Of Women and Salt

by Gabriela Garcia

  “I’m sorry, who are you?”

  “I’m … a member of the community. I am worried that Immigration officers may have left a student, from your school, behind … alone … when they took her mother.”

  “Oh,” the woman says. “Yes, I’ve heard of this happening before. Have you called the police? What is the student’s name?”

  The man at the door slides his thumbnail over the tab of his beer. He looks at the nail. She can taste the beer, memory on the tongue. Why is it that men can be “hard drinkers”? Suave and smooth, leather and whiskey. Her father. A woman who can’t stop is simply a mess. Irresponsible.

  “I—Ana,” Jeanette says. She’s not sure why she opts not to tell the woman Ana’s last name.

  “I see,” the woman says. There is a muffled sound, then shouting: “Delilah, put the dog down! What’d I tell you about—”

  “I’m sorry to bother you—” Jeanette says, ready to end the call. She assumes everyone wants the other person on a call to end it.

  “Ana, you said? Well, I’ve got near seven hundred kids this year. I must know ten Anas. Do you have the number of the police? I can get you the number of the police.”

  “I’m so sorry to bother you,” Jeanette says again, and ends the call.

  The man asks for her phone number as she turns to leave, and Jeanette doesn’t answer but instead thinks cleaning caddy. She thinks arched eyebrows and she thinks impossible choices and she gets the sensation that Ana’s mother already knows about her, already knows she will disappoint. She thinks impossible choices and she remembers, remembers so deep it hurts, why she never thought mother of herself. “I’m sorry,” she says, and she’s saying it to every mother in the world, but the man at the door doesn’t understand; he is not a mother and he is just nodding.

  It starts to rain as Jeanette makes her way back to the house, and she sees Ana peering out the window. For some reason the image of a tiny face through a rain-smeared window, a tiny face so full of expectation, makes her remember: She has missed her NA meeting. Jeanette stops, looks up. Will she tell her PO? He will want to know why, and he will assume it’s because she doesn’t want to get better, doesn’t want to let go of Mario, doesn’t want to see another day. She will tell him she’s missed a meeting but will not miss another one, and he will be disappointed and he will not believe her, but she is used to disappointment. She is used to disbelief.

  Jeanette doesn’t rush back. She lets the rain patter down around her, soak through her clothes, run into her shoes. It feels good to punish herself. To stand shivering and cold in an empty street. Her sponsor told her once that the only love she knows what to do with is the kind of love that breaks a person over and over again.

  Wet, squeaking through her house and leaving muddy imprints, she walks past Ana drawing still, drawing a house, drawing a bird. Jeanette takes the phone to her room. But she doesn’t call Mario. She closes her eyes and tries to remember the opiate rush, the watery calm, the hit to the brain, delicious sleepy coasting. His voice in her ear: “Don’t you feel every molecule that surrounds you? Everything is holding you now.” She doesn’t call him after she’s called the cops. She doesn’t call him even when the police car pulls up and she hears Ana open the door and call her name and her heart is thumping in her chest and she feels for the first time, no, this is what it’s like to break.

  3

  AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF BIRDS

  Gloria

  Texas, 2014

  The burrowing parrot also known as the Patagonian conure also known as the burrowing parakeet is the only bird species with eyelashes. This is a little-known fact. Another little-known fact is that burrowing parrots, while often purchased as pets, become exasperated and violent if caged for too long. Burrowing parrots need interaction. They need color. If you separate two burrowing parrots, in short order the one left behind will die. She will die of loneliness.

  Every day at noon we are served lunch. This is how I count the time. We don’t eat with the children, because they are in classes; they eat together, at a different time. Our mud-colored trays are divided into five compartments. Today’s lunch: slivers of white onion, an orange sliced into wedges, white bread (two slices), baked beans from a can. The workers are other detained women who work for three dollars a day. Everyone wants to work, so there are TVs on the wall that list the names of who will work each day and where. Two of the usual workers speak Spanish. They tell me they are sorry to see me here. They tell me, hold on. You’ll be out in no time. One of them gives me my second book of bird facts. I forget how she knows I am interested in birds, but I assume I have told her. I don’t remember where she got the book.

  I am friends with all the women. I don’t know all their names. But I know which ones have a sick child, which ones lost a husband in the desert along the way. I know whom to hug periodically, whom to gift extra rations of food. We don’t speak about these—the ones who lost children, who bear wounds of rape or police torture, who are sometimes hauled screaming in the middle of the night to see one of the staff in red polo shirts. That’s where we hope they are taken. They also deport people in the middle of the night. We are given no information, no answers.

  Homer or Aristotle or Greek philosophers or Roman naturalists or all of them, I don’t remember which, believed migrating birds were warriors. They believed migrating birds were off to do battle at the end of the earth. I imagine them whirling in a spiral toward the sky, millions of them, millions of wings, one force pulsing, beating. Powerful enough to explode into fire, that beating bird heart, to break any wall.

  I don’t know why I am here.

  Here is for families. Here is for mostly mothers and their children. The lawyers call it family detention. The papers they won’t translate call it Texas Regional Residential Center. I am alone. I don’t know where my daughter is—I hope still in Florida, safe somehow, or on her way here, if safe in Florida is not an option. I pray for her every night. I pray on the concrete floor at the side of my bunk until my knees are raw and tender and I can barely stand. Some nights, my knees bleed. There is a smear of red beside my bunk. I call the smear Ana. Ana is my daughter’s name. I fear I, too, am losing my mind. I don’t know why I am here and I am alone and I am praying to a god I’m not sure exists but if she exists she is surely a bird, surely a migrating bird doing battle, surely she will break these walls.

  * * *

  Dear Ana, I am sorry. I tried to save you. Dear Ana, I am sorry. I thought I could give you a better chance. Dear Ana, I do not know if I made your life worse. I do not write any of this.

  * * *

  I found my first bird book in the craft room. The women can go to the craft room with their children. There are tables like the tables in the cafeteria. There are crayons, markers, yarn, paper in different colors, safety scissors, glue. There are flyers on the walls about sexual assault with bold letters spelling KEEP DETENTION SAFE! There is a bookshelf with books and puzzles on a floor made of foam. The first bird book was called El mundo secreto de los pájaros. El mundo secreto de los pájaros said it was for middle-grade readers. There were pictures of all the birds it described. I still come here, to the craft room, when I am saddest. I read the book on the foam floor. I read it on the foam floor and I lie on my back and I feel the foam give way beneath me. I think, how soft Ana’s skin. How like bird down, her hair.

  At first, I couldn’t stop talking about the canyon wren of North America. The canyon wren builds a pathway to its nest with thousands of stones. Imagine it, a pebble stone path winding through the canyons, the desert, and at the end a nest full of wriggling baby birds crying out for their mother, their mother who is hopping in the distance, pebble to pebble to pebble. I am a mother. I am a pebble in the distance. Or just another person with a problem in a world too full of problems to care much about one more person behind a wall, sitting in a children’s craft room, reading a children’s book. I am a pebble.

  After I couldn’t stop talking about the canyon wren of No
rth America, the women brought me more bird books. They asked visitors to bring them—volunteers and lawyers and, for the lucky ones, family. The women have become my bird family.

  * * *

  The playground is the happiest place in the compound but it is not like other playgrounds. The slides are gray and made of metal. The monkey bars, the tunnels—they are made of metal. The whole thing is covered by a gray plastic tarp. Like an industrial playground for robot children. Or a laboratory with double-sided mirrors where aliens play while doctors study their behavior. Still, I like to watch the children shriek and play after school or on the weekends. I don’t think the children care about metal. I don’t think they care about gray. Maybe some of them have no rainbow-swirled, plastic, spiraling-ladder playgrounds to compare this to.

  The playground is in the courtyard, at the center of the building. The ground is concrete, or plastic grass. On one side, our bunks. On the other are the classrooms, the medical unit, the common room, and a library that has hardly any books, some computers, mostly just binders that read SELF-HELP LEGAL or KNOW YOUR RIGHTS. I browsed them once. I understood very little. Every section of the building is called a camp and labeled with an animal and a color: red bird, green frog, and so on. Nobody refers to their room that way. Nobody says they live in an animal.

  There are a dozen children at the playground today. Thank God the children don’t wear same-colored sweatpants and oversized shirts and can run in their full plumage. Blue shorts and red shirts and black skin and brown hair and green eyes and whirling laughter. Not all the kids are like this. Some of them sit on the concrete ledge, feet swirling sand, just watching. Some of them avoid the playground altogether and spend time trailing their mothers, the adult in them sprouting, ready to emerge in all its hardness. Ana, she is all questions and laughter. She likes to color, she likes to play soccer in the dirt, always has Band-Aids dotting her skinny legs. She likes to make up stories to pass the time. The babysitter knows her more than I. The babysitter is where she spent all her time until I finished work every night. The hurt rises, always surprising me when I least expect. I have to look away from the slide, the sand, the oil burning in the distance.

  Do you think she will remember this? the woman on my left says in Spanish. We are on the bench and her child is a toddler and she is wearing yellow shorts with white daisies and she has just four front teeth. She is sitting in the sand throwing handfuls in the air while a guard stands to the side. The guard looks through her. The guard is a woman and she looks like me.

  What is her name? I say.

  Gladys, she says. Do you think she will remember this?

  No, I lie.

  I lie because I know they can detain us for months. I know this because another detained woman told me so. She is working with activists who are trying to get her out. The activists told her kids are not supposed to be detained more than twenty-one days, but the Obama administration is arguing that kids with their parents are different from kids without their parents and so the twenty-one days doesn’t apply. It’s all incredibly confusing. The woman has another daughter who is a US citizen. She just wants to get to her. Mothers with US citizen children have a better chance but still …

  Which one is yours? the woman beside me says.

  She is not here, I say.

  What do you mean? She fidgets with her shirt.

  I left my daughter with someone, I say. She was not picked up.

  Then why are you here? She frowns at me.

  I don’t know, I answer truthfully. They transferred me from Florida. I don’t know why they brought me to the family facility. I have no family with me.

  You are lucky, she says. You are lucky your child will not remember this.

  Your daughter won’t remember this, I say. I want to hold her hand but I don’t. She won’t remember this, I say again.

  We all know that last week, this woman and her daughter were placed in an isolation room for two days. The isolation rooms are in the medical unit. They are meant for people with TB and other such diseases, but the guards use them for punishment. The guards punished the woman after a bed raid. These raids are unannounced; they often wake us in the middle of the night, scaring the children. The guards found the woman had hidden snacks in the room. She worried because her daughter has lost so much weight since landing here. She said the isolation room smelled of antiseptic. She said the isolation room had a smiling zebra painted on the wall.

  * * *

  In my bunk I have started a letter to Ana. I have scratched it into the metal above me with a paper clip. It starts Dear Ana, I am sorry. That’s all I’ve written. Dear Ana, I am sorry.

  * * *

  Here is a bird fact from Around the World in Birds: An Encyclopedia. You can find it under the entry “Bird Suicide.” In Jatinga, India, after the long monsoon months, come dark, foggy nights. On the darkest, the foggiest of these nights, hundreds of birds begin to descend the night sky, attracted to the lights below. The villagers capture them on bamboo poles. They are diving to their deaths, these mostly juvenile birds. Wildlife experts have studied the bird suicides of Jatinga, India, and they can’t find a scientific explanation. I imagine myself standing in the middle of a field, a field like the one behind my childhood home in Sonsonate, in El Salvador, and I look up and there are hundreds of baby birds raining down on me: hill partridge, green pigeon, emerald dove, necklaced laughing thrush, black drongo, burrowing parrot, burrowing parrot, I am covered in birds.

  I tell you this because I threw a sheet over the chicken wire fence that contains us. I didn’t care if I got in trouble, but none of the guards saw. I wanted the sheet to land on the spikes, to make a softer place, a nest. I did not want a bird to kill itself. The sheet did not land over the chicken wire; it soared over the fence. For a moment, the sheet flew, and I said go. I said fly, fly, fly. Birds fly even if it kills them.

  * * *

  Do you have a daughter named Ana, the officer says to me in his office after I leave the playground. It is a question but he does not phrase it like a question.

  Why? I say. His office has a bulletin board covered with crayon drawings made by children.

  Just answer the question, he says. One of the crayon drawings is a bird. This must be a sign.

  She was turned in to the authorities, the guard says. She was left behind in a house by herself after you were apprehended.

  No, I say. I left her with a babysitter.

  She is with the Department of Health and Human Services, the guard says. But she is an alien minor. And she is on her way here. That’s why you are here.

  The bird in the drawing is outlined in green crayon. The inside of the bird outline is orange. The sky is big smears of blue crayon, fat strokes. There is no sun.

  No, no, no, I say. No.

  I do not want my child here, where every child has a cough and the guards run their eyes over curves, hungry. I do not want my child here but I do not want her alone thousands of miles away. I want my child safe. If safe were a place, it would look nothing like any of the options, and I want to scream but I swallow, I want to claw but I smile, because I need to seem good. Because I need to seem worthy of something, something, some solution.

  Don’t worry, the man says. She’s an alien too. She’ll go with you.

  What do you mean? I say.

  She’ll go to Mexico with you.

  I am from El Salvador, I say. I am crying now.

  To El Salvador then, he says.

  What will happen to us? I say.

  I think about how the orange of the bird on the wall is like the orange of my smock, my pants. How the orange could be the sun. How the bird could have swallowed the orange sun. A belly of sun.

  You are in deportation proceedings, the guard answers. You know this.

  So when will we go? I say. To El Salvador. When will we go?

  It’s a process.

  But why am I here if I will go? Why am I here if I will be deported anyway?

  It’s
a process, he says.

  * * *

  Beside the playground there is an open “recreation” space for the adults. Often the women will go there when the children are in school. Or sometimes a few women will take turns watching several of the children at the playground and the others will go on their own. I sit at a table with the other Salvadoran women. Beside us, another table, Guatemalans. Beside them, a table with fewer women: half Haitians and the other half I’m not sure. I think Chinese. The sun feels good on my skin after the cold of the office. Texas heat is different from Florida heat. Florida heat licks the skin. After work, I would wait for the bus that took me to the town house where I lived with Ana. I was always drenched by the time I got on the bus. I got used to the taste of sweat, licking my lips in the sun. I got used to waiting.

  You look like you’ve been crying, says a woman named Maura. She looks so young. She has three daughters but only two are here with her.

  I have been crying, I say.

  She doesn’t ask why. She rubs my back.

  Ánimo, says another woman, Alegra, who survived a bullet to the back. She was selling vegetables at her stand when the military started shooting at protesters. Ánimo, she says. Ánimo. Be strong.

  She says a woman with a baby had a court date yesterday and they got to stay. Credible fear, Alegra says. Asylum, she says. Have you gone to the CFI prep yet? The volunteer lawyers?

  CFI prep? I say.

  Credible fear interview.