American Dirt

The wall is around five and a half feet high and three feet long—just large enough, with some luck, to shield Luca and his mother from sight. Luca’s back is wedged, his small shoulders touching both walls. His knees are drawn up to his chin, and Mami is clinched around him like a tortoise’s shell.

The detective does not move to contradict her. Unlike many of his colleagues […] he happens to not be on the cartel payroll. […] The illicit payment is three times more than what they earn from the government. In fact, one has already texted el jefe to report Lydia’s and Luca’s arrival. The others do nothing, because that’s precisely what the cartel pays them to do, to populate uniforms and perform the appearance of governance.

Luca adjusts the brim of his father’s too-big Yankees hat. Papi’s sweat is seeped into the hatband, so little currents of his scent puff out whenever Luca pulls it to one side of the other, which Luca does now at regular intervals so he can smell his father. Then he has the idea that perhaps the scent is finite, and he fears he might use it all up, so he stops touching it.

If there is one good thing about terror, Lydia now understands, it’s that it’s more immediate than grief. She knows that she will soon have to contend with what’s happened, but for now, the possibility of what might still happen serves to anesthetize her from the worst of the anguish.

There is blood on your hands as well. I’m sorry for your pain and mine. Now we are bound forever in this grief.

When she was a kid, Lydia loved the Choose Your Own Adventure books. At the end of each chapter, you’d have to decide what to do next. […] She liked being able to revise her own decisions, liked knowing that nothing was permanent, that she could always start over and try again. But it was also true that sometimes it didn’t matter, the maze of the book seemed to funnel her back to the same result, no matter what she decided.

In Carlos and Meredith’s house in Chilpancingo, there are new ghosts to contend with. Trauma waits for stillness. Lydia feels like a cracked egg, she doesn’t know if she is the shell or the yolk or the white. She is scrambled. […] Lydia tries to read but her mind can’t hold the words. […] So instead she tries to keep her body occupied. […] She watches as Luca grows silent.

When the idea first occurred to her […], it occurred as a camouflage: they could disguise themselves as migrants. But now that she’s sitting in this quiet library with her son and their stuffed backpacks, like a thunderclap, Lydia understands that it’s not a disguise at all. She and Luca are actual migrants. That is what they are.

All her life she’s pitied those poor people. She’s donated money. She’s wondered with the sort of detached fascination of the comfortable elite how dire the conditions of their lives must be wherever they come from, that this is the better option. That these people would leave their homes, their cultures, their families, even their languages, and venture into tremendous peril, risking their very lives, all for the chance to get to the dream of some faraway country that doesn’t want them.

She’s still afraid, one day, it will be Sebastian. She’s been afraid for so long that now she can’t catch up to the facts: it was already him, and the rest of her family. It really did happen; all those years of worry did not prevent it.

It’s overwhelming, to be in a beautiful, festive place like this. Lydia is overcome by guilt. Because it feels incongruous and seductive and wrong to witness the simple charm of a pretty place. She can see that same kind of notion land across Luca’s features, and she reaches for his hand. His mind does his awful thing to remind him not to be enchanted: it floods him with the helpful memory of all his dead family […]. Everyone gone. Luca is gone with them for a moment […].

Soledad catches Lydia’s eye across the top of Luca’s head, and some byway of recognition darts between them. They perceive each other, the unspoken trauma they’ve both endured, their reasons for being there. It’s as subtle and significant as a heartbeat.

“You seem a lot older than you are. Like you’re this old man in this tiny body.”

Luca tries to take this as a compliment. His body isn’t tiny; it’s only moderately smaller than a typical eight-year-old’s. “I’ve seen bad things, too,” he assures her.

“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.

Marta’s death changed everything, of course. It changed everything. Beyond her shock, Lydia can sense waves of competing emotions, but she shuts them all down. […] She will feel nothing about his anguish. The note he sent her at the Dusquesa Imperial: I’m sorry for your pain and mine. Now we are bound forever in this grief.

No.

No.

His grief is not the same as hers. Lydia will not feel empathy for him. She will rage. She will inhabit the fury of her own senseless bereavement, the one that Javier invented for her. Instead, she will walk, she will leave him behind, she will repeat the sixteen names of her murdered family.

[Lydia] pictures [Lorenzo] following from a hidden distance, but she doesn’t turn to confront her suspicions. She keeps moving, adelante, keeps Luca and the girls moving. It’s not until hours later, on the doorstep of a migrant shelter, that she accords herself a pause of reassurance.

“I just want to die. I want it to be over,” Rebeca says without any inflection to her voice at all.

“Well, you don’t get to decide that, Rebeca,” her sister says.

“I want to go home.”

“There is no home. We’re going to make a new home. This is the only way forward, so we go forward. Adelante. No more crying now.”

Rebeca doesn’t believe a single word of it. She doesn’t even understand how Soledad can preserve that kind of naïveté after everything she’s been through. Rebeca has been cured of innocence. She knows that there’s no safe place for them in the world, that el norte will be the same as anywhere else. Hope cannot survive the poison of her recent proof: the world is a terrible place.

[Beto’s] a philosopher, she thinks. He’s rough, but he means what he says, and his openness is a provocation. Despite everything, he likes being alive. Lydia doesn’t know whether that’s true for herself. For mothers, the question is immaterial anyway. Her survival is a matter of instinct rather than desire.

Beto is talking beside her. “I heard if your life is in danger wherever you come from, they’re not allowed to send you back there.”

To Lydia it sounds like mythology, but she can’t help asking anyway, “You have to be Central American? To apply for asylum?”

Beto shrugs. “Why? Your life in danger?”

Lydia sighs. “Isn’t everyone’s?”

Lydia is worried about all these things, and yet, she has a new understanding about the futility of worry. The worst will either happen or not happen, and there’s no worry that will make a difference.

Lydia expected the crossing would be momentous. That it would happen in an instant, that she would, in the space of one footstep, leave Mexico and enter the United States. She expected to be able to pause, however briefly, so she might look back and reflect, both physically and metaphorically, at what she is leaving behind […]. She’s hoped, like one of those desert rattlesnakes, to shed the skin of her anguish and leave it behind in the Mexican dirt. But the moment of the crossing has already passed, and she didn’t even realize it had happened. She never looked back, never committed any small act of ceremony to help launch her into the new life on the other side. Nothing can be undone. Adelante.

“I never wished for your death,” [Javier] says. “Surely you know that, Lydia. If I wanted you dead. You’d be dead.”

[Lydia] blinks. Pulls the camera away from her face. She closes her mouth and surveys the desert landscape. And suddenly she knows what he’s saying to be exactly true. All this time, all her planning, all her strategy and self-congratulations, it was all an illusion.

Luca pins himself in next to Mami in a small dark place. He curls into her even though there’s enough room, pressing against Mami as if his life depends on her proximity, because now that they’re here, now that it’s this close, now that they’re minutes away from starting their new life, he doesn’t want to. In some primal way, he knows that once they’re safe the monsters he’s so far managed will come crashing in, and now there will be new monsters with them.

[Lydia] wonders if [Javier] feels anything now, or if he’s shut it all down, if Marta’s death was too much for him, so he found a loophole, a way to opt out of humanity. She is stronger than he is; she feels every molecule of her loss and she endures it. She is not diluted, but amplified. Her love for Luca is bigger, louder. Lydia is vivid with life.

The wall is around five and a half feet high and three feet long—just large enough, with some luck, to shield Luca and his mother from sight. Luca’s back is wedged, his small shoulders touching both walls. His knees are drawn up to his chin, and Mami is clinched around him like a tortoise’s shell.

The detective does not move to contradict her. Unlike many of his colleagues […] he happens to not be on the cartel payroll. […] The illicit payment is three times more than what they earn from the government. In fact, one has already texted el jefe to report Lydia’s and Luca’s arrival. The others do nothing, because that’s precisely what the cartel pays them to do, to populate uniforms and perform the appearance of governance.

Luca adjusts the brim of his father’s too-big Yankees hat. Papi’s sweat is seeped into the hatband, so little currents of his scent puff out whenever Luca pulls it to one side of the other, which Luca does now at regular intervals so he can smell his father. Then he has the idea that perhaps the scent is finite, and he fears he might use it all up, so he stops touching it.

If there is one good thing about terror, Lydia now understands, it’s that it’s more immediate than grief. She knows that she will soon have to contend with what’s happened, but for now, the possibility of what might still happen serves to anesthetize her from the worst of the anguish.

There is blood on your hands as well. I’m sorry for your pain and mine. Now we are bound forever in this grief.

When she was a kid, Lydia loved the Choose Your Own Adventure books. At the end of each chapter, you’d have to decide what to do next. […] She liked being able to revise her own decisions, liked knowing that nothing was permanent, that she could always start over and try again. But it was also true that sometimes it didn’t matter, the maze of the book seemed to funnel her back to the same result, no matter what she decided.

In Carlos and Meredith’s house in Chilpancingo, there are new ghosts to contend with. Trauma waits for stillness. Lydia feels like a cracked egg, she doesn’t know if she is the shell or the yolk or the white. She is scrambled. […] Lydia tries to read but her mind can’t hold the words. […] So instead she tries to keep her body occupied. […] She watches as Luca grows silent.

When the idea first occurred to her […], it occurred as a camouflage: they could disguise themselves as migrants. But now that she’s sitting in this quiet library with her son and their stuffed backpacks, like a thunderclap, Lydia understands that it’s not a disguise at all. She and Luca are actual migrants. That is what they are.

All her life she’s pitied those poor people. She’s donated money. She’s wondered with the sort of detached fascination of the comfortable elite how dire the conditions of their lives must be wherever they come from, that this is the better option. That these people would leave their homes, their cultures, their families, even their languages, and venture into tremendous peril, risking their very lives, all for the chance to get to the dream of some faraway country that doesn’t want them.

She’s still afraid, one day, it will be Sebastian. She’s been afraid for so long that now she can’t catch up to the facts: it was already him, and the rest of her family. It really did happen; all those years of worry did not prevent it.

It’s overwhelming, to be in a beautiful, festive place like this. Lydia is overcome by guilt. Because it feels incongruous and seductive and wrong to witness the simple charm of a pretty place. She can see that same kind of notion land across Luca’s features, and she reaches for his hand. His mind does his awful thing to remind him not to be enchanted: it floods him with the helpful memory of all his dead family […]. Everyone gone. Luca is gone with them for a moment […].

Soledad catches Lydia’s eye across the top of Luca’s head, and some byway of recognition darts between them. They perceive each other, the unspoken trauma they’ve both endured, their reasons for being there. It’s as subtle and significant as a heartbeat.

“You seem a lot older than you are. Like you’re this old man in this tiny body.”

Luca tries to take this as a compliment. His body isn’t tiny; it’s only moderately smaller than a typical eight-year-old’s. “I’ve seen bad things, too,” he assures her.

“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.

Marta’s death changed everything, of course. It changed everything. Beyond her shock, Lydia can sense waves of competing emotions, but she shuts them all down. […] She will feel nothing about his anguish. The note he sent her at the Dusquesa Imperial: I’m sorry for your pain and mine. Now we are bound forever in this grief.

No.

No.

His grief is not the same as hers. Lydia will not feel empathy for him. She will rage. She will inhabit the fury of her own senseless bereavement, the one that Javier invented for her. Instead, she will walk, she will leave him behind, she will repeat the sixteen names of her murdered family.

[Lydia] pictures [Lorenzo] following from a hidden distance, but she doesn’t turn to confront her suspicions. She keeps moving, adelante, keeps Luca and the girls moving. It’s not until hours later, on the doorstep of a migrant shelter, that she accords herself a pause of reassurance.

“I just want to die. I want it to be over,” Rebeca says without any inflection to her voice at all.

“Well, you don’t get to decide that, Rebeca,” her sister says.

“I want to go home.”

“There is no home. We’re going to make a new home. This is the only way forward, so we go forward. Adelante. No more crying now.”

Rebeca doesn’t believe a single word of it. She doesn’t even understand how Soledad can preserve that kind of naïveté after everything she’s been through. Rebeca has been cured of innocence. She knows that there’s no safe place for them in the world, that el norte will be the same as anywhere else. Hope cannot survive the poison of her recent proof: the world is a terrible place.

[Beto’s] a philosopher, she thinks. He’s rough, but he means what he says, and his openness is a provocation. Despite everything, he likes being alive. Lydia doesn’t know whether that’s true for herself. For mothers, the question is immaterial anyway. Her survival is a matter of instinct rather than desire.

Beto is talking beside her. “I heard if your life is in danger wherever you come from, they’re not allowed to send you back there.”

To Lydia it sounds like mythology, but she can’t help asking anyway, “You have to be Central American? To apply for asylum?”

Beto shrugs. “Why? Your life in danger?”

Lydia sighs. “Isn’t everyone’s?”

Lydia is worried about all these things, and yet, she has a new understanding about the futility of worry. The worst will either happen or not happen, and there’s no worry that will make a difference.

Lydia expected the crossing would be momentous. That it would happen in an instant, that she would, in the space of one footstep, leave Mexico and enter the United States. She expected to be able to pause, however briefly, so she might look back and reflect, both physically and metaphorically, at what she is leaving behind […]. She’s hoped, like one of those desert rattlesnakes, to shed the skin of her anguish and leave it behind in the Mexican dirt. But the moment of the crossing has already passed, and she didn’t even realize it had happened. She never looked back, never committed any small act of ceremony to help launch her into the new life on the other side. Nothing can be undone. Adelante.

“I never wished for your death,” [Javier] says. “Surely you know that, Lydia. If I wanted you dead. You’d be dead.”

[Lydia] blinks. Pulls the camera away from her face. She closes her mouth and surveys the desert landscape. And suddenly she knows what he’s saying to be exactly true. All this time, all her planning, all her strategy and self-congratulations, it was all an illusion.

Luca pins himself in next to Mami in a small dark place. He curls into her even though there’s enough room, pressing against Mami as if his life depends on her proximity, because now that they’re here, now that it’s this close, now that they’re minutes away from starting their new life, he doesn’t want to. In some primal way, he knows that once they’re safe the monsters he’s so far managed will come crashing in, and now there will be new monsters with them.

[Lydia] wonders if [Javier] feels anything now, or if he’s shut it all down, if Marta’s death was too much for him, so he found a loophole, a way to opt out of humanity. She is stronger than he is; she feels every molecule of her loss and she endures it. She is not diluted, but amplified. Her love for Luca is bigger, louder. Lydia is vivid with life.