Lucila next to me was crying in her sleep. I reached over and placed my hand on her shoulder. I didn’t want to wake her up, but I also wanted her to know that she was not alone. I touched her very gently until the crying stopped. I turned around and saw the woman on the other side of me smiling. She was an older woman from Guatemala named Colel. She spoke a mixture of Spanish and a Mayan dialect. No one understood what she said. She came with her son and her two grandsons. The son was sent to the men’s detention center in Sierra Blanca. She doesn’t know where the grandsons went. She had a picture of the two boys that she showed to everyone.
“Dónde están?”
That was the question she asked every person she met.
Then this evening, La Treinta Y Cuatro took the picture from her. It was too much to bear. I had to speak out.
“How does it hurt anyone to let her have that picture?” I’d demanded to know from La Treinta Y Cuatro, full of anger.
La Treinta Y Cuatro turned and smirked. It was as if she had been waiting for me to lose my cool.
“What business is this of yours?” La Treinta Y Cuatro took two steps forward. I felt drops of her saliva on my face.
I cocked my arm and was ready to strike her.
“No, no.” Colel was crying and grabbing my arm. “Sólo una foto. Ma’ importa. Ma’ importa.”
“There is no need for your meaness” is all I ended up saying. Colel was right. Violence was what La Treinta Y Cuatro wanted. I let Colel pull me away.
“You think you’re special?” La Treinta Y Cuatro shouted after me.
“No,” I answered.
“No? You’re right. You’re not special. You’re nothing.”
I went over the meaning of those words over and over again, for hours it seemed. You are not special. You are nothing. I realized there was a part of me that thought I was more deserving of asylum than women like Colel or Lucila. I spoke English. I could write articles for newspapers. As a reporter, I was persecuted because of membership in a particular social group, one of the specific categories for asylum under United States law. La Treinta Y Cuatro was right. I thought I was special.
Colel’s missing-tooth smile on the bunk next to me brought tears to my eyes. What made her travel so many thousands of incredibly difficult miles to the United States? When I asked her about her son and grandsons, she made a waving gesture with her hand as if to say that they simply flew away. How could she smile at me with so much love even after so much loss and so much yet to lose?
Mami used to say that every day brings a new message from God if we but listen. Every day is a new lesson.
What were the lessons to be learned from Colel and from Lucila and from all the world’s poor?
That I was not special was one lesson, I was sure.
But the other one was that we all were.
At 11:00 p.m., my father, or Bob, as I decided to call him somewhere in the middle of Oklahoma, pulled into a motel outside Springfield, Missouri.
The room had two beds larger than I had ever seen before. Bob sat on the orange bedspread of one of them and dug his cell phone out of his pocket. “Do you want to take a shower first?” It was his way of asking me for some privacy.
Inside the bathroom, I heard isolated words from Bob: unexpected delay, Border Patrol, trouble. Words like that. Then there was a long pause and Bob’s tone became softer. I turned on the shower after the word sweetie. I let the warm water hit my back and closed my eyes.
When it was Bob’s turn to take a shower, I opened my backpack and took out the disposable phone I’d bought at a gas station with the money that Gustaf gave me. I could have told my father that I needed my own phone to call Sara or Mami, but instead, I listened to the lack of trust I felt inside me and bought it while he was in the restroom. Now I took the phone out of its plastic package and then took out the slip of paper where I had written Yoya’s phone number. I remembered Yoya’s words to call day or night and I was about to punch in her number, when I heard the water in the shower stop.
I placed the plastic wrapping and the burner phone at the very bottom of my backpack, under all my clothes. It was then that I noticed the envelope for the first time. The envelope was from a tractor company and was addressed to Gustaf. It was open and had a green rubber band around it. I removed the rubber band and opened the envelope just enough to see what was in there. It was a Greyhound Bus gift card for two hundred dollars and a yellow sticky note with Gustaf’s scribbling. I unpeeled the note from the card and read the shaky writing:
Gustaf Larsson’s phone: 432-555-1699
In case you get lost.
I smiled. In case you get lost. Gustaf wasn’t talking about geography. I folded the note and stuck it and the gift card in my wallet. I reached over to the lamp next to the bed and clicked it off. I turned on my side with my back to Bob’s bed. He came out and I heard him searching in his suitcase. The smell of the now familiar cologne filled the room.
“Emiliano, you asleep?”
I didn’t move.
“I’m really glad you’re coming with me. I know you don’t think I’m a good father. But it doesn’t matter to me. I want what’s best for you now. I talked to Nancy while you were taking a shower. She’s looking forward to meeting you and to having Trevor get to know you.”
“I am not going to Chicago to babysit your son.” I was polite, but firm.
There was a long pause. “Let’s cross that bridge when we get to it, as they say in America. It’s going to be all right, you’ll see.”
I heard Bob pull the bedspread back and get in bed. The last light in the room went off.
“You’re going to like our house,” Bob’s voice came from the dark. “We fixed a bed in the basement for you. Trevor plays down there, but he goes to bed early. You’ll have your own TV. Your own bathroom. We want you to feel at home. Be part of the family. But no one is rushing you. You take all the time you need.” A pause. “I apologize for any mistakes I made. I’m sorry. What more can I tell you?”
I waited a long time before speaking.
“There’s no need to say anything else. Let’s move on.”
“Agreed. Let’s just move on. Good night, Emiliano.”
Good night, Bob Gropper, I said to myself.
* * *
I opened my eyes, startled. The digital clock next to the bed read 3:00 a.m. What woke me up was a dream of Sara crying. She was in a ship, trying to pull up women and children who were drowning, but the current was too strong, and she could not hold on to them and there were just too many women and children. I sat up gasping for air and then I lay down again, grabbed the edges of the pillow, and pushed them against my ears as if to keep out the sound of Sara’s sobs.
After a few minutes I knew that sleep would not return. I sat up and looked at the room’s air-conditioner unit. It was silent. I bent over the unit and pushed buttons until I heard a rattling. The air coming out was warm, but it was air. I touched the perspiration on the back of my head. I stretched out on the bed again and listened to Bob’s snores. Now and then he whimpered, as if he was running from someone, Able Abe probably, I joked to myself. Only it wasn’t funny.
I put on my pants, grabbed my backpack, and stepped outside. There was a metal chair outside our room. I sat there under a yellow light bulb and dug out the burner phone. Day or night, I repeated Yoya’s words.