Still, her grandmother might have kept her, and life might have gone on as it was, except that a twelve-year-old girl on their street was having a baby. Noemi thought it was exciting news, but her grandmother did not. She made a potion on the kitchen stove, and made Noemi drink it to protect her from harm. It was bitter and dark. Noemi wanted to spit the liquid out, but she obeyed her grandmother and swallowed, and felt ill.
Then Ario, who lived next door and was only nine, was shot to death in their street. People said it was a warning to his father, or his uncle, or both. Noemi had seen him lying on the ground afterward, the blood dark and pooling around his head, and she sometimes saw him in her mind before she went to sleep. She and her friend Rosa walked around that part of the street when they came home from school.
Christmas was coming, and Noemi hoped for a dollhouse like the one Rosa’s uncle had made for her. Her grandmother said nothing, but on Christmas Eve there were no presents. Her grandmother said Noemi had to go to her parents.
“That costs money,” Noemi said. “Why can’t we use the money so I can stay here?”
Her grandmother just shook her head.
A man came to the house, one Noemi had never seen before. He said his name was Chuy, but her grandmother called him Jesùs. He wore jeans and a shirt with buttons, the cuffs done up at the wrist, and a black leather jacket. He seemed older than her father, but it was hard to remember her father clearly now. She looked to her grandmother, who was stone-faced and determined.
So Noemi packed a small pink backpack with the things her grandmother told her to take: a change of clothes, a small hand towel, extra socks. Plus two comic books, her own idea. She shrugged the backpack straps onto her shoulders and followed the man out of the house she had always lived in, looking back to see if her grandmother would cry. Her wrinkled face crumpled with pain, but Noemi saw no tears, so she would not cry, either.
The man had an orange car, and Noemi sat in the back seat, as her grandmother had told her to. She had rarely been in a car before, and she inspected the door handle, the seatbelt, the pocket in the seat in front of her. She and her grandmother always took the bus, or went on foot.
“Do you know my parents?” she asked.
There was a pause. “I know your father.”
“How?”
The man didn’t answer.
“Why are you taking me to them?”
“It’s my job.”
“Do you make a lot of money?”
He snorted. “Not enough.”
“Do you have a family?”
He didn’t answer.
Noemi watched the back of his head, the side of his square cheek, his short hair and broad forehead in the mirror. Then she got out a comic book and tried to read, but she felt sick to her stomach.
“You have to look out the window at one thing that isn’t moving,” the man said.
So she put the comic away and stared out the windshield at the distant mountains. She guessed they must be driving north. That was the way everyone went. She got to thinking about whether there were other directions to go.
“What’s other from north?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
She wasn’t sure. “I mean, is there a different one?”
“There’s south,” he said. “And east and west.”
She counted. “There are four?”
He looked at her in the rearview mirror. “What the hell do they teach you in school?”
She was silent, embarrassed. “My grandmother can’t help me with my homework.”
“There are four points of the compass,” he said. “And also an infinite number. Because you can have southeast and northwest and every direction in between.”
“Oh.” That didn’t make any sense at all.
“I got you a Christmas present,” he said, and he handed something back to her. It was a plush toy pig, very pink, with tiny black eyes and a curly tail. She squeezed it and felt its softness.
“Thank you,” she said.
Before they got to the Colombian border, Chuy told her to sit in the front seat. If the border patrol asked, she was his daughter. Did she understand?
She nodded.
When they stopped, he handed papers to the border guard and answered some questions.
The guard asked Noemi questions, and she leaned forward in her seat. Yes, this man was her papa. Yes, she was from Ecuador, and they were visiting her cousins in Cali. Yes, she liked her pig.
She must have done a good job, because afterward, Chuy seemed relieved. He put the papers on the seat and she saw that his last name was the same as hers.
They drove, and drove, and slept in the car, but then they stopped at a hotel. Noemi had never stayed in a hotel before. She pulled back the covers on her bed and saw a dark red smudge. She froze, thinking it was blood, but then she looked closer.
The red mark was really a scorpion, twitching its tail on the smooth white fitted sheet. Its back was crawling with something. “Chuy,” she said.
He came to look. “It’s a mama.”
Now Noemi saw that the mother scorpion had babies all over her back, no bigger than grains of rice. Their tiny tails were waving. “Will they sting me?”
“Not if you don’t scare her,” he said.
“I’m scared.”
He took a glass from the bathroom and trapped the scorpions beneath it. Then he borrowed her comic book and slid it under the upside-down glass, letting the mother scorpion step on. He carried them all outside. He and Noemi inspected the bedsheets together, shaking and smoothing them, to make sure there were no loose baby scorpions.
“She was looking for a warm, dry place for her babies, that’s all,” he said.
Noemi eyed the disordered sheets, uncertain.
“You want to trade?” he asked.
She nodded, and they checked the other bed for scorpions. Nothing was there, and Noemi climbed in. The sheets were cool and the mattress was soft. Chuy sat on the scorpion bed with his back to her and unbuttoned his shirt. He had tattoos on his back and arms. She was going to ask him about those, but decided not to, and she fell asleep.
At the border to Panama, she did a good job again. As a reward, they went to watch the ships go through the locks in the canal. Chuy explained how they worked, how the locks were like stairs, filling with water to float the ships so they could go up over the mountains, and then emptying so the ships could go down again on the other side. He told her thousands of people had died building the canal, because it was so dangerous, but also because they came from France and didn’t know how to live in this country. He bought her an ice cream and they watched some more.
In Panama, they stayed in a room in someone’s house, and the orange car was stolen in the night. Chuy swore and kicked the curb where it had been parked. But he said they weren’t giving up, and they moved to a truck, and rode in the cargo space in the back, with some other people. Chuy was silent, or listened to a little radio, and Noemi spent her time in a made-up world of her own, whispering to the toy pig. She lived in the present now. Her past with her grandmother, her future with her parents, none of it was real.
She thought about the skinny girl on her street who was going to have a baby. She wondered what it would be like to have a baby of your own. Like a doll but real. Who would love you always.
“Crying and shitting all the time,” her grandmother had said. “I promise you, mija, you don’t want that.”
When Chuy brought mangoes or tortas or coconut water in a plastic bag, Noemi ate and drank quickly. She never saved anything, or planned ahead. She didn’t believe in the future anymore. It would come or it wouldn’t. There were an infinite number of directions to go. She told all of this to the pig.
5.
LIV STRETCHED OUT on the bed in the cabin and looked at the list of shore excursions. Benjamin had his feet up on the couch. They were all getting restless on the ship—the balcony episode had proven that. They needed an adventure.
“This is a good country for us to go ashore in,” she said. “They call it the Switzerland of Latin America.”
“Why?” Benjamin asked. “Self-righteousness and shady banking practices?”
“Ha,” she said.
“Or good chocolate?”
“There’s a hummingbird sanctuary,” she said, “but it’s up in the mountains.”
“If hummingbirds were bugs, people would be grossed out by them,” he said.
“You have officially become a spoiled Californian,” she said. “Hummingbirds are magical.”
“They’re like giant flying cockroaches.”