Жанин Камминс - American Dirt

Luca’s heart is hammering in his chest just thinking about it. He reminds himself to breathe. Then he looks at Mami, taking it in, considering their likelihood of survival. He feels a sudden surge of manic energy coursing through his body, so he has to stand and spring and kick and let it loose into the world.

‘If you get really lucky, sometimes the train might even stop,’ Rebeca says. ‘And then you just climb down. Simple.’

‘But there’s plenty of times we let a train go by, too,’ Soledad says. ‘If it’s moving fast, we don’t even try. We’ve already seen two people who tried to board and didn’t make it.’

Lydia looks at Luca to see how this information will affect him, but he gives nothing away.

‘Were those people boarding the same as you? From the top like this?’

‘No!’ Rebeca seems almost proud. ‘We’re the only ones who board like this. I haven’t seen anybody else do it.’

Lydia screws up her mouth. So these girls are either brilliant or insane. ‘How many times have you done this?’ she asks.

The sisters look at each other, and it’s Soledad who answers. ‘Five, maybe? Six?’

Lydia lets out a deep, low breath. She nods. ‘Okay.’

‘You want to come with us?’ Rebeca asks. It’s not until after the words are out that she glances at her sister, remembering they’re always supposed to check with each other first about everything. Soledad touches the top of Rebeca’s head, and the gesture reassures her sister in the language of their lifelong intimacy that it’s fine.

‘Maybe,’ Lydia answers, ignoring the hitch in her lungs as she expels the word.

They talk a little while they wait, and Lydia learns that the girls are fifteen and fourteen years old, that they’ve traveled over a thousand miles so far, that they miss their family very much, and that they’ve never been on their own before. They don’t say why they left home, and Lydia doesn’t ask. They both remind her of Yénifer, though it’s probably only their age. The sisters are taller and more slender, darker skinned than her niece, and both are luminous and funny. Yénifer had been studious and solemn. Even as a baby she’d had a certain gravity to her.

Lydia’s older sister, Yemi, had selected Lydia, who was just seventeen the year their father died and Yénifer was born, to be the girl’s godmother. Lydia remembers holding the baby over the baptismal font and crying. She made sure not to wear mascara that day so she wouldn’t stain the baptismal dress. She’d known she would cry, not from joy or the honor of being the godmother or the emotion of the moment, but because her father wasn’t there to see it. So Lydia’s own tears had splattered across the child’s forehead along with the holy water, and Lydia was surprised to see, through the blur of her vision, that the baby in her arms didn’t join in her tears. Yénifer’s eyes were wide and blinking. Her mouth, a perfect and puckered pink bow. Lydia loved that baby so much that she couldn’t imagine she’d ever love her own child more. When Luca was born, years later, Lydia learned the incomparability of that kind of love, of course. But it was still Yénifer, that somber, shining girl, who had allayed her grief when she lost the second baby. Wise little Yénifer at nine years old, who’d cried with her and stroked her forehead and reassured her, ‘But you do have a daughter, Tía. You have me.’

The enormity of Lydia’s loss is incomprehensible. There are so many griefs at once that she can’t separate them. She can’t feel them. Beside her, the sisters talk lightly to Luca and he responds with his reanimated words. There’s an effervescence among them that feels extraordinary. The sound of Luca’s voice is an elixir.

The sun feels hotter when they’re sitting still, and Lydia notices that her arms are as tan as childhood. Luca, too, is a shade browner than usual, and there are dots of perspiration all along his hairline beneath Sebastián’s cap. But the wait beneath that sapping sun is almost too brief, Lydia thinks. She could’ve used more time to talk herself into this. It’s not even two hours before the distant rumble of the train grows into their consciousness and all four of them rise without speaking and begin to ready themselves. In truth, Lydia’s in no way convinced that they’re actually going to go through with it. She hopes they do because they need to be on that train. And she hopes they don’t, because she doesn’t want to die. She doesn’t want Luca to die. She feels as if she’s outside her own body, listening to that train approach, moving her backpack to the other side of the roadway, prompting Luca along in front of her. She packs their canteen into the front pocket of her backpack and zips it up. Even if she felt confident that she could jump onto a moving train, how can she ask her son to do this crazy thing? Her shoulders feel loose, her legs erratic beneath her. Adrenaline sluices all through her jittery body.

Beside her, Luca follows a crack in the asphalt beneath his sneakers. He keeps his eyes and thoughts fixed on the minutiae. He leaves it to Mami to take in the broad sweep of the task at hand: the dun-colored grasses and scrubby trees crowding the embankment, the dome of blue overhead, the overpass and train tracks intersecting like a cross. The wind fuzzes through Luca’s hair as the noise of the train grows closer, the booming clatter and reverberation of those monster wheels hauling themselves along the metal of the track – the very loudness of that noise seems designed as a warning that enters through your ears but lodges in your sternum: stay away, stay away, stay away, don’t be crazy, don’t be crazy, don’t be crazy . Luca holds his backpack by the top handle, low in front of him with both hands. There’s one kid at school who’s a daredevil. Her name is Pilar, and she’s always doing crazy stunts. She leaps from the very top of the jungle gym. She flies from the highest arc of the swing. Once, she climbed a tree beside the school gate and shimmied out on an upper limb, from where she climbed onto the roof of the school building. She did cartwheels up there until the principal called her abuela to come talk her down. But not even Pilar would jump onto a moving train from an overpass, Luca thinks. Pilar would never, in a million years, believe steady, rule-following Luca capable of participating in such madness. He watches the nose of the train approach and disappear beneath the southern edge of the roadway. He turns then, and sees it emerge from beneath his feet. Mami peers over the edge of the low guardrail just as the train pulls itself into view.

‘It’s good.’ Rebeca smiles at them. ‘Nice and slow.’

‘Ready?’ Soledad says.

Her little sister nods. Lydia’s face is grim while she watches the girls. Luca studies the stretch of the train and sees a few migrants clustered near the tail end, on the last five or six cars. One is standing, silhouetting his body into an X, and he waves at them. Luca waves back.

‘Let’s go,’ Soledad says.

She and her sister line up beside each other, smack in the center of the track. They squat, holding their packs beneath them, and wait for the right car. They look for one that’s flat on top. One that has the kind of grating you can walk on, sit on, grab onto. The first half of the train is all rounded tanker cars, so they wait. And then finally, quite slowly, Soledad tosses her pack and then follows it. With one graceful, chaotic, suicidal lurch, she moves her body from the fixed to the moving, she drops – Lydia can’t tell how far it is – six feet? ten? – and then the girl is instantly receding, her form growing smaller as she moves away with the train.

‘Come on!’ she shouts back to her sister. ‘Now!’