Enrique's Journey (24 page)

She has often worried from afar about her boy. In 1999, a sister in Honduras disclosed the truth about Enrique: “He's getting in trouble. He's changed.” He was smoking marijuana. The news made Lourdes sick. Her stomach tightened into a knot for a week. Now she is more worried than ever.

Lourdes has not slept. All night, since Enrique's last call from a pay phone across the Rio Grande, she has been having visions of him dead, floating on the river, his body wet and swollen. She told her boyfriend, “My greatest fear is never to see him again.”

She has spent part of the night in her kitchen, praying before a tall candle adorned with the image of San Judas Tadeo. This saint tackles difficult situations, matters of life and death. Lourdes lit the candle days ago, when Enrique made his first phone call from Nuevo Laredo. Each time Lourdes walks past the candle, she prays: “God has granted to you the privilege of aiding humankind in the most desperate cases. O, come to my aid that I may praise the mercies of God! All my life I will be your grateful client until I can thank you in Heaven.”

Now a female smuggler is on the phone. The woman says: We have your son in Texas, but $1,200 is not enough. $1,700.

Lourdes grows suspicious. Maybe Enrique is dead, and the smugglers are trying to cash in. “Put him on the line,” she says.

He's out shopping for food, the smuggler replies.

Lourdes will not be put off.

He's asleep, the smuggler says.

How can he be both? Lourdes demands to talk to him.

Finally, the smuggler gives the phone to Enrique.

“¿Sos tú?”
his mother asks anxiously. “Is it you?”

“
Sí, mami,
it's me.”

Still, his mother is not sure. She does not recognize his voice. She has heard it only half a dozen times in eleven years.

“¿Sos tú?”
she asks again. Then twice more. She grasps for something, anything, that she can ask this boy—a question that no one but Enrique can answer. She remembers what he told her about his shoes when he called on the pay phone.

“What kind of shoes do you have on?” she asks.

“Two left shoes,” Enrique says.

Fear drains from his mother like a wave back into the sea. It
is
Enrique. She feels pure happiness.

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 immigrant men being routed to Orlando, Florida. They stay overnight in Houston, and at midday, Enrique leaves Texas in a green van.

Five days later, Lourdes's boyfriend gets time off from work to drive to Orlando, where Enrique has been staying with other immigrants and waiting for him to arrive. Her boyfriend is handsome, with broad shoulders, graying temples, and a mustache. Enrique recognizes him from a video his uncle Carlos brought back from a visit.

“Are you Lourdes's 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 get to his mother, Enrique, eleven years older than when she left him behind, bounds from the backseat of the car and 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 nine now.

Enrique leans over and kisses the girl on the cheek.

“Are you my brother?”

He nods. “Where's my mother? Where's 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.

A TWIST

The Odyssey,
an epic poem about a hero's journey home from war, ends with reunion and peace.
The Grapes of Wrath,
the classic novel about the Dust Bowl and the migration of Oklahoma farmers to California, ends with death and a glimmer of renewed life.

Enrique's journey is not fiction, and its conclusion is more complex and less dramatic. But it ends with a twist worthy of O. Henry.

Children like Enrique dream of finding their mothers and living happily ever after. For weeks, perhaps months, these children and their mothers cling to romanticized notions of how they should feel toward each other.

Then reality intrudes. The children show resentment because they were left behind. They remember broken promises to return and accuse their mothers of lying. They complain that their mothers work too hard to give them the attention they have been missing. In extreme cases, they find love and esteem elsewhere, by getting pregnant, marrying early, or joining gangs.

Some are surprised to discover entire new families in the United States—a stepfather, stepbrothers, and stepsisters. Jealousies grow. Stepchildren call the new arrivals
mojados,
or wet-backs, and, to gain power over their new siblings, threaten to summon U.S. immigration authorities.

The mothers, for their part, demand respect for their sacrifice: leaving their children for the children's sake. Some have been lonely and worked hard to support themselves, to pay off their own smuggling debts and save money to send home. When their children say, “You abandoned me,” they respond by hauling out tall stacks of money transfer receipts.

They think their children are ungrateful and bristle at the independence they show—the same independence that helped the children survive their journeys north. In time, mothers and children discover they hardly know each other.

At first, neither Enrique nor Lourdes cries. He kisses her again. She holds him tightly. He has played this out in his mind a thousand times. It is just as he thought it would be.

All day they talk. He tells her about his travels: the clubbing on top of a train, leaping off to save his life, the hunger, thirst, and fear. He has lost 28 pounds and is down to 107. She cooks rice, beans, and fried pork. He sits at the table and eats. The boy she last saw when he was in kindergarten is taller than she is. He has her nose, her round face, her eyes, her curly hair. Lourdes has three children, but Enrique is special. He is her only son.

“Look, Mom, look what I put here.” He pulls up his shirt. She sees a tattoo.

EnriqueLourdes,
it says across his chest.

His mother winces. Tattoos, she says, are for delinquents, for people in jail. “I'm going to tell you, son, I don't like this.” She pauses. “But at least if you had to get a tattoo, you remembered me.”

“I've always remembered you.”

He tells her about Honduras, how he stole his aunt's jewelry to pay drug debts, how he sold the shoes and clothes she sent to buy glue, how he wanted to get away from drugs, how he ached to be with her. Finally, Lourdes cries.

She asks about Belky, her daughter in Honduras; her own mother; and the deaths of two of her brothers. Then she stops. She feels too guilty to go on.

The trailer is awash in guilt. Eight people live here. Several have left their children behind. All they have is pictures. Lourdes's boyfriend has two sons in Honduras. He has not seen them in five years.

One of the boyfriend's cousins left behind a wife and son, two months old. He has not seen them in two years.

Another cousin and her husband left behind a four-year-old daughter. The husband has never seen the daughter; his wife was pregnant when he left. She calls every two weeks and vows to return to Honduras in a year if she hasn't been able to bring their daughter north. “The most important thing is love. Not losing that,” she says. Three pictures of the little girl, in a pink shirt and pigtails, stand as a constant reminder near a television in a corner.

Enrique likes the people in the trailer, especially his mother's boyfriend; he could be a better father than his own dad, who abandoned him ten years ago to start another family.

In Honduras, Enrique's grandmother walks next door to talk to Enrique's girlfriend, María Isabel.

She has news: Enrique made it.

María Isabel wails, “He's not coming back!” She locks herself in her bedroom and cries for two hours.

For the next few months, María Isabel spends hours at a time silently sitting on a rock in front of her aunt Gloria's house. At night, Gloria hears María Isabel sobbing.

Gloria's daughter tries to console María Isabel. At least now, the daughter tells her, she's sure Enrique is alive. “Cheer up,” she says. “He's there. He'll send money. If he'd stayed, you would have both died of hunger.” But María Isabel, normally always giggling, is serious and sad.

Belky, too, is depressed. She stops talking. In the morning, she cries before facing each new day. She longs to be with her mother. Maybe, she tells herself, she should have gone with her brother, taken the risk. Now both Enrique and Diana are with her mother. “Now I'm the only one left here,” she tells her aunt Rosa Amalia.

Three days after Enrique arrives, Lourdes's boyfriend helps him find work as a painter. He earns $7 an hour. Within a week, he is promoted to sander, making $9.50. With his first paycheck, he offers to pick up $50 of the food bill. He buys Diana a gift: a pair of pink sandals for $5.97. He sends money to Belky and to his girlfriend in Honduras.

Lourdes brags to her friends, “This is my son. Look at him! He's so big. It's a miracle he's here.”

Whenever he leaves the house, she hugs him. When she comes home from work, they sit on the couch, watching her favorite soap opera, with her hand resting on his arm. Each Sunday, they go shopping together to buy enough food to last the week. Lourdes cooks for Enrique, and he begins to put on weight.

Over time, though, they realize they are strangers. Neither knows the other's likes or dislikes. At a grocery store, Lourdes reaches for bottles of Coke. Enrique says he does not drink Coke—only Sprite.

He plans to work and make money. She wants him to study English, learn a profession.

At first he is quiet and shy. That begins to change. He goes to a pool hall without asking permission. She becomes upset. Occasionally, he uses profanities. She tells him not to.

“¡No, mami!”
he says. “No one is going to change me.”

“Well, you'll have to change! If not, we'll have problems. I want a son who, when I say to do something, he says ‘Okay.' ”

“You can't tell me what to do!”

The clash culminates several weeks after Enrique arrives, when María Isabel telephones collect and her call is rejected because some of the immigrants in the trailer do not know who she is.

That was right, Lourdes says; they cannot afford collect calls from just anyone.

Enrique flares and begins to pack. Enrique says, “Who are you to me? I don't even know you!”

Lourdes is enraged. She grabs him by his arm and pulls him into the privacy of her bedroom. “You will respect me!” she yells. “I am your mother.” Lourdes blames Enrique's grandmother María: she spoiled the boy and let him run amok. Lourdes is determined to impose discipline on her son. She walks up behind him and spanks him hard on his buttocks, several times.

“You have no right to hit me! You didn't raise me.” He tells her that only his grandmother María, who raised him, has that right. Lourdes disagrees. “I sent money. I supported you. That is raising you!”

Enrique locks himself in the bathroom and sobs. He throws about anything he can find—toothpaste, shampoo, a perfume bottle. Diana rushes into the bedroom, crying. Enrique storms out of the house. Lourdes's boyfriend and his cousin try to calm her. They cruise the streets, trying to find Enrique.

Enrique hides behind a small Baptist church two miles away. He sleeps in the graveyard behind the church, between the headstones.

Lourdes stays up most of the night. What, she worries, will be her future with Enrique?

The next afternoon, however, their love prevails. Enrique returns home and apologizes to his mother. He tells her he loves her. He comforts her with a little white lie. He tells her he spent the night safely sleeping in her car.