were still moving when the narrow pinpoints of daylight coming through small scars in the trailer’s aluminum shell faded to darkness.
In the middle of the night, things went terribly wrong.
It started with sirens in the distance. As the sound came closer and caught up with us, conversation stopped inside the trailer.
“Uno. Dos. Tres.” Rosa counted under her breath as the sirens resolved themselves into at least three vehicles.
The truck slowed and the surface beneath the tires roughened. The floor beneath us sloped slightly to one side as the driver pulled the rig onto the shoulder of the road. But he kept the truck moving.
The sirens blazed past. The red lights of emergency vehicles glanced off the trailer, throwing shattered fragments of light into the interior. Then the light was gone. And the sirens were lost in the distance.
But the driver must have panicked. The truck pulled back onto the highway, continued along at high speed, then abruptly braked and downshifted to make a right turn. More time passed and the road deteriorated. The movement of the trailer became increasingly violent. We were thrown like rag dolls, bouncing against each other and into the unyielding shipping crates.
Then, abruptly, the terrifying ride stopped.
For a moment, except for the sound of the engine, there was silence. Then male and female voices erupted, shouting in Spanish, cursing the driver in the vulgar colloquialisms of Mexico and Guatemala and Honduras and El Salvador. We threatened him, demanding that he open the trailer door and let us out now. But the driver didn’t respond. Instead we felt the jolt as he freed the truck from the trailer. Then he drove away, abandoning us to the desert heat.
Despite the exterior lock, a dozen sets of bare fingers and straining backs and shoulders tried to pull the trailer door upward. The heavier men and a few of the women threw their shoulders against the door, trying to shift it outward. We climbed up the stacked crates, grasped the overhead track for the door and tried to yank it from the brackets that mounted it to the ceiling.
We were still working to escape when the pale beginning of a new day gradually found its way in through the tiny holes in the trailer wall. The heat inside the trailer grew worse. As each escape attempt was revealed as futile, activity inside the trailer slowed. An hour past dawn and those inside the trailer were quiet. Deathly quiet.
Rosa cried out again.
Her contractions were now coming in waves, one after another, barely giving her time to rest in between. For the first time since her labor began, she began crying. Quiet, hopeless weeping. Heart-wrenching, inconsolable weeping.
“Never give up, little one,” I murmured.
Only after I had spoken did I realize that I’d said the words in Vietnamese, repeating them exactly as I had first heard them. Rosa was too preoccupied to notice, but the words brought back memory, still vivid though two decades had passed.
I was eight when Grandma Qwan put me on a fishing boat crowded with people fleeing Vietnam. The men she’d paid had assured her that I would be safe. And perhaps they’d believed that. But we were intercepted midvoyage by Thai pirates. From my hiding place beneath a pile of rotting nets, I listened to the screams as they murdered the men, raped the women and stole everything of value.
Fourteen of us were left alive—cast adrift on a ruined boat without food or water. Thirteen women and one scrawny, mixed-race orphan who reeked of fish guts and filth. Days passed. One by one, the others died. Some of thirst and exposure. Some quietly, hopelessly, casting themselves into the sea. Until just one young woman and I remained. Though I was just a child, I had seen enough death to know that she would not live much longer.
That night she had held me close.
“Never give up, little one,” she had whispered in Vietnamese, as if she were telling me a precious secret.
When I awoke, she was gone. And I was alone.
I did not despair. I did not give up.
I had come too far to die today.
I stopped thinking about the imminent arrival of Rosa’s child. Using an edge of the cigarette lighter against the vertical surface of a nearby crate, I imagined that I was drawing with a nicely sharpened charcoal pencil on paper torn from an expensive vellum pad. I drew the exterior of the trailer, its only door solidly locked, and surrounded it with desert. A blazing sun hung in the sky. Mentally, I set that drawing aside. Then I drew the interior of the trailer.
I began with a rectangle with six solid walls—back and front, sides, ceiling and floor. I sketched the details of a door that pulled upward to open, that rode on tracks mounted parallel to the ceiling. Between the tracks and the ceiling there was at least a foot of space. I added crates. And refugees. And load bars that ratcheted into place…
The load bars could be moved!
I stood and began dragging at one of the horizontal bars as I described my plan to the others. Within moments, I had help. We freed the bar, set it on its end and ratcheted it upward until it pressed against one of the tracks from which the trailer door was suspended. Then the big, slow-moving man from Honduras, who was the strongest among us, continued working the stiff ratchet. He lengthened the load bar one inch at a time until there was so much pressure against the track that it buckled and bent.
Though the door remained on its track, it sagged at a top corner, bringing in a triangle of bright sunlight and a hot desert breeze that was fresher and cooler than the stale air inside the trailer. The space between the door and its frame wasn’t very large. Even the weight and strength of the man from Honduras failed to make it larger. But the gap was enough that a very small, athletic woman from Vietnam could squeeze herself through.
I pushed myself through headfirst and on my back. Head and shoulders escaped the trailer and above me I saw the brilliant blue Texas sky. Cloudless and beautiful. Breathtaking. But the thrilling moment of rebirth was immediately quashed by more practical concerns.
Grabbing finger and handholds wherever I could find them, I hauled myself upward until my entire body was free of the trailer. Then I hung for a moment, catching my breath, taking advantage of the trailer’s height to look off into the distance. As far as I could see, there was nothing but clumps of scrub, spiny cactus and an occasional thorny tree. And lots of rocks. The largest of which I tried not to land on when I pushed away from the trailer and dropped to the desert floor.
The landing was inelegant, but relatively painless. I picked myself up off a patch of dusty earth, spent a moment prying a large dry thorn from the palm of my right hand and dusted the back of my pants. Then, using a solid-looking rock, I tried to dislodge the padlock that locked the trailer door down. Spurred by cries of encouragement coming from within the trailer, I bashed and pounded at the lock until my hands were bloody, until the rock split in two.
Then, though no one could see me, I shook my head. Beating at the lock was wasting time and eating away at my remaining energy. Adrenaline helped, but it was only a temporary cure for dehydration and heat exhaustion.
“Take care of Rosa,” I shouted in Spanish. “I will go find help. And I will come back. I swear.”
Then I turned my back on the trailer, focusing on a single goal. I had to find help. For everyone. I began following the truck’s tire tracks. I wanted to hurry, to run, to push myself to my limits. Instead, I walked. Slowly, steadily, concentrating
