Nancy liked to sprinkle her speech with Spanish even though Ana spoke English. Ana nodded though she wasn’t sure.
The first day they’d been in the home, Gloria had served their food in a separate part of the house, a little room off the kitchen, where the two of them could eat out of sight. But Nancy had swept in and said no, no, they were now part of the family, of course they had to eat with her and Roberto, and they had all eaten together in mostly silence as Roberto glared and Nancy directed questions that her mother answered with a quiet humility Ana had never seen in her, and she wished they could just eat, alone, in the little room so she could just stop … performing. But that was years ago. Now she liked being around Nancy. She wanted so badly to be Nancy. Not of here but with a not-of-hereness that evoked curiosity and interest, maybe humor, like when Nancy went to the mercado and her Spanish was met with amusement, with kindness. Nancy in a huipil, her hair in ribboned braids. Nancy telling the Indigenous artesanos at the market how beautiful they wove. Nancy with the not-of-hereness people smiled at, just a little bit of smirk. Said here, come, take.
Her mother wasn’t the doting type. Ana had made her a card once, for Mother’s Day, and written Thank you for sacrificing everything for me. “Is that what you think?” Gloria asked her that night. “That I’m supposed to sacrifice everything for you?” Ana hadn’t understood what she did wrong, what she could have possibly said that was wrong. Her mother apologized shortly after, thanked her for the card, told her that she loved her, that she was tired. She knew her mother was tired. That’s why she helped. That’s why she worked.
That’s why she walked the blocks around Doña Nancy’s colonia watching the rich kids kick balls around the skeletons of new construction feeling so much older, too old for shrieking, too old for candy-sticky skin, too old for looking so free. Until a boy said hi one day, asked her age, until she replied with her new accent and, yes, of course, they were the same age.
Go play, her mother would say in the early days. Go play, Doña Nancy would say, showing up from the mercado with a wooden ball on a string attached to a bucket. A doll. A Jacob’s ladder.
Doña Nancy taking her to Cristalita to eat frozen strawberries with cream, sugared strawberries, everything strawberry in the city of strawberries, then buying her a doll. I’ve never seen anyone treat their maid like she’s their child, her mother muttered when Ana got back home with her gifts. I’m not her maid, she protested. Her mother smiled.
When she first got to Mexico, baby deportee, the strawberries had made Ana sick. Or maybe it’d been something else. She was sick all the time at first. Doña Nancy said to her: me too.
They were lost or abandoned or there had been some mix-up. Or this was on purpose. A kindness? A cruelty? A trick? They’d been dropped off over the border in Mexico instead of flown to El Salvador and no one kept track of them. Everyone assumed they were traveling north. Straight off the train tracks and biding time in a city along the path. They just lay low and ducked migra like the rest, knowing they’d make their way back. The first thing her mother had done was call a cousin who lived in Irapuato. The cousin found Gloria this job. She made hardly any money, nothing even close to what she’d earned in Miami, but they had a room. Her mother told her she’d save so Ana wouldn’t have to hop trains or walk miles, if she could help it. Burn money on a van, on the most expensive guide. Months whipping by. Years. Doña Nancy: “Who’d want to leave such a beautiful country?” As if anything were about beauty. Or want.
Her mother wasn’t the doting type but Ana knew her mother loved her. Because, look—she, too, cried sometimes talking about the kids playing, about all the other possible lives if x or y had happened instead of z. Saying, I’m so proud of you, all the ways you help me. Gloria loved to dance but she didn’t go to dance clubs as she had in Miami anymore. And whenever Ana spied Nancy in the bathroom, carefully applying eyeliner for a night out with Roberto or her “ex-pat” friends, Nancy jiggling her hips to a radio song with a shot of tequila in her hand, she wanted her mother to be Nancy too. She wanted to grow up even faster so maybe she could set her mother free.
Her last year in Mexico, Gloria got sick. Fast, like one day blood in a tissue and the next there they were, the two of them, huddled in a dark IMSS hospital. (Nancy had paid a doctor to see her even though she had no papers but let them know she couldn’t pay long-term.) Doctor saying, Why’d you wait so long? Saying, I don’t know, there’s not much we can do, would the patrona pay for chemo? I don’t know, it’s so advanced.
Walking her mother down a hallway, holding her oxygen tank. Helping her onto a bus because Nancy was working and couldn’t pick them up. How her mother placed a hand in her lap. Whispered thank you, and Ana wasn’t even sure for what.
She remembered curling next to her mother on their twin bed, ear to her chest. To hear her heart. Each labored breath. To will each one. Please please please.
Money in the floorboard. Would chemo buy her more time? She could have taken it but she didn’t. She could have taken it because years later Nancy caught Roberto with his mistress, and she raged, she threw her ring down the sink, she left Mexico
