The Vow

by Jessica Martinez

  I scan the parking lot for my dad’s Camry. I haven’t exactly driven it around yet. I think it would make me miss him. “No, I just miss the good old days in the truck.”

  “Sure. The truck with no AC and a broken door that you couldn’t stop complaining about. Of course you do. How’s Wisper Pines this morning?”

  “Aside from the unconscionable bastardization of the English language I have to be reminded of every time I see Wisper without an h, it’s fine.”

  “So yes, feeling more like yourself. Do I need to tell you to chill out, or are you going to get there on your own?”

  “I’m good.” I put the address my dad gave me into the navigation system and inspect the map it produces. “I don’t trust this map.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You just don’t trust the car,” she says. “The navigation system hasn’t been wrong yet.”

  “Is this the first time you’ve used it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Awesome. Let’s drive.”

  * * *

  The navigation system, not surprisingly, is as fan-freaking-tastic as the rest of the car. It practically drives us there, and by there I mean to a squat, turd-colored apartment building three blocks from the University of Louisville Law School.

  Annie and I sit, neither of us speaking, neither of us moving to get out.

  “What are you thinking?” she asks finally.

  “I’m thinking I hate that question. And I’m thinking it’s stupid that my dad set this thing up when I obviously need a real attorney. I feel like one of those newborns abandoned on the fire station porch by a fourteen-year-old after being given birth to in a bathroom stall at a school dance.”

  “Lovely. Let’s go.”

  Annie opens her door first. I follow her.

  Inside is less than impressive—not a dorm but dusted with that same institutional aura. “I feel like I should be wearing an orange jumpsuit,” I mumble.

  “Did you say third floor?”

  “Yeah. Do you suppose the inmates here go by their names or numbers?”

  “I’m ignoring you.”

  “Okay.”

  The third floor smells like beer and cotton candy, probably because there’s a girl sitting on the floor outside the elevator consuming both. Her lips are bright blue and silently mouthing the words as she reads the mammoth textbook in her lap.

  “This is the face of higher education in the United States of America?” I whisper to Annie as we move past her.

  “Keep moving.”

  We find the apartment halfway down the hall, and Annie knocks before I can vocalize one of the many reasons not to.

  “Come in,” a male voice calls.

  Annie opens the door, and the beer-and-cotton-candy smell is instantly gone, replaced by a moldy-carpet-infused-with-sulfur aroma. A curly-haired guy eating egg salad out of Tupperware is sitting on a couch, staring at his watch.

  “Hold on,” he whispers, putting up a hand. We hold on. Apparently Sam Cane is still learning to tell time. I look at Annie, but she refuses to look back at me. “I’m timing something,” he says, still whispering.

  Timing something. Like the amount of time it takes egg salad to turn? And why the whispering?

  “Done,” calls a female voice from another room.

  “Liar,” he shouts, and slams the container of egg salad down on the counter. The plastic fork bounces out and onto the floor.

  “How long?” asks the same bubbly voice, and then a girl appears. Or not a girl. A woman, probably midtwenties, wearing about a pound of makeup. Or maybe the pound of makeup is wearing her. She looks a little like Annie—a fuller, older, color-enriched version. The hair is darker blond and a bit red. The eyes are a couple shades darker blue. “How long?” she repeats. She has a folded newspaper in one hand, a pencil in the other hand, and a crazy-competitive smile gripping her face.

  Curly-top rolls his eyes and mutters, “A minute thirty-three.”

  “Ha!” She whacks him on the arm with the newspaper.

  “Here, let me check it. I don’t even think I believe you.” He squints at a little corner of the newspaper, while she turns back to us and grins and shakes her head like we’re old friends.

  “Excuse him. He’s a sore loser.”

  “I’m not a sore loser.”

  “You are, but it’s okay. I might be a sore loser too if I just lost the Jumble for the ninth time in a row. It is nine now, isn’t it?”

  He’s still squinting at her answers, ignoring her.

  “But seriously,” she says, “not everybody can be good at the Jumble. You’ve got other talents.”

  I grip the scrap of paper in my hand a little tighter, wishing I could make it disappear or just not have printed on it the name of this dufus who has lost the Jumble to Miss America here nine times in a row.

  He looks at me with sleepy eyes.

  “No,” I mumble, “I think we’re in the right place. We’re looking for a Mr. Cane.”

  “Then you are in the right place,” the woman says.

  “Super.”

  “That would be me.”

  I wait for the punch line.

  She gives me a pageant smile. Apparently there is no punch line.

  I shove the paper into my pocket. “Mr. Sam M. Cane?”

  “Yeah,” she says, and holds out a hand to shake. “Everything but the mister. You must be Mohammed.”

  “Mo.” I shake her hand, feeling strangely disoriented. I’ve had entirely too many carbs and not nearly enough protein in the last couple of days. “You’re Sam?”

  “Yeah. Samantha takes too long to write. And you must be Annabelle?”

  Annie just nods, so I say, “It’s Annie.”

  “Cool,” Sam says.

  Cool?

  “You two want to sit?”

  Annie pushes me toward the couch. Curly-top gets up, mumbling something about having to go to work, and shoves the folded newspaper in the trash on his way out.

  “Sorry about him,” Sam says. “He has a delicate ego, but he does most of the cleaning around here so I put up with him.”

  Annie and I sink into the couch, while I consider whether Sam and the sore loser are a couple or just roommates. She certainly outranks him in the looks department, but maybe he has one of those lame talents chicks fall for, like writing depressing poetry or playing the guitar.

  Sam takes the chair on the other side of the beat-up coffee table, sitting with her feet pulled up, arms wrapped around her knees. Maybe professional decorum is something you get when you graduate from law school. Or maybe she’ll sit like that in court someday. “So I’m told you guys need some help,” she adds.

  “Uh, yeah.” We do need help. That government website my Dad directed me to nearly made my head explode, but I’m pretty sure Law School Barbie is not going to be the one to clarify things for me. “We just got married and now I need to apply to become a permanent resident. I think I need a work visa too.”

  “Before we start, I should tell you I don’t really know anything about immigration law,” she says.

  I fight the colossal urge to roll my eyes and yell, Then why are we here?

  “But it’s easy enough to figure out which forms you need,” she adds. “I went on the CIS website last night and—”

  “Yeah, I’ve looked at that,” I interrupt. “No offense, but I think we might need to get a real attorney.”

  Annie pinches my arm.

  “Ow. What? I said no offense.”

  “None taken,” Sam says. “You can definitely get an immigration attorney to file your applications for you if you don’t mind spending the money, but you don’t really need one. Not for this situation. I mean, the information is confusing, so it helps to have someone show you which forms you need and how to fill them out, but I can do that.”

  “Thank you,” Annie says. “That’s exactly what we need.”

  “I mean, technically I’m not supposed to be pr
acticing law before I’m admitted to the bar.” Sam stops and waves her hand in the air, like the detail is a hovering mosquito. “But this isn’t really practicing law. It’s more like giving you friendly suggestions.”

  “Sure,” Annie says.

  “Seriously?” I ask, but nobody’s listening to me. Annie’s gazing at Sam like she wants to ask to be adopted.

  “Do you have your birth and marriage certificates?” Sam asks.

  Annie pulls out the file she’s brought along and hands it to Sam, who flips through it. “Wait, you guys are how old?”

  “Eighteen,” Annie says.

  “And you?” Sam says to me.

  “Seventeen.”

  She puts the file down. “Wow. So you guys got married because . . .”

  “Because we’re madly in love,” I say. “Now what do we need to do to get started on this?”

  Sam looks to Annie. “Okay, I can give you guys suggestions, but I can’t help you break the law.”

  “What are you talking about?” I ask. “Since when is getting married breaking the law?”

  “Getting married isn’t,” she says. “Filing immigration papers based on a fraudulent marriage is.”

  “Fraudulent?” Annie asks.

  “Not real,” Sam says, her eyes flitting back and forth between Annie and me.

  “I thought you didn’t know anything about immigration law,” I say. The pinch from Annie is much harder this time.

  “I believe I said I don’t know much,” Sam counters. “But I called a few friends last night and found out the basics. I do know that you guys are going to have to go for an adjustment of status interview in a few months. They’ll separate you and ask you the same questions to make sure your answers match up. You’ll have to show them proof that you’re living together. More than just this.” She holds up the marriage certificate.

  “And what if we can’t do that?” Annie asks.

  Sam puts the marriage certificate back down and closes the file. I suddenly feel naked. Stupid. We are idiots. I’m not sure why, but we are.

  “Let’s speak hypothetically,” Sam says.

  “Let’s,” I say. I should probably be feigning enthusiasm, but I don’t like this egg-salad-rotting-in-my-nostrils feeling, and I already know I’m not going to like what’s about to come out of Sam’s mouth hypothetically.

  “Let’s pretend that you two just got married.”

  “That’s not pretending,” I say. “We did just get married. Do you know what hypothetical means?”

  “Right,” Sam says, “so I guess that’s not the hypothetical part.”

  I stare at Sam, waiting for something hypothetical to come out of her glossy pink mouth and enlighten me.

  “Let’s say you two got married just so Mo could stay here. If I knew that, if one of you tells me that, I can’t help you.”

  “What?” Annie asks. “Why?”

  “Because I can’t help you commit a felony.”

  I think I can hear Annie’s heart thudding. I ignore the voice in my head that’s screaming Felony, felony, felony and say, “Wait. Lawyers defend criminals all the time.”

  “But I wouldn’t be defending you. I’d be helping you commit a crime. Hypothetically.”

  “Right,” I mutter. “Great. This is why we need to get a real lawyer. Law students still have ideals. Whatever happened to the stereotypical scumbag attorney—Ouch, Annie, pinch me once more and I swear I will never watch Project Runway with you again.”

  “Hold on,” Sam says. “We were talking hypothetically for a reason. Nobody has confessed to participating in a fraudulent marriage, and I’m only suggesting that nobody does.”

  She pauses to stare meaningfully at both of us, but I’m watching her nose, not her eyes. It’s a perfectly normal nose when she’s quiet. But then she starts talking again and it bobs up and down like there’s an invisible string connecting it to her bottom lip or something. Therefore, I can’t not hate her.

  “Let’s talk more about the interview,” Sam says. “They’ll ask you the questions married people know about each other—who sleeps on what side of the bed, that kind of thing—and you’ll bring stuff that proves you’re really married. Wedding pictures, honeymoon pictures, your apartment lease with both your names on it, checkbook with both your names on it, evidence of joint purchases, yada, yada. It’s not uncommon for them to send agents out to interview people you know, relatives, bosses, friends to make sure you’re actually living together and in love. And if he buys that you guys are actually married, and not committing immigration fraud, then you’ll be a conditional permanent resident, Mo.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I say. “Agents will come to Hardin County?”

  “It doesn’t happen most of the time, but if there’s even the tiniest of red flag in that interviewer’s mind, then they’ll investigate, and at that point it’s sort of impossible to hide the lie. If it’s a lie. Which I’m not saying it is.”

  I try swallowing the golf ball lodged in the back of my throat, but it can’t be coaxed down. I should be processing what she’s saying to me, but I can’t focus because all I can think about is why I didn’t know this and if Mom knew any of this, and if she did, why didn’t she tell me? She couldn’t have known. But did Dad?

  “When is this interview?” Annie asks, barely above a whisper.

  “A few months. Probably October or November. And then two years after that, you will petition to have conditions removed.”

  “Can we speak hypothetically again?”

  Sam nods.

  “What if a couple isn’t living together? What if their friends and family don’t know they’re married?”

  “Then that couple should either get their marriage annulled immediately to avoid a felony conviction and a fine and possible jail time for the US citizen”—she pauses to stare at Annie—“or they should make it real.”

  “But who’s to say what’s real?” Annie asks, an almost panicky tone to her voice. “What if they love each other like best friends? Because they are best friends. Who is anybody to say that their marriage is less real than, say, my parents, who haven’t had a real conversation in years and have separate bedrooms?”

  If Sam is embarrassed by the overshare, she doesn’t let on. She gives Annie a sympathetic look, but I see more. There’s a glimmer of condescension in her eyes. She’s underestimating Annie. People shouldn’t do that.

  “Listen,” Sam says, the glimmer still there. “The United States government doesn’t allow people to file for permanent residency because they have a best friend who’s an American citizen. They allow people to file for permanent residency if they have a spouse who’s an American. You could argue about what kind of love makes a marriage a real marriage all day long, but if that couple isn’t living together, hasn’t told a soul that they’re married, and is planning to divorce as soon as the immigrant’s status has been secured, it’s obviously fraudulent, and that couple is screwed. Screwed. Seriously, I don’t mean to scare the hypothetical couple, but they either move in and start doing the married people thing, or march back into that courthouse and get it reversed.”

  “And go back to Jordan,” I say.

  Sam shrugs. Clearly you don’t need a heart to be in beauty pageants.

  “The married people thing?” Annie says. “Are you saying they’re actually going to ask if we’re sleeping together?”

  “No. But you’ve got to be living together.”

  “For how long?” Annie asks.

  “If you’re not still actually married when you’re petitioning to remove conditions—so that’s two years after your interview—you’re going to have a hard time convincing them the marriage was real.”

  Annie looks like she’s going to throw up. “Two years,” she mumbles.

  “I thought people did this all the time,” I say.

  “Oh, they do,” Sam says, flipping open the file folder to the first form in a stack. “They also get caught all the time. They get examples ma
de of them all the time. And then the one gets sent home and the other has a criminal record. I mentioned the fines and possible jail time already, right?”

  Annie nods, eyes glazed.

  “There’s one more thing you should consider,” she says, turning to me. “The US government gives visas to foreign students all the time. You’d have to go back to Jordan to finish high school and apply to American colleges, but once you’ve been accepted, you could apply for a student visa. It wouldn’t be a sure thing, but it would be legal. As opposed to other methods.”

  “But not a sure thing,” Annie repeats. “And what happens when he’s done with college?”

  “His visa expires and he goes home.”

  “Back to Jordan,” Annie corrects.

  “Yeah.”

  Annie shakes her head.

  “So what’ll it be?” Sam asks. “Do we need to start going through these documents, or do you guys have stuff to rethink? It’s pretty expensive to file them, so it makes sense to be really sure that you aren’t going to change your minds in case you have, um, issues.”

  I turn so I’m facing Annie and try for all the world to pretend Sam is not here. Annie’s bottom lip is quivering. This is bad. This is very, very bad.

  “Why don’t I give you guys a minute?” Sam says. “I’ll be in my bedroom.”

  I wait until the door slams shut before I let out my breath. “We’re being represented by the Legally Blonde chick.”

  “Reese Witherspoon. And I like Sam.”

  “Let’s argue about how annoying she is later. We can’t do this. We have to get it annulled.”

  “No.”

  “Maybe I should go back to Jordan and try to get a student visa.”

  “No.” She frowns and stares over my shoulder at the wall. “Why should you have to lose everything that’s important to you—your senior year, basketball, your friends? You could be valedictorian, Mo. And you heard her. It’s not a sure thing. The odds could be something crazy like one in a thousand applicants gets a visa.”

  She’s right. Sam probably doesn’t even know the numbers, but maybe that doesn’t matter. It’s our only legal option, now that our perfect marriage solution is irreparably screwed up. “We’re committing a felony, Annie. Why didn’t I know that? This is a fraudulent marriage. We’re felons.”