NO SCHOOL,” PAPÁ SAID THE NEXT MORNING. “THERE IS NO need.”
“I’m staying in New Orleans,” she said. “I’m not going back to Las Monarcas.”
He said, “You will do as I say.”
He hadn’t raised his voice, and so she was the one to scream. He endured it with a blank face. Winded, she turned from him and stomped to the back door but stopped; he had forbidden her from leaving the apartment.
He stayed home all day to make sure she did as well. Work for him wasn’t assured, anyway, he reasoned, and Rodrigo might have luck on his own. Regardless, in a few days’ time there’d be one less mouth to feed on their American dollars. Luz vacated whichever end of the house her father decided to occupy. A charged silence gridlocked them. When Rodrigo returned at the end of the day he didn’t speak, shuffling around the apartment and averting his eyes.
HER FATHER STAYED HOME WITH HER AGAIN ON TUESDAY. LUZ SAT alone on the stoop, blind to the hot, crawling day. Inside, her father planned her departure. The street blurred, and Luz contemplated what it would take to truly defy her father—to defy him in an active way. If Jonah drove past, could she run from the stoop and get into the truck and never turn around? Let her father go to the cops then, she thought. Let him wager that the police would care to find a single undocumented Mexican girl more than they’d care to call la migra on his behalf. This was the only way: get up and go. Run, as fast as she was able. But the prospect put cold fear in her belly, and so she sat and waited, and Jonah didn’t come by, and there was nothing she could do to get in touch with him.
THE DAY DARKENED, AND LUZ REMAINED ON THE PORCH STEPS. Rodrigo mumbled greetings when he returned and climbed around her. When the screen squealed open again, it was her father on his way out. He looked down at Luz. “Walk with me—?” her father began, but Luz got up, stepped around him, and went inside. “Luz, please,” he called after her. “Come talk with me.”
But Luz didn’t answer, striding wordlessly past Rodrigo on the futon toward the rear of the house. When she finally glanced back, her father had disappeared.
Luz paced the shadowed recess of the back bedroom. She began to stretch, her instinctual prerace routine. Hamstrings, then quads. She sat on the floor and did hurdlers. She twisted her trunk, loosened her back. She looked at the back door.
If you’re going to go, go right now. The soles of her feet prickled. Start running.