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The fury of those nativists advocating wholesale slaughter was what struck Nadia most, and it
struck her because it seemed so familiar, so much like the fury of the militants in her own city. She
wondered whether she and Saeed had done anything by moving, whether the faces and buildings had
changed but the basic reality of their predicament had not.
But then around her she saw all these people of all these different colors in all these different
attires and she was relieved, better here than there she thought, and it occurred to her that she had
been stifled in the place of her birth for virtually her entire life, that its time for her had passed, and a
new time was here, and, fraught or not, she relished this like the wind in her face on a hot day when
she rode her motorcycle and lifted the visor of her helmet and embraced the dust and the pollution and
the little bugs that sometimes went into your mouth and made you recoil and even spit, but after
spitting grin, and grin with a wildness.
• • •
FOR OTHERS TOO the doors came as a release. In the hills above Tijuana was an orphanage called
simply the House of the Children, perhaps because it was not precisely an orphanage. Or not only an
orphanage, though that is what it was referred to by the college students from across the border who
would sometimes come here to do volunteer work: painting, carpentry, the hanging and spackling of
drywall. But many of the children in the House of the Children had at least one living parent or sibling
or uncle or aunt. Usually these relatives labored on the other side, in the United States, and their
absences would last until the child was old enough to attempt the crossing, or until the relative was
exhausted enough to return, or on occasion, quite often, forever, because life and its end are
unpredictable, especially at a distance, where death seems to operate with such whimsical aim.
The House sat on a ridge at the crest of a hill, fronting a street. Its chain-link-fenced and partly
concrete-floored play area was at the back, facing a parched valley, on which the other low dwellings
of that street also opened, some of them rising on stilts, as though jutting out to sea, an effect that was
incongruous, given the dryness and lack of water all about. But the Pacific Ocean was only a couple
hours’ walk to the west, and besides, stilts made sense given the terrain.
Out of a black door in a nearby cantina, admittedly an atypical place for a young woman like
herself to be found, a young woman was emerging. The owner made no fuss over it, for the times
were such, and once this young woman had emerged she rose and strode to the orphanage. There she
located another young woman, or rather a grown girl, and the young woman hugged the girl, whom she
recognized only because she had seen her on electronic displays, on the screens of phones and
computers, it having been that many years, and the girl hugged her mother and then became shy.
The girl’s mother met the adults who ran the orphanage, and many of the children, who stared at
her and chattered as though she was a sign of something, which of course she was, since if she had
come then others would come too. Dinner that evening was rice and refried beans served on paper
plates, eaten on an unbroken row of tables flanked by benches, and the mother sat at the center, like a
dignitary or a holy figure, and told stories that some of the children, being children, imagined
happening to their own mothers, now, or before, when their mothers were still alive.
The mother who had returned on this day spent the night at the orphanage so her daughter could say
her farewells. And then mother and daughter walked together to the cantina, and the owner allowed
them in, shaking his head but smiling as well, the smile bending his mustache, and making his fierce
visage somewhat goofy for a moment, and with that the mother and her daughter were gone.