“Mis hijos,” she said, by which she meant that we, her children, grown, bearded, our own hair beginning to gray, were what she had to show for it all. It was our bodies, the fact that we were breathing, alive, that we were beautiful in whatever kind of sun. It was the fact that she was alive, that she had made it.
We drove to my house, where she would stay for the last three weeks. I thought about my body, how it took up the space around it, how it was here. We had always been here, but it wasn’t enough.
Prove her presence.
I went to the bathroom and touched the tattoos on my body, and rubbed the piercing on my nose. It was a screw stud. Amethyst. Amá hated my tattoos and piercings. I grabbed the nose ring and tore it off. If I could, I would have torn off my tattoos.
Prove her presence.
Welcome to America.
The blood in the sink was pink, then red, then pink again. Then gone.
13.
The day before her departure, we gathered for a family portrait. We got dressed up as if it was Easter. It helped that it was a Sunday, made it feel like we didn’t have to go out of our way just for this, that it was something we happened to stumble upon in our Sunday best. We wanted to do what every picture does, hold things in place.
Still, no one said why we stood together and posed for a picture.
“Okay, now everyone smile,” I said as I set the timer on the camera and ran back to get into frame. I never knew if other people hold their breaths when they take a picture, but I always did. I tense up a little, hold my body straight and tall. My ballet teacher once told me to dance as if there was a string on the top of my head pulling the lines of my body upward.
“Say cheese, say whiskey.”
Click.
I felt like I was dancing. We squeezed and arranged close in a different order for another picture, and Amá’s thick coat brushed against my arm, her weight next to mine, next to everyone else’s, was unbearable. We froze and released. Another picture, froze and released. I don’t think we ever saw the pictures. I don’t think we ever developed them.
We kept taking pictures on our phones and played with an app that swapped our faces. The app let me try on different templates. As a child, then bald, then as an old man. “How would you look old,” said the app.
We all tried on our old faces. Was that how our mother would see us the next time we all gathered together? I had never considered the bags under my eyes, the wrinkles starting to branch out from the corners of them like thin trees in early spring. What would blossom from their tips?
Change happens so slowly that I never noticed, for example, when exactly it was that Amá began to hunch over a little, or how much gray hair was powdered at the edges of her temples. Those changes came over us like a slow song that put us to sleep—we never knew when exactly we went from being awake to being asleep. But there we were, dreaming, not knowing that we were dreaming.
*
After the photoshoot, I took Amá back to my house, where she was staying in my guest room, which was crowded with her four suitcases. She sat on her bed and read the Bible, as she did most nights before going to bed.
“Good night, Amá,” I said, and kissed her on her cheek.
“Good night, mijo.”
The next day I would take her to the airport, where she would board the plane for Guadalajara. I headed upstairs and sat alone for a minute. I was sure this was the right choice. But if it wasn’t the right choice, it still wasn’t too late. She was still here, she could still say no. I didn’t want her to say no. As much as it pained me, I wanted her to leave because I wanted a definite ending to whatever it was we had started twenty-something years ago. This was it, her grand finale. She would collect her prize at the other side.
What was her prize? To return to a man I’m not exactly sure she ever loved? But it was more than just their reunion. Much more. It was about her not having to work any longer. It was about her not having to still fear immigration in old age, to not have that looming sense of surveillance always following her. I didn’t want her to be undocumented anymore; I wanted her to feel like she belonged in the country in which she lived. If that couldn’t happen in the U.S., then we would make it happen in Mexico.
We were tired of waiting and tired of having the same conversations over and over about social security numbers, about new updates to the immigration law that never came, about raids in the news. I didn’t want her to take any part of it anymore. None of us did, and neither did she.
Her prize was peace of mind. But it wasn’t free.
In the end it was not our choice to make, but hers. I went back downstairs and walked over to her room, where she was still sitting on her bed, reading her Bible. I came down to make sure she had everything ready, but I really just wanted to talk.
“Are you ready?” I said. She looked up at me through her glasses. Her eyes were red.
“Ya, everything’s ready.” Her four suitcases were stacked near the door, and her small carry-on was placed carefully on top of them. She’d decided to take pictures, a smoothie blender, clothes, a few porcelain figurines that held sentimental value, shoes, coats, a coffee grinder, dresses for church, some linens, a few pieces of jewelry, soft towels, paper and pens, and other small items.
“Do you have your tickets ready?” I said. I don’t know why I said the plural, tickets. It was out of instinct. It was the plural: two tickets, one to go and one to come back. She was the singular, a one-way ticket. I wondered if she picked up on my mistake too, if she knew I took a slight pause after saying that final s? I kissed her on her cheek and said good night another time.
I couldn’t sleep that night, but I knew that would happen, so I took a sleeping pill to help me, and another cup of vodka, and a Xanax just in case because I couldn’t stop my fingers from trembling. Soon enough, I could feel the lull slowly creep its way inside me. My body began to tingle at the tips, but it was not soothing. That night, I was conscious of my body leaving consciousness. In those last moments, I thought of the TSA at the airport looking down at Amá’s one-way ticket, her Mexican consular card she used as ID shining against their black light.
I fell off the edge. I dreamed I was trying to put on a shoe, but it wasn’t the right one, which was my mother’s dream. I needed to get onstage for the show, but I still had a missing shoe. The director was waving at me to hurry. I walked out to the middle of the stage and wept. I was blind again. I could hear everyone in the audience applauding, as if that itself was the show, as if they knew that the play was scripted like that—me weeping onstage, still trying to look for my other shoe, kneeling on the ground and tapping the floor gently with my hands.
[Fourth Movement as ESL]
No ghosts ever appeared to me or followed me around, even though I knew they were real. There are just some people who are meant to be haunted, and others are meant to move through the world disbelieving them. I was neither.
“He needs interaction, otherwise he’ll have problems later in life,” my first-grade teacher, Mrs. Conejo, said to Amá, who looked at her nervously.
“Don’t ever tell them anything,” Amá said to me, over and over. It was easier to keep quiet than to make up stories about myself. I made imaginary friends from that quiet, which were not ghosts, but kind of. No one would know the difference.
14.
It was the day of her departure, and still no one said the words we were all thinking. What exactly those words were, I wasn’t sure, but they were on the tips of all our tongues. We could see them on each other, even if we couldn’t see them on ourselves.
“Let me do your hair,” said Amá’s only daughter, and Amá sat on a small ottoman in front of her, cradled between her thighs. She brushed her hair and curled it. She took her time to make sure Amá looked pretty, and would stop now and again to pick it up and let it slowly fall on her shoulders. Each brushstroke was steady and with purpose. No energy wasted.
Without intending it, we all sat around them in a circle
and stared, as if we were staring at a campfire, mesmerized by the light and the heat that would burn us if we came too close. It was their moment, and their moment only.
“There you go, see how pretty you look,” she said to Amá.
Still, no one said anything.
We sat silent in my living room, unsure of what to say because no one wanted to initiate any forward movement. Finally someone said “Okay” and patted their palms on their lap quickly, which meant that it was time. That was the first time any of us admitted it. It was the first time we confirmed to each other that indeed it was happening, that it wasn’t just something in our heads, even though we could see it all happening in front of us as we cleared her house, as we packed her suitcases, as we posed for a picture. It brought to the surface our collective grief, which we had all kept quietly inside because we knew if one of us broke, we would all break. We did it for each other.
The puzzle in our mouths spilled out, but it wasn’t words, it was sound.
No one was hiding anymore. It was as if in the months leading up to that moment, we had been lost in a labyrinth, and we could hear each other but we could not see each other. We knew we were all there from our voices, but we couldn’t be sure. And suddenly the walls lowered. We could see each other, and we could see that each of us was weeping. We had always been weeping, but it was easy to hide it when walking alone through the maze, saying to each other, “I’m okay.” But it was then that we all saw each other for the first time. We saw how small and wrinkled we had become. We saw how much we had changed because we rarely encountered this side of ourselves. I couldn’t remember the last time I saw my brother weep, but I realized that his grief left his body differently than before. He had changed. We had all changed. We greeted each other in our despair and held our faces. Brother, how much you’ve changed since we last cried together.
We loaded the luggage and took separate cars to the airport. We drove slowly. We appreciated every red light. Every stop, every tractor trailer that merged in front of us. For once, how great it would have been to be pulled over, for the cop to lean into our windows and ask for license and registration. What would happen if she missed her flight? Would that give us the courage to state the obvious? That despite her departure seeming inevitable, there was nothing wrong with staying.
We’d booked the latest red-eye we could find so that we could sleep on the plane and not have to see the world as it happened. We arrived at the airport and parked all of our cars near each other. Everyone took a bag, or a suitcase, or held one another; either way everyone was carrying something. Everyone had a hand in the decision, as if each of us was carrying a piece of her. We knew if one of us broke again and said no, don’t go, that the rest would probably follow, and if the rest followed, Amá would see our pain and stay. But no one budged. Was it pride? We all swallowed that thick crow and kept moving toward the entrance, looking at each other, hoping the others, even one of the grandchildren, would break.
It was still early, so we waited at some tables. Still, we kept looking at each other to see if anyone would speak out against her decision, but no one did. We bought coffee and talked about how hot the water was. We stayed until we could stay no longer. Finally we broke, but in the wrong direction. Our seams tore through the paths we had never experienced. We hugged. We didn’t know if this would be the last time we would all be together like this. Certainly it would be the last time we all looked the way we did together, still young.
Amá was still standing. We were all still standing. None of us had bent from the weight of it all. We were strong. At least four generations had prepared us for moments like these.
We couldn’t take all the luggage through the escalator, so we walked over to the elevator to take us to the next floor. I pressed the button to call the elevator down and the small red light lit up. The doors opened and I took my mother inside, holding her by her arm, which dangled limp off her body in pain, just as it always did. She didn’t turn around to watch the doors close with everyone else stuck on the other side. The doors closed.
*
It was as if someone had suddenly turned on gravity, as if that entire time we were actually floating in midair, unknowingly. Her body bent in half when the doors shut, and she screamed. I had never heard my mother make those sounds. I didn’t know she was capable of them.
It was more of a wail than a scream—sustained. It was a wail in which all of the words were the same even though they weren’t. It sounded like she was saying the same thing over and over, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” What she actually said was “This is stronger than me.”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. This is stronger than me.”
I don’t know if she ever got back up, not completely at least. The whole way through the airport, it felt like she was still crouched over. Both of us were a little closer to the earth, even though in about an hour we would be a few miles above it. Just before going through security, I turned to Amá and said, “Amá, it’s not too late to turn around, are you sure?” But I knew it was too late. From that moment, the distance started growing. From that moment forward, her children would live mostly in her memory.
We passed through TSA as if we were floating downstream in a river. There was nothing in our way to snag us, nothing to stop us. The agent waved us on, she raised the metal in her arm and the X-ray machines waved us on, the drug dogs waved us on, even the walls, if they had hands, would have waved us on. That’s how easy it was to return.
[Fourth Movement as Velvet]
My younger brother and I pretended to be deer. We held our hands on our foreheads like antlers and charged through the tall grass in the backyard. “Do they run like this?” asked my younger brother, antlers in full velvet, the kind of velvet they tear away by rubbing against a tree. “Yes, like that, just like that,” I said to him and hid in a small cave made by the tall grass, where I picked up grasshoppers and squeezed them between my fingers until they vomited a little black bead of tar from their mouth and eyes. I watched them squirm even long after being dead. There were so many grasshoppers I could hardly take a step without crunching them beneath my shoe. And all of their legs kept jittering even without their bodies, like a silent prom dance in the daylight. “And do they drink like this?” asked my brother, bending his small body to drink from an invisible river. “Yes, just like that.” I said as I lay there, in the field where grasshoppers jumped all over me, burying myself in imaginary velvet, squeezing all those little thoraxes until they popped and wiping them off on my shirt.
15.
We landed at the Guadalajara airport in the morning. So far it was my third trip to Mexico, and the changes in my body and mind that I experienced the first time felt like they happened without me, automatic. I had new things to worry about other than myself. Amá held up her bad arm with her good arm as we exited the plane, the same smell of wet earth mixed with diesel wafted in.
“Are you okay, Amá?” I asked her.
“Yes, mijo, I’m fine,” she said, her eyes still bloodshot from the night before.
I looked ahead and saw the good that would come out of this. I saw her at her home in Tepechitlán, a home which she owned and would never pay rent. I saw her getting a real ID from a country that claimed her as a citizen. I saw her walking to the mercado in the morning, sifting through ripe tomatoes and jars of fresh honey and bananas for her morning shakes with the blender she carried in her suitcase. I saw her taking her afternoon strolls and watering her plants in her garden and going to the bank to pick up the money we sent her for the week. I saw her waking up late and grinding her own coffee to drink outside in the sun, just like I had when I was there. Nowhere in this vision did I see Apá. I saw her happy.
She handed her passport to the agent, who asked what her purpose was and how long she would be staying in Mexico.
“I’m here to see family, and I don’t know how long I’ll be staying,” she said to the stoic agent, who slammed a stamp of arr
ival on Amá’s passport before she could finish talking.
*
“There, I see him,” I said to Amá, who was standing on her tiptoes to see over the people better. It was like déjà vu from my first trip—Rubi and I landing in Guadalajara, greeted by Apá in a palm sombrero. In the distance was Apá in his usual white palm sombrero. It was the first time they had seen each other in twelve years.
There must have been a time when they loved each other. Maybe he loved her when he first came to the U.S. in the 1970s and left her behind to care for their firstborn, when he would write letters to her, and she in turn would write back. There must have been something more than commitment, or social norms, that held them together for so long, but I couldn’t understand it, or I couldn’t see it. It was their own distinct language. Whenever they fought, she always reassured us by saying “Don’t worry, I know your father.”
They drew close and embraced each other. He wrapped his shawl over her and held her in the middle of the aisle. Her arm still dangled to the side. Wrapped together, they looked like one person crouching down, holding their stomach, in laughter, or pain, or both.
The intercom above announced something, but it was muffled. There were small groups just like ours, holding each other closely together, always with one person in the middle letting everyone embrace them. The scene felt familiar, like I knew exactly what would happen next. The small huddles dissipated, soon to be replaced by new ones.
Children of the Land Page 24