Жанин Камминс - American Dirt

During these days of calcifying quiet, the dreadful wheel of Lydia’s mind never slows, no matter how she tries to arrest it. She keeps herself steady in front of Luca, but there are times when she has to excuse herself quickly. She slips into the bathroom and opens the tap so the running water will disguise the muffled, wrenching noises of her grief. Her body is a cramp of misery, and the physical sensation is so elemental that it makes her feel like a wild animal, a mammal bereft of her pack. At night, as she lies next to Luca in Sebastián’s godson’s narrow bed, she directs her thoughts toward blankness. She does this exercise with authority, and her mind obeys. She repeats this over and over: don’t think, don’t think, don’t think. And because of this self-control, she moves mercifully toward sleep. The flashbacks dump adrenaline into her bloodstream a hundred times a day, so her body is helpfully exhausted. Her eyelids drop. But then there’s the moment after letting go, the momentary drift after casting off from the shore and before being caught by the current, and in that lapse, she plummets. Her limbs jerk, her heart clobbers, and her brain provides the memory once again of clacking gunfire, the odor of burning meat, the sixteen beautiful faces, scrubbed blank of their animation and turned vacant toward the sky. She sits up in bed, steadies her pitching breath, and tries not to wake Luca beside her. Every night, this hurdle between wake and sleep. This one patch she can’t cross. What kind of person does not bury her family? How could she leave them there in the backyard with their eyes and their mouths open, the blood cooling in their veins? Lydia has seen outspoken widows before, widows made brave by their anguish. She’s watched them talk into the cameras, refusing to be silenced, placing blame where it belongs, scorning the violence of cowardly men. Naming names. Those women get gunned down at funerals. Don’t think, don’t think, don’t think.

On Wednesday, Carlos takes the day off work to drive the third church van to Mexico City. Lydia leaves Abuela’s red overnight bag on the end of the bed where they’ve spent the last three nights. Inside are her heels and Luca’s dress shoes. She’s crammed everything else into the two backpacks, and that’s all they will carry now. They will fly north from Mexico City, she’s decided. It’s their only option. They will go with only these two backpacks so they’ll be nimble, so they won’t have to stand gazing at the baggage carousel waiting for what they don’t need anyway. Lydia doesn’t know what, if anything, Carlos and Meredith have told the Indiana missionaries about their two extra passengers, but no one asks her any questions when they get in. The teenagers flash their gooey smiles and try to talk to her about their Savior, but Lydia pretends not to speak English. She keeps one arm around Luca in the backseat and tries to act the way a normal person would act. She has difficulty remembering. The missionaries have duffel bags and fancy backpacks, and every single one of the girls wears her hair (curly or straight, coarse or silky) in two French braids. It’s a missionary code, Lydia realizes, and she reaches up to touch her ponytail. The girl on the bench seat beside her notices.

‘You want me to do yours?’ She smiles at Lydia. ‘We all do each other’s.’

Lydia hesitates, because the most impeccable French braids in the world wouldn’t cause anyone to mistake her for a teenage missionary from Indiana. But even ludicrous armor is better than nothing. The girl mistakes Lydia’s reticence for a language barrier, so she points to her own braids, the braids of the two girls in the row ahead, and then to Lydia’s hair. ‘You like? French braids?’

Lydia nods, pulling the ponytail holder out of her thick, black hair, and turning her back to the girl, who begins crawling her fingers along Lydia’s scalp. It’s hot in the van. When the girl is finished, she asks if anybody has a mirror. There are five teenage girls in this van, and not one of them is vain enough to carry a pocket mirror. Finally, one of the girls opens the camera app on her iPhone, switches it to selfie mode, and hands it to Lydia. ‘They’re so pretty on you!’ she says loudly, pointing to the braids. ‘¡Me gusta!’

Lydia looks at herself on the screen, twisting her head slightly to inspect the braids. She looks younger, she thinks, a little. She smiles and hands the phone back. Relief washes over Lydia when the singing starts, because the clamor of it fills the van and leaves no room for thinking. All the missionaries sing, and Carlos, too, loudly and cheerfully.

‘You should nap,’ she says quietly into Luca’s ear as they approach Axaxacualco. He looks at her without blinking. ‘I see traffic ahead. You should nap on the floor, here. Cozy.’ Lydia reaches beneath the bench seat and makes a space between two of the larger duffel bags. Luca slips into it and makes himself small. A stuffed backpack makes a pillow. He closes his eyes as the traffic begins to snag, and with it, the breath in Lydia’s chest. The girls sing ‘Jesus, Take the Wheel’ louder. Carlos catches Lydia’s eye in the rearview mirror. He blinks once, because it’s all the reassurance he can offer her. The line of cars in front of them has come to a stop. Theirs is the second of the three vans. Meredith is driving the one in front.

In the road ahead, two young men, two teenage boys, really, tote AR-15s. Perhaps it’s precisely because that make of gun isn’t quite as prolific or as sexy as the ubiquitous AK-47 here that Lydia finds it all the more terrifying. Ridiculous, she knows. One gun will make you as dead as another. But there’s something so utilitarian about the sleek, black AR-15, like it can’t be bothered to put on a show.

Sometimes the muzzle of one of those guns makes it inside the rolled-down window of a waiting car, but generally they remain outside, pointing skyward. The boys hold their weapons with both hands. Mostly the drivers don’t flinch. Mostly the drivers defer to the boys’ exaggerated egos, go along with their pretend swagger, because although no one expects the boys to open fire, they all know that the only road to genuine bravado runs through faking it first. It’s only a matter of time, and no one wants to find out if today is the day these boys finally mean it. One by one, the drivers reach carefully into their wallets or purses or glove compartments to extract the mordidas . They hand over the money without complaint, and with genuine bendiciones, because these boys could be anyone, they could be the drivers’ brothers or children or grandchildren. Certainly, they are someone’s.

Carlos rolls and brakes, rolls and brakes. Luca keeps his eyes closed, and the missionaries sing. Lydia prays for the unlikely possibility that the boys on the road ahead are uncorrupted autodefensas .

The singing missionaries are conducting their own brand of bravado, too, because even though the roadblock is exciting to them, even though their pastor, who’s in the van behind, explained that roadblocks are quite common here and nothing to be alarmed by, that they’re almost like passing through a toll gate, the girls know that toll booth operators in Indiana don’t carry automatic weapons. Secretly, in the sinful hidden chambers of their hearts, most of these girls had looked forward to experiencing a roadblock – the exotic thrill of it, the wash of adrenaline, the stories they’d get to tell when they returned home to Indiana! But on the way down from Mexico City, they’d been waved right through without stopping. A guilty disappointment. Still, now that the moment is actually upon them, now that they can see the boys in the road ahead, close in age to themselves and brandishing unthinkable weapons, now that their inexperienced missionary nervous systems are flooding their bloodstreams with chaotic hormones, every one of those braided girls feels sick with fright. Some of them wish for the courage to witness to the boys, to save them by reminding them of Jesus. But mostly they just want to go home. One of the girls in the front seat, the one with the iPhone, tries to start another round of singing, but no one joins her and the effort falters after a couple of bars. Carlos rolls down his window.