Words Unsaid

by KG MacGregor

  “I’m hungry,” Ruben said.

  “Yeah, me too,” Andy replied. They both had picked at their food earlier, which was crappier than usual and that was saying a lot. Before takeoff they’d been given exactly the same meal for dinner as they’d had for lunch—a cheese sandwich with a limp lettuce leaf and a slice of tomato thin enough to see through. A little mayo would have been nice, but apparently there was a rule that all sandwiches had to be dry and tasteless. Today’s fruit was a disgusting clump of dried apples and apricots wrapped in cellophane, and there was a crumbly white cookie that smelled of coconut, which he hated. “If I’d known I was going to be this hungry, I’d have eaten everything in the bag…and probably the bag too.”

  “Those apples were gross.”

  Upon being seated next to Ruben on the plane, Andy discovered to his surprise that the boy spoke perfect English. A second grader, he lived near Hollenbeck Park with his dad and his dad’s new girlfriend Liza, an “American” who didn’t like him very much. His Aunt Carla was in LA too, and married to a US citizen. Liza didn’t like her either so he didn’t get to see Carla very much. It scared him to realize that with his father locked up there probably wasn’t anyone looking for him right now.

  “Where do you think they’re taking us?”

  Andy looked up as a guard exited the lavatory and hitched his pants before walking back up to the front of the plane. “Not sure exactly but I heard one of them say something about Louisiana.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “It’s between Texas and Florida. And a heck of a long way from California.” He didn’t want to swear in front of a kid only seven years old.

  “Why do they gots to take us so far? They should have let us stay at the place they took us to first.”

  “Because nothing they do makes any sense.”

  “It’s not fair. I don’t know anybody in Luciana.” The poor kid looked seconds away from bursting into tears, which Andy wanted to head off because one of the asshole guards was walking up and down the aisle making fun of the kids who cried, calling them babies and telling them to suck their thumb.

  “Have you ever been on a plane before?”

  Ruben shook his head. “I don’t like it. It’s scary.”

  “Nah, it’s really safe.” He repeated some of the things his mom had told him when he’d gotten nervous flying over the ocean to Germany, how people were far more likely to die in cars and on bicycles. “My mom and me, we fly lots of places, like to Germany. I was supposed to fly to Mexico all by myself last weekend, but this happened.”

  “We never get to go to Mexico. That’s where my abuela lives, but my dad’s afraid to visit because they might not let us come back.”

  “Does she ever come visit you at your house?”

  “She maybe came once when I was little. I don’t remember.”

  Andy had learned in the courtroom that visitors to the US needed a visa, which was how the government knew Ruben had relatives in Mexico. Whereas Andres Casillas—the real one—had no record of visiting his mother in Guatemala, or of her visiting anyone who lived there. Whatever status his mother had, it was lost. She’d be deported as soon as she got out of prison.

  “I want to go back home!” Ruben said, his voice quivering as if the dam were about to burst. “I hate planes. I hate the stupid food. I hate everything.”

  From the row ahead, Santos rose up and leaned menacingly over his seat. “Nobody gives a shit what you hate, you big baby. Shut the fuck up.” His message delivered, he turned and slid back down.

  Ruben wasn’t the least bit intimidated. He kicked the back of Santos’s chair and yelled, “I hate you. Why don’t you shut the fuck up, you dog dick.”

  Wow. It took a lot of guts—or a lot of stupidity—for a seven-year-old kid to call a gang member like Santos a dog dick. While Andy was impressed, he was also worried about what might happen to Ruben if Santos ever got him alone.

  “He’s just tired,” Andy said to Santos. “Everybody’s tired.”

  Santos answered without turning around. “You need to keep his whiny ass out of my face.”

  “Maybe we should try to get some sleep, Ruben. Come on, you can lean against my shoulder if you want to.”

  Defeated, the boy swung his feet again, but deliberately missed the seat in front. Then he fell across Andy’s lap as much as his seat belt would allow. “Wake me up if they start handing out snacks.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “There they are!” Georgie shouted, prompting Eleanor to squeal with excitement. They’d been watching at the window in the living room for Tony and Serafina. Tony had called earlier to report that the government hadn’t contested her release.

  Lily tugged Anna by the hand from the kitchen. “Let’s go meet her, make sure she knows we don’t blame her for what happened.”

  They walked out the side door from the family room to find Serafina tearfully hugging the twins. Eleanor, also in tears, stood on tiptoes with her arms around Serafina’s neck while Georgie hugged her waist.

  “Cue the waterworks,” Anna said as she wiped her eyes.

  “You and me both,” Lily replied. She waited her turn as Anna drew Serafina into a hug, holding her for a long moment as they cried together. When Serafina turned to her, she managed a feeble “Welcome home” as her voice cracked. Hers were tears of joy, sadness and relief, acknowledging their shared trauma and the fact that it wasn’t yet over.

  “I’m so sorry, Lily. This is all my fault. I never should have asked him to go with me. He only said yes so you’d let him stay and go to the party with his friends.”

  Taking her face in both hands, Lily wiped Serafina’s tears with her thumbs. “We do not blame you for this. They had no right to take either one of you. Believe me, we’ve seen these thugs for exactly who they are. ICE gives them license to do whatever they want—”

  “And then lie about it to a judge,” Anna added. She held out an arm. “Come into the kitchen so Lily can fix you a nice lunch. I’d offer to do it but you deserve better than that. I bet you haven’t had a decent meal since you got picked up.”

  As they walked inside together, Lily hooked her arm through Tony’s. “Thank you, my friend. Will she have to go back to court?”

  “No, everything’s dismissed. They say there’s no record, but I don’t trust those goons as far as I can throw them.”

  “I’m just worried this will come back to bite her in the ass once she’s eligible for her naturalization interview.” As soon as she said it, she felt Eleanor’s eyes on her. “I know, that’s a dollar in the bad word jar.”

  Tony laughed. “I bet that jar’s seen a lot of action these last few days.”

  “Seriously, is this going to screw up her citizenship application? Her five years are up in October.” All she needed now was to take the citizenship test. “Just please promise me she won’t get denied because of this.”

  “I’m pretty sure this won’t even show up in her file. But I’ll make it a point to keep checking all summer so there won’t be any surprises.”

  “Did Anna tell you we think Andy is in Louisiana? That’s where his plane was headed when it left Phoenix last night. He probably won’t stay there long though. They don’t have any detention facilities for unaccompanied minors.”

  “If he headed east, he’s probably on his way to Homestead but it could be Berks. Both are lockdown. Homestead’s where they send suspected gang members.”

  Lily had read all she could find on ICE’s detention of minors. Berks was a former juvenile detention facility in Pennsylvania repurposed for detention of immigrant families and youth. Kids sent there typically had longer stays. The Homestead center was like a sprawling child prison, housing up to two thousand minors at any given time. Most of the children had been separated from their families at border crossings but if they had any family members in the US, they were usually released to their care within a few weeks.

  They caught up with the others in the kitchen, where Lily
immediately went to work preparing Serafina’s favorite breakfast burrito. Tony leaned against the counter as she whisked the eggs in a skillet, and said, “I was talking with Monique Johnson at the Legal Aid Foundation. She said this push to pick up gang members is a relatively new initiative. They used to wait until there was an arrest for gang-related crimes. Now they’re just doing random street sweeps. Arrest first, ask questions later…if at all.”

  “A class action suit waiting to happen.” In theory, anyway. Private law firms had little hope of a payday from the federal government because of sovereign immunity, so it probably would take a years-long suit from the ACLU to force changes at the policy level.

  Meanwhile, it was attorneys like Tony and Shelynn who were fighting on the front lines of the immigration wars. Lily and Anna were now convinced they should hire someone from the trenches like those two instead of a Brooks Brothers suit from a firm like Walter’s who didn’t know how the games were played. In fact, Anna was disappointed they couldn’t simply hire Shelynn to dog Andy’s case through the system. She knew all the tricks, like the one about how to track detainee flights, but she said she had her hands full with cases in Arizona.

  Lily delivered the fresh hot burrito to Serafina and joined them at the table. “Tell me everything. Start at the beginning, at the festival.”

  Between bites, Serafina recounted the events surrounding the stabbing, how the paramedics had tended to the victim while the police interviewed witnesses. “I wish we’d moved on, but it just wasn’t right. A poor man was stabbed and his family deserved to know who did it, so I told them what I saw. Andy didn’t even see it—he was buying a drink, but he came back while I was talking with the officer.”

  Lily was troubled by Serafina’s gaunt look. If she’d struggled to get enough to eat in detention, Andy would be struggling too, especially since he was a picky eater to begin with.

  “When the police officer finished, people all of a sudden started pushing and shoving, yelling at everyone to run. I fell and Andy helped me up, but someone picked up my bag and ran away.” Her voice shook with anger as she complained of the officers’ refusal to look up her green card information. “They came because of the gang members but they took everybody. There’s even a name for all the extra people they pick up. They call us collaterals.”

  “Like collateral damage,” Anna said with disgust.

  “I thought they’d let Andy go,” she went on, taking a few seconds to check her tears. “This one officer, he kept asking me my name, then asking Andy his. He did it three times, like he didn’t believe us. The whole time he was taking videos of Andy and talking to somebody on his phone. Then he yelled for somebody to arrest us both.”

  Tony nodded slowly. “This is finally starting to make sense. That officer had an informant on the phone doing live IDs. That’s who pegged Andy as Andres Casillas.”

  Serafina raised a hand to her mouth. “So that’s why he kept saying Andy’s driver’s license was fake. He thought Andy was someone else.”

  “Not just someone else,” Anna said. “An errand boy for a gang member who murdered a nine-year-old girl.”

  “Allegedly,” Lily said. She was no longer taking ICE’s word for anything. “How did Andy seem the last time you saw him? Was he scared?”

  “More than anything he was angry. I warned him to keep his head down, to stay out of trouble. He knew you would come for him. He said he couldn’t wait for his mom to get hold of those”—she made sure the twins weren’t listening—“we say los carajos.”

  Lily met Anna’s questioning look. “That means dicks. Andy’s right, I’d love to get those dicks in my courtroom.”

  “Oh, he didn’t mean you.” Serafina pointed to Anna. “He said she was going to tear off their arm and beat them with the bloody end.”

  Anna slapped the table. “Well, he certainly read my mind. From what Shelynn Kelly said, there’s not much else you can do to these bastards. Absolutely no one holds them accountable for anything. I can’t believe what they do to people—especially women and kids—at these detention facilities. Every inch of those places ought to be covered with CCTV.”

  Serafina visibly shuddered. “A lot of them are. There were even cameras in the showers at Adelanto.”

  Lily couldn’t stand to hear another word. She rose and carried the plate to the sink.

  “Leave it, Lily. This is my kitchen again.” Serafina shooed them toward the family room. “It feels good to be home. Now if we could just get Andy back.”

  Eleanor met them in the doorway holding Anna’s phone. “Mom, you just got a text.” By the expectant look on her face, she’d already read it. “It’s from Shelynn Kelly.”

  “Hmm…she says a Swiftair flight left Louisiana at four fifteen this morning headed for Homestead.” Anna whirled and bounded up the stairs, yelling, “Looks like I’m going to Miami.”

  * * *

  Two large ceiling fans stirred the air in the windowless room, the only relief from the muggy heat that had hit Andy the moment he stepped off the plane. This was Florida. He’d never been here before and hoped never to come again.

  “Let’s go! Grab your size and keep the line moving,” a guard bellowed, gesturing to a table piled with clothing. In a stark contrast to the ICE police, this one wore blue cargos and a yellow polo shirt with a chest logo that read CHS… whatever that meant. “Do not touch anyone. Not your brother, not your sister, not your best amigo. If you touch anyone while you’re here in this tropical paradise, you will immediately be sent back to whatever shithole country you came from.”

  Andy looked around, wondering how many of the boys from his plane spoke only Spanish. “No tocar los otros,” he said. Probably wrong but close enough.

  “Zip it!”

  Thank God Andy understood both the command and its crabby tone. In a prison full of Spanish speakers, the least they could do was have a translator. Then again, it probably was hard to find Latinos willing to treat other Latinos like shit.

  He had no idea what size underwear he wore. He’d switched from regular briefs to Calvin Klein boxer briefs a year ago but had never bought them for himself. New ones magically appeared in three-packs on his bed, gifts from the laundry fairy.

  Armed with this embarrassing ignorance, he was to choose a pair of white jockey shorts from the long table, where piles were loosely grouped by size. Most were kids’ sizes, he realized, which was stupid since the guard on the plane said this place was for teenagers only, thirteen to seventeen. The younger ones, including Ruben, had remained on the plane to go elsewhere.

  A pair of jockeys marked large looked as if it might be too small. After a few tense seconds of searching as the guard badgered them to hurry, he located what he thought might be the last extra-large on the table. Santos, who was behind him in line, was going to be pissed.

  Andy already missed Ruben, who had cried and hugged him when he left the plane. Wherever the plane had gone from here, he hoped someone would take Ruben under their wing and keep him calm. The boy’s temper could get him into lots of trouble.

  The next table was dark green gym shorts, stamped on the leg with a white logo that read ICE. As if anyone here needed a reminder. He selected a pair and moved on to a third table of white T-shirts in adult and child sizes, then a fourth table with white crew socks.

  “Next stop, bug check,” the guard said, pointing a thumb over his shoulder. “No critters allowed.”

  Third in line for the head check, he noted that the checker was a female guard, the first one he’d seen since his arrest. She wore blue gloves and had her hair pulled into a tight bun. “Got another live one here, Jimmy! Coming your way.” She directed the teen across the hall, where Jimmy awaited with clippers.

  Andy’s stomach dropped as he recalled how Ruben had leaned against his shoulder on the flight. Kids that age got head lice all the time. A couple of years ago Georgie and Eleanor had brought them home three times in one month. They all had to use a special shampoo, but that obviously
wasn’t how they dealt with lice here. He’d die of shame if he had to go back to school with a buzzcut.

  It was the first time he’d thought of school since this ordeal began. What would he tell people when they asked what he’d done over spring break? By now he should have been posting photos from Los Cabos. Julian was probably sharing some from his dad’s movie set in Tokyo, Jackson from skiing in Vail, and Albany from frickin’ Paris.

  I spent my spring break in an ICE shithole wearing shackles and handcuffs, getting my head shaved on account of lice.

  “Clean,” the guard declared after fluffing his hair with a pencil. “Straight to the showers.”

  Relieved, he hustled back to the hallway. A shower sounded fantastic, his first one in four days. Judging from the smell on the airplane, he wasn’t the only one in need of a good scrubbing.

  A male guard at the end of the hall, blond with pasty white skin, handed him a small red belt with clips. “This here’s a laundry loop. You know how to use it?”

  Andy shook his head.

  “You run it through your shirt, your tighty-whiteys, and one of your belt loops. Then clip your socks here. Make sure it’s tight or you’ll never see those rags again. And write your name on the tag part,” he said, handing Andy a black sharpie.

  His name. Should he write Andres Casillas? That would be like admitting he was the gang member they thought he was. But if he wrote Andy Kaklis, they might throw his clothes away. In the end, he compromised, writing small to fit it all on the tag: Andres Kaklis (Casillas).

  The shower room had twelve stalls with curtains, and a shelf outside each one where he could leave his fresh clothes and dirty laundry. He took a folded towel from a shelf and entered the farthest stall, where he stripped and looped the belt through his clothes. The water was tepid and the pressure was low, but he couldn’t have cared less—he was finally getting clean.