No Witness But the Moon(62)

And yet in those moments before Adele and Vega found Sophia, Adele’s pain had been as acute as any of the women in Las Madres Perdidas. Her heart blew up in her chest until it felt like it was going to explode in desperation. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t feel cold or dampness or hunger. At that moment, she would have struck any bargain, risked any punishment, and paid any price to assure her daughter’s safety.

Just like Marcela.

She heard the sirens before she saw the red flashing lights. The police arrived first. Two young officers whom she knew by face, though not by name. She could barely form the words but they knew what to do. The ambulance came next. Then a fire truck. The firefighters helped Vega and Sophia up the embankment. Sophia was lost in the folds of Vega’s jacket. She wasn’t crying anymore. She was holding tight to Vega’s neck while Diablo danced around his feet.

Vega was shivering. His shirt was muddy. His boots and pants were soaked to the shins.

“She’s gonna be fine,” Vega told Adele. He gave her a wink. “She’s brave like her mother.”

The EMTs loaded Sophia into the back of the ambulance. One of them handed Vega back his jacket. He slipped into it gratefully.

“Thank you,” Adele said to him. Those words didn’t begin to cover her gratitude.

“You ride over to the hospital with Sophia,” said Vega. “I’ll take Diablo back to your house, grab your car, and meet you there.”

The EMTs were closing the doors of the ambulance. Adele needed to hop inside.

“Jimmy—” There was so much she wanted to say and no time to say it.

“I’ll be over as soon as I can.”





Chapter 23


Marcela pulled her hood tightly around her face and slipped into her father’s building. Darkness fell early this time of year. In the Bronx, the concrete canyons ate up the natural light, replacing it with the glare of streetlights and hallway CFL bulbs that offered neither warmth nor clarity.

Marcela desperately needed both at the moment. Alma wasn’t expecting her. Alma would not be happy to see her.

For ten years, Marcela had lived about fifty miles north of her father and his second family. But it was only two years ago that she and her father were finally able to come to a truce. His priest had brokered it. Father Delgado. He was one of the few people her father had ever told about his trip across the border.

“I know you’re angry that your father abandoned you,” the old priest had told her. “But your father wants your forgiveness.” By then Marcela was well versed in what the border does to parents and children. She was a parent, too. So she swallowed the anger and tried to turn her thoughts to their early years together in San Pedro Sula. The cornhusk doll her father once made for her. The time he bought her a bag of cotton candy at a street fair—a memory so strong that even now, the smell of that sugary confection brought back that day, the sun on her shoulders, her hands and face covered in sticky sweetness that melted into every pore of her being until even her toes curled with delight.

They did not talk about that last morning together in Honduras—the one when she said good-bye to her father and sixteen-year-old brother under the broad canopy of a huanacaxtle tree. Marcela could still see Miguel waving good-bye from the back of that truck overloaded with people and backpacks. He would always be that gangly young prince who hefted her over deep puddles in the streets after it rained and spoke with hope in his chest of what he would do in El Norte. He seemed so old when she was ten. He seemed so young now. Three years, it was supposed to be. Only three years before they would all be together again.

Of all the lies people tell you about journeying to El Norte, this was the biggest lie of all.

“I want to make it different for you and Yovanna,” Marcela’s father told her one day a few months ago. All of a sudden. With no pretext. That was Hector Ponce. Marcela could never read his mind. She didn’t question why or how. She didn’t want to know the details then.

She knew too many now.

Marcela stepped inside a black-and-white-tiled hallway that smelled of roach defogger, chili powder, and cooking oil. She walked down a flight of stairs to her father’s basement apartment. Her father’s sons, twelve-year-old Aaron and fourteen-year-old Felix, were standing outside the front doorway, huddled against a wall with friends, trying hard to look defiant and tough, though Marcela could see the freefall in their eyes. She could feel their loss like a magnet, drawing her in. She wanted to comfort them. She knew that was impossible—even dangerous at the moment.

“Marcela,” Felix called softly. He was a stocky teenager with his mother’s square chin. He had a tendency to stutter when he got excited. “I can’t believe this is h-h-happening.”

Marcela gave the boy a hug. She wanted to feel her father’s blood coursing through his veins but all she could feel was Alma. These boys, they were not like Miguel with his cougar grace or Reimundo with his dark liquid eyes. She could never look at either of them without thinking of what Miguel and Reimundo might have done with their lives had they been born here instead of Honduras. At the very least, they would be alive.

The front door of the apartment was open and packed with Alma’s relatives and men in suits. Lawyers. Here it was, twenty-four hours after the shooting and Alma was still surrounded by people while Marcela had to pretend like nothing had happened.