They had lived in Miami five years, first in a small, roach-filled apartment in Homestead and then in a town house in the Kendall suburbs. The last had been the happiest years of her life that she could remember—an elementary school she loved with a huge jungle gym under the sun, weekends playing in the ball pit of a McDonald’s across the street from their complex, trips to the beach, barbecues at the park. She’d had no idea how tenuous a life she’d borrowed.
Then her mother taken. Arriving home from school to a locked door, an empty house. A neighbor—Janet? J-something?—took her in for a few days before officers came for Ana too. Then family detention, a jail for mothers, babies. A transfer to a different, cold, cold holding center. Other officers, Border Patrol? Hard to keep track of. Then, her mother had told her, a bus that dropped them in Mexico, an agent that said, “Make your way to El Salvador from here.” They never did.
She heard the shore before she saw it. Heard the footsteps of others who reached the bank and abandoned their tires. So much mingled sorrow, relief. How nice it would be to … collapse. Rest awhile. She couldn’t. She stood on the pebbly shore, the cold air shocking her skin into goose bumps, and kicked the tire aside with her leg. A rock had scratched her foot and she bled, but she had no time to worry over a small injury, minor pain. She blinked until she could make out a bush ahead and sprinted toward it, holding the bag and her throbbing arm at her side.
Behind the bush, Ana tore the plastic garbage bag and thrust her clothes on. She lamented she hadn’t thought to bring a small towel. Her soaked bra formed rings on her T-shirt. Wet clothes a dead giveaway. She tried to dry herself as best she could with her one other, much dirtier, shirt. Ana put a sock over her cut foot and it quickly reddened with blood, slid into her crusty sneakers. Then, she made her way toward a sandy path, some houses farther ahead, highway, a dollar store, fast food. She moved through the scrub.
An engine whir and the screech of tires. She remained hidden but could see through the leaves. A few meters from her, a white van turned on its lights near another trail. Two men with flashlights and bulletproof vests jumped out from either side. They aimed the flashlights at three of the children.
She could hear their words, in Spanish. Questions about where they were coming from, whom else they were with.
The children in the light’s halo were eight or nine, two boys and one girl. The girl’s hair was sopping wet and she held a small black backpack with a broken strap. The kids looked at one another and slowly walked toward the agents, the girl dropping her backpack as if unsure what to do with it.
Ana became acutely aware of her breath, like she had no idea how she’d ever breathed without thinking about it, without measuring each inhale and exhale. Her whole body a spark. She wanted to run but had the better sense to stay hidden. She watched the agents’ flashlights zoom above her as they made circles. She huddled deeper into the shadow of the bushes before her and thought of the promise she’d made her mother before she died—she’d survive, she’d fight. She told herself to swallow. She told herself to breathe.
They rounded up the rest of the children. Ana knew the parents instructed their kids to purposely look for the agents, to go to them. All sorts of rumors—they wouldn’t send children back, they’d process asylum more quickly for a child without a parent or a parent with a child, they’d send them straight to their families if they had someone in the country. None of it was true or all of it was true.
So much silence and the mind became unbearable. She’d cried quietly many nights on the floor of drop houses and motels all over Tamaulipas, San Luis Potosí, Monterrey. Cancer had ripped through her mother so fast, there was little time to consider something so frivolous as loss. What a luxurious thing, to feel. The pain a tender ache now that she could massage and curl into. For so long, she’d held the grief at bay. She’d smiled strong for her mother as she walked her brittle body down the corridor of a clinic or placed the ventilator over her mouth. She’d pretended that, when her mother coughed and the tissue came away wet and blood spattered, there was still possibility, a chance for recovery. Her very job, Ana thought, had been not to grieve, so that her mother could. She’d been the airy balance in a world of plastic tubes, breathing machines, metal. On her silent trip, Ana had allowed the weeping child through, a child as alone in the world without her mother as she had been six years ago.
She remembered: her neighbor who took her in for a few days. A brief moment, a small act, but ingrained in the way childhood becomes a series of images, a detail, a color, a word so that one moment becomes a defining moment and you’re not even sure why. J-something, absentmindedly slicking gloss over her lips, scrunching her hair with fruity mousse each morning. J-something’s house, an exact replica of her mother’s but bare, devoid of any decoration or personality. She remembered how, before she knew anything of what was to come, she’d curled in bed with her and they’d laughed together.
She’d felt so guilty and anxious, even as a child confused about what happened, the thought that police had taken her without a word to this woman, that this woman had probably wondered for the rest of her life what had happened to Ana. The police always did things like that. Enemy. J-something must have been in her room when the officers came. She never came out. Ana thought of trying to find her online, years later, to explain. But Ana had spent only a handful of days with this woman; it seemed silly, an imposition even. And yet, when Ana first thought of returning to the United States, where she had no family, this stranger had inexplicably popped into her mind. Maybe she just wanted to thank her. For softening the blow.
Ana doubted she’d ever see her again, but she was going to make her way to her old neighborhood anyway. At least she’d be in Miami, where the terrain was the tiniest bit more familiar. Where she’d sourced those childhood flashes. Where high schools were used to girls with no parents and no social security numbers.
Ana could hear some of the children crying as the agents loaded them onto the van. She could hear one of the women saying, this is my daughter. One of the men saying, no, there’s no one else. She could hear muffled sounds from the agents’ walkie-talkies and the slamming of van doors. By the time the van’s engine roared and the lights disappeared, she wanted nothing more than to fold into the dirt and sleep. But she couldn’t stop now. How long before there were other vans? Men searching for tracks?
Right now there were no other vans, no other men, just the houses, the stores. An abandoned fishing pole, an abandoned Styrofoam cooler. Almost perverse, these marks of leisurely afternoons, maybe a splash in the river, the flick of a wrist. She wondered how many families looked across the river and thought of girls like her, said to themselves, Thank God that’s not us. If life had taken only the slightest turn, she’d have thought that too.
The path snaked through the dark brush like a river cutting earth. She tried to remember the pollero’s instructions, right—no, left—a highway? Lights ahead cast shadows over the ground like prison bars, and Ana could feel a false safety beckoning: Crawl into the light. How long since she’d slept a full night? How long since she’d—?
The adrenaline rush faded, only exhaustion in its wake, she couldn’t even finish a thought. Up ahead she heard the rush of a single car.
* * *
The Amtrak train dropped her in Hialeah after three days and who knew how many transfers. Of all the train terminals she had passed through, this one struck her as saddest of all. A convergence point for south and west, tired bodies, people who couldn’t afford plane tickets or had accrued too many DUIs to drive down. A man with a long red beard hoisted a duffel emblazoned with a Confederate flag onto his shoulder. A woman dragged three crying children who clung to her legs.
Ana emerged blinking into the violent sunlight. A fading, sun-bleached mural on one wall of the train station depicted the Miami she’d harbored in dreams, all swaying palm trees and impossibly blue sky, sky that bled into ocean until you couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. A met
al cage covered half the mural and protected the air conditioner inside from theft. Beyond the train station, Ana could make out factory plumes and warehouses intersected by highway and the Miami-Dade Metrorail.
She’d done her research and knew she could take the Metrorail to Kendall and from there a bus to her old complex. She had the money all counted out in another ziplock in her backpack. She walked to the Hialeah station, passing boarded-up business fronts, check-cashing stores, pawnshops. Comforting, the Salvadoran pupusa spot, tucked between two abandoned buildings beneath an overpass. She couldn’t see inside, because someone had painted a countryside landscape complete with a horse carriage over the glass. Flyers for various performers and club nights were tacked over rolling hills. But she could smell the masa, the refried beans, childhood.
On the Metrorail, she sat between high schoolers making their way home from school, boisterous and happy and ignoring her, and downtown workers in suits reading books or staring blankly. Ana had taken improvised sink baths in terminal bathrooms, but she knew she looked a little wild. Sticky, salty. Her stomach rumbled.
Miami roared into a blur below—used-car lots, sprawling malls, pastel-colored condo complexes with pools and tennis courts, squat houses with metal bars, front yards strewn with broken appliances, corroding playgrounds. In the horizon, so many cranes rose into the sky like beanstalks, half-finished high-rises in their jaws. When night descended, the whole city lit up in purple and blue and white, an explosion of color.
Her stop was a mall parking lot, in the shadow of department stores and luxury jewelers. The bus snaked down Kendall Drive in the dark, and she recognized little. Every strip mall was different, full of businesses she didn’t remember. There were no more open spaces, big green lots. Every space filled by a new rental complex or a new strip mall or a new chain restaurant.
What would she even say? If she knocked on the door and the neighbor answered? If a stranger did?
She’d thought she’d be able to remember the path to her old home but was glad she carried an address with her. Nothing struck her as familiar—the whole complex was smaller than she remembered, grubbier than she remembered. She had expected a feeling—of home, a place in the world?—but it didn’t come. All she felt was tired.
She made her way to what would have been her neighbor’s door, walking past streetlights and feral cats, people walking dogs. It was April, but one patio was still strewn with Christmas lights. Little barbecues. Bougainvillea, birds-of-paradise. Many windows had the X-marks of masking tape. She remembered her mother doing this to prevent flying glass if a hurricane blew the windows. She knew hurricanes wouldn’t arrive for months.
An older woman answered the door. She had bleached-blond hair pulled back into a severe bun. A hollowed look, dark rings under her eyes.
“I’m so sorry to bother,” Ana said, hearing the accent she’d acquired after so many years in Mexico. “I’m looking for someone who used to live here. Years ago. It’s possible she doesn’t live here anymore?”
The woman towered over her. She looked down and then beyond Ana, as if distracted. “Are you looking for Jeanette?” she said in a small voice that didn’t fit her.
Ana was taken aback. She’d already settled for disappointment. She’d already wondered what bus bench she’d sleep on, where she’d find a job when she didn’t find this J-person. It’d been an impractical plan, she could admit it to herself.
“Yes,” she said, hearing the anticipation and hope in her own voice. “Does she still live here?”
The woman didn’t meet her eyes. She brought a hand to her collar. Beyond her, Ana could see the town house was near empty, just a few pieces of furniture. “Who did you say you were?”
It was a simple enough question, but Ana fumbled to answer. She said something about a night at her neighbor’s house and a missing mother. She said something about years in Mexico and a grandmother in El Salvador.
The woman’s eyes darted back to her. “I know you!” she gasped. The woman fumbled excitedly, or tensely, Ana couldn’t tell. She didn’t wait for Ana to say anything else, just led her into the house and began to brush crumbs off a kitchen table and rifle through cabinets to set a plate of food with a nervous energy that put Ana on edge.
But Ana was relieved to sit in the air-conditioning, to eat Cuban croquetas. She hadn’t seen those in years.
The woman sat across from her, stared. Ana couldn’t remember what this house had looked like so many years ago, but she was sure the table was the same. The woman picked at her nails and stared out the window at the empty unkempt lawn, at the cars parked in their designated lots.
“You said you knew me?” Ana was so hungry and couldn’t take a bite.
The woman asked Ana why she was there, grew wide-eyed when Ana told her the story of where she’d been just days before. Ana hesitated when she said she wasn’t sure where she would spend the night, but the woman interrupted right away.
“You can spend the night here,” she said. “You can stay as long as you need to.”
Ana thanked her profusely, this woman she did not even know, but she was suspicious at the way she darted questions, at times couldn’t sit still and at others would quiet suddenly, seemed to disappear into her own mind, couldn’t even tell her how she knew her.
As the woman took the empty plate before Ana to the sink and rinsed the crumbs, she finally introduced herself as Carmen. “I am Jeanette’s mother,” she said, back to Ana. “I’m sorry to tell you this, Ana, but Jeanette died.” Carmen shut off the faucet and turned to face her. A cat Ana hadn’t noticed hopped off the windowsill and extended into a stretch.
Ana swallowed. “Died?” The cat darted off.
Carmen had tears in her eyes. Her bottom lip trembled.
Ana looked down at the table. She hadn’t known Jeanette, not at all, but for so many months, she’d harbored this silly fantasy of a distant friend in her childhood world. She searched for words. “I’m so—”
“Overdose,” Carmen said, and shut off the water. She gripped the edge of the counter and bent her head.
Ana tried to conjure an image of Jeanette, tried to form a story about her life in all the years she hadn’t seen her. She realized addiction wouldn’t have figured into her story. “I’m—” She wanted so badly to sleep, to will away the last few months, to have her mother again. “I’m so sorry,” she said, angry at her own mechanical language.
“There is something else,” Carmen said. Her mascara ran now, splotches down her cheeks. “It was me,” Carmen said, “who encouraged her to call the police on you. I think it is my fault you were deported.”
Ana lifted her head. Beyond the kitchen, she could see the empty living room through the pass-through. Just a couch and a sliding glass door. The cat pawing at the door.
“What? The police? She told them to take me?”
“It was so long ago,” Carmen said. “What did I know then of what was right? What did I know then of what the world is capable of?”
Ana didn’t know whether she spoke about the death of her daughter, or Ana’s story. The air-conditioning sputtered on. How quickly a story unravels, an image blurs.
“Do you live here now?” Ana said because she could think of nothing else to say.
For so long, she’d had a different story about her own trajectory. She marveled at the way memory became static history, this thing so easily manipulated and shaped by her own desires. She had wanted to believe that Jeanette was a soft landing before the shock of detention, of deportation, all those years before. She had wanted to believe Jeanette kind. What did she know of other people? Of what they do?
“I suppose you could say that,” Carmen said, dabbing at her eyes with a napkin. “She rented this house because she couldn’t live with me anymore. And now I can’t seem to leave it. I bought it. I can’t seem to go home to my own big, empty house. I have no one left.”
“I have no—” Ana started to say, but then stopped herself.
* *
*
The arrangement was supposed to be temporary. Ana was only thirteen, after all. Carmen deemed it irresponsible to let her live alone in the house indefinitely. Carmen had lived there only part of the time. But now she took all her things back to Coral Gables and made no mention of moving back. Months bleeding into months. Carmen helped Ana enroll at the local high school, the high school Jeanette herself had attended. But Ana wasn’t looking for a savior and wasn’t looking to save anyone else; she’d learned in Mexico how easily a person in a certain position over her could build that kind of story for themselves. She lied about her age and found a job as a dishwasher at a restaurant. School, work, five hours of sleep each night. Day after day. She offered money to Carmen for rent, but Carmen didn’t take the cash.
Ana didn’t actually see her that often, though Carmen did check in on her from time to time. Ana didn’t know how to feel about her, this woman who never knew her life. Who’d endangered it. She chalked up Carmen’s absence to memory, Ana embodying something Carmen wanted to forget perhaps.
But on Ana’s fifteenth birthday, Carmen gifted her an antique book. A copy of Les Misérables in Spanish, a first edition. Carmen said that after her own mother died, a niece in Cuba sent the book through a courier for Jeanette. This was months before her daughter’s death. Carmen hadn’t wanted to give the book to Jeanette, because she knew that after her relapse, she might sell it. Carmen said her niece in Cuba had remembered Jeanette loved the book during her last visit to the island, had remembered how she flipped its worn pages.
In the margin of one page, Carmen showed her, was Jeanette’s handwriting below another note in faded script that seemed to spell out the same thing. We are force, the scribble read. And then Jeanette had added her own words, We are more than we think we are.
And though Ana had no idea why Jeanette had written those words, she chose to believe the sentence, the scribble, was a cry across time. Women? Certain women? We are more than we think we are. There was always more. She had no idea what else life would ask of her, force out of her, but right then, there was cake and candles and this, a gift. She thought that she, too, might give away the book someday, though she had no idea to whom. Someone who reminded her of herself maybe. Someone drawn to stories. She said thank you and put the book aside.
Of Women and Salt Page 18