Sanctuary Read online

  And then, he stopped calling. We waited for days that turned into a week and then two weeks and then a month. Even the lawyer Mami paid with whatever she could pawn couldn’t answer our pleas. We never got to learn when or how or why the detention center was emptied out, forcing all of the immigrants onto planes for deportation. We never found out where Papi was when the war caught up with him in Colombia.

  Had he made it back to our home in Suárez?

  Was he just stepping off the plane?

  Did he see who shot him in the back nine times?

  Mami never intended for me to see that picture of my father’s remains. No nine-year-old should ever have to see something like that. But one of our cousins, who was still living in Suárez, texted Mami one night as we were eating dinner. She dropped her phone and let out such a gut-wrenching wail. As I went to pick it up, she tried to grab it from me, only, for once in her life, she was too weak.

  The photo was of Papi’s body lying on the side of a steep path through the mountains. Maybe the same one he used to climb with me on his back when I was too little to appreciate it. His face was beaten into a purplish mess, and his eyes were frozen in pain. There was blood everywhere.

  When we got that picture, I kept staring at it. Trying to rearrange it or turn it upside down or inside out so it could be someone else. But there was no denying it was him. He was wearing the same pale yellow T-shirt I’d last seen him in almost a year before. His new chin hairs poking out in thin tufts.

  I saw that image of Papi constantly, twisted and cold in all his deadness. I saw him when I closed my eyes at night and when I opened them again in the morning, when I brushed my hair or heard a guitar on the radio or smelled fried onions or walked, talked, laughed, breathed.

  The Sunday after we got that picture, Mami took us to church to pray for him. I wanted to scream at everyone there, My papi is dead! They took him away, and you don’t care!

  Instead, I sat there not even crying.

  Just waiting for all the candles to go out.

  * * *

  ×

  “¡NIÑOS, VALI, ERNESTO!” Mami shouted from the kitchen, pulling me out of my dream as I sobbed for Papi all over again. This was why I didn’t want to even try to sleep, especially without Mami lying next to me. It was too easy to get sucked into any of those brutal memories. “¡Vengan! ¡Rápido!”

  Ernie stumbled out of the closet Mami had repurposed as a little bedroom for him. It was tight quarters, but at least it was his own. Which was a blessing, even if it stank of old socks in there.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked. His long eyelashes blinking fast as he tried to figure out why I was in tears. He was hugging Señor Cebra—the purple-and-white-striped stuffed zebra that he’d been sleeping with since he was born. I sometimes forgot my little brother was only eight years old. It was easy to do, since he had Papi’s genes and was already up to my chin. Ernesto Palmero, Mami called him, because he towered like a palm tree.

  “Nothing. It’s okay,” I told him.

  It wasn’t okay. Nothing about this world was okay.

  But maybe I was just too used to living a lie to say anything else.

  CHAPTER 3

  Ángel de Dios, mi querido Guardián, me presento hoy ante ti para agradecerte y pedirte que siempre estés a mi lado, para que guies, ilumines y gobiernes mi vida.

  It was just a few minutes past dawn now. Mami’s ajiaco was still simmering on the stove, and I was still smoldering with questions, but we had to keep going. Somehow, it was a weekday and I could hear people in our apartment building turning off alarms and opening doors, and we had to do that too, to keep up with the charade of our lives here.

  Ernie and I stood next to Mami as she offered a morning prayer in front of her altar. It wasn’t so much an altar as a wooden shelf that she’d nailed to the wall above our kitchen table. On it were all the people Mami treasured most— a yellowing photograph of my abuela and abuelo, some ridiculously awkward school pics of me and Ernie, a palm-sized portrait of la Virgen.

  My favorite picture was in a smaller oval frame—the one tucked behind an ivory crucifix. It was of me and Papi at the beach, just after we’d arrived in California. Papi loved going to the ocean, howling into the wind. The photo was a little blurred, but I could still make out his fingernails, wide and flat like weathered seashells. His shaggy beard was just giving way to a hint of a smile, and his T-shirt clung to his chest with sweat. I looked like I couldn’t have been more than five at the time, decked out in my blue-and-white polka-dotted bathing suit. Papi was holding me up on his shoulder like a trophy. But really, he was the prize.

  Today as I stared at that picture, everything in me shook. Mami’s votive flames looked too close to Papi’s beard, and la Virgen wasn’t even watching over him.

  “What if San Diego is still under attack? Or all of California?” I whispered. Mami ignored me, continuing with her prayers. But maybe I did have a sense of defiance in me after all. Or just a searing, unstoppable pain from having my papi stolen from me and murdered all those years ago. “They could deport Tía Luna,” I said louder. “They could come here next.”

  “Shhh. Tenemos que tener fe,” Mami said.

  Te imploro desde el fondo de mi corazón que por favor protejas a nuestra querida Tía Luna. En tu dulce nombre, Amen.

  As she finished her prayers, she dug her worn knuckles into the tops of my shoulders, trying to knead out all my knotted worries. I had to squirm away from her, though. I felt like if she pressed too hard, she would unleash a storm of tears and terror that I’d never be able to overcome.

  “It is okay,” she told us. “We eat breakfast.”

  She started cooking a pan of huevos pericos. I had to admit, it did smell comforting. And I knew we were very lucky to have eggs, tomatoes, onions and the occasional hunk of cheese from McAuley’s farm, especially when there was no fresh produce or dairy for sale around here. The three of us sat down and tore into our food. It was like we were filling up all those holes and unanswerable questions with this meal. As Mami chewed, I saw the muscles in her cheeks clenching and releasing; her eyes focused only on her food. I didn’t know how she kept it all together. How she fed and clothed us while our world was being demolished. I couldn’t decide whether this was resilience, or foolishness.

  “Okay, al colegio!” Mami said as she swallowed a last bite of egg. She blew out her candles, scooted back from the table, and watched us eat a few more forkfuls before giving us our orders for the day.

  “Dishes dried before you leave. Make sure the door is locked. Stand up straight, respect your teachers.” As she spoke, she planted kisses on the top of both our heads and then pulled three different bags over her shoulders. They were filled with her uniform, her lunch, her hairbrush, and probably another crucifix.

  “You’re going to work?” I asked, totally confused.

  “Sí, and you are going to school,” Mami instructed. “We’re safe. We going to be okay. Oh! And Ernesto, after school, you go to fútbol and wait until Vali comes to pick you up, yes?”

  “Soccer, Mami,” he corrected her.

  “Fútbol,” she insisted. “¡Adiós! Y tranquilos que todo va estar bien.”

  I think she really believed that too. She enunciated everything in her imperfect English, her voice clear and firm so I could hear her resolve.

  “Love you, Mami!” Ernie called after her, even though she was already out the door. Then he turned to me and said, “The bathroom’s mine.”

  With water rations, every drop counted. The person who took the first shower got the longest shower. On any other day I would have fought my little brother for those extra drops, but again, this wasn’t any other day. I was still sitting at the table, stunned by Mami’s blind optimism.

  “Go for it,” I told him.

  Though after waiting ten minutes for Ernie to finish up in the bathroom, my bladder
and I regretted that decision. Through a crack in the bathroom door frame, I could see my little brother posing in front of the mirror, staring at his reflection.

  “Hey!” he yelped as I pushed open the door. “A little privacy?”

  I had to glue my lips together so I didn’t bust out laughing. He was trying to tame his crazy hair with a wet comb, some gel, and what looked like a squirt of toothpaste. Ernie definitely had Papi’s mane—dark, wild, and unmanageable. It now had a minty sheen to it too, with some of his curls shellacked down, but most of the back still sticking up in tufts.

  “Wow. Someone special you want to take to snack time?” I teased. As if anyone in his second-grade classroom would notice.

  “Whatever,” Ernie shot back. “Your face looks like snack time.” Which didn’t make sense at all. But on this day after, or day before, or whatever we were now calling this darkness disguised as a school day morning, I was grateful for my little brother getting me to laugh.

  * * *

  ×

  OUTSIDE, THE AIR felt charged and hot. It was only the first week of May, but I was already sweating buckets in my itchy school uniform. Before we moved up to Vermont, I’d always heard that the winters here were bone-chilling and the only hope of summer was a few weeks in August. Maybe those were just stories, though. I still had yet to experience a real blizzard or build a snowman. We’d had a few ice storms and some flash floods up here, followed by our current drought, which was in its second sweltering year. Even today as we walked to school, it had to be eighty-five degrees, and the wind was so strong it stung my eyes. The streets and sidewalks were splintering; the forests that used to cover the mountains around us were singed from all the wildfires. It was like a town built out of shadows.

  Nothing to see here. Nothing to say or do or change.

  Not that Southboro, Vermont, had ever promised to be some great metropolis or even have more than one street that could be called “downtown.” That was the whole reason Mami had relocated us up here from San Diego almost seven years ago. Everything we had was gone. Papi was gone. Our home was gone. Our sense of security and promise were gone.

  Mami’s little sister, Tía Luna, didn’t want us to leave California. She found a man who for the right price married her and gave her papers. She told us to come stay with her a few miles away in Imperial Beach, where she was a housekeeper. And we did for a while. But we still felt the “cleanups” and riots amping up around us. I was a mess—peeing my bed and beating my fists into the floor. Trying to knock out that image of Papi on the ground, purple and lifeless.

  When we lived in Imperial Beach, every day there were new Presidential proclamations about how “illegals” were trying to ransack and ravage the country. The economy was in danger. The land was in danger. Everybody’s taxes had to triple because there were evil foreigners lurking everywhere, ready to pounce on innocent Americans and take everything they’d worked so hard to achieve. The Great Wall, which had started in San Diego, now had to be extended across all the southern states that touched the border—Arizona, New Mexico, Texas.

  Still, the President reminded America, nobody was safe from “the immigrant infestation.”

  So Mami did the thing that Colombia had taught her to do—

  Run.

  When they are coming for you, run.

  Run faster than them. Run smarter than them. Just run.

  She looked up agricultural towns as far away from San Diego and the border as possible, and found McAuley’s Dairy Farm near Southboro, Vermont. With the help of Tía Luna’s savings, Ernie, Mami, and I got on a plane to the other side of the country. We said goodbye to the amusement park with the dolphins and the lemons in Tía Luna’s yard. To the last places we had been when Papi was still alive.

  I remember Ernie being so excited about our first trip in an airplane. We shared a bag of cheese crackers and I pretended not to notice the motorcades of tanks and cranes down below as we flew over the expanding Wall construction.

  I knew Mami had moved us up here to protect us and hopefully start over. I knew she thought that here, in this pocket of quiet she had created and prayed for, we could find some peace. Colombia couldn’t give it to us. California couldn’t either. Maybe a ho-hum unextraordinary town like Southboro, Vermont, could. As soon as we got here, there was a new rule from Mami: we could only speak to each other in English. Even though there were ID scans in schools and government buildings, the public parks and stores were left alone. For the most part, we were able to live here without feeling afraid.

  But would that still be true after what we’d seen last night?

  “Vali,” Ernie said now, elbowing me as we approached his school’s gates. “I said bye!”

  “What? Wait.” I felt the overwhelming urge to hug him and hold him, but I knew he wouldn’t abide by that this close to his school, where his friends could see him. Or maybe I could impart some wisdom or warning about being aware and alert and the frailty of our existence. I couldn’t form any of these frantic feelings into a sentence, though. So instead I said something random just to keep him there a moment longer.

  “Um, did you pack your lunch?”

  “Yeah. You watched me do it,” he answered, rolling his eyes.

  “Did you brush your teeth?”

  Instead of answering, he just breathed on me so I could smell his breath. “Anything else?” he asked. “Or can I go now?” I couldn’t tell if he was amused or annoyed by my stalling. Either way, I was going to make us both late for school, and that wouldn’t help either of us stay under the radar.

  “Nah . . . that’s it,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant. “Just . . . go straight to the soccer field after school and . . . yeah. I’ll meet you there!”

  “Okay. Bye!” he yelled over his shoulder as he ran toward Southboro Elementary’s entrance.

  I watched him step through the first gate and get his wrist scanned without a single glance back. Then he showed his school ID to the nearest security guard and skipped through an open door. I felt myself wincing as I stood there. I was grateful Ernie could sail into school without fearing he’d get stopped or questioned. I really was. But I was also incredibly jealous. I rubbed my finger over that lump in my right wrist. I could still remember my first few years of elementary school, in California, when there were no guards outside of schools. Also, teachers weren’t armed at all, and students could read whatever they wanted. I could also remember when I first got my fake chip and Mami said, “These won’t last forever, but . . .”

  That dot-dot-dot at the end of her sentence hounded and haunted me every day. The government still hadn’t figured out a way to track down all these counterfeit chips, but it was only a matter of time. If someone had taken on the identity of a dead person, the death records caught up with them. Or if there was a real, live Amelia Davis out there, scanning her wrist at the same time as me, what then? We’d heard about people being taken away by ICE because their fake chips got detected or somehow malfunctioned. When that happened, the scanner made this horrible chirping noise, like a carbon monoxide detector that had run out of batteries.

  I knew that noise all too well, because I heard it one day last year. It was the worst day of my life since Papi disappeared.

  Mami was going into Town Hall to pay our water bill. Ernie and I usually just waited outside because it smelled like hot floor wax in that building. But we heard Mami say good morning to the ICE officer in the doorway, followed by the scanner chirping once, then twice, then over and over again in rapid fire.

  We ran toward the front steps of the building, but he was already escorting her into a back alley behind the parking garage.

  “Wait!” I called out after them. The officer turned around and glared at me. He looked like he’d just woken up, his face sagging with a bushy mustache and thick jowls. Mami refused to make eye contact with me, though. Instead, she raised her pointer finger ever
so slightly at me. As if to say, Stop. Do not cause a scene.

  The officer had my mami behind that parking garage for at least a half hour. It was agonizing waiting for her to come back. Ernie and I just sat behind a parked car. We couldn’t move a muscle. We couldn’t ask questions or look concerned, and we certainly couldn’t shout and plead, Give us back our mami!

  Even though that’s exactly what we both wanted to do.

  Mami did come back. Only, when she emerged from that back alley, she looked a thousand years older. Her jeans were scuffed at the knees and had bits of gravel flaking off. Ernie and I both ran to her and wrapped our arms around her so tight.

  “Mami! I thought you weren’t coming back!” Ernie wailed into her chest. She told him of course she was coming back and everything was okay, but I could see that the edges of her eyes were wet as she ushered us away from the building. Ernie was only seven at the time, so I wasn’t about to explain what I thought that man had done to our mami in the alleyway. Instead, I clung to Mami’s side, desperate to get us home. Mami didn’t speak for the rest of that day. I tried to make her an arepa and some coffee, even though I knew she didn’t want it. She was stuck in a horror I couldn’t pull her out of. I made sure Ernie and I gave her some quiet. We swept the floors and carried our trash to the dump and turned on the lights when it got late. Because otherwise, I think Mami would have just sat in the dark until the next morning.

  We never discussed what had happened. From that day on, Mami delivered our water payments after hours so no one would be scanning at Town Hall. She lived carefully, vigilantly. Never looking back; only forward. This is what it took to survive.

  I, on the other hand, felt like I was suffocating just remembering that day. As I headed toward my bus for school, I kept looking around to see if I was being watched. I had this image of my family being in some sort of bubble or snow globe while the world—or at least California—was catching fire. As I got on the bus, my fears swirled around me so fast, I forgot to breathe. My legs buckled.