No Witness But the Moon(12)
“Is Sophia okay?”
“The text isn’t from Sophia. It’s from Dave Lindsey.” The chairman of the board of La Casa, Adele’s Latino community center. “Dave says one of our clients heard from his cousin that the dishwasher who was shot worked at Chez Martine, that French restaurant in Wickford.”
Vega looked out at the highway that ran alongside the building. Headlights flashed and faded like shooting stars across his field of vision.
“Jimmy? Is that true?”
He didn’t answer. He felt like he’d flicked his finger at a domino this evening and the trail of tiles kept continuing to fall.
“Oh God, please say it’s not true.”
“Don’t tell me you know this guy?”
“I’ve never met him before in my life,” said Adele. “But if he’s the dishwasher from Chez Martine, I know his daughter. She’s Sophia’s babysitter, Marcela.”
Chapter 4
Marcela Salinez followed the sound of Spanish chatter and unfolding metal chairs. Her knees buzzed with the sweet reprieve of being able to sit for an hour. Today, she’d cleaned three large houses. Twelve bedrooms in all. Eleven bathrooms. A dozen mirrors. Walls and walls of glass. Then she rushed home, put a plate of tamales into the oven for her family, grabbed a quick shower, and headed out the door to La Casa, Lake Holly’s Latino community center.
This was her Friday night routine. These women were the only people who understood her, truly understood her. Not her husband, Byron. Not even her other friends, the ones who could tuck their children into bed at night. For the hour Marcela was with these women each week, their children became more than just stilted voices over a long-distance phone line or grainy fishbowl images on an ancient computer screen. Here, in the safety of La Casa, they could laugh and cry as they shared stories of holidays and celebrations they would never know except through the time-lapse photos that papered their tiny apartments and au pair suites.
The women called themselves Las Madres Perdidas—The Lost Mothers.
Their children lived in locks of hair and lost baby teeth that sat in boxes on the women’s dressers, as if they could be mailed piecemeal over a border that would never let them reunite any other way.
This was the last time Marcela would ever attend one of their meetings.
She wasn’t a lost mother anymore.
“Okay, everyone! Time to take a seat,” said Rosa Or-do?ez, the founder of the group, as she finished setting out cake and coffee beneath posters exhorting people in English and Spanish to Dream Big! and Learn Something New Every Day!
The women gathered in a semicircle in front of a dusty chalkboard and balanced cups of lukewarm coffee and store-bought cake on their knees. They chatted to one another about nanny and housekeeping jobs that never seemed to pay enough and rents that only went up. They compared currency exchange rates and the best places to wire money back home. Finally, the talk died down as Rosa took a seat.
“We have something to celebrate tonight,” said Rosa. “As some of you already know, a ‘special gift’ has arrived.” That was the euphemism they all used—regalo especial. They all knew what “special gift” meant. It was the only gift any of them wanted.
“Marcela,” said Rosa. “Please share with everyone your good news.”
Marcela took a sip of coffee and smiled shyly over the rim of her cup. She was thirty years old. There was a time not long ago when her dimpled smile and long dark eyelashes used to turn men’s heads as they’d once turned Byron’s. Fatigue had worn her down of late, made her eat more and sleep less. She compensated with home-color kits that turned her hair every shade of dark red and bright lipsticks that made her feel at least a little more attractive when she contemplated another day of scrubbing toilet bowls and ironing shirts.
She felt older than her thirty years even though she was one of the younger women in the group. There were mothers in this room ten and fifteen years her senior, women who had left their countries when their children were babies and now worked to support two generations of offspring they could never see. Marcela wondered if her good fortune would only fill them with more sadness and frustration.
“My thirteen-year-old daughter, Yovanna, has arrived from Honduras,” said Marcela softly.
A flurry of questions flew out of the women’s mouths about the girl’s journey.
How much did you pay?
How dangerous was the crossing?
How long did it take?
Did immigration stop her at the border?
Did she spend time in a detention center? “Ice boxes,” the women called them. Hieleras in Spanish. The detention centers at the border were known for keeping detainees—even small children—in freezing cold quarters without blankets to punish them for crossing.
Outside this room, no one could speak of such things. Not to employers, some of whom didn’t even know the women had children. Not to friends whose own children were here. Not even to the staff at La Casa. The staff knew that such things existed. But they could not partake—or even appear to partake—in anything illegal. This room on Friday evenings was the only place these women could share the photos and stories that kept them from being ghosts on the landscape of their children’s lives.
Marcela tried to answer all their questions. The basic facts were easy enough to explain. The trip had cost ten thousand dollars—an unbelievable, princely sum. Even after years of saving, Marcela had had to borrow most of it from family. The journey had taken more than five weeks—a period in which Marcela could barely eat or sleep for fear of what would happen to her daughter. Would she be raped? Beaten? Jailed at the border? Held for ransom with dozens of other desperate migrants in some brutal Texas safe house?