Quotes from Jeanine Cummins

There is always a smile, a blessing, a flare of recognition from the hardworking young man who, because of the way beauty begets empathy (among other things), imagines his own little sister or cousin or daughter in the place of these girls.

She sticks her hand through the fence and wiggles her fingers on the other side. Her fingers are in el norte. She spits through the fence. Only to leave a piece of herself there on American dirt.

From the Author's Note: In my conversations with Mexican people, I seldom heard the word American used to describe a citizen of this country – instead they use a word we don't even have in English estadounidense, United States-ian.

But now the cartels murdered a Mexican journalist every few weeks, and Lydia recoiled from her husband's integrity. It felt sanctimonious, selfish. She wanted Sebastián alive more than she wanted his strong principles.

What love had been there was already slipping away. She could still sense it like a ghost in the room, vague and inanimate, but she could no longer feel it. Her affection had gone, leached out, like blood from a cadaver. When he squeezed her fingers, she caught the scent of formaldehyde. When he hooked his sad gaze into hers, she saw the glass of his lenses, spattered with blood.

melts into him like a pat of butter on a pan.

So Lydia grew up with a mother who emphasized the importance of being independent and saving for the future. A mother who had loaned her the money to open her bookstore. Though Lydia had been grateful, she'd never imagined that her mother's eccentricity might one day save her life.

There's a moment, Lydia realizes, or no, more than a moment—a span of perhaps fifteen minutes just at twilight—when the desert is the most perfect place that exists. The temperature, the light, the colors, all hang and linger at some unflawed precipice, like the cars of a roller coaster ticking ever so slowly over the apex before the crash.

Luca even hears Abuela lightly scolding them all, not because she actually disapproves, Luca realizes, but because a casual reprimand is Abuela's way of participating, and that is the thing, really,

every family tree has at least one crooked branch.

none of them had chosen to marry Sebastián, or to take on the risks of his profession as their own. Only she had done that, and now her family had paid for her choice. The fears of her past and the horrors of her present are so mixed up they feel like the unmatching pieces of a rompecabezas, like she's trying to piece together things that were never meant to fit.

Beto is afraid of turning eleven, because it feels like a treachery to his brother. "But I guess it would be worse to not turn eleven, right?

Despite everything, he likes being alive.

I've seen bad things, too," he assures her. "Yeah?" He nods. "I guess you wouldn't be on top of this train if you hadn't.

At worst, we perceive them as an invading mob of resource-draining criminals, and, at best, a sort of helpless, impoverished, faceless brown mass, clamoring for help at our doorstep. We seldom think of them as our fellow human beings.

Move north. Reach the border. Find a coyote. Get across. Take a bus to Denver. There will be churches there. Libraries, internet access, immigrant communities. People willing to help. For now just move north, move north. Get Luca out of danger.

Lydia thanks the girls, and her spoken gratitude feels entirely insufficient, because what she really needs to say is that the food, yes, but also their kindness, their humanity, their very existence, has nourished some withered, essential part of herself.

Luca likes to listen to the foreign sounds, the peaks and rolls of the words he doesn't understand. He likes the way voices sound the same in every language, the way, if you train your ear to listen just outside the words, to only the shifting inflections, you can attach your own meaning to the sounds.

His shadow makes the shape of grief as he hurtles toward the earth.

Hell is wet and cold and black and lost. Her brain tap-dances and contracts,

Then he has the idea that perhaps the scent is finite, and he fears he might use it all up, so he stops touching it.

The flashbacks dump adrenaline into her bloodstream a hundred times a day, so her body is helpfully exhausted.

Padre nuestro, bless these children with your love and grace. Protect them from any further harm, God, and provide them with comfort in their time of unspeakable grief. May Jesus walk the road with them and repair their broken hearts. May Mother Mary sweep all dangers from their road ahead and lead them safely where they're going. Padre nuestro, these two faithful servants have shouldered more than their share of life's burdens already. Please, God, may you see fit to relieve them

The girl is so beautiful she seems almost to glow, more colorful than the landscape in which she sits. The dingy gray of the concrete overpass, the pebble brown of the tracks and the earth, the faded blue of her baggy jeans, the dirty white of her oversized T-shirt, the bleached arc of the sky, it all recedes behind her. Her presence is a vivd throb of color that deflates everything else around her. An accident of biology. A living miracle of splendor. It's a real problem.