seven
Several days later, sometime after nine in the evening, I was parked in front of a house in a working-class section of Oakland. It was an inexpensively well-kept place, with a small trimmed lawn, and no weeds between the stepping-stones that led to the house. There was a geranium by the front door, blooming red. This was where Nidia Hernandez was staying with friends.
Shay had looked pretty sour when I told him I was taking nearly two weeks off, but there was nothing he could do. I was an independent contractor; I worked, or not, at both my will and his. He could have fired me just as easily.
That afternoon, packing had been quick and easy. Hot-weather clothes, one heavy jacket for the evenings. A recently purchased guidebook to Mexico. A bottle of Bacardi and several minis of Finlandia, tucked protectively between layers of clothing. The little care package Serena had sent to me-a sheaf of twenties and fifties, the promised expense money, and a handful of Benzedrines wrapped in foil, to help me stay alert on the road. The rest of my pay would wait until I was on my way back up north; Serena and I had arranged that I’d stop at her place and we’d settle up then.
Finally I’d cleaned and oiled the Airweight, which was now taped under the front seat of the car I’d rented. I didn’t expect any trouble in Mexico. I was just being careful.
A young man with a peach-fuzz mustache answered the door when I knocked. “Are you Hailey?” he said.
“I’m in the right place, then.”
“Yeah, hello, yeah,” he said, and moved aside. I stepped into a narrow entryway of brown-checked linoleum, and the boy called to someone farther back in the house in Spanish so rapid I didn’t catch much of it, except for Nidia’s name.
A middle-aged woman came around the corner into the entryway. She was thin, with red-tinted hair pinned up on her head.
“Is it her?” she said in a gently accented voice. “Oh, please come in. My name is Herlinda.”
“Hailey,” I said.
“Come into the kitchen.”
I followed her. The floorboards felt slightly warped under my feet, and the house smelled of many, many meals cooked there. We rounded a corner, and I got my first look at Nidia Hernandez.
She was sitting in a chair slightly pushed back from the kitchen table, two scuffed suitcases at her feet. I could see where she’d draw unwanted masculine attention. Her hair was cinnamon-colored, in curls weighed down into near-straightness by their length. Her eyes were green-brown, and she had a heart-shaped face. She wasn’t very tall-maybe five-two-and slender except for the little potbelly a lot of girls had nowadays, the obsession for flat abs being over. She looked from Herlinda to me.
“Hey,” I said. “I’m Hailey.”
“Thank you for coming,” she said.
“I was sorry to hear about your boyfriend. Serena told me,” I said.
She nodded and said something that I thought was “Thank you” but couldn’t be sure: She was that quiet. We both looked to Herlinda to take over.
Herlinda did, fixing hot chocolate and offering pan dulce, both of which I accepted, although I wasn’t hungry. Then she spread a map of Mexico on the table and began the debriefing I’d been promised. “Have you ever been to Mexico?” she asked.
“To Baja California, yes,” I said.
“Did you drive?”
I nodded. It had been CJ’s idea, a road trip to a seaside town he’d heard about.
“Good,” Herlinda said. “So you know a little about driving on Mexican roads.” Even so, she went on to tell me things I’d already heard: that in isolated areas, drivers tended to go down the center of the road until they saw oncoming traffic, and that it was common for both parties to be jailed in case of a traffic accident. If I were in one, she said, I should be exceedingly polite to the police and keep my ears open for the subtle implication that a bribe would clear the whole thing up. I nodded assent. Her son leaned against the refrigerator and listened.
Then Herlinda turned her attention to the map. I saw a star, hand-drawn in ink, in the northern Sierra Madre region.
“That’s where we’re going?” I said.
“It’s the nearest town to the village,” Herlinda said.
My confusion must have shown on my face-I didn’t understand the distinction she was making-so Herlinda said, “You won’t take Nidia all the way; the road isn’t passable by car. You’ll take her to this town, and you’ll see the post office there. It has a Mexican flag over it. Take Nidia inside, and the postman will take her up to the village when he goes with the mail. They do it all the time, her mother says.”
“If the road’s not passable by car, how does the postman go up? Horseback?”
Herlinda smiled. “He has four-wheel-drive.”
I was embarrassed at my assumption. “If I’d known,” I said, “I could’ve got something with four-wheel.”
Herlinda shook her head. “It’s not just that,” she said. “The road’s narrow and it’s steep, and I guess city Mexicans don’t do well with it.” She left the obvious unsaid: Not to mention gringos.
Then she looked up at the kitchen doorway. I followed her gaze and saw a thin girl of maybe twelve or thirteen there, wearing a long pink nightshirt.
“You’re supposed to be in bed,” Herlinda told her.
“I wanted to say good-bye to Nidia.”
I moved from the kitchen counter and told Nidia, “I’ll take your bags out to the car,” thinking they’d want privacy for their good-byes.
Outside, I sat behind the wheel of the car I’d rented, a powerful V6 Impala. When I’d first driven it that afternoon, I felt a small rush of elation and power. Then, just as quickly, I’d been stabbed by a memory: Wilshire Boulevard and a hard thump from the front end of my car.
He darted out of nowhere; it was an accident; there was nothing you could have done. It had become my mantra in moments like these. But I wondered, if I ever owned a vehicle again, how long it would take before I could drive without thinking of Trey Marsellus.
eight
It was in northern Arizona that I first tried to have a substantial conversation with Nidia.
We had been traveling by night. That was my plan until we got to the border. Nocturnal travel was cooler in the Southwestern heat, and it would lower our chances of setting off a speed trap, because despite what I’d told Serena about being cautious on the road, I was pushing my luck just a little on speed. I wanted the trip to be done in about seven or eight days. It would have helped if Nidia knew how to drive, but she didn’t.
So, mostly, she’d been dozing as we drove through the night, or sometimes working on a knitting project in her lap. We didn’t talk much.
I couldn’t decide whether I liked Nidia or not. She was polite to me. Very polite, in fact, as though I were an authority figure just by virtue of being chosen to take her to Mexico. If she disapproved of my occasional bad language, or the liquor I drank neat over ice when the driving was done, she didn’t say anything about it. But my occasional attempts at small talk had all died pretty quickly. I just couldn’t seem to make any connection with her.
Tonight I didn’t mess around with small talk at alclass="underline" I turned down the radio and asked her something serious.
“So what’s wrong with your grandmother?”
She looked up at me. “What?”
“Your sick grandmother,” I repeated, “what’s wrong?”
“She’s very old,” Nidia said slowly.
“It’s just old age?” Her answer surprised me; it seemed like a flimsy reason for a girl of Nidia’s age, just starting out in life, to be dispatched to a remote village indefinitely.