The calendar said it was only June, but already the air was stifling. Thick and stagnant, it attracted insects and odors, seeming to grip them both in an interminable holding pattern.
Already tired of dealing with both, Nio Garcia swept his dark hair across his forehead and flung the residual sweat droplets to the ground with a flick of his hand. He wasn’t sure how long he had been seated on the floor of the cramped shipping container, even less certain how much longer he would have to be. Terrible fatigue had long since gripped him, the hours of sweating in the portable oven taking their toll on his body.
Most of the people bunched tight in the room with him were what the rest of the world would call refugees, fleeing their homeland for the promise of a better life. They had paid someone they didn’t know a great deal of money they didn’t have to take them someplace they’d never been.
To many of the fellow Cubans they were leaving behind, they were simply deemed lucky.
The path Garcia had taken in getting here was much different from most of the people around him, having never been a mistreated field worker or forced to spend years in the military. Despite being a pureblooded Cuban, four days prior was the first time he had ever set foot on the island.
Three years before Nio was born, his parents had managed to escape aboard a fishing trawler. Together they had taken nothing more than the clothes on their back and spent two days hidden beneath fifty pounds of mildewed fishing nets. When at last they emerged to feel the sun on their faces again they were standing on the beaches of Florida, indebted to the men that had brought them but having never felt freer in their lives.
It took two years of hard work in Miami to clear the debt of their passage and once it was gone, they pushed north up the coast to Fort Lauderdale.
It was there that Nio was born.
Nearly twenty-three years after arriving in America, word was received that Jorge’s father was in poor health and would not be long for the world. Despite the arguments of his family, Jorge insisted on seeing his father before he passed.
With improved border security and tighter Coast Guard precautions, the days of using old fishing charters for getting on and off the island were a thing of the past. Jorge contacted several noted Cubans in the area and found that the most trusted way in and out of the country was through an operation in Boston, Massachusetts.
Without question, he took the next flight north.
Five days after his departure a blank post card arrived postmarked from Havana letting his family know that he was safe.
It was the last word anybody had heard from him in over three weeks.
Nio waited in hope that his father would return, but with each passing day his anxieties grew. After a week he approached his mother about going in search of him, but she balked at the idea, warning him against doing anything rash. At the end of the second week, he had approached her with the same request.
She wrote him a check for the plane ticket without asking a single question.
The next morning, Nio contacted the University of Miami to let them know he was taking a leave of absence before reaching out to the same outfit in Boston and making arrangements.
The trip south had been a damp and sweaty two days, most of it spent in complete darkness, listening to the metal of the old boat groan with each wave it crested. The ride was made in near solitude, a product of very few people ever wanting back on the island once they were off.
Now just days later, Nio found himself wishing he had that kind of space again.
Forty-eight hours had been the sum total of his time in Havana, every last one of them spent searching for his father. In the course of those two days he was able to track down his grandmother, two aunts, and an uncle, enduring their tears as they extolled their joy at meeting him for the first time. To the person, every last one of them told of how great it had been to see his father.
In equal measure, they also informed him that not one of them had heard from him since his departure weeks before.
Tucked into the corner of the container, Nio sat with his chin on his knees, sweaty flesh pressed in on him from every direction as the doors burst open. A flood of bright lights punctuated the darkness, causing many to wince, some murmuring with hope that an end to their perpetual holding period was finally at hand.
To their chagrin, it was nothing more than the arrival of more passengers, extra bodies to be wedged into the darkness, more humanity to smash into a space that could ill afford it.
After almost two days seated in the container, the scene didn’t even register with Nio. He had seen it play out a dozen times before, felt reasonably certain it would again before the return leg of his journey was finally under way.