WAITING

WAITING
She takes $500 she has saved, borrows $1,200 from her boyfriend and wires it to Dallas.

In the house with the clothing, the smugglers wait. From the bags, Enrique puts on clean pants, a shirt and a new pair of shoes. The smugglers take him to a restaurant. He eats chicken smothered in cream sauce. Clean, sated, in his mother’s adopted country, he is happy.

They go to Western Union. But there is no money under his mother’s name, not even a message.

How could she do this?

At worst, Enrique figures, he can break away. Run.

But the smugglers call again.

She says she has sent the money through a female immigrant who lives with her, because the woman gets a Western Union discount. The money should be there under the woman’s name.

It is.

Enrique has no time to celebrate. The smugglers take him to a gas station, where they meet another man in the network. He puts Enrique with four migrant men being routed to Orlando, Fla. They stay overnight in Houston, and at midday, Enrique leaves Texas in a green van.

Five days later, Lourdes’ boyfriend gets time off from work to drive to Orlando, where Enrique has been staying with other migrants and waiting for him to arrive. Her boyfriend is handsome, with graying temples and a mustache. Enrique recognizes him from a video that his Uncle Carlos had brought back from a visit.

“Are you Lourdes’ son?” the boyfriend asks.

Enrique nods.

“Let’s go.” They say little in the car, and Enrique falls asleep.

By 8 a.m. on May 28, Enrique is in North Carolina. He awakens to tires crossing highway seams: Click-click. Click-click. “Are we lost?” he asks. “Are you sure we aren’t lost? Do you know where we are going?”

“We’re almost there.”

They are moving fast through pines and elms, past billboards and fields, yellow lilies and purple lilacs. The road is freshly paved. It goes over a bridge and passes cattle pastures with large rolls of hay. On both sides are wealthy subdivisions. Then railroad tracks. Finally, at the end of a short gravel street, some house trailers. One is beige. Built in the 1950s, it has white metal awnings and is framed in tall green trees.

At 10 a.m., after more than 12,000 miles, 122 days and seven futile attempts to find his mother, Enrique, 11 years older than when she left him behind, bounds from the back seat of the car, up five faded redwood steps, and swings open the white door of the mobile home.

To the left, beyond a tiny living room with dark wooden beams, sits a girl with shoulder-length black hair and curly bangs. She is at the kitchen table eating breakfast. He remembers a picture of her. Her name is Diana. She is 9. She was born in California, not long after Lourdes came to the United States, while she lived with a former boyfriend from Honduras.

Enrique leans over and kisses the girl on the cheek.

“Are you my brother?”

He nods. “Where is my mother? Where is my mother?”

She motions past the kitchen to the far end of the trailer.

Enrique runs. His feet zigzag down two narrow, brown-paneled hallways.

He opens a door.

Inside, the room is cluttered, dark. On a queen-size bed, under a window draped with lace curtains, his mother is asleep. He jumps squarely onto the bed next to her. He gives her a hug. Then a kiss.

“You’re here, mi hijo.”

“I’m here,” he says.

[ Return to Top ]

NEXT: CONCLUSION