‘Thank you,’ Rebeca says.
The nurse clears her throat. ‘I’ll tell your father you called.’
After they hang up, they stay in the room without speaking. Soledad stands up and sits down and stands up again at least ten times. Rebeca sits on the edge of the couch and shreds a Kleenex into pulp. Luca does not move. He hopes the sisters will forget he’s there. He hopes they won’t speak to him or ask anything of him. He needs to get out of this room but cannot move. His papi is dead. Luca lifts a hand to touch the red brim of his dead father’s hat. He pictures Papi on the back patio of Abuela’s house without nurses or blankets or beeping machines that might save him. He pictures the silence of pooling blood. Luca stands there and blends into the wall.
Soon, there’s a knock on the door. Soledad is grateful for the knock, as it gives her something outside her body to attend to. She opens the door.
‘About finished?’ A staff counselor stands in the hallway with another migrant. ‘There’s a fifteen-minute time limit when people are waiting.’
‘Yes, sorry,’ Soledad says. ‘We’ll be right out.’
Luca slips out just before the counselor closes the door.
Inside, Soledad whispers, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘What?’ Rebeca looks up from her tormented Kleenex.
‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It’s my fault, Rebeca. Forgive me.’
Rebeca moves swiftly across the small space and throws her arms around Soledad so her rainbow wristband presses against the still-wet blackness of her sister’s hair.
‘Sh,’ she says.
‘It’s all my fault,’ Soledad says over and over again, until finally Rebeca pushes back from her and shakes her roughly by her two shoulders.
‘Don’t be ridiculous. It’s no one’s fault. Only ese hijo de puta.’
Soledad crumples even smaller into her sister’s arms. ‘But I had to make a horrible choice,’ she cries. ‘It was you or Papi, I knew that. I knew we were putting him in danger if we left. Iván warned me. I just, I didn’t really think he’d go through with it. I thought if we left, he…’
She doesn’t bother finishing the sentence because it doesn’t matter what she thought. She was wrong. The sisters take two shaky breaths together, and Rebeca wipes Soledad’s tears with her thumbs.
‘Stop,’ Rebeca says. ‘Stop it, Sole. Papi would’ve made the same choice. When he’s better he’ll be so proud of you. You’ll see.’
Soledad dries her face with a fresh Kleenex. She blows her nose. ‘You’re right.’
‘He’ll be okay,’ Rebeca says.
‘He has to.’
Into the clicking, beeping silence of Papi’s hospital room in San Pedro Sula, the nurse Ángela enters solemnly in her white sneakers. She had known his name, of course, because of the identification they found in his wallet. But there had been no visitors, no inquiries, until today. Sometimes it’s easier that way – you can provide the care the patient needs, manage his pain, and administer to his broken body without the weight of additional sorrow. Ángela has been a nurse in this city long enough to know that the pain of the family often eclipses the pain of the patient.
It’s relatively quiet in the ward this evening, so after she checks his vitals and changes his waste bag, Ángela has time to sit with him. It’s still light out, but she turns on the table lamp anyway because she finds its soft glow comforting. She closes her eyes briefly before she speaks to him. Her colleagues don’t do this anymore because it’s too taxing. Too heavy. Ángela is the only one. The violence is overwhelming in this place now. It’s become a gang pageant of blood and grisly one-upmanship. The ICU is always busy, but it’s not as overcrowded as the morgue. The other nurses use irreverent humor to cope. They use a secret rating system of smiley faces to forecast their patients’ chances of survival. Ángela doesn’t judge them for it. They have to go home to their children at the end of their shifts. They want to stay married. They want to eat dinner and drink a beer in the yard with the neighbors. But after twenty years on the job, Ángela still can’t shut it off. She doesn’t even want to.
She pulls the chair closer to Elmer’s bedside and lifts his hand, careful not to disturb his IV line. She rubs the back of his hand with her thumb. ‘Elmer, your daughters called today,’ she says quietly. ‘Soledad and Rebeca called from Mexico, and they’re doing well, Elmer. Your daughters are okay. They’re on their way to el norte.’
CHAPTER TWENTY
Later that night, when the initial wash of shock has lost its bite and the sisters are beginning to feel calm beneath the new distress of the terrible news, Lorenzo shows up at the shelter. Lydia is helping in the kitchen, stirring a huge pot of beans on the cooktop, when she sees him through the open door to the large dining room. From a distance, he’s not as menacing as he’d appeared on the train. He’s not as tall, not as bulky as his first impression would’ve suggested. Like every other migrant here, he looks bone-weary, and relieved to be indoors where the aroma of a hot meal greets him. Still, Lydia instinctively moves her body out of his line of vision and accidentally drops the long wooden spoon into the vat of beans.
‘¡Carajo!’ she says out loud.
She presses her eyes and mouth closed for just a moment, and when the woman who runs the kitchen notices, she tells Lydia not to worry, and hands her a pair of tongs so she can fish the wooden spoon out of the beans.
Lydia helps serve the dinner, too, on paper plates, and the migrants have to line up cafeteria-style for their food. When Lorenzo comes through, and Lydia ladles a spoonful of beans onto his plate, he nods at her without making eye contact, without further comment, and that strange behavior makes Lydia even more afraid. Has she offended him, provoked him to change his mind about letting them be?
‘Would you like a little more?’ she asks him, but he’s already moved along to the rice station.
The sisters and Luca are behind him in line, and while they’re waiting, Soledad feels a hand slip beneath her arm and grope her breast. It’s so fast, like a sparrow. Her whole body recoils from that hand, but when she whips her head around to confront her offender, there are three migrant men all standing there facing one another. They’re so deep in conversation, and so oblivious to her presence, that there’s no way to determine who it was that grabbed her. Their disinterest is so convincing that Soledad finds herself wondering if she imagined the violation. No, she tells herself. I am not crazy. She grinds her teeth and clamps her arms in front of her. She keeps her body hunched into a warning.
After dinner, everyone gathers in la sala to watch television, but not Lorenzo. Lydia doesn’t know if she’s relieved or concerned about his absence. It’s both. She wants to keep an eye on him and hopes to never see him, ever again.
On TV, no one wants to watch the news because it’s all too familiar, so they put on Los Simpson. At home, Mami doesn’t like Luca watching Los Simpson because she thinks Bart is rude, and she doesn’t want Luca to start saying things like cómete mis calzoncillos, but what Mami doesn’t know is that Luca and Papi used to watch it together all the time when she wasn’t home, and Papi would stretch out on the couch with his shoes off and his toes wiggling in his socks, and Luca would drape himself across Papi’s chest like a blanket, and Papi would rub Luca’s back while they watched. It was their secret ceremony. They’d imitate the voices, and Papi would keep the remote control close by so, if Mami came in unexpectedly, he could change the channel to Arte Ninja real quick. Luca doesn’t like watching Los Simpson here in this tiled room with its fluorescent lights and everyone sitting on folding chairs with their arms crossed and their shoes on. He endures it by unlacing and relacing his sneakers three times, and when it’s over, Mami suggests to Soledad and Rebeca that they might all say a rosary together, for the full restoration of their father’s health. Also, she knows the practice will serve to calm her nerves, to soothe her agitation before she attempts to sleep. They retreat to the corner of the room where the tables are, and several other women join them. The sisters are grateful, and it’s the first time in Luca’s life that the rosary doesn’t feel like a chore. He listens to the chanting voices of the gathered women, first his mother’s lone cadence.