It felt like she was in the middle of a tug-of-war, with forces larger than us tugging on each of her arms, or pushing her away. We had just taken her to Mexico, and now we were bringing her back. I called our lawyer because we didn’t feel like we could call or trust the police, and he explained to us what we needed to do and the possible options. Suddenly we found ourselves back in the same scenario as before with the U visa: trying to convince others of the scale of Amá’s suffering.
My only job was to bring her over. I wasn’t supposed to think about Apá, or focus on anything else other than bringing Amá. And was she really better off with us in the States? Could we really protect her more than if she stayed in hiding somewhere in a small hut on a coastal village in the Gulf Coast? Who were we to those people who had Apá? We were insignificant, we were nobody. But we wanted to be together and be nobody. When she left, we promised ourselves that if anything happened, we would do whatever it would take to get her back. And that was what we were doing.
*
Before we boarded our plane, I begged Amá to eat something. We sat down at a Chili’s. It tasted like all the food had been prepackaged and cooked in the U.S. I took a picture of her poking at her soggy potatoes just as she looked up at the camera, and sent it to everyone back home so they could see for themselves that she was safe.
2.
Our drive in the taxi to our hotel in Tijuana felt just like the trip to Juárez, except this time, we were trying to cross Amá over. She had no appointment like Apá; she would undergo no biometrics, but simply present herself unannounced. We arrived in Tijuana on Saturday morning and decided we would wait until Monday morning to go to the border, when we would be sure the supervisors were on shift. I knew most people asking for asylum were not staying in hotels, I knew the incredible privileges we were afforded and didn’t take them for granted. I was merely doing for Amá what was in my greatest capacity. If I had more money, I would have probably considered flying her over the border in a Cessna. We were doing all that we could to help, to get us through it, however little or much that was.
We arrived and checked into the hotel. Amá lay down on the couch in the lobby with a sweater over her head while we waited for our room to be cleaned.
“Mom, wake up, our room is ready,” I said quietly, as if I too believed she was sleeping. Sleep was a faraway thing that receded more the closer we came toward it.
She opened her eyes and stood up. Her movements looked robotic. She was trying her best to look normal, untroubled. We all looked the same, and I wondered if people could tell from the smiles on our faces.
“Finally,” she said as she picked up her small purse, her only possession. I thought about all of those days we’d spent arguing over what should go in her four suitcases, how I nearly stormed out of her house when I couldn’t convince the others that she didn’t need to take a toaster with her, that she could buy one over there. We were starting again from zero. Always starting again.
*
A tall and slender man helped us to our room with our luggage. “Thank you,” I said. “My pleasure,” he said. He stood at the doorway and smiled at us. I didn’t have anything else to say, but he remained there. My mind wandered elsewhere. I didn’t get the hint, and he tightened his lips and walked away. Rubi and Amá walked in and plopped themselves on the bed, breathing a heavy sigh of relief.
“You didn’t give him a tip?” Rubi asked, lying back on one of the double beds.
“I blanked—do you have some cash? I can go give it to him.”
“No, that’s fine, we’ll catch him on the way out.”
Rubi closed her eyes and padded the plush pillows. We were all tired, but she was the one who’d booked the flights, who’d read the reviews of the hotel, who’d kept me calibrated. Without her, I probably would have stormed into Tepechitlán by myself with a death wish. I smiled and nestled against her warm body. For a moment, we felt safe. The blinds were drawn, and the door looked sturdy—the windows were thick and double-paned. It was quiet except for the steady hum of the traffic outside. We felt hidden, but we still couldn’t allow ourselves the pleasure of releasing the tightness winding in our bodies. Even lying in the bed felt like uselessly pushing against a wall, and the entire world was on the other side, holding my father perhaps in a dark room somewhere on a mountain.
3.
Amá still didn’t talk about Apá, and I didn’t want to tell her what I knew. I closed the curtains tighter so that it was completely dark except for the small sliver of light coming from beneath the door. I blocked the gap with a towel and turned on a desk lamp.
Rubi went to sleep immediately, with all her clothes on. I went over to Amá on the other bed. I held her on the edge, neither of us speaking. I wanted her to be mad, to scream, to find a gun and swear vengeance, but instead all I felt was the sharp edges of her bones. It was nice to be completely silent, each of us knowing what the other was thinking.
“Mijo, I want to take a shower,” she said as she held my hand.
“Sure, let me turn on the water.” I walked over to the bathroom to draw her a bath.
The towels were neatly stacked, and the tile floor was cold on my feet. I turned on the water and adjusted it for her. I let my hands run beneath the faucet, not to clean them but to feel the vibration of running water. The sound of rushing water calmed me. It felt mechanical—predictable. I liked how certain it was: I could turn the lever, and water would always come out. I set a towel on the floor for her to step on and put the toothbrush we bought at the airport near the sink.
“The water’s ready, Amá,” I said.
“Thank you, mijo.”
It was four in the afternoon on a Saturday. She hadn’t really slept since they took Apá on Thursday. She and Rubi went to sleep to the vibration of the highway traffic outside. She would not wake until the next day in the afternoon.
*
I couldn’t sleep as well as Rubi and Amá, so I spent most of the night watching reruns of HGTV’s House Hunters International and arguing with the homeowners in the show about their poor taste in kitchens.
The next day, we got dressed and headed downstairs to eat. Our waiter lit the candle on our table and bragged that their kitchen was the finest in the city. It almost felt as if we were just out on another weekend afternoon, eating dinner. We all ordered chicken because the waiter said it was to die for. He said it like that, “to die for,” even though we had been speaking Spanish the whole time.
There was an American couple a few tables over from us who weren’t so quiet. The husband was wearing a loose medical gown and had an IV stand next to him, with a tube running into his arm. The hotel was a hotspot for American medical tourists who came for cheap procedures. The man looked like he was in recovery. Through a small fold in his robe, I could see that he had bandages around his waist. Hotels catered especially to those Americans, offering free shuttles to and from different clinics, which were mostly conveniently located in the hotel district of the city.
When the food came, we ate quietly. The waiter stopped by our table to ask if everything was fine. We nodded, and he refilled our glasses of water. I thanked him, a reflex. Everything seemed to be a reflex. I grabbed our room keys out of reflex; I looked at the attendant in the eyes and thanked him out of reflex. I felt like my body could function without me, like if my spirit left the room, my body would continue, thanking the waiter, saying “Excuse me” and “Please” and “You’re so kind.”
I ordered a dirty martini. I had never ordered one before, but I didn’t know why I wanted one then. I felt like a dirty martini was supposed to say something for me to the waiter and those around me that I couldn’t say myself. I said it loud so everyone around could hear. I asked to make it extra dirty, without knowing what that really meant. I’d heard people liked their dirty martinis extra dirty. I wanted more alcohol, but didn’t realize having it dirty meant less.
Amá’s eyes were still red. It was difficult to deny the language our bodies
spoke without our will or permission.
“How was your chicken?” I asked Rubi.
“It was whatever,” she said with a bland look on her face.
I was instructed not to answer, but continued to receive calls from strange men who left voice mails demanding things and what sounded like impersonations of my father. I put the phone away quickly.
“Who was that?” Amá asked.
“Nobody, Amá, it’s nobody.” I said, but I knew she didn’t believe me. After dessert, the waiter brought our check with a broad grin.
*
We finished eating, and I forced the last of my dirty martini down with a bitter look on my face. It wasn’t very good—not that I knew the difference anyway, but I wanted more vodka, less olive brine. Amá never liked it when I drank. In my head, I imagined myself calling the waiter over and saying that it was too dirty. In my head, the waiter knew what I meant by “too dirty,” and he knew me by name and would ask about my work. But I didn’t say anything. We walked back up to our room without leaving a tip.
Our rooms were exactly as we left them. I looked for any signs that anyone might have entered, but I couldn’t find any. I felt like everyone around me knew something that I didn’t, like I was in an episode of The Twilight Zone, or in the movie The Truman Show, and everyone around me was playing a role. Everyone was looking at a small invisible camera except for me.
*
Better yet, I felt like I was in the movie Labyrinth with David Bowie and Jennifer Connelly. Everyone around Connelly’s character, Sarah, knew something that she didn’t. Their absurdity was justified by the fact that they had seen everything happen before, they knew how it would all end. Perhaps absurdity was the only remedy and explanation for having seen the future.
There was no real point in trying to make sense of anything. We were back on the border of Tijuana and San Ysidro, just as we were in 1993 trying to do the same thing again and again.
In the Labyrinth scene with the Fireys, they removed their limbs according to the whims of their games, which had no specific rules. They tried to remove Sarah’s head but didn’t understand that hers didn’t work like theirs did—you couldn’t just saw it off and put it back together. I remembered Sarah’s eyes shot with terror. Theirs were two realities that had so much to do with each other, yet so little. And the worst was that the Fireys could not understand why Sarah’s head could not be unscrewed off her shoulders like theirs. Perhaps if she stayed a little longer, they would hold her down and laugh unknowingly as they sawed it off, until realizing they couldn’t put it back together, that she could not just laugh it off like them.
My phone kept ringing, and the men promised to do the same to Apá, and sometimes they laughed too.
Sarah looked rich in the movie. The white suburban girls always looked rich. If only the Goblin King had wanted money instead of innocence, like the people who had my father, perhaps Sarah could have saved herself all that trouble.
They knew Sarah would reach the palace, and they knew she would return with her kidnapped brother safely in her arms. Sarah was the only one out of the loop, like in The Truman Show. All uncertainty was concentrated into one person; for everyone else, it was repetition.
It was the last movie Jim Henson, the creator of the Muppets, directed before his death. I couldn’t remember if anyone died in the movie, or if they just disappeared.
And what do you say to someone whose loved one has died? I never knew the right words.
In Spanish, when someone dies, you say to their loved ones, “Mi más sentido pésame.” But this had always sounded too artificial to me, or too much of a template for what we should have said but couldn’t. It seemed like the easy way out. I thought you should have to struggle a little, even if that meant saying something that you would regret in the future. I didn’t know if anything like that existed in English.
I remember the first time I heard someone use the words “Mi más sentido pésame.” I was confused. It sounded like something in the phrase was missing. The syntax seemed off. Literally translated, it means “My greatest sentiment, it weighs down on me,” or “My sorrow, it is your sorrow too.” More appropriately it means “My deepest condolences.” But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like it should mean “Believe me, I know what you are feeling,” or “What I am capable of feeling I possess because of this,” or “The weight of this, I too am carrying it.” It is a template for empathy that people use at a time when sorrow won’t allow them to think, when all they can do is move their mouths.
Mi más sentido pésame. Our chicken is to die for.
4.
I went back down to the bar by myself, took out my laptop, and pretended to work on something. “Dirty martini with Bombay Sapphire, please,” I said to the bartender, pointing at the bottle.
There was a painting on the wall that I was drawn to. I noticed it when we first arrived. It was a picnic scene. Everyone in it was young and cosmopolitan. They were lying on the grass, drinking wine and eating what looked like bread, or cheese, or both. They all looked like they had just gotten good news, or anticipated getting good news soon. Either way, something good was happening to them, and they were aware of this—they knew their future.
It didn’t look like they had any plans to leave. It wasn’t clear how long they had been there. I couldn’t tell if it was morning or afternoon, but there were shadows from the large branches hanging overhead. It probably wasn’t morning. Their brown skin glistened. They were dark-skinned like me, they were beautiful. It was obviously a painting of leisure—one that I’ve seen many times before but with different actors. They looked like they came from money. They looked as if they all had the last scene of King Lear memorized to perfection. They’d read all the French Surrealists and could recite certain lines during sex. You loved to hate them, and they didn’t care much about you. Maybe they all made love to each other at one point, often in groups of three. They were tender lovers. It didn’t look like any of them would be in bed by midnight.
I wanted to be glamorous like them. I called my friend Derrick and wept over the phone. I had had enough. I didn’t want any more of this. I wanted something else, anything but this, this goddamn place, these goddamn papers, these goddamn people leaving voice mails on my phone.
It felt like somehow this had all happened before, and was destined to happen again, so what was the point in being mad? If that was the case, I should have surrendered, I should have stopped fighting, if there was no point in changing the outcome. I kept crying into the phone, and my friend just listened to me weeping softly, silently, at him.
“I’m sorry but I can’t tell you where I am,” I said.
His voice was calm and reassuring. I didn’t expect him to say anything, but I wanted to hear someone breathing, so I kept up the conversation. After a while I hung up and took the last drink of my dirty martini.
*
I couldn’t help thinking how far removed I felt from the kind of life the people in the painting lived. It looked like something Joan Didion would write about. I loved being confused by Joan Didion. I loved not knowing the people she made references to in her essays, and I purposefully never looked them up because I wanted them to stay mysterious and never lose their splendor. She said it with so much languor and abandon, not caring if her reader knew who those people were or not. I remembered a passage where she talked about someone named “Axel Heyst in Victory, and Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove and Charlotte Rittenmayer in The Wild Palms.” I had never heard of those people or those works. I didn’t know if they were books, or movies, or plays, or all three, but they sounded like something I could never access. They sounded strange and shiny in my mouth. I didn’t know what a chiffon dress looked like or how it would feel against my skin, or a frangipani. I adored it all. A distant glamour that was always walking away. I guess that’s why I ordered a dirty martini at a hotel bar in Tijuana—because I didn’t want to be drinking a dirty martini in a hotel bar in Tijuana.<
br />
Our chicken is to die for.
*
I paid my tab and ate the olives that I’d set aside for the end. I could taste the vermouth infused into them. They were still very salty, and they left my lips dry. I hadn’t taken a shower since I left Sacramento on Friday, but it didn’t bother me until I got to the elevator. When I touched the metal button of my floor, it felt oily. I imagine that it tasted like the inside of a battery, or chewing on a copper wire. I ate a chicken’s heart and liver that tasted like that once—all metal in my mouth. Apá forced me to eat it, though I didn’t want to. It made him angry. “Eat, it’s good for you,” he yelled. The taste of iron and the gelatinous texture slid slowly down my throat. I closed my eyes until the door opened on my floor.
I felt guilty that I’d brought my mother to this hotel, thinking this would all make it better, that the food, the martinis, and the fresh linen would make it all go away. I smiled at an employee walking by and struggled to open my door.
In the bathroom, I stripped down and looked at myself naked in the mirror. I had gained a lot of weight in the last few years. Most of it was from the Prozac. I stared at my caramel skin, at all the hair below and around my bellybutton, at the hair on my chest and around my nipples. It looked like ripples in a stagnant pond. My thick black pubic hair looked like an oasis in an empty desert. I opened my mouth and stuck out my tongue as far as I could. I examined myself for a long time. The flat fluorescent light in the room highlighted my scars, cellulite, and stretch marks. I had a strangely shaped body—skinny but round in all the wrong places. I rubbed my beer belly that I’d sworn I would never get and turned on the water. I planned to take a taxi to the border checkpoint in the morning. I knew I needed some sleep.
Children of the Land Page 27