“No,” Mami said, hands on her bulging stomach, her voice tinged with alarm. “No, I mean, it’s started. The baby’s coming!”
The head of every single person in the little boat turned in surprise. Isabel sat down with a splash in the water. She didn’t know what to think. How to feel. She’d been put through the wringer—the elation of leaving Cuba, the exhaustion of the storm, the horror of Iván’s death, the relief at seeing the lights of Miami, the despair of running into the Coast Guard ship and knowing they would never get to el norte. And now her mother was having a baby. Isabel’s baby brother. Isabel could only sit lifelessly and stare. She had nothing left to give.
“I’m not staying in that refugee camp at Guantanamo behind a barbed-wire fence,” Lito said. “That’s just trading one prison for another. I’ll go back to Cuba. Back to my home. Castro said he won’t punish anyone who tried to leave.”
“Unless he’s changed his mind again,” Amara said.
It was Luis who saw the Coast Guard searchlight sweep past them on the water and point somewhere else.
“Maybe none of us will have to go to Guantanamo!” Luis said. “Look! They’re not after us! The Coast Guard is after someone else!”
Isabel watched as the searchlight found another craft on the water a few hundred meters away. It was a raft full of refugees, just like them!
“More Cubans?” Amara asked.
“It doesn’t matter!” Se?or Castillo said. “Now’s our chance! Paddle for shore! Quickly!”
Isabel spared her mother a look, then grabbed a water jug carved into a scoop and started rowing as hard as she could. So did Lito, Amara, and the Castillos.
“But be quiet,” Lito whispered. “Sound carries a long way on the water.”
“Ohhh!” Isabel’s mother cried.
“Shhh, Teresa,” Papi said, holding her hand. “Don’t have the baby yet—wait until we get to Florida!”
Isabel’s mother gritted her teeth and nodded, tears welling in her eyes.
The lights of Miami got closer, but they were still so far away. Isabel glanced behind her. In the darkness, she could pick out the lights of the Coast Guard ship, alongside another dark craft. Shadowy figures were moving back and forth between the two.
They were taking the refugees on board to send them back to Cuba.
“Ohhh!” Isabel’s mother cried, her voice like a cannon shot in the quiet.
“Row, row,” Se?or Castillo whispered.
They were so close! Isabel could see which hotel rooms had their lights on and which were off, could hear bongos beating out a rhythm over the water. A rhumba.
“The current’s taking us north,” Luis whispered. “We’re going to miss it!”
“It doesn’t matter—as long as we’re standing on land, we’re safe!” Lito said, his voice thin from exertion. “We just can’t be caught on the water! Row!”
“OHHHH!” Isabel’s mother screamed, her voice booming out across the water.
BWEEP-BWEEP!
The Coast Guard cutter made the same sound as before, and its searchlight lit up their little boat. They’d found them!
“No!” Isabel’s mother sobbed. “No! I want to have my baby in el norte!”
“ROW!” Se?or Castillo yelled, giving up entirely on being quiet.
Behind them, the Coast Guard cutter’s motor roared to life.
Isabel churned at the water, bending her flimsy jug-paddle in her desperation. Tears streamed down her face, from sorrow or fear or exhaustion, she didn’t know.
All she knew was that they were still too far from shore.
The Coast Guard ship was going to catch them before they reached Miami.
Sirens. Soldiers shouting through bullhorns. Screams. Explosions. Mahmoud was barely aware of everything that was happening around him. He lay on the ground, curled into a ball. Trying desperately to draw a breath that would not come. His eyes felt like bees had stung them, and his nose was a streaming cauldron of burning chemicals. He made a choking, gurgling sound that was somewhere between a shriek and a whimper.
After everything, he was going to die here, on the border between Serbia and Hungary.
Rough hands pulled Mahmoud from the ground and dragged him away, his sneakers twisting and scraping on the dirt road. He still couldn’t see a thing, couldn’t force his eyes to open, but he felt his chest beginning to work again, the barest tendrils of air reaching his lungs. He drank the air in greedily. Then he was thrown to the ground, and someone pulled his hands behind him and tied them together with a thin piece of plastic. It cinched painfully tight, and Mahmoud was lifted again and rolled onto the flat metal bed of a truck. He lay there, still gasping for breath, the plastic zip tie cutting angrily into his wrists as more people were tossed into the truck beside him. Then Mahmoud heard the truck’s doors slam and the engine start, and they were moving.
Mahmoud’s breathing finally came back to something like normal, and he was able to sit up and open his bleary eyes. There were no windows in the van and it was dark, but Mahmoud was able to see the other nine men with him, all of them red-eyed and crying and coughing from the tear gas, and all of them handcuffed with zip ties. Including Mahmoud’s father.
“Dad!” Mahmoud cried. He worked his way across the floor of the bouncing van on his knees and fell into his father. They put their heads together.
“Where are Mom and Waleed?” Mahmoud asked.
“I don’t know. I lost them in the chaos,” Dad said. His eyes were red-ringed and his face was wet from tears and snot. He looked terrible, and Mahmoud realized he must look just as bad.
Mahmoud thought the van would stop soon, but it drove on and on.
“Where do you think we’re going?” Mahmoud asked.
“I don’t know. I can’t reach my phone,” Dad said. “But we’ve been in this van for a long time. Maybe they’re taking us to Austria!”
“No,” one of the other men said. “They’re taking us to prison.”
Prison? For what? Mahmoud wondered. We’re just refugees! We haven’t done anything wrong!
The van stopped, and Mahmoud and the other refugees were unloaded into a building one of the soldiers called an “immigration detention center.” But Mahmoud could tell it was really a prison. It was a long, single-story building with a barbed-wire fence surrounding it, guarded by Hungarian soldiers with automatic rifles.
A soldier cut the zip tie off Mahmoud’s wrists. Mahmoud expected the relief to be instant, but instead his hands went from numb to on fire, like the tingling needles he felt in his leg after it fell asleep, times a thousand. He cried out in pain, hands shaking, as he and his father were hurried into a cell with cinder-block walls on three sides and metal bars on the front. Eight other men were pushed inside with them, and up and down the hall more prison cells were filling with refugees.
A soldier slammed the barred door shut, and it locked with an electronic bolt.
“We’re not criminals!” one of the other men in the cell yelled at him.
“We didn’t ask for civil war! We didn’t want to leave our homes!” another man yelled.