When Ernesto finally made it to Salinas, he couldn’t believe his luck. Never had he seen such lushness: low mountains to the east, rolling farmland on the edge of the city in all directions. So much richness. He smelled artichokes, cabbages, and strawberries on the wind. In the mercado, the fish arrived each morning still wet from the sea.
The houses! So grand, with grass in front and back, trees thick with leaves, cars parked inside, out of sight. No bars on the windows here, no high walls. Maybe everyone is too rich to steal, he thought.
Still feverish and dehydrated, he thanked God for beauty at the end of a perilous journey.
At first life was hard. He knew no one, had no money. He stayed in a refugio, shivering under a dirty blanket, smelling the stink of life without hope. The men in the other beds wore shabby, frayed coats and had no teeth. Ernesto did not want to sleep: He was afraid he would wake up and be one of them.
In El Salvador, in his village, he was a fisherman. He wanted to fish, but he did not have a way to get to the docks. On his second day in Salinas, he walked out of town to the fields. He was hired right away to pick strawberries. “Six dollars a day,” Celestino the foreman said. He told Ernesto the hours were long, and to stay away from the organizadores sindicales if he didn’t want trouble.
Ernesto’s heart leapt with joy. He could do a lot with six dollars a day.
After a week, he left the refugio and stayed in worker housing. The conditions were not so good—fourteen men in a shack, plastic on the roof to keep out the rain, rats in the mattresses—but he did not mind. The men were like him: hard workers with families, trying to make a better life. Better than the men in the refugio, who sat by the side of the road all day, begging and drinking.
He did not let himself think about Maria, about the children. He knew Maria was waiting for the money. Gabriela and Javier: Ernesto knew they missed him. His Gabriela, his princesa, so serious, so smart. And Javi: his sweet son, his dearest boy. Ernesto hurt to think of them without him, not knowing how much he missed them. Maybe they knew. He told himself they did.
Maria was young when they married. He had waited many years. Maybe they were in love at the start. It was hard to say. The way it was in bed made him forget life—how painful it could be—for a while. But the fighting got worse. They became angry, cold. “Go to California,” she finally said. “Lilian’s Eduardo sends money every month.” Then she said, “Maybe it will be better that way.”
***
At night, he took a class at the library to learn English. He saved money to buy a car. His back hurt from working the fields and sleeping on the thin mattress. He did not want to pick or fish anymore. He wanted a different kind of life.
After two years, he drove to the sea. Celestino had given him the name of a man who ran a mercado there, who hired good workers. “El no va a pedir sus papeles,” he said. “You’re smart, Ernesto. Good with people. He won’t care about papers.”
Dan hired him right away, after watching him bone a salmon. “We don’t get many guys who know their way around a fish like that, Ernie,” he said. “How’s eleven dollars an hour sound?”
Ernesto swelled with pride. So much he could do with such riches. Maybe, he thought, I can buy one of the houses with all the grass.
In the end, a house was too much money. He rented an apartment in Salinas and drove back and forth to work. He did not mind. He was alone for the first time in two years. Driving, he could breathe and think. There was so much beauty to see: hills green after rain, turning brown in summer, soft like kitten fur. The harbor full of trawlers, skiffs. Sometimes after work, he parked nearby and watched the otters, the silent pelicanos sailing the wind. He closed his eyes and heard waves lapping, boat hulls knocking together, the grunts and squawks of coots. The air smelled like his village.
He found an old sofa by the side of the road not far from his apartment and hauled it up the stairs. He went to el mercadillo—the flea market—and bought a knife and fork, a plate, a mattress to sleep on. He ate beans, rice, tortillas. Sometimes fish, if there was extra at work and Dan said to take it home. He saved money for a radio.
It was lonely at night: no one to talk to, except for the call once a month. He told the children how much he missed them, told them not to cry. Maria thanked him for the money. She didn’t yell so much, but there was no love in her voice. Once she asked, “You still wear your ring?”
“Yes,” he said.
“There’s women there, at your market?”
“I don’t look,” he said. Then, “They don’t, either.” Trying to joke.
She didn’t laugh. “They will.”
“And you?” he asked. “You wear your ring?”
“Of course!” she said in a huff.
They hung up. He heated beans in a pot and ate them in the dark, wondering whether it was better this way—alone—than to be unhappy in a house full of people.
***
Nothing changed for a year or two.
One day, when he called, Maria said, “Javi is not here.”
She began to complain: He did not go to school; he had friends she did not know. She could smell cigarettes on his breath.
“No smoking!” Ernesto said. “A thirteen-year-old boy should not smoke!”
“You think I don’t know this? You think I’m a fool? You have all the answers? What do you think I should do that I haven’t already done?”
“Search his backpack, his closet. Make him stay home and study.”
“And what should I do when he laughs and slams the front door in my face? You,” she said, her voice shaking with anger, “you think you know everything in California, with your fancy job, your new friends, your new life!”
“You told me to come here!”
“He needs a father. A man in the house,” she said.
A father. A man. “I am his father!”
She sighed deeply. He knew she was full of despair. “You should come home.”
“I cannot! I have a job. I make money here. You—it’s your job to raise them, make them go to school!”
“Gabriella is first in her class! I am doing my job!”
Then Ernesto knew: He did not want to go home. He did not want to sleep in bed with a woman who could always find something to yell about. It would kill him, lo comería vivo. Eat him alive.
“I am doing my job,” he said. Then he added, “I have no friends.”
***
Javi stopped going to school. He was only home a few days a week, Maria told Ernesto. She did not know where he went. She knew he was taking drugs, but she did not know how to stop him.
One day when he was fifteen, la policía came, yelling, pointing their guns. Ernesto knew that was how they were: arresting more people to show they were fighting the gangs. They paid no attention to Gabriela’s sobbing, Maria’s screaming for mercy, and took his boy away.
“So now he sits in jail,” Maria said on the phone. “Go ahead. Tell me I am a bad mother.”
“You are not a bad mother,” he said. He did not want to fight. His heart was broken.
“I know what you think.” Her voice full of bitterness.
He could not breathe. The air was like water all around him. He was gulping, trying to stay alive.
“You should have been home,” she said. “You live with that now.”
Hanging up, he thought, This is not a marriage anymore.
***
But they stayed married. Maria found a lawyer to help get Javi out of jail. The lawyer said sometimes the judges liked it if the parents were married, which was rare in El Salvador. Maybe, he said, it would help with una liberación temprana. An early release.
Ernesto wore his ring. He did not want to answer questions. Dan was always full of questions. The ring made people think he was like them. Normal.
He wore the ring because he knew Gabriela would be sick at heart if he didn’t. She had finished el bachillerato and started college: a first in his family. He thought of her as he boned fish, talked to customers at the counter, listened to cumbia on the radio at night. Everything was for her and for Javi.
***
Months went by, then a year. The loneliness was worse. He missed dancing with a woman in his arms, cooking for her. He missed a woman’s scent. The way she was different from a man: her softness, the way she might sing under her breath as she put something in a drawer, how she might close her eyes when she tasted delicious food.
In all those years, no one was exactly right.
He did not look for a woman. Not exactly. But all day, as he talked to the housewives buying fish, he waited to feel something.
Linda came to the counter once in a while; she was not a regular. Ernesto liked her shy smile and pretty gray curls. She was someone who didn’t want to argue, never complained about the prices. And one day, the first thing she said was “I don’t know what I want!” and it didn’t sound like she meant fish. He wanted to tell her he didn’t know either, but all of a sudden, he did.
He invited her to his apartment for dinner. He made pupusas with tilapia, curtido with carrots and jalapenos. She told him how she worked for forty years and then retired: It was hard to fill her days. About her friend with cancer, how she cooked for her until she died. About her husband who drank and cheated until she left him. Twenty years.
“Why you stay so long?”
“Because I did not want to hurt my girls,” she said. “And maybe also because I thought he would change. It was stupid.”
“People don’t change. But you were not stupid.”
“People are who they say they are. And they don’t have to say it with words,” she said, smiling in a sad way. Then she said, “Where is your wife?”
He knew she had seen his ring. He did not want her to know the truth: that he had to stay married to a woman he did not love for his son.
“No wife for ten years,” he said. “I wear my mother’s ring so I will look like everybody else.”
He saw the look of relief in her eyes. And also hope.
***
The first time he took her to bed, they touched and kissed. No more. It was enough. He thought that sometimes, when you were without joy for a long time, you had to be careful letting it back in. Just a little at a time. All at once, it was too much.
Also, he was a gentleman.
***
They were happy. They made love and slept in each other’s arms. They danced to cumbia with the lights off. He loved how she leaned against him to learn the rhythm, how they moved like a conversation without words. He loved that she ate everything he cooked for her and wanted more.
He told her about his village, about his children. She told him what she wanted in life: to be a grandmother someday, to learn to understand poetry. She was an adventuress at heart, she whispered shyly. “Maybe see the world a little,” she said. “Maybe with you.”
He did not tell her he loved her. Maybe she did not love him the same way. Maybe God punished you by taking away what you loved the most. (Sometimes, at night, that was what he thought.) Maybe he did not say it because saying the words meant something else was supposed to happen—you lived together or got married—and he did not know what that was for them. His apartment was not for Linda. Not beautiful enough.
Also, he did not know if the judge at home had a way to see what he did in California. Maybe there were spies. Judges, la policía: He could not trust. He could not take a chance with his Javi.
Once, deep in the night, he found her hand. “This is good,” he whispered.
It took her a long time to answer. His heart beat hard.
“Yes,” she said.
“Did you ever think you would find it again?”
“No.”
He kissed her. He did not tell her he had never felt like this before. Not with Maria. Not with anyone. Ashamed, to be sixty years old and never to have known love that was soft like comfort and still burned hot.
***
He began to hear things: from neighbors, from Julio who took his rent check and fixed the plumbing. Everyone whispered their terrible stories, afraid. People began to disappear. Someone’s sister, someone’s son. Rounded up, like herds for slaughter.
He thought, This cannot happen! I am American now! This is where I belong! But it was coming. He could feel it in his bones.
He texted Linda, Te amo. She wrote back, Me, too. I love you.
One night, he awoke to the whirr of helicopters. He heard yelling and the insistent thud of fists pounding on doors. Then a terrible flash of light and a bang louder than any gunshot. A smell like firecrackers. He peeked through his curtains and saw a man in uniform grabbing Benita Flores by the arm and flinging her to the ground. Benita quivered in her nightgown on the cold landing and held her hands over her eyes. “No MS-13!” she cried. “No gang!” Another soldier ran out of her apartment with a computer under his arm.
I love you. He read it over and over, in the bus they were crammed into, and then later on the plane that rattled in the wind beneath it, flying into the whitening sky.
***
His mind blurred as they touched ground. He shuffled along with the rest of them as a soldier led them to a windowless room. A few of the babies began to cry. Their mothers hushed them in frightened, weary whispers.
Finally, he was sent on his way. Ten dollars and change in his pocket: now, a small fortune. He inhaled deeply. The air smelled of diesel and ceviche from a vendor’s stall. He was sweating from anxiety, from the humidity: something he had forgotten.
There on the crowded street, he pulled out his phone. I love you, he read, as if to memorize it for the last time. But he did not press ‘delete’. He turned toward the bus station. In two hours, he was home.
***
Maria did not seem shocked to see him at the door. He knew then that other men—her brothers, the husbands of friends—had been forced to return. “No knocking,” she said, standing back so he could enter. “It’s your house, too.”
She had aged, as he had, certainly. She was thicker and had gone completely gray. Her hair was still long, but now she pulled it into a low bun. Her neck, bared for anyone to see, no longer stirred him.
They ate early that evening: breaded tilapia, yuca frita. Maria did not talk much, but he could see that her hands fluttered over her spices as she cooked, and that she pulled stray tendrils of hair behind her ear with a certain lazy playfulness. She told him about Gabriela, how she loved her pharmacy classes in Australia, how she had a boyfriend there.
“So she will not come back,” he said, and Maria nodded. For a moment, they were united in the same sadness.
“I am glad,” Ernesto said. “I do not want her to live this life.”
He said it on purpose, to see what she would say. The Maria he knew would take offense, assuming he meant it as a criticism of the life he had with her. But she said nothing. She was, he could see, trying to please him. It touched him, even though he knew she had no real feeling for him, as he had none for her.
In bed, they both did all they could. He tried to talk himself into believing he wanted newness, something different from what he had known. But finally he rolled onto his back, panting, soft. I love you. “I cannot. I am sorry.”
“You cannot? Or you do not want to?”
“I am tired. You do not know what I have been through.”
She did not answer for so long that he thought she had fallen asleep. But she had not.
“Whoever she is, she is gone. You will never see her again,” she said. “We are all we have.”
Tears welled from his eyes, dripped down the sides of his face.
“We pretend for Javi,” she said.
***
Over the next few days, he became accustomed to his new life, which, the longer he lived it, seemed to be all he had ever known. He planted herbs for Maria’s window garden and painted some of the walls, which had grown dirty and scuffed in his absence. He walked to the beach and chatted with neighbors cleaning their catches: snook and snapper and bass. He and Maria skirted each other carefully, saying as little as possible so as not to be misunderstood. He wondered if life would now be nothing but this: a formal, indifferent companionship, hardly better than solitude. Maybe worse.
He spoke to the lawyer on the phone. No news, he was told.
“Is no news good news?” Ernesto asked.
“No news is no news,” Señor Landaverde said. He sounded tired and overworked, as though he had been picking strawberries under a hot sun.
“Is my son all right?”
Señor Landaverde sighed. “He is as well as he can be.” Then he added, “It is good you are home. I will get word to the judge.”
“And then you can get him out?”
“We will try,” Señor Landaverde said. “That is all we can do, is try.”
Ernesto thought he was paying a lot of money to someone who sounded so defeated and hopeless. But what choice did he have? He closed the bathroom door and opened his phone. I love you. He pressed ‘delete’. No more foolishness. Now, everything was for Javi, to bring him home.
***
When he heard Linda’s voice, he panicked: Had Maria been sneaking looks at his phone? Had she found an old voicemail he had forgotten to erase? But no. Linda was on his front step, exchanging pleasantries with Maria. Asking for him.
Impossible. A miracle.
In the moments it took him to reach the door, he devised a plan.
“Why are you here?” he asked loudly, knowing Maria was eavesdropping in the kitchen. “You have to go.”
“How could you?”
“Please. You must go now.” He leaned close and whispered, “To the hotel on the playa. I will meet you. We figure out something.”
He knew from her face that she was sorry she’d come. Bloodless, stricken. As long as he lived, he would never forget that he had been the one to cause her so much anguish.
“She means nothing to me. Not since you,” he whispered. “I love only you.”
“But the whole time, you were lying.” A long pause. “You’re just another liar!”
In all the time he’d known her, she’d never been angry. Not one time.
“Not about everything. Just this one thing.”
Another pause, in which she seemed to collect herself.
“I am glad you are safe,” she said.
She turned and headed toward her taxi without a backward glance.
He longed to tell her everything: that she was the only woman he had ever loved. That as soon as Javi came home, they could plan a future. He would shout it, not caring that Maria would hear, or the neighbors, or God, even, who was doing it again: taking everything away.
Instead, he committed to memory the tumble of curls grazing her shoulders, the creamy whiteness of her skin, the softness he knew beneath her blouse.
Watching her walk away, he swallowed the jumble of words on his tongue. Because it came to him in a flash: She had braved the unknown in a dangerous place to come for him. That would have to be enough. He would have to content himself with that.
THE END