BY ALEX ESPINOZA
El Sereno
The child returned to me by the border patrol isn’t my son. My Ariel is still missing. Maybe he was left in those overcrowded detention centers. What I am certain of, though, is that this boy, the one I have, he’s an impostor.
He’s wrong.
I want my son back.
He looks just like him, right down to the birthmark he has on the back of his left arm. He even has the cluster of three little moles on the side of his neck.
“Máma,” he said the moment he laid eyes on me, tugging at the arm of the social worker who’d traveled with him. “Máma.”
“Sí,” I said, sobbing, “soy yo. Máma!” I stood in the airport terminal with my cousin Licha, her boyfriend Juan, and the attorney named Grace Lopez-Hull. I gripped the teddy bear I’d bought him—a large brown thing wearing a bright red bow tie with yellow polka dots.
“That’s your mother,” I heard the social worker state. “Mercedes.”
“Máma. Mercedes,” his voice echoed.
He even lisped the way my Ariel did, pronouncing my name Merthedes like he always had.
Grace shouted at the reporters and the police and the airport security in their puffy jackets and dark boots to move aside, to give me some room. Let the woman go to her son, she implored. They’ve been separated long enough. The photographers and the reporters smiled and snapped pictures of me as I made my way to him. Then I hugged my boy and I pulled his black hair back and brought his face to mine and said, “Look at me, Ariel. Look at me. It’s your mother. Do you remember?”
He nodded, rubbed a few tears from his eyes, and said, “Yes. You are my máma.” He pressed his finger against my collarbone, and I felt the jab penetrating my skin, warming my blood because here was my son again. There were more pictures, and a handful of the reporters sighed and gripped their microphones and I could hear one saying into a camera positioned near us, “We’re reporting live at LAX where five-year-old Ariel Tomás Garza has been reunited with his mother. The two were separated for months after being detained by ICE. They were part of the second wave of asylum seekers stopped at the border.”
“A tearful reunion after a harrowing separation,” I heard another reporter say.
A woman speaking into a tiny tape recorder said, “I’m witnessing Mercedes Garza and her young son finally together. As I stand here in an unassuming LAX terminal this cold and rainy evening, I am reminded of the bond between a mother and her child, how strong and yet fragile this bond is. Who knows how many other mothers out there are missing their children? The current administration’s policies are literally ripping families apart. We have no idea what the psychological ramifications of a traumatic experience like this could have on these individuals.”
There were questions, so many questions, and my head was spinning, and all I could do was grip Ariel with the same force I had exerted when the officers tore him away from me. Grace Lopez-Hull answered the inquiries in English, and I could only make out a few phrases: “… not for six months,” she replied to one reporter. “If you have kids, imagine not knowing about your child for six long months.”
“I feel like a piece of me has been recovered,” I told another reporter from a Spanish-language newspaper. “We gave up everything to come here. We were only seeking asylum. We just wanted to be safe.” My hands shook, and Ariel looked away. “At the border, they questioned us. They separated me from my boy. I have not seen him until now. I didn’t know where he was, if he was alive. Nothing.”
Grace, Licha, and Juan led us out as the reporters followed, a long mass of people trailing behind. It was like a pageant. Exciting and terrifying at the same time. All I heard was the consistent snap of pictures, the endless murmuring of questions, and Grace shouting at them to stop, urging them to leave us alone. There would be more time, she promised, but now we needed some peace, my son and me. Because we were going home.
In the car, I kissed his head and cheeks and each eye. I felt his hands, checked his arms and legs for bruises or injuries. It wasn’t until Licha turned the car light on that I was able to notice that he looked taller, his limbs dangling down the seat bench like limp tree branches. He was wearing different clothing—a red jacket with a hood, a striped undershirt, tan trousers, and brand-new shoes with different-colored laces.
“You’re safe,” I said. “Seguro,” I said, again and again.
Licha maneuvered the car out of the airport, and we started on the freeway toward their apartment.
“Let’s get you some food, yes?” Juan said from the passenger seat. “Hamburgers and fries.”
“Does that sound good?” Licha asked. After switching lanes, she reached around and squeezed his foot. “Your mother said you asked about me before the migra took …” Her voice trailed off. “Anyway, aren’t you happy to see me?”
He hardly said a word, though. He just stared out the window, the teddy bear resting on his lap. I thought, Shock. That’s likely what it was. Shock. After all, this was a lot for a child to endure.
Licha and Juan cracked jokes, tried engaging him, but Ariel was so aloof and distant. Not like him at all, they whispered. He would talk and talk for hours. He had always been so curious, my boy. This child was silent, almost brooding. The whole car took on an air of unease. It was immediate. What had they done to him in there? I wondered. How long would it take for my Ariel to be himself again? I had to be patient, to love and reassure him. But when I reached out across the car seat to hold his hand, he recoiled.
He then turned and asked, “Why are you doing that?”
“What do you mean?” I said, my voice meek. “I haven’t seen you in months. You are my son, and I’m so happy to be with you again.”
He placed his hand out and said, “Go ahead then.”
His skin no longer felt like his skin. It wasn’t soft like I remembered. It felt like holding a doll, plastic and hard.
Was I losing my mind?
We’d been through a lot, I thought, as we continued on toward the apartment. Here we were. Finally. After everything. After all the walking and the sleeping in muddy ditches and on the cold steps of the few churches that offered us clemency, us looking like a band of marauders with plastic bags draped over our shoulders to protect us from the torrential rains.
I sighed. Things were fine. We were the lucky ones. We got out of that infernal country, and now we were here. We would start over. In Los Angeles.
In a neighborhood named for peace and serenity.
El Sereno.
At the apartment, I watched him pick up his french fries, take tiny bites of his hamburger, then rub his nose and eyes. He must be tired. Licha and Juan had retired to her bedroom. I took the sheets and pillows from the hall closet and made up the couch.
“Here is where I’ve been sleeping,” I told Ariel.
He looked around at the small living room—its oversize television and mismatched chairs, the broken tiles of the entryway, and into the kitchen where the crumpled fast-food bag sat, bloated and empty. I bathed him, using an old margarine tub to splash water over his head and body. I rubbed soap over his distended belly and across the small crevices along his back. I felt the bones of his spine, little lumps connected, one after the other, like smooth river stones. He stood in the middle of the bathroom, shivering. I pulled strands of his wet hair back, wiped his face, his body, and dressed him in the pajamas I had brought with us from home.
I wanted to ask where he’d been. Where they’d kept him. Had anybody hurt him? Was he afraid? Did he know I had spent the weeks after I was released racked with guilt and anger? That I blamed myself for this? That I thought it would have been better had we stayed put, never trying to make the journey to the United States? There was danger back home, of course. He was getting older. It was only a matter of time before the gang would come into town again, rounding him up like they did so many others, and take him into the jungle, never to be seen again.
There was so much I wanted to know. Instead I picked him up, cradled him in my arms, and walked him down the short hallway and back out to the living room. He was already asleep; I could hear the familiar whistling of his breath as it passed through those small nostrils. Not even an ant could wiggle through them, my mother would say before she died.
Tomorrow, I told myself. There will be time for questions tomorrow.
I undid my braid, let my long hair tumble down my back and across my chest. I held my son tightly against me, rocked him even though I knew he was fast asleep, even though no amount of my moving would ever rouse him. This is what a mother yearns for. To be with her child like this. In the serenity. No bullets piercing the night sky, rattling the trees, disrupting the movements and rhythms of the spirits they say roam the darkness.
Tomorrow there would be an opportunity for questions.
Between the gangs, the drug cartels, the corrupt military and politicians, where could someone like me turn? I watched whole communities burn to the ground, saw countless men and women and children slaughtered, their bodies tortured and disfigured, left to rot and fester in mass graves. It was the stuff of nightmares. I need no proof of the existence of hell; I have lived there. Hell is where I came from. Hell is what I was determined to leave behind. For the safety and well-being of my son.
The handful of us that were left cowered in fear whenever we saw the trucks. We watched as they took turns on us—soldiers one day, drug kings the next, then the pandilleros. They would descend into town, gather us in the main square, and make us watch the public executions or tortures. We watched as they hauled the young girls away, raped them, then returned them to us, shattered, their eyes vacant, their mouths quivering.
One of those was my comadre Amparo’s daughter, Venacia. I remember the day. How could anyone forget something like that? I stood with Amparo under the shade of a guava tree washing clothes and hanging them out to dry on a string we’d tied across the front of my house. It was weeks since Venacia had gone missing, taken by a group of soldiers. She was destroyed. Her skirt was torn, her legs scratched and bruised. She only wore her green sweater, the school’s crest over the right side of her chest frayed. There were leaves and bugs in her hair. But it was her face that made us both gasp, that caused us to turn away. She’d been beaten badly, and her nose had been fractured. Her eyes were swollen and there was a large gash running down the side of her cheek. She screamed when we tried touching her, when we tried getting her out of the filthy rags she was wearing. There was dried blood caked on her underwear, inside her thighs, and along her back. Bite marks and cigarette burns dotted her breasts. This is what happened to our children. They would come back broken, forever changed.
***
I loved Ariel’s father very much. He read books and believed in the ability of people to rise up and change things. Daniel wanted to fight. He wanted to take back the country and overthrow the crooked politicians and mercenaries, the drug lords and gang members. He thought democracy could one day return to the country, that we would live to see the moment when everything would be restored once more.
“A utopia,” he once said to me.
“A what?” I asked. This was in the days when we’d just discovered that I was pregnant with Ariel.
“A utopia,” he repeated. “A place where people live communally, where everything is shared, and where everyone has a purpose.”
He saw hope in everything. That’s what I loved so much about him, my Daniel. His courage, his faith that was endless, a faith that indeed made me believe that things would change someday. But, in fact, they got worse.
After Venacia returned—and was never again in her right mind—and once Ariel was born, more factories closed down, more people lost their jobs, and everything was teetering toward complete collapse. Paper money lost all value; a few street vendors started stitching together shirts and jackets out of bills. It was a sight to see a purse made of hundreds and hundreds of thousand-peso notes selling for less than a pack of cigarettes. The supermarkets ran out of food. Teachers went on strike, hospitals closed down, and the police simply stopped caring. My husband grew more and more desperate and angry. He took to pacing back and forth. He cursed the wealthy and those who supported the president and his crooked administration. I tried calming him down, but it was useless. He was fright ened. He had me and Ariel to worry about. What kind of future would there be for our son?
The protest happened on a warm Saturday afternoon. First it was a few campesinos. Then somebody showed up with a bullhorn. Then more people came out. A hunger strike was called. Some of the men, including Daniel, sat down, linked their arms together, and demanded justice. Then we heard a loud rumble, a slow groan coming deep from the bowels of the earth. People scattered when they saw the tear gas canisters fly through the air and hit the ground. Daniel and the others held firm, though. They didn’t budge. They wrapped handkerchiefs over their mouths and noses and remained there, even when the gunfire began. I heard fast, sharp whizzes, smelled smoke; one of the buildings was on fire now.
I watched the soldiers descend on the square. A woman gripped my arm. Daniel shot me a look, those wide eyes of his cutting through the smoke and bullets. Go, he was telling me. So I ran, following the stream of women shouting and crying, all of us scattering like torn strips of paper. There was no Daniel. No Horacio. No Miguel. No Antonio. No Justo. No Mario. All our men were gone. We waited a few days. A body turned up, splayed across a pile of boulders beside the river with a note attached to his chest. It was a warning. I had no time to mourn him, no time to remember my beautiful man. Soon they would come for the rest of us. There was only one thought: Leave. So, we gathered our things, those of us who were left—the women, the children, the homosexuals, the elderly, the sick and disabled—and we formed a caravan. We walked for days, addled by the heat and hunger. Some of us died or got lost along the way.
“May God be with them,” we said, erecting crosses along the roadside.
We arrived. Somehow. We arrived. We declared ourselves at the border, told the agents we sought asylum. This was when they separated me from Ariel. They took him and the rest of the children. We were sent into a giant room with green cots lined up along a cinder-block wall. There was one bathroom, a handful of tables, and a television. All of this was enclosed behind a metal fence, and guards with guns paced back and forth along the outside perimeter.
I don’t know how long I was there. I was allowed only one call. Thank goodness Licha was home. It took them a few days, but she showed up with Juan and the lawyer, Grace, who argued and argued with the government officials, and I was released.
“She’s a real chingona,” Licha said.
Juan nodded. “Don’t mess with Grace.”
I told her about Ariel. I pleaded, said I would not leave the facility without him. We had come too far, I explained. We had lost so much.
“The children were sent to another facility,” she told us. “And I don’t know where that is, but I promise you I’m going to find out.”
“She owes us a solid,” Juan said. “Isn’t that right, Gracie?”
She balled up her fist and gave him a soft punch in the arm. “Yes. Anything for Licha. She’s like family.” Grace glared at Juan. “You, on the other hand—”
“Stop joking,” Licha said. “This is serious. How do we know the boy will be okay?”
“Because he has to be,” Grace said. “I promise you that we will find your Ariel and get him back.”
Weeks went by. There were phone calls. There were forms that needed to be filed. There were meetings and interviews. An endless parade of men and women in suits and ties who scrutinized me, who asked me why I would risk so much, why I would take such a dangerous trip with my young son. Wasn’t I afraid that something terrible would happen to him along the way?
“Yes,” I said. “But I was also afraid that something terrible would happen to him if we stayed back there.”
Weeks became months. I cried a lot. Licha and Juan tried to distract me. They took me places on the weekends. The beach. The mountains. We saw celebrities’ houses, large structures as ornate as birthday cakes. The weekdays were the hardest, though. There was no one to keep me company. I found myself wandering up and down the street. I went to the El Sereno Park just a short walk from the apartment. I sat there for hours watching the children play. My heart longed only to see them jump and laugh and run around. I imagined my Ariel there, among them.
More time. More waiting. Nothing.
It was agony.
Then the call came. Grace had located him. He was on his way, from where we weren’t told, only that he was safe.
I cried. Licha and Juan clapped and shouted.
He was coming back to me. At long last. The only piece of home I had left. A reminder of my husband. I would feel complete again.
Hot dogs sliced into little pink circles and cooked with eggs. To drink, a glass of chocolate milk. That was his favorite meal. Always. Without fail. Only, the next morning, when I cooked this and offered it to him, he refused it. He sat at the table and stared and stared at the food.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I’m not hungry.”
“Try,” I implored him.
He played with the food for an hour. He moved the hot dog circles to one side of the plate, stabbed the eggs with his fork, and tapped his finger against the glass of chocolate milk. I sensed an unease in him, a restlessness.
A few hours later, as I was in the kitchen cleaning up, my back to him, I heard a sound. Movement. Like furniture being dragged across the floor. I turned the water off and found him standing in front of the television. Just staring at it.
It was turned off. His eyes were vacant, his mouth wide open, like he’d seen something awful and was about to scream. I tapped him on the shoulder, but there was no response. I shook him. Nothing. I snapped my fingers right in front of his face. Still nothing. I picked him up, carried him to the couch, and shouted his name, over and over. It was only a few seconds, but it felt like an eternity before I saw movement in his eyes and his face.
“Ariel,” I said, “what happened?”
He paused, opened his mouth, and recited a string of numbers in Spanish: “186543379-675-344547.”
“What?” I asked. “I don’t understand.”
Then he looked at me and said, in a voice that was clear and very stern, “I’m fine now. You can return to what you were doing”
“But, Ariel—”
“I’m fine.”
Water, he said. He needed water. I poured him a glass, and I watched as he gulped the entire thing down in a matter of seconds. He demanded another. Then another. In total, he finished four large glasses, then sat on the couch and smoothed out the wrinkles on his shirt from where I’d grabbed him.
“What is there to do here?” he said.
He didn’t talk like my son. His words were elevated, clear, almost like they’d been rehearsed. “What do you mean?” I asked.
He tilted his head to one side, squinted his eyes, and repeated it: “What is there to do here?”
I pointed out the window. “There’s a park.”
He rose slowly off the couch, zipped up his jacket, and said, “Let us go there then.”
I put the dishes away, grabbed my sweater, and we headed out.
Fresh air will be good, I thought as we made our way down the steps and toward the street. He probably wasn’t allowed outside where they kept him and the others. Poor children. They need air and grass and trees.
Still, I tried convincing myself that the feelings of unease and dread cascading down and around me were just figments of my imagination. At the park, instead of playing, instead of running around or climbing on the playground equipment, he sat down on a bench and just watched them, watched the other children. When I asked him if he wanted to walk over, maybe talk with some of the other kids, he said he was fine.
“Do you just want to sit here?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied. “It suits me fine.”
The sun was warm; a bright white light bathed everything. I looked out across the street, watched ravens circle in the sky over the railroad tracks running parallel to Valley Boulevard. We just … sat there. I was on one end of the bench and he was on the other. He perched at the edge, starting intently like an animal stalking its prey. He flinched when I reached out and tapped him on the shoulder. It was getting cold, and the clouds were gathering. I was afraid it would rain.
“I don’t mind the rain,” he said. I noticed a few drops fall on his jacket.
“You’ll get soaked,” I explained. “I didn’t bring an umbrella.”
He didn’t budge, though.
I stood, stretched my legs. Nervousness had settled in my stomach. I took a few steps away from the bench, turned around for just one second, and then he was gone. I called his name, but there was nothing. My eyes scanned the playground, the trash can near the bathrooms. No Ariel. Where was he? Then I caught a sense that someone was watching me. Standing in front of a cluster of low bushes was my son. At first, I thought the light was playing tricks on me, and I approached slowly. The few drops of rain turned to drizzle as I bent down toward him. I couldn’t see that it was a dead raven at first; all I could make out through the drizzle clouding my eyes was a clump of black feathers, oily and slick as tar. The bird’s beak was ash gray, dusted with a white film that looked like chalk. Its yellow eyes were still, bulging out of their sockets, as if the poor creature had been startled or choked.
“He was making too much noise,” Ariel said, holding the animal’s limp body. “He needed to be quiet. He needed to obey. If you break the rules, you get punished severely.”
I looked on in horror. “Put that down,” I finally said. “Please, Ariel. Put it down now.”
He said nothing to me, though. He simply tossed the dead bird on the ground; it landed with a light thud on a muddy patch between our feet.
The rain was falling harder now. I reached out to scoop him up in my arms. I gripped him, and I ran down the street, past the tire shop and the liquor store, across the parking lots riddled with empty bags of chips. A man with stringy blond hair holding a dog on a leash was coming out of the coffee shop. I almost knocked him over, and I apologized in my best English.
He nodded, said, “It’s okay. No hay problema.”
The dog wore a silly pink knitted sweater. Those big, moist eyes looked up at us, but the animal concentrated its stare on Ariel. Then it growled and barked, baring its teeth, its nostrils flaring. When the man reached out to pet the dog, speaking to it in a soothing voice, the animal lunged forward, biting his arm. It broke skin, and I saw fat sores starting to form, then bleed across his hand as he dropped his coffee and yelled, “Rufus! What the fuck?”
On I ran. Past the run-down motel with its coral-blue walls and rusted iron gate, past the little shop with the purple doors selling nopalitos in glazed pots. The puddles on the sidewalk widened and grew deeper. The drops falling on the roofs of the houses and the shops sounded like bullets. My breathing became ragged. I couldn’t see very well; strands of damp hair fell over my eyes. But I held onto my Ariel, and we ran and ran and my skirt was soaking wet and so was my sweater and my feet and my arms were sore and my legs were trembling and by the time we reached the front of the apartment door, I was heaving and crying and I was wet and angry and I couldn’t figure out why. And my son, there in my arms, he felt light as air. It seemed the tighter I held him, the thinner he became.
Inside, I took off his wet shoes and hurried him into the bathroom. I grabbed towels and placed him inside the tub and told him to remove his wet clothing. First his jacket and his shirt, then his pants and underwear and socks. I noticed a strange patch of raised skin across his waistline as I reached over to pull a pair of freshly washed pants on him. A cluster of perfectly round bumps. I touched them and asked if they itched.
He shook his head. “No,” he said.
“Do they hurt?”
“No, it’s fine. You don’t need to worry.”
The raised bumps didn’t go away. They never spread. He never complained about them. If I asked him to let me see them, he’d raise his little shirt. I’d push the elastic band of his pants down, and there they’d be. Always the same. I rubbed ointments and lotion on, but they never went away. They never worsened. They just were. I was confused. Were they an inoculation? Maybe someone had hurt him in there. How long would they last? Would they ever go away?
Then one night, I was awakened by a strange voice. It sounded like a man speaking. Through the haze of half sleep, I rubbed my eyes and focused. Yes, it was a man, I was sure of it. The voice was gruff and deep. At first, I thought maybe it was Juan; he was spending the night so he wouldn’t have to drive back home to Fontana after his long shift at the factory.
The voice speaking, though, was closer. It wasn’t coming from the bedroom. I turned my head. Through the light of the streetlamps outside, I could make out Ariel’s profile. I could trace the dark outline of his forehead, the small ridge of his eyebrow, his nose, and then his lips. They seemed to be moving, like he was talking in his sleep. It was his voice that I was hearing. Low and sinister. It wasn’t my son. That wasn’t his voice. And the words he was speaking. It was like he was talking in another language. An endless string of words I couldn’t figure out. But he only knew Spanish and a little English. Finally, after about thirty minutes, he stopped. He just … stopped talking.
The next morning, as Licha and Juan got ready to leave, Licha turned to me and asked what I’d been watching the night before.
“Me?” I looked at her confused. “Nothing.”
“I heard the television on. Voices.”
“Me too,” Juan said. “Like a conversation.”
“Oh,” I said. “It was just … I couldn’t sleep.”
I lied. I also said nothing about the strange marks on his body and the dead bird.
I didn’t want them to think I was crazy. It would all pass, I thought. Little by little.
We walked to the library up on Huntington Boulevard. There, we gathered a stack of picture books, and I asked Ariel to sit by me and look at them as I turned the computer on. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for, but there had to be something to explain all these odd things. It took awhile, but slowly certain similarities began emerging. A mother in Texas reported that her daughter had grown very depressed and moody ever since she’d been returned. The girl refused to go outside and spent all day in her bedroom, the curtains drawn. She turned very pale, and her hair started to fall out in clumps. Another woman reported that her son had become increasingly violent, harming himself and others; he had beaten up a classmate and pushed him down a flight of stairs. Another mother from Arizona was so sure her daughter had been replaced by a robot that she began cutting the little girl’s arms and legs to see if she bled. The little girl nearly died before the mother was arrested and her daughter placed in a foster home.
All of these children had been separated from their parents after crossing the border. Just like me and Ariel. None of it made sense. I watched Ariel flipping through a book on dinosaurs. He was so unfamiliar to me now, so distant and far away. No matter what I did, I couldn’t break through to him.
I remember my mother and grandmother telling us stories about duendes, small creatures that lived in the forests and caves around the village. They’d roam the countryside at night and steal laundry and food, vandalize the barns, and rouse the chickens and roosters.
“I saw one once,” my grandmother told me when I was a girl. “A little thing. It looked like a child scurrying a few feet ahead of me as I was coming back from the río one evening. In the moonlight, I could see that it walked funny. As I approached, it turned to look at me. Its eyes glowed bright green. And when it grinned, I saw a set of sharp yellow teeth. It had long fingernails, and its skin was covered in hair.”
The truly sinister ones, though, did more things, awful things. They butchered animals for food, skinned their hides to wear. They disguised themselves and walked into houses, caused mischief; some even reportedly lit a woman’s home on fire as she slept.
They would also steal babies and children, replacing them with look-alikes in order to trick the parents and cause more mischief. When I asked why they did this, my grandmother sighed and shook her head.
“They’re just bad,” my mother replied. “They only do it because they are evil. There’s no other reason. They are bitter and foul things with hate in their souls.”
Maybe politicians are duendes disguised as people. I don’t know who this child is, but he is not mine. I am not crazy. Even after all that I’ve been through, I’ve remained fully intact, fully aware of myself. I am of sound mind, as the Americans say. I look at this boy now, this mysterious little life lying next to me, sleeping. The rash on his waist has changed now. After the blisters broke, scabs formed that scarred, leaving a series of marks on his skin, dark lines like those found on the backs of packages with tiny letters and numbers:
Grace took notes in her pad and snapped a few pictures. She said she’d get to the bottom of this, though I have little faith now. Things are getting worse. They say on the news that more caravans of migrants are on their way. It seems governments everywhere are unraveling, and the only choice people have is to leave. Such is the will to live. Part of me wishes I could tell those mothers I see on television not to come here. To stay where they are, that the lives of their children aren’t worth it. That this process changes them, that they will forever be plagued by irrevocable damage, that our babies will be lost to us.
But I can’t stop them. And even if I could, I wouldn’t. Because at least we are alive.
My child is out there somewhere. I’ll find him.
I’m a mother and, like all mothers, this is what we do.