“Marcela,” said Rosa. “Please share with everyone your good news.”
Marcela took a sip of coffee and smiled shyly over the rim of her cup. She was thirty years old. There was a time not long ago when her dimpled smile and long dark eyelashes used to turn men’s heads as they’d once turned Byron’s. Fatigue had worn her down of late, made her eat more and sleep less. She compensated with home-color kits that turned her hair every shade of dark red and bright lipsticks that made her feel at least a little more attractive when she contemplated another day of scrubbing toilet bowls and ironing shirts.
She felt older than her thirty years even though she was one of the younger women in the group. There were mothers in this room ten and fifteen years her senior, women who had left their countries when their children were babies and now worked to support two generations of offspring they could never see. Marcela wondered if her good fortune would only fill them with more sadness and frustration.
“My thirteen-year-old daughter, Yovanna, has arrived from Honduras,” said Marcela softly.
A flurry of questions flew out of the women’s mouths about the girl’s journey.
How much did you pay?
How dangerous was the crossing?
How long did it take?
Did immigration stop her at the border?
Did she spend time in a detention center? “Ice boxes,” the women called them. Hieleras in Spanish. The detention centers at the border were known for keeping detainees—even small children—in freezing cold quarters without blankets to punish them for crossing.
Outside this room, no one could speak of such things. Not to employers, some of whom didn’t even know the women had children. Not to friends whose own children were here. Not even to the staff at La Casa. The staff knew that such things existed. But they could not partake—or even appear to partake—in anything illegal. This room on Friday evenings was the only place these women could share the photos and stories that kept them from being ghosts on the landscape of their children’s lives.
Marcela tried to answer all their questions. The basic facts were easy enough to explain. The trip had cost ten thousand dollars—an unbelievable, princely sum. Even after years of saving, Marcela had had to borrow most of it from family. The journey had taken more than five weeks—a period in which Marcela could barely eat or sleep for fear of what would happen to her daughter. Would she be raped? Beaten? Jailed at the border? Held for ransom with dozens of other desperate migrants in some brutal Texas safe house?
Yovanna hadn’t been jailed at the border or held for ransom. Those two things Marcela knew. She’d prayed every day to Saint Toribio Romo, the patron saint of immigrants, for Yovanna’s safe crossing. And her prayers had been answered. Sort of. No one had warned her about the nightmares. Or the anger. Or the fact that Yovanna would be so far behind in school that even in a special class for non-English speakers, she would be frustrated. No one had warned Marcela that she would leave behind a tenderhearted little girl and get back a sullen teenager who blamed her for everything. I left for YOU, Marcela kept shouting. But Yovanna only ever seemed to hear three of those four words: I left YOU.
“You are so lucky,” said Guadalupe Carrillo wistfully, tucking her graying hair into a bun at the back of her head. Guadalupe was a live-in nanny who took care of three American children while her own three children grew up in Guatemala. Guadalupe had tried twice to get her oldest son here but he’d never made it farther than southern Mexico before getting caught and turned back. Since his last attempt, he’d suffered a broken jaw and the loss of his two front teeth after several gang members beat him up. He was only fifteen.
Ana, a Honduran who worked at a nail salon, couldn’t hide her envy. Her nine-year-old son had lived apart from her practically his whole life. She narrowed her gaze at Marcela now.
“And how is your husband adjusting to having a stepdaughter live with him?”
Marcela played with her empty coffee cup. She had a sense that Ana knew even before she asked the question what the answer would be. It was the same for all of them who had new relationships here. But even so, she felt defensive. She chose her words carefully.
“He is—hopeful—that Yovanna will be a good big sister to our three-year-old son, Damon.” Marcela tried not to think about Byron’s real words to her when she told him Yovanna was coming: We have a child already. Why must you bring your daughter here? Where will she sleep? How will you support her when we can barely support our son?