CHAPTER 25

M"We came across when I was six.

My baby sister, Brisa, was only eighteen months old.

My father had come to the States years before.

He left the first time when I was a year.

My parents got together young.

Where they came from there were no jobs.

You either eked out a living from the earth or you moved.

I grew up in a neighborhood called La Neza .

It was on the northern outskirts of Mexico City; it's a shantytown really.

It grew out of nothing, poor people arriving looking for work in the city who couldn't afford rent, so they flocked there and built homes for themselves out of whatever they could find.

They didn't have electricity or any running water.

My dad still had to pay rent for the two room cinder-block structure they lived in.

Just because it was a ghetto, doesn't mean there weren't landlords.

Then I came along.

They couldn't afford to take care of a kid, so my dad went to work in Los Angeles.

He found a job as a waiter.

It was a long time before he contacted us.

He was supposed to be sending his money back to support us.

But I think once he started his new life, he really just forgot about us.

My mom was young and didn't have any skills.

She ended up taking in laundry and scrubbing other people's dirty underwear from dusk to dawn.

There were always tubs of water all around us.

To me the whole world smelled like that blue block of laundry soap.

I remember when her fingers would split open and bleed.

I knew she was unhappy and missed him.

I knew she was scared all of the time.

So scared that sometimes I still hear her crying in my dreams.

A couple of times she got threatened, and once they came in and robbed the place.

She took us on a bus all the way back to her hometown.

Some rural farmland in the middle of nowhere.

Her parents, my grandparents, sent her back after just a few days.

They said that my dad would eventually send for her and that we had to wait.

But the years went by, and he came and went a few times, but he never thought we could make it across the border alive.

Every once in a blue moon he'd send money.

We'd watch it go out as quick as it came.

I thought that money was magic.

Fucking mystical dollars, the weavers of our destiny.

I was probably five when she started taking in "dates."

She only broke down and did it after she was raped.

I sat on the other side of the wall and listened to it and not because I wanted to.

I listened to her cry and softly call my father's name while anonymous assholes had their way.

You can't protect your mother from men when you're only five years old—no matter how bad you might want to.

Brisa was born not long after.

My mom delivered at home, and I was scared shitless.

She screamed and cursed at her midwife, scratched her arms and pulled her hair.

Brisa was yellow when she came out, totally jaundiced.

There wasn't a doctor we could afford, and the midwife promised the yellow-color would eventually go away.

We took her to a neighborhood healer who reluctantly passed an egg over her in exchange for the chicken it came from.

She burned incense and chanted a prayer.

Either it worked, or Brisa naturally grew out of it.

My sister could have been fathered by anybody, even the landlord.

He came pretty regularly to collect ‘the rent' from my mom.

But my mom was convinced Brisa was my father's daughter.

Maybe she was delusional.

She had to hang onto something.

"All you have to do is look at her nose," she would say.

And Brisa did look just like the picture my mom had hanging on the wall of me when I was in diapers.

I loved my baby sister whether she was full blood or not.

Taking care of her gave me something else to think about.

I looked forward to her growing up—to a time when we could actually play together.

I was the one who watched Brisa while my mom turned "dates."

I learned how to change her and how to rock her to sleep in my arms, how to quiet her when she was hungry by letting her suck on my finger.

The way we were wasn't any way to live, and one day, my mom decided she'd had enough.

One night she just didn't go to sleep, and she stayed up sewing our names into our clothes.

I don't know how she was so fearless or where she found the resolve.

She got money from her family and some from my dad's.

She wrapped Brisa to her body, and we only carried one bag.

We road La Bestia North and the trip nearly killed us.

It was cold.

It was evil.

The trip was fucking torture.

I think that what saved us again and again was Brisa and how she was tied to my mom's body.

It kept away the men and kept all of them from robbing us.

I swear my mother didn't sleep, not a single minute during the four days it took us to get to the border.

She clung to us and she clung to the train.

She was so determined and stared death right in its face.

She was so brave—was the same age that I am now.

The trip terrified me but I was happy because I thought we were going to be reunited with my dad.

I believed that in America we'd finally find safety.

That men wouldn't hurt my mom there and that we'd be protected by my father.

That we'd all smile around the breakfast table like they did in the television commercials.

That mural in TJ on the side of the strip club wasn't just a coincidence.

What I drew there happened in real life.

My mom had to pick up a few jobs to raise the money for the coyote.

I remember her whispering over and over, "Don't let Brisa cry, Moisés.

They won't give me the job if they know you're here."

I did my best to hide both of our sobs.

The coyote we ended up contracting was probably dirty.

He had to be considering what little she could pay him.

The ones that aren't just fucking you over charge more for a real crossing.

We were thirteen thick in the back of a van.

Old people, kids, babies and parents.

All of us scared shitless, already ruined from the journey.

But we were willing to risk death to change our luck.

She gave him every last cent we had, and then he took more in a gas-station bathroom while I held Brisa in the corner and cried, and he called me a pussy.

I wanted to die after a day in the van.

The heat was unbearable and somehow worse in the dark.

Everybody was crying and praying, and we were all eating dust that blew up through the rusted holes in the floor.

We kept waiting for it to stop so we could get out, but it kept on going forever until it felt like days had passed.

Probably fucking driving us in circles.

Then all of the sudden it stopped, and we all went flying into one another, banging our heads.

When they jerked open the doors, the light hurt our eyes, and everybody was blinking, trying to adjust.

We were so fucking helpless and scared.

That's when I knew that our fate was completely out of our own hands.

We all wanted to see America, but it looked like we were still in Mexico pulled off to the side of some forgotten highway.

There were a few guys with rifles, and one fat guy in a maroon colored button up shirt with sweat stains under the armpits.

He was wearing aviator glasses.

They looked in at us, and we all squinted back, wondering what the fuck was happening.

Were they just going to shoot us? Would they let us out to stretch our legs or would that be the end of us? A pile of dead bodies in the back of a truck, or left on the road to be eaten by vultures? But it was worse than that.

When they pulled my mom out of the van, I screamed.

I was sitting between her legs.

I tried to hang onto her but they pulled me off like a bug and threw me back into the van.

I thought they were pulling her clothes off to rape her again, but what they were going for wasn't her body.

They were after my baby sister.

See my mom had good genes that made her always stand out.

She was tall, she was beautiful, and she had something regal about her—something all those predators wanted to take and destroy.

They didn't think she deserved it, and they wanted her to know they had absolute power.

Remind her of her place.

They tore Brisa from her body, and my mom turned into a raving beast.

She was a wild animal.

I thought they would kill her for how she was screaming and clawing.

But they took my baby sister over to a black sedan that was waiting, and they opened the door, set her in the lap of some lady.

All I saw was her profile, her blonde hair and her high-heeled shoes.

She looked like a telenovela star to me, she grabbed Brisa and closed the car door.

The windows were tinted.

That was the last I ever saw of her.

I tried to help.

I tried to get to my mom, but some lady held me back— thinking back on it, she probably saved my life.

I'm sure they would have shot me without a moment's hesitation.

Nobody knew what they were doing, if they would take other kids, if they would shoot my mother for screaming.

Then they shoved her back in, and she fought with everything she had.

She scraped her fingers along the door until they bled and were broken.

I sat close to her hip, and I was afraid to touch her.

She finally fell asleep, but even asleep, she still moaned and lamented.

That wasn't the end because we would spend another twenty-four hours in the back of the van.

No food, no water, no toilet.

Not even light or air.

Just dust, hundred degree heat and some soul snuffing terror.

We ran out of water in the first couple of hours.

Some people got sick, and it started to stink, but you couldn't see who, because it was as black as night except for some rays of light coming up through the rusted floor.

They looked like laser beams filled with dust, and I ran my hands through them for hours while she slept.

Sometime that night I thought I would die of thirst.

I started to get lethargic, to drift in and out.

Everything seemed really fuzzy.

My vision was grainy.

I kept hallucinating thinking I could see Brisa, that she was back with us.

Then my mom saved my life.

No matter how many wrong turns she took later, I could never hate her.

I knew that she loved me even though she couldn't always show it."

"What did she do? How did it end?" This is my first and only interruption of Mozey's telling.

I am all at once gripped and shattered by his story.

"You really want me to keep going?"

"You have to tell me, Mozey."

He shifts and moves his hands on the wheel, then looks off into the horizon.

He focuses on the road and then begins to speak again.

"Somebody did die.

An older man.

The adults moved him to the back as best they could.

We put our stuff on top of him to try to temper the smell.

Doesn't take long at all in that kind of heat.

We tried not to cry because we would dehydrate ourselves even more.

"It was probably only twenty-four hours, but those hours lasted an eternity, and they were the darkest days on earth.

It was a never ending journey.

Eventually she woke up, and like I said, I was fading.

I knew I had to try hang on.

I wanted to stay alive, if only to protect her.

I remember I kept tugging on her skirt.

At some point I lost consciousness, then my mother pulled me to her breast.

See Brisa was still nursing.

Mostly at night and probably for comfort, but we were poor and my mom knew it would make her strong and resilient—that it was the best food she could get.

She was falling apart back then, but she had good intentions.

She always wanted what was best for us.

"The breast milk revived me.

When I woke up all the way and realized what I was doing, I felt so ashamed that I pulled away from her.

She whispered in my ear in Spanish, ‘God gave me milk to feed my children.' "Thing is, I wasn't ashamed to be six and nursing.

I wasn't embarrassed to be breastfeeding in the back of a van crammed with twenty other refugees.

My shame came from stealing my sister's milk.

The milk belonged to Brisa, and I felt so awful that it was meant to sustain her and not me.

It was the worst feeling in the world, to drink from my mother's breast and know that my baby sister was somewhere—crying and hungry for what I was taking.

Knowing all along that my mother was dying inside thinking the same thing and that I was taking that bond between them, taking what wasn't mine, stealing it from both of them.

"And that's the story of how I survived and Brisa didn't—or at least not as Brisa.

The story of how we climbed on board, joining the American dream.

It's how my mom fell and could never quite get back up on her feet.

The story of how Moisés Robles de la Cruz stole his baby sister's milk and became such a fuck-up."