Hailey's War

nowhere with an invalid? I think she’s had enough death and dying. I don’t think it’s right.”

There was a second or two of silence before Serena spoke. “Has she said she doesn’t want to go?”

A beat passed before I admitted, “I haven’t asked.”

“Well, she packed her stuff and got in the car, prima. Doesn’t that tell you something?”

“I’m going to ask her straight out.”

“I don’t think you should interfere,” she said. “This is about family. If this were your father, if he were sick, how far would be too far for you to go to take care of him?”

I closed my eyes. Nowhere, of course. I would have gone to the other side of the planet.

“Hailey?” she prompted.

“If I ask Nidia directly and she says she doesn’t want to go to Mexico, I’m not taking her,” I said.

“Fine,” Serena said, her tone short. “Go ahead. I can tell you what she’s gonna say, though.”

“I’ll call you later.”

I disconnected the call and walked back to the room. “Nidia,” I said as soon as I’d closed the door behind me, “are you absolutely sure you want to do this?”

“Como?” she said, confused.

I set my cell phone down on the dresser and said, “You’re undocumented. Once you cross the border, you can’t come back. Not easily. The U.S. is allocating more money to border security all the time.”

She seemed on the verge of speaking, but I needed to finish. “My hand to God, no one can make me muscle you off to Mexico if you don’t want to go. Just say the word, and I’ll turn around and take you back. If you can’t go to your family, Serena would take you in. I’m sure she would, for Teaser’s sake.”

It seemed like an odd thing to say, given the testy exchange we’d just had on the phone, but I knew Serena. If push came to shove, she’d help this girl.

“No,” Nidia said, straightening, and there was a sharp tone to her voice I hadn’t heard before. “I want to go. No one’s making me. You aren’t going to change your mind about driving me, are you?”

I licked my lower lip, surprised at how adamant she seemed. “Nidia,” I began. Then I turned and walked over to the window. The sheer inner curtains were drawn, but I could see the parking lot outside, the peach glow of the lights. I wasn’t looking for anything or at anything: I was about to say something delicate.

“I don’t want to offend you by talking about something that’s personal, but Serena told me about Johnny, your fiance,” I said slowly. “He obviously cared about you a great deal. What do you think he’d advise you to do here?”

There was no hesitation before I heard her say, “Johnny would want me to go.”

I turned around to face her. There wasn’t any doubt in her green-hazel eyes. “Okay,” I said. “Then I’ll take you.”

She relaxed. “Good,” she said. Then she added, “My abuela needs me. That’s why.”

I picked up my cell phone from the dresser. “Listen, I’m going to go out and get a drink,” I said, scooping up my hoodie off the back of a chair. “Don’t wait on me. Get some sleep.”

I called Serena as soon as I was far enough away from the motel room not to be overheard through the walls. She obviously recognized my number on caller ID and answered with, “So?”

“She wants to go,” I said, turning my face up against a light breeze. “I’m taking her.”

“Told you.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said, watching the white lights of the freeway in the distance. “Serena, you know I love you, right?”

“Wow, you get over being mad quick,” she said, amused.

“That’s not what I’m saying,” I told her. “What I’m saying is, I love you, but don’t ever throw my dead father into a conversation to score points off me again.”

I’d hoped that the world-weary-but-nice-looking guy from poolside would be in the bar, but he didn’t show in the time it took me to nurse two margaritas, so finally I just paid and left.

ten

Mexico.

Crossing the border wasn’t a big deal. The traffic was the worst of it, inching up to the low brown structure of the border checkpoint, where forbidding signs advised that bringing a firearm into Mexico was punishable by Mexican law. But after showing our various forms of ID-my driver’s license and passport, Nidia’s Mexican birth certificate-we were told to drive on. They didn’t even ask about a gun. I smiled and finger-waved like an excited tourist as Nidia and I pulled away, the Airweight taped under my seat.

Then we were into the crush and color of Juarez, American logos competing with old Colonial architecture. Most of it I’d expected from pictures. Little things surprised me, though, like passing a storefront church advertising meetings of Alcoholicos Anonimos. You didn’t expect things like that in Mexico.

After that, we drove on the main highways in broad, bright daylight, jockeying among big semi-trailers. It was hot, and I worried about the air-conditioning straining the Impala’s engine, no matter how new and well-maintained the car, so I cycled the a/c on and off, alternating with the whipping wind of two rolled-down windows.

Our second day, we started out early, because this was the day I believed I’d get Nidia to her destination. I wanted to leave us plenty of time to navigate the smaller, secondary roads we’d take once we got off Highway 16. We’d be climbing up into the mountains, and I had visions of the Impala inching along behind a flock of sheep being driven by a sheepherder on foot, or following a lumbering farm truck at twenty-eight miles an hour.

And I was worried about Nidia, who’d shown a minor tendency toward car sickness even on the straighter roads. She never complained, but several times when I stopped for gas, she’d asked me for ginger ale, to settle her stomach.

Now we were beginning to climb up into the mountains. The sun had just gone down, and the traffic had thinned out as the trees and brush on the roadside got thicker. The surrounding landscape reminded me of the mountains of eastern Nevada, but more extreme: steeper, lusher, more remote.

Nidia had taken out her knitting again. When I asked her what she was working on, she told me it was to be a sweater: It got cold in the mountains at night, regardless of the season. I had to take her word for it-not about the weather, but that the knitting project would someday be a sweater. It was shapeless now, though I liked the yarn she was using, a dun brown variegated with pale pink.

We didn’t talk much, and I cruised the radio dial for any kind of American music. Like Herlinda had suggested, I’d taken to driving down the center of the road-there was no dividing line, anyway, and no traffic going the opposite direction. Once or twice, I thought I spotted a car about a half-mile behind us; I saw it on lower switchbacks in the highway, when I glanced in the rearview or out the window.

Ahead, in a steep mountain face, the dark opening of a tunnel yawned before the Impala. I slowed down and edged the car to the right side of the road in case of oncoming traffic, and as we drove into the narrow dimness of the tunnel, the radio cut out as though turned off. I reached down to flick on the headlights, and they flashed off what looked like a low wall of dark metal in front of us, a wall that resolved itself into a stalled car, sideways, blocking the road.

“Jesus!” I hit the brakes so hard that Nidia’s body snapped against the restraint of her seat belt and the shapeless knitting project bounced off the glove box and onto the floor. We skidded to a stop about six feet from the dark, stalled sedan.

“Sorry,” I said to Nidia, touching her shoulder. “Are you okay?”

Then I noticed headlights behind us. It was the car I’d caught glimpses of in the rearview. Unlike us, they didn’t