There is nowhere else they can go.
I am at your disposal to answer any questions and vouch for the girls’ honor and morality.
Sincerely,
Señora Ermeregilda Marquez
There were parts of the letter that I didn’t like. “Honor and morality” made me feel itchy with shame. For myself, of course, not Gabi. And I winced when Señora Marquez added “with murder or worse” because the only thing worse than murder is watching someone you love be murdered.
Mrs. Schoenbeck’s eyes return to the top of the page to reread the letter. Then, she unfolds the second envelope. This one is printed from a computer. The envelope, stamped with both POR AVIÓN and AIR MAIL, had made its way from New York to my mother and now back to the United States again.
To Whom It May Concern,
I am writing to give a character statement for Marisol Morales. She is the daughter of my longtime employee and friend Maria Espinosa Morales. My husband and I lived in San Salvador for nearly ten years. My husband worked with Democracy International during the last elections. When the election-monitoring mission was over, we chose to stay, even though Howard had retired. We thought the elections would bring changes, improvements. However, we watched with concern as the situation in the country continued to destabilize and gang influence increased. We left eighteen months ago, afraid for our lives when our driver was abducted in front of our apartment complex and held for ransom. Despite our paying the ransom, his headless body was found in Parque San Jose a week later. I believe that Marisol is being targeted by the local gang and that her life is in danger. Marisol is not an immigrant so much as a refugee, and as such is seeking asylum.
I am now a widow of considerable means. I am willing to act as a guarantor to Marisol. What is more, I am willing to have Marisol live with me at my farm in upstate New York, and I am willing to support her so that she does not become a burden upon the state.
I enclose my address and contact details.
Sincerely,
Mrs. Howard J. Rosen
I didn’t know what Mrs. Rosen would write, only that Mamá had asked her for help and Mrs. Rosen had responded with this letter and the money necessary to pay the coyotes who brought us past the border. I knew we would get caught, though Gabi hoped we’d be able to sneak ourselves all the way up to New York. She was counting on my English being so good that we’d be mistaken for Americans.
Mrs. Schoenbeck frowns. “This letter from Mrs. Rosen mentions you but not your sister.”
I say a bad word under my breath. I don’t know enough curse words in English yet, but I know plenty in Spanish.
I point to the date of the letter, written at the top of the first page. “Mrs. Rosen did not know, when she sent the letter, that Gabi was in danger too. It was before the letter from Señora Marquez, do you see?”
She does not answer. I want to fill Mrs. Schoenbeck’s silence with words so badly, I nearly bite my tongue. The story of everything that happened to us before Pablo died, before Papá disappeared. How far back would I have to go? How many litros of words would I have to spill to tell a story that would convince her, convince all of them? When did our bad luck, our mala suerte, begin?
* * *
“Americans are stupid.”
“They’re rich, anyway,” I said. I was ten, and agreeing with my brother was the price I paid to hang out with him.
“Rich and stupid,” Pablo said.
“There have to be some poor Americans somewhere.” And smart ones, like Amber’s best friend, Aimee, on Cedar Hollow. But Pablo hated that I watched American TV shows.
He snorted. “They think they’re poor if they have only four pairs of sneakers.”
I tried to keep my breathing from turning into panting. I trailed behind Pablo, not wanting to lose sight of him. I couldn’t let him slip away like he usually did.
“Slow down!”
“¡No seas mantequita!” he shouted over his shoulder, speeding up. Don’t be butter. When he wanted to make sure the insult stuck, he’d say it in Spanish. I wasn’t soft like butter, though, and he knew it. I ran faster to match his long strides.
We were the only kids in our neighborhood who really spoke English, thanks to Mamá and because Mrs. Rosen paid for us to attend the American Academy on weekends. The kids in the neighborhood thought we were gringos and stuck up. Pablo thought so too, and it burned a hole in his stomach. But I insisted on talking to him in English as much as I could. I didn’t want to lose it by not practicing.
“¡Basta!” I yelled. He stopped, then leaned into the chain-link fence, waiting for me to catch up. When I finally reached him, my hands went to my hips, a replica of our mother’s stance.
“Why are you hurrying? Why can’t we just walk?”
“Because Flaco y Tato are waiting for me, and if I’m late because of my baby sister, I’ll never hear the end of it.”
“I’m not a baby.”
“Yeah, you’re not a baby. Gabi is the baby. You’re the brat.”
“Come on, Pablito.” I let a little tremble lace my voice. I knew how to play the little sister.
“Fine!” He hooked his fingers high up on the metal links and dangled his feet, stretching his long brown body, like a hanging chile or a ham.
I laughed. “You look like un jamón.”
“Well, you still look like una trucha,” he snapped.
I was stung and furious. I wanted to come up with a really good respuesta—I just needed time to do it. Mamá always said I had beautiful eyes, like my abuela. But Pablo had started calling me trucha when I was five because my eyes were so big in my tiny face. The name stuck with his friends. What’s funnier to seven-year-old boys than calling someone a trout?
Before I could insult my brother the way he deserved, his friends arrived.
“We came to find you. You’re always late,” Tato said as Pablo gave me a look that said see? and peste all at once. Pablo’s friends were all there, slapping hands and teasing each other. El Flaco, who wasn’t skinny, El Negro, who wasn’t black, and Tato, the one who was really good at fútbol. There was a new, older, taller boy too. I stared at him like you’d stare at a lion in a flock of sheep.
“Hey, Pablo, this is my primo, Antonio,” Flaco said.
My brother acted cool, nodding his head in Antonio’s direction. But he couldn’t keep his eyes off the older boy’s shoes.
They were new. Blindingly white and clean. Expensive. American. They must have cost a million dollars.
The boys moved away and I followed them, despite the cloud of dust they kicked up with their shuffling steps.
“Who’s this?” Antonio said, stopping to point at me. I felt smaller than I had a minute ago. As small as our youngest sister, with her dolls and tea parties.
“My sister Marisol.” Pablo shrugged. “I have to watch her.”
Antonio gave me a look, like he was trying to see what I was made of underneath my skin. I felt like a bug, the kind in the folding cabinet that Señor Melo brings out for science, the dead and trapped kind.
“Muy guapa.” Very pretty. And I was truly pinned to the spot. “Not so much today, maybe!” Antonio continued, and all the boys laughed. Pablo laughed the loudest. “But one day you’ll be very pretty, Marisol.” He leaned close to me, his head bowed. His teeth were the whitest I’d ever seen. He stroked his fingers down my cheek. I felt like it must be leaving a mark.
I started to cry. I didn’t know why then, though I do now. I wonder at what kids can know without knowing. El Negro looked uncomfortable, and Antonio stared at Pablo, daring him to stop him.
Pablo shrugged. “Come on, it’s a compliment,” he said. It wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted Pablo to shove the boy with the American shoes away. To tell him to leave and never come back. But he didn’t.
Antonio winked at me before moving to the fro
nt of the pack, already the leader of the neighborhood boys.
That was the day La Mala Suerte came to my family. And she stayed, wearing us down, taking our money, my father, and my mother’s health. Year after year until, in an abandoned locker room, dogs and guns making the same sounds of alarm in my head, we were trapped. My baby sister—no longer a baby—calling to me as if I could save her.
Chapter 2
Mrs. Rosen passed away.
I startle out of my chair a little. Was I asleep? Even after four days in this detention center, I crave sleep more than food. Every day Gabi and I were on the road, on a bus, hiding in a muddy hole, or walking along the train tracks until our legs were numb, I didn’t sleep much. Someone had to watch over Gabi.
I rub my eyes and straighten up. “I’m sorry, I think I fell asleep.” Mrs. Schoenbeck is standing at her end of the table. A different guard is by the door, and the door is open. How much time has passed?
Mrs. Schoenbeck doesn’t sit or smile or ask me a question.
“Mrs. Rosen has died, Marisol. We just confirmed it.”
Panic floods my chest—there’s no room for air in my lungs. Mrs. Schoenbeck does not look into my eyes.
“But. But she wrote to us. She said to come.” It was only a week ago—no, it was more than that. Everything is confused in my memory. Two weeks from San Salvador to the border. Two days in a detention center in Texas. Then a bus ride to Pennsylvania, where they gave us chaquetas because it is cold here in April. Almost a month since Mrs. Rosen sent the money. All that money. Gone. And now Mrs. Rosen is gone too.
“I’m sorry,” Mrs. Schoenbeck says. I don’t know if she is sorry because Mrs. Rosen is dead or because we have come here for nothing. Without saying anything more, she leaves the room. It’s a blessing, at least, that she hasn’t said what I know must be true. There’s no way we will be allowed to stay. We will be sent back home, and everything will be the way it was before. Only worse. Because I made it so much worse.
This guard—his name tag says WILSON—leads me back to my classroom and gives me a worksheet to do.
“Do you want something to eat?” he asks.
I need to be alone, so I break my rule—the one that says I should be as small and unnoticed as I can be, and not to bother anyone. “Yes, please.”
As soon as he leaves the room, I cry. Quickly, to get all the tears out. I don’t have time for more, but if I try to keep them in, they will pour out at the wrong time. I cry for myself, only a little, because I can’t help it. Then I cry for Mrs. Rosen, who I didn’t know I loved until I knew she was dead. And that’s it. I grab a tissue from the desk. I can’t cry for Gabi. If I cry for my sister, that means I’ve lost hope. I can’t do that.
Wilson comes back with a glass of orange juice and a chocolate chip cookie. He notices my puffy, red face and asks if I want to go back to my room. If I needed any indication that we have failed, I need look no further than the pity in Wilson’s eyes.
“No, thank you.” I walk stiffly to the desk and start to fill out the worksheet on the periodic table, which I learned years ago, and imagine that each word I’m writing—Antimonio, Arsénico, Aluminio, Selenio—each element, is a brick. I can rebuild this dream. I can find a way to keep Gabi safe.
* * *
By the time I pick up Gabi at her classroom, my face is smiling and tear-free.
“Did you have a good day?”
“Yes!” She dances as we walk down the hall. I have to remind her to be more quiet. “I was star reader. Again.” She smiles.
“Naturally.”
“Yes. And Angela and Nestor called me a chupamedias and una culebra—how do you call it in English?”
“Um. Let me think. A suck-up? A brownnoser?” I look at her sharply. “Don’t ask me why.”
“Well, they said it behind my back but so I could hear it too. I ignored them.”
“Good.” Before dinner, we get an hour of exercise. The other children in the center go outside to play in the courtyard. But Gabi and I always go to the little trailer next to the kitchen, where most of the books are. It’s not that we don’t like the other kids. It’s that they don’t like us. They see us as different because we can speak English. Mrs. Rosen used to say that my English was good enough that I could be on TV in the States, if I were taller. Thinner. Mrs. Rosen is dead, I remind myself. There’s no one here waiting.
At the trailer, I’m surprised to see Reynolds waiting for us. My body fills with panic, and I step in front of Gabi. They’re going to send us back. Right now. I don’t know how to fight them.
“Don’t go to the dormitory after dinner. The asylum officer wants to see you again. Both of you girls.” I don’t move, as if being still can make me invisible.
“Okay? Marisol?”
“Yes,” I say, my voice only just above a whisper. When Reynolds leaves, Gabi takes a book from where she’s hidden it behind the bookcase. She settles in at one of the tiny tables that are too small for her and starts reading. She’s been trying to read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone because it was the book Pablo and I loved most to read in English, but she struggles with some of the more complicated words.
“Why is this so hard?” she complains after a minute.
I look over her shoulder. “Well, English isn’t like Spanish,” I begin.
“I’m not stupid,” she says sharply. I take a deep breath. Since we arrived in Pennsylvania, we have been fighting so much more.
“I just meant that Spanish is more simple, honesto—written like it’s pronounced.”
Gabi buries her head in her book. Her lips move, very slightly, as she sounds out the English words. I walk to the little trailer window, leaving her in peace to concentrate.
I wish I could escape into a book and forget what is happening to us. If the asylum officer says our form has been denied, do we go back the way we came? They could put us on a bus back to Texas, over the border again. Then, will they leave us in Mexico, unwanted baggage?
This trailer sits on cement blocks and is a little higher than the kitchen next door. I watch through the window as the women in white coats and paper hats make food. They might be talking, but I can’t hear them over the clatter of metal pans. On the stove, huge pots hold boiling water and let out swirls of steam.
One of the women—she sweated through her paper hat and has taken it off to fan herself—tosses the ladle she’s been using into the sink and marches to the back door. I straighten up, all my muscles tense. She’s not supposed to. I know she isn’t, and so does she, because she looks over her shoulder at the other kitchen workers and at the door leading back into the main building where a guard sometimes stands. But no one is there now, and the woman swipes a plastic card in the lock. When the light on the door glows green, she uses a crate of oranges to prop the door open.
My hand goes to my jeans pocket, and I remember, all in a rush, that my letters are gone and that they will not let us stay. That we’re only waiting to be sent back home. But the last of the money from Mrs. Rosen is still sewn into my belt, the stitches going right through the paper of a hundred-dollar bill so that nothing could shake it free. When I shower, I take the belt into the bathroom with me, holding it above my head so it stays dry. I keep the belt with me always. It’s my last plan.
“Gabi?”
“¿Qué?” She’s not paying attention if she’s answering me in Spanish.
“We have to leave.”
She turns to me, a confused expression on her face.
“¿Por qué?”
“Never mind why. We just have to. Now.”
Her face is a storm of anger and fear. I think she will argue with me, and I don’t know what I will do if she says no.
“Sí. Okay, yes, I mean.”
She takes the Harry Potter book. I hesitate for a second, wondering if the beat-up paperback will slow us down or i
f it makes the situation worse if we’ve stolen a book. But the situation can’t get worse, I tell myself. Which is always the wrong thing to say to yourself.
* * *
This is how I make decisions now. I ask myself, What is the worst thing that can happen if I do this? And if not doing it is even worse, then I do it. It becomes a question of which thing will hurt Gabi more. So, in the end, it isn’t hard to choose to run away.
We walk out of the trailer and down the block steps to the kitchen doors. The kitchen workers are too busy to notice us. They assemble the huge metal pans of food at the front of the kitchen, where they will be put on carts and wheeled into the cafeteria. I hear the sounds of running feet and children’s voices as they start to file into the cafeteria. If you didn’t see the barbed wire on top of the metal fencing, you would be sure this was a school. Maybe it was a school once. Outside the back door of the kitchen, there is no fence, no barbed wire. Only a row of dumpsters and a road.
We crouch down low, Gabi in front of me, and head to the back door. A man’s voice cuts through the clanging kitchen sounds, and my muscles tense up. This detention center is for women and children. The only men here are guards. Do we stop and turn back, or do we go on? I hear him laugh, teasingly. He’s not paying attention. At the back door, I give Gabi two oranges from the crate and stuff two more into the pockets of my sweatshirt.
Outside, the cool air feels good on my face. I look down the road, so inviting and empty. But I decide against it. Anyone looking out the back door would see us walking down the road. Even if we ran. Instead, we wedge ourselves into the tight space between the building wall and the dumpster. Just in time, because the male guard, with sharp words, kicks the crate of oranges away and closes the kitchen door.
The Grief Keeper Page 2