The Lemon Orchard (15 page)

“I want her, she’ll fly us to Papá,” Rosa said, and began to cry, and again Roberto panicked because she had no tears on her cheeks.

The coyotes walked faster, herding the ten of them along. The sun dipped down, and as they approached the rocks he noticed deep shadows.

“Hey, can we take a rest here?” he asked the coyotes.

“Listen, you hear that?” Benito asked, pointing overhead. “Helicopter. Border agents in the airship looking for us. It’s getting dark, so we have a little cover, unless they’re using heat sensors. Two miles and we get into the van, and we’re all on our way to L.A.”

Roberto strained his ears, couldn’t hear anything but the desert wind. Holding Rosa, he almost wished for the helicopter—no, he
did
wish for it—he wanted ICE to come, find them, and take her to the hospital. But then he thought—two miles. They could make it.

“We’ll be at Papá’s house tonight,” he said to her.

“The mariachis?” she asked.

“Yes!”

She was okay. If she remembered the mariachis, and wanted to hold Maria, she was going to get through this. Roberto told himself that, even while cursing himself for doing everything wrong. He should have carried more water, he should have found a better coyote with a smarter route, he shouldn’t have taken Rosa on this journey—his father had been so much smarter, had left him behind when he was a child.

Passing through the rock formations, Roberto tensed up. For a minute he thought the coyotes had led them into a trap—this would be the right place for bandits. But they made it through, and now there were just two miles to go. The tall rocks looked purple and gold and cast long shadows, and then as the sun disappeared, there were no shadows.

Suddenly everyone got a second wind. Benito and Pedro were dehydrated too, but they started to trot, and the remaining ten walkers kept up. Roberto ran along with them, holding Rosa as if she were light as air, knowing it was less than two miles to go. He counted his steps, lost track, forced himself to keep making progress. She squirmed, nearly dropping from his arms. Roberto fell behind, focusing all his attention on each step, staying strong and holding Rosa tight.

“Daddy, I’m going to be sick,” she said.

“It’s okay,” he said. Let her throw up all over him, he didn’t care. He just had to get her to the road, and the van, and there would be water.

“Hurry, faster!” Benito called. “Hear those engines? Fucking ICE SUVs!”

“Daddy, put me down,” she cried.

He ignored her, tried to keep up with the others. There were rocks in small formations, and the ground had turned from hard earth to small pebbles. She retched and cried, sick and embarrassed, and calling “Abuela, Abuela . . .”

She wanted his grandmother. He stumbled on a stone, nearly twisted his ankle, fell to one knee and skinned it right through his jeans. Rosa tumbled from his arms, but he caught her, let her stand wobbly on her feet for a minute, vomiting spit and bile into the sand, leaning against a round boulder.

“Wait!” he yelled to the others.

The moon rose, turning the desert bright as morning. Now he did hear noise—but not SUVs, just regular traffic. Up in the distance he saw one set of headlights, bright white car lights parked along a road.

“That’s it,” he said to Rosa. “We get there and we’re home.”

“Abuela,” she wept. “Maria.”

Roberto watched the figures getting smaller. He narrowed his eyes and swore he saw the van. All he had to do was get Rosa to the road—another half mile at the most. He tried to stand, and nearly passed out. “Come on, baby,” he said, trying to lift her. “Just that far, see the van?”

She curled up in a ball by the boulder, where it felt cool. Roberto watched his fellow travelers reach the road, start climbing into the van. He didn’t think—he just acted. They weren’t going to leave Rosa and him in the desert. He knelt down, pressed Maria into Rosa’s hands.

“Five minutes, love,” he said. “That’s all. Stay with Maria, and I’ll be right back. Don’t move. Promise me you won’t move.”

“I promise.”

He’d cracked his knee, maybe broken something, but he had never run faster in his life. The moon shone bright on Rosa’s boulder—a beacon of gold blaring from the bleak and empty land. The faster he ran, the more dangerous he felt. He’d kill the driver if he tried to leave without them. He’d jump on the windshield and make them stop, grab Pedro’s pistol, hold it to his head and walk him back to the boulder to get Rosa.

The road looked smooth. He tripped over a stone, and his ankle twisted. The van’s headlights were on, the door was open. All ten of the migrants were already inside; he saw Pedro and Benito climbing in last.

“Wait!” he yelled. The moonlight caught the metal of their guns. Or jewelry. Or bracelets. His eyes were used to the bright moon, and hadn’t picked up the two dark shapes behind the van. SUVs.

The metal on Benito and Pedro and all the others was handcuffs.

“We got another one,” a voice said in English.

“He wanted us to wait,” another voice said, laughing. “So we waited.”

Roberto couldn’t understand the language but he knew La Migra when he saw it. He turned and bolted—straight back the way he’d come, heading for the moonlit boulder. He could see Rosa’s tiny shape curled up at the base, her little feet in her lime-green sneakers, and he heard the hissing and howling of night creatures, and he bellowed, “Rosa!”

“Stop right there! Put your hands up!” the voice yelled.

“Mi hija,” Roberto shouted. “Ella está ahí, tengo que rescatar a mi hija!”

“You’re in America, speak English now.”

The shotgun butt cracked him across his skull, and he never even felt himself hit the rocky ground. He didn’t die, but in that moment his life ended.

chapter six

Julia

At the Casa, listening to Roberto, she heard how the border agents had arrested and detained the group. Roberto couldn’t get any of them to look for Rosa. But once he was at the detention center, waiting to be processed, something like a miracle happened. A border agent named Jack Leary walked into the holding cell and asked if anyone there had a child. For a minute Roberto had thought he had found Rosa, but no—he had just seen her footprint. Roberto told him what had happened. Leary went straight to look for her, but by the time he got to the big rock, Rosa was gone.

It took two days for Roberto to be processed—arrested and deported to Mexico across the river from Nogales. He went straight to Altar, and found his way along the same route taken by the coyotes. Landmarks had been burned into his memory: a saguaro cactus shaped like a horse, piles of plastic water bottles left by previous groups, the body of the man he and Rosa had traveled with, and finally the boulder where he’d left his daughter.

He made it to the highway, and this time there was no La Migra waiting for him. A trucker picked him up and drove him to the next town, where he’d called his father. And his father drove down from Los Angeles to get him.

After he finished telling her, Roberto left the kitchen, and she watched him cross the courtyard, pass behind the barn. The sprinklers went on, filling the dry air with mist. It was late in the day for irrigation—usually Roberto took care of it before the sun crested the mountains.

Julia couldn’t breathe. She could see the moonlight on the endless desert, Rosa so tiny in that wild landscape. It was as if Roberto’s memory had become her vision. She could feel Roberto’s heart pounding, his panic in those minutes without Rosa in his arms, running back to her. Just a few more yards—all he’d had to do was make it to the rock, and Rosa would be safe now.

Stepping onto the terrace through the mist and darkness, she saw Roberto checking on the sprinklers. She walked outside, through the lemon trees to find him.

“Roberto,” she said.

“How can you look at me after what I just told you?” he asked. “I let my daughter go.”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

He kept his head down, as if he couldn’t bear to see her eyes. She touched his face, turned it to meet his gaze. Then she reached for him, holding him close. He embraced her and his head came to rest on her shoulder. Around them the water hissed. Her feet felt wet in the soaking earth.

They broke apart, and his shoulders slumped. She could feel the shame pouring off him.

“Thank you, Julia, for listening to me,” he said. “You’re the only person I’ve ever told that story, all of it.”

“I wanted you to tell me,” she said. “And I understand.”

“Thank you for saying,” he said. “But impossible a woman like you would ever be so reckless, take your daughter into danger, leave her even for a minute.”

Julia’s head buzzed with thoughts and memories. But she took a deep breath of the mountain and sea air, and touched his arm. “I have blamed myself for five years,” she said. “As long as you have suffered over losing Rosa, I’ve felt the same about Jenny.”

“That was not your fault.”

Julia smiled sadly. “I said the same thing to you, but it’s hard to take it in and believe it, isn’t it?”

“Very. But different for you—you didn’t leave Jenny, you . . .”

“Roberto, I failed her. I must have, because why else would she have done what she did?”

Now he held her, rocking her while she tried to breathe.

“I knew she was so sad, she missed her boyfriend, but I had no idea she was so desperate. I never imagined, we were close and talked about everything, but I missed the signs. She must have been trying to tell me, because that’s how we were. But I didn’t hear her.”

“For her, it might have been too hard to tell you,” Roberto said.

“I would have helped her.”

“Maybe she didn’t want help,” Roberto said.

“But Roberto, I still don’t know and I never will! Evidence adds up to one thing for the police, but I’m her mother. I can’t believe Jenny would do it. She’s my girl, she wouldn’t leave me that way. She wouldn’t do it to herself! But then there’s the evidence. It’s so hard to think about, I pushed the thoughts away. I broke our connection.”

He nodded, as if he understood.

“But it’s not broken forever,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Little by little,” she said, “Jenny is coming back to me. It started when you first told me about Rosa, when we were sitting on the house steps that night. I actually felt her with me.”

“En serio?” Roberto asked.

“It sounds crazy, right?”

“Maybe a little,” he said.

“I know, it feels that way to me. But I swear, it was as if she were right there, sitting next to me.”

Roberto stared at her with wide brown eyes and took her hand. Lemon trees surrounded them, their branches arching low over their heads. She smelled citrus, felt the leaves brush the top of her hair. He put his arms around her and kissed her, long and slow. When he stopped, her heart was pounding.

They held each other for a long time before he let her go. She felt him watching her head toward the house before he turned in the opposite direction. By the time she glanced back, he had walked into the rows of lemon trees, disappeared into the night’s ghostly mist.

The next morning she woke up and saw that Serapio’s wife’s car was gone—he must have returned home to East L.A. He’d left without saying goodbye.

She drove along the Pacific Coast Highway with the radio on. She kept it tuned to Sirius E Street, and listened to Bruce Springsteen. He was singing “Further On (Up the Road),” but it could have been anything. He’d become a companion and guardian angel during these years alone. The way Bruce sang, whether it was a rock song or a ballad, she knew that he understood suffering. His music had kept her company cross-country, and it was keeping her sane right now.

Pulling onto Westward Beach Road, she went past the Sunset Restaurant. The road hugged the bluff, and she took it all the way to the last lifeguard station and got out. Bonnie ran straight for the tide line. It had always been this way. In Connecticut, walking along Griswold Point, she’d investigated all the kelp that had washed up between tides. Her limp was worse, and her coat had lost some of its luster, but on the beach she was still the puppy Julia and Peter had brought home for Jenny.

Julia left her shoes in the car, rolled up the legs of her jeans, and walked behind Bonnie in the hard sand. The waves here were the most beautiful she’d ever seen. Great curling tubes of blue-green glass breaking into white foam that spread across the packed sand and rolled back into the Pacific.

She walked barefoot through the foam, cold on her feet—much colder than the Atlantic and Long Island Sound—deep enough so the waves splashed her pants. She felt the waves wanting to pull her out, into the ocean, picking up smooth rocks and bits of broken shell.

Offshore four dolphins swam north, parallel to the beach. Bonnie heard one exhale from its blowhole, and began racing back and forth along the sand, barking. She jumped into the water, swam out twenty yards, but was no match for the dolphins. Julia sat on the sand, watching. The dolphins were long gone, but Bonnie swam in the waves, buoyed by the sea.

Julia slipped off her jeans and T-shirt and walked into the ocean in her underwear. The water felt cold on her legs, but she dove straight in—a habit from her childhood, growing up at the beach. Sometimes people would give themselves time to get used to the water, but not Julia. She’d taught Jenny to do it the same way.