Hailey's War

tall-maybe five-two-and slender except for the little potbelly a lot of girls had nowadays, the obsession for flat abs being over. She looked from Herlinda to me.

“Hey,” I said. “I’m Hailey.”

“Thank you for coming,” she said.

“I was sorry to hear about your boyfriend. Serena told me,” I said.

She nodded and said something that I thought was “Thank you” but couldn’t be sure: She was that quiet. We both looked to Herlinda to take over.

Herlinda did, fixing hot chocolate and offering pan dulce, both of which I accepted, although I wasn’t hungry. Then she spread a map of Mexico on the table and began the debriefing I’d been promised. “Have you ever been to Mexico?” she asked.

“To Baja California, yes,” I said.

“Did you drive?”

I nodded. It had been CJ’s idea, a road trip to a seaside town he’d heard about.

“Good,” Herlinda said. “So you know a little about driving on Mexican roads.” Even so, she went on to tell me things I’d already heard: that in isolated areas, drivers tended to go down the center of the road until they saw oncoming traffic, and that it was common for both parties to be jailed in case of a traffic accident. If I were in one, she said, I should be exceedingly polite to the police and keep my ears open for the subtle implication that a bribe would clear the whole thing up. I nodded assent. Her son leaned against the refrigerator and listened.

Then Herlinda turned her attention to the map. I saw a star, hand-drawn in ink, in the northern Sierra Madre region.

“That’s where we’re going?” I said.

“It’s the nearest town to the village,” Herlinda said.

My confusion must have shown on my face-I didn’t understand the distinction she was making-so Herlinda said, “You won’t take Nidia all the way; the road isn’t passable by car. You’ll take her to this town, and you’ll see the post office there. It has a Mexican flag over it. Take Nidia inside, and the postman will take her up to the village when he goes with the mail. They do it all the time, her mother says.”

“If the road’s not passable by car, how does the postman go up? Horseback?”

Herlinda smiled. “He has four-wheel-drive.”

I was embarrassed at my assumption. “If I’d known,” I said, “I could’ve got something with four-wheel.”

Herlinda shook her head. “It’s not just that,” she said. “The road’s narrow and it’s steep, and I guess city Mexicans don’t do well with it.” She left the obvious unsaid: Not to mention gringos.

Then she looked up at the kitchen doorway. I followed her gaze and saw a thin girl of maybe twelve or thirteen there, wearing a long pink nightshirt.

“You’re supposed to be in bed,” Herlinda told her.

“I wanted to say good-bye to Nidia.”

I moved from the kitchen counter and told Nidia, “I’ll take your bags out to the car,” thinking they’d want privacy for their good-byes.

Outside, I sat behind the wheel of the car I’d rented, a powerful V6 Impala. When I’d first driven it that afternoon, I felt a small rush of elation and power. Then, just as quickly, I’d been stabbed by a memory: Wilshire Boulevard and a hard thump from the front end of my car.

He darted out of nowhere; it was an accident; there was nothing you could have done. It had become my mantra in moments like these. But I wondered, if I ever owned a vehicle again, how long it would take before I could drive without thinking of Trey Marsellus.

eight

It was in northern Arizona that I first tried to have a substantial conversation with Nidia.

We had been traveling by night. That was my plan until we got to the border. Nocturnal travel was cooler in the Southwestern heat, and it would lower our chances of setting off a speed trap, because despite what I’d told Serena about being cautious on the road, I was pushing my luck just a little on speed. I wanted the trip to be done in about seven or eight days. It would have helped if Nidia knew how to drive, but she didn’t.

So, mostly, she’d been dozing as we drove through the night, or sometimes working on a knitting project in her lap. We didn’t talk much.

I couldn’t decide whether I liked Nidia or not. She was polite to me. Very polite, in fact, as though I were an authority figure just by virtue of being chosen to take her to Mexico. If she disapproved of my occasional bad language, or the liquor I drank neat over ice when the driving was done, she didn’t say anything about it. But my occasional attempts at small talk had all died pretty quickly. I just couldn’t seem to make any connection with her.

Tonight I didn’t mess around with small talk at all: I turned down the radio and asked her something serious.

“So what’s wrong with your grandmother?”

She looked up at me. “What?”

“Your sick grandmother,” I repeated, “what’s wrong?”

“She’s very old,” Nidia said slowly.

“It’s just old age?” Her answer surprised me; it seemed like a flimsy reason for a girl of Nidia’s age, just starting out in life, to be dispatched to a remote village indefinitely.

Nidia added, “She hurt her leg. Her hip, I mean.”

“A fall?”

She nodded.

“So how’d you”-I didn’t want to say the first thing that came to mind, which was, draw the short straw-“become the one who goes south to take care of her?”

Nidia said, “It’s something I’m good at. That was my job for a long time, taking care of a man who was sick.”

Serena hadn’t mentioned that. “Sick with what?” I asked.

“Cancer,” she said.

“What happened to him?”

“He died,” Nidia said. “It was… it was very sad, he was-” She turned her face toward the window, and I knew she was fighting back tears. I focused back on the road, averting my eyes. She wasn’t really thinking of the cancer guy, of course. She was thinking of Johnny Cedillo, whom I deliberately hadn’t brought up, thinking it still too raw a wound.

Then she spoke again. She said, “Adriano was smarter than anyone I’d ever known. He studied math for a living, but not math like people usually think of it. Adriano’s work was the kind of math you can’t even really use. I asked him why he was interested in stuff like that, and he said it was like being an explorer in the desert, places no one had gone yet. He liked being out putting his footprints in sand no one had ever walked in before.”

Nidia wasn’t crying, but she was speaking quickly, as if she was distracting herself from her grief with trivia about the cancer patient.

“You guys talked a bit, then, it sounds like,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “I was working for him for a little more than a year. At first I just came over to make some meals, clean up his apartment. But then he got sicker and needed someone living there, so I moved in.”

“Where was his family?” I asked. “There wasn’t anyone to help take care of him?”

“No,” she said. “He had a brother who died, and his mother was already dead, too. His father was still alive, but they didn’t…”

“Get along?” I supplied.

“Maybe,” she said. “And he never got married. Adriano didn’t have a life like most people had. His mind was