Infinite Country(23)
On their few calls during his months of detention, Mauro’s voice changed. He became broken-breathed, throat gruff as if he’d spent the night screaming. But when Elena asked how they were treating him, he assured her it wasn’t so bad in there; he met men who were doctors and lawyers and engineers in their countries, others who came to North America and built highways and roads and schools. Several were in detention for over a year already, hoping to be granted a “voluntary departure” instead of being branded with deportation. If so, they could apply to come back without having to wait five or ten years like Mauro would due to his arrests.
Some of the Puerto Rican guards spoke Spanish to the detainees, reporting news of the world like the August blackout that knocked out power across the northeast, paralyzing traffic and airports, though the detention center had a generator, so they only experienced a slash of darkness and a few flickers, a brief respite from the ceaseless fluorescence inside those walls.
Elena spent the day of the blackout on a folding chair out on the sidewalk with the other neighborhood mothers, while the kids twirled in the spray of an open hydrant. The men had already pulled meats from the freezer, and were grilling over coals out back. By nightfall, the power was restored, but the residents of the house acted as if it were a holiday, with music and dancing in the grassless yard. Elena sat with her children and watched, quietly celebrating that the Moldovan man and his family had recently moved out.
During the years Elena and Mauro contemplated staying in the country and the threat of being caught and sent back, they thought only of their lives lived here or lived there, not a fractured in-between. It never occurred to them their family could be split as if by an ax.
Elena knew Mauro wanted a life for his family in the United States, but they never discussed the possibility of that life continuing without him. He told her once through the buzzing detention center phone line, “You should stay. No matter what happens to me or what I say later. Stay.” She pretended not to hear him. Instead, she told Mauro how fast the kids were growing. Karina was speaking in long, complicated sentences, making up stories for Nando as they sat by the window watching the street, telling her hermanito the pedestrians were magic people who at night ascended to the sky, danced across the stars, and trampolined off the moon. Nando listened, mesmerized, and Elena was grateful Karina somehow knew, at not even four years old, to entertain her brother so her mother could look after the baby.
Elena waited to hear Mauro’s response but, as happened several times before without warning, the line went dead.
* * *
One night Elena dreamed they were back on the roof of Perla’s house. She stood with Mauro and the three children under the aluminum sky, gossamer clouds pushed to the mountain crests, the church of Monserrate like a merengue atop its peak. In her dream, they’d never left their land. North America remained an unknown distant place. Mauro toed the roof’s edge the way he did when they were younger, then took baby Talia in his arms. Elena told him to give her back, but he wouldn’t, and instead held the child to the sky as Elena cried that he was going to let her fall. The next morning, she called the detention center and begged to speak with Mauro, but the woman on the other end told her he was already on a plane home.
* * *
Elena was not selfish enough to think her pain unique. The Sandy Hill house had several women tenants on their own—husbands and novios in other countries or held by the system. The neighborhood was full of mixed-status families. Sometimes they heard about Immigration raids in the area—sidewalk roundups or weekend sweeps at playgrounds and backyard parties—and people would try to avoid leaving their homes for weeks. With the apparent logic that removing fathers is the most efficient method for undoing a family, the officers targeted men more often than women.
Elena sat around the kitchen table with two other Colombianas, Carla and Norma, as the children played on the living room floor, with baby Talia lying on a play mat beside them. For weeks after Mauro left, Elena managed to work a handful of days helping other women who cleaned or at a bakery on Market Street. It wasn’t hard to find someone to watch Karina or Nando, but even Toya, the Dominicana who ran a small day care out of her apartment, required that children left with her be out of diapers. Carla and Norma, with three children each, said there was only one way to manage. Send the baby to be cared for by her grandmother.
“She’s American,” Carla said. “You can bring her back later when you’re more established. If you keep her with you now, you’ll never get on your feet.”
Going home was never an option for these women. When Elena brought up the possibility of packing up, taking the children to Colombia to be with their father and grandmother, Norma warned, “This is a chance you won’t get again. Every woman who has ever gone back for the sake of keeping her family together regrets it. You are already here. So are your children. It’s better to invest in this new life, because if you return to the old one, in the future your children may never forgive you.”
What was it about this country that kept everyone hostage to its fantasy? The previous month, on its own soil, an American man went to his job at a plant and gunned down fourteen coworkers, and last spring alone there were four different school shootings. A nation at war with itself, yet people still spoke of it as some kind of paradise.
On certain autumnal days in the north, Elena could close her eyes and see the crystal sky over Bogotá, a blue that only existed at that altitude, the afternoon mountain cloud cascade when twilight swept the city in gold. She still struggled with the inertia of the North American lowlands, the feeling that she was always sinking.