The officers have finished with Lydia, and they seat her back on the ground beside Luca.
‘Come on, little man,’ they say to him.
Luca stands. He puts his arms and legs out and makes his body into the shape of an X. They remove his backpack and throw it into the back of the truck with the others. He does not complain. They turn his pockets inside out. He does not complain. They remove Papi’s red baseball hat from his head.
‘Nice hat. You a Yankees fan?’ one of them says.
‘You can’t have it,’ Luca says. ‘It belonged to my papi.’
‘Oh yeah? Where’s your papi now?’
‘He’s dead.’ Luca wields that truth like a battle-ax.
The officer is impassive, but he nods and sticks the hat back onto Luca’s head. Luca turns and puts his wrists together so they can cuff him. The officers laugh.
‘Nah, chiquito, we’re not going to cuff you,’ the first one says. ‘That your mami over there? Go sit with your mami.’
Luca doesn’t understand why, but he feels ashamed not to be cuffed. Diminished. His face flushes hot, but he goes and sits down on Mami’s lap, nonetheless, which is a thing he hasn’t done for at least two years.
When the two vans arrive, the officers open the back doors and usher the migrants inside. There are no seats or windows. They are unmarked cargo vans, and Lydia knows that probably means they’re all going to die. Her mind is racing and blank at once. She doesn’t recall the details, the words, the exact numbers or dates, but she’s remembering the disappearance of those forty-three college students from that bus in Guerrero in 2014. The massacre of 193 people in San Fernando in 2011. Just a few months ago, 168 human skulls found in a mass grave in Veracruz. Who will miss Luca and Lydia if they disappear? We have already disappeared, she thinks. We already do not exist. When she looks at Luca, she sees the shape of his cranium beneath his skin.
The migrant men are loaded into the dark vans first. They sit awkwardly inside with their legs extended and their hands cuffed behind them, trying not to tip over on one another. Some of them are already crying. The first van is full; the doors are closed. Lydia and Luca are last to be loaded into the second van. Rebeca and Soledad are still seated on the tailgate of la migra truck.
‘My daughters,’ Lydia says to the officer who fondled her as he hoists her now into the back of the van.
‘Your what?’
Lydia points with her chin to the sisters in the back of the truck.
‘Those are your daughters?’ he asks, even though they both know that the two Central American girls with their Honduran accents and their skin an entirely different shade than Luca’s are not Lydia’s daughters.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘We need to stay together.’
‘No room,’ he says, lifting Luca into the van beside her. ‘Van’s full.’
He slams the left-hand door, but Lydia sticks her leg out to block the second door with her foot.
‘Please,’ she says, looking across at the silent sisters. Rebeca and Soledad stare back at her, their expressions ranging like a quarrel of sparrows across their faces. ‘Please, we have to stay together.’
‘Don’t worry,’ the man says, pushing Lydia’s leg back inside the van. ‘We’ll give the girls a ride.’
When he slams the door, Lydia’s almost grateful for the blackness.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Behind Lydia’s most immediate fear of being murdered in obscurity, or worse, watching Luca suffer some act of brutality, she’s also afraid that, whomever these men are working for, they may find out who she is and submit her to a different kind of murder instead. Even if they’re not actively looking for her, they might discover her accidentally, as Lorenzo did. If they are working for a cartel, which seems increasingly undeniable, and they do recognize her, they wouldn’t necessarily have to be allies of Los Jardineros to identify her as a valuable commodity. There are any number of ways they could use her: as a bargaining chip, a peace offering, a humiliating prize, an expression of competitive violence. Lydia still has her voter ID card in her wallet. Why? Why hadn’t she gotten rid of it? If she survives this captivity, she will destroy it before they go any farther. She will surrender her name; she has already relinquished everything else. Lydia thinks again of Marta, swinging from the vent of that distant dorm room. She thinks of Javier in grief. And though she can’t conceive of forgiving him for what he’s done, she also wonders, now that she knows about his daughter, if she might’ve been able to reason with him, given the chance, to appeal to that decimated, fatherly part of him. To plead for mercy, for her life and Luca’s.
Beside her, Luca presses his head against her arm. ‘Mami, I’m scared.’
‘I know, amorcito.’
‘Where did they take Rebeca?’
‘I don’t know, amorcito.’
She curls her head over his because it’s all the comfort she can give him. She tries not to think about what Soledad and Rebeca are enduring right now. Her body shudders in an effort to sling her imagination shut. Sweat trickles down her spine, and the hot air in the van feels damp and close. The reek of fear is thick. But when Luca slips his little hand up beneath her hair and clutches the nape of her neck, the sensation of his slick palm against her skin is like a shot of determination. They will survive this. They must. She curves her whole body toward him in the dark.
When finally the van doors open, the light is painful after all the blackness. The migrants feel sweaty and dizzy and thirsty. Luca’s pants haven’t dried because it was so humid inside the van. The stale urine has a piquant odor, but no one mentions it. Maybe not all of it is coming from Luca. The migrants scoot on their butts toward the open doors and try to hop down without falling. It’s a cement floor beneath them. Dim fluorescent lights high overhead. They’re inside a large warehouse, and the men in charge are no longer wearing uniforms. It takes a moment for these facts to land in Lydia’s consciousness. It’s not a precinct or a jail or an immigration detention center, but a dingy, anonymous warehouse. Carajo.
In one corner, there’s a utility sink with water running, and the migrants are permitted one at a time to stick their heads under the murky tap and take a drink. The water tastes of rust and hard-boiled eggs. Luca can’t reach.
‘Please, can you untie me so I can help my son?’ Lydia asks one of the guards.
He doesn’t answer her but instead lifts Luca so he can stick his mouth beneath the faucet.
‘What stinks?’ the man asks and then, realizing it’s Luca, tosses him down. ‘¡Qué cochino!’
Luca manages not to cry. He stands next to his mami. They are made to sit on the floor, and for a long time that’s all they do, lined up along a wall, listening to whatever sounds they can hear: a steady trickle of water dripping into that filthy sink, the clacking of some metal rollers nearby, the occasional furtive whisper of one migrant to another, the unafraid voices of the guards echoing from a nearby room where they’re talking and laughing. They’re smoking in there, too. Luca can smell it. The migrants don’t ask questions or complain. No one moves. Some of them pray quietly together. After what feels like hours, a door in one wall rolls up on its tracks, and all the migrants squint from the onslaught of unexpected daylight. A truck rolls in, the one with all their backpacks, the one with Rebeca and Soledad seated in the bed, facing the rear with their backs to the cab, their wrists still bound behind them. The door quickly rolls shut again.