Жанин Камминс - American Dirt

And now it’s Lydia’s turn to experience that empathy-paralysis. The depth of her feeling surprises her, because how can she have any leftover grief available for other people, for Paola’s murdered nephew? But there it is – an anguish that makes her feel hollow in the bones, despair for a beautiful boy Lydia never met. For the innumerable griefs of all those stolen boys, stretching from family to family like one of Luca’s connect-the-dots. It’s so big, the pain. It’s exponential. Each violent death amplifies itself a hundred times, a thousand times. Everyone in this bank knows some small or large portion of that grief. Everyone in Nogales. Everyone who lives in a place that’s been carved up into plazas and parceled out for governance by men like Javier. For what?

Lydia lets go. All the torrent of emotion she’s been corralling for weeks, it all tries to squeeze through at once. She curls into a tight ball in the wooden chair and she sobs quietly, and her body is a knot of grief, and Paola is a stranger, but her hands on Lydia’s back are the hands of God. They are Sebastián’s and Yemi’s and Yénifer’s. They are her mother’s hands. Lydia weeps into Paola’s lap, and Paola weeps with her. They weep for themselves and for each other. And when they’re finished, they clean themselves up using only the Kleenex on Paola’s desk.

Paola rubs Lydia’s knee roughly and then honks her nose into a tissue. She tosses it like a three-pointer into the wastebasket on the far side of the little cubicle. And then, ‘I might lose my job,’ she says quietly. ‘But I will get you that money.’

Lydia’s head pounds. She closes her eyes in grateful disbelief. The aftermath is like a jackhammer in her sinuses.

It takes a few minutes, but soon there’s an envelope fat with cash, and then Paola produces her own purse from a locked drawer in the bottom of her filing cabinet, and hands Lydia an extra 500-peso note. ‘For your son,’ she says.

Lydia hugs her, and there’s no way to thank her. It’s impossible.

The apartment is weirdly nice, if impersonal and sparsely furnished. It’s the lower level of a house that’s built into a hill, so it’s half a flight down from the street. It has four large rooms: a living room (with two black leather couches, a flat-screen television, and some grim artwork), a kitchen (whose refrigerator contains only a jar of mayonnaise and two eggs), and the two bedrooms (which are entirely empty, save a lone wire hanger on the tile floor in one, and an aerosol can of Raid on the high windowsill in the other). At the sleek kitchen counter, Lydia hands over their money. The price El Chacal demanded was $11,000. She gives it to him half in pesos and half in dollars because the bank didn’t have enough cash to give her all one currency. The two stacks of bills she hands him include all the money from her mother’s account, the 500-peso note Paola gave her, and every penny she had left in her wallet. The exchange rate has been dismal, so the total sum of her money is roughly $10,628. A few weeks ago, when the peso was stronger, it would’ve been enough. Today, she’s $372 short. The coyote counts the money, works out the exchange on his cell phone, and when he realizes she’s short, pushes the cash back at her, shaking his head.

‘No es suficiente.’

‘But we’re only a little short. Maybe I can pay you when we get to the other side. When I get a job, I can make up the difference.’

‘That’s not how it works.’

It’s inconceivable that it might come down to this. $372.

‘We had more, but we got robbed on the way.’ She hears the desperation in her voice.

‘Everyone gets robbed on the way,’ he says, unmoved.

‘No,’ Soledad says. ‘She paid to ransom us.’

‘She saved our lives with that money.’ Rebeca turns to her sister. ‘We can ask César. We have to.’

Soledad looks worried about asking their cousin for even more money, but she nods. There’s a note of hysteria in the room, hopping from face to face. Only the coyote is immune to it.

‘We won’t be leaving for at least a day or two,’ he says. ‘You can stay here with your son. You come up with the cash before then, you can come.’

Two days, Lydia thinks. They’d lived frugally in Acapulco, never touching their savings, taking a packed lunch to work most days, buying new clothes only when the old ones could no longer be repaired. The rare dinner out, an occasional movie. This is how they splurged. For their anniversary last year, Sebastián bought her a vial of lavender oil, so she could put a drop on her pillow each night before bed. What a luxury that had been! But when she thinks now of their small, sunny two-bedroom apartment, filled with shoes and books gathering dust, its kitchen pantry stocked with uneaten maize, dry beans, and cereal, the linens folded in the hall closet, two bubble-shaped wineglasses drying in the rack beside the sink, it all feels like extravagance. She has nothing now. What can she sell? How can she possibly get $400 in two days? Her mind searches for people she can ask for money. Dead. All dead. If she had her uncle’s number in Denver she might call. She thinks wildly, shamefully, of her body. How much could she get for sex? It’s sickening and obscene, and she’s grateful when she manages to discard the thought without real analysis. She will find a way.

Beto and Luca are sitting on one of the black leather couches behind them, playing some game about cars, but they can feel the strange tremor of agitation in the room, and they are drawn to it. They appear magnetically, one on each side of Lydia.

‘What’s wrong, Mami?’ Luca asks.

‘Nothing, amorcito, no te preocupes .’

But Beto, who’s accustomed to having to work things out without people explaining them to him, looks at the stacks of money on the counter, and then at Lydia’s face, and then at El Chacal, and says, ‘How much is she short?’

El Chacal lifts his phone from the counter and reads from the screen – ‘Three hundred and seventy-two dollars’ – and then sets the phone back down.

‘How much is that in pesos?’ Beto asks.

The coyote does the math. ‘About seven thousand five hundred.’

Beto goes into his pocket and flicks out his wad of cash while Lydia watches. He already paid for his crossing and still has money to burn. We just met this kid this morning, she thinks. He doesn’t even understand how much money this is. She rejects her misgivings instantly. He covers it.

She draws him in and hugs him. ‘Thank you.’

El Chacal tells them they’ll cross when the other pollitos arrive, and they should make themselves comfortable while they wait. He leaves them with almost no instruction, and after he’s gone, Lydia wonders if he’ll ever come back. They’ve given him everything, their very last chance of escaping to el norte. He doesn’t seem like a thief, but what if he is? Or what if he gets hit by a bus? She balls her hands into fists and tells herself to shut up. Don’t think .

They all take their shoes off as soon as the coyote is gone, and it’s incredible what a pleasure it is to be barefoot. To wiggle your toes freely without constraint. Con un olor a queso . Luca and Beto run up and down the hallway between the kitchen and the bedrooms, feeling the cool tiles beneath their sticky feet, and making tiny footprints of phantom condensation along the floor. Soledad tucks in her T-shirt and shows them a trick she can do: a handstand against the wall, her arms strong beneath her. The boys applaud. When they try to watch TV, they discover that the flat screen doesn’t work. Lydia finds a dog-eared paperback in one of the kitchen drawers and reads while the boys and sisters nap. It’s an older novel, a Stephen King book Lydia read many years ago, and slipping back into it is briefly transporting, like she can reach back through time and commune with the person she was when she first read it. That act of communion feels both lucky and holy. When the others awaken, she abandons the book with some reluctance, leaves it facedown on the couch, cracked open at the spine to page 73. They all look forward to taking showers, and are disappointed to find there’s no hot water. There’s also no food or pots, and only one frying pan in the kitchen, but Lydia heats up what little water she can in that, so they can sponge the dust and the sweat from their skin. They eat nothing, contenting themselves with the relatively recent memory of the birria, and fall asleep as the sun sets.