Quotes from Jeanine Cummins

So there it is. The welling reservoir of grief, keen and profound beneath the bruise, the proof of her humanity, still intact. She needs to bury it back where it was. She can't indulge it yet.

magic that's marginally maternal, but entirely female.

She could do anything back then, before she had maternal fear to spark any real caution in her soul.

So Lydia grew up with a mother who emphasized the importance of being independent and saving for the future.

On Sundays when she had extra time, she'd steam milk for froth, or brew the grounds with cane sugar and cinnamon for café de olla.

His grief is not the same as hers.

That pang Lydia felt had many parts: it was anger at the injustice, it was worry, compassion, helplessness. But in truth, it was a small feeling, and when she realized she was out of garlic, the pang was subsumed by domestic irritation. Dinner would be bland. Sebastián wouldn't complain, but she'd register the mild disapproval on his features, and she'd feel provoked. She'd try not to start an argument.

Her body has become unused to electric comforts.

Lydia knows she's increased their chances of survival. She needs to take encouragement where she can find it. She mustn't despair at the enormity of the task yet ahead. She should focus only on the immediate next steps.

she would staple him to her, sew him into her skin, affix her body permanently to his now, if she could. She'd grow her hair into his scalp, would become his conjoined twin-mother. She would forgo a private thought in her head for the rest of her life, if she could keep him safe.

This street dead-ends in a fishbowl of concrete: a line of shops to the right, some formidable, blockish government buildings to the left, and a wall directly in front, which is topped with a second wall, which is topped with a third wall, which is topped with razor wire and mounted cameras. It's behind this wall, stretching high up into the sky, that the American flag moves stiffly in the mild wind. Only a few feet away from it, on this side of the fence, a Mexican flag also flies.

That a closed door only invites closer scrutiny.

The depth of her feeling surprises her, because how can she have any leftover grief available for other people, for Paola's murdered nephew? But there it is—an anguish that makes her feel hollow in the bones, despair for a beautiful boy Lydia never met.

Paola is a stranger, but her hands on Lydia's back are the hands of God. They are Sebastián's and Yemi's and Yénifer's. They are her mother's hands.

One of the very first bullets comes in through the open window above the toilet where Luca is standing.

married people were entitled to a certain measure of privacy, that they needn't tell each other everything.

It was one of the reasons she'd fallen in love with him; he didn't press her on personal matters, he was seldom jealous, and he had no interest in annexing or directing her friendships with other men.

He can prolong the moment of irrational hope that maybe some sliver of yesterday's world is still intact.

Luca has difficulty reconciling all the genuine kindness of strangers. It seems impossible that good people—so many good people—can exist in the same world where men shoot up whole families at birthday parties and then stand over their corpses and eat their chicken.

For mothers, the question is immaterial anyway. Her survival is a matter of instinct rather than desire.

Hermana Cecilia's voice is the most soothing sound Luca has ever heard, a peaceful, uninflected hum of determined protection, so that no matter what words she says, the words Luca hears are You are safe here, you are safe here, you are safe.

Only one out of three will make it to your destination alive. Will it be you?" He points at a man in his fifties with a neatly trimmed beard and a fresh T-shirt.

Lydia feels annoyed that her niece won't get to see the music box she purchased for her special day. How expensive it was! She realizes, even as this thought occurs to her, how bizarre and awful it is, but she can't stop it from crashing in. She doesn't rebuke herself for thinking it; she does herself the small kindness of forgiving her malfunctioning logic.

She's wondered with the sort of detached fascination of the comfortable elite how dire the conditions of their lives must be wherever they come from, that this is the better option. That these people would leave their homes, their cultures, their families, even their languages, and venture into tremendous peril, risking their very lives, all for the chance to get to the dream of some faraway country that doesn't even want them.