But there is no heroin yet. There is no Operation Shut Down Every Pill Mill. We are far from the dollar-a-milligram to come. We are far from treatment bed after treatment bed after treatment bed, half of them scams, but I don’t know this yet. We are far from my mother screaming she’d lose her life to save mine, she’d lose her life to hear me say I want to live. Mario and me: we are headed to hell hand in hand, but I don’t know this yet. I just know it’s not one Oxy anymore. I just know I’m falling in love too. With it. With him. Becoming the same thing. Falling in love. Falling in love.
Nobody says rising in love.
And the husband with his wife standing before me and the husband says, she doesn’t want to get an eye lift even though I tell her she looks like shit with all those wrinkles. He tells me I’m pretty again and says, give her something that will at least make it better. I lay out the options on the counter, and the woman looks from one bottle to the next and I notice her eyes begin to water and I beg her in my head please don’t cry please don’t cry please don’t cry. She doesn’t cry.
I thought I came here, she says instead, her voice shaking. I thought I—
She doesn’t want to get an eye lift even though I tell her she looks like shit, the husband says.
My hand is shaking and her hand is shaking and all I can think is a needle doesn’t really hurt that much, it’s just a pinch.
When the woman walks away, the husband hands me a blue-black container in its package and says also, he would like to return this.
I say, you didn’t buy that here. We don’t sell that here.
Yes, you do, he says, I see it right behind you on that shelf. I have the receipt, he says.
You didn’t buy that here, I repeat.
And I know I’ll be fired and I know that neither Mario nor I will have a job and I know that he will never love me like I need him to love me, which is to say a love that erases everything that came before, and I know that he will end me but I feel like a truck, I feel like a bag bursting with rocks, I feel like I could crush everything beneath my weight.
You didn’t buy that here, I say. I will not accept this, I say.
12MORE THAN WE THINK
Ana
Mexico, 2019
She was only thirteen, but Ana was not afraid of death. She’d already seen it up close—how death had devoured her mother bit by bit, from the inside out, until what remained became apparent: a husk, a whisper, something you could mourn alive, not her mother at all. So she faced the river brave. She watched its muddy current swallow vines and leaves. She felt its power beneath her feet, how the placid shore hid a deeper hunger ahead.
The pollero handed her a black garbage bag in which to place her few possessions—a tattered backpack that contained a ziplock with all her important documents and a cell phone with an American SIM card she’d purchased from a gas station. She stripped to her underwear beside the dozen others who did the same—a few children and teens like her, mostly, and four adult women, two men. She stuffed her clothes, a yellowed Hello Kitty shirt and dirt-streaked jeans, into the bag. She tied a double knot.
A little girl beside her began to whimper.
Her older brother, a teenager, placed a hand over her mouth. “Shut up before he hears you,” he whispered as the girl placed a hand over his. She stopped crying.
The pollero had guided them to a large black van by the shore hidden in the scrub. Now he opened the back doors to several tires secured with rope. He held a flashlight in his teeth as he motioned to the group. He wanted them to drag a tire each, to help the little kids. He’d gone over it earlier.
Ana rubbed her legs together for warmth. All around her, thick brush scratched her ankles and mud coated her shoes. She trudged behind the others and pulled at a tire that bounced once on the ground and fell on its side. She struggled to lift the tire from the sludge and roll it toward the river. Some of the smallest kids shared a float with a sibling or adult, pushing alongside them, too little to really help. The adults instructed them, watched over them.
The pollero showed the group how to position themselves onto the tire so their upper body was supported. Ana squinted. She could barely make out his features in the dark, the cave of his black eyes and the long, thick hair he wore in a ponytail. He had on a hooded sweatshirt and dark corduroy pants that concealed the gun she knew he carried.
He’d shown it to them back in Monterrey, as they huddled in a one-room stash house before the next leg of the trip. He’d shown it while instructing them not to speak, to listen to every instruction, the code word should anyone pull them off a bus. The kids had stared wide-eyed. The adults had barely batted an eye.
Ana was the only one who started the trip already in Mexico. The others had journeyed for a month or more, from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras. They spoke little to one another. Their accents were noticeable; you never knew whom to trust. And a couple of them spoke Mam, K’iche’, barely any Spanish at all. Ana couldn’t remember quieting for so long. Other than a few whispered words—Where’s
