We emerged from the double doors to an unbearable brightness. There were no longer any lines. Everyone was scattered about, hopping on the bright-red light-rail train headed to San Diego. Everything looked authentically American—the shops, the sidewalks, the gait of the passersby going wherever it was that they had to be in a hurry.
Rubi and I sat down on the cement in the middle of the plaza and cried. We held each other, but we couldn’t feel our bodies. We wailed beneath the bright sun reflected in the polished floor below us. Everyone around us kept moving, nobody stopped. It was as if they were water, moving around and away from us, and we had become two large boulders in the middle of a river. We grew still and hunkered toward the earth we had become.
We couldn’t breathe, unable to hold our bodies together any longer. At least when I left Amá in Tepechitlán, I’d been able to walk away, I had enough strength to carry my bags.
I wanted my green card to be something I could give away, something I could trade legitimately for. I would give it to my mother. If that was an option, I would gladly have stayed in Mexico for the rest of my life in hiding, if it meant she was safe on the other side.
Trade me. Take me.
A woman who was standing beside us finally had the nerve to come up and ask if we were okay. What kind of question was that? I don’t know why I entertained her with an answer. Reflex. In between any breaths I could manage, I told her my mother was in there and pointed back at the compound. She looked at us with a puzzled and worried face, as if “in there” was nowhere exactly, a nonplace, as if it had no bearing on what was out here. But at the same time she kept shaking her head as if to say, “What a shame, what an absolute shame.” She apologized and walked away.
My leaving was loud, it could never hold still.
I held Rubi, and she held me. We took some pills to calm us down and looked into each other’s eyes for a long time, until our breathing began to settle. Holding Rubi’s hands, I could feel her pulse, and I tried to see if I could match it. We breathed and nodded to each other before getting back up.
*
We wandered through the town of San Ysidro, rolling our luggage behind us like a pair of dead dogs by the tail. We didn’t know what we were looking for, so we just kept walking. I didn’t have the energy to call back home just yet to tell the rest of the family what had happened. I didn’t want to stray too far from the compound. I wanted to stay close to Amá, even if she didn’t know I was there. She knew we wouldn’t leave.
We booked a hotel nearby. I was tired of hotels. I was tired of the same continental breakfasts, the same musky odor of the beds, the same towels, and the same mirrors, which told a different story about me every time—I was too fat, I was too skinny, I was too dark, I was too light, I was too bony. I was never just enough of anything.
We checked in and headed to our room. It was the same procedure. Open the door, close the windows, lock the door, roll up a towel beneath the door, unplug the phone, check the bathroom, check beneath the door, open all of the drawers, lie down and stare at the ceiling.
I had to take sleeping pills, even though the only thing my body wanted to do was sleep. I took another hot shower, too tired to care about the water shortage, even though my guilt didn’t drain as easy as the water. I thought I would make up for it later by not washing my jeans for a month. My skin was tender and red, my fingers started to wrinkle. I opened my mouth against the shower head and let it fill with water.
I lost track of time. Everything I ate tasted like almonds. Still the same hot shower, still my mouth wide open, still the curtains drawn, still the Do Not Disturb sign purposefully hanging on the door, still my dirty clothes piled on the floor, and the same goddamn home-improvement channel drumming about a chic midcentury remodel and young couples who didn’t deserve to be happy. I grew resentful of the other guests who smiled at me at the breakfast bar in the morning. I either didn’t return their smile or snarled beneath my breath and walked away. I started bringing my breakfast up to my room.
My paranoia was growing, and not being able to sleep didn’t help. I thought cars were following us and our phones were tapped. I kept changing my clothes at all hours of the day and peeking through the window. I was awake even when I slept, just waiting for my phone to ring, obsessing over its battery life.
9.
It was a Wednesday when I got the call.
“Your mother will be released at the McDonald’s near the San Ysidro Port of Entry,” said a stern man.
McDonald’s?
It didn’t sound real. I didn’t know who to trust anymore, and my phone grew strange in my hand. I looked at Rubi, and she knew exactly what the phone call meant. We threw everything into our suitcases and took a taxi back to the port of entry.
Going back to the port, I thought about my jagged numbers etched on Amá’s arm, her map to find her way home. There was doubt in the man’s voice over the phone, almost as if he didn’t want to give us a guarantee that she was actually getting out, but only hold out the possibility. We returned to that bright plaza where everyone walked in different directions, where they hopped so casually onto the bright-red light-rail trains with the word Metro printed on their sides in large white letters, edging to the very tip of the border before whisking away to the north.
I waited inside the McDonald’s, and Rubi waited outside, in case she was released elsewhere. Every woman in the restaurant looked like Amá, and I had to stare closer and longer to convince myself that it wasn’t her. The smell of processed meat and oil from the deep fryer made my stomach turn. Families went about their business, eating their large burgers, dipping their fries into ketchup, and belching after taking long drags from their Cokes. It was difficult to concentrate.
There was too much noise, too many wrappers, too much color. I still hadn’t slept well, and I got nervous when people edged too close to me. I remembered begging my father to take us to McDonald’s as a child, refusing to eat what Amá had spent all afternoon cooking unless he took us to those golden arches.
*
I held myself at the edge of a table facing the street for a couple of hours. My eyes began to strain. I was suspended in a tightness that wouldn’t let me relax, and with each hour that went by I wound myself up tighter and tighter, scanning the busy bodies ahead. I was afraid anything would make me spring open. Worse, that I would slowly start to lose hope with each hour—the gentle weight of defeat pressing on my shoulders, unwinding, easing me down into a loose wire tossed on the floor.
None of the faces, none of the bodies, none of the shadows along that bright plaza were my mother’s.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw a small woman with disheveled hair and a small plastic bag hanging off her arm. A large American border guard walked her up and left, patting her back as he turned away. She wasn’t moving; she was looking cautiously around her, hands folded at her stomach.
It was her.
I jumped out of my seat and ran toward the door, yelling “Amá!” It felt like I was holding her for the first time. She looked thin and like she hadn’t slept or eaten in days. I couldn’t believe she was there, in front of me, holding a plastic bag with “Department of Homeland Security” printed on it.
And again we stood there in the middle of the flow of foot traffic, motionless, with everyone walking around us, barely noticing or caring to notice the miracle that had happened before their eyes. She was wearing the same thin fleece jacket and gray sweatpants that she’d been wearing the day we left her. We walked away from the port, and I held her hand tight but not too tight, and Rubi held her other hand. We didn’t know who was keeping the other from falling.
“Don’t tell me anything right now, we’ll talk about it as soon as we leave here,” I said, still holding her arm, looking around suspiciously while Rubi hailed a cab. We wanted nothing more than to leave that place. It made our stomachs turn to think of staying there any longer. Part of me wanted to burn all of it to the ground, leave in my wake nothing but as
hes, but instead I turned to my mother and smiled.
*
As we waited for our taxi, Amá pointed to her shoe and lifted her pant leg a little, revealing a large black box wrapped around her ankle with a black band. She had a GPS tracking device placed on her as a condition of her release while she waited for her court date in the U.S. A small green light flickered on and off, sending a signal to a computer somewhere about her every movement.
Her options were to either wait six months in ICE detention or wear the ankle monitor, which was an obvious choice. And she only had a choice because they allowed her case to move past the next step: to go through a credible fear interview. They wanted to make sure that my mother’s fear was legitimate, that there was a reason why she was running, why any of us were running. She rolled her sweatpants back down over the device and smiled, but her eyes were dark and tired. We hopped in the taxi and headed toward a car rental company outside town. With each mile we headed north, Amá said she could breathe a little better. With each mile north we felt our bodies unclick their tightness one cog at a time.
Because of the ankle monitor, her prison would be everywhere and everything, surveillance looming everywhere.
They told her she needed to establish a routine so that they could enter her patterns into an algorithm that would determine if there was any suspicious activity. She gave them the address where she would be staying and a list of the places she might frequent. They told her that at any moment, they could show up to ensure that she was abiding by the rules. “This is a privilege,” they said as they tightened the monitor around her ankle inside the compound. “You don’t want to ruin it.”
She was terrified of that device, and as much as she wanted to run away from it, she couldn’t. It was as if someone had told her she needed to hold a snake for six months, or else.
Or else what?
It was a long, invisible chain and the person or machine at the other end felt each and every little tug she made. They said it would talk to her if it detected any tampering. A voice from a thousand miles away would come shouting out of the little black box, and an alarm would ring, and agents would be dispatched immediately to find her. She needed to switch out and rotate the two batteries it came with in order to keep the device charged on a daily basis, otherwise it would set off an alarm. She was paranoid (as we all were) that it would unexpectedly die, so she switched batteries much more often than what was required, sometimes three times a day. We were always looking at the green light to see how the battery life was doing. We didn’t want anything to go wrong. It was always watching. At least, that’s what we were told.
I almost felt a little at ease knowing she had the monitor on. Someone would always be able to see exactly where she was, which meant, by extension, that we would always know where she was at, which meant, hypothetically, that we could never lose her again, that she would never go missing like Apá.
10.
We rented a car and drove away from the border. I drove fast, pushing ninety-five. I wanted to get home as quickly as possible. Home. Home to the rest of the family, home to my bed and my own mirror, and my own quiet.
But it was as if something didn’t want us to leave. We were still stuck in the labyrinth, and the Goblin King was laughing somewhere in a room, tracking my mother’s device. On our way down the summit of Tejon Pass, we got a flat. I screamed at customer service over the phone, I screamed at the tow truck company, who said they wouldn’t be able to get there until the next day. We booked a night at yet another hotel nearby. I was almost certain that I had no more credit on my cards, but I tried anyway. Thankfully one of the cards worked.
The hotel belonged to the same chain as the one we’d stayed at in Ciudad Juárez when I took my dad for his appointment. The receptionist asked if I wanted to open a rewards account, since I stayed with them so often.
“No, I’m fine, thank you,” I said with a tired smile, even though I knew I would probably be back in another one of their hotels either way. Something always drew us back to the border.
Even though it had been two years since Apá’s Juárez appointment, walking into the hotel room made it feel like it was just the day before. It looked identical to the one in Juárez, and I almost expected to see the bustling streets of Juárez if I peeked out the window. It was evening, and the sun was going down over the rolling hills of the valley below. We were tired but didn’t really notice while driving up. My lingering paranoia made me shut the blinds, unplug the phones, and stuff another towel under the door crack. I did it very subtly so as to not scare Amá.
It wasn’t until we lay down on a bed that we realized just how tired we were. It was the same endless scene we had been performing. We all took a shower and tried to sleep. We would continue in the morning. Things would be better in the morning, we told ourselves. We could start over in a different car.
We were in bed for maybe three hours before we couldn’t stand being in one place any longer; the idleness was unbearable. We left in the middle of the night in a taxi, headed toward Bakersfield to catch the next Amtrak headed north.
*
“I love trains, it’s been years since I’ve been in one,” said Amá as she adjusted herself on the seat, with a small table in front of her. The sun would be rising in a few hours, and though it was dark outside the window, Amá stayed glued to the glass, looking over at us occasionally and smiling. The train started its heavy groan and trudged forward.
The sun started to rise, and we could see the outlines of the mountains in the distance. Mile after mile of orchards and fields zipped past us—the same orchards and fields Amá had worked for so many years, everything she had known.
“Isn’t this fun?” she said, taking a deep breath.
We got off the train in Stockton and had to switch to a bus the rest of the way. So far we had walked, taken a taxi, driven a car, boarded a train, and now were on a bus, all to get farther and farther north.
The family couldn’t wait until we arrived, so they drove an hour to meet us at our penultimate stop. We had arrived. Amá hugged her children, all of us, in the parking lot; she held them as if they were made of glass and would easily break, and they held her as if she was already broken, trying to put the pieces back together, though she would never look the same.
11.
Weeks later, still waiting to hear news from Apá, we sat outside in my garden, and I asked Amá what had happened while she was in detention.
They separated the men from the women. There were pregnant women and women with small children at their feet. There were women nursing babies and older women, and young women. Nobody slept. We couldn’t sleep because they never turned off the lights, and there were no windows. I lost track of time. I didn’t know if it was day or night. No beds, just the floor.
I was afraid I would miss them calling my name, so when I closed my eyes, I still tried to concentrate on the noises. Whenever the doors opened, everyone looked up and paid attention. Some women had been there for months. They gave us the same food every day—bean burritos or ham and cheese sandwiches on plain white bread with lots of mayonnaise. I saved extra food in my pockets for later. We lay down on the floor to sleep when we could. Someone had left a small blanket, so I took it and used it as a cushion. I used my shoes as pillows.
They took away our laces and everything in our hair, so I found a sock on the floor and used it as a hair tie. I met a nice woman from Guatemala with two small children.
They didn’t let us use the bathroom when we wanted. They had their own schedules and took us in groups. We couldn’t shower. I took some diaper wipes from the nursing mothers to give myself a sponge bath, just to wipe my hands and face with.
They called me into a room and sat me alone in front of a screen. They said a voice would ask me questions from the speakers. There was a camera pointed at me. They said I wouldn’t be able to see them, but that they could see me. I answered their questions. I told them the truth and hoped they believed me. I went
back to the large room and lay down on the floor. There was nothing to do but wait.
When they said I would be leaving, that they’d spoken to my son, I didn’t believe them. It didn’t really sink in until they took me and I saw the sunlight coming from a large door ahead of me. That’s when they put on the monitor and told me I would be sent back into detention if I didn’t follow the rules. The ink on my hand had washed away, but I remembered your number. After a while they let me go. I knew someone would find me.
[Fifth Movement as Bleach]
For years I kept dozens of copies of my “documents.” I couldn’t throw them away, I couldn’t burn them. Among them was one with my name and a number whose individual digits added up to forty-four. The combinations that could add up to forty-four seemed infinite, and I was one among that endlessness. It was like choosing numbers for the lottery—my mother’s birthday, my street address, the day my grandfather died.
*
I dissolved the copies. I dipped them into a bucket filled with bleach, glue, and water. I turned them into pulp; the image of my face broke apart, spilling its ink into the rest of the sludge. But here and there I could still see an eye, my hair, my chin. How stubborn I was.
I ran my fingers through the pulp and squeezed it between my webs. I wanted all of it to go away, to meld together like a ball of mating snakes, one unrecognizable from the other.
*
The water was a cloudy blue, like the sky in a midwestern spring—pockets of blue behind an overwhelming gloom, the blurriness of spoiled milk or of my paternal grandfather’s eyes the last time I saw him before his death.
I wanted it to become something more than the sum of its parts—a rearrangement of the details of my life into a better outcome. Everything that went into the bucket was still there, nothing had gone away: the paper, the cotton in the paper, the dye in the ink, the glue, and the chemicals that gave the paper its clinical whiteness.
Children of the Land Page 30