B0061QB04W EBOK (26 page)

I didn’t want to tell them the truth. I didn’t want to admit that Papi didn’t want me. He only wanted my sister and my brother. So I started to lie. “Yes, my papi is taking me to El Otro Lado with him. Goodbye, my friends. I will miss you.” I could see the look of envy in their eyes.

“You’re so lucky, Reyna,” they said to me. By the end of the school day, I was starting to believe the lies myself. But then I was suddenly
afraid. When my classmates found out I wasn’t going anywhere, they would make fun of me so much I knew I would die of shame because they would never let me forget that my father had not wanted me. Like my mother, I was afraid of people knowing that I had failed.

After school, when we got to Abuela Evila’s house, Papi and Mila were sitting on the patio with my grandmother. He called us over, and I was the first to rush to his side.

“Papi, you have to take me back to El Otro Lado with you,” I said.

“Why is that?”

“Because I told my friends you would, and I have said goodbye to all of them! I’ll die of shame if they know that I lied, Papi. Please take me with you.”

He laughed. Mila didn’t laugh. She glared at me.

“She’s a stubborn one, isn’t she?” Mila said.

“You leave her here with me, Natalio, and I will teach her some manners,” Abuela Evila said. “This girl needs to learn that bad things come to women who don’t know their place.”

Mila looked furiously at my grandmother. Abuela Evila had not liked the fact that in the days Papi and Mila had been there, not once had Mila offered to help with the cooking or to wash the dishes. After the meals were over, she usually stood up, along with Papi, and left the kitchen to go sit on the patio or watch TV.

“It’s different for women in the U.S.,” Mila said. “Over there, women aren’t treated like servants.”

“I won’t go with you if you don’t take Reyna,” Mago said. “I mean it.” I looked at my sister’s face, and on it I saw the conflict inside her. I knew she was dying to go. More than anyone, it had been she who had yearned for him all those years. But destiny had also made her become my little mother, and unlike my mother, Mago’s maternal instincts won over her need to save herself. “I’m serious, Papi,” she said.

“M-me, too,” Carlos said, halfheartedly.

Papi reached his hand out to me, and I took it. “You really want to go live with me?”

“Sí, Papi. Please take me with you.”

“All right, then in that case, I will take all my children back with me.”

“But, but where in the world are you going to get the money?” Mila said.

“We’ll borrow it,” he said. “Beg everyone we know.”

Papi said he would need money to pay a smuggler for the four of us—me, Carlos, Mago, and him. Betty could fly back with Mila since she was a U.S. citizen. For a brief moment, I felt the familiar jealousy I’d felt when I had first heard of my American sister. Being born in the U.S. was a privilege I wished I had had. That way, I wouldn’t need to sneak across the border like a thief. I thought about the time Mago, Carlos, and I had tried to steal mangoes from El Cuervo’s grove, and how frightened I had been of his gun. I felt a shiver run through me.

“Will they shoot at us?” I asked as we listened to Papi talk about the crossing, the people called la migra. I could hear the fear in his voice.

“No, Chata, no. No one will shoot at us,” he said as he sat me on his lap. “Don’t be afraid.” But I saw the way he glanced at Mila before hiding his face in his beer.

The next day, Mago and I went to give Mami the news. Papi didn’t want to talk to her himself, claiming that Mago might have a better chance of convincing her to let us go. He knew Mami had not forgiven him for what he’d done. At the sight of him, who knows what might have happened. As it was, Mago and I had a hard time convincing her to let us go. Fortunately, Tío Gary had come to Abuelita Chinta’s house just in time to talk some sense into my mother. He said, “You aren’t taking care of them, Juana, why deny them the chance to go to El Otro Lado? Besides, our mother is too old to be taking care of your kids. Let them go, Juana. It’s for the best. Don’t deny them the opportunity to have a better life.”

“Fine,” Mami said. “If they want to leave with him, so be it.” She turned to look at us and said, “Tell your father that he can’t have Betty.”

My father was furious. “That’s why I couldn’t be with her anymore,” he had said when Mago had delivered Mami’s message. “She has never had a good vision of the future.” He turned around and looked at us. “I know I promised not to separate you, but if your mother won’t hand over Betty’s birth certificate, I won’t be able to take her. She’s too little to run across the border.”

Mago was holding Betty’s hand. Papi reached his arms out and put Betty in his lap. “You hear that, mija? Your mother is keeping you from me.”

Betty had just turned four in March. Like me, she had no memory of him and this was why, as he held her in his arms, she squirmed away and returned to our side. “I want my mami,” she said.

“You see what your mother has done to me?” Papi said. “She has robbed me of my youngest child. There are laws in the U.S. I could have gone to court, filed for custody. I would have had rights. Instead, your mother took off like a thief and came back here, stealing her from me. And now look, my own daughter doesn’t even know me.”

“You tried to shoot her, Papi,” Carlos said. “Mami was scared.”

Papi laughed. “She overreacted. I wasn’t going to shoot her. And whatever happened to that man was an accident. An accident.”

“If you had just listened to your mother, this wouldn’t have happened,” Abuela Evila chimed in. “I told you she was not good enough for you, Natalio. I told you she would be trouble. But you didn’t listen.”

“I will go talk to her one more time,” Mago said, standing up. “If we’re going with you, we can’t leave our little sister behind.”

Mago and I went to Mami’s work. We walked into the record shop and saw Mami dusting the counter while dancing to a cumbia. We stood there and watched her, and I knew that this was a different side to Mami she didn’t allow us to see. There she was smiling, dancing, singing, things I hadn’t seen her do ever since El Otro Lado had taken her away. I thought that part of Mami was gone. But then I knew that it was there, except not when she was with us.

Mami turned and saw us standing there at the entrance of the store.

“You startled me!” she said, clutching her chest. She rushed to the stereo and turned down the volume.

“Mami, we want you to let Betty come with us,” Mago said as she pulled me into the store with her. “We can’t leave her behind.”

“Well, as you’ve always said, Betty is my daughter, not yours, so I get to decide her fate,” Mami said.

“Why would you separate us like that?”

Mami took a deep breath. “Mago, I don’t want to fight with you. If your father wants to take you with him, then you should go. Going to El Otro Lado is a good opportunity, for you, for your brother, for Reyna.”

“So, why won’t you let us take Betty, too?” I asked.

Mami looked away and didn’t answer. Later, I would come to realize that her decision had come from stubbornness. Pride. If she had allowed my father to have Betty, it would have meant that he had won.

“Come on, Nena, let’s go,” Mago said. We went out into the busy street, and I turned to look behind me. Mami stood there at the door of the record shop and waved goodbye. Too soon, I couldn’t see her anymore through the crowd of people rushing down the sidewalk. In my head I could still hear the song Mami was listening to. I could still see her dancing in the record shop, her lips curved into a smile. I pulled my hand from Mago’s and stopped walking.
What if I stay? Could Mami be that woman, the one in the record shop, when she was with me? Could she finally start being the mother she was before she left? Maybe she could, maybe she would, but if I leave, then I’ll never know.

“Nena, you coming or what?” Mago said as she stood there holding out her hand to me. I turned to look at Mago, and at the sight of her I knew I could not survive being separated from her. Back then, she had still been
my
Mago. Hers was the first face I saw when I woke up and the last when I fell asleep. How could I think of staying, when knowing that if I did, I would lose the one person who had always stood beside me?

I ran to take my sister’s hand, choosing not to follow the crumbs back to my mother.

I thought of Mami dancing in the record shop, and I promised myself that was how I would always think of her, and I would try to forget that other mother, the one who left and left and left.

20

O
UR FIRST TWO
attempts across the border were failures.

Even now I blame myself. I was not used to walking and running so much and so fast. To make things worse, I had woken up with a toothache on the morning of our first attempt, and my father didn’t have anything to give me for the pain. Around noon I began to get a fever, and the pain became unbearable. My father ended up carrying me on his back, but still, it wasn’t long before a cloud of dust rose in the distance, and before we knew it a truck was heading our way. We rushed into the bushes, but the truck pulled over and border patrol agents got out and told us to come out from our hiding places. We were sent back to Tijuana.

The second time we tried to cross, we had the same bad luck. Again, I couldn’t keep up with the rest of them, and the heat of the sun’s rays beating down on my head gave me a headache. Once, when we sat down to rest, I walked away to relieve myself in the bushes and
found a man lying not too far from me. I thought he was asleep, but when I got closer to him, I saw the flies buzzing over him and the big bump on his forehead.

I screamed for help. Papi arrived first, followed by the coyote, and then Carlos and Mago. Papi told Mago to shut me up before la migra heard me.

“Is he dead?” I asked Mago as she took me away. “Is he dead?”

“He’s sleeping, Nena. He’s just sleeping,” she said.

We got caught shortly thereafter, and I was glad because I couldn’t get that dead man out of my head.

I am grateful now that back then I was too young to fully grasp the extent of the danger we were in. I am glad I did not know about the thousands of immigrants who had died before my crossing and who have been dying ever since.