“Maybe in Honduras, that’s true,” said Adele. “But this man is probably here. In the United States. I’m sure the police—”
“Can do nothing!” Marcela shook her head. “It doesn’t matter if he’s in Honduras or Lake Holly or anywhere in between. If he loaned my father money, then he has the power to make my family pay. You cannot fight a man like that. You can only pay him or worse things will happen.”
Adele got up from her chair and paced the kitchen floor. “Marcela—you’re not seriously asking me to give you eight thousand dollars, are you? I don’t have that sort of cash just lying around. I’m a single working mother.”
“But you have important friends and donors. They do.”
“Do you realize what you’re asking? You’re asking me to approach law-abiding citizens and prominent people in the community and ask them to contribute funds to pay off some gangster to aid in the smuggling of an undocumented—”
“But she’s already here in Lake Holly. You aren’t smuggling her anywhere.”
“As far as the United States government is concerned, I’m engaged in facilitating the funding of an illegal enterprise involving the transport of an undocumented minor. That’s a felony, Marcela. It doesn’t matter whether I stick her in my car and drive her over the border or pay off someone who already got her here.”
“But you’d only be doing it to help me. Not for profit.”
“Which means I’d get five years in prison, not ten. That’s the only difference.”
“You could say you gave me money to go to school. You had no idea what I was using it for.”
“That would be a lie. Under oath, that would be perjury. I could be disbarred as a lawyer. I could go to jail and lose custody of my own daughter. Not to mention the fact that I’d be drummed out of La Casa and the entire immigrant services community for asking such a thing of others. There are people in this country who already believe that the humanitarian work we do should be illegal. How would it look if I do something that really is?”
“But I wouldn’t tell anyone. Please, se?ora. She’s my daughter. And this man—he will kill her if he doesn’t get his money. He gave me a week. A week! I have no other way to raise eight thousand dollars in a week.”
“Does Byron know?”
“I haven’t told him yet.”
Adele stopped pacing and braced her hands on her kitchen sink. She kept her back to Marcela and looked out her kitchen window, past Sophia’s pinch pots and clay turtles that lined the sill. The refrigerator was covered in Sophia’s drawings of unicorns and rainbows. Adele couldn’t imagine a time when she wasn’t a mother, when Sophia wasn’t the center of her universe. If she were in Marcela’s shoes, she would do whatever she had to to make sure her daughter was safe. How could she ask Marcela to do less?
“Let me call Detective Vega—”
“No!”
“He did a terrible thing, Marcela. I understand that you are furious with him. But he would try to help you now. I know he would. He would put you in touch with the right people at the very least.”
Marcela leaned forward. Her eyes were dark and sober. “If you were me, after what happened, would you trust such a man with your daughter’s life?”
I don’t even know what happened, Adele wanted to say. That was the worst part. The not knowing. No, scratch that. The worst part was that Vega did know—and he wouldn’t tell her. Was he holding back in some rigid adherence to duty? Or because he’d done something too terrible to admit, even to her?
He couldn’t have.
He wouldn’t have.
But we’re all capable of the couldn’ts, Adele knew. They’re often only a second of indiscretion away from our coulds.
The shower knobs squeaked off upstairs. The water stopped rushing through the pipes. “Mom!” Sophia called out.
“Be right there, Sophia!” Adele reached for Marcela’s hand. “I understand your concerns—”
Marcela yanked her hand away. “No, you don’t, se?ora. With all due respect, you cannot. Your daughter is safe upstairs. She hasn’t spent the last ten years with a picture of you taped to her wall so she remembers what you look like. She didn’t just survive a trip that no child should ever have to make only to die here because her family can’t repay a loan. Do you know what she has endured already? She cries every night. I’m afraid to ask her about it. What can I say to make it better? All I can do is make her safe now. That’s what I’m trying to do, se?ora: make her safe. If she was your daughter, wouldn’t you do the same?”
“Yes, I would.”
“Then you’ll help me get the money?”
“Mom!” called Sophia again.
“Let me think about what to do.”
Chapter 15
“So you’re sure you’ll be okay by yourself?” asked Joy as she finger-combed her long dark hair and checked her eyeliner in the reflection on the stove.