The Others

There were more of us than I had imagined there could be. That was the first lesson of the road, that I was not special, not chosen, not even unlucky in a way that singled me out. I was one of many, and the many were a kind of arithmetic I could see being done in the men’s faces when they looked at us, counting, always counting. We were moved in groups, held in truck beds and back rooms and once for a long time in a place that had been a school. I will tell you about the people, because the people are what I kept. The rest I have set down somewhere I do not go.

There was a girl. I never knew her right name, and I have made my peace with the fact that I never will, which is its own particular grief, to love someone and not own the one word that was theirs. She was older than me, maybe twenty, and she had been on the road longer, and she had learned the thing I had not learned yet, which is how to stay kind inside a place built to burn the kindness out of you. She wore a marigold behind her ear. I do not know where she found it or how she kept it, a single flower going brown at the edges, but she kept it the way I had kept my prayers, like proof of something.

She is the one who told me. We were close in the dark and I was crying the way you cry when you have run out of the loud kind, and she put her mouth near my ear. Do you know why they are for the dead, she said. I did not. Marigolds, she said. They are for the dead, so the dead can find their way home. The color is so bright the souls can see it from a long way off and follow it back. She said it the way you hand down a recipe, like something her own grandmother had given her, and then she took the flower from behind her ear and she put it behind mine, and for a moment I was not cargo. I was a girl who had been given a flower by another girl, which is a thing that happens in the living world, among people.

There was a boy, too. Mateo. He was small, younger than me, and he had no one, and he had fixed himself to my side the way the little ones did when they found someone who had not yet gone hard. I told him I would keep him with me. I want that written down, that I told a child I would keep him, and that I meant it with everything I had, and that meaning it was not enough, because on that road meaning a thing and being able to do a thing had nothing to do with one another. But that is further on. In the room that had been a school he slept against me and I prayed over him, low, and for a little while having someone to protect gave me back a piece of the steadiness the truck had taken.

That is what the others gave me, and it is the only thing on the whole road I would not give back. My own faith had started to shake. I could feel it the way you feel a tooth that has begun to loosen, a wrongness you keep testing with your tongue. But hers held, the marigold girl’s, and Mateo needed mine to hold, and between the two of them I borrowed and I lent and the three of us made a warmth that was not enough to live on and was somehow enough to live on. I prayed louder for them than I had the courage to pray for myself. It is easier to believe Heaven is listening when you are asking on behalf of a child asleep against your ribs.

I did not know yet what the road did with people you loved. I found that out. But in this part, the part I can still hand you warm, there was a girl with a flower and a boy who trusted me, and we held onto each other in the dark and called it home, because it was the only home on offer.