‘Want to try?’ he asks.
Luca nods and stands up. He looks at Mami to make sure it’s okay first, and then, with her encouragement, takes a step toward Ricardín to study how he plays the thing, how he uses it to draw music out of thin air. Even seated on the couch, Ricardín is taller than Luca, so Luca has to look up into his face. When he holds the armónica up to his mouth, his hand is so large, the instrument disappears behind it, like he’s concealing it beneath a baseball mitt. His fingers move up and down, up and down, showing glimpses of the flat metal beneath. Luca watches carefully, and then Ricardín hands the armónica to him.
‘Go ahead,’ he says. ‘Give it a try.’
Luca takes it and holds it up to his mouth. He blows. And he’s surprised that, right away, he can make such a lovely sound.
‘Hey!’ Ricardín grins at him. Luca smiles and tries to hand it back, but Ricardín pushes it toward him again. ‘Keep going. Again!’
He claps his giant hands while Luca runs the metal instrument up and down his lips, trying the different sounds it makes. It’s easy.
‘Chido, güey,’ Beto says. ‘Can I try?’
Luca hands him the armónica. While the boys pass the instrument around, Choncho asks Marisol about her family in California. She tells them she was arrested at a routine immigration check-in almost three months ago.
‘Wait, you actually go to those things?’ Nicolás, the PhD student, asks.
‘Of course!’ Marisol says. ‘I play by the rules!’
‘What is it?’ This is Lydia.
‘A routine immigration check-in?’ Marisol asks.
‘Yes.’
‘It’s an appointment, usually once a year, where I have to go and check in with an ICE officer,’ Marisol explains. ‘So they can review my case.’
‘But what for? So you can get your papers?’
‘No, just so they can keep tabs on me,’ Marisol says.
Lydia is confused. ‘And ICE is . . . ?’
‘Immigration and Customs Enforcement.’ Nicolás fills in the acronym. ‘I never went to a single one of my check-ins.’
‘I guess it doesn’t matter now,’ Marisol says. ‘We both ended up in the same boat. To think of all that wasted bus fare.’
‘But I don’t understand,’ Lydia says. ‘They always knew you were there?’
‘Sure, for years,’ Marisol says. ‘After my husband died, and I didn’t leave before the deadline they gave me, I received a notice to come for a check-in. I went every year. Never missed one.’
‘And they didn’t deport you? Even though you were undocumented?’
‘Not until now.’
‘But why not?’
Marisol shrugs. ‘I never committed any offenses. I have a daughter who’s a citizen.’
‘They have discretion,’ Nicolás says. ‘They’re supposed to be able to use their discretion, so they can divert their resources to deporting bad guys. Gang members, criminals.’
‘But now suddenly they’re deporting people just for showing up at their check-ins,’ Marisol says.
‘And that’s what happened to you?’ Lydia asks.
Marisol nods. She’d been dressed in her dark red scrubs, planning to head straight to her job as a dialysis technician after her appointment. It was a Tuesday morning, and both her daughters were at school. They’d been worried about the upcoming check-in for months, of course. Everyone worried now. The appointments used to be just procedural, an easy way for the government to exert some control over an overburdened system, and an opportunity for the migrant to improve her legal status by demonstrating her cooperation. But now everyone was alarmed by the spike in arrests, and some people stopped going to the check-ins altogether. Not Marisol. She hadn’t been willing to demote her daughters to a life in the shadows. San Diego was the only home they’d ever known, so she never really believed they’d deport someone like her, a middle-class woman with perfect English who came here legally, a homeowner, a medical professional. Three months later, she’s still in a state of disbelief. Ricardín provides a bluesy riff on the armónica to conclude her story, which makes it funny instead of heartbreaking. They all laugh.
‘So you were in detention for two months?’ Nicolás asks.
Marisol nods.
‘What was that like?’
She pauses to consider the question, and as she remembers, she winces. ‘I mean . . .’ She gropes for a word to encompass her memories of that place, but she can’t find one substantial enough. ‘Horrible?’ she says. ‘Like you’d expect, I guess. I slept on a mat in a cold cell. It was freezing all the time, como una hielera. No blankets, no pillows, only those tinfoil things. I woke up stiff and sore every morning, with a kink in my neck. They wouldn’t replace my contact lens solution, so when that ran out, at least I didn’t have to look at the walls closing in.’
Nicolás cringes while she talks. ‘I couldn’t hack it. I’m claustrophobic.’
‘Yeah, it was utterly dehumanizing.’ Marisol sighs. ‘But my lawyer thought I had a good chance, so I told myself to be strong, that it would all be worth it.’
‘Good for you, sticking it out,’ Nicolás says. ‘I left after two days. They were going to transfer me to El Paso, so I did voluntary departure. I knew I’d rather walk through the desert than spend another day in that place.’
‘But it was such a waste of time!’ Marisol says. ‘Two months I sat in that cell without my daughters.’ She presses her eyes closed and then opens them again. ‘So many mothers in there without their daughters, without their children.’ Her eyes fall to the floor and her voice drops to a whisper, but they can all hear it in the hushed room. ‘Most of those women were separated from their children at the border,’ she says. ‘When they were caught coming in. Some had babies taken right out of their arms. I thought those women would lose their minds. They didn’t even know where their children were – some of them were too young to talk, too young to remember their names.’
Lydia leans forward over Luca, who’s sitting between her legs. She pinches his T-shirt between her finger and thumb. It’s too much. They all glance at her without meaning to. They don’t want her to think the same thoughts they’re thinking, so they quickly look away. Marisol tries to change the subject. Back to Nicolás. ‘Weren’t you eligible for a student visa? As a PhD candidate?’
‘I took a sabbatical for one semester.’ He shrugs. ‘Didn’t realize I had to file extra paperwork for that.’