Red Weather

1. Autobus Esmarelda

1 1 AutobusEsmarelda After all these years, it was hard to imagine they were still alive. In the cold still hour before dawn, when other people woke to think of unpaid bills, of all their unkindnesses, their keenest embarrassments, Neva lay awake watching different versions of her parents’ lives flicker by like home movies. She imagined amnesia or imprisonment. A new city where they were unknown and their days full—new house, new jobs, new children. Sometimes what flickered by were possibilities too terrible to think of. But she always pushed those away. Better not even to imagine. When her brother lay awake, what did he see? It was something she and Harker no longer talked about. But they were always there, a shifting space at the edge of her vision, at the acute corner of consciousness. She’d left Atlanta in a rush. The train to New Orleans, the flight to Mexico City, another train, and now the last bus—the trip to get here was a blur. After so many years of waiting, she had simply moved. She had followed the only trail that had been offered in years, the only trail rising from the tangled threads of their history. She had not panicked, not thought much about where she was, what she would do when she got there, not until she saw the families on the bus with her, hovering in their own orbits, more apart from her than she’d been from the landscape outside the train window. Panic—even more than she felt looking out the side of the swaying bus at the hundred-foot drop. How had she come here, and where was here? It might take her days to get back to Atlanta. It might take weeks. With wet palms and a mouth dry as the landscape she’d passed through the day before, she shut her eyes, breathing slowly and counting , counting each inhalation, each exhalation. She couldn’t think about it, couldn’t think, because she might start screaming, might cry, throw up. She closed her eyes, trying not to be sick, imagining the scene on the bus, the Indian families huddling together protectively, the sneery 2 tie-dye guy who made a point of speaking Spanish with the driver, his girlfriend who never spoke. What if the bus driver put her off? She counted each breath, and when she got to eighty-nine, she heard one of the little girls behind her say “Abuelita” and turned to see the grandmother fishing a banana out of a bag and giving it to her granddaughter. They stopped in four small towns, villages really, where there weren’t real bus stops, pulling up in front of a small market, then a fruit stand, until finally they just stopped along the highway at a place the driver and the family of nine seemed to recognize. At the first stop, a father and son got on with huge bundles and got off again at the next stop. After that, people left the bus steadily until there were only Neva, the American couple, and a man in a maroon sports coat. Over the tape player Neva listened to the same mix repeat itself: Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe,” the Monkees’ “Last Train to Clarksville,” Jefferson Airplane’s “Volunteers of America.” She slept, waking when the bus stopped, so stiff that stretching her legs was painful , to see the bus driver beckoning her to the front of the bus. Everyone else was standing in the dirt road by the side of the bus. “Señorita,” the driver said, and she took her backpack off the rack and stumbled outside where the bright light and heat felt like a wall against her swollen face. She tipped her head down. The driver opened the compartment in the side of the bus and handed out their luggage: a large cloth rucksack for the tie-dye couple, a black valise for the sports coat man, and Neva’s duffel and brown suitcase. The others walked away. “Where are we?” she asked the driver, who answered “La frontera” as he was climbing back on the bus. The border. He looked back to her. “Coatepeque,” he said, pointing. Finally, she thought. Esmarelda was written in dirty white script across the bus’s sea-green exterior. The driver turned the bus around in a quick U in the narrow dirt road, and Neva dragged her bags out of the way just...