Infinite Country(11)
In South Carolina they became used to stares, absorbing hisses from locals of Go back to where you came from while Mauro and Elena pretended not to understand. Sometimes when Mauro was out alone, someone would mutter terrorist at him, as if he were one of the hijackers whose faces plastered the news.
At a gas station, Mauro went inside to buy his Saturday Powerball ticket. Two starchy men followed him out to his car, walling him between their bodies and truck.
“Where you from?” one said, more accusation than question.
Mauro didn’t respond, and the man grabbed him by the neck while the other punched him again and again. Mauro hit the ground, nose bloody, a tooth lost in the gravel. There were witnesses, though nobody said anything as the men sped off in their truck or made a move to help Mauro stand.
When the pet-food plant announced layoffs, there was an exodus to Georgia and Florida, where other workers said there were more factory and farming jobs. Mauro insisted the family go north instead. Elena wondered if even with their homegrown war, Colombia wouldn’t be safer for them. But then Perla would remind her the latest peace negotiations with the guerrilla commanders had been a fiasco, and of the day of the new president’s inauguration when an explosion killed fifteen near the presidential palace despite the high level of security; and the massacre in Bojayá, where hundreds of townspeople were murdered and wounded in a church beside a school, including dozens of children. Even the crucifix was left dismembered. It happened far away from the capital, all the way on the Pacific coast, but it was still our country, our dead, Elena thought. Tragic, almost, that she never felt more patriotic than when grieving her country’s victims. The turn of the millennium showed no end to the violence. Elena knew in every war it was the innocents who paid, but in this American offensive, all foreigners could be perceived as the enemy.
Mauro spent most evenings in the common room with other workers, drinking beer they took turns buying for the group. Elena wanted to wait to talk to him when he was at least only half-drunk, but those moments were becoming rarer. She called him into their room. The children were asleep on the bed. Mauro and Elena sat shoulder to shoulder on the floor. Through the window, the misty phosphorescence of the factory lights. They’d already been given notice to be gone by the weekend.
“I’m tired of moving, always being strangers, having people look at us like we’re a plague,” Elena said. “We didn’t come here for this kind of life. Let’s go home.”
She felt his beer breath warm on her face as he sighed. “We’re young and healthy. If we don’t spend these years trying to make a better future for our family, when will we? I’m not ready to give up.”
“I miss my mother.”
“Do you want to end up like her, spending your life in a house breaking down all around you? If we stay we can keep sending her money until she decides to join us here.”
“We can sell the house and find another,” Elena said. But they both knew Perla would never allow it, stubborn as she was. Even with her chemical asthma from decades of working in the laundry she refused to close.
“Please trust me, Elena. It’s not yet time to go back.”
* * *
In Delaware, on the drive to the hospital through streets cottoned with snow, Elena tried to find the seam between earth and sky, but there was none. Talia started pushing her way out hours before, but Elena wanted to wait until the baby was absolutely sure it was her moment. There was no time left for an epidural. She didn’t have one when delivering her other children. Elena had only one ultrasound in the last nine months, early on at a clinic across the river in Blades that didn’t require insurance and where she had to pay cash. They couldn’t afford another, and she had no medical care beyond her instincts, but she didn’t worry. In Texas she’d had plenty of scans and checkups, and the doctors were always telling her something was wrong with her baby, that she would be wise to terminate or he might be born dead or close to it. She didn’t listen, and Nando was born small but perfect. Later she heard from other women who’d been told similar things and given birth to healthy babies too. She didn’t know she would have a daughter until the baby was in the doctor’s hands. With her previous births she’d bled like a slaughtered calf but not this time. The ease of Talia’s arrival stunned everyone.
* * *
On the day of her birth, their home was a small bedroom in an apartment above a pizzeria whose ovens below kept them warm on days the radiator blew out, the scent of dough and cheese filling their walls. The apartment’s true tenants were a couple from Pakistan. Mauro knew the husband from his janitor job at a local motel. He and his wife slept in the other bedroom and told Elena and Mauro to call them Mister and Madame. Mister worked as a front-desk attendant and Madame as a seamstress. Their teenage son died of leukemia years before, so his bedroom was empty and they sublet it to the family for one hundred dollars a week. Elena could only communicate with them in scrambled words and gestures. Mauro mostly took over with the English he’d learned at his jobs.
Nights were cold. The family wore their coats even to sleep, the children released from their blanket cocoons only for changing or to be fed. Karina was three. Nando, two. Madame looked after them so Mauro could stay in the hospital and hold the baby as Elena slept. She shared a room with another woman. The new mother of a boy. Elena noticed nobody came to visit them. She didn’t speak Spanish, but when they were alone she brought the baby to Elena’s bedside and they held each other’s children until her boy cried and they traded back.