It is easier to go further back, to deflect past with past. I ask about Cuba again.
My mother sighs.
There is nothing to say, she says. But I’ll tell you this: I was not rich like the other Cubans who came at that time.
It is more than she has ever said.
So how did you survive? I say, and what I really mean is how will I walk out of these gaudy gold-etched doors into the wet open mouth of a hot Miami afternoon and survive, and then the day after that, how will I survive, and then the day after that, how will I survive, and when will I stop feeling exhausted from all the surviving?
My mother laughs. Your father, she says. That’s how. Do you understand now why it’s been so hard for me to say no to that man all our life together?
See me, see me, I think. Just for this one moment, see me. I am sinking, I am screaming, Tell me how to live, Mommy.
I dip a finger into my cup, and she watches, perplexed, as I place it in my mouth.
I want to go, I say. To Cuba.
My mother laughs sarcastically. She rolls her eyes. It’s so good, my mother says. It’s so good to see you doing well. I mean, I think you are well. Are you well?
I nod. I can feel the sugar crystals dissolving on my tongue. Everything sweet. I run my tongue over my teeth.
* * *
The woman still comes alone during the week. But now I notice what I hadn’t noticed before. Her eyes are red-rimmed like my father’s last time I saw him, months and months ago. Cirrhosis had made him all blood vessel, bloat. But the woman is not all blood vessel or bloat, though her hands tremble each time she picks up a shoe to inspect it.
I watch her from my counter right across from the shoes. She always makes it a point to come to my counter even when she doesn’t buy something. But she is forgetful and often buys the same product she bought a day before or returns something she already has. She apologizes so often I begin to call her Mrs. Sorry to myself.
I see the woman during the holiday season, after Mario loses his job. I see her the week one of the clinic doctors catches Mario slipping pills into his shoe. He paces the whole week, yelling and throwing things. He knows he won’t be arrested, because the authorities are already starting to crack down on some of the clinics, inspectors and whatnot, all political he says, which means nothing to me but to him means he won’t be arrested because the clinic won’t call the cops.
But still. He’ll become a patient now, he’ll need to pay for the bottles and doctor shop, just like everybody else. The profit margin smaller. I ask my mother for a little more money so we can invest it, and she asks for what and I say I need new clothes, for work. And I tell Mario I am getting money from my mother, thinking that will make him feel better, one less problem, one way I make things better, and it does a little.
He hugs me and tells me I am the best thing to ever happen to him and it’s so hard for me to let go of that warm cologne embrace, needing this, wanting this so bad.
But the woman: she is back with her husband and they browse the shoes and she does not come to my counter. She just passes by and we make eye contact. We both smile at the same time.
* * *
I don’t know when the twenties become forties. I barely notice when the forties become eighties. I do remember my first. Pale pink in my hand, like a tutu, like the one I wore to my dance recital in second grade. Or like the houses in my subdivision, or guava juice from a can, or dusk when the sky eats the sun and traffic stalls and I don’t make it home until pink turns to red, red turns to black.
The first: Mario put the pill in his mouth and the coating turned to jelly. He rubbed it off on his white shirt. Forever we’d be walking around with streaks of Easter-pale on our shirts, baby pink, orange, green. There is something so childlike about this life, ours.
Mario toyed with the pill. He shaved it down—took a hose clamp he’d stolen from an auto store, used it like a cheese grater. The Oxy turned to dust. Mario racked up a line. I knew how to sniff—not that different from the coke, I figured—but this was different, different texture, different taste in the back of my throat. Mario told me not to tilt my head back. And then: I turned to dust. I turned to sitting by the ocean wrapped in towels or sinking into cotton candy clouds, or warm rain washing clean, or holding Mario’s hand, soft and slippery, maybe velvet, maybe maple syrup. No, a guest bathroom. Let me explain.
A memory: Hurricane Andrew, 1992. We crouched into the only room with no windows, the hallway guest bathroom. I don’t think I’d ever been confined in a space so small with my parents. This was before my father’s drinking had gotten as bad as it did, before my mother had lost layers of herself until she was emotionally weightless, onionskin.
Back then there was something like TV love still. Back then there was me, small and shaking each time I heard a crash, a Category 5 wind whip to crush a car beneath a palm, to blow a roof into the night, send a balcony rail sailing. But I wasn’t afraid. Mom smelled like soap, like clean. A candle flickered on the bathroom sink; we’d lost power already. She wore a black nightgown with red flowers, and I thought her the very definition of beauty, womanhood, future me, the person emulated in every game of dress-up.
Dad stoic, patting me on the back. I was so used to seeing him in scrubs or a suit, and plaid pajama pants felt like a sign I’d crossed into a more intimate space, that we’d be a closer family that night. The bathtub was stopped up and filled with water that sparkled in the candlelight. I could see us reflected when I looked up at the bathroom mirror, and I wondered what others saw when they looked at my family. We looked close.
At one point the wind picked up outside and we heard the loud snap of a branch and my parents both hugged me, together. Heroin would take me there. Heroin would be the only time traveler I’d meet in this life. So safe in that warm bubble, that eye of the storm. Everything raging outside, and me, warm and embraced. What does it say about a person when she doesn’t want one of the deadliest hurricanes in Florida history to end?
* * *
But I’ll never recover that first time. Or that bathroom. I’ll rack up lines and swear I’ll never mainline, trying to recover that first high. Then buy rigs pretending I’m a diabetes patient needing insulin. Skin-pop, needle into the skin but not hitting a vein, not yet. Share a rig with Mario. I’ll run out of money and the clinics will shutter and the country will catch on and my mother will catch on and the pills will dry up completely so Mario will buy from his boy for way cheaper for that first high. I’ll even knowingly buy pandas or heroin stepped on with fentanyl because anything anything anything. To recover that first high. Nobody telling me it will never come. Nobody telling me life will be a daily quest to stave off the sickness and I won’t even feel good anymore. Dope made us sick, then it healed us. Don’t believe anyone who tells you dope isn’t love.
But there is no heroin yet. There is no Operation Shut Down Every Pill Mill. We are far from the dollar-a-milligram to come. We are far from treatment bed after treatment bed after treatment bed, half of them scams, but I don’t know this yet. We are far from my mother screaming she’d lose her life to save mine, she’d lose her life to hear me say I want to live. Mario and me: we are headed to hell hand in hand, but I don’t know this yet. I just know it’s not one Oxy anymore. I just know I’m falling in love too. With it. With him. Becoming the same thing. Falling in love. Falling in love.
Nobody says rising in love.
And the husband with his wife standing before me and the husband says, she doesn’t want to get an eye lift even though I tell her she looks like shit with all those wrinkles. He tells me I’m pretty again and says, give her something that will at least make it better. I lay out the options on the counter, and the woman looks from one bottle to the next and I notice her eyes begin to water and I beg her in my head please don’t cry please don’t cry please don’t cry. She doesn’t cry.
I thought I came here, she says instead, her voice shaking. I thought I—
She doesn’t wan
t to get an eye lift even though I tell her she looks like shit, the husband says.
My hand is shaking and her hand is shaking and all I can think is a needle doesn’t really hurt that much, it’s just a pinch.
When the woman walks away, the husband hands me a blue-black container in its package and says also, he would like to return this.
I say, you didn’t buy that here. We don’t sell that here.
Yes, you do, he says, I see it right behind you on that shelf. I have the receipt, he says.
You didn’t buy that here, I repeat.
And I know I’ll be fired and I know that neither Mario nor I will have a job and I know that he will never love me like I need him to love me, which is to say a love that erases everything that came before, and I know that he will end me but I feel like a truck, I feel like a bag bursting with rocks, I feel like I could crush everything beneath my weight.
You didn’t buy that here, I say. I will not accept this, I say.
12
MORE THAN WE THINK
Ana
Mexico, 2019
She was only thirteen, but Ana was not afraid of death. She’d already seen it up close—how death had devoured her mother bit by bit, from the inside out, until what remained became apparent: a husk, a whisper, something you could mourn alive, not her mother at all. So she faced the river brave. She watched its muddy current swallow vines and leaves. She felt its power beneath her feet, how the placid shore hid a deeper hunger ahead.
The pollero handed her a black garbage bag in which to place her few possessions—a tattered backpack that contained a ziplock with all her important documents and a cell phone with an American SIM card she’d purchased from a gas station. She stripped to her underwear beside the dozen others who did the same—a few children and teens like her, mostly, and four adult women, two men. She stuffed her clothes, a yellowed Hello Kitty shirt and dirt-streaked jeans, into the bag. She tied a double knot.
A little girl beside her began to whimper.
Her older brother, a teenager, placed a hand over her mouth. “Shut up before he hears you,” he whispered as the girl placed a hand over his. She stopped crying.
The pollero had guided them to a large black van by the shore hidden in the scrub. Now he opened the back doors to several tires secured with rope. He held a flashlight in his teeth as he motioned to the group. He wanted them to drag a tire each, to help the little kids. He’d gone over it earlier.
Ana rubbed her legs together for warmth. All around her, thick brush scratched her ankles and mud coated her shoes. She trudged behind the others and pulled at a tire that bounced once on the ground and fell on its side. She struggled to lift the tire from the sludge and roll it toward the river. Some of the smallest kids shared a float with a sibling or adult, pushing alongside them, too little to really help. The adults instructed them, watched over them.
The pollero showed the group how to position themselves onto the tire so their upper body was supported. Ana squinted. She could barely make out his features in the dark, the cave of his black eyes and the long, thick hair he wore in a ponytail. He had on a hooded sweatshirt and dark corduroy pants that concealed the gun she knew he carried.
He’d shown it to them back in Monterrey, as they huddled in a one-room stash house before the next leg of the trip. He’d shown it while instructing them not to speak, to listen to every instruction, the code word should anyone pull them off a bus. The kids had stared wide-eyed. The adults had barely batted an eye.
Ana was the only one who started the trip already in Mexico. The others had journeyed for a month or more, from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras. They spoke little to one another. Their accents were noticeable; you never knew whom to trust. And a couple of them spoke Mam, K’iche’, barely any Spanish at all. Ana couldn’t remember quieting for so long. Other than a few whispered words—Where’s the bathroom? I think one of the children is sick—Ana hadn’t spoken in weeks.
The pollero instructed them on how to dog-paddle once they hit the water, even through the waist-high parts of the river, as he waited for a call from a lookout. The mud could swallow them like quicksand if they touched the ground, he said. They would drown and no one would be able to help them if the Border Patrol didn’t come. They needed to paddle with their feet and hold their bags on their heads or with their teeth. Most of the people in the group hoped Border Patrol would catch them. Hoped they could start their asylum process on the other side and not in a tent camp. But the pollero had instructed some of the adults and older teens on where to go to try to blend in if they weren’t caught. What streets to look for, what houses.
But right now, all Ana could see was water. Water like polished black stone. Ana could make out more bushes, more dirt, on the other side. The sides looked the same. Everything scrub, dirt, her own shivering body. During the day in Miguel Alemán, the sun was brutal and unrelenting. She’d folded her one clean shirt under a baseball cap just to protect her neck from sunburn. It was already peeled and raw, because they’d spent the day camped out and hiding at another part of the river.
They’d waited to cross but there were too many patrols on the other side. At that part of the river, there’d been no hint of breeze or even life. Just brush, tumbleweed, straw-colored dust that she’d expelled into tissue. She’d breathed so much sand she pictured it coating her lungs, its own desert beside her heart, a dune under her ribs.
But tonight was opposite, dry ice. It hurt to breathe. The mud was cold. She knew the water would be too. She knew the cold would wipe the fear, and she wanted to be there already, in the water, floating on her back, though she knew that wouldn’t be the case.
“I don’t want to go in,” the little girl in pigtails whispered beside her, teary.
“You have to,” Ana told her. “It’s going to be okay.”
“My mom is on the other side,” she said.
“We’re going to be okay.”
The girl reminded Ana of herself, of the trunk of a car, the cold of metal, of hospital machines. Of when she’d been motherless for days after her mother’s detention, taken in by a stranger and wondering if she’d ever see her own family again.
The pollero got the call. Border Patrol agents switched shifts and would leave their patrol cars empty with the headlights on. A one-hour window, what they’d waited for all day. He whispered directions, thrust their tires.
Motherless, motherless again.
The adults pushed the kids forward as best they could. A few sniffled and whimpered; one yelped when her feet touched the water. Ana gripped her plastic bag with one hand and dragged the tire with the other. Her feet touched the icy water, and the mud became thicker, more greedily sucking. She lifted each foot with effort and finally gave up and slid through the muck.
The water was thicker than she had imagined. She’d pictured a swift river and currents she’d have to battle with all her might. But the river was rather narrow, and the water swampy, muddy. Ana could barely see before her, but she was guided by the shapes on the other side. She plodded until the water drenched her waist, and she remembered the pollero had told them to swim. She waded with one hand holding the bag on her head and the other grasping the tire. All around her, the others did the same, quiet, the only sound water splashing. Ana tried to wipe her eyes with her forearm but streaked mud across her face. Her eyes stung. She had only waded for minutes but already her arms felt tired, her shoulder muscles burned. She kicked and kicked but was making it across at a crawling pace. Maybe there was a current.
Ana heard a yelp and the commotion of splashing water.
Behind her, the pigtailed girl who had gone in with her was thrashing and crying out. “I’m stuck! I’m stuck!” she wailed.
Her brother, holding himself afloat beside her, leaned over his tire and pulled at her arms. Water lapped over the little girl in spurts. Her head bobbed in and out of the water.
Ana froze, unsure whether to turn back and swim the feet that separated her from t
he girl. But one of the older women, closer, made it to the girl and pulled at her from the other side.
“My feet!” the girl cried. “The river is eating me!” She splashed and wailed each time her head went under.
“Quiet!” the older woman whispered loudly. “Stop yelling!”
Others along the ant trail of tire and body stopped and looked over. But slowly, as if an escalator had restarted, the bodies moved forward again. Standing still meant the current pushed the group further askew of the bushes for which they aimed. Ana began to kick again too. She reasoned there was no use in dooming herself if another was helping the girl. But there was an ugly calculation in her decision too—she also reasoned that there was no use if the girl couldn’t be helped. She tasted her own tears, or maybe sweat, her own salt. The sound of legs paddling and splashing. The pigtailed girl quieting. The whole night too quiet. She’ll be okay. Snaking her way forward. She could make out the shore, could see a bank and the patchy grass that framed it. Soon she would touch ground in the country that made her, expelled her. But Roma, Texas, meant nothing to her. Would Miami? Miami without her mother. She was crying again.
Ana was so young when she had first traveled to the United States. She could no longer make out the real memories from those instilled by her mother’s stories. Could no longer tell what had actually shaped her from what she’d been told had shaped her, should’ve shaped her. Somebody else’s story. She could close her eyes and see the trunk of the car, musty and hot, pinpricks for light and air over a piece of cardboard that covered her.
Of her actual life in the US, though, she remembered more. She’d lived first in an apartment somewhere else in Texas with three other migrant families, sharing a twin bed with her mother. Then a friend had told her mother about a job working for a housekeeping company in Miami. So they had traveled by bus, Ana splayed on her mother’s legs so they’d only have to purchase one ticket.
Of Women and Salt Page 17