Cristina Henriquez is the author of the novel The World in Half an the story collection Come Together, Fall Apart, which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection. Cristina earned her undergraduate degre from Northwestern University and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She lives in Chicago. cristinahenriquez.com
ALSO BY CRISTINA HENRÍQUEZ
Come Together, Fall Apart
The World in Half
The paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2019 by Canongate Books
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
First published in the United States in 2014 by Alfred A. Knopf,
a division of Random House LLC
canongate.co.uk
Copyright © Cristina Henriquez, 2014
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book
Excerpt from “A Primer” from Words for Empty and Words for Full, by Bob Hicok, © 2010. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Marvin Bell, excerpt from “Poem After Carlos Drummond de Andrade” from Nightworks: Poems 1962-2000. Copyright © 1990 by Marvin Bell. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual person, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on
request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78211 122 1
eISBN 978 1 78211 121 4
Contents
For my father, Pantaleón Henríquez III
Let us all be from somewhere.
Let us tell each other everything we can.
— BOB HICOK, “A PRIMER”
Alma
Back then, all we wanted was the simplest things: to eat good food, to sleep at night, to smile, to laugh, to be well. We felt it was our right, as much as it was anyone’s, to have those things. Of course, when I think about it now, I see that I was naïve. I was blinded by the swell of hope and the promise of possibility. I assumed that everything that would go wrong in our lives already had.
THIRTY HOURS AFTER crossing the border, we arrived, the three of us in the backseat of a red pickup truck that smelled of cigarette smoke and gasoline.
“Wake up,” I whispered, nudging Maribel as the driver turned into a parking lot.
“Hmmm?”
“We’re here, hija.”
“Where?” Maribel asked.
“Delaware.”
She blinked at me in the dark.
Arturo was sitting on the other side of us. “Is she okay?” he asked.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “She’s fine.”
It was just after