The Lemon Orchard (31 page)

Jack waved to let him know he’d be right there, then turned back to Ronnie. “Look, sorry to trouble you. I’ll go check with Delfina. Have a good night.” He started toward Ralph’s SUV.

“Thank you,” she said sounding relieved. She snapped on her seat belt. “She’ll help you. When you find Rosa, let us know how she’s doing, okay?”

The hair on the back of Jack’s neck stood up. He stopped walking and turned slowly toward Ronnie.

“How do you know her name is Rosa?”

“You must have said it,” she said. “This morning.”

He stared at the worry lines in her forehead, at the sweat breaking out along her brow.

“No, Ronnie,” he said. “I didn’t. I never said her name.”

“You must have,” she said, keeping her voice calm. “Otherwise, how would I know?”

“Good question: how
do
you know?” Jack asked.

Ronnie seemed to think about it. She looked up at the sky, hands gripping the steering wheel. She drew a deep breath. “I took her,” she said.

Julia

The ride had been long and hot, and she was glad she’d left Bonnie with Roberto’s father. As they passed Yuma and drove through the desert, he stared out the window around as if seeing it for the first time. Glancing over, she saw a shocked, numb look in his eyes. The brown landscape seemed endless. Raptors wheeled high overhead, hunting for prey.

She had programmed Pais Grande into her GPS, and they were getting close to the exit. She had a nervous feeling in her stomach, and she wasn’t sure whether she was afraid of Border Patrol checkpoints or what they would or would not find at the clinic.

She reached across the gearshift and held his hand. It was hot and sweaty; he wiped it on his jeans, then took her hand again.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “But it feels strange.”

“I can imagine.”

“We walked very near here.” He gestured south. “The rock is over there.”

He didn’t have to say which rock.

“Now I am in a car with you, moving fast,” he said. “It seems like a different life.”

“It is,” she said.

She kept her eyes on the road, but she felt him watching her. Why couldn’t it be a different life for both of them? She felt as if they were walking a fine edge, steeper than the coast path. The sky had been so blue, but the colors had changed to gold and lavender, and oncoming traffic had their headlights on. Some of the vehicles could be Border Patrol, but she knew they wouldn’t stop an old Volvo station wagon with Connecticut plates.

“I won’t let anything happen to you,” she said.

He squeezed her hand but said nothing.

Lion’s words had been haunting her. She glanced over at him. “Have you ever tried to get papers?” she asked.

“Be legal?” he asked.

“Yes, get a green card.”

“Of course that’s what I want,” he said. “But it’s very hard.”

“There’s a way,” she said.

“What is that way?”

How strange it felt to be having this conversation as they sped along a road through the Sonoran Desert. Purple shadows fell across the road, and the sky glowed a gorgeous, unearthly rose.

“We could get married,” she said.

The silence was electric, and she felt blood rush to her face. He touched her arm, gestured for her to pull off the road. The tires bumped onto gravel as she drove onto the shoulder.

“Amor,” he said. She could hear the smile in his voice. “You don’t know me very long.”

“But I know you well.”

“Julia,” he said, “no one in my life has ever loved me like this. My family, yes, but that is different. Sometimes it’s too much to believe.”

“Why?”

“Because you could have anyone. You are beautiful, educated. I’m . . . not. Why do you want me?”

“Because I love you.”

He leaned across to put his arms around her, kiss her. He stroked her cheek and hair.

“Te amo, Julia,” he said. “But I would never marry you for a green card. When we know it is right, I will be the one to ask you. I don’t want you to marry to ‘help’ me. Only to love me.”

“I do,” she said.

“Estas es mi vida,” he said. “My life and my heart.”

She stared into his eyes for a long time, and then started driving again. She didn’t want the police to find them pulled over, think they had car trouble. He reached across to hold her hand, and she wanted him never to let go.

Jack

“She was in terrible shape.” Ronnie said. “She needed fluids, supervision, treatment of her wounds. And she’d been through major trauma—she’d never have gotten the right kind of care if I’d turned her in.”

Jack had Ronnie sitting in the front seat of his SUV, and they were driving toward Nogales. It had been a challenge, getting Ralph to drive away without a good long jaw about the politics in Tuscon Sector and life after retirement.

“Keep talking,” he said. “Tell me why you took her.”

“Because I know what would have happened to her. I was the nurse assigned to her when she was admitted. If I had sent her to a Tucson hospital, she would have received critical care and then been released to a shelter to await deportation.”

“Not always,” Jack said. “She might have been considered for a foster care program.”

“How often does that happen? And even if it did, what kind of attention would she really get? She was so fragile.”

“So you kept her out of the system.”

“The system,” she said, shaking her head. “She was out of her mind, worried about her father. A little Mexican girl, not a word of English, traumatized beyond belief.”

“I thought you said she was unconscious.”

Sweat beaded on Ronnie’s forehead, and she wiped it away with her sleeve. She tried to catch her breath, but couldn’t. “You’re trying to trip me up!” she said. “You’re going to turn me in, and I’ll lose my job and my license.”

“No, I’m not, Ronnie. This is just between us.”

Her face was bright red—he was afraid she’d have a heart attack, and he was feeling pretty anxious himself. He exhaled deeply, waiting for her to calm down.

“Trust me, okay?” he asked. “I told you—I’m here because of her father. That’s all.”

“Her father,” Ronnie said. “My God, she loves him.”

“Tell me.”

“Well, that day—yes, she was unconscious. But she would come to, and cry for him. She begged us to look for him, but how could we?”

“Exactly,” Jack said.

“She was very sick, with such a high fever I wasn’t sure she’d live through the night.”

“But she did.”

“Yes.”

“And then what?”

“My middle sister, Bernarda, is a nurse in Ciudad Juárez. The hospital there is excellent. They know how to deal with desert injuries, but also, especially, psychological damage in children.”

“That city is a war zone.”

“That’s why they know how to treat children. I didn’t intend Rosa to live there—only stay there until she was well enough to be released.”

“So you sent me on a wild-goose chase to San Jacinto.”

“Yes,” Ronnie said. “I’m sorry, but I had to think, and make a plan. Rosa is very sensitive, and I didn’t want you to just . . .”

“Rosa lives with you? She’s okay?”

Now Ronnie smiled, ear to ear. “She’s wonderful. She lives with my youngest sister and her family, right around the corner. Marisol is a nurse too, and she has loved Rosa as if she were her own. We all have.”

“Can I meet her?” Jack said.

“I’ll take you to her right now,” Ronnie said.

chapter twenty-one

Rosa

Outside, dogs ran in the street and barked. She was in fifth grade and got straight As. She shared a room with Lita, her sister who wasn’t really her sister. Their brothers Oscar and Gustavo, who weren’t really her brothers, had bunk beds in the room next door, and sometimes Rosa wished she and Lita had bunk beds too, instead of having to share a mattress.

Lita was a teenager, a senior in high school determined to go to college, and it was bad enough she had to share her room with an eleven-year-old, much less share a mattress on the floor. Rosa thought Lita would like her better if they had a little space between them.

Their parents who weren’t really Rosa’s parents were Marisol and Emilio Garcia. Marisol was a nurse at the Red Cross medical clinic, and Emilio drove a garbage truck. They cared a lot about their children doing well in school, so Emilio had gotten each child his or her own desk—old junked tables from stops he made along his route, repaired and repainted for the kids.

Rosa kept hers very neat, while Lita’s was a complete mess. Lita was into politics and was always demonstrating against the police for not really investigating “femicides”—the killing of women—in Ciudad Juárez, where their aunt Bernarda worked, so her desk was always covered with flyers, which she would clear away to do her homework.

Rosa’s desk was the opposite. She had made herself a blotter out of construction paper and cardboard. The family shared a computer in the kitchen, so Rosa sometimes did her homework there, leaving her blotter free for a notebook and a tray to hold pens and pencils.

She had made the tray from a branch she found on the street. Emilio had helped her, using his knife to carve a smooth hollow. The only other thing on her desk was a small picture frame with her most treasured possession inside: a picture of herself, her father, and her great-grandmother, taken before she left Mexico.

Rosa had lived with the Garcias for almost half her life. She kept track. She got lost in the desert when she was six, and by the time she turned twelve in just a few months she would have spent as much time with the Garcias as she had with her papá.

When she got sent back to Mexico from the desert, she was very sick and spent a long time in hospitals—she had made it to the States, a little medical clinic, but her
tías
Ronnie and Bernarda had her transferred to Children’s Hospital in Ciudad Juárez.

At first she did nothing but sleep, with tubes in her arms, bandages all over, and gauze on her eyes because the bright sun had burned her all over, even her eyes, and she was lucky she didn’t go blind. They told her that a long time later. When she woke up, she didn’t know where she was.

That seemed so strange to her because even now she remembered dreaming in the hospital, seeing the shadows of doctors and nurses moving behind her bandages. Her dreams were vivid, and in them her father was with her.

They were home, or sometimes they were walking in the desert, but always she could hear her name, Rosa, coming straight from her papá’s lips. Telling her he loved her, he was taking her to a better place. She dreamed of her abuela, her great-grandmother rocking her in her lap, singing a song about the little burro.

In every dream she held Maria, the doll her abuela made for her before they left on the long journey, and sometimes in the dream she lost her father and Maria and she would cry in her sleep.

The
tías
—Ronnie and Marisol—would come to see her in the hospital where Bernarda worked. They told her she never had to worry, that they would be her family until they could find her own. They were all nurses, and even though Rosa was Bernarda’s patient, the others would help change her dressings, read her stories, braid her hair.

Each of them had a husband and children, and Rosa would hear the sisters bicker about whose family Rosa should live with. They all wanted to take care of her. Bernarda lived and worked in Ciudad Juárez, where the drug war made life dangerous. Ronnie worked at the medical center in Pais Grande in Arizona, and she had taken a big chance by spiriting Rosa across the border, and they didn’t want her to risk getting caught and being in trouble. By the time Rosa was well enough to leave the hospital, weeks later, Marisol took her home.

She knew she was lucky. They treated her well. Sometimes Emilio talked about wanting to cross, to go live in the States, saying anything there would be better than trying to raise a family in Altar, where it was so hard to make enough to support his family. Rosa got scared when she heard that. She would have nightmares and scream in her sleep on the nights he talked about it.

He said he wouldn’t care if they were all illegals, at least he wouldn’t have to worry about the
cholos
in the town square, the coyotes who could take his kids and sell them and they’d never be seen again.

Lita got angry and snapped at him when she heard him say “illegals,” and told him the better phrase was “undocumented immigrants.” She was applying to colleges, and was trying to get a visa to study in the States at the best school she could get into.

She knew she’d probably end up going to Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico in Mexico City. It was the country’s best, and she had the grades to get in. She wanted to study political science and then become a lawyer. She said her family lived surrounded by suffering and she was sick of it and wanted to help people.

Rosa wanted to help people too, the way Susana had helped her. When she first woke up in Children’s Hospital, she was too sick and weak to talk, and she still couldn’t remember her name. That’s when she had first met Susana, her therapist. Even though Rosa couldn’t speak, Susana had sat by her side and “listened.” Without words, Rosa and Susana had started to communicate.

During those weeks in the hospital, Rosa had needles in her body, tubes delivering fluids because without them she would have died. Her fever had been very high, and her heart stopped more than once. She had lost oxygen to her brain. It’s a miracle . . . she heard that many times: that she didn’t die, that she didn’t lose brain function, that she was “normal.”

But Rosa wasn’t normal. She might look it on the outside, but even there she had doubts—she sometimes felt any stranger on the street could look right through her, see her broken heart and know her story.

She told Rosa she was in a special hospital; the rooms were full of children who had been through experiences so awful they couldn’t bear to remember them. The hospital was known for helping children heal from wounds inside as well as outside.

Susana had helped Rosa remember things she had forgotten: first name, last name, where she had lived in Mexico, the sights and smells of her everyday life, anything that might help the authorities and the
tías
—Bernarda, Ronnie, and Marisol—find her real family.