Of Women and Salt

by Gabriela Garcia

  Three of them—slender, mustachioed men with handsome faces. They were there to deliver an official edict from the governor. The workers knew better than to stare, but María Isabel could see their rolling pause, could see how they all strained to hear.

  Antonio folded La Aurora and placed it on the lectern as Porteños read the scroll before him and the soldiers watched. Porteños said the words under his breath and guided his fingers across the lines. Then, hand on the back of one of the soldiers, he guided them out the door, where they continued to huddle and speak in whispers.

  “Gentlemen,” Porteños said with a nod. The door’s closing echoed through the workshop.

  “There will be no more readings,” he announced, matter-of-fact.

  Antonio kept his eyes to the ground when Porteños led him out. María Isabel could hear them speak outside but could not make out the words. Antonio sounded agitated, and Porteños seemed to calm and admonish him simultaneously. Then, silence, just the brusque click of Porteños’s heels as he reentered the workshop and walked back to his desk.

  Everything in María Isabel told her to go after her husband. She closed her eyes and silently repeated the words that had carried her through past weeks: We are force.

  She stood. She tucked her chair into the desk and walked out the door, knowing she’d never walk through its arched entryway again. A handful of workers followed. Porteños didn’t even bother to look up.

  * * *

  They knew they risked their lives. But María Isabel and Antonio had ceased to care. Something greater than themselves swam in their blood; this would be their war.

  Each day, when the workers who remained at the workshop had their lunch hour, María Isabel and Antonio met them in a clearing in the middle of a sugarcane field. Antonio struggled to receive copies of La Aurora now that Porteños y Gómez no longer employed him, but he rode into the city every few days to bring back other news. They made the trek to their meeting spot with a bundle of books each, philosophy texts and political manifestos, mostly. The workers repaid them with yeasty bread, with fat sausages, with cauldrons of ajiaco. On Christmas eve, they even slaughtered a pig that roasted for hours. Every day at noon, they lit their cigars and took a place on dried palm that lined the ground. They nodded and clapped at passages that inspired or put to words that which they all felt.

  And María Isabel learned to read more each day. Now that she had empty time at home, she sat with Antonio for hours, and when all had gone to bed, she ran her fingers over crisp pages by candlelight until the stub wore to darkness.

  But still, they were dark days for her, filled with hunger, with panic, with mourning, even as she celebrated a secret: she was pregnant, her belly beginning to swell and round. She’d known for months before she shared the news with Antonio or his mother; she’d known even before she walked out of Porteños y Gómez. But she had kept quiet because marveling at what a life could be felt tenuous when death sank its tentacles into everything else. When she finally told Antonio, he lit up like wildfire in a field of grass, deepened his resolve to resist the terror the governor’s edict had staked in their minds.

  But Antonio didn’t want her making the trip to the clearing with him any longer. He urged María Isabel to rest, take shade. Her mother-in-law agreed and made hot compresses of cheesecloth and cotton for her aching back, told her to mind her priorities. For a few days, she listened to them and stayed in the comfort of their homey cabin, stewing beans and embroidering a baby bonnet. But even in her state, she yearned to leave. She made the trips until her ankles could no longer tolerate them. And then she put aside all her housework and read for hours.

  She could now string letters into words. She marveled at the magic of it all, how human beings had thought to etch markings on stone to tell their stories, sensed each lifetime too grand, too interesting, not to document. She placed one hand to her belly and felt the something in her move and stretch as if seeking its own freedom, felt as if the whole world were her womb. She wanted to write her own words. She wanted to write her life into existence and endure. Perhaps a piece of her knew death crouched close.

  How did the soldiers find out? No one would ever know for certain, though they would speculate: perhaps Antonio had left behind compromising evidence at Porteños y Gómez (the translated letter from Victor Hugo?) and Porteños denounced him, perhaps a worker had betrayed him, perhaps it was simple bad luck—the soldiers marching through the field and finding the clearing, hearing the voices, the words.

  The four soldiers were kind enough to let the workers go after they disrupted the lesson with whip cracks, a pistol shot. But they stood Antonio atop one of his fat books. One said, “Now will your literature save you?” Antonio clasped his hands behind his back, looked up.

  And María Isabel, as though she knew, collapsed on the floor of their home, moaning, watching the liquid burst beneath her. She gripped her sister-in-law’s hand and screamed, beseeched the santos. She let Antonio’s mother wipe her brow and pray before her. She called the names of everyone she’d loved and lost.

  “Declare your loyalty to the Crown,” the soldier in the field said, rifle pointed at Antonio’s head.

  “Libertad!” Antonio yelled, loud enough that he hoped María Isabel would hear, that she would know he’d fight until the end.

  But the world was going silent for María Isabel as she strained with the little strength left in her. She tasted the salt of her sweat and pushed and grasped at all before her, saw the room undulate, felt the waves crash inside. She heard her mother-in-law and sister-in-law’s voices as if sieved through layers and felt herself go in and out of consciousness. Her fingers brushed against the stickiness of her own blood.

  María Isabel felt her mother-in-law grasp at the fleshy head that emerged. And she heard her own pulse inside her, loud, multiplying as if fighting for two, for three, rippling. We are force. The resounding scream of life rushing out of her.

  A soldier commanded his fellow men to raise their rifles. Antonio cried out again.

  There was a click. There was a “Fire!”

  The baby’s wailing mixed with the firecracker sounds of guns ablaze, yelling to the sky. Antonio’s mother cut the cord, placed the wriggling infant in María Isabel’s arms, wrapped a blanket over mother and child. But María Isabel pulled herself to stand on wobbly legs. Weak, smeared with blood and sweat, trembling. The baby cried out again, and she held it close to her heart, tried to remember the feeling of her mother’s arms as a child. Cecilia. She rocked her to exhaustion, watched as her tiny lids fluttered into sleep, never taking her eyes off the field framed in the window. Antonio’s sister had gone to look for him. But María Isabel already knew the task would prove fruitless. She had felt the truth of the moment in her bones, in her breath. And she thought she had heard it: a faint, barely audible cry for liberty.

  She brought Cecilia to her chest as tears clouded her vision, and the infant’s newly found screams quieted when she felt the nipple and suckled. María Isabel had worried her milk sparse since regular meals had become an increasingly rare luxury. She fought anxiety over what solid food she could provide when the moment came. Instead, María Isabel fixed on a ribbon of smoke outside as it curled into itself, formed a slow waltz upward. She could think only of a cigar ashing on the edge of a life, could almost feel the warmth of its dark, woody embrace. But just like that, the sky was clear again.

  2

  EVERYTHING IS HOLDING YOU NOW

  Jeanette

  Miami, 2014

  Blue and red lights disco-dancing across the walls wake her; she watches from her bedroom window. A white van with an official-looking crest. Two agents in black jackets with reflective letters. She shrinks behind the curtain. Only a sliver of scene is visible, and the only light on the street that hasn’t burned out blazes a cold glow. The letters on the jackets seem to spell out the feeling of the night: ICE. Jeanette clutches her bathrobe tight.

  The neighbor woman is walked out in handcuff
s, wearing pajamas. On her pants, Minnie Mouse stands on tiptoe with fingers clasped at her face, hearts of varying sizes exploding in the air around her mouse ears. Jeanette doesn’t know her. Just knows that she works every day, even Sundays. She sees her leave her house always in the same pink smock, with the same caddy of cleaning supplies. Jeanette’s breath creates little spirals of fog on the window. One agent, a woman with a burst of auburn curls, shrugs her jacket closed with one hand while the other holds the chain that links the woman’s handcuffs. No shouts, no screams, no tussle. The agents and the neighbor woman walk in silence to the van, lights still spinning like Fourth of July fireworks. The male agent slides the door shut with a bang. The rumble of the engine. The cloud puff of exhaust. Tiny wires crisscross all the windows, so Jeanette cannot see inside the van, cannot see the neighbor woman as the van drives down the road past every blacked-out town house window and makes a right, disappears. It all happens in minutes.

  Jeanette tries to fall back asleep but cannot. She rubs lavender oil on her wrists, takes a tab of melatonin. Lies there, eyes open, for what feels like an hour. Finally she dials the number, making sure to press *67 first to disable caller ID. Mario answers in a sleep-clogged voice. Mario answers because Mario always answers no matter the time of night. And even now, six months separated and six months sober, Jeanette still swallows the rock in her throat as she waits for the click, the familiar voice.

  She says: “I miss you.”

  No need for pleasantries or pretense. No need to even announce herself. Of course it is her. A sigh on the other side. A rustling of sheets.

  “Jeanette.”

  “Hi.”

  “We can’t keep doing this.”

  “I can’t sleep.”

  A sound like a snap. Turning on a light?

  “That brand of ginger ale that you like,” she says. “The one they stopped selling at the supermarket near our old house? I saw it today where I shop.”

  “Where do you shop?”

  “You know I can’t tell you that.”

  “At least tell me you’re still in Miami?”

  Silence.

  A sigh.

  “Jeanette, how long are we going to play games like this? If you won’t even tell me where you are, do you call just to break my heart even more? Just to make it harder for me?”

  She can picture him. He sleeps shirtless and in boxers. She can picture the print of the sheets, the color, the smell of just-washed. The pile of library books on his nightstand. The color of the walls. They picked it out together: Eggshell Bavarian Cream. What’s he reading these days?

  He says: “Just tell me you are okay.”

  She says: “I am okay.”

  She thought she was calling him to talk about the raid, the neighbor woman. Turns out she has nothing to say about that. Also turns out: sobriety is a daily exercise, especially at night. She pictures her nightstand of just a year ago: crushed OxyContins, grapey cough syrup to send her pain-free into morning. A kind of prayer. She pulls the covers to her chin. Wonders what real prayer she’d whisper if she were the kind of woman who prayed.

  * * *

  What she knows about the neighbor woman: likely in her thirties, probably Central American, comes home each evening around six or seven. She has burnt-sugar skin and dark black hair. Always her face is perfectly made up. Arched eyebrows. Deep brown lips. Eyelashes that curl up like flower petals. Unmarried? Jeanette has never seen her with anyone, not even a friend. Just a young daughter who gets dropped off every night around eight. What happened to the daughter? She realizes she hasn’t thought about the daughter. The driver who drops off the daughter never gets out of the car. Every day the little girl just runs up to her door and knocks. She is around seven or eight years old, Jeanette guesses. Occasionally their paths cross when she and the neighbor woman are at their driveways. They say hello to each other, the daughter smiles. They’ve never talked more than that. Jeanette is twenty-seven, and she hardly notices or thinks about children.

  And now, after the raid, the blood orange of a Miami morning like any other. Of course she is still in Miami. These streets course through the blood—all pastel mini-mall suburban blight, tropical flourish to each dragging second, each concrete bungalow a kind of American dream achieved no matter how crooked the mortgage. No other place calls her home like this. It’s just another day in another home not that different from the one she shared with Mario, only Mario isn’t here.

  Jeanette sets her laptop on the kitchen table beside the window. This gives her a view of the neighbor’s house. All day she sits with her headphones on, listening to a psychiatrist define patients by insurance number and ailment. Obsessive-compulsive disorder. Hypomania. Schizotypal personality co-occurring with generalized social phobia. She types furiously, occasionally pausing the tape to search her DSM for spelling and billing codes. She makes a note to order the newest version. She microwaves a Healthy and Lean meatball parmesan with a side of matchstick veggies. She smokes cigarette after cigarette even though her sponsor has warned her to stop because “reliance on any substance or drug is a slippery slope to relapse.” As if everyone in recovery doesn’t smoke. Outside: silence falls, a slow domino effect, cars leaving their driveways until the street is empty of all but Jeanette’s. A few rustling trees. An occasional lizard or bird. No sign of the neighbor woman. No sign that anything at all happened the night before.

  By evening Jeanette has finished her transcription work, has emailed it to her temp agency. She readies for dinner, browses the freezer, hums a top 40 tune, Rihanna or Beyoncé or Adele. She glimpses a car driving up to the neighbor’s house. The neighbor’s daughter gets out, and the car U-turns around the cul-de-sac and heads away from the house. Jeanette thinks of rushing out and stopping the car. Explaining that the little girl’s mother isn’t home. But she freezes as her mind weighs possibilities, questions, her role in any of this. She looks out the window. The little girl stands before the neighbor’s door in purple leggings and a flowered polo. She holds a pink backpack with both hands. Stares up at the door. Knocks. Stares. Knocks again. The girl scans her surroundings, and her eyes stop at Jeanette’s kitchen window. They stare at each other.

  * * *

  What can she do? The cold grass crunches beneath her bare feet. A breeze comes and goes, rustles palms. The girl has a look of mild amusement or apprehension or both as Jeanette approaches, as she invites the girl into her home. The girl looks uncertain, frowns as Jeanette kneels before her.

  “Just until we find your mom, okay? Do you know where she is?”

  “No.”

  “Who dropped you off?”

  “Jesse.”

  “Do you have Jesse’s number?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have your mom’s number? Maybe a cell phone?”

  “She doesn’t have one. I have my number, my house number.”

  “How about a family member we can call?”

  “No.”

  “No, like you don’t know their number? Know their name?”

  “No.”

  “Like an aunt or an uncle maybe? A grandma?”

  “They live in El Salvador.”

  “Okay, well. We’ll go inside. I’ll fix you a little snack while we try to find your mom?”

  The girl hesitates but then takes Jeanette’s open hand. She lets Jeanette lead her into the house, where she lumbers onto a kitchen chair and places her backpack at her feet. Her legs dangle. She is silent, fiddles with a ruffle at the hem of her shirt.

  “Do you like Hot Pockets?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want a Hot Pocket?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Ana.”

  “Ana, I’m Jeanette.”

  “Is my mom dead?”

  “Oh God, honey. No, she’s not dead.”

  Monosyllables. One-word answers. The microwave beeps. Steam emerges as Jeanette cuts the Hot Pocket in two. She places a paper plate befo
re Ana and says, “It’s hot.” The television announces a sale on brand-name mattresses of every kind. Prices slashed. Unbelievable savings. One-time event. Jeanette pieces together her own made-up stories: Immigration agents busted the mom for a fake social security number, some other harmless action born of necessity. The mother is desperately trying to explain that she had a daughter coming home from—

  “Where were you again last night?”

  Ana blows into the opening of the Hot Pocket while holding it with a paper towel. She pauses, places the pastry down.

  “Jesse’s.”

  “You slept over? Why?”

  Ana regards Jeanette in a manner that makes her suddenly self-conscious. As if Ana knows something isn’t right. As if Ana thinks Jeanette knows more than she’s giving away. As if Ana can see right through her.

  “Sometimes I sleep at Jesse’s.”

  “Who is Jesse?”

  “My babysitter.”

  “Will she come for you again?”

  “When my mom calls and tells her to pick me up at school.”

  “Will she pick you up from school on Monday?”

  “If my mom calls her.”

  Alternatively, the mother committed some kind of crime and Immigration picked her up. The mom caught a whiff that something was up and left her daughter at the babysitter’s overnight. She’s calling a relative or a friend right this moment to collect her. Someone will show up any minute now. Jeanette is embarrassed by her own problematic thoughts. Good immigrant, bad immigrant? She should know better.

  “Did you say all your relatives are in El Salvador?”

  “Yes.”

  “All of them?”

  Ana takes a bite. She chews. She swallows.

  “Yes,” she says. “Can I have some juice or water, please?”

  Jeanette opens her fridge. A moldy cube of cream cheese. Shredded Monterey Jack. White Cuban bread. She pours Ana a glass of tap water. Feels shame at where her own thoughts go. Does it even matter why ICE picked up her mom? Still, a child at her kitchen table. Still, awful that she never even asked her neighbor’s name. She hands Ana the glass of water.