‘Rebeca, we’re almost there,’ he says.
He’s been trying to pump oxygen back into her flagging person for days. He’s like a small, human bellows, and she a fire that’s dimmed to embers.
‘Almost where?’ she says.
The light is drawing out of the sky, the train is slowing, and on the car ahead of them, the twin brothers are making to disembark.
‘Almost to el norte,’ Luca says.
She gives him a skeptical look, which wasn’t the response he was hoping for. He snuffles his chin inside the zipper of his hoodie, but Mami leans forward and asks him to repeat himself.
‘We’re almost to el norte,’ he says. ‘We’re due south of Nogales now, only about three hundred miles.’
‘Three hundred miles,’ Soledad repeats. ‘What does that mean? How far have we come already?’
‘From Honduras?’
‘Yes.’
He tips his head up and squints with thought. ‘I’d say that is more than two thousand miles.’
Soledad’s eyes get big. A hesitant smile seeps into her features. She makes minimal effort to defeat it. She nods her head. ‘More than two thousand miles. We’ve come more than two thousand miles?’
‘Yes.’
‘And now we have only three hundred left to go?’
‘Yes, that’s what I’m telling you. We’re getting close.’
‘How long will that take, three hundred miles?’ Soledad asks.
Luca shakes his head. ‘I don’t know, a few hours?’
‘Why, you want to stay on the train?’ Rebeca sounds worried. ‘It’s getting dark soon.’
‘Look, we’re stopping,’ Mami says.
The brothers have disembarked and walked a decent stretch already, so it would be easy to miss the sound they emit at that moment, were it not for the fact that Luca, Lydia, Soledad, and Rebeca are all acquainted with that sound now. It’s a sound recognizable from both their recent experiences and their nightmares. The brothers are yelling.
‘¡Migra! ¡La migra! ¡Huyan, apúrense! ¡Viene la migra!’
This time the terror doesn’t gather or grow; it crashes in on them all at once. Lydia yanks the belt off Luca in a movement so swift and violent he nearly cries. The sisters are already halfway down the ladder and they don’t wait for a reasonable place to get off. The memory of Sinaloa makes them fast, not despite their damaged bodies, but because of them. They leap wildly down to the uneven ground with their unfastened backpacks thudding against them. Luca is next, and then Lydia, and thank God they’re in the city already because they scramble down the shallow embankment and immediately there are alleys and roads and walls and gardens and houses and open garages and a barefoot little girl gaping at them while she licks at an ice pop and a woman who has a food cart attached to her bicycle and a dog with a spot over one eye and tall grass around their ankles and then concrete underfoot and the brothers have gone in a different direction and there are still three or four other migrants behind them. It’s been four days since Lydia twisted her ankle, and she’s relieved to feel that the twinge has disappeared. It’s strong beneath her weight. She looks at the sisters ahead of her and considers what would happen if they got separated now; how or if they’d ever find each other again. She chases after them as quickly as she can, dragging Luca frantically behind her. They run past a shaded garden where a little boy is juggling a balón de fútbol on his knees, and a woman wearing faded jeans and flip-flops is watering her boxed herbs. She stops when she sees them, and without moving her head or raising her voice, she says, ‘¡Oye!’ in a manner that’s so subtle Lydia almost misses it. But the woman’s face has snagged her attention, and again almost without moving any part of her body, she juts her chin toward the darkened doorway of a covered shed in the back corner of her garden. ‘Rápido,’ she says, again without raising her voice.
Lydia doesn’t hesitate to consider the pros and cons. She restrains Luca with one hand on his shoulder, and then calls out as quietly as she can, ‘Rebeca. Here.’
And the sisters skid, turning to look at them. Lydia has already pushed Luca through the gate, and he’s running beneath a shade tree with riotous pink blossoms, and he’s ducking inside the darkened doorway of that shed, and Lydia is right behind him and now here come the sisters until they are all there together, squeezed into the cooled and musty little space, and the exertion of their breath sounds terribly loud, and Lydia can hear the pumping of blood in her ears, a dreadful, vulgar pulse, and she curls her head over her knees and laces her fingers together behind her head and Luca throws an arm around her lower back and they all sit as still and silent as possible until, after a few minutes, they hear the mother calling to the little boy, and she says, ‘Come on, I’ve picked some oregano for dinner. Inside, let’s go.’ And in the silent moment that follows, the fears that Lydia hadn’t paused to entertain before come flocking in and lodge in her throat. This woman has trapped us here; she has gone to get la policía; she has gone to get someone much worse than la policía, this will be the end for us, why did I trust her, why didn’t we keep running. It’s too late for these fears, of course, because the decision has been made, and they can’t venture out now because they’ve given up their lead, and now they’re stuck here while la migra combs the neighborhood. Lydia gets hold of herself in the only way she can. Don’t think, don’t think, don’t think. And then they hear the bang of a door and the woman calls out again to her child. ‘Close that gate before you come in!’ And there’s a creak and a clang as he slams the gate, the echoing bounce of the balón when the little boy lets it drop, and then the rumble of a car or truck, a vehicle door opening, slamming, footsteps, and a new voice.
‘You seen any visitors?’ the voice says. ‘Migrantes?’
Lydia’s heart feels like machinery in her chest. Rebeca and Soledad are standing, facing each other, their fingers tangled together in the darkness, their heads tipped down in prayer. They cannot hear the little boy’s answer, but then the bang of the door and the mother’s voice is there again.
‘Víctor, I told you to come inside,’ she says.
A man’s voice, beyond the gate. ‘We were just asking him if he’d seen any migrants. We had a few get off the train just at the end of the street.’
‘We haven’t seen anyone,’ she says. ‘I was out here with him until only a moment ago. Go inside.’
The door bangs once again.
‘Little girl down the street saw them heading this way.’
‘They must have turned before they got here. We were outside all afternoon. You have a cell phone, or I just call the station house if we see them?’
The voices drop lower, become momentarily indiscernible. Lydia opens her eyes wide, as if she can increase her range of hearing that way. At this very moment, Lydia knows, the woman may be pointing to the doorway of this shed. She may be mouthing the words There are four of them, inside the shed. Los agentes de la migra may be unholstering their weapons. Lydia trembles with the thought and closes her eyes again. Her finger slips inside Sebastián’s wedding ring. Don’t think, don’t think, don’t think. And then there’s a kind of miracle, a tiny distraction: her finger moves absently through the void of Sebastián’s ring and provokes a funny idea, that it’s like the magic ring from The Hobbit, that if she slips her finger fully inside and holds on to Luca, it will make them both invisible. Seguro. She can make out the woman’s words again. A shift of the wind.