No Witness But the Moon(13)
Yovanna hadn’t been jailed at the border or held for ransom. Those two things Marcela knew. She’d prayed every day to Saint Toribio Romo, the patron saint of immigrants, for Yovanna’s safe crossing. And her prayers had been answered. Sort of. No one had warned her about the nightmares. Or the anger. Or the fact that Yovanna would be so far behind in school that even in a special class for non-English speakers, she would be frustrated. No one had warned Marcela that she would leave behind a tenderhearted little girl and get back a sullen teenager who blamed her for everything. I left for YOU, Marcela kept shouting. But Yovanna only ever seemed to hear three of those four words: I left YOU.
“You are so lucky,” said Guadalupe Carrillo wistfully, tucking her graying hair into a bun at the back of her head. Guadalupe was a live-in nanny who took care of three American children while her own three children grew up in Guatemala. Guadalupe had tried twice to get her oldest son here but he’d never made it farther than southern Mexico before getting caught and turned back. Since his last attempt, he’d suffered a broken jaw and the loss of his two front teeth after several gang members beat him up. He was only fifteen.
Ana, a Honduran who worked at a nail salon, couldn’t hide her envy. Her nine-year-old son had lived apart from her practically his whole life. She narrowed her gaze at Marcela now.
“And how is your husband adjusting to having a stepdaughter live with him?”
Marcela played with her empty coffee cup. She had a sense that Ana knew even before she asked the question what the answer would be. It was the same for all of them who had new relationships here. But even so, she felt defensive. She chose her words carefully.
“He is—hopeful—that Yovanna will be a good big sister to our three-year-old son, Damon.” Marcela tried not to think about Byron’s real words to her when she told him Yovanna was coming: We have a child already. Why must you bring your daughter here? Where will she sleep? How will you support her when we can barely support our son?
Byron needed time, Marcela told herself. He was a good man. He was just very—practical. He carried his practicality with him everywhere, like the soles of his feet. They had a tiny three-room apartment. Marcela, Byron, and Damon already slept in the only bedroom. Yovanna was stuck with a borrowed cot in the living room. It was a cramped life.
My nineteen-year-old’s in Honduras, too, he’d pointed out during that terrible argument. You don’t see me moving her in with us! Marcela didn’t remind Byron that his daughter was grown with a child of her own and a mother nearby. Nor did she point out that her sorrow was different from his. A mother’s wholeness lives outside her body. It beats in the breast of another. How could he expect her to live the rest of her life with a divided heart? To inflict on Yovanna the same fate that had been inflicted on her as a child?
She had to go back to her early youth to recall a time when her heart hadn’t felt divided. If she closed her eyes, she could still smell the perfume sweetness of ripe sapote fruit dangling from the tree in their dusty courtyard where her older brothers kicked around a bundle of wrapped tape and pretended it was a soccer ball. She could still feel the pearls of sweat on her father’s neck as he hoisted her up on his shoulders to watch the priests in glittery robes carry a giant statue of Jesus through the narrow streets of San Pedro Sula. Later, in her teenage years, she could still see the boy with hooded eyes, big dreams, and fast hands who used to woo her in the back of a rickety delivery truck, despite her mother’s warnings that neither the boy nor his dreams would stick around.
The women in this room understood. Here in this semicircle of cold metal folding chairs, they were first and foremost mothers even if, in the rough economics of their world, loving their children meant leaving them.
The talk soon turned to the usual worries, the sense of impotence that distance and closed borders bring. Elena feared her daughters in El Salvador were being beaten by her in-laws. Elena called them all the time but the girls could never speak freely because the grandparents listened in on the phone. Ana’s ex-husband had stolen their son from Ana’s mother’s house and dumped him at his own parents’ farm where they worked him to death and refused to send him to school. Guadalupe’s seven-year-old daughter was complaining of stomach pains regularly but Guadalupe’s mother was too timid and old-fashioned to take the child to a hospital. So much was out of their control. They came here to earn money to provide a better life for their children. They lost their children in the process.
It was ten-thirty P.M. by the time Marcela returned to the old frame house where she and Byron rented their tiny apartment. She climbed the narrow wooden staircase. Behind the closed doors of the other five apartments, she heard game shows and soap operas blaring in Spanish from televisions. She heard salsa, rap, and cumbia rhythms from radios. Babies cried and adults raised their voices and lowered them again, aware that the thin walls were never constructed to shelter so many different families. The house was built up against the easement for the railroad tracks and every thirty minutes or so, Marcela heard the peal of the train whistle, followed by a push of air that rattled every window in the house. Pictures never stayed straight on walls and dishes left too close to the edges of tables often found their way onto the floor. She’d lived in this apartment for three years now. The rumble of the train had found its way into her dreams.
She heard raised voices behind her own front door as she unlocked it. Byron and Yovanna were in the living room, their angry faces lit only by the glow from the television that took up nearly the entire space along one wall.