The Leavers(104)

“In Ardsleyville?”

“No, this was still in New York.”





Seventeen



The van that took me from the salon had no windows so there was no way to tell if we were five or fifty blocks away. I couldn’t see any of the other women from Hello Gorgeous, only shouting strangers, more officers in uniforms. One of them passed me a phone and said I could make a call.

My finger hovered over the keypad as I tried to remember Leon’s number: 347, that part I was sure of. 453-8685. Or was it 435? 8568? 445? His number was programmed into my own cell phone, but that was in my bag.

“Where’s my bag?” I asked in English. The officer didn’t answer.

I dialed. 347-453-8685. The phone rang. Leon might be at work, but I could leave him a message.

It kept ringing. There was no message, so I tried again. 347-435-8685.

Two rings and a man picked up who wasn’t Leon. I asked for Leon, but the man said something in another language.

The officer reached for the phone. “One call only.”

I ignored him and dialed again. 347-453-8658. After several rings came a recording, a computerized one that repeated the number, followed by an instruction to leave a message. It wasn’t what Leon had on his phone, but I spoke fast. “It’s Little Star. The police took us from the salon. I don’t know where we’re going, but find out and come get me. Hurry.”

Later I’d feel certain that the number was 435-8586. In the tent, there was a single telephone that hung from the wall, but it had no dial tone. Each morning, for the next four hundred and twenty-four days, I would pick up the phone in hope that there would be one.

“But there never was,” I said. “That damn phone never worked.”

“You were there for four hundred and twenty-four days?” You sounded like you didn’t believe it.

“I counted.”

“That’s almost two years!”

“Fourteen months. See, I told you, it’s too much to hear.”

“It’s not. I need to know.”

I wanted to stop talking, but also I wanted to tell you. I said, “The hours in between lying down and getting up were a nightmare.”

THE PLANE HAD TOUCHED down in darkness and sand. In the distance, swollen tents were boxed in by barbed wire, big white boxes in a harsh sprawl of nothing. Texas, though I didn’t know it then. The endpoint, the ultimate waijiu. Too cold in the winters and too hot in the summers, a mean, scorchful hot that grasped for rain.

Heavy white plastic stretched over the tent’s metal frame. Uneven concrete floors, like the cement had been poured in a hurry. The food looked sickly: waxen bread, pasty oatmeal, noodles with fluorescent cheese, and because the dining area was next to the toilets, it all tasted like piss and shit. The sharp tang of urine eventually faded, leaving only hunger, and I ate milk and cheese that left me cramped on the toilet.

The lights never turned off, so my eyeballs ached and throbbed. I’d lay in my bunk and hear Leon sleep-talking next to me in the bed we had shared, you and Michael next to us in the bed you had shared, and I’d curse at the guards in Fuzhounese. Fuck your mom. Fuck yourself. The worst part was that you would think I abandoned you.

When sleep did come, it was jagged and soundless. I’d wake to voices, not sure if it was hours or minutes later, and see a guard standing over me, marking a piece of paper.

Bed check, the guard would say.

I’m here, I’d respond in English.

The tent was the length of a city block but narrower. Two hundred women slept in two-person bunks grouped into eight rows of three bunks each. We wore dark blue pants with elastic waistbands, baggy blue shirts. Shoddy sewing; sloppy hems. None of us had any money and we couldn’t get any, unless our families knew where we were. We could work on the cleaning crew, sweeping floors, scrubbing toilets, taking out trash for fifty cents a day, but there was a long waiting list to join, seventy-three names ahead of mine.

The toilets and showers were in a large open stall ringed by a low wall that came up to my waist. Most days there wasn’t any soap and often, no water. Hives broke out across my face and a rash oozed up my arms, and my skin got raw and dry. In the middle of the tent was a glass octagon with tinted windows, where the guards watched us. They could see us but we couldn’t see them. I’d stand under the octagon’s stepladder and wave.

I asked the guards for a lawyer, for Immigration, but they told me to wait. No one offered advice or answers. Some women didn’t speak any English, and others spoke in such rapid English I couldn’t keep up. Any day now, I kept telling myself, Didi and Leon would find me and get me out of here.

ON THE TWELFTH DAY, a Chinese woman with freckles came up to me in the oatmeal line and said in Mandarin, “Come eat with me. I’m Lei.” I was so happy to talk to someone I wanted to kiss her.

Over oatmeal, I found out Lei was originally from Shandong and had been in the tent for almost eighteen months. She’d gotten a speeding ticket in Chicago and was shipped off to ICE.

“Eighteen months?” I’d been trying so hard to tamp down my panic by picturing myself back home with you, these twelve days just a blip in our regular routines. Thinking of these routines comforted me. Cooking dinner with Vivian. Riding the train to work. Telling you and Michael to shut the TV off and go to bed. Now that hope of returning was being yanked away. “I can’t be here for that long. I have a family and they don’t even know I’m here.” I looked around at the tables of women scooping up clumps of oatmeal with their hands. There were never enough forks or spoons.