Star in the Forest Read online

  The next day, Mamá said her heart kept booming, like it was stuck, like when a clock alarm’s beeping and you can’t find the Off button. Finally, she said she wasn’t going to drive anymore in this country because it was giving her nervios. And she started saying she missed Papá, and maybe she’d send him that money if he swore not to speed again.

  For a few days, Papá’s red truck sat in front of our trailer, looking lonely. I passed it every day on the way to the bus stop, and coming home from the bus stop, and on the way to the forest, and on the way home from the forest. I brushed my hand against it every time I passed, and a thin layer of dirt rubbed off on my fingertips.

  After church on Sunday, we were walking home from the bus stop when I saw the drywaller guys peeling off the Mora sticker with a knife. They were putting on a sticker of a beautiful lady in a swimsuit instead.

  Mamá frowned at the new sticker, but she didn’t tell them to get their hands off Papá’s truck.

  I pressed my lips together, tight and furious.

  Inside, Mamá started scrambling eggs.

  I couldn’t hold it in anymore. “Did you sell Papá’s truck to the drywall guys?”

  “Yes.”

  “You want us to forget about him, don’t you?”

  “He’s coming home, Zitlally,” she said. And she smiled in a shiny-eyed way that made me sure she wasn’t joking. “I sent the money from the truck to your father. Money to pay the coyote. He’s coming home. Probably in a week or so. Si Dios quiere.”

  I was so dizzy with happiness, I couldn’t find words.

  “We wanted it to be a surprise, Zitlally,” she said. “We wanted him to just show up at the door and see how happy you’d be.”

  There was so much happiness in me now, the trailer was too small to hold it all. So much happiness it was bursting out the windows and through the screen door. So much happiness the only thing I could think to do with it all was grab some stale tortillas and run next door to Crystal’s.

  Usually Crystal was the one who knocked on my door, but this time I knocked on hers. She answered the door in pink leggings and a purple T-shirt that was too big for her.

  “My dad’s coming home!” I said. “Want to go to the forest to celebrate?”

  “Woohoo!” she shouted. “Woohoooooo!”

  She put on some sparkly flip-flops and we took off running down the path and I didn’t even feel embarrassed that her outfit looked like pajamas. It was full-fledged springtime now. Red tulips with velvety black stars inside had opened up next to the daffodils.

  When we got there, Star was wagging his tail like crazy. I gave him a hug and a tortilla and unhooked his chain.

  “Hey!” Crystal said. “I got an idea!”

  “What?”

  “Let’s train Star. We can put on a dog show for your dad!”

  “You know how to train dogs?”

  “Duh!” She said it in a nice way, though. “My dad trained like nineteen hundred sled dogs in Alaska a few years back. You know the ones in those races?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, he trained, like, all the winners. And he taught me, too.” She nuzzled her nose against Star’s. “Plus, we had a puppy once named Poopsies, and she peed everywhere and chewed up everything and my mom’s boyfriend said if Poopsies didn’t get good fast he was gonna put her in a sack filled with stones and throw it in a river.”

  “That’s awful!” Now that I thought about it, I remembered, a couple of years back, a puppy yapping and whining in their trailer.

  “I know. If my dad was there he would have kicked the dictator’s butt and made Poopsies into a blue-ribbon sled dog. But he was working with kangaroos in Australia, so I got out a bunch of books from the library and started training Poopsies myself.”

  “Did it work?”

  “I practically got that dog to talk!” she said.

  “Where’s Poopsies now?” I asked.

  Crystal looked away, at grass poking through an old engine. “With my dad. He fell in love with her since she was so well-behaved. So I said he could take her along on his trips. He gets sad sometimes without me, you know?”

  I knew where her dad really was. But it seemed too late to tell her now. It seemed like something a person shouldn’t do to her best friend. So I decided to let myself believe her dad really was a sled-dog-training, lemur-studying, polar-bear-saving world traveler. Who got sad sometimes.

  Crystal must have learned something from those library books, because the first day of training, with just some Cheerios, we taught Star how to sit! And on the second day, with lemon wafers, how to lie down. And on the third day, with Doritos, how to roll over. He was such a smart dog.

  The fourth day he learned how to shake hands. That was the day Papá called us to say he was in Sonora, right on the Mexican side of the border. He said he was going to cross over to Arizona that night, over to the American side. And then it would be just another day or two until he got home to Forest View.

  Mamá made flan and hot chocolate that night to celebrate, and we all watched TV together in our room, feeling warm and cozy. Dalia didn’t complain that it was a cartoon, and when Reina got scared at the shark, we held her tight, and then we stayed like that, holding each other.

  The next day, in the car part forest, when I told Crystal my dad was just on the other side of the border now, she screamed, “Woohooooo!”

  “We have to teach Star something amazing, something to really impress your dad.”

  We looked around the car part forest for inspiration. Flowers, vines, weeds, trees, and lots of car parts. A squirrel ran along the hood of the truck cab and inside the open window. It sat on the steering wheel and made those funny chirping sounds, like it was trying to tell us something, an idea.

  “I know!” I said. “My dad will probably be sad we sold his truck. So we can get Star to do a trick with this truck. Like stand on it or something.”

  “Or drive it!” Crystal said. She put her hand to the door’s rusted handle. She had to pull with all her might to get it to creak open.

  Star was a perfect student. A plus plus. He learned how to climb into the truck cab, and not only that. He put his paw on the horn and beeped it!

  Crystal and I burst out laughing. We laughed so hard we fell to the ground and rolled around and didn’t care how dirty our clothes were getting. We laughed and laughed, and when Star saw us laughing so hard, he beeped again and again.

  “It really looks like he’s driving!” I said between little gasps.

  “Your dad’s gonna be laughing so hard he’ll pee in his pants!” Crystal said.

  And then we laughed some more at that.

  The next day was Friday, which meant that Papá was probably on our side of the border now and on his way to Colorado. All day in school, that’s all I could think about. When Mr. Martin told me to read the next paragraph about amphibians, I didn’t even know what page we were on. There was an awkward silence, but then Crystal called out, “Second paragraph on page thirty, Zitlally.”

  My face felt a little hot, but mostly I felt thankful, and I didn’t care that everyone in the fifth grade thought she was my best friend now.

  After school, we got together our bag of supplies to wash Star and make him look good for Papá. He’d already gotten a little dirty over the past week, but nowhere near as bad as before. “We’ll just do a little touch-up,” Crystal said. We filled the turquoise car-washing bucket halfway with water and brought it down the path toward the forest. We had to take turns carrying it because it was really heavy and the metal handle kept digging into our palms.

  “Too bad there’s not electricity there,” Crystal said. “Then we could bring my mom’s curling iron and totally style his hair.”

  “Yeah, too bad,” I said, secretly glad there was no electricity. It would have been embarrassing for Star to have his hair curled. After all, he was a boy. I just wanted his fur to be clean and white so that the star on the back of his neck would stand out for Papá. And I
wanted him to smell like an orange Starburst.

  The tulips’ petals were shriveling and turning brown at the edges now, and the daffodils’ had already fallen off. Too bad Papá wouldn’t get to see how pretty they looked when they were new and bright.

  That’s what I was thinking when we turned the corner into the car part forest and saw that Star was gone.

  PART THREE

  Papá

  For a long time, we looked for Star. We looked under every crumbly car part. We ran all around Forest View, up and down every street, calling “Star! Star!” We asked everyone we passed if they’d seen him. No one had.

  We even walked around the edges of Forest View, in case he’d left the trailer park. Most of the yards backed up to a tall chain-link fence with a bunch of gigantic pipes on the other side. We followed the fence and got to a small highway, where cars whizzed by. Then we walked along the edge of the highway and through the backyards of two run-down hotels. And then we were back at the chain-link fence and the giant pipes.

  “I wish we took a picture of him,” Crystal said. “Then we could photocopy it and put up signs all over the telephone poles.”

  I thought about that. “But what if his owner saw it and got mad?”

  Crystal shrugged. “Well, maybe we could call the pound and see if Star’s there.”

  “We can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “We don’t have papers or tags or anything to prove it. Plus, we’re under eighteen.”

  Plus, I thought secretly, what if the pound people found out I didn’t have papers, either? What if my whole family got deportada because of me?

  Our legs were tired by now. And we were shivery cold because the sun was going down and the wind was picking up. Even so, we went back to the forest in case Star had come back.

  He hadn’t.

  So we sat in his spot and cried together.

  “Maybe he just went exploring for a little while,” I said, when I was ready to stop sniffling.

  Crystal nodded. “Maybe he’ll be back tomorrow.”

  By the time we came out of the forest, it was dark. We walked fast by the broken-glass park. There were already guys hanging out there, smoking and drinking beer and talking loud. Luckily they didn’t notice Crystal and me.

  When I got home, Mamá grabbed me and hugged me so tight I could barely breathe.

  “Dios, Zitlally, where were you?”

  “With Crystal,” I said.

  “Are you all right?”

  She probably saw my red eyes and blotchy face and the crusty stuff around my eyes.

  “Something sad happened.” And I thought, I’ll just tell her about Star and maybe she can help us get him back so he can do his tricks for Papá. But when I opened my mouth to tell her, I noticed her face.

  Something was wrong, something more than me coming home late. Her face was like mine—blotchy and crusty. Her eyes were red, too.

  She didn’t ask me what sad thing had happened. Instead, she said, “Zitlally, we have bad news, mi amor.”

  Behind her, Reina and Dalia were hugging each other on the sofa. They looked like someone had just died. Was it Star? Was he hit by a car? Did they somehow know he was mine?

  “It’s your father, mi vida. He’s secuestrado.”

  I thought I knew what secuestrado meant, but maybe I didn’t, because it only happened in movies, not in real life.

  But then I knew I was right, because Dalia said, in English, “Kidnapped.”

  Secuestrado, secuestrado, secuestrado.

  All night, that was all Mamá talked about, on the phone with my aunts Rosa and Virginia and María. With Uncle Luciano in Mexico. And when she said secuestrado, she was always tugging at her hair, or twisting her rings, or wringing a dishtowel. And she was shaking, like when the cop pulled her over, only that lasted five minutes, and this was lasting much, much longer.

  Mamá said that some bad men had called her that afternoon. They were holding Papá prisoner in the desert. They wouldn’t let him go until she paid them ten thousand dollars. She told them she didn’t have that much money. They said, “Find it,” and hung up.

  We didn’t sleep. We stayed up all night and whispered to each other, secuestrado, secuestrado, secuestrado. We said the names of the entire Holy Family over and over again. Jesús María José Jesús María José Jesús María José.

  Saturday morning, Crystal came to the door and said, “Want to look for Star?”

  I shook my head.

  “Oh.” She peered over my shoulder. “Is your dad here?”

  “No. There’s a problem.” I looked down at my furry slippers. “Anyway, I can’t talk now.”

  She seemed hurt, but I closed the screen door and went back to the bedroom with Reina and Dalia and watched TV all weekend.

  But I didn’t actually watch TV. I stared at the moving shapes and colors and wondered how it felt to be secuestrado. I wondered if they were giving Papá food. I wondered if he was blindfolded.

  On Monday and Tuesday I didn’t go to school and Mamá didn’t notice.

  Crystal did.

  She left the notes and handouts and homework assignments at my door in big yellow envelopes covered in glittery dolphin stickers. She’d re-copied all her notes onto pink notebook paper for me. She had neat bubbly handwriting, and over each of her i’s she made tiny dog faces. It looked like a lot of work.

  I asked Mamá how it felt to be secuestrado and if Papá had food and if he was blindfolded.

  She didn’t want to answer. She said I’d have nightmares.

  So I asked Dalia what had happened to Papá. Exactly.

  She told me. She said that there are bad men who roam the desert at the border. They look like ranchers, and they drive their trucks around and if they see migrantes who look thirsty and hungry and lost, they say, Get in the back of the truck and we’ll give you sandwiches and Coke. And even if you have a bad feeling in your stomach about it, you get in because they have pistols in their jeans. And then they take you to their house and lock you in a room with no windows and call your family and say if they don’t get money wired to them soon, they’ll kill you. Dalia knows this because it happened to her old boyfriend when he crossed.

  “Is Papá blindfolded?” Somehow being blindfolded seemed like it would be the worst part. Not being able to see. Not knowing what was happening. Or what would happen next.

  “Who knows.” Dalia thought. “I bet he’s just locked in a room.”

  “With food?”

  “I bet they give him food.” Usually Dalia didn’t like to answer my questions, but now she was patient. “But probably it’s bad food, like old tortillas and cold, crusty beans without salsa.”

  “Maybe Mamá could call the police,” I said.

  “She can’t. Because we have no idea where Papá is. And he’s illegal. No one cares about him but us. And if the cops found him, they’d send him back to Mexico again.”

  I took a warm bath with lots of bubbles and closed my eyes and imagined I was in a dark room with bad food. And then I tried to imagine where Star was—probably in a dark place, too, probably scared and hungry and missing me. It was true, their fates were all tied up together.

  Way back, before we left Mexico, Papá knew everything and could do anything. When I was six, on the day before we left for Colorado, we went on a picnic in Xono. “Pay attention to everything, m’hija,” he said. “Because we might not be back for a long, long time.” He rubbed his hand over his face and Mamá touched his shoulder.

  We found a spot by the stream on wispy, light green grass. I paid attention to how soft it was, like a mat of feathers. I paid attention to how the trickling water rang light as bird songs in some places and deep as church bells in others.

  Papá found a spot where the stream poured straight out of some mossy stones. He filled a cup and let Dalia and Mamá and me take turns drinking the cold, sweet water. How does he know, I wondered, which water makes you sick and which water is good?

 
; I wolfed down my lunch so I could play in the stream with Dalia. When I hopped to my feet, Papá held up a tiny piece of my leftover avocado-and-cheese sandwich. “Are you going to finish?”

  I shook my head and splashed into the water.

  He smiled sideways. “This bit of sandwich could be a feast for forty-seven ants.”

  I stopped splashing. “Really? How many would it take to eat a whole sandwich?”

  He looked at the sky and thought. “Five hundred sixty-two.” He tossed the sandwich scrap into the trees, and I imagined hundreds of ants pouncing on it. Then he winked at me. “But only five hundred thirty-three if they’re really hungry.”

  How does Papá know this? I thought. Is there anything he doesn’t know?

  Then we came to Colorado. And here, every day I found out new things he didn’t know and couldn’t do. He couldn’t ask the lady at Walmart where the garbage bags were. He couldn’t pronounce the name of my school. He didn’t know about the silent e rule. He probably didn’t even know how many American ants it took to eat one sandwich.

  Sometimes I liked being the expert. I felt proud explaining that in English, j makes a j sound, not an h sound. Or asking the guy at Ace Hardware if the fifty-percent-off Christmas lights were already marked down. Or reading the sign over the pink ice cream, which said it was peppermint, not strawberry.

  But sometimes I wished we could go back to the day of the picnic by the stream, when Papá knew everything and could do anything. Back to a time when I’d never heard of deportado or secuestrado. Back then, I would never, ever—not in a million years—have imagined that these things could happen to Papá.

  On Wednesday, I went to school. It distracted me a little from imagining Papá locked in a dark room with bad food.

  Crystal was extra nice to me. “Your hair looks pretty,” she said, even though it was the same as always.

  “You didn’t find Star, did you?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “I left a bunch of bologna there, but I think the squirrels just ate it.”