For ten years, Marcela had lived about fifty miles north of her father and his second family. But it was only two years ago that she and her father were finally able to come to a truce. His priest had brokered it. Father Delgado. He was one of the few people her father had ever told about his trip across the border.
“I know you’re angry that your father abandoned you,” the old priest had told her. “But your father wants your forgiveness.” By then Marcela was well versed in what the border does to parents and children. She was a parent, too. So she swallowed the anger and tried to turn her thoughts to their early years together in San Pedro Sula. The cornhusk doll her father once made for her. The time he bought her a bag of cotton candy at a street fair—a memory so strong that even now, the smell of that sugary confection brought back that day, the sun on her shoulders, her hands and face covered in sticky sweetness that melted into every pore of her being until even her toes curled with delight.
They did not talk about that last morning together in Honduras—the one when she said good-bye to her father and sixteen-year-old brother under the broad canopy of a huanacaxtle tree. Marcela could still see Miguel waving good-bye from the back of that truck overloaded with people and backpacks. He would always be that gangly young prince who hefted her over deep puddles in the streets after it rained and spoke with hope in his chest of what he would do in El Norte. He seemed so old when she was ten. He seemed so young now. Three years, it was supposed to be. Only three years before they would all be together again.
Of all the lies people tell you about journeying to El Norte, this was the biggest lie of all.
“I want to make it different for you and Yovanna,” Marcela’s father told her one day a few months ago. All of a sudden. With no pretext. That was Hector Ponce. Marcela could never read his mind. She didn’t question why or how. She didn’t want to know the details then.
She knew too many now.
Marcela stepped inside a black-and-white-tiled hallway that smelled of roach defogger, chili powder, and cooking oil. She walked down a flight of stairs to her father’s basement apartment. Her father’s sons, twelve-year-old Aaron and fourteen-year-old Felix, were standing outside the front doorway, huddled against a wall with friends, trying hard to look defiant and tough, though Marcela could see the freefall in their eyes. She could feel their loss like a magnet, drawing her in. She wanted to comfort them. She knew that was impossible—even dangerous at the moment.
“Marcela,” Felix called softly. He was a stocky teenager with his mother’s square chin. He had a tendency to stutter when he got excited. “I can’t believe this is h-h-happening.”
Marcela gave the boy a hug. She wanted to feel her father’s blood coursing through his veins but all she could feel was Alma. These boys, they were not like Miguel with his cougar grace or Reimundo with his dark liquid eyes. She could never look at either of them without thinking of what Miguel and Reimundo might have done with their lives had they been born here instead of Honduras. At the very least, they would be alive.
The front door of the apartment was open and packed with Alma’s relatives and men in suits. Lawyers. Here it was, twenty-four hours after the shooting and Alma was still surrounded by people while Marcela had to pretend like nothing had happened.
She was getting very good at pretending.
Alma was propped in a chair, surrounded by people hovering protectively over her and holding her hand. She was a short, stocky woman who favored bright red lipsticks and tweezed her eyebrows until they were just slash marks across her brow, which gave her a harsh look. She came here from Honduras when she was sixteen and had had the good fortune of squeezing in under the amnesty so she was legal, unlike Marcela and her father. She worked at a bakery off the Grand Concourse. Between Marcela’s father’s job as a dishwasher and building handyman and her job in the bakery, they squeaked by. Without Marcela’s father’s wages, it would be a struggle—which was why Alma had wasted no time in securing an attorney and filing a lawsuit.
Alma sat up straight when she saw Marcela. Her eyes narrowed suspiciously.
“Marcela. You came.” Nothing in that greeting sounded like a welcome. Marcela noticed others eyeing her so she bent down awkwardly and hugged Alma. Then she leaned into her ear.
“I need to talk to you,” she whispered in Spanish. “Privately.”
Alma pressed her red lips together and dabbed her eyes. She rose unsteadily. One of her friends patted her hand. “I’m okay,” Alma assured the woman. Then she turned to Marcela. “In the bedroom, yes?”