‘I’m sorry for yesterday.’ Lydia wants to explain, but there’s so little she can say without revealing herself. ‘I got spooked. I’ve seen, we’ve seen so much atrocity, sometimes I can’t tell what’s real. Who to trust—’
‘Please,’ Marisol interrupts her. ‘Don’t apologize. You’re right to be wary, I’m sure.’
Lydia takes a deep breath. ‘If you want to stay alive, you have to be.’
Marisol stops rolling the T-shirt she’d been packing and looks up at Lydia. She nods.
Marisol makes the trip to the grocery store alone this time, and when she returns, she stores half in the fridge for later, and then she and Lydia prepare the food together, a huge amount of food, they think. There are eggs again, and rice and beans and tortillas, and this time also some plantains and more avocado, and even a small bit of cheese and some nuts and some yogurt, all of which are expensive but dense with the protein their bodies will require for the journey. The large brothers and their sons are happy with the food, and chivalrous about making sure everyone has enough to eat, but when it’s clear that the others are finished and there’s food left, they devour every morsel. Soledad and Beto do the cleaning up, while the others sit talking on the couches and stools.
Luca sits on the floor between his mother’s legs and listens to the grown-ups telling stories. Even though it’s a bunch of strangers in the house, it has the atmosphere of a party. As such, it makes Luca feel very still and alert. The large brothers from Veracruz are gregarious. They tell stories and sing songs, and their voices boom out through the room regardless of their intended volume. They are demonstrating for their sons how to be in the world, how to fill up even more space than the bulk of your body demands, to leave no room for misconceptions, to put people around you at ease with your unusual size. They tell stories of their years working in el norte, picking corn and cauliflower in Indiana, working as line packers at a dairy plant in Vermont, sending every paycheck home to Veracruz. Slim’s son Ricardín carries an armónica in his breast pocket, and when he takes it out to play it, his father slaps his leg in time with the song, which draws Beto out of the kitchen and into the center of the room, where he pushes aside the small coffee table to make room for break dancing. Rebeca flits away to the bedroom to rest, and the two quiet men who arrived first disappear as well, but the rest remain there, talking and sipping instant coffee from paper cups. Luca is drawn mostly to Ricardín, because of his quick smile and the armónica. Ricardín notices Luca watching him, and holds the armónica up.
‘Want to try?’ he asks.
Luca nods and stands up. He looks at Mami to make sure it’s okay first, and then, with her encouragement, takes a step toward Ricardín to study how he plays the thing, how he uses it to draw music out of thin air. Even seated on the couch, Ricardín is taller than Luca, so Luca has to look up into his face. When he holds the armónica up to his mouth, his hand is so large, the instrument disappears behind it, like he’s concealing it beneath a baseball mitt. His fingers move up and down, up and down, showing glimpses of the flat metal beneath. Luca watches carefully, and then Ricardín hands the armónica to him.
‘Go ahead,’ he says. ‘Give it a try.’
Luca takes it and holds it up to his mouth. He blows. And he’s surprised that, right away, he can make such a lovely sound.
‘Hey!’ Ricardín grins at him. Luca smiles and tries to hand it back, but Ricardín pushes it toward him again. ‘Keep going. Again!’
He claps his giant hands while Luca runs the metal instrument up and down his lips, trying the different sounds it makes. It’s easy.
‘Chido, güey,’ Beto says. ‘Can I try?’
Luca hands him the armónica. While the boys pass the instrument around, Choncho asks Marisol about her family in California. She tells them she was arrested at a routine immigration check-in almost three months ago.
‘Wait, you actually go to those things?’ Nicolás, the PhD student, asks.
‘Of course!’ Marisol says. ‘I play by the rules!’
‘What is it?’ This is Lydia.
‘A routine immigration check-in?’ Marisol asks.
‘Yes.’
‘It’s an appointment, usually once a year, where I have to go and check in with an ICE officer,’ Marisol explains. ‘So they can review my case.’
‘But what for? So you can get your papers?’
‘No, just so they can keep tabs on me,’ Marisol says.
Lydia is confused. ‘And ICE is…?’
‘Immigration and Customs Enforcement.’ Nicolás fills in the acronym. ‘I never went to a single one of my check-ins.’
‘I guess it doesn’t matter now,’ Marisol says. ‘We both ended up in the same boat. To think of all that wasted bus fare.’
‘But I don’t understand,’ Lydia says. ‘They always knew you were there?’
‘Sure, for years,’ Marisol says. ‘After my husband died, and I didn’t leave before the deadline they gave me, I received a notice to come for a check-in. I went every year. Never missed one.’
‘And they didn’t deport you? Even though you were undocumented?’
‘Not until now.’
‘But why not?’
Marisol shrugs. ‘I never committed any offenses. I have a daughter who’s a citizen.’
‘They have discretion,’ Nicolás says. ‘They’re supposed to be able to use their discretion, so they can divert their resources to deporting bad guys. Gang members, criminals.’
‘But now suddenly they’re deporting people just for showing up at their check-ins,’ Marisol says.
‘And that’s what happened to you?’ Lydia asks.
Marisol nods. She’d been dressed in her dark red scrubs, planning to head straight to her job as a dialysis technician after her appointment. It was a Tuesday morning, and both her daughters were at school. They’d been worried about the upcoming check-in for months, of course. Everyone worried now. The appointments used to be just procedural, an easy way for the government to exert some control over an overburdened system, and an opportunity for the migrant to improve her legal status by demonstrating her cooperation. But now everyone was alarmed by the spike in arrests, and some people stopped going to the check-ins altogether. Not Marisol. She hadn’t been willing to demote her daughters to a life in the shadows. San Diego was the only home they’d ever known, so she never really believed they’d deport someone like her, a middle-class woman with perfect English who came here legally, a homeowner, a medical professional. Three months later, she’s still in a state of disbelief. Ricardín provides a bluesy riff on the armónica to conclude her story, which makes it funny instead of heartbreaking. They all laugh.
‘So you were in detention for two months?’ Nicolás asks.
Marisol nods.
‘What was that like?’
She pauses to consider the question, and as she remembers, she winces. ‘I mean…’ She gropes for a word to encompass her memories of that place, but she can’t find one substantial enough. ‘Horrible?’ she says. ‘Like you’d expect, I guess. I slept on a mat in a cold cell. It was freezing all the time, como una hielera. No blankets, no pillows, only those tinfoil things. I woke up stiff and sore every morning, with a kink in my neck. They wouldn’t replace my contact lens solution, so when that ran out, at least I didn’t have to look at the walls closing in.’
Nicolás cringes while she talks. ‘I couldn’t hack it. I’m claustrophobic.’
‘Yeah, it was utterly dehumanizing.’ Marisol sighs. ‘But my lawyer thought I had a good chance, so I told myself to be strong, that it would all be worth it.’