American Dirt

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.

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.

[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.

“Elmer, your daughters called today,” [Ángela] 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.”

“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.”

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 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.

El Chacal has never read academic theories of trauma psychology, but he has seen a thousand different varieties of it here in the desert. He is, in every practical sense, an expert in the field. He knows better than to give Soledad the gun.

“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.