The pollero instructed them on how to dog-paddle once they hit the water, even through the waist-high parts of the river, as he waited for a call from a lookout. The mud could swallow them like quicksand if they touched the ground, he said. They would drown and no one would be able to help them if the Border Patrol didn’t come. They needed to paddle with their feet and hold their bags on their heads or with their teeth. Most of the people in the group hoped Border Patrol would catch them. Hoped they could start their asylum process on the other side and not in a tent camp. But the pollero had instructed some of the adults and older teens on where to go to try to blend in if they weren’t caught. What streets to look for, what houses.
But right now, all Ana could see was water. Water like polished black stone. Ana could make out more bushes, more dirt, on the other side. The sides looked the same. Everything scrub, dirt, her own shivering body. During the day in Miguel Alemán, the sun was brutal and unrelenting. She’d folded her one clean shirt under a baseball cap just to protect her neck from sunburn. It was already peeled and raw, because they’d spent the day camped out and hiding at another part of the river.
They’d waited to cross but there were too many patrols on the other side. At that part of the river, there’d been no hint of breeze or even life. Just brush, tumbleweed, straw-colored dust that she’d expelled into tissue. She’d breathed so much sand she pictured it coating her lungs, its own desert beside her heart, a dune under her ribs.
But tonight was opposite, dry ice. It hurt to breathe. The mud was cold. She knew the water would be too. She knew the cold would wipe the fear, and she wanted to be there already, in the water, floating on her back, though she knew that wouldn’t be the case.
“I don’t want to go in,” the little girl in pigtails whispered beside her, teary.
“You have to,” Ana told her. “It’s going to be okay.”
“My mom is on the other side,” she said.
“We’re going to be okay.”
The girl reminded Ana of herself, of the trunk of a car, the cold of metal, of hospital machines. Of when she’d been motherless for days after her mother’s detention, taken in by a stranger and wondering if she’d ever see her own family again.
The pollero got the call. Border Patrol agents switched shifts and would leave their patrol cars empty with the headlights on. A one-hour window, what they’d waited for all day. He whispered directions, thrust their tires.
Motherless, motherless again.
The adults pushed the kids forward as best they could. A few sniffled and whimpered; one yelped when her feet touched the water. Ana gripped her plastic bag with one hand and dragged the tire with the other. Her feet touched the icy water, and the mud became thicker, more greedily sucking. She lifted each foot with effort and finally gave up and slid through the muck.
The water was thicker than she had imagined. She’d pictured a swift river and currents she’d have to battle with all her might. But the river was rather narrow, and the water swampy, muddy. Ana could barely see before her, but she was guided by the shapes on the other side. She plodded until the water drenched her waist, and she remembered the pollero had told them to swim. She waded with one hand holding the bag on her head and the other grasping the tire. All around her, the others did the same, quiet, the only sound water splashing. Ana tried to wipe her eyes with her forearm but streaked mud across her face. Her eyes stung. She had only waded for minutes but already her arms felt tired, her shoulder muscles burned. She kicked and kicked but was making it across at a crawling pace. Maybe there was a current.
Ana heard a yelp and the commotion of splashing water.
Behind her, the pigtailed girl who had gone in with her was thrashing and crying out. “I’m stuck! I’m stuck!” she wailed.
Her brother, holding himself afloat beside her, leaned over his tire and pulled at her arms. Water lapped over the little girl in spurts. Her head bobbed in and out of the water.
Ana froze, unsure whether to turn back and swim the feet that separated her from the girl. But one of the older women, closer, made it to the girl and pulled at her from the other side.
“My feet!” the girl cried. “The river is eating me!” She splashed and wailed each time her head went under.
“Quiet!” the older woman whispered loudly. “Stop yelling!”
Others along the ant trail of tire and body stopped and looked over. But slowly, as if an escalator had restarted, the bodies moved forward again. Standing still meant the current pushed the group further askew of the bushes for which they aimed. Ana began to kick again too. She reasoned there was no use in dooming herself if another was helping the girl. But there was an ugly calculation in her decision too—she also reasoned that there was no use if the girl couldn’t be helped. She tasted her own tears, or maybe sweat, her own salt. The sound of legs paddling and splashing. The pigtailed girl quieting. The whole night too quiet. She’ll be okay. Snaking her way forward. She could make out the shore, could see a bank and the patchy grass that framed it. Soon she would touch ground in the country that made her, expelled her. But Roma, Texas, meant nothing to her. Would Miami? Miami without her mother. She was crying again.
Ana was so young when she had first traveled to the United States. She could no longer make out the real memories from those
