J. Jance: Day of the Dead

“What did we watch last night?” she asked.

“Watch?”

“On TV. If someone asks where we were or what we were doing, we were home all night long, watching television together. That means we’d better have our stories straight about what we watched, what we ate, and what time we went to bed.”

Saying nothing, Larry returned to the task of scrubbing the car, but that was when he realized, once and for all, that the genie was out of the bottle. And she wasn’t ever going back in.

Maria Elena Dominguez rode the bus from Hermosillo to Nogales, fighting to stay awake and clutching her backpack all the while. There was little of value in the knapsack-only her papers and the change of clothing she’d been given earlier that morning as she left El Asilo Seguro. Still, Maria Elena was afraid someone might try to steal her paltry belongings. Even when she dozed off, she didn’t relinquish her hold on the backpack’s straps.

“So,” Senora Duarte had said with a sneer as Maria Elena slipped silently into her office at eight-thirty that morning. “You must be one of the lucky ones.”

Fifteen-year-old Maria Elena didn’t feel lucky. Her father, a leftist sympathizer, had been gunned down by a troop of soldiers four years earlier in their tiny village in Chiapas. Then, during her father’s funeral, the same group of soldiers had appeared again. This time, Maria Elena’s mother and her older brother, both of them screaming and fighting their captors, had been hauled away in a single armored vehicle, while a petrified Maria Elena had been carted off in another.

The driver of that one, an older man who reminded Maria Elena of her grandfather, had been kind enough. He had given her food, sharing some of his own with her. Several days later, she had found herself in a Franciscan-run orphanage on the outskirts of Matias Romero in Oaxaca. Looking back, Maria Elena realized the orphanage hadn’t been such a bad place. The problem was, Maria Elena didn’t consider herself an orphan and refused to stay there. Twice she ran away but was picked up and returned to the orphanage without ever making it home to Chiapas.

The third time she ran away she was caught and shipped off to another facility, a juvenile detention center in Colima. Finally, for reasons none of them understood, she and two other girls, accompanied by a guard and wearing shackles, were taken by bus far to the north to yet a third facility-El Asilo Seguro outside Hermosillo. Despite its benign-sounding name-the Safe Haven-El Asilo Seguro was by far the worst of all, and it was anything but safe.

For one thing, boys and girls were warehoused together. There were supposedly separate sleeping facilities, but curfews inside the institution were widely ignored and sleeping arrangements poorly supervised. Sexual encounters were forbidden, but that prohibition wasn’t strictly enforced, either. Many of the inmates, like Maria Elena, were orphans whose crimes involved nothing more serious than running away. Others, at ages as young as eleven or twelve, were already hardened criminals. That number included two convicted killers, several drug dealers, and a band of tough-eyed gang members who carried knives and were a constant simmering threat to everyone around them.

Arriving from Colima, Maria Elena and the two girls with her, Madelina and Lucia, were smart enough to figure out that the knife-wielding boys were interested in girls for one reason and one reason only. In order to avoid being preyed upon, the girls manufactured a story about how they had been sent away from their previous institution because all three had been diagnosed as HIV positive. To their amazement, the ruse worked. It turned out that the devil-may-care gangster wannabes who weren’t afraid of drugs or guns or knives or each other were deathly afraid of AIDS. The new arrivals were pretty much left to themselves. The three girls had survived by sticking together, by speaking only to one another, and by making themselves invisible.

Maria Elena tried hiding out in silence now, avoiding Senora Duarte’s question and piercing gaze with a simple shrug rather than a verbal reply.

“You’re wrong there,” the senora said, pulling her reading glasses down onto her sharp nose. She glared through them at a stack of papers on the desk in front of her. “You really are lucky. It would seem you have a patron,” she continued, “a benefactor in the States who has arranged for you to come live with him and his wife and go to school.”

Maria Elena’s jaw dropped. Once she had loved school. She had wanted to grow up and become a teacher, but the last time she had actually attended school had been three years earlier in the orphanage. In Colima, there had been a few classrooms, fewer teachers, and even fewer books, but at El Asilo Seguro no one bothered to pretend that they intended to reform or educate their charges. Maria Elena’s heart beat fast at this first tiny glimmer of hope. Perhaps her long-abandoned dream was possible after all. It was strange that she hadn’t been consulted about these arrangements in advance, but still…

“I have examined the papers,” Senora Duarte went on. “Everything appears to be in order. You are to catch the bus from Hermosillo to Nogales this afternoon. The ticket is right here, as is your passport and identification card. You’ll find some money here as well, enough so you’ll be able to buy food and water for your journey. You will be picked up at the bus station in Nogales and taken from there to your new home.”

Maria Elena’s head teemed with questions. She had heard some of the older kids talking about passports and identification cards. Legal ones were very difficult to come by, and forged ones were obtainable only by those with enough money to pay the price. What would happen to her if she reached the border and for some reason her paperwork wasn’t in order? And how would she know this person-this kind stranger-who was supposed to meet her in far-off Nogales?

“But…” she began aloud.

Senora Duarte’s disapproving frown silenced her. “Certainly you wouldn’t be so foolish as to turn down such an opportunity!” she declared.

“No, senora,” Maria Elena murmured in agreement. “I would not.”

“Very well, then.” Senora Duarte picked up the papers and stowed them inside an outside pocket of the knapsack, which she then zipped up. “Here,” she said, handing it over. “You can’t travel in your uniform. Go see Senora Escalante. She’ll give you something suitable to wear.”

As directed, Senora Escalante had outfitted Maria Elena with two sets of someone else’s cast-off clothing-one to wear on the bus and another to change into later. The skirt and blouse were too small; the shoes far too big. They flopped up and down when she walked. By the time she had walked through the bus station and found food to eat, Maria Elena had painful blisters on both heels. But none of that mattered. Her feet might be sore, but her heart was light. She was out. She was free. She was on her way to a new life.

At the bus station, she wondered briefly what would happen if she tried to trade the ticket she had-the one to Nogales-for one that would take her back to Chiapas. But who would be there if I did go home? she asked herself. She knew for sure that her father was dead. Most likely, so were her mother and brother. After four years, who would be left to take her in or even care about her?

In the end, she boarded the bus for Heroica Nogales. Where will I end up? she wondered as the blurred landscape unfolded outside the moving window. Along the way, the world outside that window became more and more barren. More and more empty. That emptiness bothered Maria Elena. It reminded her of how empty her life was. It made her wonder what her new life would be like. Who were these kind people-this man and woman-who were taking a stranger into their home? Were they hoping for a daughter to replace one they had lost, perhaps, or were they looking for a servant-little more than a slave-who would work for them for next to nothing?