THEY WILL SEND YOU BACK

I had not called my mother. I am used to my father leaving at all hours to go fishing. It never mattered when I came home, though I always came. Until Luke.

I slip in the door past the stack of gear by the house. It’s midnight. I almost trip over Pilot, who is right by the door, as if she is on guard. As if she needed to warn me. She whines, and I hear her tail beat on the floor. I kneel to stroke her. She paces from me to my father’s bedroom door. The house seems like someone else’s house. It smells like someone else’s house. Their stuff smells different from my father’s and mine.

I stay on the floor with my dog, not wanting to go farther. I belong more with Luke than here in what should be my own house. I am so tired, though, and want to climb the stairs to my bed.

I think my mother is asleep in the bedroom, but she calls out. “Would you help me turn over?” she says. “Where have you been?” I force myself to enter the room. I lean beside the bed, and she wraps her fingers around my arms above the elbows. She pulls until she is on her side. “I can’t sleep on my back or my belly. He’s been kicking all night.”

“Shhh, Mom, now you’re on your side. Go to sleep.”

Her long black hair falls over her face. “Where have you been?” she says.

I tell her, “Get a little more sleep.”

My mother calls from the bedroom, maybe from out of a dream, “If you are in trouble with the law, they will send you back.” I remember the women talking at the Cambodian’s house. A mother had given up on her drug-using son.

They will send you back. The phrase replays. They will send you back.

- - -

In the morning I wake from a dream I don’t remember. But I wake up left alone, my heart panicked. I wake missing people. I miss myself, the girl I was. I miss my house with my father. I sit in the kitchen with Pilot. I sit cross-legged on the floor like a child, watching her gobble her kibble.

“Good girl,” I say. “I have to leave you again to go to school.”

Pilot wags her tail to hear me talk to her. The story comes back to me while she gobbles. How could you forbid someone to eat? When you’re hungry, that’s all your mind can hold. Hunger. Hunger. That’s all there is. I must have food. What do you do with that fear, not of starving, but that a soldier could control you so completely to be able to say, For this one! Nothing. And there is no one not afraid.