Of her actual life in the US, though, she remembered more. She’d lived first in an apartment somewhere else in Texas with three other migrant families, sharing a twin bed with her mother. Then a friend had told her mother about a job working for a housekeeping company in Miami. So they had traveled by bus, Ana splayed on her mother’s legs so they’d only have to purchase one ticket.
They had lived in Miami five years, first in a small, roach-filled apartment in Homestead and then in a town house in the Kendall suburbs. The last had been the happiest years of her life that she could remember—an elementary school she loved with a huge jungle gym under the sun, weekends playing in the ball pit of a McDonald’s across the street from their complex, trips to the beach, barbecues at the park. She’d had no idea how tenuous a life she’d borrowed.
Then her mother taken. Arriving home from school to a locked door, an empty house. A neighbor—Janet? J-something?—took her in for a few days before officers came for Ana too. Then family detention, a jail for mothers, babies. A transfer to a different, cold, cold holding center. Other officers, Border Patrol? Hard to keep track of. Then, her mother had told her, a bus that dropped them in Mexico, an agent that said, “Make your way to El Salvador from here.” They never did.
She heard the shore before she saw it. Heard the footsteps of others who reached the bank and abandoned their tires. So much mingled sorrow, relief. How nice it would be to … collapse. Rest awhile. She couldn’t. She stood on the pebbly shore, the cold air shocking her skin into goose bumps, and kicked the tire aside with her leg. A rock had scratched her foot and she bled, but she had no time to worry over a small injury, minor pain. She blinked until she could make out a bush ahead and sprinted toward it, holding the bag and her throbbing arm at her side.
Behind the bush, Ana tore the plastic garbage bag and thrust her clothes on. She lamented she hadn’t thought to bring a small towel. Her soaked bra formed rings on her T-shirt. Wet clothes a dead giveaway. She tried to dry herself as best she could with her one other, much dirtier, shirt. Ana put a sock over her cut foot and it quickly reddened with blood, slid into her crusty sneakers. Then, she made her way toward a sandy path, some houses farther ahead, highway, a dollar store, fast food. She moved through the scrub.
An engine whir and the screech of tires. She remained hidden but could see through the leaves. A few meters from her, a white van turned on its lights near another trail. Two men with flashlights and bulletproof vests jumped out from either side. They aimed the flashlights at three of the children.
She could hear their words, in Spanish. Questions about where they were coming from, whom else they were with.
The children in the light’s halo were eight or nine, two boys and one girl. The girl’s hair was sopping wet and she held a small black backpack with a broken strap. The kids looked at one another and slowly walked toward the agents, the girl dropping her backpack as if unsure what to do with it.
Ana became acutely aware of her breath, like she had no idea how she’d ever breathed without thinking about it, without measuring each inhale and exhale. Her whole body a spark. She wanted to run but had the better sense to stay hidden. She watched the agents’ flashlights zoom above her as they made circles. She huddled deeper into the shadow of the bushes before her and thought of the promise she’d made her mother before she died—she’d survive, she’d fight. She told herself to swallow. She told herself to breathe.
They rounded up the rest of the children. Ana knew the parents instructed their kids to purposely look for the agents, to go to them. All sorts of rumors—they wouldn’t send children back, they’d process asylum more quickly for a child without a parent or a parent with a child, they’d send them straight to their families if they had someone in the country. None of it was true or all of it was true.
So much silence and the mind became unbearable. She’d cried quietly many nights on the floor of drop houses and motels all over Tamaulipas, San Luis Potosí, Monterrey. Cancer had ripped through her mother so fast, there was little time to consider something so frivolous as loss. What a luxurious thing, to feel. The pain a tender ache now that she could massage and curl into. For so long, she’d held the grief at bay. She’d smiled strong for her mother as she walked her brittle body down the corridor of a clinic or placed the ventilator over her mouth. She’d pretended that, when her mother coughed and the tissue came away wet and blood spattered, there was still possibility, a chance for recovery. Her very job, Ana thought, had been not to grieve, so that her mother could. She’d been the airy balance in a world of plastic tubes, breathing machines, metal. On her silent trip, Ana had allowed the weeping child through, a child as alone in the world without her mother as she had been six years ago.
She remembered: her neighbor who took her in for a few days. A brief moment, a small act, but ingrained in the way childhood becomes a series of images, a detail, a color, a word so that one moment becomes
