Wilber was overwhelmed.
The sponsor agreement he’d signed with the Office of Refugee Resettlement had seemed far less formal than the document he was now faced with, which outlined the responsibilities of a court-appointed guardian. He read through it again. It wasn’t that the individual points seemed unreasonable. “As guardian, you are responsible for providing for food, clothing, shelter, education, and all the medical and dental needs of the child,” the paperwork read. He was already more or less doing these things. “You must provide for the safety, protection, and physical and emotional growth of the child.” But in Spanish legalese they felt alarmingly official. He had no papers, after all, and here he was placing himself once again on the government’s radar.
“A guardian, like a parent, is liable for the harm and damages caused by the willful misconduct of a child.” How could he be sure his younger brothers didn’t fuck up? If they did, would he be punished or risk deportation himself? Already they were going to school late or skipping it entirely, not only to babysit Rosalinda’s daughter Silvia but sometimes just to stay home and do God knew what, while he worked his long hours and shuttled back and forth along the highway, minding the speed limit.
To have a shot at Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, they had to move fast. First they’d have to file a petition in probate court arguing that going back to El Salvador was against their best interests as children—and since they were technically children only until they turned eighteen in mid-April, they’d need to file a special motion to get an expedited court date. The judge would have full discretion on whether to grant the motion, and if he or she didn’t, they’d be ineligible by the time their appointment did come around. Given the time crunch, the judge woud be deciding whether to grant the guardianship and the Special Immigrant Juvenile Status on the same day.
If the probate court judge determined that the Flores twins had experienced abuse, abandonment, or neglect, they would issue something called a predicate order for SIJS, and Amy would then file an SIJS application, along with the state court’s findings, with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Once the predicate order was granted, the twins could apply to become legal permanent residents—in other words, get their green cards.
But without Wilber, none of this would be possible.
Wilber spoke to Amy over the phone. Yes, she explained, his name would be entered into official government records (as it had when he’d signed on to take the twins from the shelter in Texas), but the courts had no established procedure for handing over his information to immigration officials. And though he’d be responsible for the twins, his obligation would last only until they turned eighteen.
He’d got them this far. “All right,” he told the twins that night. “I’ll do it.” He signed the paperwork with Amy.
Still, they wondered whether he would actually go through with being their guardian. What if he was saying yes now just to seem like the good guy, because he was afraid of how saying no would look to Ms. Amy, to the school, and to his family back home? He had the power to yank away his promise, and their prospect of gaining legal status, at any time. The twins knew that until he showed up at court with them—a legal necessity—there were no guarantees.
A few days later he asked the boys for help moving in a new bed he’d picked up from a friend. Wilber and Ernesto, on opposite ends of the heavy, jiggling mattress, bickered about how to best maneuver it around the back courtyard and through the front door. Ernesto hated how Wilber snapped at his suggestions, as though he were a stupid kid. He snapped back, and soon they were shouting over the mattress, the sounds partially muffled by the foam. “Motherfucker,” Wilber said in English. Ernesto knew what that word meant.
“Fuck you,” he spat, also in English, though more heavily accented, and dropped the mattress on the gravel. In Spanish he called Wilber an asshole. They didn’t speak for several days after that.
It rattled Raúl. “He’s taking care of us,” he said. “Give him a break.”
“Taking care of who? He doesn’t give a shit about us,” Ernesto said. “He wished we never came.”
Amy, meanwhile, who was working day and night to prep their case, managed to secure them a court date on April 8, three days before their birthday. This was great news—but there’d be no time to appeal if they were turned down.
Wilber signed the papers three weeks before April 8. To complete the transfer of guardianship, their parents also had to sign off. Amy and the boys somehow had to get the papers to La Colonia, where their parents had no computer and only an intermittently working phone. Mail was tricky—even if it reached the family, which could take weeks, it would be complicated and expensive to send back. Emailing a scanned copy of the paperwork would be faster (the family could go to the town’s copy shop, where the proprietor could help them), but this wasn’t ideal. The document would be less reliable in the eyes of the court because it would be hard to prove its origin. Fax was preferable because the transmission carried a marker of the date, time, and phone number from which the fax was sent, which would prove, at least, that the document originated in El Salvador. Amy devised a plan with the twins to email the papers to Maricela, who would print it at the copy shop, bring it to her parents to sign, and then fax it back to Amy from the shop.
The Internet and printer worked fine, but then came a hitch.
“There’s no fax,” Maricela reported via Facebook. La Colonia’s one fax machine was on the fritz, with no prospect of being fixed soon.
The next best option was in a neighboring town, a thirty-minute bus ride away.
“I don’t want her to go,” Ernesto said. He knew bus travel in the area had become dangerous; even performing the short errand, he insisted, would put his sister at risk. April 8 was fast approaching, but he was vehement.
Things were indeed getting worse around La Colonia. The nearby town had jumped to the sixteenth most dangerous municipality in the country, with fifty-nine homicides that year out of a population of about seventy thousand, and one of the highest disappearance rates in the country. The gangs’ ground troops—still mostly poor local kids—were more and more visible to those who knew to look for them, posted on the streets, tracking the movements of daily life. Small as the town was, it was easy enough for gangs to notice people who didn’t belong or deviations in the townspeople’s routines. Little things like going to the bank, or bigger things like boarding a bus, offered good potential for a money pickup for any profiteer who happened to be paying attention. As a resident, to deviate from routine was to put yourself at potential risk.
Maricela knew that the sooner her brothers got papers, the sooner they could start paying back the debt. And in truth, she always relished the opportunity to leave La Colonia. She was going to find the fax machine, she told Ernesto over Facebook. That was that.
She hitched a ride to the end of the serpentine road that led to the town at the foot of the hill and the crossroads with the main highway, Lupita in tow. Now almost two, Lupita was leaving the cooing baby stage and becoming a serious little girl, with a wide, flat forehead like her twin uncles’ and, like Ernesto, brows that were almost perpetually furrowed. Despite living in a small, packed house—her grandparents, her six aunts and uncles, her mom, the chickens, and the dogs—she was shy around almost anyone besides her mom. Whenever Maricela left to spend the day with Cesar, even if she just walked to the door with her purse slung on her shoulder, Lupita launched herself into a paroxysm of grief, flinging herself toward her mother with wails and screeching. Her aunts and grandmother would scoop her up while Maricela hurried out the door, both guilty and irritated. She adored her daughter, but didn’t she, too, need a life apart? Aside from her weekly visits to Cesar, she rarely went anywhere without her.
They rode a bus to the neighboring town without incident. Once there, she hoisted Lupita onto her hip, marched through the bustle to the copy shop, and faxed the paperwork to her brothers.
On the ride back to La Colonia, she was triumphant. She’d done something useful, she felt, and they owed her now.
Along the main road, three men boarded the bus and walked toward the back, where they drew knives from their pockets. The bus driver either didn’t notice or didn’t care, and drove on. “Excuse us,” they said tensely, brandishing their weapons. They walked the aisles like boys carrying the alms baskets at church. The passengers knew what to do—heads down, they offered up dollar bills, phones. She knew that as long as she handed something over, nothing was likely to go wrong. Maricela held out a few dollars from her worn wallet, along with her cellphone—the one phone the family had.
The guy attending her aisle grabbed the money and the phone and noticed the gleam of her daughter’s gold chain, a gift from Lupita’s father in the United States. The guy looped his finger between the bracelet and the girl’s soft skin and yanked. It broke against her wrist, and she began screaming. Maricela grabbed her and held her close, trying to lull her to quiet. The thieves got off the bus, and the driver shifted it into gear. They chugged up the road as if nothing had happened.
“I knew she shouldn’t have gone,” said Ernesto when he heard from Maricela on Facebook. “I knew something would happen.” Once again, someone he cared about had suffered on account of him.
But they had the fax. They were ready to go to court.
Ernesto’s bad dreams continued to bleed into his waking hours. Raúl could sense when an attack was coming the same way he knew it was about to rain. It was something between a seizure, a trance, and a fit of rage. Suddenly his brother would seem possessed by a demon. Raúl thought of the corpse in the desert; touch a dead person, he knew, and you could be fouled by their spirit. When Ernesto got like that, hot and rigid, it was no use trying to soothe him. Put your hand on his shoulder, and he’d buck and shake his head, jaw wired shut. What, really, was going on?
“You okay?” Raúl asked from time to time.
“Leave me alone,” Ernesto would reply. Or “Mind your own business.”
There was still something Ernesto wasn’t telling him.
At school, we finally persuaded Ernesto to meet with a counselor, but in the small, quiet room, he refused to talk. The counselor suggested music therapy, and together they pounded the skins of two tall drums for half an hour. Ernesto’s hands tingled for the rest of the day. After school he crawled into bed and slept fourteen hours straight.
After the following session, Ernesto fired his counselor. “Brujería,” he said by way of explanation. Witchcraft.
Ever since Ernesto had started at Oakland International, he’d shown up every couple of days in the Bob Marley T-shirt Wilber had bought him—the one with Marley in profile, sucking on a joint. He’d been told multiple times not to wear it; drug-related clothing was against school policy. When Cormac, the dean of discipline, finally told him he had to change, Ernesto flipped.
“No,” he said, walking away from Cormac. “No way. I’m not changing.” But until he changed, he couldn’t go to class. He sat in my office in protest. We showed him a stack of T-shirts we kept for this sort of occasion—he could choose any of them to wear for the day. “If you make me change my shirt, I’m going home,” he threatened, dart-eyed. He stayed in my office as other students came and went, teeth clenched.
“Just change your shirt,” we pleaded. We weren’t taking it away from him, or telling him he couldn’t wear it elsewhere—just not at school. But he wouldn’t budge.
We called Raúl into the office, thinking he might be able to help.
“They want me to change my fucking shirt,” Ernesto said. “It’s a free country, isn’t it? I can do what I want.”
I went next door for a meeting in the library, hoping Raúl could calm his twin down. Every now and then through the window into my office, I caught a glimpse of Raúl holding up another T-shirt option, like a street vendor hawking the latest fashions. What about this one? Or this one? Look how cool this one is!
When I walked back in fifteen minutes later, the pile of shirts was gone. Raúl had put on every one, shirt over shirt over shirt, trying to make his brother laugh. The last was a big white tourist tee, the kind you’d buy at the airport or in a crappy beachfront shop, MEXICO spelled out in neon block letters balanced on the webbed hand of a sombrero-clad gecko.
“Come on, how about this one?!” he said, taking a spin. He giggled. “Really cool, this one.”
“Fuck you,” Ernesto mouthed silently. “I will fucking kill you.” He slapped a tight fist into his palm. Raúl giggled some more.
Ernesto stood and stormed out of my office, out of the library, and through the school’s front door.
“Fucking!” he shouted on his way to the street.
He waited for the bus, brooding, and took it all the way back to East Oakland. He returned to school with only an hour left in the day, wearing a sweatshirt. When the last bell rang, he walked outside and pulled off the sweatshirt, to reveal the Bob Marley shirt. He lit a cigarette.
“Do you think evil spirits are real?” Raúl asked me several days later, a rare moment when it was just him and me. Then he answered his own question: “I know for sure that they are.”
Then: “Do you think I’m crazy?” he added.
Most of the boys’ friends at school were also unaccompanied minors. Alfredo, from Guatemala, was big and muscly, with slick-backed hair, a cowboy belt, and silver rings on his fingers. He had been nabbed by la migra in Texas along with his cousin Brenda, who was short and demure, with thick curly hair, apple cheeks, and a full smile that showed three silver-capped teeth. She took to following the twins around campus like a shy fan. The twins feigned lack of interest, but when she wasn’t around, they sought her out and flirted with little jabs about someone’s accent, or their funny Spanish sayings, suggestive pushes of the shoulder.
As in El Salvador, Ernesto fell into socializing easily, and when he was around other people, his attacks stayed at bay. They’d go watch soccer games at their friend Douglas’s house, also an unaccompanied minor—he lived near Fruitvale with his uncle, who was strict but rarely around. Sometimes at Alfredo’s, his mom would make them food, and they’d play video games or watch Spanish movies on his couch. When they could, which wasn’t often, they’d get ahold of alcohol, passing the bottle around. One day their small crew took the bus to the woods to take a walk that devolved into a boyish sword battle with sticks. They hit each other hard, as if playing the parts of ancient warriors. Ernesto videoed it, the phone camera shaking with his laughter.
Ernesto controlled the cellphone, making plans that Raúl was free to join or not. Raúl always went along, cautiously—he had learned the hard way that friends often came with a price. His new classmates seemed to be good people, but you never could tell. A few class clowns encouraged him to mess with their English teacher by throwing pencils; he was the one caught in the act and sent to the main office. He was so repentant and ashamed we wondered if he hadn’t done something more serious.
“I need to choose better friends,” he proclaimed that day.
Ernesto secured himself a girlfriend from another school, named Marie. They met at a park near Hillside where he and Raúl sometimes went to smoke. She was only fifteen, a bit chubby, with long, straight hair and a tea-stain birthmark that spread from her lower eyelid to above her brow. He thought she was beautiful, birthmark and all.
Like Gabby’s, Marie’s family was Salvadoran, but she was born in the United States, which made her a U.S. citizen. She spoke perfect English and Spanish, which impressed Ernesto. He and Raúl still hardly spoke any English at all, defaulting to Spanish and afraid to speak up at all in class lest they make any mistakes. Marie is an English name, Ernesto explained to Raúl, pronouncing it phonetically in Spanish: Mar-i-yay.
The first time they kissed, days after they first met, Raúl sat off to the side smoking a cigarette. He pretended not to be paying attention. Ernesto talked and texted with Marie late into the night, and in just over a week he used up all their phone minutes for the month. So for the rest of March they could only text, meaning they couldn’t accept calls from Amy. Raúl scolded him, but for Ernesto, it had been worth it.
Marie introduced him to her family and to the nicely decorated living room in their home a few blocks away. She and Ernesto would sit and watch TV with her parents, who would serve him sodas and chat with him about El Salvador, about school, like a real family. Ernesto loved it over there. But nothing beat their afternoons at Arroyo Viejo Park, when he could sit with Marie and feel her up until nightfall. Given the crime in his neighborhood, it was best to be home before dark.
“Are you going to the park today?” he’d text her from class, hiding the phone underneath his desk.
“Maybe,” Marie would reply coyly. “You?” As if there were some reason, other than each other, that they’d end up there.
“Definitely,” he’d say. And after school, he’d race off campus. If Raúl was taking too long, Ernesto jumped on the bus without him.
“Does Marie know about your court case?” I asked Ernesto.
“No,” he said. “No way. I don’t want to bother her with all that.” Marie’s role for Ernesto was to help him forget.
Raúl feigned indifference to his brother’s activities. “Who needs a girlfriend?” he called from the backseat while we were driving to a meeting with Amy. “They take up too much time.”
“Jealous,” Ernesto said.
“No, seriously,” Raúl said, “I don’t even care.”
A few days before the court date, the probate court investigator left an urgent message for Amy. She had been assigned to investigate the twins’ living situation and proposed guardian—standard practice in SIJS cases—and Wilber’s background checks had raised some red flags. When she ran his name through the computer, something came up that he hadn’t disclosed.
“It didn’t sound super serious, but you never know,” Amy said. Had he been arrested for something, the boys worried, before they’d arrived in the United States, and never told them?
Wilber would have to go for an in-person interview at the courthouse, and soon, before the court appointment the following week. It unnerved Wilber to learn that after a night in jail and hours of community service and thousands of dollars in fines, his record wasn’t clean. The additional meeting meant he’d have to take yet another day off work. “I’ll have to ask my boss,” he told Amy.
Paperless people like him had only so many job opportunities—things that paid in cash, or that accepted phony Social Security cards. In this city, construction, restaurant work, and landscaping were the big three. In the Central Valley, people worked in the fields, but he’d left El Salvador to avoid that life. Worse than forgoing a day’s pay was the shame of walking up to his boss, head hung, to ask for leeway and special favors. He wanted to be the reliable guy, the guy who showed up to work every day with no needs and no drama and worked his ass off. That’s how you got ahead, he knew, when you had to work double time, triple time, just to stay afloat.
Wilber waited until the day before the interview to ask for the time off. “I’ll be there,” he told the twins.
The Berkeley courthouse was an unassuming building, a beige box lined with windows and set back slightly from busy Martin Luther King Jr. Way. It was directly across from where a farmer’s market was held each Saturday, ever packed with Central Valley fruits and vegetables, overpriced vegan chocolates, and raw cheeses, weighed and sold by grizzled older farmers and young hipsters alike. Today the streets were quiet, their well-manicured gardens in bloom.
“Berkeley’s nice,” Raúl said nervously as we walked inside.
The investigator, a tall Caucasian woman with thick-framed red glasses, ushered the Flores brothers through a door and told Gabby and me to wait outside.
I’d been asked to accompany them to make sure they found the building and got there on time. Gabby had tagged along, I gathered, to support Wilber. We took a seat in a bright, windowed alcove and made small talk. She was excited to finish up her high school credits at the local community college so she could transition to being a full-fledged undergraduate. Wilber was really supportive of her, she said.
She told me how they’d met. “It kind of started on Facebook. We had friends of friends in common, and we just kind of got talking.” Her voice had a friendly lilt, and she stuck out her chin to emphasize her points, keeping her hands folded in her lap. She was sweet-faced in a childlike way, dressed somewhere between fashionable and don’t-notice-me plain. “It was pretty awkward at first, like, when we met? But then we just sort of really liked each other, and that was that.” At nineteen, she seemed comfortable being in it for the long haul with Wilber.
“It was nice of you to come and support the boys,” I said.
“Oh, it’s no problem. I didn’t have nothing better to do.”
“Wilber’s doing a really good job,” I said.
“Yeah. It’s hard. But it’s good. They’re nice kids.” Wilber had really done a lot for them, she said, but “that’s family.”
We sat for a while in silence. Then the doors opened and the three Flores brothers emerged with matching strides. All had gone well, their looks told me. “We’re all set,” the investigator said.
“I guess there was some traffic ticket I never told them about,” Wilber explained, whitewashing the story of the DUI as we walked down the street back toward the car. “I didn’t realize they needed to know stuff like that.” The ghost of that night would haunt him forever, it seemed; he hadn’t quite grasped that the arrest meant he now had a permanent record. “But she said it’s okay, and that it won’t affect the case.” There was nothing to do now but wait.
It was April 8, three days before the twins’ birthday: their day in court.
Though Wilber had now been to the courthouse, rather than risk him getting lost in Berkeley, I suggested we drive together from the school. The appointment was at 12:00 p.m., and the boys still doubted whether he’d show up. Eleven a.m., when he said he’d arrive, passed. We sat in the courtyard, the thin springtime sun spilling down on us, not saying much. The boys passed their phone back and forth, checked their phone, and repositioned their seats on the long green benches that surrounded a patch of plants. Ernesto wore large navy blue fake plugs in his ears. Remembering them, he quickly snatched them out of his ears and stuffed them into his pockets, to make sure he looked serious. Raúl began tapping his feet.
“He’ll be here,” I said.
“Yeah, he will,” said Raúl.
Twelve minutes later, in walked Wilber, wearing high-tops and a flat-brimmed baseball cap. The boys stood up. Ernesto ran to deposit his earrings in his locker, and we climbed into the car for a quiet ride to Berkeley.
The courtroom’s metal detector unnerved the boys—they felt frantic surrendering their backpacks and emptying their pockets. No one had warned Ernesto about removing his belt, so the alarm blared as he passed through the gate. He and Raúl both startled. The guard patiently instructed him, in exaggerated pantomime, to return through the metal detector, yank off his belt, and place it on the conveyer belt. Walking back through the gate, Ernesto was just boy and cloth: no earrings, no wallet or phone, none of the trappings of almost-adulthood that he wore as both badges of honor and armor.
Upstairs, Amy briefed them again on what was going to happen. When the judge called their names, they would walk to the front of the courtroom. The judge would ask them questions. Amy didn’t expect the questions to be hard or complicated, but the boys should know that there was no wrong answer, that they only had to tell the truth. They laughed, nervously, their eyes alternating between her face and the floor.
They waited in the pews while several other family cases played out. A young woman was there to give up custody of her two young children to the children’s father and his new girlfriend. On the other side of the aisle, a curly-haired toddler rested her head against her stepmother’s shoulder, sucking on her pacifier.
“I love my children, and I want to support them, but I know I’m not able to do so at this time,” the mother told the judge.
The Flores case was next up. The boys looked at each other, then at Amy, and stood, adjusting their shirts. We pushed through the low, swinging gates and took our seats to the judge’s right. Ernesto and Raúl sat like soldiers at attention, willing themselves to make eye contact with the judge.
The judge confirmed who was there, then smiled down at the boys.
“I’m granting the guardianship to Mr. Wilber Flores,” she said. “And I’ve read over the petition, and I’m going to approve that, too.”
“Thank you, Your Honor,” Amy said. She looked at us, smiled, and nodded toward the exit.
That was it.
The Flores brothers walked back down the aisle between the pews of waiting children, first Raúl, then Ernesto, then Wilber. Once out in the bright hallway, they turned and looked pleadingly at Amy, not sure what they had heard.
She broke into a smile. “This is great!” she said. “She granted it!” meaning both the guardianship and the order establishing their eligibility for Special Immigrant Juvenile Status. The judge had given no verbal explanation—but she’d deemed, based on the twins’ written testimonies, that it was in their best interest to be allowed to stay in the United States.
Raúl started laughing and stamped his foot. Ernesto’s eyes shone with almost-tears. The twins looked at each other for an extended moment. The group exchanged celebratory hugs.
“Wow,” said Wilber. “Wow. So lucky. So great.”
“Now,” Amy reminded us, “immigration still has to approve this, and you’ll have to do another interview, but this is a really good sign. They rarely go against what this court recommends.” For today, they’d had a victory.
The afternoon was bright and warm as the brothers walked to the car, past the lush Berkeley yards decorated with succulents and fruit trees.
“You know what my dream is?” said Wilber after a while. “I actually want to join the army. The U.S. Army. As soon as I get my papers, I’m going to join. It’s a good job with good pay, and I love the desert.” All the wars and many of the military bases, he knew, were in deserts—Iraq, Afghanistan, Texas, southern California.
“Not me,” said Raúl. “I hate the desert.”
“I’d love to go to Iraq. And I think I’d be a good soldier. I want to help America fight.”
They walked by a patch of roses. “That’s my dream,” Wilber said, smiling faintly in his reverie. The twins were unsmiling now. “Once I get my papers,” Wilber said, “that’s my dream.”
On the way back to school, the boys watched Berkeley turn into Oakland, and the red lights shift to green, as families of all colors walked across streets and bicycles rattled by, as lunatics raved on corners and homeless wheeled their carts beneath the California sun.
Back at school, the boys ambled across the courtyard until Ernesto peeled right and sprinted back to his locker. “My earrings,” he said. He fastened them back into his ears and went to class.
That night Wilber entered the twins’ room and sat down on the edge of the bed. “I’m happy for you guys,” he said. “I really am. But it’s been so easy for you.” They’d been here only a few months and had already got their papers. “I’ve been here for seven years.” He knew it didn’t work that way, papers falling from the sky once you’d been here long enough, but still, he wished.
Ever since the twins had come to live with Wilber, jealousy, that slender snake, had twisted through him on and off—when he dropped them off at school, or when he met with their lawyer today in court. He knew the journey had been hard for them, but it wasn’t easy for anyone.
For seven years he had commuted to work, scared of being stopped by police again for speeding or for a knocked-out taillight, worried that la migra would raid his workplace, run his prints, and send him home. For seven years he had felt the everyday racism: a Latino like him could show up in a suit and tie at the nicest restaurant in town and still be treated differently than a grubby white guy in jeans and a T-shirt. Life for an undocumented person was better in Oakland than in lots of other places; in Arizona, for instance, he’d once heard the police stopped Latinos just to check their papers, not even with another pretense, and that their politicians wanted to get rid of immigrants altogether. California was better, but still, it wasn’t easy. Racism, he knew, was everywhere on earth but perhaps strongest in the United States, this place home to so many different kinds of people.
He’d felt it that night in the parking lot, the cop’s smug gaze, the way he approached Wilber in the car, which wasn’t even turned on. He would have found any reason to arrest him and his friends. There was the way people looked at him when he was one of the only Latino guys in the store, and a fear that a person could never fully kick, a hum of you don’t belong. The problem with being paperless in Oakland was that you could almost forget you were an outsider, if only for a flickering moment; when the truth kicked back in, it was all the worse. Gabby, her family, now his own brothers—they all could legally call this place home. But he still lingered among the eleven million in the shadow zone. Those dreams he had—joining the army, going to Iraq, getting papers of his own—were just fantasies.
The twins sat on the bed listening to Wilber, the Spanish rap thudding through the scratchy computer speakers. They didn’t know what to say, other than they were sorry.
“Don’t worry,” Ernesto said, in a rare showing of tenderness.
“You’ll get papers someday,” Raúl said.
“Yeah,” Wilber said, “I guess everything comes in its own time.”
For the rest of that week, the boys showed up at school on time, did their homework, and took home books to read at night. After nearly a year of struggle, they now saw the warm potential of the life on this side of the border.
The evil spirits went into hibernation, by Raúl’s estimation, and Ernesto slept well.
The twins kept their celebrations between the two of them, out of respect for Wilber and their undocumented friends. They were even shy about telling their teachers they’d taken their first step toward papers. They did tell their parents, and Wilber Sr. and Esperanza knew that the prayers they’d murmured at church and while holding the statue of the Virgin and Child had worked. The twins didn’t plan any celebration on their eighteenth birthday, either. Birthdays back home were never a big to-do; there’d been eleven of them and no extra money. Raúl celebrated by going to a neighboring high school’s soccer game, where a friend had arranged for them to meet up with some cute emo girls from another school. He smoked cigarettes, assuming an air of cool as the girls, at a staggered distance, chattered with one another, stealing glances at their male companions. One of them asked him for a cigarette; he felt the thrill of brushing her hand with his, then bringing the flame to her black painted lips. Nothing came of the outing, but he came back well after dark with a confidence he hadn’t felt since he’d left home. He had papers, he was eighteen—officially a man: the whole world was unlatched.
Ernesto, too, spent that first week on a cloud, but the dreams came back.
It was just Raúl there to shake his twin back to himself, sit with him while he calmed his quickened breaths, and wait until his brother fell back asleep before allowing himself to shut his own eyes.
Eventually, he asked his brother point-blank: “Why do you have so many bad dreams?”
For whatever reason, Ernesto finally felt like talking. “All right,” he said, “I’ll tell you.”
Raúl perked up, surprised.
“Remember in Reynosa when you went to the bathroom?”
In the safe house, when Raúl had gone upstairs to splash himself with water, Ernesto had sat, avoiding eye contact, on the small mattress they shared on the floor. One of the coyotes, the guy who acted like the boss, opened the door. “Come help me out back?” he’d said. Ernesto looked up and realized the guy was talking to him.
He followed him to the outdoor area where women were cooking food for the migrants shacked up inside. One of the migrants, who had been complaining about how long he’d been there, was back there, too.
“Why haven’t we moved?” he was shouting. “When are we going to get out of this fucking hellhole?”
It was stressful, the waiting—Ernesto had been there only two days, and it had got to him, too.
“What am I paying you thousands of dollars for,” the man shouted to the boss, “to just sit here and wait forever?”
The boss slapped him across the face. “We move when I say so, asshole.”
Instead of silencing him, the slap turned the man hysterical. He flailed, kicked, and shouted. Ernesto backed up against the cinder-block wall, trying to disappear.
“I’ve been here for two months!” he cried, spit flying from his mouth. “I paid you people to get me there!”
At this, one of the guides took out a machete, sliced the guy along the side of his torso, then jabbed the long blade deep into his stomach. He fell to the floor shouting, blood pooling out of him.
“Help!” he said, and looked at Ernesto, right in the eyes. “Help me!” he pleaded, but Ernesto was frozen still. He did nothing.
The leader, the one who’d ordered Ernesto back here, took out his gun and shot the dying man in the head. His body relaxed into its final slump on the cement. Ernesto turned around and hurried back inside.
“I saw all this, right in front of me,” he told Raúl. He never found out what the coyote had wanted from him.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” asked Raúl. As far as he knew, it was the first big secret his twin had ever kept from him.
Ernesto hadn’t told him back in Reynosa because he couldn’t unlock his throat to talk. And also to protect him. To protect them both, really—if Ernesto had blabbed about the murder, what would stop the coyotes from offing him, too? After that, it was just too much to talk about, as if the words might bring it all back to life. When they were caught in Texas, the migra officer had asked, in his one-on-one interview, whether he’d seen the coyotes do anything illegal, whether anyone in their group had been mistreated. Cooperating with the authorities against human smugglers and crime rings could help a person get immigration status through a U visa, available “for victims of certain crimes who have suffered mental or physical abuse and are helpful to law enforcement or government officials in the investigation or prosecution of criminal activity.” It’s questionable whether this would have qualified him for a U Visa. But, either way, all Ernesto had said was no, as the memory of the bullet puncturing the migrant’s head swamped the space behind his eyes.
When he’d fallen on the corpse in the desert the following week, onto some poor, miserable migrant just like them, it was God’s way of reminding him: A man died, and you did nothing, you did nothing, you did nothing.
And it wouldn’t all go away because his life here was becoming more permanent. In fact, after the initial post-court reprieve, the luckier he was, the worse Ernesto’s dreams seemed to become. That’s what penance looked like.
That night they stayed up talking and hardly slept. The next morning they arrived late at school.