Carrie’s sisters had finally gone, giving her a rare moment alone in the bedroom the three girls shared. In her socks, she slid down the hallway silently, holding her breath as tightly as she gripped her backpack. She peaked around the door to the living room. There, her exhausted single mother had fallen asleep on the couch that doubled as her bed in their tiny one-bedroom apartment. Her face, warm but lined and weary by day, was smooth in sleep, lit by the dancing shadows cast by the telenovela unfolding on the muted television.
Carrie cringed and hoped she would not be the cause of even greater burden to this woman she loved; this woman who had traversed the Devil’s Highway with her five children. Mami carried little Estrellita and Carrie’s oldest brother, Jose, carried the baby: the one whose name they did not say, the one who did not make it. So much at stake so her children could live the American Dream. Carrie did not know the baby’s name, but she had seen the sadness enter the woman’s eyes when people spoke in hushed tones of that boy who died from lack of clean water, an abundance of rotten food and a bout of diarrhea that left him sitting in his own filth when there was no time to stop and change his diaper.
Jose had whispered to her once that he had been so physically wasted from plodding eternally through the desert that he had no real idea how long the boy he carried was dead before they stopped for rest and he realized the goneness. The hollowness in his voice and the vacancy in his eyes told Carrie that Jose would never forgive himself for not having recognized it--felt it--the very moment the boy had died. The guilt would plague him always; Jose never again made eye contact with Carrie after that conversation; he left home not long after and not long after that stopped calling. One dead, one gone: her mami had lost two sons coming to Chicago from Mexico. Was it her boys that she dreamed about now, Carrie wondered, this woman whose every waking action was to benefit her children?
Needing to know one way or another before her sisters returned, Carrie shut and locked the bathroom door. She caught sight of her own image in the smoky glass and paused, remembering the night with Paulo: loving it then, hating it now. She carefully removed from her back pack the brown paper sack that had weighed 100 pounds as she carried it home from school. Fireworks on the Fourth of July made less noise than opening the bag and pulling from it the home pregnancy test that Paulo had shoved at her in lunch. She spread the directions out in the dry sink as a formality; she had danced these steps before.
Carrie had gulped down several jaritos at dinner; mami had wondered aloud why she was so thirsty, concerned about dehydration. The woman was always concerned about her, making up ailments to cluck over. She’d held it for hours through dinner and then for hours until her sisters had gone to their movie. Ironically, when she finally squatted over that tiny stick of fate, her pelvic muscles were cramped so tightly no urine would come. She turned on the faucet and the saturated directions folded in on themselves in the basin. Startled by the spasm in her bladder, Carrie peed all over her hand before moving the stick into the stream.
She was supposed to wait three minutes for the chemical reaction that would seal her destiny, but she couldn’t take her eyes off of the testing stick. It is reasonable to say that she aged three years in those three minutes and her mind’s eye wandered three days, three months and three decades down the road of what her life could be. She might end up just like her mother, doing shift work in the garment district and cleaning houses in her off hours and still never having enough money, enough food, enough sleep. Mami had only love in abundance. This would kill her. Turning old in her mind, Carrie had lost focus; she jerked her attention back to the present. Her breath caught, and her eyes filled with tears as she read the indicator.
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