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not far from here. We had fun that day.
    Sylvia is in a box on a plane right now. She’s flying home to her family in a small village in Mexico where she’ll be buried in a tiny graveyard full of flowers. If the Mexicans are right about what happens after you die, she’s already in heaven. I hope they know what they’re talking about for Sylvia’s sake. Tomás, her husband, won’t be attending the funeral. It’s far too risky for Tomás to cross the border into Mexico. Who knows if he’d ever make it back? My dad talked to Tomás’s employer, a factory farmer near here who plants genetically modified seeds from Monsanto. He grows corn, only corn, as far as the eye can see. He gets his laborers from a contractor who brings them in on horrible, crowded trucks like cattle. All of them, like Tomás and Sylvia, are part of an illegal workforce that people around here don’t like to think about too much. They work cheap and they don’t expect benefits. My dad asked the farmer if Tomás could have a few days off to deal with his affairs. Tomás is a good worker so he said he’ll probably take him back but he couldn’t promise anything. Why should his production suffer just because someone’s wife died? he reasoned. Besides, according to his records, Tomás doesn’t even exist. Rosa, the baby, is being sent to her grandparents in Mexico now because Tomás could never manage to take care of her if she stayed. He has no home here to speak of. Sylvia has a sister in the area, Wanda, but she’s also a farm laborer with two kids back at home in Mexico. I’m not sure who’s taking care of them but I sure hope someone is.
    Sylvia was a housekeeper and a nanny for the Thompsons, who live in a development called Orchard Hill. It used to be a fruit orchard but pretty much all the trees had to be cut down to build the houses. There doesn’t seem to be a hill anywhere either. When the accident happened, Sylvia had just dropped off two of the Thompson kids at a summer day camp and she was on her way home to clean the house before it was time to pick them up. People around here who knew her say she was a happy person and a good, honest worker. You would think that they’d be able to come up with something better than that. Does anyone really want to be remembered as a good, honest worker? I seriously doubt it. I’m sure she would prefer something like: Sylvia loved to dance and had a wonderful singing voice. She loved her baby, Rosa, and hoped to send her to school in America one day. The smell of corn tortillas made her terribly homesick and the sound of mariachi music on the radio made her cry. She looked great in red and owned three red skirts. When she smiled at you her face lit up and it was impossible not to smile back . Something like that.
    From inside my darkroom I can hear Steve or Miguel starting up the tractor, drowning out Bruce, our highly dysfunctional rooster who crows almost all day long. He has a determined look on his face as though he’s misplaced something important like his keys, and he’ll spend entire days scratching in the dry dirt looking for them. When he stops crowing for a while I find myself waiting for it. Aah, farm life.
    My darkroom is an old supply shed, with blankets nailed over the windows, that my dad converted for me to fulfill a contractual agreement we arrived at on the day we left the Noe Valley house for good. He told me that if I let go of the banister and got in the car, he would build me a darkroom on the farm. Of course I needed that in writing. Parents are often full of empty promises when they want to motivate you and I needed a completion date for this alleged darkroom. I am, after all, the daughter of a lawyer. Before I got in the car I went up and down the street and delivered an index card with our new address and phone number to each of our neighbors just in case my mom came looking for us. They all looked at me like I was a sad orphan, which made me feel slightly better