Alone, we make our slow way up the street, tripping over uneven cobblestones, your pumps a ridiculous thing, my white boots at least flat and easier to manage. There is no sidewalk, and the doors of the houses open right into a road that is so steep I have to prop my hands on my knees to push myself up it. Through tiny windows, lamplight flickers behind closed curtains.
“This is a rather fun adventure, isn’t it? I bet this town’s a flutter of tourists,” you say jokingly, breathless, panting as you turn to look at me, your face exhausted, despite how hard you’re playing at being alert.
We reach the last house before the mountain takes over, and you stop and stare at it, biting your lips. From a fence post, a burro watches, stolid and unblinking.
“Pretty sure this is it.” You don’t look or sound sure.
“What’s it?” I ask.
“Miguel, that man who slipped you the note? Supposedly his aunt and uncle live here. He told me theirs was the last house on the left. Only...” you hesitate, looking back down the street “... I don’t know which end of the street he meant. I wish it wasn’t so late.”
I hang back, watching you step up to the front door and give it a gentle knock. The door opens, and an older woman appears in a pool of light wearing heavy trousers and a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled past her elbows. Her dark hair is pulled into a bun, and the white streaks along her temples look like brushstrokes of paint. You say something, and the grooves around her mouth shift into a smile as she opens the door wide and beckons for us to come in.
We have no luggage, toothbrushes, pajamas or change of clothes. We step empty-handed into a house with stucco walls hung with paintings of fish and seashells and eat a dinner of rice and beans with avocado and mango rolled into soft tortillas. The man and woman are Fede and Rubenia. They are old, their faces filled with lines, and yet they insist we take their bed and fold themselves into a blanket on the wooden floor. It is the first time I ever remember sleeping beside you. The bed is soft, and I curl against the flat of your back and press my feet against yours and listen to night insects buzz like an electric hum until everything sinks and settles into silence.
Sunlight through the open door wakes me up. A beam stretches to the table where you stand next to Rubenia as she pours a glass of water from a ceramic pitcher. Your city dress is gone. Today you wear a heavy white cotton blouse with wide sleeves and a matching skirt, embroidered with large yellow flowers. The old woman hands the glass to you, and the water catches the light and casts prisms of color up your arm. My heart clenches as if you are a dream and will disappear in a puff of smoke.
Turning, a smile spreads across your face, and the prisms on your arm disappear as you step toward me. “Good morning, darling.”
I rise out of bed feeling rested and sturdy. “Morning,” I say in English, catching myself in time to say “Buenos dias” to Rubenia.
“Buenos dias,” she says with a soft smile.
Yesterday it seemed I’d be nauseous and shaky-legged forever. This morning, I am hungry. I eat two helpings of black beans and politely decline the eggs. Fede is gone, but Rubenia sits at the table nodding encouragement with each bite. She offers me a third helping, but I shake my head and thank her, feeling as if I’m going to burst. You have stepped outside. Through the open doorway I see you speaking to a man wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a checkered shirt.
When I join you, you introduce him as Jesus, Miguel and Dominica’s brother. I shake his calloused hand as Rubenia comes out with a burlap bag, opening it to show us a stack of soft tortillas and cheese wrapped in thin cloth and a jug filled with water.
“You are the dearest,” you say, throwing your arms around her.
Rubenia pulls away, nodding shyly and giving me a wet kiss on the cheek, her lips velvety soft. I can’t think of anyone back home who would take in strangers, clothe them and feed them and kiss them when they leave.
Jesus drives a faded, pink truck that he says used to be bright red. “Twenty years ago,” he laughs. The truck rattles at every bump as if it’s going to fall open around us. I sit squeezed in between you two, keeping an eye out for ruts in the road so I can hold on to the dashboard instead of bouncing up and hitting the ceiling. The gearshift is pressed against my leg, and Jesus apologizes every time he takes hold of it, the engine roaring with each shifting gear. The narrow road, tunnel and steep cliffs are just as terrifying in daylight as they were last night, and I close my eyes every time the truck lurches toward the edge.
It’s a relief when we finally drop onto flat desert, no trees in sight, just pointy cacti and lumps of rock and sage. The sky is a bundle of white clouds, the hills crusty and dry, the road empty, save for the occasional truck loaded down with crates that Jesus steers around without slowing down. We pass a man on horseback as he herds a group of skinny cows, a dog yapping them into order. Strange things begin appearing out of nowhere: piles of abandoned cabbages and chickens that scatter as we roar past. How chickens or cabbages came to be here, all alone, I can’t imagine. You laugh at these oddities, looking from the window to me, squeezing my hand and smiling as if we’re tourists in this barren land instead of escapees. Your hair is tied back with a scarf that crests the top of your head, and your face is scrubbed clean, no lipstick or mascara, which makes you look young, your loose-fitting skirt and blouse—a gift from Rubenia—folksy and modest. I like you this way.
By early afternoon, we are in the town of El Brasil. Jesus parks on the street, takes the money you offer for the ride, wishes us luck and walks off waving his hand over his head. You drop your purse into the burlap bag Rubenia gave you and shift the fat strap onto your shoulder. This town is bigger than the last one, full of gray-plaster buildings and washed-out adobe huts with faded tapestries hanging behind open, carved-out doorways. Soda bottles roll in the gutters, and scraps of newspapers flutter across our path.
I glance at you, wondering if you have a plan, not daring to ask how we’re getting home or what will happen if Chu Chu stops us or if we’ll run out of money. The concerned expression on your face makes me even more nervous, but you perk up when you see a store with a faceless mannequin in the window wearing a red, flowered dress. You eye my dress, socks and boots—none of which are white any longer—and say “First thing is to get you out of that ridiculous outfit.”
Inside the small store, we crouch behind racks and try on clothes that are nothing like what we’d buy in a department store in LA. I think of you back home needing matching bags and hats and lipstick colors. Nothing matches here. The blouses are made of thick cotton with square necks and wide sleeves, and everything is embroidered or printed in diverse, colorful patterns. There are no children’s clothes, but we eventually find a small blue dress sprinkled with white birds, and it fits well enough. The cotton is light and breathable and a relief after my belted, buttoned school uniform.
“Your boots will have to do. But these pumps of mine will never make the journey.” You bend over and unbuckle the top strap of your shoes. “We don’t have far to go to the border now.”
“How are we getting there?”
“Walking.”
“Walking? Why can’t we take a taxi or a bus?”
“I don’t have enough money for a taxi, and if Chu Chu is as thorough as I know him to be, he’ll have the bus drivers around here looking out for us.”
This seems unlikely, but clearly you’re taking no chances. “I thought he was looking for an old woman?”
“He might be, or he might be looking for me by now.”
“How far is it to the border?”
“Jesus said it was about twenty miles.”
“Twenty miles! I’ve never walked more than a few blocks in my whole life.”
“We’ll be fine.” You slide your feet into a pair of leather sandals and wiggle your toes with their pink-painted nails. “So long as we don’t have to do it in heels.”
“What if we get lost?” I ask.
“We’ll stop and ask someone.”
“But what if they’re on the lookout for us?”
“Nina, you’re going to have to trust me.”
Despite how dependent you always seemed back home, needing Grandmother Maria’s advice on everything, you seem bizarrely sure of yourself in this foreign place.
On the street, we buy straw hats to protect our faces from the blazing sun, two bottles of Jarritos, bananas and warm tortillas we get from a street-food stall to add to Rubenia’s store before heading out of town.
It’s too hot to talk, and the silence becomes oddly peaceful as the road lengthens and stretches away to low hills, the land bare and brittle, beaten down by sun and wind. The only things alive are thick-trunked, pale green cacti lining the road like prickly armed beggars and the occasionally stunted mesquite we rest in the shade of, sipping soda gone flat and munching tortillas, before moving on.
As we walk, a stillness settles inside me. I don’t even mind the weariness in my legs or the blaze of white sky overhead. I sink into the pleasure of Itime with just the two of us. No school or husbands or Grandmother Maria or film sets to compete with. For hours, we don’t see a single car or truck, just the straight, hard-packed road disappearing into ripples of heat. I wonder if it is only in moments of crisis that I will have you to myself or if things will change when we go home. Maybe the fear of losing me will make you more devoted, I think, walking closer to you, the heat like breath between our bodies.
When the sun sinks low in the sky, we picnic in an empty church, washing down our mushy, bruised bananas with clean water from Rubenia’s jug. The church walls are white stucco, the benches dark wood. You ask about my time at Chu Chu’s, and I tell you everything, except the part about the tequila. My impression of Señorita Perron makes you laugh, and you snort with disgust as I mimic Florinia’s accent. I tell you she’s not half as pretty as you, and you smile your stage smile, and we fall silent.
The church is so quiet it’s like our own world.
“We should pray,” you whisper, and we clasp our hands and hang our heads. I pray for selfish things: that Alfonso is gone and I never have to go back to boarding school; that Grandmother Maria moves out and you never marry again; that we spend every Saturday night eating orange sherbet and watching television.
Afterwards, as you stand in the half darkness singing to me, I wonder what you prayed for. Your voice is achingly beautiful, the notes rising and falling in a way that makes my chest hurt with a pleasurable sadness, like a good cry.
I want you to always sing and to always be with me.
We fall asleep curled on the floor behind the altar, watched over by a statue of Juan Diego set into an alcove above our head. He kneels at the feet of the Virgin of Guadalupe, white stone carved into white stone. I press my back closer to you, into your soft, full chest, your arm around my shoulder. Body carved into body.
Chapter Sixteen
* * *
Border Crossing
Daughter,
The truth, dear one, is that I pray we make it to LA in time for my screen test for Rio Bravo. I should pray that we make it safely over the border, but as I sit with you in the quiet and warmth and safety of the church, I have a resounding feeling things will work out. So I pray for something that feels more useful.
But when I wake up the next morning with you curled under my arm, stiff and sore from that hard church floor, I am filled with doubt. I think about that night with Alfonso, how I should have come home earlier, kept him enticed, been a better wife. I’m sure I could have prevented it. And your father, I should never have let Mamá tell Chu Chu what happened, never let her pack you off to school. If you’d been home, Chu Chu wouldn’t have taken you so easily. Now we are in his country, under laws I don’t understand, headed toward one of the largest, most popular border towns with police and border patrol looking for us. I keep imagining you being dragged into a car with that oafish woman or, worse, handed over to Chu Chu and his young, beautiful new wife who I picture smiling at me as she shoves you into the back of their car.
Keeping an arm around you, I twist my cramped neck and look up at the high beams thick as railroad ties leading to blunted dead ends. I think about the time I left Cuba for New York with Mamá when I was fifteen, how clear-eyed and confident she’d been getting on an airplane for the first time, heading to a strange country, how sure of it all. Even after I married Chu Chu and went to Mexico City, Mamá stayed in that foreign city of New York and waited for me. I was angry with her for not returning to Cuba, for being so sure of my failed marriage. “Men you cannot control,” she’d said, “but your talent is yours. If you fail at that, you have only yourself to blame.”
Not entirely true, I think now. My talent is dependent on men and greed and a film industry I have no control over, even as I’ve learned to love it. And I do love it, the attention, the allure, how men look at me, how I know exactly what to do to direct their eyes where I want them to go. All eyes on me. I need that.
I slide my numb arm out from under you, watching you sleep and knowing that even if I can get you out of this country, I have failed you. If I had been shooting Rio Bravo when all of this happened, I would have convinced myself to finish the movie before coming for you. You have never been my first priority, no matter how much I want you to be or how much I love you. It is an obvious and unsettling fact I now fully understand about myself.
“Nina?” I gently shake you awake, your confused eyes adjusting as you rise up on one elbow and take in the soft light through the stained-glass windows. “Look,” I whisper, pointing to a yellow-breasted bird perched on the back of a pew. It tilts its head, searching us curiously before fluttering up to the rafters.
You get to your feet, watching the bird dart around the high ceiling. “How will it get out?”
“Through the open door, if it’s smart enough.” I stand and stretch, reaching my arms up and then touching my toes, easing the stiffness from my lower back before sliding my feet into my sandals. I check to make sure my alligator purse is still nestled safely at the bottom of the burlap bag, then take stock of our water supply. The jug is only a quarter full. We’ll have to be sparing, but Nuevo Laredo is not too far, maybe nine miles. I sling the bag over my shoulder. “We should get going while it’s still cool. Maybe we’ll find a ride today. I don’t fancy another night in a church. You?”
“I didn’t mind it.”
“Well, my bones are not as young as yours.” I hand you your hat, secure mine on my head and walk to the church door, pulling the heavy handle to open it.
There is only a faint, orange glow at the edge of the horizon, but the day is already warm, the sky a hard blue over the pale, red hills. You stand in the doorway, your back to me, still watching the bird.
“Come, Nina.”
“What if it doesn’t know how to get out? It will die in there.”
“It can sing, can’t it?”
“Yes.”
“And what have I taught you about song?”
“That songs transport us.”
“That’s right. If it has its voice, it is not trapped.”
You follow slowly, looking back, waiting for the bird to escape. I look back, too, even though I know it’s more likely the bird will bang into a window than find a way out that door. Either way, I fear it’s a bad omen.
I pull your attention to the road, pointing to the horizon and telling you to watch for dust up ahead. “T
hat’s the sign of a car coming,” I say, handing you a tortilla rolled into a tube which you nibble like you would crust from toast. I take a sip of water from the jug and return it to the bag where it bangs heavily against my side. The ground slopes upward as we walk, sagebrush and thistle edging onto the road.
Hours go by, and we don’t see a soul, not even a scraggly cow or donkey. We are out of water, and when a large crate appears in the distance I hope for abandoned fruit or vegetables, even cabbage would do, but as we approach a rifled soldier steps into the road. It’s a sentry box, not fruit. He holds his gun easily in both hands, and the sight makes my heart hammer in my chest. A large sign with the words Alto/Stop is jammed into the dirt next to him. When he sees us, he gives a tight nod, and I ask him, sweetly, how much farther to Nuevo Laredo.
“A little over a mile,” he replies, and all I can think about is fresh, cold water to drink when we get there.
“Thank you,” I say with a smile and start to proceed past when he puts a hand up.
“You’re not from here?”
“No,” I say, honestly, wondering if my Cuban accent tipped him off.
“Where are you from?”
“The United States.”
He raises an eyebrow. “Where are you from originally?”
“Cuba.”
“No belongings? You came empty-handed to Mexico?”
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