—Bueno, you can stay here until you figure things out, Esperanza said. —What else can we do? All God’s children are our children.

—There she goes with God again, Don Chan said.

Esperanza was relieved that it wasn’t either of her children in such trouble. She crossed herself, kissing the air.

—C’mon, Hush, let’s go into my room so you can rest, Dallas said, anxious to hear all the details.

Meanwhile, Bobby wondered what had led Hush to his doorway. He didn’t care to think that Hush was actually looking for Dallas. He could only think of the ray of light she encompassed, which he so desperately needed and had not realized he was missing.

6

¡Rompamos las alambradas

y las empalizadas

la tierra de quisqueya

para el que la trabaja!

—Dominican laborer’s chant

La Zona Franca

1997

Miraluz crammed into the buses with hundreds of other women, six days a week, to work at the underwear factory in La Zona Franca. She sewed a sleeve, a bra strap, a seam of a crotch, wondering what all the pieces she put together looked like as a whole. She had tried to organize the women to better their working conditions. But when she found a gang of union breakers tormenting her sons in front of her house she realized that she too should lay low for a while.

But Miraluz was never one to sit still. Even after 1965, when many of the Invisible Ones fled the country or became too disillusioned to fight for anything but themselves, Miraluz stood in front of the American tanks that rolled through her streets, refusing to believe that it could be that easy to be defeated by them. —Why aren’t you on our side, she yelled out to the Yanqui who looked past her.

Twenty years later, insults, ideas, anger raged inside of her and made her body swell up. Soon the seat at the sewing machine started to feel smaller, her clothes tighter. Her feet pushed up against the leather of her shoes. She had heard that feet expanded with time. But why had she not felt the difference before? Nothing was fitting her right. The crotch on her jeans was riding up on her and the shirts sent to her from abroad stained quickly at the armpits. Her clothes were rebelling against her.

Miraluz was convinced that the factory was also shrinking. Some said that Miraluz’s preoccupation was making her bigger, or that the piles of bras on her sewing table were getting higher, or maybe the ceiling was gradually descending due to rain that didn’t cease or the weight of the fluorescent lights. Maybe the manufacturer was hiring more people, adding more sewing machines, and thus the space was more crowded, so that the perception of shrinkage made sense. All of those reasons would have rung true if everyone had agreed that the factory was indeed shrinking, but it was only Miraluz who insisted. And she was having a hard time breathing and it wasn’t just the lint in the air.