Mona stood and introduced herself. “I’m the lawyer from Juntos,” she said in Spanish. Mona worked for a not-for-profit called Together for a Safe Border. Everyone called it simply Juntos. The two women shook hands, Mona noticing how bright Carmen’s black eyes were, like stones in a shallow stream. They sat down. “First, let me ask, how are you doing in here?” said Mona.
“Fine.” The girl shifted her gaze to the still-virgin page on Mona’s yellow legal pad.
Mona put down her pen. “How’s the food?” she said.
“It’s fine.”
One thing Mona knew, prison food was never fine. “Listen, Carmen,” she said, “I’m not from border patrol. Juntos has nothing to do with the government. We’re on your side. You understand?”
Carmen’s gaze lingered.
Mona could tell she was being sized up. “For me to be able to help you, I need to know you’re telling me the truth. Everything you say to me is confidential. Understand? Everything.”
Carmen nodded. “The food here is disgusting.”
Mona smiled. It was a small truth, a first step. “What about the guards?”
Carmen looked over her shoulder at the dough-bellied man in uniform by the door. “The guards are disgusting, too.”
Mona softened her eyes, waited for more. When nothing came, she said: “Carmen, has anyone forced you to do anything you don’t want to do?”
Carmen shook her head. “Not like that. They violate us with their eyes. And they don’t respect us. They make us eat with plastic cutlery, for our own protection, they say. The knives are useless. We end up eating with our hands like animals.”
Mona wrote it all down. Carmen was warming to her subject.
“The toilets overflowed last night. They didn’t fix it until this morning.”
Mona reflexively scrunched up her nose. Paradise Detention Center was less than a year old. She’d read somewhere that the BSCA had received $15 million in taxpayer-funded subsidies.
Yet the toilets overflowed.
“I bet you can’t wait to get out,” she said.
“I don’t want to go back to Mexico. I’d rather stay here.”
Mona nodded. She could detect Carmen’s Chilango accent. “You told the agent at Long Beach you’re from Tijuana, but you don’t talk like a northerner,” she said.
The girl shrugged. “I grew up in Ciudad Neza,” she said, meaning Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, a well-known slum east of the capital. Mona asked how long she’d lived in Tijuana.
“Five years.”
Mona calculated she must’ve left home at fifteen. “Did you finish high school?” she asked.
Carmen shook her head.
“Too boring.”
“Why did you go north to Tijuana?”
The girl hesitated before saying, “To find work in a maquiladora.”
“Which one?”
Carmen gave the name of a company Mona had never heard of. Mona wrote it down. “What do they make?”
“Electric components. For automobiles.”
“How much did they pay you?” Mona asked casually.
“Thirty pesos an hour,” said Carmen.
About a buck eighty. Pure fiction, thought Mona. She knew the real figure the border factories paid the women they employed. And Finn had told her about the money belt and all the cash floating on the water. Far more than Carmen would’ve made working in a factory. She wrote down Carmen’s number anyway. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Carmen shifting in her seat.
“Are you married?” said Mona casually.
“No.”
“A boyfriend?”
“No.”
Mona gave Carmen a friendly smile. “I’m surprised. You’re very pretty. You remind me of someone…”
Carmen didn’t ask who. Her guard stayed up.
Mona softened her eyes. “Let’s talk about how you got here. It must’ve been terrifying when the boat started to sink.”
“The man said it would be safe.”
“Which man?”
“The man in Tijuana.”
She paused, and her expression changed.
“Thank God for the lifesavers,” she said. “The captain saved my life.”
Captain. Mona suppressed a smile. Four days earlier, her husband, Nick, had pulled Carmen out of the water. Mona thought she might try calling him Capitán when she got home, see how he liked that.
“What made you get into that panga, Carmen?”
“To escape poverty and misery.”
It was a stock answer the coyotes trained their clients to give. Mona had heard it a hundred times.
“But you had a good life in Tijuana. A good wage, no husband or boyfriend weighing on you—”
“I don’t want to work in a maquiladora for the rest of my life.”
“What do you want to do?”
Carmen sat up a little taller. “I want to be an actress on television.”
Mona’s expression didn’t change. Everybody has dreams.
“I can imagine you on-screen. You’re pretty enough.”
This time, the compliment outflanked Carmen’s guard. She started twirling a lock of hair. Mona tapped her pen on the pad. “I remember now who you remind me of: Do you watch Aprendí a Llorar?”
Carmen looked coy. Aprendí a Llorar was a hit Colombian TV show about a teenager named Dolores Romero who loses her parents when their private jet crashes into a mountain. Dolores inherits their fortune but can’t touch it until she turns eighteen. Her uncle becomes her legal guardian and tries to poison her. She survives and runs away, but the toxin leaves her horribly disfigured. Penniless, she gets a job with a traveling circus, selling tickets from a darkened booth. She falls in love with a handsome young knife thrower but doesn’t dare show him her hideous face.
“You look just like Dolores at the start of Aprendí a Llorar!” said Mona.
“That’s just a stupid telenovela,” said Carmen. Mona shrugged. Telenovelas were her guilty pleasure. It’s how she switched off after work. That’s why she knew that the lovelorn but disfigured Dolores strikes up a friendship with a sideshow snake charmer, who works out what kind of toxin the uncle used and concocts an antidote. Dolores blooms into a ravishing beauty and becomes a target for the knife thrower, spinning on his wheel. A television producer sees their double act, signs them up, and makes them famous. The uncle recognizes Dolores on TV, tracks her down, and tries to murder her again, but the knife thrower saves her just in time, killing the uncle in a flurry of blades. Millions tuned in to watch the finale, in which Dolores returns to her family’s hacienda and marries her knife thrower on her eighteenth birthday.
“How much did you have in your money belt?” said Mona.
“Five thousand dollars.”
Mona raised an eyebrow. “You saved up $5,000 just from working at the maquiladora?”
Carmen shrugged. “I work hard.”
“How much did you pay the man on the beach?”
“One thousand.”
“Did you pay the same the first time you tried to cross?”
No answer.
Mona looked candidly at Carmen. “I want to make sure you understand how serious the situation is,” she said. “The first time a person gets caught trying to cross the border, it’s a misdemeanor. La migra sends you back and tells you not to try again, like they did”—Mona consulted her notes—“on August 26 last year, at San Ysidro. But the new laws mean if you get caught a second time, they can send you to prison for two years.”