Miles interrupted the stare-down. “She’s a lawyer in our firm.”
“You have a case here?”
“We don’t have meetings on Saturdays, thankfully,” Grace answered. Up close, Linny saw that they actually had similar hairstyles, layered with side-swept bangs.
Turning back to Miles, Linny said, “I haven’t talked to Van in a while.”
“She’s fine.” His tone was mechanical, almost dismissive.
“Is she here?” Sasha asked loudly. “I’d love to meet her.”
Miles barely let his gaze rest on her. “She’s in Michigan,” he told Linny. Then he touched Grace’s shoulder. “We should get going.”
As they sailed across the shiny stone floor toward the lobby of the hotel, Miles’s hand drifted to Grace’s back, as if escorting or protecting her. It was the kind of gesture Linny had seen him use with Van.
All at once she snapped awake. She slipped down from the barstool. She hurried to the lobby and crossed it, heading toward the hidden bank of elevators. Rounding the corner, she spotted Miles and Grace stepping into the same gold-toned car. Her impulse was to jump in after them. But instead she stopped in front, in full view. Her face was what Miles saw as the doors closed.
Later, after Linny and Sasha had questioned and rehashed the whole scene—was Miles cheating on Van so brazenly? and what, if anything, should Linny say to her sister?—she found a seat on a bus heading west to her apartment. The days lined up in front of her—more meals, menus, her father’s citizenship party—and Linny thought of her sister driving through her subdivision in Ann Arbor, deaccelerating, directing the car into the driveway. She pictured Van just sitting there, almost unwilling to move. How well Linny knew that feeling, every time she relinquished an off-street parking spot to drive somewhere, and every time she returned, circling blocks to find a space. During winter storms some people dug out their cars in the morning and left lawn chairs in their place to stake a claim; trespassers would find their cars keyed. Whenever Linny did nab a space she felt a mixture of relief and dread. Now I have to get out of the car, she thought at those times. And she always did, even though she dreamed of driving on without a map, or even steering her way to a garage at the airport, abandoning the car there, and buying any ticket she could afford. For the first time, it occurred to Linny that maybe her sister had fantasized that very same thing.
5
Van
When Vijay Sastri called, patched through by the International Center’s answering service, Van had been setting the table for a late dinner while Miles stood at the stove, tasting the shrimp and red curry dish he’d prepared. I’m at the police, Vijay told her, his voice shaky. In the town of Northville. A car accident. He’d been an anxious driver since getting carjacked at a gas station the year before, and when he missed a stop sign and plowed into the passenger side of a Cadillac, he panicked and tried to drive away from the scene. But a police cruiser two blocks over had heard the crash and pulled Vijay over. The officer was the one who found the gun, stashed under the passenger seat of Vijay’s car.
Taking this all in, Van walked away from the table, toward the other end of the house. What were you doing with a gun? She wanted to scream. But all she said was, Do you know if they called Immigration yet?
Vijay had no idea. Will you come here to help me?
You’re going to need an attorney who does criminal law.
Why? I am not a criminal!
You can’t get a gun license unless you’re a citizen or a permanent resident. And if you had a gun under the seat you would need a license for a concealed weapon. That’s why they arrested you. Vijay—are you listening to me?
From the living room Van saw Miles leaning against the counter, waiting. He had set out the bowls of shrimp curry and rice, brought forth two bottles of imported beer. It was one of Miles’s thoughtful dinners, and Van was going to ruin it all.
If Vijay had been drunk-driving, or simply a bad driver, Van knew she could have kept him in the country. But certain offenses—drug possession, domestic violence, and firearm possession without a license—were pretty much nonnegotiable. The case went to trial in January 2002, a time when judges were less than generous with immigrants. Still, Van worked and reworked the language of her argument. She sometimes even believed the judge would understand how Vijay’s carjacking had propelled him to a gun store, afraid for his safety. He hadn’t known about needing a license. And he hadn’t realized that he was risking deportation. Why would he chance everything—his home, his livelihood, his job, his ability to support his family back in Hyderabad? There were so many things, Van said, that immigrants didn’t yet know.
But the judge on the case was known for his strictness, and Van shouldn’t have been surprised when, after all of her preparation and worry, all those nights when she worked instead of going to bed with Miles, the deportation decree came down anyway. She would always remember the way Vijay’s eyes closed upon hearing the decision. She would remember the stifled cry of his wife and her slow walk out of the courtroom, the sky-blue fabric of her sari sighing around her ankles. Van dreamed about them sometimes—a hot climate she did not know, filled with the smell of motorcycle oil, the vague images of dust and yellowed sky that she had borrowed from her mother’s descriptions of Vietnam.
The night of the decision, Van and Miles had driven in silence to downtown Ann Arbor to have dinner with a couple they’d known in law school. Van had wanted to cancel but Miles said it would be rude. He was angry about the Vijay news, and Van was stunned to realize that he blamed her.
Van pointed out a parking spot on Main that turned out to be in front of a fire hydrant. With an exasperated sigh, Miles pulled away from the curb too fast and almost hit another car going past. Van jumped in her seat, letting out a little scream, and that’s when Miles had growled, “You’re not helping! Why can’t you ever pay attention?”
He made a U-turn in the middle of the street to catch a spot that another car was leaving. As he parallel-parked he said, “You need to think about what you’re doing. I think you need to step up.”
“I don’t want to talk about this.”
“It’s not the classroom anymore. This is life. These are other people’s lives. This is the stuff that matters.”
“Shut up, Miles.” She’d never said such a thing before, and he turned to her with a look that sharpened into contempt.
“Is that in your arsenal of great argumentative tactics?”
“What do you think you’re accomplishing here?” Van burst out. She felt a kind of wild panic trembling in her chest and she put her hands there as if to contain it. She wanted to point out that he’d acted almost resentful of the time she’d spent on the case. Over the Christmas holidays they’d flown to San Francisco to be with his family and she had stayed in their room, working, while he went to parties with his parents and older sister.
“I’m trying to help you, Van. You need to acknowledge that you failed. What are you even doing at that International Center?”
“It was a nearly impossible case. Everyone at the IC said that.”
“If those excuses make you feel better, fine. But they don’t help anyone else.”
“Go to hell.” Even as Van said it she hated herself for falling back on such words.
“You do not speak to me that way.” The more out of control Van felt, the more calm Miles seemed to be. He opened the door, and the car began making a ping-pinging noise. “I am going to dinner with Ed and Jamie. You are not.” He removed the keys from the ignition, halting the pinging. Before Van could think of another thing to say, he slammed the door and started walking across the street toward the restaurant where their friends—his friends, in truth, stopping by Ann Arbor for a nostalgic visit—were probably already sitting at the table with drinks, waiting to receive his composed, surely convincing story of how Van had gotten stuck in Detroit on some case.
Van, stuck in Miles’s car without a key, had a moment of fury rush through her. She
considered storming after him into the restaurant, letting Ed and Jamie know just how he’d left her there. She considered sitting there until he returned, though it was so cold she could already see her own breath. Finally, she considered leaving altogether. It was the only moment of their marriage that she had truly contemplated what it would be like to leave him. To clear the house of her belongings before he could get back from the restaurant. In the end, she did what Miles probably expected. She took a cab back to their house and went to bed.
He woke her up in the darkness, sliding next to her, offering an apology, and Van took it even though she could still repeat exactly what he’d said to her in the car. The words had an enduring effect. At the Center, Van began shying away from deportation and asylum cases, focusing instead on simpler petitions for spouse and child visas. It didn’t help that Miles had always criticized Van’s hour commute to work and the Center’s drafty, asbestos-laced building where, in the depth of winter, Van had to pile on sweaters.
And then Van discovered she was pregnant, something she thought she could trace back to the very night of Vijay’s deportation, the argument in the car, then the sex in the middle of the night after Miles had whispered, I’m sorry. The news gave her a fresh hope that they would recover, dispel the tension from the house. Miles had been the one, after all, who had wanted to start trying sooner than the three-year mark they had vaguely agreed on before they got married. After September 11, he had gone through a range of reactions—a loud-spoken desire to move to a real city; a wish to live closer to his parents and sister—before settling on the need to have a child. Why are we waiting? he suddenly asked. He went to the bathroom and opened the drawer where Van kept her birth control pills. What do you say? He handed her the packet, and she tossed it right into the trash. And the effect of the pregnancy worked. Miles started talking expansively about the future, about the books, gadgets, and education their child might require. He looked at fancy strollers online and kept a list of baby names, favoring Andrew or Justin for boys, Sophie or Amelia for girls.
When Van resigned from her job at the Center it was easier to agree with Miles about the commute, the asbestos, the immigrants and social workers chain-smoking around the perimeter of the building. It was safer to come back to Ann Arbor. And so, a little over two years after her first day at the International Center, she left with another job already in hand at Gertz & Zarou, a small practice in town that only handled corporate H-1Bs and permanent resident applications. It happened fast, even easily—one day she felt like an immigration lawyer, the next she was more of a paper-pusher.
It was in her second week at Gertz & Zarou that Van had her first ultrasound appointment and heard, instead of a heartbeat, the static of nothingness. The video monitor showed a wobbly empty sac, flickering around the edges. Blighted ovum, the doctor called it. Meaning nothing had ever really grown in there. They scheduled a D&C and Van went home, utterly unprepared for what she would say to Miles. Coming on the heels of Vijay’s deportation, it felt like another failure, or at the very least a punishment, a sign of her inability to hold any world together.
The whole thing hit her harder than it did Miles, which Van’s pregnancy books, in the small space devoted to miscarriages, had said was normal. Fathers-to-be just didn’t get attached, they said, the way mothers-to-be did. Miles said, “The bright side is you can get pregnant.” But it only deepened Van’s reticence. She tried never to cry in front of Miles—he thought crying a sign of weakness or manipulation—but for the few days that led up to the D&C procedure she allowed herself to tear up, if she was alone, while watching television. She couldn’t help looking on the loss as a sign of her lack of responsibility. Van had been unable to provide shelter to anyone. And every subsequent month she got her period the blood was her confirmation.
In the drawer of her nightstand Van still kept the baby name lists, along with her ovulation charts, her basal body thermometer, and books with titles like Seize Control of Your Fertility. February, right before Miles left, had marked a full year of their trying to conceive again after the miscarriage.
They had agreed to try for a year before going the way of fertility tests. Miles was adamant about this. He wanted it to happen the natural way, he said, and he was certain it would if only Van would relax. He grew annoyed by her charts and temperatures; he thought she was obsessive. He’d read that a woman could disrupt her ovulation with so much stress and planning, and he refused to have sex just because some thermometer said so. Each month Miles read the news of no news in Van’s face, and the more sex Van sought, the more he didn’t feel like it. The previous fall, Van had finally said she was going to see her doctor about a fertility drug called Clomid. Let’s just see a little longer, Miles had replied. Probably Van should have paid more attention.
Van had no one to talk to about this except the anonymous women she sometimes typed to on fertility and pregnancy message boards. She had grown apart from her college and law school friends, most of whom had moved to other states. When they talked or e-mailed they mainly discussed work, or kids, or people they knew. Besides, everyone else seemed to have no problem having children. Baby pictures popped up regularly in Van’s e-mail, and she was always expected to write back about how cute and adorable they were. She didn’t know how to break past all that bright chatter into real intimacy, the tell-everything best friendship she hadn’t known since middle school. And anyway, it seemed that half the women she’d known in law school were becoming stay-at-home moms; their discussions of playdates and schools were edging Van out of correspondence. The one exception might have been Jen, but Van had been too ashamed of leaving the Center to maintain much of a friendship. Jen had a flat, unvarnished way of delivering her opinions that made the prospect of facing her in person or talking about her job in Ann Arbor seem unbearable.
It would have been a perfect time to have a sister she could count on, but Van couldn’t imagine confiding in Linny, who could cook for entire families but surely wouldn’t know about wanting a child of her own. Van never told her about the pregnancy and D&C, and of course talking to their father was out of the question. As far as they knew, Van and Miles had never even tried.
The law offices of Gertz & Zarou, located near a shopping mall fifteen minutes from the Birch Crest Hills subdivision, occupied half a floor of a squat building called Executive Plaza. Gertz & Zarou had contracts with the university and engineering firms around southeast Michigan, and the five lawyers handled employer-based H-1B work visas and permanent residency and naturalization applications. The hours were predictable and slow, with trips every two weeks to the Immigration field office in Detroit, not far from the International Center that Van now avoided. She’s basically a glorified paralegal, she had imagined Miles describing her job. He used to say that she did good things for little profit, though once he had added to a group of friends, “Van’s a fighter. It’s that Napoleonic complex put to good use.”
That February night Miles left, Van had stayed late at her office. She had been working on getting Sunil Gupta, an H-1B at GM, a spousal visa for his new wife, and wanted to put the application in the mail first thing on Monday morning. An H-1B visa could only extend up to six years; after that, the visa holder had to leave the U.S. for at least a year in order to reapply, or he could stay in the States and ask his employer to sponsor his application for permanent residency. Because Sunil had been living and working in Michigan for nearly five years—like most of her clients, he was an engineer—he was eligible to begin applying for permanent residency. That’s when Van advised him to get married as soon as possible, for while he still held an H-1B visa, he could get his wife to the U.S. in a matter of months. If he became a permanent resident while still a bachelor he would have to wait three or four years, maybe more, for a permanent resident spousal application to go through.
It didn’t make much sense, Van admitted to her clients. But H-1Bs were considered temporary workers, while permanent residents were considered immigrants. It w
as a lot easier to get into the U.S. as a temporary worker, even if that person was hoping all along to become a permanent resident. For years the process of transforming an H-1B from temporary worker into permanent resident had been a standard procedure, overseen by lawyers like Van who kept careful track of each round of paperwork, each shift in forms and rules.
Each spring the U.S. set out a fixed number of H-1B visas, available to whomever applied first. In many years the number ran well over a hundred thousand, but it was clear to Van that under the Department of Homeland Security, the process was going to get tougher and the number of visas would soon shrink. She always felt relieved to see clients through to approval, and was not surprised when the ones she met looked dazed, flushed with the joy of having won a kind of lottery. Still, their stay in the U.S. remained tenuous, dependent on whatever company had hired and sponsored them. An H-1B could never leave his employer without losing his visa, and his wife (Van had almost never dealt with a female H-1B) couldn’t legally work.
Van hadn’t yet encountered a company unwilling to sponsor their H-1Bs’ applications for residency—the need for engineers was that strong. At that point, Van would place ads for each applicant’s job. The goal was to show that the need for the immigrant existed, that no U.S. citizen out there was able to do the job. The immigrant’s very presence in America had to be justified. So the advertisements went out for sixty days in the Detroit Free Press and journals like Mechanical Engineering. Typically this time would pass without a single response, allowing Van to prove that the would-be immigrant in question was a necessary one. After that, there was just the permanent residency application itself, with the fingerprinting and questions, the fees, and all the waiting time. Van never did feel that she’d completed a case until an immigrant’s actual “permanent resident alien” notice—the sought-after status of green card, those two words still used, revered, meaning legitimacy, safety—arrived in the mail.
Bich Minh Nguyen Page 7