Se?ora. Adele felt the full force of the word, the polite and stilted boundary it erected between them. Adele’s own parents were undocumented immigrants from Ecuador. Adele did not see a divide between her and the people she worked with at La Casa. But they did. The honorific, which Adele had shrugged off as simple “good manners,” now brought a dull ache of understanding to her heart. There was a chasm between her and Marcela that could never be breached, not even with the best of intentions.
Adele gave Marcela a pained look. “I grieve for you, Marcela. If there was something I could do right now, I would. But I’m already running late and I still have to take Sophia to her friend’s house.”
“It’s about my daughter, se?ora. She’s in danger.”
“Yovanna?” Adele frowned. “But she’s here now. She’s safe.” It was a miracle the child had made it at all. Adele heard so many terrible stories from clients. If a person was lucky enough to make it out of the cesspool of violence that was Central America these days, they faced rape, robberies, and beatings on the journey north through Mexico—assuming the Mexican authorities didn’t deport them first. At the Texas border (that’s where they almost always crossed), if they weren’t detained by U.S. immigration, smugglers often packed them thirty to a room in safe houses and held them for ransom.
Every moment of the 2000-mile journey was frightening and perilous. But here? In suburban Lake Holly? This was where they could finally begin to decompress and deal with the longer-term problems of being undocumented, uneducated, and non-English speaking in a country that wanted to deport them. Stressful? Absolutely. But far less dire than what they’d already endured.
“By danger—do you mean from the immigration authorities?” asked Adele.
Marcela started to cry. In the nine years Adele had known her, she’d only see Marcela cry once: the day she got word that her brother Reimundo had been shot and killed in San Pedro Sula by a fourteen-year-old gang member on a bicycle. Adele put her arm around her.
“It’s okay. Come. We can talk for a few minutes. At least until Sophia gets out of the shower.”
In the kitchen, Adele got Marcela a box of tissues. She offered to make coffee but Marcela declined.
“I am fine. Thank you.” Marcela perched herself on the corner of one of the kitchen chairs and blotted her tears. Adele took a seat across from her. There was a heaviness in Marcela that Adele had never seen before. Her shoulders looked weighted down. Her hair, dyed auburn for the fall, was growing out at the roots. She usually wore makeup, but not tonight. Her eyes carried an intensity that didn’t need any embellishment.
“I need to borrow eight thousand dollars.”
The words sprang from Marcela’s lips so suddenly, Adele wasn’t sure she’d heard correctly.
“Eight thousand dollars?” Adele repeated. “Dios mío, why?”
Marcela shook her head. “I can’t say. Not to you. Not to anyone. But I promise you, I will pay you back. If it takes the rest of my life. If it takes the rest of my children’s lives—”
“Does this have anything to do with why your father was at Ricardo Luis’s house?”
“My father was not a thief!”
“I didn’t say he was.” Adele put a hand on her arm. “But you have to tell me what’s going on. Is someone threatening you? Threatening Yovanna?”
It was a smuggler, Adele decided. It had to be. Yovanna had been in Lake Holly—what? A week? After probably a five-or six-week journey from Honduras. That sort of trip didn’t come cheap. And now the smuggler was demanding repayment.
No. That didn’t make sense, thought Adele. Smugglers always got paid up front. They disappeared as soon as a deal was completed—often before. This wasn’t money to pay for the journey. It was money to pay someone back for the journey. That sort of borrowing only comes from two places: family and loan sharks. If Marcela was coming to her, then it wasn’t to pay back family—unless family was the reason she was in this mess in the first place.
“Marcela, did your father borrow money from someone that he couldn’t pay back?”
“Please, se?ora. There is nothing you can ask that will help me. It will only cause more trouble.”
“Have you spoken to the police?”
“After what they just did to my father?”
Adele had a sudden panicked thought: was it possible that Marcela had no idea Vega was the man who shot her father? Adele didn’t want to be the one to tell her. She didn’t want to leave something like that unspoken, either.
“Marcela,” she began slowly. “You do know—that is—the police officer who confronted your father—” Adele still had a hard time saying “shot” or “killed.”
“I know about el detective, se?ora. I know what he did.”
Marcela held Adele’s gaze. Her eyes were hard. She had always been timid before this but anger had sharpened her resolve. “Now you understand how hard this is for me to come to you. But you are my only hope. I need to repay this money my father borrowed, or this man—he will kill my daughter.”
“How did he contact you? By phone? The police can run a trace.”
“They will never find him,” said Marcela. “These sorts of people, they have a way . . .” Her voice died in her throat.