

  That’s why it doesn’t make any sense—what that lady told me on the phone a few days ago. Sally was out and Amanda was trying to teach me how to play a card game called solitaire. Yeah, it’s pretty pathetic. I know so few people in this place that Amanda has been teaching me how to play cards with myself. I need to do something to keep from thinking about that girl I met in the garden—Gretchen. I want to think about her, but I know it’s pointless to go there. Still, I can’t figure out why I felt so jumpy around her—I mean, not in a bad way. It was like the way you feel when you know something good’s about to happen. Like when you’re a carefree little kid and it’s the last day of school before Christmas holidays, and you keep looking at the clock in the back of your classroom, waiting for the holiday to start.

  I don’t know much, but I know that nothing good is gonna happen with that girl, because I’m probably never going to see her again. So feeling like that when I think about her is pointless.

  Anyway, I was trying to distract myself, watching Amanda deal the cards, when this nice lady called me from that place where Ari is staying. She told me her name was Ms. Rosales, and that she was trying to help my brother. I’m pretty sure she called herself a social worker. Anyway, she said that Ari
seemed “lethargic,” and she asked me whether he was “mute.” I told her I didn’t know what those words meant, so she started explaining in Spanish. She said, “Does he talk?” And I said, “Yeah, he talks. The kid won’t shut up.” Then her voice got all concerned and she told me he wouldn’t speak a word. She said not to worry, that it was probably a result of the “trauma” he experienced while we were traveling through Mexico.

  Not to worry. I feel like I’m gonna puke when I think about the “trauma”—or maybe the fact that I’m the one who made Ari leave home in the first place.

  The thing is, it’s supposed to work out for my brother. That’s what the lawyers keep telling us. That’s what I keep reminding myself. Those lawyers call Ari an “unaccompanied minor,” which sort of pisses me off, since I “accompanied” his scrawny ass all the way through Guatemala and Mexico, kicking and screaming. Anyway, as long as Ari will tell some judge why we left and that our parents abandoned us a long time ago, he’ll probably get permission to stay in America. That’s pretty easy to do, since we haven’t heard a thing from our so-called mom in, like, ten years, and we don’t have a dad. We never did, neither one of us.

  But what if Ari refuses to speak? Then what? How are they gonna let him stay if he won’t even talk to them? He doesn’t have to tell them everything, but they need to know something.

  * * *

  Sally shows up in the doorway. I don’t know, maybe she was there all along, but she says something that makes me look up.

  “A letter from Ari?”

  “Yeah, well, a picture, really.”

  I turn it around to show her.

  “Wow,” she says. “He’s a good artist.”

  I shrug. “Who knew?”

  She takes the piece of paper from my hand and studies it. “Is that what it looks like there? I mean, in El Salvador?”

  “Not in Ilopango, where we live,” I say. “It kinda looks like a bomb dropped in the middle of town and nobody bothered to clean up the mess.”

  “Sounds charming.” She comes to sit on the edge of the bed, still holding that piece of paper.

  “The tags add color.”

  “Tags?”

  “You know, like, gang tags. Graffiti. People mark their houses and stores and stuff with gang signs. That way, the gangs won’t mess with them. At least, that’s what they hope.”

  “Oh.” Little creases run across her forehead. “It’s really like that? I mean, I thought maybe they exaggerated it all—you know how the news can be.”

  “It’s not like that everywhere,” I say, leaning against the headboard. “But, yeah, in Ilopango. It’s bad. There was, um, a truce a couple of years ago. I guess the gangs decided it would be a good idea to stop killing each other. My town was part of it, so things got better for a while but…”

  “They’re bad again?” She’s tracing the edge of the paper with her finger, back and forth.

  Worse than ever. “Yeah, the federal police got involved and, I mean, they’re a little trigger-happy, you know?”

  I’m pretty sure Sally doesn’t know. She’s from England for chrissake. I heard the cops there don’t even carry guns.

  “I’m sorry,” Sally says, handing Ari’s drawing back to me.

  “Me too,” I tell her. “But I shouldn’t be so hard on my town. Ilopango’s a pretty place. It’s on a big lake with a volcano on the other side. I mean, not an active volcano, but, uh, it’s nice—or it used to be.”

  “Are there beaches nearby?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “You can take the bus. I mean, it’s only, like, an hour to La Libertad, on the coast.”

  “Do you like the beach?” she asks.

  “Ari likes it more than I do.” I close my eyes and think of Ari swimming out past the breakers in La Libertad. “He’s all proud that he can swim. He rides the waves.”

  “Do you swim?”

  “Barely.” I figure with Sally I don’t need to hide how much of a coward I am. She already knows my story—most of it, anyway. “I’m scared to death of those waves. They’re big, and the current is strong. It’s the Pacific.”

  “I’m like Ari.” She leans back on her elbows and smiles. “I love to ride the waves. It’s really quite brilliant—the water surging below you, and you sort of fly for a few seconds.”

  “Until you crash. And your face hits the sand.”

  “Well,” Sally says, chuckling, “there’s that. But you don’t always crash. Sometimes the wave takes you right into shore and you land softly on the sand, the water washing around you. It’s lovely.”

  She closes her eyes, all serene, like she’s imagining it.

  “I’m gonna take your word for it,” I say.

  “For now you are.” Sally sits up straight and looks at me. “Since no ocean will be found within a few hundred miles of this place! Atlanta’s so bloody landlocked.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” I take Ari’s drawing and start to fold it so it will fit back into the envelope. “I’m happy here.”

  “Good,” she says. She reaches over and grabs my other hand, squeezes it lightly. “We’re so glad you’re here, Phoenix. We feel lucky to have you.”

  “Yeah, you’re lucky,” I reply, nodding. “How else would you two get your community garden built for free?”

  We both laugh, and it feels good.

  “Speaking of that…” Sally stands up. “I need to stop gabbing and head over to the nursery for those plants. Are you up for it?”

  “Sure,” I say.

  I decide not to put the drawing back into the envelope. Instead I walk over to the desk and pin it up on the empty corkboard.

  “Can I—”

  “Of course,” Sally says. “It’s your room, Phoenix.”

  And I guess it is, but not for long. I know the statistics. It’s pretty much impossible for people like me to get permission to stay in the United States. Since I’m not a minor anymore, they told me I’m an “asylum seeker.” That’s the technical term. In the Atlanta court, where I’m heading soon, not a single person “seeking asylum” from all the stuff happening in El Salvador has been allowed to stay. Not a single one. I don’t really expect to be the first. That’s not my kind of luck.

  CHAPTER NINE

  GRETCHEN

  KAREN PULLS SOME CHAIRS in from the hallway, and we all sit in a tight circle.

  “Would you like a cup of tea?” she asks, heading toward an electric kettle shoved between several enormous piles of paper on her desk.

  “Yes, thanks,” Mom says. “That sounds lovely.”

  Lovely. None of this is lovely. This is all very unlovely.

  Karen takes four mugs from a drawer and arranges them in a line.

  “I’m the lead attorney in a federal criminal investigation of gang activity in Georgia.” Her voice is serious, but she doesn’t look at us now. She’s fiddling with the mugs. “We are examining a major crime that took place in the Old Fourth Ward on August fourteenth, around eleven p.m. Our investigators found record of an assault robbery around the same time of the event, and we believe the two may be connected.”

  “You mean my assault robbery?”

  I know that’s me, asking the question. But I think I am beginning to have an out-of-body experience.

  “Yes, Gretchen.” Karen sits down and crosses her ankles. I focus on her feet, hoping to pull myself back into the conversation. She’s wearing black heels that look like they’ve probably been in her closet since 1983. She offers me a piece of toffee from a cut-glass bowl on the coffee table. I unwrap the toffee and slowly put it into my mouth.

  “Can you tell me in your own words what happened, Gretchen?”

  “Well, I was leaving work, walking to my car. It was parked on the street. And a guy came up to me…”

  And then what happened? The toffee sticks to my teeth, almost forcing my mouth shut, so I can’t tell this nice woman how I felt that night. How I walked toward my car, on legs exhausted from a double shift at the restaurant. How I went alone through
the dark August night. How humid the air felt—so humid that its heaviness pressed down on my bare shoulders. I didn’t want to stop to get my mother half-and-half. I didn’t want the smell of fried chicken clinging to my scalp. I needed a cold shower. I wanted to drink a kombucha. I was too tired, even, to text Adam and ask him to meet me at my house. I wanted Netflix and air conditioning. I wanted my feet up on three pillows. I wanted rest.

  I do not want to tell this nice woman how I was halfway to my car, the only car left parked against the curb. I don’t want to tell Karen how I had been late to work twelve hours earlier, how I had barely squeezed my economy car into the only remaining spot on this now-abandoned street. I do not want to tell her how I heard him first, his feet pounding, and how I turned to see him running toward me, with crazed eyes. How my legs launched into a run, trying to close the distance to the car.

  I didn’t see his body when it slammed against my back. I only felt it, hurling us both to the ground. And then he pressed my face against the cracked sidewalk and wrenched my hands above my head. I felt his knee in my back, smelled his stale breath, warm against my cheek. He dug his hand into my pockets, and I freaked. I felt his hand near my crotch, and I knew he would try to pull off my pants. I bit his arm and he flinched. My red lipstick smeared across his forearm. I saw it there, part of me on him. That’s when I tried to break free. I flipped my body over and struggled to stand. He punched me in the gut. I was on the ground, lying on my side, folded over myself. He kicked me, maybe twice, until I was flat on my stomach. Then he dug through my pockets.

  “Please don’t hurt me,” I heard myself beg quietly, over and over.

  I think what I really wanted to say was, Oh please, God, don’t rape me. Please don’t. He was on top of me again, holding me down with his body while his hands roved. I could see his face, his smooth skin and his wide brown eyes. I couldn’t look away, because his eyes looked terrified. They looked as scared as I felt.