Prologue
The girl shook her twin brother’s shoulder, but he didn’t stir.
She stared at his chest, trying to see whether it was rising and falling. A thin slice of streetlight streaming in the open tent flap barely penetrated the darkness. She inhaled sharply, fear spiking through her. The pungent smells of the tent overwhelmed her—dirty diapers and sweat and sour milk. Perspiration dripped down the girl’s cheek.
The girl pressed her ear to her brother’s chest, but the other sounds in the tent—the raggedy breathing and moans of the other children—were so loud she couldn’t hear anything.
A boy sleeping nearby murmured something nonsensical. The only word she could distinguish was an anguished “Papa!”
Nearby, a three-year-old boy had crawled off his mattress and was huddled in the bed next to his, shivering. His little body pressed close against a teenage boy who had only arrived yesterday. The toddler whimpered in his sleep. The teenager threw an arm around the boy, drawing him close.
Most of the other kids in the camp were boys. When they’d first arrived, she’d looked around the dozens of kids milling around the lunch line for other girls, but most were teenage boys. She was the only girl in their tent.
The girl pressed a hand to her brother’s forehead. She drew it back in horror. His forehead was as hot as a stove.
In desperation, she grabbed him by both shoulders and shook him violently. This time her jagged and torn fingernails dug into his shoulder through his thin, damp t-shirt. He moaned.
She nearly cried out with relief but stifled the noise, quickly looking behind her at the tent opening.
The guard would return on his rounds within the next five minutes or so. She took her brother’s hand.
“Pablo? You have to get up. We have to leave,” she whispered in Spanish. He didn’t stir. His hand was cold and his entire body shuddered. Another zip of terror shot through her. Valentina had pleaded with the guard earlier to take the boy to the medical station at the camp.
The guard had pretended not to speak Spanish, although she’d heard him speaking it the first day they arrived. How long had that been? Pablo had fallen ill that first day and had grown steadily worse. The second day she practically carried him over to a medical tent and the doctor there had poured some liquid medicine and forced Pablo to swallow it. Then the doctor had looked at her with sad eyes and sent her away. He hadn’t taken her brother’s temperature, looked in his throat or ears or eyes, or listened to his chest like her mother’s doctor back in Guatemala did the one time Valentina was sick.
That made today the third day they’d been in the detention camp.
As soon as they crossed the border at Tijuana, their tia—a friend of the family they’d been instructed to call “aunt”—grabbed their hands and led them to a main road. Tia Anita stood shading her eyes, praying out loud for a vehicle to come down the hot pavement. Valentina and Pablo could barely stand. Tia Anita had given them the last sip of her water that morning. Valentina had looked at the bottle and handed it to Pablo.
He’d seemed out of sorts, and she thought some water might help.
She was wrong. It had been the beginning of whatever illness now ailed him.
After standing by the side of the road for twenty minutes, Valentina heard the sound of a vehicle. Tia Anita told them to wait and stood in the middle of the road in front of the vehicle, making sure it stopped.
It was Border Patrol. Valentina sighed in relief. They would help. They would grant them asylum and help them reunite with their father in Salinas.
They’d made it.
But after they crawled in the car and gulped down water and some rectangles of strange food, Tia Anita began arguing with one of the men.
Valentina tugged on Anita’s shirt sleeve. “Que pasa?”
Anita shook her head in warning. But Valentina saw tears in the woman’s eyes.
Finally, they pulled up to a gate at a large fenced area. The driver spoke to the guard and the gate swung open. The fence was twice as tall as the vehicle. Valentina looked at Anita. But the woman stared straight ahead. They parked near a low building, and when they got out, Anita crouched down before her.
“Mija. They want you and Pablo to go to a place where the children sleep while they make sure you are supposed to be with me. Then we will be put back together to find your papa. Okay?”
“No!” Valentina stomped her foot. “I don’t want to leave you.”
“Lo siento,” Anita said, looking down as a man led her away.
Valentina started to chase after, but a woman in green pants and a green shirt took her arm. The woman smiled at her, but her eyes looked sad.
“Let’s go this way, sweetie.”
Pablo clutched Valentina’s hand, his face expressionless. Looking back, Valentina knew he must have already been very sick.
The woman took them into a small room and examined them. She asked who Anita was and where their parents were. Valentina told them her mother was very ill in Guatemala and needed medicine. Her father had come to work in California to get money for their mother’s medicine. But their mother had grown too ill to care for them, so Tia Anita agreed to bring them to their father to live.
The woman’s forehead scrunched together, and she chewed on her lip a little before speaking. “Is your father an American citizen?”
Suddenly Valentina felt much younger than her twelve years. “No se.” I don’t know.
“Where are you meeting him?”
Valentina swallowed and replied the same way. “No se.”
The woman exhaled loudly.
“Is this woman Anita really your aunt?”
Her voice was so sad that Valentina couldn’t lie to her. She shook her head.
The woman closed her eyes for a second. Then opened them. “Did she get paid to bring you here?”
Valentina felt tears prick her eyes. “No se.”
“Okay,” the woman said, standing. “We’ll try to find your father. Meanwhile, why don’t we find the tent you are assigned to.”
The first day Valentina had been grateful for the abundance of food and water offered to them, and that first night she slept until the sounds of the other children in the tent had woken her the next morning. Her brother was slower to wake, and Valentina realized he needed a doctor. When she told a guard, the man pointed to another smaller tent across the way that had a red cross on it.
Inside was where the sad-looking man gave Pablo a cup of medicine.
But on the second day when she tried to find the guard, a new man was there and told her to stay in the tent. He said it in such a mean voice that Valentina had cowered and returned inside.
Today was the third day. Pablo had been lying on the mattress in a deep sleep all day. At dinner, Valentina had begged every guard she could see for help, but nobody had listened. An hour ago, she decided the only hope to save her brother was to escape.
Somehow, she’d have to get them out of the guarded camp and find a doctor who would cure her brother. She thought of the tall fence and the guard shack at the gate. She wasn’t sure yet how she’d get over the fence, especially with Pablo so sick, but she had to try.
That’s when Pablo started making some strange sounds beside her. She leaned over. It sounded like he was choking.
“No!” she screamed it, not caring if it woke the other children, not caring if it summoned the guard. “No!” she screamed again.
Grabbing her brother by his shoulders she shook him violently, lifting him off the bed, but his head flopped to the side, motionless. His eyes were sightless in the thin stream of light pouring into the tent.
She gently laid him back on the mattress and placed her head on his chest, tears streaming down her cheeks soaking his shirt.
She didn’t even notice the children standing around her, looking sleepy and bewildered as the guards rushed into the tent, shining bright lanterns.
But it was too late.
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