The Barbarian Nurseries A Novel

26




On the morning of Araceli’s second day in court the large crowds of protesters had disappeared from the front steps of the courthouse. In their place there was Janet Bryson, alone, scanning the street and the parking lot for the friends she had made yesterday, at first perplexed by their absence and then, finally, disappointed by their lack of resolve. “They said they would be here,” she said to herself aloud, and when the defendant in The People v. Araceli N. Ramirez appeared at the bottom of the steps with another Mexican, Janet Bryson barely noticed, because she was so upset with the unpunctuality and flakiness of her fellow Californians. What are they doing that’s so important that they can’t be here? What’s on their televisions that’s so captivating; what excuses about traffic will they concoct? Araceli walked up the steps with Felipe and didn’t see Janet Bryson. The shouting woman of the day before had dissolved into the background for Araceli, because at the bottom of the stairs Felipe had reached over to take her hand.

Felipe had wrapped his fingers around Araceli’s suddenly, instinctively, because he was swept up by the emotion of leading his new friend into a courthouse, which he thought of as a place where people went to disappear and never come back. They could take Araceli away and send her to one of those prisons in the desert, in faraway valleys where people trekked to visit incarcerated fathers and brothers on pathetic road trips where an ice cream for the kids at Burger King on the way back was supposed to make it all better. Felipe had suffered such trips to see his older brother—who was still in that prison, thirteen years later—and when he reached over to take Araceli’s hand, it was to comfort himself as much as her. He knew she was someone special and brilliant whose freedom and future were under threat. They walked up the stairs with palms joined for twenty-four steps and thirty-eight paces to the door with the metal detector, until he let go and allowed her to enter the court building alone, and said, “Te espero en el parking lot, just like yesterday.”


Inside the paneled courthouse, the proceedings resumed with Ruthy Bacalan rising to her feet and announcing, “We call Salomón Luján, Your Honor.” The Huntington Park city councilman entered the courtroom, in black denim jeans and a thick leather belt whose bronze buckle bore the initials SL. His nod to the formality of the courtroom was a freshly ironed plaid shirt with mother-of-pearl buttons, and boots polished so that they resembled the skin of the oak table on Paseo Linda Bonita. Once on the stand he recounted the phone call that brought Araceli Ramirez to his home, and the arrival of the defendant and her two charges at her front door. “She told me she was looking for their grandfather,” he said in moderately accented English, “because the mother and father had abandoned her in the house, alone, with two gringuitos,” he said.

“With two what?” the judge interrupted.

“Sorry. I mean with two little American children.”

“And did these children you saw,” Ruthy asked quickly, “did they seem to be well taken care of?”

“Yes. They look a little tired. But this lady, Araceli, she was in charge. Their hair was long, but she made them comb it. She was taking care of them, yes.” After asking Luján to recount how Brandon, Keenan, and Araceli had all slept in his daughter’s room—“She’s the one going to Princeton, correct?”—and having Luján confirm that he was a member of the Huntington Park City Council, Ruthy moved to the moment at which Araceli fled his home, alone.

“Did she tell you why she was leaving?”

“Yes. Because of the immigration.”

“She was afraid because she felt she might be detained for her immigration status?”

“Yes.”

“And when she left, did she leave the children in your care?”

“Yes. She could see, on the television, that their mother and father were back home. So she didn’t need to take care of them anymore.”

“And you had them until the police arrived?”

“Yes.”

“Nothing further, Your Honor.”

Arnold Chang said he didn’t have any questions for the councilman—the prosecutor seemed as eager as Araceli to be out of the courtroom.

“The defense rests, Your Honor,” Ruthy said.

“Any affirmative defense or motions?” the judge asked.

“Motion to dismiss based on insufficiency of the evidence,” Ruthy said. “I would like to be heard, Your Honor.”

“Go ahead.”

Araceli watched and listened as Ruthy rose to her feet again and launched into a spirited monologue directed at the judge and, with the occasional sidelong glance, at the prosecutor. “It strikes us as a misuse of prosecutorial power to file charges against the only adult in the household who acted responsibly,” Ruthy said. She sometimes held her belly in her palm as she spoke, and she leaned on the lectern once or twice as she described Araceli’s attempts to find a safe place for the children first with their grandfather, and then in a “traditional home with a respectable family” in Huntington Park. “Clearly,” she concluded, “these are the actions of an adult who’s taken the responsibility of caring for two children seriously.” When she finished she plopped back down into her chair, and all the men in the courtroom seemed relieved that she did, because it seemed she might go into labor if she kept on talking.

“And the People?” the judge asked.

Now Arnold Chang stood up and began using the same legalisms Ruthy had pronounced, but with a dismissive tone, as if firing tennis balls back across the net. “The facts in evidence establish the vulnerability that is at the essence of the endangerment statute,” he said, and Araceli wrinkled her brow at him because despite his at times abstract and difficult English, the meaning of what he was saying was clear in his flustered, strained brow, and the way he stretched out his arm in Araceli’s direction to make a point. “The vulnerability need not be an actual physical threat, but may also include a looming emotional threat over the psyche of the victims. The People argue that the disturbing nature of the journey undertaken by the defendant with the two minor children, into an area of persistent physical dangers, all thanks to the poor decisions of the defendant, falls within the definitions of the statute.”

After the prosecutor had stopped and returned to his seat, the judge leaned back into the cushions of his swivel chair and said, “Well, then.” Araceli understood that it was now his turn to decide the next stop on her journey through these buildings and their rooms of concrete and wood paneling. He rubbed his bald head vigorously with both hands, in what felt like some odd judicial ritual, then looked at a clock on the wall. He allowed the second hand to advance in its circular motion and kept on looking as it reached the six at the bottom and swung back and began climbing again toward the twelve, leading Araceli to wonder if he was peering into the clock’s face and studying it for a message only he could discern. Finally, he turned to the lawyers.

“I’m going to grant your motion, Ms. Bacalan.”

This short statement was followed by a long silence whose contours Araceli did not fully appreciate, because she did not know what “motion” meant, precisely, in this context. Motion. Moción. Something is moving. The judge will allow something to move. Me? Do I move? But to where? The prosecutor sat up straight, as if preparing to launch into new arguments, while Ruthy leaned back in her chair and gave her pen a jaunty twirl between her fingers.

Addressing the prosecutor, the judge said, “You’re not even anywhere near a preponderance of evidence.”

“I respectfully disagree, Your Honor.”

“Well, you can make a trip to the Court of Appeals if you like, counselor. If you feel it’s worth it. This court has rendered its decision.”

“Your Honor, before you adjourn,” Arnold Chang interjected, “there’s also the matter of the defendant’s immigration status.”

“Excuse me?” the judge snapped. He leaned forward and glared at the prosecutor.

“Objection,” Ruthy said, almost spitting the word out as she rose quickly to her feet.

The judge motioned for her to sit down, then leaned back in his tall padded chair and brought his hands together before his face as if in prayer. “Counselor, there’s a couple of things,” he began. “First, I’ve got a pretty full docket here. Unfortunately, I don’t have the luxury of an hour, or even fifteen minutes discussing facts not related to the charges before this court. And second, and most germane, is that big bronze seal that’s floating over and behind my head. See that?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“It’s got the San Francisco Bay and a lady with a spear, and it says ‘State of California.’ Is there an immigration law in the California code that you’d like me to enforce, counselor?”

“No, Your Honor.”

“Case dismissed,” the judge said. “Ms. Ramirez, you’re free to go.” He pounded the gavel, which sounded with an odd clack-clack, and rose to his feet and retired to his chambers, carrying an empty coffee cup he intended to fill before returning to the bench for the next case.


They walked up a wide staircase of weathered granite into the open house, a family of five, Maureen holding Samantha’s hand as the little girl raised her legs high to navigate each step, Brandon and Keenan and their father following after. Maureen stopped in her climb to look longingly at the Prairie style, Frank Lloyd Wright—inspired windows, each an eye-pleasing geometry of nine glass rectangles separated by thin strips of wood. The windows were authentically old and American, as were the pillars of river stones that held up the rafters of the front porch, and the polished floors in the living room whose brown mirror greeted the Torres-Thompson family as they walked through the front door.

“This is nice,” Scott said.

Of all the Craftsman homes they had seen in South Pasadena, this was the purest gem. It wasn’t as big as some of the others, but it was the best preserved, and it seduced Maureen with the triangles of its eaves, the sturdiness of its exposed rafters, the long beams that loomed over the living room and jutted out over the porch outside. It was a squat story and a half, perched halfway up a gentle rise above the concrete wash of the Arroyo Seco.

The boys ran through the living room to the stairs and climbed up to the two rooms of a second story that was tucked underneath the sloping ceilings of a pitched roof. The floors creaked and moaned with each of their steps. “It’s like an eagle’s nest up here,” Brandon said, and he lay on his stomach and looked out a window frame that was only six inches off the floor. He scanned the neighborhood, the billowing canopies of the sycamores and oaks, the spotted green fruit of a black walnut tree, and the shadows and shafts of light that cut through leaves and branches to dapple the sidewalk below, and he remembered the tiny talking forest creatures of a novel he’d read a long time ago.

Down in the living room, Maureen paced the echoing floors and thought about how she liked the simplicity and directness of the Craftsman design, with its embrace of early twentieth century American values of openness and restraint. Sunlight and breezes raced through its spaces, which seemed familiar and somehow midwestern. This house embodied the new person she wanted to become, and she felt it was a good sign that at this property, unlike all the others, the Realtor had not done a double-take when he saw the notorious Orange County family from the television news walk up to the door.

“It’s from 1919,” Scott said, reading the brochure as he climbed the stairs behind them. “The plumbing is probably not great.”

“Who cares about the plumbing?” Maureen said. We’re looking for a new beginning, she thought, and some old pipes aren’t going to stop us.

She returned to the porch and admired the street, with its wide oaks and denuded jacarandas, each standing in a pool of purple flowers. It was a version of an America that was, a Main Street USA, a Music Man. She thought, Only the streetcars are missing. This is the kind of street where the boys can ride their bikes. There were no walls separating this neighborhood from the rest of the city, and yet there were no bars on the windows either, no suggestion that the residents lived in fear. This is as it should be. Yes, the air was still and dirty here; she would miss the sea breezes living inland. She was losing the California home of her dreams—she had been chased away from it, really, but perhaps it was for the best. I paid for my ocean view with that horrendous isolation, up on that hill, in that gated and insular place.

“It’s just nineteen hundred square feet,” Scott said. “Can we squeeze in?”

“That’s the point,” Maureen said. “To make do with less.”

Scott examined the asking price, a nose more than seven figures, and more than he had paid for the house on Paseo Linda Bonita five years earlier. Now I might be paying more for less house and no ocean view. It made sense only for the supposedly excellent local public schools, and for having a home small enough to take care of without a Mexican living with them.

“What if we offer a little less than that?” Scott said to the Realtor, a man with slippery hair and ruddy skin who was just reaching the top of the stairs.

“They may take it. You’re lucky; it’s a good time to buy. The prices have sort of stabilized the last month or so.”

“Do you think the prices will start to drop?”

“No. Not a chance.”

Up on the second floor Brandon was still on his stomach, still looking out the window, a bit disappointed by the failure of this new landscape to trigger any vision or hint of adventure. And then a girl of twelve or thirteen appeared below. From his perch he watched her pass before the house, hands folded over her chest holding a book, a long black braid bouncing on the back of her neck, advancing with a slow, feminine glide over the sidewalk squares. The sight of her brought forth an unfamiliar sensation deep in his stomach. That’s a pretty girl. He quickly forgot about forest creatures and everything else on the street until the girl disappeared from his field of vision, and for the next hour he didn’t think about any of the books he was reading, about Holden Caulfield or the dragon in Eragon, and instead he secretly wished they would move to this house so that he might see that girl again and maybe even talk to her.

Maureen walked out the back door and climbed down the stairs with Samantha, and allowed her little girl to roam the fescue lawn in the backyard. There was neither a pool nor room for one. Good. Better that way. The yard was separated from the neighbors not by the high walls of the Laguna Rancho Estates, but by a picket fence not much taller than Samantha herself. Standing at the door that led from the kitchen to the backyard, Maureen could look directly into the property of another Craftsman next door. She saw a woman there in a large straw hat leaning over a row of plants with a hoe. A garden occupied much of the woman’s yard, and it was filled with emerald globes and sunflowers reaching skyward, and corn plants that would soon be man-high, each looking as stiff and sturdy as a tree.

“Hi, there,” the woman said.

“Hi,” Maureen said.

“That’s a great house.”

“Yes, it’s lovely.”

“Gonna buy it?”

“We’re thinking about it.”

The woman smiled and rose to her feet and grabbed a box. She walked to the picket fence and lifted the box to show off the contents, a collection of a dozen red spheres, each the size of a tangerine. Maureen walked across the lawn to take a look and the woman used her gloved hand to shake off some bits of loam and handed a tomato to Maureen.

“They’re beautiful.”

“I’ve got too many, believe it or not. I’m taking these to a friend of mine.”

“You grew all these?”

“My summer crop. Black cherry tomatoes, planted in April. They’re heirlooms, organically grown.”

“Organic,” Maureen repeated, and thought that the word carried lovely sounds to match its meaning—proximity to nature, purity, simplicity.

“Do you garden?” the woman asked.

Maureen opened her mouth to say no, then yes, but sputtered and said neither.

Finally she asked, “Is it hard to learn?”


“That hardly ever happens, you know that,” Ruthy said. “Every once in a while, we get these tiny miracles. I guess that’s why I haven’t quit yet.”

“¿Se acabó todo?” Araceli asked. They were standing alone, outside the courtroom, and she was still confused. At one moment, she was a woman with the ligatures of United States jurisprudence affixed to her skin, at another she was free to leave the courtroom and travel about the continent again. The judge had decided the government was wrong, but was a judge allowed to do that?

“Yes, it’s over,” Ruthy said. “The case was dismissed. There are no longer any charges against you. Like the judge said, you are free to go. Se puede ir. In fact, you should go now, and not hang around here at all. Because the DA’s office has gone totally nuts. The deputy DA wanted the judge to hold you for the immigration people, which is totally inappropriate. It’s sort of amazing to hear a county prosecutor say such a thing in open court. Did you see how angry the judge got? So don’t even go back to that address in Santa Ana. That’ll be the first place they’ll look for you—because he’s probably calling the ICE people right now.”

“Thank you, thank you so much for everything,” Araceli said, placing her hands on Ruthy’s shoulders, as if to hold her steady. She gave her a Mexico City kiss on the cheek goodbye, and as Araceli made her way down the hallway alone, she took one last glance at Ruthy’s turning, round silhouette and the hand that rested atop the cotton hillside of her belly. She walked briskly toward the parking lot, to give Felipe the good news and to think about what she should do next. Just outside the courthouse’s glass entryway, behind the nylon cordons that blocked a patch of concrete now empty of photographers, Araceli passed Janet Bryson, who was standing alone with a rolled-up sign she had only briefly displayed on the courthouse steps.

“They’re letting her go?” Janet Bryson said, having heard the news seconds earlier from the departing deputy district attorney. “Where is the media? Where is the outrage?”

Next Araceli walked past Giovanni Lozano, who had his poster-portrait of her dangling upside down in his grip. “They’re letting you go?”

“Sí,” Araceli said breathlessly. “¡Me voy!“ She hustled as fast as she could without breaking into a jog, the memory of her failed sprint from the Huntington Park police alive in her thighs and the panicked tom-tom beat inside her chest. Don’t run, because that will get you in trouble, but move quickly, mujer, because they might grab you at any moment. The ICE agents wore either stiff forest-green uniforms or navy-blue wind-breakers, and she scanned the path to the parking lot for them. There was a man following them back from the courthouse yesterday, in a car, driving slowly—perhaps he was with the ICE. Now she turned and saw a swarthy, middle-aged man in a suit, running after her with long strides of his tailored wool pants—could it be? Yes, it was the Mexican consul. “¡Araceli!” he called out. “¡Ramírez!” She was about to break into a run when she felt a hand land decisively on her shoulder and heard his Mexico City accent call out her name: “¡Araceli Noemí Ramírez Hinojosa!”

With his full arm over her shoulder, the consul now guided a still-surprised Araceli back down to the courthouse plaza and a waiting cluster of suited men.

“We’re here to help you,” the diplomat said, and Araceli detected that sly sprinkling of irony with which Mexican officials flavored their pronouncements. “And, more important, we have something to give you.”

One of his suited assistants produced an envelope and gave it to the consul, while another stepped back and aimed a camera.

“We received a request from some people in Santa Ana,” the consul said. “We took the account number they provided us. And with the very kind cooperation and signature of your former patrón, el señor Torres, we secured the money from your account. As you requested.”

“I never requested that. From you.”

“Well, someone contacted me. And you should thank them. And thank me. Pedro here works in the consulate and is also a freelance writer and photographer for Reforma. He’ll do a little article for us. Right, Pedro?”

“Por supuesto, licenciado.”

Araceli peered into the envelope. “This is a check.”

“A cashier’s check. Safer than cash. And, if I may be permitted to say, for an amount that is surprisingly large. It’s so good to see one of our paisanas doing so well for herself. It’s made out to the name on your voting card. And if you lost that one, here’s another I had made for you and sent from the Distrito Federal. And also a passport, which I think you never obtained.”

She examined the new documents, with their seals and hologram squares, and remembered how people suffered a via crucis of lines, forms, waiting rooms, and belligerent officials to get these in Mexico City. Now they gave them to Araceli without her even asking: it was a bureaucrat’s idea of a Christmas present.

“If you don’t mind, we’d like to take a photograph or two to illustrate the story.”

“You want to take a picture of yourself giving me my own money?”

“It will just be a second. And it will help us here at the consulate tremendously.”

Araceli could not say whether the consul was a good man or a bad man. Clearly, he was at the mercy of that clubby Mexico City culture that took bureaucrats, professors, and even painters and poets and transformed them into obsequious babblers. Araceli had escaped from all that, and she thought she should tell the consul to go to hell and leave her alone, because, after all, what had her government done for her? They said they would give me classes in drawing and professors who could teach me to master oils, but it was all a trick, because they don’t give you brushes or a canvas, or a studio, or the time to become what you dream. Instead our government gives us the roads we take in our northward escapes, and the policemen picking at their teeth and sizing us up to see if we can pay a bribe. It gives us the cartoon pictures of Juarez in our textbooks, and the lessons about the agrarian reform and the Constitution of 1917.

Araceli wanted to be angry, but in the end she felt pity, and she turned and posed, foot forward and leg extended, like a beauty contestant, because in the end it was all a joke, and because if the police or the ICE caught her again, she might actually need this bureaucrat’s assistance. Click. Click-click. Click.

“¡Gracias, paisana!”

He offered his business card and she took it, mumbling “Gracias” and slipping away, and thinking that a paper rectangle printed in Mexico City was a poor defense against the ICE. They can grab me at any minute and send me back into tiny, locked cubes, because the eyebrows on the television and the screaming woman on the staircase demand it.

Araceli found Felipe asleep in the cab of his truck, a baseball cap pulled down tight over his eyes, his largeness barely contained by the weather-scarred red skin of his pickup. His mouth gave little wet puffs, but even in this unflattering state, she found him attractive: above all, because she sensed an innocent, incipient devotion in him. He would wait for her an entire day, without eating, if he had to. Finally she woke him up.

“You’re back,” he said, startled.

“Ganamos,” she said.

“You won?”

“I am free. Se acabó todo.”

“¿Estás libre?”

“Yes, except that now I have to run away.” “Right.”

“How much gas do you have in this truck? Because I need to get far away.”


Felipe maneuvered his pickup through the streets of Laguna Niguel with an aggression she had not seen before, squealing through a couple of turns, accelerating with controlled desperation, and after a few minutes they were on the freeway, headed north, his truck settled into a fast cruise. “We need to get out of the city,” Araceli said. Towers covered with razorlike antennas loomed over the highway, and danger seemed to lurk in every off-ramp, in every Denny’s and every Taco Bell, in every parking lot: a reporter, police officer, or immigration agent might ambush her from any of these urban hollows at any moment.

“So we go to the desert, to the east,” Felipe said. “That’s the fastest way out.”

“And after the desert?”

“The desert is big. If we keep going, we get to Arizona. To Phoenix.”

“Will you go with me, that far?” Araceli asked.

“Anywhere you want to go. For as long as you want. After Phoenix is New Mexico. After that, Texas, I think. And then, no sé. Tennessee, maybe? It’s a big country. All the way on the other side is Carolina. Carolina del Norte y Carolina del Sur.”

Felipe looked out over the asphalt, the white lines, the traffic drifting toward him and away, and turned and gave Araceli a gentle, mischievous smile. They were beginning a journey without a destination, without limits, on the spur of the moment, with only the clothes on their backs. Araceli guessed he was not normally a rule-breaker or risk-taker. Probably he owed money on this truck. He took no chances with his wardrobe either; he was a man of steady and unchanging habits. And yet, he kept driving. Soon they were on another freeway, headed east toward a place called Indio, according to the green signs that floated over their heads. Felipe said the hard part of the drive started after Indio, when you passed into the Mojave Desert, which you had to cross to get to Arizona. But before they got to the desert there was more city to contend with, the serpentine flow of trucks and campers and convertibles and station wagons all moving very slowly, as if each bumper were attached to the next, a conga line of blinking red lights following the curves of the freeway around office complexes, up into hills of dry grass and their crowns of nectarine-colored condominiums. Felipe’s air-conditioning didn’t work, so he lowered the windows, the roar of the traffic and the wind joining the grind of the engine, and when they spoke they had to shout. “I think we should buy some water!” she said. “So that we can drink when we cross the desert!” They pulled off the freeway and stopped at a gas station and jumped back on again. Araceli expected to see cactus at any minute, but the traffic was slow and the metropolis went on, exit after exit announcing a new district of the city unknown to her—Covina, Claremont, Redlands—more malls and parking lots extending from the freeway’s edge like crops growing along a riverbank. Los Angeles did not want to let her go; it kept its hold on her with its sprawl.

“It’s a long drive!” she shouted. “When do we get to Indio?”

“Una hora más. I do this drive once or twice a year. To see my family in Imuris and Cananea. Sometimes I go with my father. We go to Phoenix, then Tucson, and from there we drive south, into Mexico. I was born in Cananea, did I ever tell you that? You know, we could go there. I wouldn’t mind that. It would be a good place to get a new start. Mexico isn’t that bad. You’re poor there, but it’s más calmado.”

She thought about Mexico and the check in her pocket. The amount was a small fortune on the other side of the border. She could start a small business, or buy a house and build a barbecue in the back and cover the patio with bricks. Or she could rent a studio with big windows to let in the light and a concrete floor that she could spill paint on.

On the other hand, there was still the United States, and the promise of even greater riches, and the smooth satisfaction of being a woman who stood her ground. She could find an apartment in this Phoenix place if she wanted to. It was a city in a desert valley where people couldn’t survive without air-conditioning, and Araceli wondered if she could live in such a place, without rain, clouds, and seasons, especially now that the traffic had sped up and they had finally reached the outskirts of Indio, the landscape turning dry and chalky. They drove past trailer parks rising from dirt lots, the wind spraying brown dust devi ls along the ground. A tumbleweed bounced along the strip of dirt in the middle of the freeway, and she sat up and pointed it out to Felipe. “Mira, Felipe, es una de esas malas hierbas. ¿Cómo se les llama? Tumbleweed!” She felt proud of herself for remembering the name, wondering how and why she would have learned such an obscure Americanism. Tumbleweed, the plant that rolls like a wheel, which is what the specimen she had just seen was doing, headed toward Arizona like Araceli and Felipe.

A hot wind blew in through the window, the heat of the desert and the black highway rising into the pickup truck, making Felipe sweat, the perspiration dripping down his neck and covering his T-shirt. She reached down between her feet and pulled up another bottle of water and opened it, handing it to him, and you would have thought she’d given him a bouquet of roses. Even the smallest kindness from me makes him happy—he must be in love. But when will he kiss me?

“How far is Carolina?” she asked.

“Very far. Maybe four or five days.”

“Would you drive five days with me?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Aren’t you worried?”

“About what?”

“Getting caught. By the immigration.”

“No. I’m a citizen.”

“Of the United States?”

“Yes. I got my papers last year. Through my uncle. It took ten years.”

“But I don’t have papers, and you could get in trouble for helping me. You’re breaking the law.”

“So?”

“And you still want to drive with me. And help me escape?”

“Yeah.”

It took a moment for this small miracle to sink in and feel true. Yes, it was there to see in his serene and satisfied study of the road ahead of them. It was the look of a housepainter after a day of flawless work. He was a big man with big sexy hair, and he was hers. He would even break the law for her.

“¡Qué romántico!” she shouted, and laughed, and he laughed too, in a muted and nervous way.

“After we get to Phoenix, we have to decide,” he said. “There’s two ways we can go. We can keep going east, and go to Texas or Carolina. Or we can go south, to Sonora and to Nogales and Imuris—to my tierra. If we go south, we can’t come back north, because there are checkpoints with la migra.” He turned to look at her and asked, “Where do you want to go?”

“A mí me da igual,” she said, because she could see herself following either path.

Soon the last human settlement was behind them and they sped across a vast, open plain of sand the color and texture of flour, covered with skeletal shrubs, maroon mountains rising in the distance, rocky and lifeless. “We reached the desert,” Araceli shouted. The road had become a straight line, dipping over the horizon in a watery mirage.

“It’s the Mojave,” Felipe shouted back.

They were in an eastward flow with sports cars in bright primary colors that zipped past their truck like low-slung missiles, and big sedans with people inside reading books and looking at tiny screens, passengers and drivers cool and comfortable behind shields of tinted glass. They were people of all the American colors, and carried an air of affluent confidence and anticipation: The road belongs to them and they know it, Araceli thought, and they even appreciate it. There were great big vehicles the size of small homes too, with license plates of many different colors that announced their owners resided in the LAND OF ENCHANTMENT and VACATIONLAND, or that they were headed to a SPORTSMAN’S PARADISE.

The plain of shrubs and sand undulated as if it were a vast pool of liquid, or an ocean, with mountain ranges standing like islands in the distance. An hour went by wordlessly as they crossed this sea, and Araceli would think later the time swam by, it slid along so smooth and quiet and lovely. She imagined gliding across this desert ocean, with Felipe at her side, until they reached Carolina del Norte, or maybe even Veracruz, and the real sea at the end of their journey, to begin life anew.

Now several tall plants were growing alongside the highway, the long succulent fingers of the ocotillo, their barbed, candy-cane digits reaching for the white sun. Suddenly there were dozens of them, and now hundreds, covering a mountain slope. Araceli was going to comment on the beauty of the ocotillos when another pickup truck identical to theirs began to roll alongside them, the two vehicles cruising together long enough for Araceli to stare through the open windows and examine the face of the driver. He was a mexicano, like her, though perhaps ten years older, with a freeway of worry lines carved into his forehead, and a muddy complexion that suggested Michoacán or Guerrero, or some other corner of her country where the people raised corn. He was looking at the straight highway with faraway eyes, as if remembering other journeys on other highways like this one, and suddenly she realized this man was the person she might become if she stayed in the United States. She imagined a biography for him, a story of crossings, arrivals, money, and disappointments. There are so many of us on these roads. So many of us from adobe villages and cinder-block colonias. We are scattered on this highway between the motor homes and the sports cars, we scrubbers and builders, we planters and cooks, searching for the next place, the next hope.

“A lot of people are going to Arizona,” Felipe said. “I have a cousin who lives there. He says no matter where you go, you can find a job in a day. We’ll be there in an hour. The border is the Colorado River. When we go over the river, we’re in Arizona.”

Araceli had never been in another state besides California. It’s called the United States because there are many, fifty altogether. She wondered if there would be authorities at the border, an official checkpoint where they would demand to see her documents. If so, they would discover she lacked the necessary stamps of U.S. eagles—she had a passport now, but a passport without a visa was just another reminder of her Mexicanness. The anxiety about crossing the river and the coming frontier distracted her until they reached a place called Blythe and the signs said Arizona was just five miles away.

“What happens when we cross the border?” she finally blurted out.

“What?”

“In Arizona. Do they ask for my papers?”

“No. You just cross.”

“They don’t check anything?”

“No. Just the trucks carrying fruits and vegetables.”

They rattled down the highway, toward an oasis of tree canopies and green bushes. Soon they were on a wide bridge, rolling across to the other side. LEAVING CALIFORNIA said the sign as they passed over a muddy river.

“¡Adiós, California!” she yelled with her arms raised in the air, as if on the last drop of a roller coaster.

“ ‘Bye!” Felipe shouted in English, and they laughed and shouted together.

On the other side they were greeted by a sign that said WELCOME TO ARIZONA, decorated with what she assumed was the flag of that state, red and yellow rays rising from a patch of blue, a copper star in the middle. Araceli admired its simple abstract expressiveness and thought, That’s what a flag should look like.

They drove past the checkpoint for trucks Felipe had mentioned, and started to climb away from the river and into a rocky landscape. This is Arizona, these red stones, already the landscape looks different. I have seen these fire-colored rocks in the movies and thought it was in California, but I was wrong. She had arrived in a new place, and suddenly days and weeks of worry and fear lifted, and she lay her head against the door, feeling she would fall asleep any minute in this peaceful, rust-colored place, where a dozen tall saguaros had raised their arms to greet her.

Araceli fell into a soothing darkness and dreamed, for the first time, of Brandon and Keenan, that she was guiding them by the hand along the red Arizona rocks, away from a pool of water. Then the sun caught her full in the face and her dreams turned yellow and while these golden dreams lived they wiped out the memories of many years, of all her highway travels, her border crossings, her goodbyes and hellos.

She awoke to the taste of humid air and looked around to see that they were still in the desert. The forest of saguaros had grown thicker and a bank of percolating thunderclouds with bright white roofs and dark gray bellies was looming over the horizon with cathedral-like majesty. For a moment, Araceli wondered if the clouds were an apparition, or an extension of her dream, because the sky had been empty and blue when they crossed the river.

“Look at those clouds,” she said.

“Es un monsoon,” Felipe said. “You see them in the desert in the summer. Looks like we’re driving right into it.”

The air cooled and thickened and soon the sun disappeared behind the storm, shooting out rays in the patches of blue between the clouds, lines that spread out like a fan, the image in the Arizona flag she’d seen when they crossed the border, yellow streaks radiating from the star. She tasted the humid air again and understood that this storm came from the south, from somewhere deep in the tropical heart of the earth, from Mexico or some other wet and needy land.

Soon they were underneath the cloud bank and it began to rain. First a few drops, each one large and heavy on the windshield, then thick sheets that covered the road with swirling streams, so that Felipe had to pull over to the shoulder and wait for the storm to pass. Araceli opened the window and let the warm water fall on her face, a rain stronger than any she could remember, a downpour that washed away all the dust of the desert and turned it to mud.

She turned and saw Felipe’s face was wet too, and at that moment she leaned across the cab to kiss him. Their lips met in a moist caress. And then another one. And one more, until they stopped and looked at each other and Araceli suddenly felt lighter and younger, and she kissed him again and their arms and hands reached for one another too, until she gently pushed him back and said, “Slow.”

The rain stopped and the sound of cars splashing by on the wet road brought them back to where they were—on the shoulder of a highway in Arizona, in flight.

“We have to keep going,” she said.

They rejoined the road and in a few minutes they were entering a metropolis, Phoenix, with its low-slung warehouses, and neighborhoods with homes of rocky front yards and cactus landscaping. The sun returned, the clouds retreated, and the highway grew wider, spreading out from two eastbound lanes to three, until they reached the city center and the glass towers pulsated in the returning heat. The highway sank below the level of the street and spread out into four and then five lanes. Several green and white rectangles loomed on the overpasses above them, with odd-numbered highways and new destinations. 17. FLAGSTAFF. 225. TUCSON.

“So we have to decide,” Felipe said. “Which way are we going? To Flagstaff if we stay in the United States. To Tucson if we go to Mexico.”

Araceli looked up at the signs and thought, Yes, it’s my choice.

She raised her hand, stretched it out until it almost touched the windshield, and pointed with her index finger.

“Para allá,” she shouted above the roar of wind and engines, and then she said it in English too, just because she could.

“That way.”