Once indoors, Antonia can see that Estela is still a girl on the cusp of womanhood. In fact, if hers had been a family of means back home, she’d probably be having her quinceañera, instead of getting herself in trouble with a boyfriend headed out of the country. Her face has a sweet, girlish roundness; her eyes, an astonishment that gives a child’s tug to the heart. She’s actually quite pretty, her brown skin so smooth and unblemished it looks polished. Antonia catches herself doing one of those Third-to-First-World makeovers she deplores in others: put on a little makeup, give her a nice haircut, dress her up in some trendy clothes, and Estela could be a model in one of those diversity-touting brands—the only problem again being the deplorable condition of her teeth, a few missing, one incisor that looks eaten away by what appears to be decay.
¿Quieres algo de comer? Antonia offers. Not that there’s much in the house, as she had emptied the fridge and pantry of perishables when she left. Salsa and parmesan on crackers, for the main course; for dessert, the same crackers with Nutella—which she used to stock up on, as it was a favorite of Sam’s, all but the opened jar having gone to the local food pantry.
Just water, Estela says, downing a first glass, then a refill. After the desert crossing, she probably can’t get enough of it.
Antonia is aching to know what happened next door. Did Roger throw the girl off the farm when her week of grace was up? If so, what are Mario’s plans? But an ingrained sense of courtesy kicks in. When she taught The Odyssey, Antonia would point out to her students how being a host involved certain protocols: before all else, there was the greeting, the foot washing, the feeding. Only after the guest had been properly attended to came the payback: tell me your story.
One urgent question she does allow herself to ask Estela now. ¿Cuándo vas a dar a luz?
The girl looks at her blankly. Dar a luz, Antonia repeats. Do they say it differently in Mexico? When is the baby due? She gestures a round belly, then turns her palms out.
The girl shrugs. Could it be she doesn’t know? Has no one taught her the science of her own body? But then, why does she look so worried? Perhaps she does understand but is afraid of giving a wrong answer.
It’s going to be soon enough, that much Antonia can tell. She’ll have to call the Open Door Clinic for an appointment as well as check on the hospital’s policy if the girl goes into labor. Would Admissions have to notify the authorities? Would Estela be rushed back across the border before the baby drops anchor stateside? How does that all work?
That’s for Mario to figure out, she reminds herself.
But he doesn’t have the language or know-how to negotiate the medical bureaucracy, which has eluded Antonia herself since she went on Medicare. The entrails of the health care system, a phrase she has come to associate with the whole dysfunctional federal government, a stinky coil of stomach, small intestine, bowel (the three branches), none of them working properly.
There’s always Mama Terry, though Mario would have to come up with some cash to pay for her services.
Recently, several ad hoc migrant groups have sprung up around the state with a phone tree of volunteers who can translate, offer rides. Antonia somehow got put on that list. Just because she’s Latina doesn’t automatically confer on her the personality or inclinations of a Mother Teresa. It irritates her, this moral profiling based on her ethnicity. Forget The Odyssey and the tradition of harboring strangers. When is Mario coming by? Antonia blurts out.
Estela winces. Antonia has touched a sore spot. I don’t know, Estela says in a whisper.
How can she not know? Don’t parting lovers always arrange for their next rendezvous? Unless, of course, those parting lovers don’t have the luxury of controlling their lives. Or thinking they can.
Little by little the girl explains the fix she is in. She was not evicted by el patrón. It’s Mario who wants nothing to do with her. It turns out Mario has been gone almost two years, first Tejas, then Carolina del Norte, finally settling in Vermont this past January. No way el bebé is his. (So, she does know her science.) When Estela arrived with that big belly of hers, he was as surprised as Antonia. Furious Estela had not told him.
But he wouldn’t have let me come if I had told him, the girl is quick to add. He says so himself: he is not going to raise another man’s bastard.
But it’s not your fault, Antonia defends the girl. Antonia has been following reports on the news: girls traveling to the border, raped by coyotes, by those who run the so-called safe houses, by thieves, thugs, even by other migrants. But when Estela doesn’t jump to her own defense, Antonia asks as delicately as possible, not wanting, God knows, to stir up any dragons. ¿Te violaron?
Estela bows her head in shame.
Dímelo. Tell me your story.
Sobbing, Estela confesses. She was not sure Mario was ever coming back. She was lonely. There was a man in her village, un hombre importante. He paid her attention, bought her pretty things, gave her money for her mother and younger siblings. We are seven sisters, she explains. No brothers.
Seven sisters! We are—Antonia stops herself. Is it still four sisters? She shakes away the horrible thought. It’s been a respite from that horror to have to attend to someone else’s horror.
Estela goes on to recount that when she became pregnant, the important man wanted her gone. He had a wife, his honor to protect. He found a coyote and paid for Estela’s journey.
But wait, I thought Mario paid for the trip? He borrowed a bunch of money.
That was after the robbery. The first coyote abandoned Estela’s group in the desert, after stealing from them all they carried; Estela ended up in the hands of a second coyote, and that’s when Mario stepped in to help. He only knew that Estela was en route to him. Had she told Mario then about her condition, what would have become of her, of her baby?
This is telenovela material—in fact, some critics would say, Too much, ratchet it down a notch. But it isn’t a telenovela to the people it happens to. Another way to dismiss their plight. Ratchet it down a notch.
I will talk with Mario, Antonia promises.
The girl’s face lights up. Tell him I want to be with him; tell him I didn’t know what else to do.
Desperate situations call for desperate moves, Mario should understand. But for the obfuscations of machismo—Antonia’s own father banished first one, then another daughter when he discovered they had transgressed with their American boyfriends. Antonia’s exile came spring of her senior year at college: her father called her dorm one Saturday only to find out from the big mouth at the switchboard that Antonia was away for the weekend with her boyfriend. When she returned, there were half a dozen pink message slips tacked to her door, Call home. Her father answered on the first ring, shouting into the mouthpiece, YOU ARE DEAD TO ME.
A year later, Antonia showed up at her parents’ house in Queens. Her boyfriend had left her; she had lost her job, working the night shift at the state mental facility, her charges tied to their beds—the days before patients’ rights and HIPAA monitoring of conditions. Nights were surreal, filled with howling, screams, shrieks, wails. The distraught and disturbed in need of soothing. The soiled in need of a cleanup. And here Antonia had taken the night shift thinking she’d get a lot of writing done. When she complained to her supervisor about the patients’ mistreatment, she was fired. Where could she go? She hitchhiked home. Only then, when she had hit rock bottom, did her father “forgive her.”
But along with machismo, the culture also commands respect for elders. Antonia is now la doñita. Older than Mario’s mother by a dozen years. She will counsel him on the right way to act in this situation.
Gracias, gracias, ay, gracias, the girl keeps saying, tears in her eyes.
Wait to thank me till it’s over, Antonia jokes. She feels uneasy accepting Estela’s gratitude when she knows damn well she’d rather pass on this heavy load.
* * *
After settling Estela into the guest room, Antonia heads for next door. She turns into the driveway—Roger’s pickup is gone—and parks in front of the trailer behind the barn. The curtains the workers always keep drawn lift ever so slightly. Before she can even knock, the door opens: José comes out on the concrete stoop, then steps down to the ground to stand eye level with her.
Mario no está, he announces.
Mario not here? ¡Por favor! she challenges the nervous young man. It’s not like the undocumented have the freedom to go missing or for a leisurely stroll in this predominately white town and state. Her minority students often complained to Antonia about being followed around in stores, as if the darker color of their skin made them likely shoplifters. Migrant justice groups have taken up the issue: immigration control is not supposed to be the province of local law enforcement. Some enlightened counties—like her own—have outright refused to be an arm of ICE. But that doesn’t guarantee a damn thing; a disgruntled state trooper or a cop in a bad mood after his wife left him or after he nicked himself shaving can always phone in an anonymous tip. Alerts are constantly issued—somehow Antonia got herself on that email list, too: La migra picked up two outside Walmart in Burlington; ICE arrested three passengers getting off a bus. La policía stopped a car about a broken taillight and apprehended three individuals, a college girl transporting two undocumented migrants. The student was taking them out for pizza, first time off the farm in months the day after Thanksgiving—jeez, Black Friday all right—and the three were brought to the local jail: the student was later released, a hearing pending; the two young men kept behind bars, soon to be deported.
No me voy hasta que no lo vea, Antonia announces, loud enough for Mario to hear her on the other side of the thin door. She is not leaving until she talks to him.
Okay, okay, José concedes, looking over his shoulder. He reminds Antonia of a teenager covering for a buddy in hot water. Mario is somewhere on the farm; José is not sure where. We don’t want any trouble. La doñita knows how difficult el patrón can be.
I can be difficult, too. Antonia stands her ground, one hand on her hip, a cultural signal if there ever was one that this viejita means business. Mario! she calls out, her voice in command mode. Mario!
How different her behavior at this moment from her docility in the Illinois station with Officer Morgan. Sam often noted that Antonia got a lot bossier in Spanish. The minute they touched ground in the DR, a more self-assured self took over. But in English, even after years of education and employment, the worm of self-doubt still eats away at the core of her certainties.
The trailer door finally opens a crack. Déjala entrar, Mario calls to José. Soon el patrón will be back from his errand, and he has already told them in a loud voice, as if the issue is volume not language: NO VISITORS. Visitors spell trouble. Roger’s illegal aliens are his own dirty little secret. He doesn’t relish breaking the law but sometimes even law-abiding citizens have to defy the authorities in order to survive. Desperate situations call for desperate moves. Not so different, after all, from the undocumented he employs. Antonia was at that debate on campus a few months ago, farmers and their workers, talking about the similar predicaments they were in.
Inside the trailer, Antonia tries to persuade Mario. Estela’s just a girl. She’s got nowhere to go. And no, I can’t keep her with me, she adds. You’re going to have to figure something out.
Mario studies the scuffed linoleum floor as if it were a road map that might show him a way out of his dilemma. Antonia knows he’s in the unenviable position of not wanting to contradict la doñita: she could turn him in; she could complain to el patrón. But he can’t get past his revulsion at taking up with a girl who willingly gave herself to another man. He has his own honor as a man to defend, he says.
Honor, schmonor. Antonia waves the word away. What about showing a little compassion? Estela made a stupid choice, but it was only because she was lonely. She thought she had lost you. She loves you. It’s you she wants to be with.
Then she shouldn’t have done what she did. He had to make many sacrifices himself. It took him a while to cross over, to pay back the money he’d borrowed to pay the coyotes so he had something to send home. Even then, he had been against her making the journey north, precisely because he did not want her exposed to any harm. But it turns out, she had already willfully thrown away the flower of her girlhood.
Antonia is surprised by the fanciful phrase coming from the mouth of this impoverished and uneducated man. As if poetry can’t survive in such impoverished conditions. In fact, poetry (and honor) might be all you do have. Sometimes she catches a glimpse of her faulty default self, and she doesn’t like what she sees. We all make mistakes, she reminds Mario more gently. Look at Jesus, didn’t he teach us to forgive? Perdónanos nuestras deudas, así como nosotros perdonamos a nuestros deudores, she intones. Forgive us our trespasses. How readily she recalls the words of her childhood prayers. Bedrock stuff she’ll never get rid of. Madre Teresa, after all.
But Mario’s bedrock machismo has an equally strong hold. He shakes his head in quick jabs. He will have nothing to do with esa puta. Take her to the migra and they will send her back home, where she belongs.
Don’t call her that! Antonia feels her own anger rising. She’s not a puta. She’s . . . una jovencita, loca enamorada . . . Antonia struggles for the correct term, convinced if she lands on the right phrasing, it will be the abracadabra that unlocks the young man’s heart. But she’s fallen out of practice of arguing her case in Spanish now that Mami and Papi are gone.
Call her what you want, Mario says, a snarky insolence in his voice Antonia has never heard before. It grants her a rare glimpse of who the young man might be in a world where he could be the macho, wielding power. But to me she is no better than a prostitute.
José has been standing by, witnessing the escalating scene. He comes forward now. El patrón is due back any moment. If la doñita will allow him, he, José, will talk to Mario, convince him of the honorable thing to do even if the girl has done a dishonorable thing. ¿Hasta mañana?
Antonia is relieved to defer the confrontation till tomorrow. She needs to run into town, get a few groceries, connect with her sisters over what has or hasn’t transpired with Izzy. Has Investigator Kempowski come up with anything? Has Mona landed in Boston? Tilly set out from home? She also needs to make those calls to the clinic and the hospital.
The last thing she needs . . . She doesn’t dare complete the thought. Just thinking it might bring on the next worst thing.
On her way into town, Antonia calls her sisters, using the Bluetooth device Sam recently installed in her car, knowing how Antonia liked to use her driving time to make many of her obligatory calls. I don’t want to end up being a widower, he had remarked. Those now seemingly prescient moments come back to haunt her: the past signaling this future, but with the roles reversed.
Tilly’s number, then Mona’s, goes to voicemail after half a dozen rings. Do they hear church bells and decide not to pick up? Any news? Please call me back. She dials Izzy. Why not? Instantly, she’s shunted to voicemail, Izzy’s phone out of juice or turned off.
Kempowski also can’t come to the phone right now, but her call is important to him. Please leave a detailed message. She decides not to, as there’s only so much nagging you can do, even if you are paying someone a hefty fee to find your missing sister. Besides, she wants to talk to him in real time, another strange phrase, real time. What other kind of time is there? Language seems increasingly strange. When did that start?
She’s in the checkout line when a call comes in from Mona. She landed a couple of hours ago at Logan, where she was picked up by Maritza, and they’re headed to Athol. Some interesting details have been surfacing. Maritza saw Izzy a couple of days before Izzy left to look at some properties for her centro. Izzy was high as a kite, talking nonstop. At one point Maritza said Izzy went to the bathroom, and her cell started to ring, so Maritza opened Izzy’s handbag to answer it, and whoa! It was full of cash, packets of bills, and half a dozen bottles of medications. So, did you rob a bank? Or a drugstore? Maritza confronted Izzy when she came back to their table. Izzy just narrowed her eyes and grinned with mischief. I mean, just the idea that Izzy would be walking around with a bag full of loot.
Kempowski needs to know all this.
I’ve already told him, Mona informs her. There’s a gloating tone to baby sister’s voice. As the youngest, she loves it when she can be first one to know and then report to the others.
Antonia unloads her cart onto the conveyor belt, a pile of groceries she would never buy for herself. But back in aisle two amid the sugary cereals, Antonia decided to bend her strict eat-healthy rules to accommodate Estela. Cocoa puffs, potato chips, Oreos, soda, taco shells, Goya beans, cheddar cheese, chocolate milk. The items speed forward into the ready hands of Hi, I’m Haley.
Hold on a sec, Antonia tells Mona. Haley needs to know if Antonia wants paper or plastic. Antonia hoists her paper bags into the cart and rolls away from all the noise.
Sounds like you bought up the store, Mona says, sounding offended about having to wait.
Does she tell Mona about what has come up? Antonia decides not to. Last thing she needs is Mona’s advice about what to do with Estela.
Anyhow, as I was saying, I called Kempowski, and he already was in touch with the Realtor, Nancy Something, who couldn’t say enough nice things about Izzy, how she, Nancy, felt she had met a long-lost sister. How she showed Izzy some really great deals. But for now we’re just going with the motel and the farm. Mona has moved from recounting what she has learned about the Realtor to imitating her.
A farm! Antonia feels she’s trapped in the maze that is Izzy’s mind in one of her manic spells. The world is crazy, grant it that, and granted she has been so wrapped up in her grief, but still, how could its craziness have come so close and she never noticed until recently? She needs the psychic version of Sam’s movement lights to flash warnings in her brain when precarious situations and needy people are nearby.
Mona, too, has lost her glee. She continues her narrative in a weary voice. How Izzy slept over at Realtor Nancy’s house before taking off to visit her sisters outside Chicago. How Nancy tucked her in that night. Her “long-lost sister” on whom she can unload all her worthless properties. What a total jerk! I don’t even want to talk to that woman, Mona says in their mother’s ultimatum voice.
We’re going to have to work with a lot of jerks if we want to find our sister, Antonia reminds Mona. She, too, is finding it increasingly difficult to keep up her faith in people, in herself. In the past when her own stash got this low, there was always Sam filling up her cup with his abundant kindness. She has continued to think a lot about the afterlife, especially in the absence of any sign from Sam. What, if anything, does it mean? An afterlife? All she has come up with is that the only way not to let the people she loves die forever is to embody what she loved about them. Otherwise the world is indeed depleted. Sam: always thinking the best of people. Izzy: casting her bread upon the waters. Generosities of which Antonia was often the lucky recipient. But what is she thinking? Izzy is not dead.
And guess what? Mona interrupts Antonia’s thoughts. Kempowski was going to have Izzy’s cell phone pinged, but no need. Nancy turned it in. Seems Izzy left it behind there and it ran out of juice. No wonder we couldn’t reach her.
Tomorrow, Mona and Maritza will be meeting up with a local investigator that Kempowski has enlisted near Athol. They mean to stay there for a few days, looking around, talking to this Realtor Nancy. I’ve changed my flight home. You want to come down and meet us? Mona asks. A question with a strong-arm muscle of should in it.
Antonia explains the situation that has come up, burnishing the bleak details, as Mona isn’t making any empathic sounds at her end. But Mona is stern in her response: sisterhood comes first. Izzy is their sister. So as not to sound heartless, she adds that it is very sad of course about the girl, but Antonia shouldn’t get in the middle of a boyfriend-girlfriend fight.
It’s not a fight. He threw her out. She’s homeless, helpless.
A long silence at the other end. Do what you want, Mona says in an aggrieved voice.
Neither alternative is what Antonia wants. What is the right thing to do? An old quandary, and the older she gets, the more she realizes she still hasn’t figured it out. Tolstoy had it right in that story she used to teach about the three questions: What is the best time to do things? Who is the most important one? What is the right thing to do? Funny how Antonia remembers the questions but can’t for the life of her remember if Tolstoy provided any answers.
Let me see what I can work out, Antonia promises, already making a mental list: check in on José’s man-to-man talk with Mario, set up medical care for Estela, and housing, if she can’t convince Roger about an extension of his kindness. Because no, Antonia’s home is not an option. She has already decided: she is the most important one.
Back at the house, Estela is fast asleep in the guest room. She must be bone tired, pobrecita. Antonia had shown the girl the room, laid out some towels. Why don’t you freshen up, get some rest? I’ll be back in a little while. The towels are still in their neat pile, Estela on top of the made bed, her head cushioned on one arm, a red string bracelet matching Mario’s on her left wrist. Maybe there’s an expiration date on how much luck and protection it can provide?
Antonia takes the folded blanket and covers the girl, who startles awake but, on hearing the soothing Ya, ya, duérmete, duérmete, instantly falls back to sleep.
When Mona was recounting how Realtor Nancy tucked in Izzy, Antonia had felt uneasy, as if her sister were being fattened up, not for the kill, but for the sell, an abandoned motel and a farm in the middle of nowhere. But now there’s a tenderness to the thought. Whatever has happened to Izzy, she did experience the kindness of a host toward a stranger.
Later, at her laptop, recalling Estela’s blank look, Antonia Googles the Spanish for giving birth, dar a luz. Is it not used in Mexico? According to one of the websites, parir is the working-class term. Dar a luz was used originally to refer to the Virgin Mary giving birth to the light of the world, a euphemism the upper classes appropriated, a more polite way of referring to a lady’s parturition. Antonia had often bragged to Sam about the poetry of her native language, the beautiful way, for example, that Spanish had of referring to giving birth: dar a luz, “give to the light.” That intense need to get the words right.
But even the beauties of language, of words rightly chosen, are riddled with who we are, class and race, and whatever else will keep us—so we think—safe on the narrow path.