Hailey's War (9 page)

He darted out of nowhere; it was an accident; there was nothing you could have done
. It had become my mantra in moments like these. But I wondered, if I ever owned a vehicle again, how long it would take before I could drive without thinking of Trey Marsellus.

It was in northern Arizona that I first tried to have a substantial conversation
with Nidia.

We had been traveling by night. That was my plan until we got to the border. Nocturnal travel was cooler in the Southwestern heat, and it would lower our chances of setting off a speed trap, because despite what I'd told Serena about being cautious on the road, I was pushing my luck just a little on speed. I wanted the trip to be done in about seven or eight days. It would have helped if Nidia knew how to drive, but she didn't.

So, mostly, she'd been dozing as we drove through the night, or sometimes working on a knitting project in her lap. We didn't talk much.

I couldn't decide whether I liked Nidia or not. She was polite to me. Very polite, in fact, as though I were an authority figure just by virtue of being chosen to take her to Mexico. If she disapproved of my occasional bad language, or the liquor I drank neat over ice when the driving was done, she didn't say anything about it. But my occasional attempts at small talk had all died pretty quickly. I just couldn't seem to make any connection with her.

Tonight I didn't mess around with small talk at all: I turned down the radio and asked her something serious.

“So what's wrong with your grandmother?”

She looked up at me. “What?”

“Your sick grandmother,” I repeated, “what's wrong?”

“She's very old,” Nidia said slowly.

“It's just old age?” Her answer surprised me; it seemed like a flimsy
reason for a girl of Nidia's age, just starting out in life, to be dispatched to a remote village indefinitely.

Nidia added, “She hurt her leg. Her hip, I mean.”

“A fall?”

She nodded.

“So how'd you”—I didn't want to say the first thing that came to mind, which was,
draw the short straw
—“become the one who goes south to take care of her?”

Nidia said, “It's something I'm good at. That was my job for a long time, taking care of a man who was sick.”

Serena hadn't mentioned that. “Sick with what?” I asked.

“Cancer,” she said.

“What happened to him?”

“He died,” Nidia said. “It was … it was very sad, he was—” She turned her face toward the window, and I knew she was fighting back tears. I focused back on the road, averting my eyes. She wasn't really thinking of the cancer guy, of course. She was thinking of Johnny Cedillo, whom I deliberately hadn't brought up, thinking it still too raw a wound.

Then she spoke again. She said, “Adriano was smarter than anyone I'd ever known. He studied math for a living, but not math like people usually think of it. Adriano's work was the kind of math you can't even really use. I asked him why he was interested in stuff like that, and he said it was like being an explorer in the desert, places no one had gone yet. He liked being out putting his footprints in sand no one had ever walked in before.”

Nidia wasn't crying, but she was speaking quickly, as if she was distracting herself from her grief with trivia about the cancer patient.

“You guys talked a bit, then, it sounds like,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “I was working for him for a little more than a year. At first I just came over to make some meals, clean up his apartment. But then he got sicker and needed someone living there, so I moved in.”

“Where was his family?” I asked. “There wasn't anyone to help take care of him?”

“No,” she said. “He had a brother who died, and his mother was already dead, too. His father was still alive, but they didn't …”

“Get along?” I supplied.

“Maybe,” she said. “And he never got married. Adriano didn't have a life like most people had. His mind was different. He just wanted to be a—what's the word? Like a student, but even more serious about it …”

“A scholar?”

“A scholar,” she said. “He wanted to understand the universe, everything about it. I think God knew that. God took him early so he could finally have all the answers he wanted.”

God apparently had a protracted, painful way of curing intellectual curiosity, but I didn't say that.

The following night took us through New Mexico, and then, aided by a short
roadside nap, I pushed on until we crossed the little handkerchief-corner of westernmost Texas. Maybe my desire to get us over the state line before quitting for the day was symbolic. I was Texan by birth, though I couldn't remember my early days there. So, around five, Nidia and I were rolling into El Paso.

I decided to spend a little more money on a hotel, checking us in at a place with a pool and some restaurants nearby. We needed somewhere nice. It would be Nidia's last night in the States, and I was so tired from driving that my eyes felt gritty. I intended to get a long, long sleep tonight. Starting tomorrow, we were going to drive days instead of nights, and I was going to slow our speed way down. Herlinda had warned me about getting into a dustup with Mexico's police, and I'd taken her words to heart.

Nidia and I brought our things in from the car, into a room where the air conditioner was already working hard, exhaling frigid air to keep the Texas heat at bay. I bought a Diet Coke from the vending machine, poured it over ice, and laced it heavily with Bacardi. I drank while sifting through my clothes, looking for something to wear in the pool. I hadn't brought a suit, but right now, even though it was still about ninety degrees outside, the thought of a long soak appealed to me.

“Want to come?” I asked Nidia, but she shook her head quickly no.

I slipped my feet into a pair of rubber flip-flops. “Be thinking about what you want for dinner,” I said. “It's your last night in America. There must be something you'll miss.”

She nodded seriously, as if I'd posed her a study question for an exam later. I drained the last of the rum and Diet Coke and left.

There were too many little kids in the pool for me to swim laps, but I dived
into the deep end, then opened my eyes and navigated around them until I came up for air in the shallow end. Then I sat on the steps, body half in and half out of the water, tipped my head back, and closed my eyes. Though it was nearly six, it felt like midafternoon. We were only a few weeks past the summer solstice, and the sun was fairly high in the Texas sky, the heat maintaining its midday levels.

When I opened my eyes again, I saw a guy looking my way. He was sitting on one of the lounge chairs, but he hadn't come here to swim or sunbathe. He was dressed in business casual, dark trousers and white shirt, no jacket or tie. He was around thirty years old, with an athletic build and close-cropped dark hair that looked like it would curl if allowed to grow any longer.

“How's the water?” he asked, unashamed to be caught watching me.

“Come in and find out,” I said, and raised my hand to rub my birthmark lightly, a gesture I thought I'd outgrown.

“Can't,” he said. “I didn't bring anything to swim in.”

But he got up from his seat and walked to the water's edge, and sat on his heels to test the water temperature with one hand. I tried to decide how I'd describe his face to someone else: It was clean-shaven and soft, but not in a way that suggested flab or weakness, more like the slight jowliness of a mastiff or a Great Dane, that actually connotes strength. His eyes were Mediterranean, deep-set and heavy-lidded in the way that looks like world-weariness to a casual observer.

“You from Texas?” he asked me.

“California,” I said.

“I'm heading across the border into Mexico tomorrow,” he said. “Just into Juarez City, on business. It's my first time. I hear there's no
real good time to cross; the traffic's always backed up at the border. Have you heard anything about that?”

I shook my head. “I have to cross tomorrow, too, but I haven't really thought about traffic. It'll take the time it takes, I guess.”

We spoke a minute or two longer. I said I was on a “summer road trip” with a friend and left it at that. It was pleasant, after Nidia's alternating politeness and silences, to be talking easily with another American. I wondered if his friendliness was just that, or if it was the beginnings of a pickup.

“Well,” he said, “drive safely tomorrow.”

Just friendliness, then. “You, too,” I said, and watched as he walked back to the pool gate and disappeared from my view.

“There's a storm coming, and the people of this sleepy town …”

The TV was flickering with the sound low. I'd tuned it to the Weather Channel, waiting for the local forecast, but at present, the screen was filled with images of tornadoes wreaking havoc in the Plains States. Nidia was sitting cross-legged on the bed in her nightgown, her hair wet from the bath, watching the TV. I was rearranging the things in my backpack, putting what I needed in easy reach. Earlier, we'd had dinner in the hotel's restaurant. I was ravenous, though I'd done nothing more strenuous than driving, and ordered a barbecued half-chicken and a baked potato and salad. I persuaded Nidia to have a real American meal on her last night here: a hamburger, fries, and a milkshake, the kind that came with extra in a tin cup on the side.

Still half listening for a change to the forecast for Texas and northern Mexico, I dug my passport out of the duffel bag and transferred it to my messenger bag, where it'd be more convenient in the morning. Nidia, of course, not being a U.S. citizen, only needed her Mexican birth certificate and a photo ID, not a—

That thought gave me pause. Nidia wasn't a citizen. Unlike me, once she crossed the border, she had no legal way of getting back.
Though she'd need to be in Mexico awhile, maybe even until her grandmother's death, it seemed to me that Nidia's family was abandoning her to indefinite life in Mexico.

Was that so bad? Maybe I was being an American chauvinist. Except there was a reason so many Mexicans, including Nidia's parents, had come to El Norte. I wondered why Nidia's mother hadn't taken it on herself to go back and take care of her ailing mother, instead of sacrificing the hopes and plans of a daughter just on the cusp of adulthood.

“Nidia,” I said, picking up my cell phone, “I'll be back in a minute, okay?”

She nodded, undisturbed.

I went out to the pool area—it was deserted now, though the water glowed an inviting warm turquoise—and made a call.

Serena picked up on the third ring. “Hailey, what's up?” she said. “Where are you? Mexico?”

“We're still in Texas,” I said. “Listen, I'm getting a funny feeling about this.”

“What's wrong?”

“What do you really know about this family?” I said. “Did you know any of them except Teaser?”

“Why? What's wrong?” she repeated.

I sat down on a chaise, still looking at the calm water of the pool. “Well, Nidia's only nineteen,” I said. “Once she crosses the border, who knows if she'll ever get back? Most Mexican parents who bring their families across do so at great risk, so their kids can have better lives. It just doesn't make a lot of sense that they're forcing her to go back.”

“Maybe it makes sense because their grandma is sick and needs help,” she said. “Mexicans are very family-oriented, and—”

“No. No way,” I said. “Don't even start with that you're-white-you-wouldn't-understand rap. This girl's fiancé died in Iraq, and then the cancer patient she was taking care of died, and now she's going
off to live in the middle of nowhere with an invalid? I think she's had enough death and dying. I don't think it's right.”

There was a second or two of silence before Serena spoke. “Has she said she doesn't want to go?”

A beat passed before I admitted, “I haven't asked.”

“Well, she packed her stuff and got in the car,
prima
. Doesn't that tell you something?”

“I'm going to ask her straight out.”

“I don't think you should interfere,” she said. “This is about family. If this were your father, if he were sick, how far would be too far for you to go to take care of him?”

I closed my eyes. Nowhere, of course. I would have gone to the other side of the planet.

“Hailey?” she prompted.

“If I ask Nidia directly and she says she doesn't want to go to Mexico, I'm not taking her,” I said.

“Fine,” Serena said, her tone short. “Go ahead. I can tell you what she's gonna say, though.”

“I'll call you later.”

I disconnected the call and walked back to the room. “Nidia,” I said as soon as I'd closed the door behind me, “are you absolutely sure you want to do this?”

“Como?”
she said, confused.

I set my cell phone down on the dresser and said, “You're undocumented. Once you cross the border, you can't come back. Not easily. The U.S. is allocating more money to border security all the time.”

She seemed on the verge of speaking, but I needed to finish. “My hand to God, no one can make me muscle you off to Mexico if you don't want to go. Just say the word, and I'll turn around and take you back. If you can't go to your family, Serena would take you in. I'm sure she would, for Teaser's sake.”

It seemed like an odd thing to say, given the testy exchange we'd
just had on the phone, but I knew Serena. If push came to shove, she'd help this girl.

“No,” Nidia said, straightening, and there was a sharp tone to her voice I hadn't heard before. “I want to go. No one's making me. You aren't going to change your mind about driving me, are you?”