He came in and just stopped by the door.
We were in this sort of dormitory where the local Jesuits put the volunteers who came down to work in their shelters. And it felt like an hour passed before he came over to the little bed I was sitting on, cupped the back of my head in one hand and hugged me up against his belly.
But then he said, "Don't ever...ever...do that again," in that new, mean voice.
And I must've looked really scared when I pulled back to look at him because he caressed my cheek and said, "I kept imagining you getting lightheaded and...careening off into a ditch or...through one of those damned guard rails—you'd lost so much blood."
I rubbed his side and said, "I'm here now, though. Sit by me. Please?"
And after a little bit, he sank down on the bed and we sat staring at each other like two middle school kids trying to figure out how to say we liked each other. It was that awkward, honest to God.
But I put my hands on his chest just to feel him. And he leaned to kiss me from forehead to lips—I clutched the bedspread and tried to ignore what that did to me in...certain places...
And he chuckled and said, "So much for the long speech I'd prepared."
"Oh, you were going to read me up and down, right?"
"In no uncertain terms, yes. I practiced."
I touched his face. "You should be angry. You were suffering as much as me. And I just--"
"But I wasn't," he said. "I couldn't, could I?"
"It was your baby, too."
"It wasn't my body, though. Going through all those changes every day. And then lying there in a pool of blood, feeling it all just...slip away..."
He paused for a moment trying to erase that image, probably. And then he asked me, "What was your first thought? When you truly knew you were pregnant?"
And I remembered how I'd tried not to know for as long as possible. The mind games I played. But all I said was, "I wasn't...sure we were ready. But I believed we'd be ready."
"And I never let you say that. I never let you say anything. I went off on my little fantasy trip and you came along--did you feel you'd failed me? When it was over?"
"Well, I've felt that way about a lot of things. Like...I was failing at life, basically..."
He sighed and said, "We scooped you up and threw you in the deep end. All of us."
I smiled. Yet another swimming thing...
And then I kissed him and ran my hands back up that chest again. "Damn, this is going to be rough..."
"How so?"
"Well...this...woman Madame sent over to see me...she told me we'd have to wait awhile before—"
"Oh, of course. Goes without saying, that." He shuddered a little bit, after he said it.
And when I said, "Freaked you out that bad, huh?" he chuckled, "That's not how I meant it, but now that you mention it..."
I ran a finger from his chest to his crotch and said, "Well, your plumbing's okay, though..."
And he caught my hand and said, "It's my turn to suffer some, physically, don't you think?"
I watched him for a few seconds...and then smiled and said, "Nope."
And I loved the big laugh it got. And how he touched my face again and said, "Paper thin, these walls. Priests skulking around, too."
I shuddered. "Okay, that's creepy."
"Not how I meant that, either, but it's probably best we behave accordingly."
He kind of loved me up with his eyes then. Gives me the shivers when he gives me that gaze. "I couldn't function properly with you gone. I found myself unable to form a proper sentence or...follow a thought. You're like water or food or...that sort of thing to me. I waste away..."
I was about to leap on him, thin walls be damned, when there was this huge BANG--Chas leapt up just as the door flew open, off the hinges, actually.
And this camo-covered dude with a ponytail and a long, braided beard pointed this massive AK at us and barked, "Let's roll! Now!"
Something sent me rushing to grab my bag--he turned that gun on me when I dove for it. And when Chas leapt right between that gun and me, Beard Man smiled, poked the barrel of the gun into Chas' chest and chuckled, "Lookit this pretty mother fucker here! Wha'chu gon' do, son?"
Chas shoved the barrel away and Beard Man snatched my bag and looked in, sniffed...and frowned. Because I'd done this thing some of my women friends did when they knew Customs might search their luggage when they were traveling between countries.
I was heading toward the border on a day when the checkpoint agents just outside of town might not just wave me through as usual. So I took all but one row of the big sanitary pads out of the package, stuffed the baggies full of Maria's herbs down in there and put the pads back just like they were arranged at the factory.
And then on top of the pads I'd put a couple of pairs of soiled panties. Gross, but in this day and age nobody wants to be touching anything with blood on it, even with gloves on. If they look at you funny, you just say something like, "Caught me off guard," like there'd been no time to rearrange things in a more sanitary way.
Cause after a long day rooting through all kind of luggage, some agents decide it's just not worth the trouble. Though some of them take it as a signal to dig even deeper. But I've never had one reach into a package of pads or tampons so far. Not at the little checkpoints outside border towns, anyway. At the actual border they'll tear a whole car apart if they get suspicious.
Beard Man grimaced and shoved the bag back at me so roughly that Chas bristled. But I caught hold of his arm and said, "Papi, just go."
And Beard Man snorted, "Yeah, Papi better go. Let's move!"
Chas put an arm around me as we stepped into the chaos in the hallway. Four camo guys were throwing the student volunteers up against the walls, bleating orders and threats, patting them down, "confiscating" cells and everything else they found. Beard Man raised a hand when one guy got to my bag. But the guy unzipped it, screwed up his face and shoved it back at me.
The students, three women and eight men, were kind of shivering and exchanging terrified glances—Chas wasn't shaking, though. His "inner sociopath" takes over in situations like these, so he goes still and chill in a way that could trigger guys like the ones shoving us around. They don't want chill. They want scared.
But I knew his mind was recording everything and everyone. He'd tell me things, later, that no one else would've noticed or thought of. It was partly the training he'd had and partly just the way his mind works. Would've been a badass spy, Chas. Diabolical mind.
They wound up herding us into the kitchen where they sat us on the floor against a wall.
And then Beard Man glared at each of us with his stern, greyish blue eyes, and said, "You people don't understand what's really goin' on here. But we do. And we're tired of people comin' down here helpin' it happen. So now—"
"Van," one of the shooters called.
And they started yanking us up off the floor and out to this big white cargo van that had rolled up to an exit off the kitchen.
They threw us in as rough as they could, trying to intimidate the men. I clutched Chas arm as they slammed the back doors. And all the other volunteers glanced around as that van took off in a cloud of dust.
"What the hell?" one woman cried.
"I know that one with the weird beard," one of the men said. "Duane Something—they call him Hoss."
"What's his deal?" another guy asked.
"They think the other groups down here are chickenshit, basically. Cause they work with the Border Patrol and National Guard and all that."
"What do they do, then?"
"Y'all quit that yammerin' back there," the shooter in the passenger seat bellowed. And he opened the little door in the panel between the cab and cargo space and leaned into it, gun raised.
That woman raised her chin. "So we're hostages, right?"
"You're a buncha spoiled brats don't see what's goin' down down here. But maybe you'll hear us now. You'n' all your little Snowflake friends. There's a goddamned war goin' on! And you're fightin' on the wrong side."
He threw some water bottles at us and went back to his seat after that. Chas grabbed two and sat back down, his eyes trying to read me.
I murmured, "It's okay." And he kissed my shoulder and went back to scanning the van and other faces. Spent a long time staring at that cab door. And the back doors, too...
So I whispered, "Don't."
And he smiled and whispered, "Catch a little cat nap if you can."
"Because?"
No answer. Just another smile. Which he passed along from face to face as if to test them with it. I liked the way that one woman who'd piped up just stared right back real steady and alert. The others gasped and shuddered every time we hit a dip or a bump.
I mean, they were mostly just law students looking to get some credits and a killer line to add or remove from that resumé, depending on the firm they were trying to impress. Politically, they were probably a much more mixed bag than our captors thought.
One guy could've been in my college crew, back in Tucson. Longish hair, kneeless jeans, a t-shirt with a sort of Warholish painting of Kendrick Lamar on it.
I smiled because one of my favorite fight songs was the one where Kendrick keeps saying, "We gon' be all right." I was hoping it would prove to be true...
We wound up out in this...compound, I guess they call it. A bunch of old, broke down trailers and one big pre-fab almost like the one we'd been snatched out of that looked like it was for meetings or something. Folding chairs stacked up next to the long tables against the walls.
They set us against the walls, too. Spaced out away from each other so we couldn't communicate. And this one super scary looking older man, all wiry and jumpy, glanced over and then came over, snatched up my bag and looked down into it like he'd been told what was in it.
And then he leaned down and said, "You come down here for somethin' different?" His breath reeking of tobacco or something he'd chewed to make his teeth so yellow.
I said, "Like?"
"What do you need hospital pads for?"
I blinked...and then quickly said, "I...have a fibroid issue. Makes me need...that kind."
He finger-tweazed out a pair of the panties by the waistband and hissed, "God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap!"
And that tough woman who spoke up the first time sneered, "Jeezus," and shook her head.
So he craned to look at her and said, "You'll be meetin' him sooner rather than later, you keep speaking his name in vain."
And then he glared at me and said, "There's a slaughterhouse just across where a woman can do what the law won't let 'em do up here. Course Arizona's still lettin' 'em do it, but the times they really are a'changin'! Victory is at hand!"
He put those panties right up to my face and growled, "And woe be unto women like you when that victory is won," before dropping them back into my bag, rising up and barking, "Put 'er away from us! And take that bag'n' give it to Gail. She can dole 'em out when she feels like it!"
Chas grabbed my arm when two guys came to grab me, but they slammed him into the wall and pulled his arms around behind his back while another one dragged me out of the room.
He dumped me into a little closet full of boxes and other miscellaneous junk. No windows, no light except from under the door. I could barely stretch my legs out in front of me—definitely couldn't lay down all the way.
I could hear them talking through a vent in the wall, though.
"They been given everything they want their whole lives, these damned college kids," one of the shooters said. "They march 'em right from public school into those fuckin' colleges where they guilt trip 'em 'til they're all broke down'n' demoralized. Turn all the men soft and all the women against 'em. That's why our numbers are down so low. Turned us against one another! Made the men all weak—got no balls, these ones!"
"Get all the money, though," another one said. "So they can hide out in the suburbs—lay out in front of that big ol' beach house on some island and forget what's goin' down back home."
"Well, I tell you one thing," this woman's voice piped up. "If she really done what you think she done you can let 'er sit there 'til she's swimmin' in it for all I care! I'm not nursin' nobody could do somethin' like that."
But then this other guy told her, "Bonnie had them fiber things. Like to bled to death every month."
"You believe that?" the other guy snapped.
"Same pads. Hadda wear two of 'em! Blood got so thin they fin'ly hadda go on in there'n' pull everything out. 's how come we only got the three kids."
And then Wiry Guy—I heard him answer to "Tuck" a couple of times--said, "Just let 'er set this one day and night, mebbe. Give that man she come with somethin' to worry about. Watchin' us like a damned hawk—y'all be careful around him. Sounds like some kinda foreigner'n' we don't wanna start no kinda international incident or nothin'."
"Needa let him go then," the woman said. "Turn his ass loose! Let 'im wander around out there like one o' them fools they're tryin'a sneak across all the time. Time they find his sorry ass out there it'll be nothin' but some bones to pick through."
They all had a big laugh about that. And I knew there was no chance they'd let him go. Or that he'd leave me behind, even if they could've.
They never got around to what they planned to do with us or anything strategic like that. So I just sat there all crampy and sweaty until they opened the door and shoved in a paper plate and a bottle of frozen water. Sandwich on the plate was just baloney and bread without anything on it.
I was nervous about that the cold water might make me cramp even more. That tea would've helped. Might've even put me to sleep.
I just curled up in fetal position. Sighed.
And then...I smiled...