Illegal

by Francisco X. Stork

  “When you were little?”

  “More little.”

  There. Finally. A full smile. The kid had a sense of humor. You had to dig for it, but it was there. Trevor reminded me of Javier—a boy in Juárez who made the most beautiful piñatas. Javier was a former drug addict who at twelve was wise beyond his years.

  “If you don’t like to read, then what do you like to do?” Trevor asked, wiping milk from his upper lip with the back of his hand.

  “I like to play fútbol. You call it soccer here in the United States. I like to hike. Back in Mexico, I belonged to a club called the Jiparis that went on long hikes in the desert. Sometimes we spent nights out there.” I also liked Perla Rubi and I liked making money, but there was no need to tell the boy everything.

  Trevor raised a thumb to his mouth and then quickly put it down. “I’m not very good at sports.”

  The way he said it reminded me of the loneliness I felt in that basement room after Bob left. I turned sideways and saw a room where there was a sofa, an armchair, and another flat-screen TV. Over the sofa, there was a picture of two blue lines and two orange lines on a background of pink. There was a hum that came from the refrigerator and the ticking of a clock somewhere, but otherwise the house was silent. It was hard to believe that the father I had grown up with lived in this house.

  “We play kickball and other sports in my school. I go to regular kinder in the morning and then to Kinder-Plus until two p.m. In Kinder-Plus we don’t have to play sports.”

  “What do you do? When you come home from Kinder-Plus and your mother takes a nap.”

  “I make myself a snack. Sometimes I play Legos. I’m building the First Order Star Destroyer. Do you know what that is?”

  “No.”

  “It’s one of the spaceships from Star Wars.”

  “I know Star Wars.”

  Trevor’s eyes lit up. “The First Order Star Destroyer has one thousand four hundred and six pieces. It’s the third time I’ve put it together.”

  Trevor carefully slid down the stool. He took his empty glass and plate to the sink and then he returned the milk and cookies to where he had found them. I drank the remaining milk in my glass with one long swallow. I was about to take it to the sink but stopped when I saw Trevor’s serious face.

  “I don’t actually need anyone to take care of me.”

  “Okay.”

  Trevor looked as if he were trying to hold back tears. “Mommy said you didn’t want to take care of me.”

  I stood, took my glass to the sink. I suddenly felt a strong dislike for Nancy Gropper. I turned to face Trevor. What was there to say? It was the truth. I did not want to babysit him. But he was just a kid with a tuft of hair sticking out. I spoke as gently as I could manage and said the first thing that came to my head. “I need to get a job. I need to make some money.”

  “I can take care of myself, but Daddy and Mommy say there has to be an older person in the house with me.” Trevor kept his eyes fixed on his feet. Then he looked up, remembering something. “I have money. I have four hundred and fifty dollars. Popsy gave me the money.”

  “Who’s Popsy?”

  “My grandfather. He didn’t give me the money all at once but little by little. I was supposed to buy toys with it, but I don’t play with toys … hardly.”

  I heard a toilet flush upstairs. I moved away from the island and looked out the window. On the sidewalk in front of the house, a mailman was talking to an old woman with a sausage-like dog on a leash. The dog had a green sweater with jingle bells. Where was I? I could have been on a different planet for how strange and alien it all seemed. I turned quickly to Trevor, who was standing behind me, watching me.

  I needed something normal. “Is there a park with trees around here?” I realized immediately how stupid the question sounded. Don’t all parks have trees?

  “Yes. Five and a half blocks from here.”

  “Can you take me there? You want to ask your mother?”

  “That’s not necessary.” Trevor walked to the laptop on the table and tapped the keys with one finger. “All set. I texted her.” He went to the hall closet and pulled out a bright blue windbreaker. I followed him out the front door.

  “Wait here. I forgot something.” I went back in and ran to the basement for the burner phone. I knew Yoya said it would be a few days before she called, but what if she found something about Mello and decided to call me?

  Trevor and I walked three blocks in silence before we came to a stoplight. What I thought about the most during those three blocks was that it was possible that I had brought danger to Bob and Nancy and Trevor, and I was sorry about that, but it could not be avoided.

  When the light turned green and we began to cross, Trevor instinctively raised his hand for me to hold.

  I looked at the small, fragile hand for a long moment before taking it.

  That first night when we sat down to a supper of Chinese food, I searched Bob’s face for some kind of love toward Nancy.

  “Is your migraine any better?” Bob asked when we sat down.

  “No.” Nancy shoveled white rice onto Trevor’s plate with a single chopstick.

  “Maybe you should go see Dr. Arnold and get an injection.”

  I stared at the chopsticks. Bob saw my look, dug in the bag, and handed me a plastic fork.

  “It’s only the second day,” Nancy said. “I like to wait three full days before the injection.” Turning to me: “I get migraines when I’m stressed. I’m supposed to inject the Sumatriptan at the onset of the headache, but I only use it as a last resort. The injection can be auto-administered, but I prefer to do it in the doctor’s office.”

  “In case there’s a reaction,” Bob added.

  “And because I’m afraid to inject the medicine into a vein or a muscle. I have a CPA, not an RN or an MD.”

  It occurred to me that I was the “stress” that brought the migraine. Her eyes bored into me when she said the word.

  We were sitting around the kitchen island. Trevor, next to me, was watching a YouTube video of someone building a Lego city. Nancy reached across and grabbed the iPad. She turned it off and put it next to her. “You know the rules,” she said when Trevor pouted.

  “Abe was sure happy to see me,” Bob said. He offered me a container. “Colonel Chow’s chicken. It’s good.”

  “General Chow,” Nancy corrected him.

  “I always get the ranks mixed up.” Bob laughed, but only Trevor found his mistake funny. I thought about the time Sara and I took Mami to the Palacio Peking for her birthday. My mother laughed when she read the fortune in her cookie. La felicidad te espera. Happiness awaits you.

  Nancy raised her hand to her forehead and breathed deeply.

  “Honey, why don’t you go lie down in bed? I can bring you a plate later.”

  Nancy shook her head. She looked at me. “I’m sorry, I didn’t get a chance to chat with you this afternoon. Trevor said you went to the park?”

  The way she asked. Did I do something wrong? “Yes. I needed air.”

  Nancy looked at me. I knew it sounded like a complaint, but it wasn’t.

  “You should ask Emiliano to teach you how to play soccer,” Bob said to Trevor as he speared a piece of chicken with a chopstick. I remembered how when I was Trevor’s age, my father would set Coke bottles in the street and he would show me how to dribble around them.

  “You mean fútbol.” Trevor pronounced it foote-bole.

  There followed a period of silence when I knew that Nancy and Bob were thinking about my refusal to take care of Trevor in the afternoons. I sipped water from the glass in front of me and cleared my throat. “I can stay with Trevor. Until I find a full-time job.” It was the first time the idea of finding a full-time job had occurred to me. But what else could I say? Until Yoya and I start looking for the men who want the cell phone?

  “Really? That would be great if you could do that!” Bob gave me a two-thumbs-up and a wink. “Trevor, looks like you got you
rself a fútbol coach.”

  “I don’t really like fútbol.” Trevor was trying to pick up a single grain of rice with his chopsticks.

  Nancy Gropper looked at me with misgiving. Like she was trying to see the real motive behind my sudden kindness. Or was she trying to determine whether Trevor was safe with me? Bob reached across the table and gently touched the back of Nancy’s head. Was that an expression of love on my father’s part? I remembered how he touched my mother’s head the same caring way.

  Nancy smiled at Bob, squeezed his hand, and stood up slowly. “I’m sorry. I’m feeling sick. I’m going upstairs to lie down in the dark.”

  Bob stood as well. He reached out for Nancy’s arm, but she shook his hand gently away. “You stay with the boys. Save the leftovers. We can have them for lunch tomorrow.”

  “Do you really think you’ll be able to go to work tomorrow?”

  “Oh, yes. One way or another. Popsy is even more nervous than usual about all the work that accumulated while you were gone.” Then to me: “There are some instructions about Trevor’s allergies and some emergency numbers that you should know about if you’re going to watch Trevor in the afternoon. I will write the allergy precautions and emergency numbers and leave them at the table. The main thing is: No peanuts! Nothing with peanuts! We don’t have anything in the house with peanuts or peanut derivatives, so you don’t have to worry about allergy reactions in here. But out there is a very different story. I would prefer it if you didn’t take him out of the house until we got you a phone.”

  “I’ll get you a phone tomorrow,” Bob said.

  “Emiliano already has a phone,” Trevor said. “He had it when he took me to the park. So there’s no need to worry, Mommy.”

  “I bought a cheap phone on the way here to call Sara and Mami,” I said quickly.

  “You could always use mine,” Bob said. He sounded suspicious or hurt, I couldn’t tell which.

  Nancy continued, businesslike: “I pick Trevor up at school at two p.m. and we’re home by two thirty. I’ll drop him off and then go back to work. Please be here between two and two thirty since you have agreed to watch him.”

  The way she said since you have agreed to watch him. The woman did not like me, did not want me in her house. She was trying, I gave her that. She tried all during dinner to be nice, but in the end, she couldn’t hide her dislike.

  Nancy turned to Trevor. “Don’t forget that tonight is a bath night.” Then she walked away.

  We ate in silence. As soon as we heard a door shut upstairs, Bob put his chopsticks down and pulled out another plastic fork from the bag. “Eating’s easier when you don’t have to work at it,” he said to me.

  “I can show you how to do it, Daddy,” Trevor said. “It’s easy.”

  “That’s okay. Eat your broccoli. It’s good for you.”

  “If I take a vitamin, it will have the same effect.”

  Bob shook his head. “Kids these days. They know too much.”

  I looked at my plate. I stuck my fork in a piece of chicken, colonel or general, who gives a crap? I could tell that Bob was embarrassed by his wife’s … rudeness. Maybe it wasn’t rudeness exactly. Then what? Some deficiency in basic human warmth. An inability to courteously hide the stress caused by my presence? How long was I going to be in that house? Whatever amount of time was too long. I wasn’t going to make it. There was a pressure in the middle of my chest, a bubble of longing and sadness and anger about to pop.

  “The migraines are hard on Nancy. She’s not herself,” Bob explained. “Thank you for staying with Trevor. That’s a big help.”

  The big help was that Nancy would be less annoyed with my presence.

  “Sure,” I said, with zero enthusiasm.

  “Would you like to call your mother?” Bob asked, perhaps sensing what I was feeling.

  I thought for a moment, then, “Not today.” If she heard my voice, she’d know immediately how miserable I felt. When I talked to her, I wanted to sound strong and content. Strong and content enough for her not to worry, for her to believe that her sacrifice was worthwhile. “Tomorrow.”

  “It gets better. Believe it or not.”

  I nodded the way someone nods when a comment is not worth a response.

  “Daddy, is Emiliano my brother?”

  There was a pleading look in Bob’s eyes. As if he wanted my permission to answer yes. I looked out the window.

  “Yes,” Bob finally said.

  “Then why does he have a different last name?”

  “He’s your half brother.”

  I could see that there was still a question on the boy’s lips. He was about to ask it, but Bob cut him off. “Not now, Trevor. Eat your broccoli. Please!”

  That’s when I first felt something very much like pity for Bob Gropper.

  We were all silent for a few moments and then I said, “You used to eat some of the broccoli on my plate when Mamá wasn’t looking. Remember?”

  “But now I have been given another chance to fix my mistakes,” Bob said with a grin.

  And for a moment there, Bob Gropper was my father again.

  All night long I went over the ways Mello could find out where Emiliano had gone. The only people who knew that Emiliano had gone to Chicago with Father were Wes and Sandy Morgan and Gustaf Larsson. They were not going to tell Mello about Emiliano. Then, around dawn, it came to me in a wave of panic that Father had visited me and that all visitors had to sign a visitors’ log and state their relationship to the detainee and their home address. It was probably illegal to ask for people’s home address, but then again, detaining a person who is seeking asylum must also be a violation of some international law. If Mello found my father’s entry in that visitors’ log, they would be able to find Emiliano that way. It was hard to imagine that Mello would go to all that trouble to apprehend one single undocumented Mexican, but it was impossible to ignore the implication behind his questions … or his smirk.

  Visitors entering the building had to turn in all their personal property to a guard as they came in. Their cell phones, wallets, purses, keys, everything was put into a paper bag with their name on it. Then they passed through a metal detector. Past the metal detector was a table with the visitors’ log. I had seen those visitors’ logs when I made my garbage rounds through the administration offices of the center. They were kept in three-ring binders in a small office next to the entrance. Each binder had that week’s list of visitors. Father visited me on a Monday the week before, so all I had to do was find the sheet for that day and rip it out.

  That was easier said than done. There was always a guard in the office. In fact, I was not allowed to enter an administration office unless there was a guard or another staff member present. My instructions for conducting the garbage rounds had been very clear: I should knock on an administration door, say “garbage,” and wait for someone to give me the okay to enter. If no one was there, I skipped that office. It was going to be impossible to open a binder, find the right page, and rip it out with a guard present. But what I thought I could do was “accidentally” dump last week’s binder in the “whale,” which is what I called the big, gray plastic container that I wheeled around. I decided that the best time to carry out my plan was during my early morning round when the guard on duty was a friendly young man named Mario.

  At 7:00 a.m., Lucila, Colel, and me sat at a stainless-steel table in the cafeteria, eating our usual bowls of oatmeal. It was a special morning because the oatmeal came with raisins and tiny pieces of dried apple—a rare treat. Colel picked up one of the pieces of apple, studied it, and then shrugged before tossing it in her mouth. Colel never failed to make Lucila and me laugh. How someone carrying so much grief inside could be so light in spirit was beyond me.

  “You’re not hungry?” Lucila asked, looking at my untouched bowl.

  “No, I don’t feel well this morning.” It was not a lie. My stomach was in knots. If I got caught stealing the logbook, Mello would figure out what I was try
ing to do—I would point him right to Emiliano’s location and would make things so much worse for Emiliano.

  Lucila leaned closer to me and said with sadness in her voice, “There are rumors that decisions for the women who have been here the longest will come this week. The women say that maybe day after tomorrow and then the buses to take us to the airport will come the day after,” Lucila said, stirring the oatmeal with a plastic spoon. Colel was having trouble opening the tiny milk carton. I took it from her and pried it open.

  “But how do the women know about these things? It is just talk. People talk to pass the time. And what makes you think it won’t be good news?”

  Lucila smiled at me. “You’ll see,” she said quietly. “Maybe this is my last week here.”

  “What does your lawyer say? Even if the decision is a no, you can appeal.” Lucila was represented by a young pro bono lawyer.

  She shook her head sadly. “I put in your bag the phone and address of Iliana. When you get out, will you …”

  “Lucila, you must not think that way.”

  “She sounds happy. But if I knew that you would check to see how she is.”

  “I’m not going to listen to this. Snap out of it.”

  “Okay, I snap out.” Lucila sat up and made a determined face. The look of a warrior.

  “There, that’s better.”

  I stopped by my bunk after breakfast and, sure enough, in the plastic bag where I kept my underwear and toiletries, there was the piece of paper with the phone and address of Iliana’s foster home. I made a face similar to the one Lucila had made and then I went out to get the whale.

  It felt good to be doing something that would help protect Emiliano, and underneath my fear I could also feel excitement. I got the whale from the back of the cafeteria and proceeded to empty into it the garbage from the kitchen and from the cafeteria. The whale was almost full, but I decided to go to the administration offices instead of taking the whale to the dumpster like I usually did. I figured that it would be easier to hide the logbook inside the whale if it was full of kitchen and cafeteria garbage. It was 8:00 a.m. and some of the center’s staff were just arriving for their shift. I hesitated a moment before crossing in front of Mello’s office. His door was open, and I could hear his voice coming from inside. Everything had to look normal. I had to look bored. I took a moment to collect myself and then I rolled the whale past his door. I knocked on his door and saw Mello on his telephone. His head was down, so I waited until he raised his eyes and saw me. He looked surprised or embarrassed, I couldn’t tell which. I pointed at the plastic container by his desk and he immediately shook no with his finger. I nodded and moved past his door. I don’t think he heard the big sigh that came out of me when I was down the hall.