Mercancia

Naida, on the road north. Between the Rocket Prologue and Chapter 1.

Everybody who tells a story like mine starts at the worst part. I'm going to start before it, while my body was still mine and still did what living bodies do, because nobody ever lets a girl like me be alive first. They only ever meet me after.

Managua, in the heat. I want you there with me for a minute. The afternoon sun coming up off the pavement so the air bent above it, diesel and fried plantain and somebody's wash drying in all of it, the dogs lying in the shade with their tongues out. I was thirteen, fourteen, some year that still had both my parents in it. My heart did the plain work of beating. The heat raised a shine of sweat on me and a flush up my neck, and by afternoon I smelled like myself, like a girl who'd been alive and moving in a hot city all day, and none of that shamed me, because it was just what a body did. I got thirsty. I ate when there was food and my stomach complained when there wasn't. When a truck backfired in the street the gooseflesh ran up my arms and then settled back down. All of it was so ordinary I never once thanked anybody for it. You don't thank God for a thing you don't know yet you can lose.

My father worked long hours and came home smelling of metal and cigarettes, and on the nights he got back before I slept he'd lay his hand flat on the top of my head, just for a second, like he was making sure I was still the right size. That was the whole thing. I've turned that hand over in my mind ten thousand times since and it's never once gone cold.

I idolized him. I never told him what my cousin did to me, because I could live through my mother not believing me but I couldn't have lived through my father's face changing. So I kept it, and I kept him, and I let him lay his hand on my head and believe I was fine. Kids are real good at letting the people they love believe they're fine.

Then the fall I was seventeen, both of them got killed. Crossfire, three words that fit in your mouth and take everything out of your life. One afternoon the world had heat in it and a hand on my head, and the next it didn't, and I was alone with the only tool I'd ever been any good at.

So I put on my good shoes and I walked to Mateo's house with my face arranged into the one that makes grown men want to help me. I'd been arranging that face since I was little. It cost nothing and it bought everything, and I was proud of how well it worked, the way you're proud of the one tool you own that's never broken. Senor Morales told me I was lucky, and because I wanted to be, I believed him.

Mateo's father met me at the door before Mateo did. He looked at me a long time. I thought he was deciding whether to let me in. I know now he was pricing me.

You've got nobody, he said. Not cruel. Gentle, even. Your parents, que en paz descansen, they left you nothing but yourself.

I work hard, I said. I can help your family. I'm good with people.

He smiled like I'd said something sweet and a little sad. I've got a better idea than scrubbing my floors, mija. The United States. Real work, good money. Enough to pay back the cost of getting you there, and then it's all yours.

I asked him what the work was. I want that on the record, that I asked. He waved it off like a fly. What does it matter? I'm taking you to a better life. Isn't that worth the cost? Don't worry. It's work you'll enjoy.

And here's the part I can't make anybody understand, the part that still lives under my ribs. I thanked him. I took his hand in both of mine and I thanked him, and I meant it all the way down, because a door had opened and I was seventeen and I didn't know yet that some doors only open one direction.

The bus left before light. I pressed my forehead to the glass and watched the heat of the only place I'd ever known go small and then go out behind me, and I told myself a story about the girl I'd be on the other side. She had her own room. She sent money home, except there was no home left to send it to, so in the story she just kept the money, neat in an envelope, proof she'd been worth saving.

Tegucigalpa. Then a different bus, a different man, no explanation. I didn't like that nobody explained anything, but I'd spent my whole life not liking things and surviving them, so I folded it small and put it away. The man who rode with us called me niña in a voice that didn't have any niña in it. By the second day I stank in a way soap would've fixed, except there was no soap, and the gooseflesh kept coming up on my arms at things I couldn't name and staying longer each time. I performed useful. I performed grateful. It was what I had.

In Guatemala City they took my papers.

It wasn't violent. That's the thing I need you to hear. A man at a plastic table held out his hand, and I gave him my documents the way you hand a teacher your homework, and he looked at them, and then he put them in a drawer and closed the drawer, and that was all.

When do I get those back? I asked.

He didn't answer me. He was already looking at the next one in line. And in the space where his answer should've been, the whole shape of it arrived at once, quiet, the way the worst things do. Nobody had bought me a ticket. Somebody had bought me.

I wasn't a girl going to a better life. I was a thing being moved to where it would be worth more. The word for it came to me in my mother's voice, which was a cruelty, that my own mind would use her voice for that. Mercancia. Merchandise.

I want to tell you I screamed, or ran, or that some animal part of me understood and fought. I didn't. I stood very still and I kept my useful face on, because it was the only thing left that was mine, and I'd learned long before that table that when the ground opens under you, you don't waste the breath. You go quiet. You watch. You wait to see what the room wants.

The road kept going north after that. Most of what happened on it isn't here. My mind took those weeks and walled them off somewhere I can't reach, and I've decided to let it keep them, because it knew something I didn't, that there are things you don't survive by remembering.

This is as far as the clean part goes. It's also as far as my body was only mine. Remember it flushed and prickled and sweated and stank, that it did all the loud involuntary work a living thing's body does without being asked. You're going to want that later.

I was grateful, at the start. I need that written down somewhere true. Not because I was stupid. Because I was seventeen, and somebody offered me a door, and nobody had ever taught me that the people who tell you how lucky you are are real often the same ones doing the counting.

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