Of Women and Salt, Gabriela Garcia [100 best novels of all time .txt] 📗

“What do you mean?”

“That one.”

“What?”

“I’ll watch Madagascar even though it’s for littler kids.”

They watch Madagascar. They eat cheese sticks. Jeanette looks out the window every few hours. Jeanette waits and waits, and still nobody comes for Ana. She does the only thing that feels right: leaves the movie midway and curls up in bed, listens to the TV’s drone and Ana’s laugh from afar. Calls Mario. Explains nothing. Talks about the time they were both high and watched Fantasia in 3-D at the movie theater four times in one weekend. They laugh together. Grow sad together. Reminisce about grabbing for each other the night Mario’s father died in a car accident. Honor the pain in silence. The tender feeling in the smallest action. How empty each day. How hard to stay on track. Has he…? No. Has she…? No. Congratulations to each other.

A pause and Jeanette says: “We never talked about having children.”

“In the middle of getting high and fighting all the time? We were supposed to be like, ‘Oh yeah, let’s just bring another life into this and fuck that one up too’?”

“Maybe if we’d had a child. In the beginning. Maybe that would’ve kept us sober. Maybe that would’ve stopped the fighting.”

She thinks Mario is crying. She hears labored breathing, shaky shuddering. She knows this routine. Knows what comes next.

“How could I have hurt you so much? I regret. So much. That I could ever have placed a hand on you.”

Jeanette wants to cry, too, but is always afraid that if she lets it happen, she will never stop. That if she lets the pain seep, she will need something, someone to stop the bloodletting. Only one way to kill pain. And then the weight of it: the daily exercise, sobriety. How it drags at her feet, keeps her chained to herself.

Jeanette shakes her head no because when Mario speaks the words, then they are real. Then she is the battered ex-girlfriend, she is the fists-to-the-face that really happened. That other life that feels so distant now. All she can feel when it’s just two voices across an expanse is the knowing that still survives. The body her fingertips memorized, the universe of a relationship. All its language and borders and landscapes. A geography she studied for years and still does not understand: a man who pummels a fist into her side the same day he takes in a kitten found lying in the crook of a stairwell during a rainstorm. Nobody knows about the fights that got physical. Nobody knows these phone calls still happen. She thinks of Ana in the next room, listening to the credits. Thinks how even the best mothers in the world can’t always save their daughters.

Ana wakes in the night and comes to her bed. Asks if she can sleep there instead. They lie faceup, blinking into the darkness.

“I couldn’t sleep,” Ana says. “I miss my mom.”

“Oh, sweetie.”

“When is she coming home?”

Jeanette runs her fingers through a tangle in Ana’s hair. “Soon, I’m sure.”

“When did she say she’s coming home?”

“Oh, soon, soon.” Jeanette tries to change the subject: “What did you mean when you said you came to this country twice?”

Ana turns. A small lump in the bed. A tiny cocoon. “I came when I was a baby. I don’t remember. Then when I turned four, we went back to El Salvador.”

“Why?”

“They made us.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. The government people.”

“So then you came back?”

“In a car trunk.”

“What do you mean?”

Jeanette’s eyes adjust to the dark. She turns, too, and can see Ana’s face, brown and smooth. A little button nose. Stringy hair spread around her like a crown. She smells as children often do, a sharp, sweaty sweetness.

“We had to hide in a dark car trunk to come back. Only sometimes we could poke our heads through the back car seats to breathe.”

Jeanette searches for words, thinks of the weight of Ana’s story and tries to find an appropriately serious response. But Ana fidgets and yawns, seems to give the moment little importance.

“She said we had to do it for me.”

“What?”

“My mom said we had to come in the back of the car trunk for me even though sometimes I miss my grandma and I had a dog in El Salvador.”

“I had a dog when I was little.”

“What was the dog’s name?”

“Matilda.”

Ana giggles and lays back. “Can you be my babysitter forever instead of Jesse?”

She knows her mother is right. She knows nobody is coming for Ana. Barefoot, she makes phone calls in the morning, T-shirt bunched at her hips, huddled in the hazy light of her room. She is not surprised to find the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services offices closed on Sunday mornings. But she is surprised the woman who answers the ICE hotline can’t find Ana’s mother in the system by name and asks for an Alien Registration Number in a monotone.

“You’re talking about an unaccompanied minor? Central America?”

“Well, no. The mother.”

“Oh, that’s good. Surge of unaccompanied minors. But if she’s got a guardian, then she’s probably in family detention. You got the alien minor’s number?”

“No, she’s—”

“Oh, well you can visit our website for more information.” The silence, when the woman hangs up, is unbearable.

Jeanette finds the numbers of immigration lawyers who are much more eager to speak. They are attentive. They have questions. How is she doing? they ask. How is she holding up? It’s a question Jeanette is used to. Her answer—“Fine”—is automatic.

“Oh, if only I had a dime for every mother taken away who can’t contact her kid, detention guards not even listening when she says she left a kid behind,” says one lawyer, whom Jeanette imagines for no reason as near retired and kind. It’s the dears she sprinkles: “Immigration is a civil matter, dear. It’s not criminal court. There’s no guaranteed phone call. There’s no public attorney.”

Jeanette can only squeak out an answer. Ana is at her kitchen table, drawing on blank sheets of