Жанин Камминс - American Dirt

‘Yeah?’

He nods.

‘I guess you wouldn’t be on top of this train if you hadn’t.’

‘ Es un prerrequisito, ’ Luca says. A prerequisite.

Rebeca nods.

‘My papi died,’ he whispers. He hasn’t wanted to say those words out loud, to admit it. This is the first time, and he can feel the words leaving his chest, like something rotten has broken off inside him and fallen away. There is a ragged wound now, where he’d been holding those words.

‘Oh no,’ Rebeca says. She leans forward like she’s suddenly off balance, but then she touches her forehead against his and they both close their eyes.

The rest of the sisters’ story emerges in stolen moments over the next several days. How Soledad’s unwanted ‘boyfriend’ turned out to be the palabrero of the local clica of an international gang. How he was, therefore, just violent and powerful enough to do whatever he liked to her without fear of reprisal, but not quite violent or powerful enough to preserve her all for himself. How Soledad’s life quickly deteriorated into a series of lurid traumas. How Soledad confided some of it to Rebeca but went to extravagant lengths to hide the situation from their papi because she understood that, were he to discover her circumstances, his resulting efforts to protect her would get him killed.

Rebeca knows that Iván, which was the name of the unwanted boyfriend, sometimes allowed Soledad to go to school, and sometimes did not. But there is much she doesn’t know – how he always allowed Soledad to go home at nights because the idea of her having a curfew served, in the depravity of his mind, to sustain her virtue. How her decency, her moral resistance to him, her very obvious loathing, all turned him on. How, as Soledad began to perceive this, she sometimes pretended to enjoy his company in hopes he’d grow tired of her. And how now, when Soledad remembers that pretend enjoyment, she feels flooded with shame. It was futile anyway, because that effort at subterfuge was no match for her beauty.

One day Iván showed Soledad a picture of the hotel where her father worked. He said her father’s name to her, and then gave her a cell phone and instructed her to answer it whenever it rang or beeped, no matter what she was doing. He showed her how to text. ‘It’s good to be alive, right, Sole?’ he said, and she cringed at the way he shortened her name, as if he were someone she loved.

During all those weeks of suffering, Soledad, who knew the only flimsy protection she could offer her baby sister was her unaccustomed distance, barely saw Rebeca at all. When Iván called, Soledad stopped whatever she was doing, as instructed, and she went to him. She left her shopping basket in the middle of the aisle, or got out of the line where she waited for the bus, or lifted herself out of the chair in the middle of her reading class, and she moved across the city to him like a zombie magnet.

Twice, Soledad saw Iván shoot people in the back of the head. Once, she watched him kick a nine-year-old boy in the stomach until he coughed up blood because that was one of the ways they initiated new chequeos into the gang. That day, she asked him what would happen if she didn’t answer her cell phone sometime, and he backhanded her in the mouth, leaving a bruise along her lower jaw and a welt on her lip that was difficult to explain to Papi. ‘I only meant if I was in the shower or something,’ she explained to Iván afterward, ‘or if my papi was there and I couldn’t answer.’ And when she said this, Iván cocked back and pretended he was going to hit her again, and Soledad winced and cowered, and Iván laughed and said, ‘Just answer your phone, puta .’ And after that, he let one of his homeboys pay him to be alone with her for an hour.

Soledad didn’t actively want to die, not really. She’d always been a happy child. She remembered how it had felt to be happy, and she wasn’t sure she could ever feel that feeling again, but the memory of it provided her with some measure of hope. Still, during that long stretch of weeks with Iván, there were plenty of times when it crossed her mind to drag a razor blade across the raised tangle of vessels in her wrist. Or to lift the homemade gun from where Iván placed it on his bedside table before he did what he did to her, to train it on him and pull the trigger. To shoot him and watch his brains splatter satisfyingly against the ceiling above him, and then to turn the gun on herself before his homies could swoop in and punish her. To be done with it all, to be free from this repetitive torture. But then she thought of her papi, the suffering her release would cause him. Her mami and abuela back home in the cloud forest, too, when Papi would have to go home to their mountain place and deliver the news. But more than any of that, even, Soledad thought of Rebeca. Her sister was afraid, but still intact. Rebeca was still undiscovered, and it was the improbable miracle of that truth that kept Soledad going. The possibility of her baby sister’s salvation.

Then one afternoon, Iván lay in bed wearing boxer shorts and smoking a cigarette. He blew the smoke toward Soledad where she sat slightly curled over herself on the edge of the bed near his feet. ‘So I heard you got a sister,’ he said, nudging her backside with his toe. Soledad was very grateful not to be facing him when he said this, because she knew her face would’ve told the whole story of panic that these words provoked. ‘How come you never mentioned her?’

Soledad was wrapped in a sheet; it was tucked beneath her arms. She made her face into the approximation of a smile and turned it toward him. ‘We’re not close,’ she said. ‘She’s nothing like me.’

Outside she could hear two of Iván’s homeboys arguing, but there were also children playing somewhere beyond, squealing, chasing one another up the block. The sunlight rocketed through the open window.

‘Nothing like you, huh?’ he said, sitting up and yanking the sheet down to her waist. He tapped the bottom of her breast and watched it react. ‘That’s not what I heard.’ Then he tossed his still-full cigarette into the ashtray beside the bed and sat up on his knees. ‘Damn, girl. Lemme get in there again.’

Soledad endured him with something more immediate and terrifying than her regular revulsion, and when he was finished, and he instructed her to come back in the morning and bring her sister, she went home, packed her backpack, took all the little bit of money Papi had managed to save from the coffee can on top of the refrigerator, and then sat down at the table to wait for Rebeca to get home. She wrote Papi a note:

Querido Papi:

I love you so so much, Papi, and I’m sorry for these words I have to write that I know will break your heart. And I’m sorry for taking all your savings, but I know that you work hard and save this money only for us, and I know that you’d insist we take it and use it to get away from here if you knew the terrible things that were happening to me. And I didn’t tell you sooner because I thought I could protect you and Rebeca if I stayed quiet and just did what they told me to do, but there are monsters in this city, Papi, and now I’m so scared, and I have to get Rebeca out of here before they hurt her, too. So we’re leaving today, Papi. We are already gone. And you must be very careful and look after yourself, please. We are taking you with us in our hearts, and we will call you when we get to el norte, Papi. And we’ll send for you when we have jobs, and you can come to us, and you can bring Mami and Abuela, too, and we will all be together again as it is meant to be.

God bless you, Papi, until we meet again.

Much of this Rebeca doesn’t know. But she does know that Soledad texted their cousin César in Maryland that afternoon while she waited for Rebeca to get home. And she knows that César didn’t ask any questions because he already knew all the worst possible answers and all he wanted to do was get them out of there. Rebeca knows that César asked if they could wait a few days so he could try to arrange for a coyote to bring them all the way from Honduras to el norte, but Soledad told him they couldn’t wait. They were leaving today, right now. Rebeca knows that César has since prepaid for their crossing with a trustworthy coyote who will meet them at the border. Rebeca doesn’t know that the sum of money their cousin paid for their crossing was $4,000 each. But even if she had known, that kind of money doesn’t even make sense to her. It’s so far into the realm of the incomprehensible that it might as well have been $4 million.