by Mike Lupica
“I don’t know who you thought you saw at that raid the other night,” the man said, “but it wasn’t me.”
He handed Nick one of the flyers in his hand.
At the top, in big letters, it read, “ICE Home Arrests. Protect Your Rights.”
Nick looked down at the flyer and realized his hand was shaking. “I don’t understand,” he said.
“Then let me explain, kid,” the man said. “I’m one of the good guys.”
* * *
• • •
His name was Ryan Gasson, and he was an immigration lawyer. He had an office on 161st Street and worked for a law firm called the Bronx Defenders.
Nick looked around.
“I still probably shouldn’t be talking to you,” he said.
“Let me guess—you’ve probably seen me outside your building before, right?” Mr. Gasson said.
“How would you even know that?” Nick said.
Mr. Gasson smiled again.
“I know a lot about this neighborhood,” he said. “I grew up on 170th.”
“Why are you handing these out?” Nick said, holding up the flyer.
“We call them ‘KYR’ pamphlets,” Mr. Gasson explained. “‘Know Your Rights.’ There’s a lot of important information in them, especially about what to do if ICE tries to enter a home illegally.”
“Illegally how?” Nick said.
“Without a signed warrant from a judge,” Mr. Gasson replied.
“I didn’t know they needed that.”
“You’d be surprised how many people don’t,” Mr. Gasson said. “Including adults. Especially adults.”
They were walking back in the direction of Nick’s building now, but Nick knew not to stop in front of it. No matter how good this guy claimed to be, he was still a stranger. And Nick didn’t want him knowing his home address.
“I still can’t believe it,” Nick said.
“Believe what?”
“You look so much like the man I saw leading the ICE raid,” Nick said. “I was sure he was you. And you were him.”
“Except he wants to send people out of the country and I work to keep them here,” Mr. Gasson said. “I’ve been all over the Bronx, but focusing on this neighborhood for the last couple of weeks, trying to quietly find out who might need our help.”
He knows I live in the area, Nick thought. What else does he know about me? Or my dad? Suddenly Nick recalled the advice from Ben’s father: know when to keep your mouth shut.
Just because he seemed nice and had these flyers didn’t mean that Nick could trust him. It could be a scam or a hoax.
“You must know some families that are worried about ICE,” Mr. Gasson said.
“No,” Nick said, too quickly.
It was a lie, of course, and he wondered if Mr. Gasson sensed it.
Then Mr. Gasson reached into his back pocket, pulled out his wallet, and took out a business card with THE BRONX DEFENDERS in raised print across the center.
“That’s got my office number on it,” Mr. Gasson said. Then he patted his jacket and shirt pocket, but shook his head.
“This is a dumb question, but you don’t happen to have a pen on you, do you?”
Nick reached into his own back pocket and came out with the marker he’d hoped to hand to Michael Arroyo.
Mr. Gasson thanked him, turned the card over, and scribbled something down. “That’s my cell number,” he said. “Hold on to that card. If you ever know somebody who might need my help, they can call that number any time of the day or night.”
Nick took it, and slid the card into his back pocket behind his Michael Arroyo card. Then Mr. Gasson handed him a couple more flyers. Nick read all the way through to the bottom of the page. In big block letters at the top were the questions “What can I do if ICE officers are at my door?” and “Do I have to let ICE into my home?”
Nick was surprised to find that the answer was no, at least not if they didn’t have the warrant Mr. Gasson had mentioned. Farther down the page, it explained what to say if the ICE agents didn’t have a warrant. You were supposed to tell them that they didn’t have your consent, and you had the right to tell them to leave.
Nick wondered if that would actually work, if they would care to listen to anything you said once they were inside.
He kept reading. “What should I do if ICE agents are already inside my home?”
Nick didn’t think there was anything you could do.
The answer was to tell them right away if there was an elderly person present. Or someone who was ill and on medication.
Like Amelia, Nick thought.
The last question on the flyer was the part Nick didn’t want to think about: what to do if a loved one was arrested by ICE.
He took a deep breath, let it out, the way he did when he was trying to relax himself on the mound.
“I’ll pass these around,” Nick said.
“You’ll be doing a good thing,” Mr. Gasson said.
By now they were walking past Nick’s building, but Nick made sure not to stop.
“Can I ask one more question?” Mr. Gasson said.
“I really need to get going,” Nick said, a little impatient.
“It’s one I already asked,” Mr. Gasson said. “Why did you turn and run when you saw me?”
“I told you that already,” Nick said. “You looked like the man at the raid. From ICE.”
“But why are you afraid of ICE?” Mr. Gasson said in a quiet voice.
Nick inwardly kicked himself for being so obvious, but then, maybe he was just paranoid.
“Because ICE isn’t nice,” he said simply.
Mr. Gasson smiled again. “Don’t lose that card.”
Then he stepped off the sidewalk and crossed the street toward the park.
He knows, Nick told himself, sounding out of breath even inside his own head. I don’t know how. But he does.
22
Amelia was on the couch reading. The book said To Kill a Mockingbird in big cursive letters at the top, by an author named Harper Lee.
“Summer reading?” Nick asked.
Amelia didn’t even glance up from the page. “Well, it’s summer, and I’m reading. But it’s not on my required reading list, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Then she looked up from the book and studied Nick’s face. “You look like you saw a ghost,” she said.
“Everybody wants to talk about ghosts lately,” Nick said, hanging his Blazers cap on the hook by the door.
Neither of their parents was home yet, so Nick took the opportunity to tell Amelia about his run-in with Mr. Gasson. She was relieved to hear that he wasn’t the ICE Man after all.
Nick handed Amelia one of the flyers, and she read through it quickly, nodding her head as she did.
“You think he was telling the truth?” Nick asked his sister.
“If he’s not, I don’t know why he’d waste his time handing out these flyers,” she said.
“I think he must be hanging around our neighborhood because so many people don’t seem to know the facts,” Nick said.
“Maybe Dad should talk to Mr. Gasson,” Amelia said. “He’s always worried about the law. Who better to talk to than an immigration lawyer?”
They sat there in silence for a couple of minutes, Nick in the armchair across from Amelia, a small coffee table between them covered in flyers.
“Are you okay now?” Amelia said finally.
Nick grinned. “Yeah, I think so. It was just so strange. Took a while for my brain to separate the ICE Man from Mr. Gasson.”
Amelia nodded.
Another silence filled the room before Nick broke it. “Do you think our prayers really will be answered one of these days?”
“A hundred percent,” she said.
“You
sound as sure as Mrs. Gurriel.”
Amelia laughed. “No one could be that sure.”
“You really mean it, don’t you?” Nick said.
“I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t believe it,” she said. “I’m even trying to figure out a way to fire up a prayer of my own.”
“Oh yeah? How?”
“You know I can’t say,” she said. “You’re the one who’s always so superstitious about saying your dreams aloud.”
“Good point.”
“But I’ll make you a deal,” she said. “If this one does come through, I promise, you’ll be the first to know.”
“Deal,” Nick said.
Amelia picked up her book again, and Nick went to go put his stuff away in his room. But when he got there, he saw the laptop open on his desk and felt an overwhelming desire to write.
Nick wasn’t sure if meeting Mr. Gasson qualified as a happy ending. But finding out he wasn’t the ICE Man would certainly do for now.
23
They held a family meeting in the kitchen after Victor and Graciela García returned home from work to discuss Nick’s encounter with Mr. Gasson.
One of the flyers was lying faceup on the table, along with Mr. Gasson’s card, the one with his cell phone number on the back.
Nick’s dad peered at them skeptically, then pushed them to the middle of the table.
“He cannot help me and he cannot help us,” he said decisively.
Nick started to contest, but Amelia beat him to it.
“Daddy,” she said, “you don’t know that.”
She called him “Daddy” when she wanted him to see her as his little girl. Mostly, so she could get him to come around to her side.
“I know what I know,” Victor García said.
“But how do you know this lawyer can’t help us if you don’t even talk to him?” Amelia said, trying to break through her father’s stubbornness.
“We have spoken to lawyers in the past,” their mom said calmly. “The last one said that if your father even attempted to contact the government, he could open himself up to arrest and deportation.”
Nick wasn’t ready to give up just yet. “But Mr. Gasson sounded like he really wants to help people like us,” he insisted, “and to defend our rights, like it says on his card: ‘The Bronx Defenders.’”
His dad slowly turned his chair to face Nick.
“We cannot afford lawyers even if I wanted one,” he said.
At times, Nick couldn’t tell where his dad’s strength ended and his stubbornness began. But he knew that when he made up his mind, it was as if his decision were set in cement.
“But, Daddy,” Amelia said, “how can you know how much this Mr. Gasson might cost if you don’t even ask him? If he’s handing out these flyers on the street, maybe he isn’t looking for money. Maybe he’s just looking for people to help.”
Their dad slapped the table with his hand. He didn’t look angry, Nick thought. Just tired.
“We cannot trust anybody outside this room,” he said.
“What about my friends?” Nick asked.
“Sometimes I wish you hadn’t told them as much as you have,” Victor García said.
Nick’s heart sank down to his stomach. He knew Ben and Diego would never tell anybody or betray his trust. But it hurt to think he’d in some way disobeyed his father by exposing their family’s secrets. Even to the two people he considered brothers.
Victor García leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. Nick knew by now that his father always looked tired when he got home from work, but there was something different tonight. His dad almost seemed defeated, even though Nick felt terrible thinking it. In Nick’s heart, his dad was his real hero, more than any baseball player could ever be. His dad had always been his hero.
Nick’s mom said nothing, just looked across the table at her husband.
But Amelia wasn’t giving up.
“When did you talk to the last lawyer?” she asked.
Nick’s dad massaged his temples. “I don’t know,” he said. “Two years ago. Maybe three.”
“But see, Daddy, that’s the thing,” she said. “So much has changed in the past few years.”
“Yes, things have changed,” their dad said. “For the worse.”
“We can’t give up hope,” Nick said. “You and Mom are always telling us that.”
His dad turned to him again. “But I don’t want false hope, either, son. To me that’s almost more cruel than no hope at all.”
He pushed back from the table now, his chair loudly scraping the floor. Then, one by one, Victor García leaned down and kissed each of his children on the top of their head before exiting the kitchen. Their mom followed.
“It’s like being sick and refusing to call a doctor,” Amelia whispered to Nick when they were out of earshot.
“I know,” he said, keeping his own voice low.
“Maybe Mom can talk some sense into him,” Amelia said. “She’s as stubborn as he is.”
Nick grinned. “Don’t let her hear you say that.”
“I don’t know why he thinks talking to Mr. Gasson would be showing weakness,” Amelia said.
“We have to find a way to change his mind,” Nick said.
“Or at least try.”
“I thought we just did.”
Amelia said, “We have to try harder.”
She got up and went to her room then, and Nick went to his. When he turned on his radio, the Yankee game was in the eighth inning, and the score was tied, 4–4. But as much as he wanted the Yankees to win every single game, tonight he hoped they’d go into extra innings. He wanted to be in his bed listening to baseball until he fell asleep.
He wanted baseball to be the last thing he heard tonight.
Only it wasn’t.
The game was still tied in the ninth when his door creaked open, revealing Nick’s dad standing in the light from the hallway.
“I just want you to know how much I love you,” Victor García said. “And how much your mother and I appreciate you finding that lawyer.”
“More like he found me,” Nick said.
His dad said nothing for a moment. The only voice in the room was John Sterling’s, announcing that the Yankees had their leadoff man on first. Nick turned down the volume.
“I don’t want you passing out flyers,” his dad said. “All that will do is direct attention to you, and perhaps me.” He paused. “Okay?”
It wasn’t really a question.
“Okay,” Nick confirmed.
“I mean it, Nicolás.”
“Nicolás” meant business. Solidified their agreement.
“And I don’t want you talking to that lawyer again if you see him in the neighborhood,” Victor García said. “Whatever help you think he can offer will only hurt us by drawing attention to our family.”
“You know best,” Nick said, even though he believed the opposite was true tonight.
“This is what I want,” his dad said, and walked out of the room. In the very next moment, Nick could hear John Sterling’s voice rising, shouting about a ball “rolling all the way to the wall!”
The winning run for the Yankees was crossing home plate, and John Sterling shouted, “The Yankees win . . . Thuhhhhhhhhhhh . . . Yankees . . . win!”
Nick should have been excited, but he couldn’t seem to muster the joy he usually felt from a Yankee win. Instead, he got out of bed and walked down the hall to the kitchen. Flicking on the light, Nick could see the flyer and Mr. Gasson’s card on the table, right where his father had left them. Nick picked them up and brought them into his room, where he placed them both in the bottom drawer of his desk. But first, he punched Mr. Gasson’s number into his phone and hit save.
The Bronx Defenders.
It sounded like a baseball team.
One his dad thought was out of their league.
24
Marisol texted Nick that she was going to be away for a few days. There was a gap in her league schedule, so she was going up to New Haven, Connecticut, with some of the girls on her team to play in a weekend tournament.
Show them what you got, Nick texted back.
Gotta get my Serena vibe going, she wrote back.
While Marisol had her two-day tournament this weekend, the Blazers had another game, which was supposed to be Nick’s second-to-last start before the championship. If they made it there. Except Coach Viera had hinted that if the Blazers locked up their spot in the big game, he might hold Nick out of his last regularly scheduled start.
Nick didn’t like the sound of that. Not at all. He and Coach were discussing it before Nick went to warm up with Ben.
“I just want to pitch as much as I possibly can,” Nick said to Coach Viera.
They were leaning against the fence. Out in the distance was a sign featuring another old quote from Satchel Paige: “Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes you get rained out.”
“You’d pitch all of our games if I let you,” Coach said. “Then at the end of the tournament I could tell people how I blew out the arm of a future Michael Arroyo by overusing him.”
“But you’re not overusing me!” Nick said. “The way the schedule works out, I’d have plenty of rest before the championship.”
“But think of how strong your arm would be with even more rest,” Coach countered.
“How often do you hear about pitchers who’ve had too much time off and performed too well because of it?” Nick asked, attempting to back Coach into a corner. “And who’s always telling me that pitchers are creatures of routine?”
“Who’s always telling me that we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves?” Coach Viera said.
Nick grinned. Touché. But it wasn’t over yet.
“Don’t managers in the big leagues set their pitching rotations a month in advance sometimes?” Nick said.