Light (Gone 6)

The truth was, as much as they loved him and welcomed him back, he was a liability to them. He was a big neon finger pointing at the family of undocumented workers.

They were living in a trailer in Atascadero. Too many bodies in too little space. It was clean, but it was also an overstuffed, hot steel box surrounded by other overstuffed, hot little boxes, many of them also full of people who did not need the attention that Edilio drew.

Edilio would have to figure something out. But he was exhausted. All the way down to the marrow, he was exhausted.

His mother kept the beans and rice and lemonade coming. Someday, Edilio, he told himself, you will get tired of beans and rice and lemonade. But it won’t be anytime soon.

He looked up from the narrow table, saw his mother at the stove, then looked above her to see his automatic rifle wedged in atop the cupboards.

Full of food and hollowed out. That’s how he felt. He was wondering if they could get away with selling the gun. Ought to be worth a hundred bucks or so. That would maybe take some of the strain off his family’s finances.

He had not told his mother about himself, his personal self. He’d kept the stories simple. He’d answered the mostly clueless questions of friends and neighbors. He was polite, but not volunteering much. Not arguing when they came up with wild theories. Sooner or later it would all come out.

But he might not come out. It was one thing to be gay in the FAYZ—people had bigger worries on their mind than who liked who. It was another thing to come out to his family. And it would be still more difficult if he had to be openly gay in the completely unfamiliar, macho culture of Honduras.

La migra could come at any moment. There were plenty of people who didn’t like the idea of Edilio as some kind of folk hero. Too many interviews with survivors had mentioned him as a leader in the FAYZ. He was conspicuous.

“I can’t eat any more,” Edilio said, pushing the plate away.

“You want to go out and play?” His mother posed the question in Spanish. She tried to speak English with him, but mostly she ended up back in her comfort zone.

Go out and play.

Despite himself, Edilio had to smile. Like he was a six-year-old. “No, Mama, I’ll just see what’s on TV . . .” And that’s when he looked up and saw the video.

The video showed a helicopter landing in a clearing in the charcoal forest. A young man, a boy, at first running away, then caught by paramedics. Resisting. Then, it seemed, breaking down, before being finally led by kind hands to the helicopter door.

There was no audio: the TV had been muted.

Edilio’s heart stopped beating the instant he saw the frightened figure. The video was shaky and poorly focused. The boy’s face wasn’t clear. But Edilio knew.

The chyron at the bottom of the screen said the unidentified survivor had been taken to a hospital just south in San Luis Obispo.

“I need to go to SLO,” Edilio said.

“San Luis? Por qué?”

Edilio sighed. For several minutes he just couldn’t speak. His heart felt ten times its normal size. He had given up. A voice in his head berated him: Why did you give up, Edilio? After all that’s happened, didn’t you learn not to give up?

He picked up a paper towel and pressed it against his eyes. He no longer felt as if he was on the verge of a heart attack. He felt, rather, that he might be on the verge of an uncontrollable laughing fit.

“Mama, sit down, okay? I have something kind of big to tell you.”

Connie left after telling Sam all he had asked her to tell him. Not what he had wanted to know, but that’s what happened when you got answers.

He sat in his hospital bed feeling winded. Feeling lost.

He wanted to talk to Astrid. He needed to talk to Astrid. But what could he do? They were blocking his calls and—

“Really, Sam?” he demanded of the empty room. “That’s all it takes to stop you now?”

The hospital was an older building on the University of Southern California campus, massive and imposing, but it still had windows that could be opened for fresh air.

An open window. Sheets. He stuck his head out and looked down. He was twelve floors up, but just two stories above the roof of a wing of the hospital.

He went into the tiny bathroom and removed most of his bandages. It hurt. He was not healed. And what he planned to do next would hurt even more. But the scabs probably wouldn’t do more than leak a little. That was nothing: Remember when . . . No, Sam, he told himself, don’t remember when.

He dressed in his street clothes, quickly wound the sheets into a loop, slid it over a pipe near the window, and without pausing to worry too much about it, swung out and slid down.