Of Women and Salt

by Gabriela Garcia

  “I’ll be right back. Just sit tight.”

  Jeanette closes the door to her bedroom. She lies back on the bed and balances her laptop on her stomach. Google searches: What happens to children if their parents are deported? A link to Child Protective Services. A link to family detention centers in the region. To lawyer after lawyer after lawyer. Another search: How to find someone detained. An Immigration and Customs Enforcement database that requires an Alien Registration Number for the detainee. No phone number she can find. Lawyer after lawyer after lawyer. A light knock on the door. Ana has to pee. Jeanette shows her the bathroom and makes up her mind that Ana will spend the night.

  * * *

  In bed, Jeanette wakes, gasps, holds her breath. A sharp pain in her chest. Almost like loving Mario, wanting to run to Mario. She holds the feeling like a single bullet. No, she’s gotten too far to break. Outside, a thunderstorm clicks raindrops over dying, sick banana leaves. Some nights like this—she isn’t even aware of it, how her fingers find their way to her nightstand, how they search for the bottle, a healing rattle. She curls an empty fist beside her and tucks it beneath her head. Ana sleeps in the small room next to her own. Jeanette strains to listen but hears nothing.

  Mario. His beard never grew in right, but he insisted on letting it grow. Red highlights streaked through his chin even though his hair had no red at all. Mario. A scar on his abdomen from a bout with appendicitis she liked to trace with her fingers. He was more organized than she but had annoying habits like forgetting wet clothes in the washing machine. He was afraid of heights.

  When his parents split up, his dad went back to Argentina, started a new family in Argentina. Mario had adored him, but his dad had never called. His mother remarried, and Mario hated his stepfather, said his stepfather constantly disrespected him, and once, they’d come to blows. Mario always worried about “disrespect.” He spent so much time angry over perceived “disrespect.” After a fight, they liked to drive in silence to the beach, way up north, way past the tourists, to the quietest stretches of sand. Just to sit, sometimes hold hands. Mario most feared everyone in his life leaving him.

  Jeanette curls on her side and places a hand to the wall as if it will pulse with an answer: what to do tomorrow, what to do every day from here on out. What color paint is this? Wonders if Ana also can’t sleep.

  * * *

  “But how could you do that?” Jeanette’s mother whispers across the kitchen table. The sun illuminates her face through the window, illuminates the particles of powder at her hairline. Ana watches the Disney Channel in the next room. Old Miley Cyrus bossing around a band of preteens. Laugh track. “How could you just keep someone’s child overnight? Someone who you don’t even know!”

  Ana has been with Jeanette all morning, watching TV shows, following her around, doodling in a notebook on her belly in the spare room where she slept. Jeanette’s mother got here an hour ago. She visits on Saturdays. Since leaving Mario, since detox, since rehab. She has never missed a weekend.

  Jeanette’s mother runs a finger over the containers before her. One holds rice and beans, the other Jeanette’s favorite dessert, arroz con leche. Her mother never shows up without food she has made the night before, claiming she has made too much, that she doesn’t want a refrigerator full of leftovers.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Jeanette whispers. “I watched Immigration officers take her mother in the middle of the night. Am I supposed to just call the cops? Will they take her to her mother? Will she go into the system?”

  “It’s not your responsibility.”

  “How can you say that?” she says. “You’re an immigrant.”

  Her mother runs her tongue over her teeth and stares.

  “What?” Jeanette says. “Do you ever think about how Cubans get all this special treatment, like literally you step on US ground and you have legal status. It’s just so—”

  “Wet foot, dry foot policy? That’s going to end any day now.”

  “Mom, that’s not even the point. Don’t you think it’s your responsibility to give a shit about other people?”

  Her mother glares at her. “And what, exactly, do you think I’m doing right now?” she says. “Giving a shit about you.”

  As a child, Jeanette used to ask her about Cuba. Her father had a whole repertoire about winding colonial streets, about the most beautiful beaches in the entire world, about the magic of sitting on the Malecón watching the waves crash. He talked about his parents, his siblings, his whole past. He drew a mythology so enchanting, Jeanette hadn’t understood why her mother never said a word and would almost snap if she asked about her past. Jeanette had never even spoken to her maternal grandmother in Cuba. And even as a child, Jeanette understood that another narrative she couldn’t access had shaped her life. She didn’t have the vocabulary to say, I want to know who I am, so I need to know who you’ve been.

  Her mother sweeps crumbs off the table into her hand. “Really, you should wipe this table every time you use it,” she says.

  “I do. Are you ever going to let me talk to my grandmother? Because lately I’ve been thinking—”

  Her mother raises her hands and shakes her head. A look Jeanette has grown accustomed to. “Call the cops. That’s what they’re there for. To figure this stuff out. To help.”

  “I’m just—I’m waiting to see if someone comes for Ana.”

  “The cops will say you kidnapped her. For all you know, there is a missing child report.”

  “Someone has to come for her. Her mother wouldn’t just abandon her. She’ll call the babysitter. The babysitter will say she dropped her off. Someone will come for her. I’ve been watching out the window. I put a note on her door. I will know when they come.”

  “Jeanette. This is not a game. You’re on probation. You really want to mess everything up again?”

  Her mother. Pearls, slacks, wrinkle cream, a box of blank thank-you notes. Always put together. Always carrying a whiff of her own success and composure like a cardigan at the shoulders. You look at her and just know: here is a woman with answers. So often Jeanette has wondered how she came from such a woman. So often she’s felt both gratitude and embarrassment on her behalf. Jeanette: always a woman on the verge of cracking. You look at Jeanette and think: here is a woman with stories.

  Not that Jeanette’s mother doesn’t know loss herself. But it’s a different kind of loss. Her mother lives among the Cuban elite, the First Wave, the people who lost homes and businesses and riches and ran from communism at the start of the revolution. Jeanette assumes she’s like them. She can only assume. She has started writing letters to her cousin Maydelis in Cuba and new little threads have emerged: that her mother lost her father young, that her grandmother hasn’t heard from her mother since she left so long ago; that she’s tried but Jeanette’s mother wants nothing to do with her, because of “politics,” her cousin says. Maydelis has a relative with internet access at work and she called Jeanette, asked for her email. They are around the same age and had spoken on the phone periodically growing up. But online they struck an easy friendship, and she’d sparked Jeanette’s curiosity, a desire to someday go to Cuba and meet this family she’d never known.

  Jeanette suspects a deeper loss, too, one her mother won’t express. Her mother laughs with abandon sometimes before catching herself, before recasting her face with dignity, poise. Jeanette suspects a different side of her mother, a smooth easiness unworn by the hard edge of new worlds, lapping at the shore of the life she abandoned. Jeanette has seen this loss in photos Maydelis has sent, photos browned with age, her mother’s youthful gaze like time will never stop, like the future is an abstraction, a given. And Jeanette has wondered whether loss unspoken becomes an inherited trait.

  “What are you going to tell him when he visits on Monday?” her mother says.

  “My probation officer?”

  Jeanette’s mother smiles but her cheekbones stay in place, her skin pulls. She cups the espresso in her hands.r />
  “Someone will come for her before then,” Jeanette says. She can hear Ana giggle at the TV in the living room.

  “And if they don’t? It’ll be the same for the girl. Whether the PO takes her Monday or the cops take her now. The only difference will be whether you get in trouble.”

  * * *

  After her mother leaves, Jeanette and Ana walk to the park. Jeanette tapes another note to Ana’s door with her phone number in case someone shows up while they are out. Hand in hand they stroll to the tiny playground: two swings, slide, seesaw, water fountain, one bench. No other children are there, so Jeanette joins Ana at the other end of the seesaw.

  All day the girl’s been asking questions. About her mother, where she is, when she can go home. Jeanette didn’t tell her mother she’d made up a lie, that she’d said Ana’s mother phoned and asked her to keep Ana for a while. Why? Ana wanted to know. Why not? Jeanette had answered. Each time Jeanette lifts her weight a little, the seesaw sends Ana floating down. Each time she sits, Jeanette hits the ground with a thud.

  At night they eat take-out pizza straight out of the box, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the living room. Jeanette browses titles under Netflix’s children’s category. Ana wants to see none of them. Ana wants to see a “grown-up movie.”

  “Your mom lets you see grown-up movies?”

  “It depends.”

  “Did you both always live here?”

  “You mean next door?”

  “Yeah. Or, like, in this country.”

  “No.”

  “Where did you live before?”

  “El Salvador.”

  “When did you come here?”

  “I came here twice. Once when I was a baby and last year.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That one.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll watch Madagascar even though it’s for littler kids.”

  They watch Madagascar. They eat cheese sticks. Jeanette looks out the window every few hours. Jeanette waits and waits, and still nobody comes for Ana. She does the only thing that feels right: leaves the movie midway and curls up in bed, listens to the TV’s drone and Ana’s laugh from afar. Calls Mario. Explains nothing. Talks about the time they were both high and watched Fantasia in 3-D at the movie theater four times in one weekend. They laugh together. Grow sad together. Reminisce about grabbing for each other the night Mario’s father died in a car accident. Honor the pain in silence. The tender feeling in the smallest action. How empty each day. How hard to stay on track. Has he…? No. Has she…? No. Congratulations to each other.

  A pause and Jeanette says: “We never talked about having children.”

  “In the middle of getting high and fighting all the time? We were supposed to be like, ‘Oh yeah, let’s just bring another life into this and fuck that one up too’?”

  “Maybe if we’d had a child. In the beginning. Maybe that would’ve kept us sober. Maybe that would’ve stopped the fighting.”

  She thinks Mario is crying. She hears labored breathing, shaky shuddering. She knows this routine. Knows what comes next.

  “How could I have hurt you so much? I regret. So much. That I could ever have placed a hand on you.”

  Jeanette wants to cry, too, but is always afraid that if she lets it happen, she will never stop. That if she lets the pain seep, she will need something, someone to stop the bloodletting. Only one way to kill pain. And then the weight of it: the daily exercise, sobriety. How it drags at her feet, keeps her chained to herself.

  Jeanette shakes her head no because when Mario speaks the words, then they are real. Then she is the battered ex-girlfriend, she is the fists-to-the-face that really happened. That other life that feels so distant now. All she can feel when it’s just two voices across an expanse is the knowing that still survives. The body her fingertips memorized, the universe of a relationship. All its language and borders and landscapes. A geography she studied for years and still does not understand: a man who pummels a fist into her side the same day he takes in a kitten found lying in the crook of a stairwell during a rainstorm. Nobody knows about the fights that got physical. Nobody knows these phone calls still happen. She thinks of Ana in the next room, listening to the credits. Thinks how even the best mothers in the world can’t always save their daughters.

  * * *

  Ana wakes in the night and comes to her bed. Asks if she can sleep there instead. They lie faceup, blinking into the darkness.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” Ana says. “I miss my mom.”

  “Oh, sweetie.”

  “When is she coming home?”

  Jeanette runs her fingers through a tangle in Ana’s hair. “Soon, I’m sure.”

  “When did she say she’s coming home?”

  “Oh, soon, soon.” Jeanette tries to change the subject: “What did you mean when you said you came to this country twice?”

  Ana turns. A small lump in the bed. A tiny cocoon. “I came when I was a baby. I don’t remember. Then when I turned four, we went back to El Salvador.”

  “Why?”

  “They made us.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. The government people.”

  “So then you came back?”

  “In a car trunk.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Jeanette’s eyes adjust to the dark. She turns, too, and can see Ana’s face, brown and smooth. A little button nose. Stringy hair spread around her like a crown. She smells as children often do, a sharp, sweaty sweetness.

  “We had to hide in a dark car trunk to come back. Only sometimes we could poke our heads through the back car seats to breathe.”

  Jeanette searches for words, thinks of the weight of Ana’s story and tries to find an appropriately serious response. But Ana fidgets and yawns, seems to give the moment little importance.

  “She said we had to do it for me.”

  “What?”

  “My mom said we had to come in the back of the car trunk for me even though sometimes I miss my grandma and I had a dog in El Salvador.”

  “I had a dog when I was little.”

  “What was the dog’s name?”

  “Matilda.”

  Ana giggles and lays back. “Can you be my babysitter forever instead of Jesse?”

  * * *

  She knows her mother is right. She knows nobody is coming for Ana. Barefoot, she makes phone calls in the morning, T-shirt bunched at her hips, huddled in the hazy light of her room. She is not surprised to find the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services offices closed on Sunday mornings. But she is surprised the woman who answers the ICE hotline can’t find Ana’s mother in the system by name and asks for an Alien Registration Number in a monotone.

  “You’re talking about an unaccompanied minor? Central America?”

  “Well, no. The mother.”

  “Oh, that’s good. Surge of unaccompanied minors. But if she’s got a guardian, then she’s probably in family detention. You got the alien minor’s number?”

  “No, she’s—”

  “Oh, well you can visit our website for more information.” The silence, when the woman hangs up, is unbearable.

  Jeanette finds the numbers of immigration lawyers who are much more eager to speak. They are attentive. They have questions. How is she doing? they ask. How is she holding up? It’s a question Jeanette is used to. Her answer—“Fine”—is automatic.

  “Oh, if only I had a dime for every mother taken away who can’t contact her kid, detention guards not even listening when she says she left a kid behind,” says one lawyer, whom Jeanette imagines for no reason as near retired and kind. It’s the dears she sprinkles: “Immigration is a civil matter, dear. It’s not criminal court. There’s no guaranteed phone call. There’s no public attorney.”

  Jeanette can only squeak out an answer. Ana is at her kitchen table, drawing on blank sheets of printer paper. Jeanette has no crayons, no markers. Ana said she preferred a blue pen anyway.


  “But don’t you worry,” the kind-voiced lawyer says. “We’ll fix this even if it takes a few years.”

  “Years?”

  “Oh, one or two. Can’t imagine more than that. Prosecutorial discretion maybe. Jeanine, was it? I love that name. I’ll get started right away.”

  And then the kind-voiced lawyer says the same thing the not-so-kind-voiced lawyers have said before Jeanette hangs up: “Bill you for the hours later, or do you want to place a credit card on file?”

  It’s a disappointment, maybe it’s selfish, but Jeanette holds on to the word dear like a blip of accidental humanity caught in a stranger’s throat, a version of the dust that drifts in a sunbeam that lands across her bed.

  She slips into a dress. She tiptoes past the kitchen. Jeanette can hear Ana’s pen scratching the paper in violent strokes. Her probation officer: he, too, will sit at her kitchen table. He, too, will scratch pen on paper. Pen on paper. It all comes down to paper.

  * * *

  Jeanette knocks on the door of the neighbor on Ana’s mother’s other side. “Do you know the woman who lives next door?” she says to the mustached man who holds a forty-ounce. Jeanette points toward the neighbor’s house.

  “All I know is she cleaned my buddy’s house for twenty bucks once. Nice woman. But poor lady can’t even afford a decent outfit. Damn shame, if you ask me. What with all the men might could’ve took care of her.”

  Jeanette looks down at her own outfit, at the bra straps budging from her tank top, at her dirty shoes.

  Just as the mustached man is about to close the door, he pauses. “Hey,” he says, pulling a phone out of his pocket. “I just remembered. You said her kid is looking for her? A friend of mine’s wife is the principal at the elementary school near here. Bet you the kid goes there. Maybe she knows something.”

  Jeanette stands in the street and dials the number. She looks back at the mustached man, smiles and nods. He watches her. And Jeanette thinks of how she wants to ask him to shut the door but she’d never ask him to shut the door. She doesn’t ask for things she wants. Two rings and a woman with a cigarette-husky voice answers. A dog barks in the background. A baby cries. Jeanette attempts to explain.