Picture Us In The Light(85)
“I’m fine.” From her clipped tone, I don’t think we’re having that conversation right now, maybe ever. I wonder, briefly, if Harry told her anything. I don’t think he would’ve; I think it’s a wound he’ll tend to alone. “What happened with your parents?”
So I tell her. For a long time afterward she doesn’t say anything. I can hear the clock we brought from the old house, shoved unceremoniously on top of the fridge, ticking invisibly. Next door the neighbor’s toilet flushes. Then Regina says, “Oh, Danny.”
“I didn’t mean to call and dump all that on you. Or, I mean, I did, obviously. Thanks for listening. But I mean, I didn’t want to call and upset you. I just wanted to hear what you thought. It won’t be that bad, right? They’ve made it this far.”
“They have,” she says, and then she’s quiet a long time.
I hear a noise from outside and it makes my skin shrink around me. I get up with the phone and check the lock and the deadbolt on the front door. “Do you think there’s anything I can do?”
“Do they have a lawyer?”
“They don’t have money for a lawyer.”
“You could try to find someone to take their case pro bono, maybe.”
“But then what—they’d like go to the police with their lawyer? They obviously can’t do that. They’re better off just hiding out like they’ve been doing. Except—” I swallow. “I mean, now they probably have years of falsifying records and stuff, so if they get caught, they’re really screwed.”
“Danny—” Her voice sounds strangled. Maybe I shouldn’t have asked her to call.
“It’s all right,” I say, to make her feel better. “I keep thinking like—okay, they lived in China before, so worst-case scenario if they end up there again—”
“It’s not just like you get put on a plane to your home country and there’s a life waiting for you there,” she says softly. “You get jailed in a detention center. And those places are awful. They’re privately run and there’s basically no oversight, and they take all your belongings and assign you a bed and make you wear prison uniforms. If you have kids, you don’t always get to keep them with you. Your parents would probably get split up and they wouldn’t be able to talk to each other and they probably wouldn’t be able to talk to you, either. And then they’d hold them there while they’re waiting for a hearing, and maybe in theory you have a few rights left, but in practice you really don’t. There’s no accountability for the guards, and they’re really terrible about getting you medical care or even food sometimes. I mean, Danny—people die in detention facilities.”
My knees stop working. I imagine my cartilage dissolving, like in a soup, leaking out my pores. I sink onto my bed. She says, “Are you okay?”
“Not really.”
“Yeah.” I hear her exhale. When she takes another breath it’s shaky, and I realize she’s crying. “I’m sorry, Danny.”
“Oh, Reg.” I feel like crap. “I shouldn’t have called you. I didn’t mean—”
“No, no, I’m glad you did. I’m going to research it for you.”
“You don’t have to—”
“No, I’m going to. I’ll look for lawyers. I’ll read up on it more.” She rattles off a list of things she’ll look up, orgs she’ll contact, and something about the plan of it—it’s soothing. If nothing else there’s a comfort in knowing someone’s holding space in their own life for what’s hurting you. That’s the thing that’s makes life bearable sometimes, I think: that you can feel more than one thing at a time, that it floods into you from so many directions at once.
I sleep late Saturday morning, the exhaustion catching up to me. When I struggle into consciousness I can hear that my mom’s up and moving around.
It’s a good sign, a relief. I should be glad. I knew she wouldn’t sleep forever; I knew eventually I’d have to face her.
I fumble around on my nightstand for my phone to see if there are any new messages, but there aren’t. The laptop is open on my desk when I get up—my dad must have come in while I was sleeping. He left all his tabs open, searches about bus routes and broken ribs and pain relief. I close them one by one. The last three are searches, too:
what happen to son if parents deported
18 year son no parents
illegal immigrant deported can you delay for son
If what Regina told me is right, I hope to God my parents have never googled all of it.
I find my mom rummaging through the kitchen cabinets and brewing one of her herbal medicines for herself, wincing in pain and catching her breath each time she moves too suddenly. I try to gather up all the things I know I need to say to her. This is what I like best about drawing, that you can retreat to a space where the moments are infinite and you don’t have just the one shot to get it right. You can say what you need to, with your whole self, in the way you want.
It doesn’t work like that in real life, in real time, and I’m struggling. But my mom lets me take the coward’s way out. She looks up when I come in and says, “Are you hungry?” and when I say yes she starts discussing places she’s driven by around here, and I answer all her questions about the neighborhood and about what I’d like to eat (true answer: nothing ever again), and in this way she never makes me face the worst of what I’ve done. All day, all night, she never complains about her pain in front of me (even though I hear it when she thinks I’m asleep and weeps in the bathroom), and she never says a word about the accident or about the fight we had in the car or the newspaper or even about me changing schools, and we don’t talk about any of it again.