The Governor's Wife (30 page)

And now he's an American hero.

The only silver lining in Carl's dark cloud of a mind was knowing that no one fell harder or farther than an American hero exposed by scandal. So Carl would continue his search for scandal in the Governor's Mansion, scandal that would drive Bode Bonner from office. The governor's staff was loyal to a fault—but there was always a fault line, a crack in the loyalty of every politician's entourage, one follower who stopped following. He would find that person. He would use that person. He would bring Bode Bonner down. Unless that Mexican drug cartel killed him first, as some drug war experts on the cable talk shows had suggested might happen.

Carl could only hope.

Jesse Rincón had never before had a
colonia
woman ask him to end a life. These women had nothing in life, yet they desperately wanted to give birth to life. But this girl sitting across his desk now pleaded for an abortion.

"If my employer learns I am pregnant, he will fire me," Marisol Rivera said in Spanish.

"You work in a
maquiladora?
"

"Yes. Across the river."

"What do you make?"

"
Un dólar la hora.
"

One dollar an hour.

"No. What kind of product do you make? Televisions, toasters, clothes …?"

"Underwear for the
gringos
, panties and thongs."

She stood and turned to show her backside. She reached back and pulled the top strap of her red thong up for him to see.

"I take a few from time to time. What they call, a perk."

"Not as good as health insurance."

"I save my wages so that one day I might live beyond the wall, perhaps when I am twenty years old."

She dreamed of living beyond the wall, but she was destined to be yet another pretty
chica
whose life is derailed by a child before she is sixteen. And Jesse had no doubt that in fifteen years, her daughter would be sitting before him begging for an abortion so that she might live beyond the wall.

"But that dream will not come true, Doctor, if I am fired for being pregnant or if I have this baby. Will you do it?"

"Marisol, I cannot."

"Why not?"

"I am Catholic."

"And I am fifteen and pregnant."

"What are you going to do?"

Marisol Rivera had left. Jesse now shook his head.

"I do not know. It is easy to say a woman should have a right to an abortion, but it is something else to perform the abortion. To end a life. What if my mother had chosen an abortion?"

"She thinks the baby will ruin her life."

"If I perform the abortion, one day she might live beyond the wall. If I do not, she will surely live out her life on this side of the wall."

"Is there a doctor in Laredo who will do it?"

"No. There might be one in McAllen, perhaps as far away as Brownsville." He exhaled. "Two lives rest in my hands."

She could tell he needed to think, so Lindsay went over to Inez's vacant desk and updated her medical histories. Jesse sat quietly for a long time. Finally, he stood and began assembling surgical tools by the examining table.

"Find her," he said.

"Your dad's on
Oprah
," Darcy Daniels said.

Becca Bonner lay sprawled on her bed in their dorm room. Asleep. They always napped after volleyball practice. Darcy rolled out of her bed, stepped over to Becca's bed, and gave her a shake. Her eyes opened.

"Your dad's on
Oprah
."

Becca rubbed her eyes and said, "I thought she quit?"

"It's a special."

On the flat-screen TV mounted on the wall, Becca's dad stood on the stage surrounded by the thirteen Mexican children. Darcy and Becca had gone to the Mansion the past Sunday to meet the kids. The audience gave the governor a standing ovation.

"He didn't spray his hair."

"Josefina looks pretty in that yellow dress."

On the television, her dad introduced the children, first the boys and then he turned to Josefina, who was almost hiding behind him.

"And this beautiful young lady is Josefina."

The camera captured her face as she slowly raised her brown eyes to him.

"
¿Yo … Josefina … soy hermosa?
"

"Yes, you are beautiful."

Tears rolled down Josefina's cheeks. She hugged Becca's father.

"Bode Bonner …
el hombre … es mi héroe
," she said on national TV.

Lindsay did not know where Marisol Rivera lived, so she and Pancho walked the
colonia
asking everyone she saw if they knew her. Up and down the dirt roads with the black satchel over her shoulder she trudged, stopping from time to time to tend to minor injuries and apply antibiotic to children's sores. The wind brought the smell of the river into her nostrils and the dirt of the desert into her mouth and inside her clothes. She spit dirt then retrieved her water bottle from the satchel and rinsed her mouth. But her thoughts were on this child so desperate to have a life torn from within her so that she might live beyond the wall. The sadness of the thought crushed her spirit that day.

It was just after five when Pancho barked.

Down a little dirt side path near the river she saw residents gathered around a small shack. A sense of fear enveloped her. She ran to the shack with Pancho at her side. The people parted for the Anglo nurse, and she ducked her head and entered the shack. She gasped at the sight of so much blood. She thought she might faint, so she went to her knees. A wire clothes hanger seemed to float in the blood. The girl lay in gray dirt made red by the blood.

Marisol Rivera would never live beyond the wall.

"I'm against abortion."

"No, you're not."

"I'm for abortion?"

"No, you're not for abortion either."

"Then what am I?"

"A politician who wants to be president."

They had flown into Chicago that morning and arrived at O'Hare to a hero's welcome. Jim Bob had tweeted ahead. They checked into the Ritz and then went to the studio. After taping the show, Mandy took the kids back to the hotel for a room-service dinner and a pay-per-view movie; Bode, Jim Bob, and Ranger Hank took a cab to Morton's for a thick steak. They now sat in a booth drinking bourbon; Hank drank a soda. He stood when a middle-aged couple came up to their table and held out a menu for Bode to autograph.

"Easy, Hank. We're fourteen hundred miles from the border."

Bode signed the menu. The couple then leaned in and took a self-photo with their cell phone, as had strangers at the studio, on the sidewalks, and in the entrance of the restaurant. After they left, Bode turned back to Jim Bob.

"Abortion is a wedge issue the Democrats use to split Republicans and women."

"It ain't the only issue splitting men and women."

Two attractive young women wielding iPhones now stopped at their table.

"Governor, will you take a photo with us? We're followers."

"Two pretty gals like you? You bet."

He stood between them and wrapped his arms around them. They squeezed in tight and smelled intoxicating. He liked Chicago. They held out their phones and took a few photos then thanked him. Bode returned to his seat but he and Jim Bob watched the girls sashay off.

"Nice followers," Jim Bob said. But his thoughts soon returned to politics. "So your position on abortion is: You hate to see a life ended. You don't think the Supreme Court should make up the law to suit their politics. The people should. Democracy should. But we have more pressing national matters to deal with right now, like the economy and deporting those damn illegal Mexicans."

"You sure that'll work?"

"This is what I do."

Bode downed his bourbon.

"She reminded me of my mother," he said.

"Which one?"

"Not the girls … Oprah."

"You're mother was white and Irish."

"She has a sweet face."

Like his mother before the cancer. Once she died, his dad's days were numbered. The official cause of death was prostate cancer, but the real cause was loneliness. He couldn't go on without her. Then it was just Ramón and Chelo to raise Bode Bonner the boy. But now Bode Bonner the man wondered: If his wife did not come back, would he die of loneliness, too?

Boca Chica lay two hundred miles southeast of Laredo.

They left in the pickup truck just as the sun rose over the Rio Grande and drove south on U.S. Highway 83, the river road. The river ran south from Laredo for almost a hundred miles, then veered east on its zig-zag journey to the Gulf of Mexico; the highway followed the river. Their journey would take them to
Colonia Nueva Vida
.

"You didn't kill that girl," she said.

Marisol Rivera had died at five and been buried by sunset in the small
colonia
cemetery. There was no police investigation, no autopsy, no news report, no obituary in the local newspaper. There were only tears.

"Or your mother."

Jesse did not speak for several long miles. She worried that she had overstepped with him, mentioning his mother. But he finally spoke.

"My father did not want me, and my mother died having me. Dying is a way of life on the border, I know that. But I cannot understand why God made it so."

"He didn't."

He stared at the road ahead for a time before he again spoke.

"You are right. I forget. There is no god on the border."

They rode in silence for many miles.

Jesse Rincón had made this journey many times during the last five years, only Pancho to provide company if not conversation. Driving the river road through the brown borderlands, he often contemplated his life and the choices he had made, and always he would revisit his choice to return to the
colonias
. His medical school classmates would be well into their private practices by now, well into families and financial success. What would his life be like now if he had made the same choice? Wife and children … a nice house in the suburbs of Houston or Dallas or perhaps Austin … vacations to the ocean or mountains twice each year … teaching soccer to his son or daughter … his sons and daughters, for he had wanted a big family, perhaps because he had only his uncle growing up. All those dreams he had envisioned as a child in Nuevo Laredo and as a student at Jesuit and Harvard, and he knew that was to be his life.

But then he came home when his uncle died.

He buried his uncle in Nuevo Laredo then drove back across the river and out to
Colonia Ángeles
to visit his mother's grave in the little cemetery. There he had cried for her and for himself. He felt alone in the world.

He stood to leave but heard a shrill scream from a shanty where women had gathered. They told him in Spanish that the woman inside was having a child, but the baby was stuck and the midwife could not turn the baby. The woman and child would surely die. He ducked inside the shanty and saved mother and child.

He knew then that this was to be his life. Coming home to the
colonias
had not been a choice, any more than one chooses where to be born. But still he had questioned his path in life, this harsh life on the border.

But not that day.

That day the governor's wife rode next to him. Their paths in life had intersected on the border. And he no longer felt alone in the world.

"Do you make this journey often?"

Lindsay decided to break the silence.

"Once a week before. Now, perhaps twice a month. But never at night. Highway bandits."

"Bandits? In America?"

"On the border, it is—"

"I know. An entirely different world."

Pancho sat between them, the windows were down, and a hot breeze blew through the vehicle. Lindsay stared out at the desert landscape that seemed endless and vacant. Until she saw blue water.

"That is Falcon Lake," Jesse said, "where the American on a jet ski was murdered by the cartel. The Mexican government sent an investigator, but the cartel killed him, too. No more investigators came after that. The border runs down the middle of the lake, but Mexican pirates often cross over and rob American fishermen."

"Bandits and pirates?"

He shrugged.

"But they say the bass fishing on the lake is very good."

They drank coffee from a thermos and drove through border counties called Zapata and Starr and Hidalgo and small border towns named Rio Bravo and Roma where the river and highway both turned east—

"Back in the fifties," Jesse said, "Marlon Brando came here to film the movie
Viva Zapata
. I have never seen it. But these counties became famous when the votes of dead people here elected Kennedy and Johnson in nineteen-sixty."

—and La Joya and Mission and Alamo and the landscape gradually changed from the scrub brush of the desert to the fertile delta land of the Lower Rio Grande Valley, lush and tropical with palm trees and bougainvillea, lemon and lime orchards, cotton and cane fields, orange groves and grapefruit orchards, and humid air that seemed to stick to her skin. They followed the river all the way to Brownsville at the southernmost tip of Texas.