“Followed you yesterday.” He picked at the cuticle on the thumb of his left hand with his forefinger. “Watched the policemen walk you to your truck same time as Benny come running out, bragging as he does about the important people coming to his house, a Ranger this time,” Rey said. “I just grabbed my stepdad’s truck and took off.”
He’d followed the squad cars, actually, shaking in fear then as he was now.
Rey had been too afraid to approach him last night, and anyway he’d had to get the truck back to his stepdad. But he’d been up all night, thinking that Darren might be the sign he’d been waiting for. “I didn’t know who else… I didn’t know what else to do.”
He’d had the shirt for two weeks, had found it out in the woods the Sunday following Labor Day weekend. “And how do you know it’s hers?” Darren said.
“I just do,” Rey said with a kind of intimate certainty that moved Darren.
The kid looked scared, truly scared. But not of the gun or the two people hovering over him at the table, one of whom was law enforcement. In fact, he’d sought Darren out because he believed something had happened to his friend. He was shaking with it, what his presence here meant. That he was frightened enough for Sera to steal his stepfather’s truck and chase down a man just because he thought he might be able to help. He was thin, so thin, in that way of boys before puberty or vanity hits, before they naturally puff up with hormones. He had a faint goatee and a square jaw, and you could have told Darren he was fifteen or twenty-one, and he would have believed you.
“Nineteen,” Rey said when Darren asked him point-blank.
He and Sera had met during their sophomore year at the high school, when she’d transferred from a school in Houston. Her family had had a rough run of it before Thornhill. She’d never said so explicitly, but he got the impression that they’d been homeless for a while, before the family landed a spot at Thornhill. “Lot of medical bills, she said,” Rey told them, adding that he always got the sense that she felt kind of guilty about that, like it was her fault, her family’s financial situation. He knew she had a condition for which she had to take great care. He knew she was sometimes in sudden pain that laid her out for days, sometimes weeks. He knew she had more appointments at the Thornhill medical facility than other folks. But she was strong — “Tried to be,” Rey said. “College was a big deal, something she never thought she’d get to do, and she pushed back when her dad wanted her to get a business degree.” He scratched at the thin hair along his chin. “She’s been thinking she wants to do something with medicine.”
“Yeah, how do they get along?” Darren said. “Sera and her dad.”
“Okay, I guess. She looks up to him in a lot of ways, for the things he’s done for her family. Benny always says she’s a daddy’s girl, but they’re different, you know.”
He grew quiet, thinking of what else he wanted to say.
Softly, he added, “He’s just really strict with her.”
“Like with clothes and curfews and stuff?” Darren said, wondering what influence the father of a college student could still possibly have over his adult child.
“More like the kind of people he wanted her to be around.” Rey pressed his lips together, not quite biting his tongue, but close, as he tried to think of how he wanted to say this. “Mr. Fuller, he doesn’t always have a lot of nice things to say about people who look like us.” He gestured between himself and Darren. Brown and black folks. “It’s not their fault, he says, that they’ve been brainwashed to think of all the things they can’t do, because politicians, a lot of them are invested in ‘keeping black folks begging.’”
“The shirt?” Bell cut in, pulling their talk back to the most pressing issue.
“It was just left in the woods,” Rey said.
He showed Darren a weird tear in the shirt along the neckline, the fabric jagged and frayed. And there had been beer bottles he’d found in the same area.
“Sera didn’t drink,” he said with a certainty that felt forced. He’d already told Darren that Sera’s college life had been a wedge between them, that Rey didn’t know anything about her life as a student. But in all the time she’d been at SFA, in all the time they’d been friends, he said, she had never ghosted him like this. She hadn’t been responding to any of his texts. And he hadn’t seen her at the Fuller house next door since Labor Day weekend, when they’d been together in the Angelina National Forest, at the exact spot in the wooded area where he’d found the shirt a week later.
“Hmph,” Bell said, a pincer-like expression on her face.
She’d grown irritable since Rey arrived. Even though his presence here was further proof that her instincts had been right about Sera — that something was very wrong — it had irrationally put her in a bad mood. Maybe because it was Rey who now held her son’s undivided attention. She openly bristled when Darren asked her to retrieve the girl’s things from the other room, sent on a lowly errand, no longer the center of the story. “You’ve had this shirt for two weeks now,” Darren said, raising his voice at Rey, “and you didn’t say anything to anyone? Why didn’t you call the police?”
Rey got visibly upset, stammering his words. “I just, I don’t know. I didn’t know what to…” He looked Darren up and down, taking in his brown skin, deciding what it might mean for what he was about to say. “I’m not even supposed to be there, man.”
He was the only one in his family who had no papers.
His kid brother had been born here in the States, Virginia, in fact.
His mother, who had left Mexico with Rey after his father died, when he was still a toddler, had remarried a citizen but was still two years away from turning a green card into something no one could touch or tear to pieces. That left Rey. And the rules of Thornhill had changed in the six years since his mother and stepfather had come to work and live there. The families they’d come in with had been undocumented or mixed status, but they were all gone now. His family was the last of that original group. The work was hard. Chicken and pork processing, it turned out, the animals being brought in on trucks from a back entrance, never the front. People were frequently injured on the job or got sick from the working conditions. And they left, sometimes packing up in the middle of the night, gone by the time the sun came up.
By the new rules, which had started last year, there was no job for Rey at the plant. He needed documents to work and, according to these same new rules, live in Thornhill. Everyone had to be here legally from now on. So he was living doubly outside of the rules, in a rainbow of shadows, hiding within his country and within his town. His mother was worried sick over what would become of him. Stress on top of chronic poor health, diabetes worsened by twelve-hour shifts deboning and preparing chicken carcasses all day, her hands slick with blood and bile, head aching from the smell none of them were able to get out of their clothes, even though Rey had never stepped foot in the plant. “I was going to leave, start over somewhere I wouldn’t be a burden on my mom, but then I found the shirt, and I couldn’t go without knowing where Sera was or if anything happened to her. I didn’t think I could tell the Thornhill police when I’m not even supposed to be living there anymore, and I was too scared to call a sheriff or somebody.” He gestured toward Darren’s brown skin, a look of hope in his eyes. “I never seen a Texas Ranger in person before, just something on TV one time. I didn’t know they could look like you.” Darren nodded. He wanted to tell the kid there were Rangers who looked like Rey too. He was reminded that it mattered, to be protected by a color or a cadence of speech that you associated with safety, the color of a father’s arms, maybe, or the tenor of an auntie calling you in for the night.
Bell returned with Sera’s belongings. She placed them carefully on the dining-room table — after shoving aside a stack of bills, paperback books, and a drugstore set of watercolors — and nearly swatted Rey’s hand away, as she would a child reaching for a jar of candy, when he went to touch them. But Darren said, “Mama,” in such a way that she backed off. Rey looked over the hair products and toiletries and balled-up clothes. He frowned for a while at the bottle of pills, his eyebrows knotting into a look of confusion. Then his eyes landed on the flip phone. “It’s hers,” he said softly, followed by a sound that rolled up from the back of his throat and escaped as the start of a sob. “This was in the trash?” He’d been calling and texting it for days.
The phone, Rey said, was Thornhill-issued, three per family. He and his brother shared one just like it. Bell perked up despite herself. “They give y’all cell phones?”
Rey asked about her schoolwork — were there notebooks, binders, anything he could have or take a look at? There was a particular project he’d helped Sera with, a school paper she’d written about the benefits of living in their town, and he was curious if she’d ever turned it in, how it had come out. He stared expectantly at Darren, who shot his mother a look, realizing she hadn’t brought out all of Sera’s things. Bell clearly didn’t trust the boy, who had very quietly started to cry, twin streams of tears down his cheeks. He’d seen the photographs by now. And he ran his fingers over the vibrant green of the pin oaks and tall pines, taking special care with a picture of Sera, her brown face turned up to the sun. “I took this,” Rey said softly. He looked up, first at Bell and then at Darren. “This is where I found her shirt,” he said. “By the mill.” Darren leaned over his shoulder as he saw in the photo of Sera what he hadn’t before, that behind clinging vines were the remains of a structure. An ancient thing that once you spotted you couldn’t unsee. This touch of humanity that had marked the woods forever.
“Show me,” Darren said.
He would, he said.
He promised.
But right now, he had to get the truck back to his stepdad. He knew a back way into the town and worried that the longer he waited, the more he risked being caught. They ran shifts at the plant around the clock, he said, glancing at his watch. He needed to get the truck to his stepdad by the time he got home from his six p.m.–to–six a.m. shift, the same one as Joseph Fuller next door. Rey’s stepdad, Artie — his name at Thornhill; he was Art or Arturo at home — had a second job on a ground-maintenance crew for the town for which he was given the use of the small pickup truck parked outside. And because there were lots of events happening in the town lately, VIP types coming through, it had been stressed to Rey’s stepfather and his crew to make sure that the grass and hedges were freshly clipped and the planted flowers, daffodils and petunias, were misted with a mixture of water, sugar, and a pinch of witch hazel to keep them looking dew-kissed and standing at attention. There’d been a lot of outsiders passing through Thornhill over the past few months. “What kind of outsiders?” Darren asked. Rich ones, Rey said. The cars were big, often black with tinted windows, a style that television had taught him to associate with rappers and NBA stars and CEOs. “They go in and out of the high-rise building at the front of the town.” Thornhill headquarters, he said.
“Plus, sometimes they tour the houses, showing us off… well, not me, of course, not our family.” There were often surprise visits to the Fuller household next door, people in those fancy cars coming to take a look, to see how the workers lived. With la jefa around all the time, Rey said, he had been trying to lay low the past two weeks until he could figure out what to do about the bloody shirt.
“Who?”
But Rey insisted he had to go. He was already coming out of his chair.
He asked again about taking Sera’s school notebooks as he wiped at his wet eyes with the back of his hand, then said he really had to leave. He would show Darren the place in the woods, he would. He promised again. He just couldn’t do it right now. He gave Darren his cell phone number and then rushed out before he could be stopped.
“You just gon’ let him go?”
Bell was in his ear as soon as the boy was gone. Darren saw the truck’s lights come on through the front window a second before Rey pulled away from the curb. “How do you know he didn’t have something to do with that girl getting hurt?”
“I don’t,” Darren said.
There was something squirrelly about the kid, it was true.
