“She was refused her stay,” Lidia, our lawyer, states, leaning forward on her desk. It’s the morning after the ICE raid, and I’m in Lidia’s office. “Your mom’s last visit—two months ago—they told her to start preparing to leave.” She sighs. “It was a courtesy, actually. Even giving her this much time. The officers know her by now. They like her.”
“You’ve got to stop it! Call them up! Tell them it’s a mistake!” I pace the small room and keep bumping into the coffee table stacked high with folders.
“Calm down, Rania. Please.”
“But I’m supposed to graduate in three weeks! Why now?”
“Rania! You’re making me dizzy.”
I drop down in a chair, my backpack mounded on my lap. I’d barely slept. Once the sun pushed through our blinds, I jumped out of bed, my mouth tasting as if it were filled with ash. Numb, I managed to drag Kamal to school, then text Fatima, who skipped our first class to meet at our favorite diner, so I could tell her that they’d taken Ammi away. We sat in the booth sipping coffee, raw, bewildered.
Now I ask Lidia, “They told her this when she did her last check-in?”
“Yes. You’ve had a removal order hanging over you for years. That’s what we’ve been fighting.”
So that’s why Ammi was late and strange that day. Ammi had always told me that even though we were denied asylum the first time, and again during our merits hearing, our appeal was going well. The board would surely understand. Look at who she was! The widow of a brave journalist. An impeccable background. A university degree. English-speaking. Posh English, even! “We’re the kind of immigrant they want.” Snap-shut, she’d sing, after a meeting with Lidia. “Just a few technicalities.”
When I explain this to Lidia, she looks at me sadly. “She told you that?”
I nod.
“And you believed her?”
That ash taste in my mouth again. “Why wouldn’t I believe my mother?”
Lidia takes a long draw from her mug with a silver bombilla, a straw, and sets it down. I’ve always liked Lidia, with her head of black curly hair, same as Ammi and me. She speaks in a quick, mash-up accent—Spanish and Southern—since she’s from Argentina, but she moved to Tennessee with her family as a teenager. “You should have seen me next to all the debutantes!” she laughs. “I didn’t fit in one bit.” The drink is mate, she’d once told me, which fuels her through hectic days.
I ask, “She was lying to me?”
“Not exactly lying. Just minimizing.”
There’s a heat growing around my cheeks, tightening my scalp. “What do you mean?”
“There have always been problems with her case. Getting testimony from others that she truly had to flee—”
“That’s bs! I remember! We packed really fast!”
Lidia moves closer, soothing. “Darling, I know. But your mother. She has her own ideas…”
No kidding. Ammi always has to do things her way. When I was younger, she’d show up to parent-teacher conferences, all decked out with blue eye shadow and dangling silver earrings, and insist that I be given harder books to read, extra math homework. She’d make sure the teacher knew that she’d almost finished her MPhil. After, she’d complain that the teacher seemed no more educated than a cashier, and she could do a better job teaching that class. I’d shrink inside. Why did a conference about me have to be about her? Her lousy jobs, driving an Uber, has not smoothed down her pride, not one bit.
“But why now?”
“A few weeks ago we found out her stay had been denied. I don’t think she was expecting that.”
The appeal: It’s hung over us for a few years, ever since she was denied asylum in the first go-round. Those fat folders my mother keeps locked in a closet and pulls out now and then, spreading them out on the dining table. Every time I’d ask her about it, she’d give me a sad smile and say, “I worry about the past. And you the future. That’s your job.”
Lidia continues, “Now this raid. They weren’t even looking for her. But she was just coming home—”
“They weren’t?” I feel faint. Collateral. That’s what they said over the walkie-talkie. Ammi was an extra prize. “Can’t you just tell them that she wasn’t supposed to be taken?”
Lidia nods, tired. “We have to go before a judge. Explain that she’s on appeal.”
“How long will that take?” I ask. “And what about me? And Kamal?”
“You’re part of your mother’s asylum case. We do have a separate juvenile-immigrant-status file for you too.”
“So let’s use that!”
“Rania, slow down. We’re waiting on that as well. Let’s start where we are. The situation with DACA for undocumented children like you is even worse. I’m sure you’ve heard the news—”
She’s interrupted by a knock on the door and Lidia’s assistant, Sylvie, pops her head in. Behind her, phones ring, people talk. It was more crowded than usual when I picked my way through Lidia’s office. “I have Mr. Chan on the line,” Sylvie says. “He says they didn’t accept the job verification he uploaded and the deadline is today—”
Lidia sighs and turns back to me. “I’m so sorry. I’m going to have to take this. I’m helping out one of our partners who usually takes these cases.”
“Wait, my mother!” I cry. Only my mother matters. Her case. Ours. Me.
“Just tell him I’ll call back in five,” Lidia says to her assistant.
“But the deadline—” Sylvie says.
Lidia waves her hand. Once the door shuts, it’s as if the room were suddenly cast in cold shadow. “They never used to bother with cases like your mother’s. She checked in, year in, year out. It was routine. But the situation is volatile now. Every day it’s another rule, another policy change.” She shakes her head. “Zero tolerance, they call it. The raids are out of control. I think they’re trying to fill some kind of quota. To show they’re tough on immigration. Or that call I just got. A simple H1B renewal. Now they make my clients jump through hoops to prove they aren’t taking a job from an American.”
I don’t care about policies or words like zero tolerance. I just want to see my mother—my stubborn, proud, impossible mother. I want to fight with her, put my arms around her, feel her scraggly curls against my throat. I want her to bustle into our bedroom and fling open the curtains, chide Kamal while gently slapping his bare soles. I want it all—the mess of combs and lotions and soaps she leaves in the bathroom, her unmade bed in the living room, her bossy instructions before she heads off for an Uber shift, or all her other jobs—cat sitting, plant watering, dropping off the dry cleaning for the old lady on the first floor. I want my summer, my life back. I’m supposed to give that up? And why does Lidia call it her application? It’s my life. My future. How much am I supposed to give up?
“Can I see her?” My voice cracks.
“That’s what I’m working on. They have her in a facility in Pennsylvania.”
“Pennsylvania!” I can barely breathe.
“I can’t say whether that’s better or worse. My clients who go to Elizabeth, New Jersey, right next to Newark Airport, are put on a plane home.”
Home? Ammi often says, I would sooner die than step back into that country that took your father. That family that has forsaken me. Her eyes are so angry, I know not to ask more. But I wonder: Pakistan was my abu, the three of us happy, laughing over supper at night. Or skipping to school in my light blue shalwar kameez and racing the chowkidar’s son across the courtyard. It wasn’t all terrible; it was the first part of my life. But Ammi doesn’t want to hear that.
“Look, I have a call in. I’ve pulled out all the stops. If it works out, is Saturday good?”
I give her a shaky head bob. “Yes.”
She gets up, puts her arms around me, and hugs me firmly. Her hair gives off a floral scent. The door swings open again, noise buzzing around us, but she grips me harder, whispering, “I’m so sorry, Rania. So sorry.”
In the elevator, standing in front of me, is a girl my age dressed up. Her collar is tacked in the back with a safety pin, ready to come loose. That pin makes me want to cry. Everything feels so patched together. Maybe she’s one of Lidia’s clients, on her way to court. I want to ask her: Are you scared too?
Outside, I wobble a few steps on the street and stop. There’s a garbage bin in front of me. I swing my leg at it and kick and kick, pain jolting through my boot toe. The ash taste in my mouth surges up. I stagger over to the side and throw up onto a grate. I can feel people bumping past me, but I don’t care. I let it all out, head bent, elbows on my knees, until I’m scraped raw.
“Hey! You okay?”
A thin, blond woman hovers near. She looks worried, but also a little grossed out.
“Yeah,” I say weakly. “Greasy breakfast.”
“I’ve had bad days too.” She pulls out a water bottle from her bag. “Why don’t you take it?”
I cradle the cold bottle against my chest, watch her walk off, hiking her bag up on her shoulder. I want to call after her and say, “Please, take me with you. My mom’s gone. In a detention center. Pennsylvania.”
But the words would make no sense. Nothing makes sense.
That afternoon Kamal and I are dragging up the stairs, since the elevator is broken, when we’re met by the glaring eyes of our next-door neighbor Mrs. Flannery.
“There you are!” She’s elderly and rarely goes out, except to push her grocery cart down to Key Food. Sometimes she sits on a folding chair in the front, scowling at the street, complaining at the kids on bikes or the delivery guys who park their scooters. She wears large glasses that give her eyes a cloudy, swollen look. In the beginning, Ammi befriended her, bringing over food or offering to fetch something at the store. I think Ammi had an angle—maybe Mrs. Flannery could get us into a better school, even give her a teaching job. But at some point she soured on us. She would slam her door, or if she heard us in the hall, she’d crack it open and peer with her angry eyes. At least half a dozen times she complained that she heard Kamal’s video games through her wall.
“So, that was quite a lot of nonsense the other night!” she declares. She is standing with her cart, which is filled with V8 cans. “What did your mother do?”
I wince. “She didn’t do anything. It was a mistake.”
“Mistake,” she sniffs.
“It was,” I say evenly and look her in the eye.
“There were some people looking for you too.”
I stiffen. “People?”
“They didn’t say who they were. But I know.”
We’ll send someone, the ICE officer said.
I look down at her cart. “Would you like some help, taking that in?”
Mrs. Flannery reels backward, offended. “I am an independent woman!” She swivels around, dragging the cart down the hall. I can hear her fumble for her keys, scrabbling with her bag’s zippers, but I don’t say anything. Ammi always tells me: Stay polite—she’s just an old woman, bitter because her own daughter never visits her.
Back in the apartment the first thing I see is a flat plastic package sitting on the table. My graduation cap and gown that I picked up the other day at school. I hurl it into our bedroom closet, not caring that it’s crumpled next to my shoes. Folded on my dresser are my new, swingy pants from Ammi for Eid. Pieces start falling into place: how Ammi didn’t want to go to a party, like we usually do—distant friends we rarely see. Instead she made koftas and rice and put out a platter of sweets and dates. Then she sat us down in the living room to give us our presents. “It’s better just us!” she exclaimed. But her eyes were shadowed, her hands so pale. This Ramzan she’d done the night shift again and again, saying she was too tired from fasting during the day to celebrate. Now I see all she was holding inside while holding tight to us.
I make supper for Kamal and watch over his homework. The whole time I can hear my mother’s voice ringing inside me, like rusty bells: You never knew what it was to grow up so fast.
What about me? I want to say back. This isn’t exactly slow going.
But it was always her story, not mine, that loomed over us. How she’d met Abu at university—she was the same age I am—a spunky girl, daughter of a military man. They’d drink cups of chai at the student canteen and argue all the time. Abu came from the wrong kind of family—poor, Shia, not even from Lahore. She knew her family would never approve. But he was brilliant. He had a tongue like a sword, slaying the dragons of corruption and intolerance. From the time he was a little boy, he knew he was going to be a journalist.
He just didn’t know he would disappear as one.
Or that he’d disappear from me too.
Maria Auntie comes over as I finish washing up. She puts her arms around me. “Don’t worry. Lidia will take care of everything and get your mother out.”
“But you…you can be our guardian, right?”
Her eyes seem glassy, focused on the wall behind me. I remember the fights I sometimes heard behind their door: about some brush with the cops Lucia had a few months ago. The money Lucia’s boyfriend borrowed. And Lucia flinging back that her mom was always busy with everyone else’s business.
Maria Auntie taps the foil and points to a bag of groceries that she’s brought. “Lucia will bring some soup tomorrow.” She peers at me. “Kamal okay?”
I blink back tears. She didn’t answer my question. “He’s scared, but he doesn’t know what’s going on.”
“Better that way.”
Is it? I want to say. All these years I didn’t know the truth about my mother’s asylum application. Now Maria Auntie adds, “I’ll speak to your lawyer. Everything will work out.”
After she leaves, I check my phone and see Fatima texted.
Ra Ra u there? U OK?
Fine.
What did Lidia say?
Complicated.
Talk?
Not now.
What r u gonna do???
Dunno. I send her a chain of sad emojis and then just turn off the phone. What hurts more: that they want us to leave? Or that my mother lied to me?
All this time.
I fall asleep on the sofa, then wake to a loud noise, my heart banging in my ribs. Just a door slamming down the hall. The TV is on mute, the picture a streaky blur. We used to watch the news all the time after the election. We were terrified: First the Muslim ban, when suddenly anyone from a Muslim country couldn’t travel here. Ammi and I would stay up, munching on bowls of chaat, unable to pry ourselves away from the terrible images: the crowds at the airport, the bobbing signs. Me and Fatima snuck out to go to protests, our voices hoarse from shouting. The family down the hall, from Yemen, would troop into the elevator, gray-faced; they told us they weren’t able to go back for the funeral of the wife’s mother. Months later, the news shifted to the border: tired families lined up; babies hiked to hips; caps pulled low; worn sneakers. I could not stop looking at a little boy, curled inside a cage on a concrete floor, under a blanket that looked like it was made of aluminum foil. He was clutching a dirty stuffed rabbit and had cried himself to sleep.
“Thank goodness we’re protected,” Ammi would whisper. “We followed the rules. We’re just awaiting our appeal. Inshallah. It will happen.”
But then came the raids. For so many months, we’d see them, late at night, squads of people coming into our buildings. One night I looked out the window and saw a van full of men who had just returned home from work, their pants stiff with paint, hoodies drawn up over their necks; delivery men, fluorescent vests and pants glowing in the dark. Their wrists were pinned behind their backs. We didn’t dare go down. “Good hunting?” I heard one of the ICE guys ask with a laugh. “Yeah, a good haul,” answered another.
We knew they were coming. These men and women, their vests say POLICE, but they are not police. They keep coming, like black locusts, swarming up our stairwells, through the cracks and seams of our doors, driving us out.