Chapter 5

The bus from the border took four days, and by the time it pulled into the depot in downtown Los Angeles, Marisol had stopped counting the hours and started simply enduring them, the way she’d once endured a three-day watch on a ridge — not by ignoring the discomfort but by finding somewhere else in her mind to live while her body waited it out.

Nothing about the city matched anything she’d built in her head on the ride north. She had imagined, without meaning to, something closer to a larger version of the market towns near the farm — noise, yes, but noise she could place, sources she could point to. Los Angeles offered no such mercy. It came at her from every direction at once: bus engines idling at the curb, a radio bleeding through an open window three stories up, a man shouting a name that wasn’t hers at someone who also wasn’t her, the flat unbroken hum of traffic that never fully stopped even at two in the morning. Her body, trained for years to catalog every sound within a mile as either safe or worth killing, had no idea what to do with a place where sound simply never resolved into silence at all.

She flinched for the better part of a week. A door slamming three floors above the room she shared with two other women sent her hand halfway to a rifle that wasn’t there before she caught herself and felt foolish for it, standing in a stranger’s kitchen with her heart going like she’d just taken fire.

Efraín noticed. He noticed most things about her, even now, even worn thin himself by the crossing and the strangeness of a country that didn’t care what either of them had survived to get there.

“It will get quieter,” he told her, the second week, watching her go still at a car horn the way she used to go still at the sound of a truck engine on the mountain road.

“It hasn’t gotten quieter yet.”

“No. But you will get better at hearing which sounds are worth answering. You did it once already.” He meant the mountain. He meant learning wind and breath before he ever let her hold a rifle. He didn’t say either of those things outright, but she understood him anyway, the way she’d learned to understand most of what he didn’t say.

~ ☆ ~

The apartment was two rooms above a shoe repair shop on a street that smelled of rubber cement and, on Sundays, whatever the Ochoa family next door was frying, and it belonged, on paper, to two women Marisol had never met before the week she moved in — Yolanda, a seamstress twice her age with a laugh that carried through the thin walls at all hours, and her niece Carmen, seventeen and permanently exhausted from a job at a garment factory downtown. Efraín slept on a cot in the front room, behind a curtain Yolanda had strung up without being asked, and the arrangement held together the way most arrangements among strangers-turned-family did in that first hard year — not out of warmth exactly, but out of the shared understanding that none of them could afford to be proud about who they leaned on.

Efraín struggled in a way Marisol hadn’t fully anticipated, and it took her longer than it should have to understand why. On the mountain he had been the person people looked to — for wind, for cover, for the quiet certainty of a man who knew exactly what he was doing and why. In Los Angeles he was simply an older man with no English and a farmer’s hands, and the work he found — day labor, loading trucks at a produce market before dawn, whatever Yolanda’s cousin’s husband could point him toward that week — asked nothing of the parts of him that had made him who he was. He came home some nights with his hands blistered from work that would have embarrassed him back home, not because the labor itself was beneath him but because none of it required him to be good at any one thing, only present and willing.