Byron needed time, Marcela told herself. He was a good man. He was just very—practical. He carried his practicality with him everywhere, like the soles of his feet. They had a tiny three-room apartment. Marcela, Byron, and Damon already slept in the only bedroom. Yovanna was stuck with a borrowed cot in the living room. It was a cramped life.
My nineteen-year-old’s in Honduras, too, he’d pointed out during that terrible argument. You don’t see me moving her in with us! Marcela didn’t remind Byron that his daughter was grown with a child of her own and a mother nearby. Nor did she point out that her sorrow was different from his. A mother’s wholeness lives outside her body. It beats in the breast of another. How could he expect her to live the rest of her life with a divided heart? To inflict on Yovanna the same fate that had been inflicted on her as a child?
She had to go back to her early youth to recall a time when her heart hadn’t felt divided. If she closed her eyes, she could still smell the perfume sweetness of ripe sapote fruit dangling from the tree in their dusty courtyard where her older brothers kicked around a bundle of wrapped tape and pretended it was a soccer ball. She could still feel the pearls of sweat on her father’s neck as he hoisted her up on his shoulders to watch the priests in glittery robes carry a giant statue of Jesus through the narrow streets of San Pedro Sula. Later, in her teenage years, she could still see the boy with hooded eyes, big dreams, and fast hands who used to woo her in the back of a rickety delivery truck, despite her mother’s warnings that neither the boy nor his dreams would stick around.
The women in this room understood. Here in this semicircle of cold metal folding chairs, they were first and foremost mothers even if, in the rough economics of their world, loving their children meant leaving them.
The talk soon turned to the usual worries, the sense of impotence that distance and closed borders bring. Elena feared her daughters in El Salvador were being beaten by her in-laws. Elena called them all the time but the girls could never speak freely because the grandparents listened in on the phone. Ana’s ex-husband had stolen their son from Ana’s mother’s house and dumped him at his own parents’ farm where they worked him to death and refused to send him to school. Guadalupe’s seven-year-old daughter was complaining of stomach pains regularly but Guadalupe’s mother was too timid and old-fashioned to take the child to a hospital. So much was out of their control. They came here to earn money to provide a better life for their children. They lost their children in the process.
It was ten-thirty P.M. by the time Marcela returned to the old frame house where she and Byron rented their tiny apartment. She climbed the narrow wooden staircase. Behind the closed doors of the other five apartments, she heard game shows and soap operas blaring in Spanish from televisions. She heard salsa, rap, and cumbia rhythms from radios. Babies cried and adults raised their voices and lowered them again, aware that the thin walls were never constructed to shelter so many different families. The house was built up against the easement for the railroad tracks and every thirty minutes or so, Marcela heard the peal of the train whistle, followed by a push of air that rattled every window in the house. Pictures never stayed straight on walls and dishes left too close to the edges of tables often found their way onto the floor. She’d lived in this apartment for three years now. The rumble of the train had found its way into her dreams.
She heard raised voices behind her own front door as she unlocked it. Byron and Yovanna were in the living room, their angry faces lit only by the glow from the television that took up nearly the entire space along one wall.
“You’re not my father!” Yovanna shouted before running into the bathroom and slamming the door. Byron paced the floor in front of the couch and ran a hand through his thinning black hair. “You think I wanted this? She goes or I do!”
In the doorway between the living room and bedroom, three-year-old Damon stood in his Thomas the Tank Engine pajamas, clutching his favorite stuffed dog and sobbing. Marcela walked over to her son and scooped him into her arms. He curled willingly to her body. She smelled the little-boy scent of baby powder and milky sweat at his neck. She held him close and shot her husband an angry look over the child’s head.
“You woke him up! How could you?”
“I woke him up? Me? Your daughter did this,” said Byron, gesturing to the locked bathroom door. “She’s been nothing but trouble since she got here!”
Marcela swayed Damon gently back and forth, making shushing noises.
“Please, mi vida, she’s been through a terrible journey. She won’t even tell me what happened—”
“And that’s my fault? I asked her to come? I work two jobs, Marcela. You work hard, too. We are exhausted. We barely get by raising Damon. How are we supposed to live like this?”
“Things will get better.”