I opened my eyes and looked around. It didn’t really look like anyone had packed up and left. I walked into Maria’s room. All her stuff was still there. And in her parents’ room I saw clothes in the closet and boxes of their things on the floor.
Something didn’t seem right.
Chapter Twelve
I don’t know why I thought about turning to Dalton. Dalton was pretty clueless about a lot of things, but then again, he had that truck. That Ford F-150. And he had been a close friend of Cole. Almost like family for a while, before Cole started getting deeper into trouble.
Dalton’s parents lived in the same part of town as Maria, and as I approached his big ugly apartment complex, I saw his truck parked outside. There was newspaper taped up on the inside of his windows. I peeked in through a small space between sheets and saw him lying there on the seat.
I tapped gently on the window.
Nothing.
I tapped harder and said his name.
Dalton woke up, startled, then tore down one of the pieces of newspaper and saw it was me. He slowly opened the passenger door.
“Jakey, what’re you doing ’round here?”
“It’s Maria. She’s missing.”
“Missing? What do you mean?”
I climbed into the truck cab as Dalton slid over to the driver’s seat. I explained what I thought had happened.
Dalton just shook his head. “I don’t know nothing about any of that shit. And it sounds like some pretty deep shit. I don’t trust nothing about the government. I don’t know what you think I can do.”
I desperately wanted an ally. Dalton was older than me, but he was also just an out-of-school teenager who slept in his truck. Not exactly someone with a lot of brains and know-how.
“No way,” he continued. “I don’t want nothing to do with messing with the government.”
I didn’t know what he was picturing. The two of us storming into wherever they were with machine guns? But I got the picture. I opened the door to leave.
Dalton grabbed my wrist. “Wait. I’ll drive you wherever you need to go. Just don’t get me into any kind of trouble with the government or the cops.”
“Okay.”
“Okay, what? Where do you want to go?”
Where did I want to go? I didn’t know anything about immigration laws, detention centers, illegal immigrants. Shit, where did I want to go?
“School,” I said. “Take me to school.”
The guard at the school entrance gave me a hard time about showing up in the middle of the day, but he let me in. I walked to Mr. Lotz’s classroom and could see through the window of the door that he was in the middle of one of his long lectures about something or other. I took a deep breath and knocked.
Mr. Lotz put his hand up to the class, then came my way, opened the door and walked out into the hall. He saw the look on my face. “Jake, what’s up?”
I tapped the door closed behind him. I told him about Maria and her family. I told him I was pretty sure they’d been taken away by government people.
Lotz nodded his head up and down. “I’ve been reading about it in the papers. I had no idea there were so many kids at this school whose parents are living here illegally.”
“Will you help me?”
Lotz suddenly looked puzzled. “Why me?”
I shrugged. I didn’t really have an answer. “I guess I don’t have anyone else I can turn to, anyone else I can trust.”
Lotz ran a hand across his forehead and then stroked his chin. “Jesus, Jake. I don’t know if there’s anything I can do.”
“Will you at least help me find out if Maria’s family is being held at the detention center? I need to know.”
Mr. Lotz didn’t answer right away. “Yeah, I’ll try to help,” he said after a few moments. “Let me see if I can get someone to cover my class. But we’ll have to call a cab. I don’t have a car.”
“I’ve got wheels,” I said. “I just need you.”
Mr. Lotz ducked back into his class, spoke to his students briefly and then hurried me to the office. I waited in the hall until he came out.
“Mrs. Warren was cool about it,” he said. “And she gave me Maria’s file. It has some info about her parents.”
We started walking toward the guard at the exit. He looked at us kind of funny, but he didn’t say a word as he opened the door for us and we walked out of the school.
Dalton gave me a dirty look when I opened the door to his truck. I’m guessing he didn’t like the look of Mr. Lotz.
“Who’s this?” he asked.
“Mr. Lotz. He’s a teacher,” I said.
Dalton didn’t have to say what he was thinking. I’d heard him say it plenty of times when he was still in school. Dalton hated teachers. All of them.
Mr. Lotz thrust his hand toward Dalton. “Jim Lotz,” he said. “Jake asked me to see what I could do. I couldn’t say no.”
Dalton reluctantly shook his hand and nodded his head for us to get in.
“Where to now?” Dalton asked.
Mr. Lotz was on his phone, looking something up. “Okay. Got it. Head downtown. Take Lombard Avenue, and then go east on Hastings.”
“Whatever you say, Teach,” Dalton said.
As we headed toward downtown, I noticed how carefully Dalton was driving. Not too fast, not too slow, looking in his mirrors when he changed lanes, staying right at the speed limit. It made me think about what Lotz had said again. One good thing. Dalton had it. Not much but something. He was a good driver. And he had a truck. And he was there to help me. That was three good things, actually.
“What do we do when we get there?” I asked.
Lotz was still pecking away at his phone. He nodded and then pecked away some more and then said, “Okay” out loud.
“Okay, what?” I asked.
“Okay. I know where they hold illegal immigrants. And I know we need an immigration lawyer. But first we need to confirm that Maria’s parents are being detained.”
“How do we do that?” I wanted to know.
“We go in and ask.” Then he corrected himself. “No. I go in and ask. They are obliged to tell me, but they probably won’t let me speak to them without the lawyer.”
Mr. Lotz saw the worried look on my face. “Sorry, Jake. One step at a time. Get the facts, assess the situation, come up with a plan.”
I don’t know what I was thinking. We’d maybe go there and magically the doors would open and Maria and her family could come home with us? “Sounds like something out of a textbook,” I said a bit sarcastically.
“Probably is.”
We sat in silence as Dalton carefully guided his truck through traffic, taking directions from Mr. Lotz, until we arrived at a tall, nearly windowless building in a part of the city I’d never even been to before.
Mr. Lotz gripped the file tightly as he got out of the truck. “Wish me luck,” he said and walked toward the building. He was stopped at the door by a security guard, and after they’d had a brief conversation, we watched him go in.
Chapter Thirteen
We waited in the truck for over an hour. I was getting real antsy.
“Be cool,” Dalton said. “Sometimes all you can do is wait.”
So we waited some more.
Finally Mr. Lotz emerged from the building. When he got into the truck, he looked at me and said, “She’s not there.”
I didn’t know whether to be happy or worried.
“But her parents are,” he continued. “The guy I talked to looked them up on the computer, and he confirmed that they have been detained and are going to be deported soon. But I wasn’t allowed to talk to them.”
“So Maria must be hiding somewhere. We have to find her.”
“Where do we start?” Dalton asked. “I’ll take you anywhere you need to go. This is getting interesting.”
But it didn’t get interesting. It just got frustrating. We went back to Maria’s apartment. We looked in every room and every closet. No sign
of her. We drove up and down the streets, and then, as it started to get dark, we dropped Mr. Lotz off at the school.
“I’m going to make a few calls to see if I can find someone to help out with Maria’s parents,” he said before closing the truck door. “Maybe we should ask for help to find Maria.”
“No,” I said. “We can’t ask the police. We can’t do that. She’d end up like her parents, and I’d never see her again.”
Lotz looked worried. He wrote something on a slip of paper and handed it to me. “This is my cell phone. Call if you think I can do anything.”
Dalton dropped me off at my apartment building. I felt lost and defeated. “Don’t give up hope, little man,” he said. “She’s hiding somewhere—you know it. She’s free, and that’s a start.”
As I walked up the stairs to my apartment, I thought about Maria out there somewhere, all on her own and scared as hell. I went in and sat down at the kitchen table, realizing I’d probably just lost the one really good thing in my life. I had that familiar nasty feeling in the pit of my stomach. I realized I might never see Maria again. We were much more than just friends. I still didn’t think of her as a girlfriend, not like the way other guys talked about their girlfriends. But she’d been there for me when I felt really down. She was my ally in a hostile world. Now I didn’t have any allies—not like her anyway.
There was a knock on the door. I got up and opened it.
It was Maria. She looked scared. Really scared.
I let her inside immediately. I looked up and down the hall. No one was there. No one was looking. “You okay?”
“They took my parents,” she said. “Three men, they just showed up and took them away.”
“Where were you?”
“My mother told me to go in my bedroom before they opened the door. But when I heard them arguing, I got scared and went out on the fire escape. I stayed there until they were gone. I knew what was happening. I just froze. I couldn’t move. Now I wish I had gone with my parents. I want to be with them.”
“Don’t say that. You’re here now. You’re safe.”
Maria shook her head. “Will you take me to where they are being held? I need to be with them. I don’t care what it’s like there. If they are going to be deported, I want to go with them. They’re my parents.”
I understood what she was feeling, but I didn’t want to lose her. Sure, she wanted to be with her parents. But then I’d never see her again.
“I know what you’re saying, but you’re here now. You’re safe. You can stay here with me until we figure something out.”
I made Maria a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. There wasn’t much else in the house. But she didn’t eat it. I looked at the clock on the stove and realized my father would be home any minute.
Minutes later I heard him in the hall, fumbling with his keys and cursing. It was his usual mood when he came home from work.
When the door opened and he walked in with a couple of bags of groceries, he looked first at Maria and then at me. He’d met Maria a number of times, but he’d hardly ever said anything to her. Maybe he didn’t like her because she wasn’t like us, or maybe he didn’t like me having a girl for a friend. I never knew.
“Looks like we got company,” he said flatly.
“Maria needs our help,” I said.
“She in some kind of trouble? ’Cause we got enough trouble of our own. We don’t need to take on someone else’s grief.”
“They took her parents,” I said.
“They who?”
“The immigration people. They’re in the detention center and are going to be kicked out of the country.”
“Freakin’ government. Won’t let anybody just be.”
“Dad, Maria needs someplace to stay. She needs to stay here with us. For now anyway.”
He just shook his head. “No way. No way, no how. We can’t get involved with any of that immigration shit. I have one son in jail. And that’s one son too many.”
Maria looked at me and then down at the floor. She started to stand up. It was pretty clear he didn’t want her here.
“She’s staying,” I said. It had been a long while since I’d stood up to my father. The last time I had, he’d smacked me in the head. Hard. But I knew I had to speak up now.
My father seemed to be pretending he hadn’t heard me. He set the bags of groceries on the table in front of us and began to put the milk and eggs in the old refrigerator we’d had ever since I could remember. The last item he pulled out was a cooked chicken in a clear plastic container, which he set on the table between us.
“This was on sale,” he said, his voice suddenly sounding completely different. “We haven’t had a good feed on chicken around here in quite a while. I hope Maria likes chicken. I really wanted some potato salad too. But you know how much they want for potato salad these days? Costs, like, an arm and a leg.”
Just then Luke arrived, walking in silently like he usually did, always seeming to know just when there was food on the table. He nodded to Maria and then gave me a puzzled look, but he didn’t say anything as he sat down at the table.
My father placed four of our old cracked plates on the table and took a jar of pickles out of the fridge. He grabbed a half-empty bag of potato chips from the counter. “Let’s eat while it’s still warm.”
So we ate. The chips were stale and the pickles had been in the fridge for months. But the chicken was warm, and it was good. We ate the whole thing.
Maria was the first one to speak. “I’ll do the dishes,” she said.
“I’d appreciate that,” my father said with the faintest hint of a smile. “Nobody around here likes to wash dishes, especially my lazy son.” It was definitely just like my father to put me down in one way or another. But this time he said it like he was joking. He watched Maria as she stood up and picked up our plates. “I guess if you’re willing to do some chores,” he said, “you can stay for a while until things get sorted out. But just until things get sorted out.”
Chapter Fourteen
Maria and I spent the evening in my bedroom, where she told me again what had happened that day and how she hid on the fire escape and then watched as her parents were put into the back of a van and driven away.
“I felt like I lost everything,” she said. “And there was nothing I could do about it. I was afraid to stay there in the apartment because I thought if they found out about me, they’d come back for me too. So I just went walking around the streets. Then I ran into Oscar. He walked me here. Some other people in your apartment building started to give him a hard time, so he had to leave. But nobody bothered me.”
“I’m glad you came here,” I said.
“I had no place else to go.”
I told Maria how Mr. Lotz had gone into the detention center. She cried a little when I told her he’d confirmed that they were definitely there, but no one was allowed to visit them.
I gave Maria the room Luke and I slept in, and I slept on the couch in the living room. Luke slept on the floor beside me. “This is great,” he said. “Feels just like camping.” Weird, since neither of us had ever gone camping.
In the morning my dad cooked us some eggs but didn’t eat anything himself. He just drank two cups of black coffee from a big mug and said he was going out for a walk.
“You know I have to go be with them,” Maria told me after a long, awkward silence.
“Okay, but we should talk to Mr. Lotz first,” I said. “He was going to do some digging and find out what can be done.”
It took a bit of persuading to get Maria to go with me back to school. I wasn’t even sure it was the right thing to do. If the immigration people knew about her, it would be the easiest place to find her. But I had no other plan. “I’m gonna watch out for you, Maria. If those goons show up, we’re gonna run.”
“Where are we going to run to?”
“I don’t know. We’ll figure that out later.”
But there were no goons waiting for us at
school. Leo and Toe saw us walking in together and Toe said, “Look what the cat dragged in.” I wanted to give him the finger and tell him to bugger off, but I didn’t.
Before classes started we went straight to Mr. Lotz. He was thrilled to see Maria.
“You found her,” he said.
“She found me.”
“Either way, I’m relieved,” he said. Turning to Maria, he added, “Maria, I’m so sorry.”
“Thank you,” she said. I wondered when I would see her smile again.
Kids were starting to file into the classroom, so Mr. Lotz led us back out into the hall. “Okay, so I did get to speak to an old college buddy of mine who now practices law. He says this sort of thing is happening all over. The bad news is, he doubts he or anyone else can stop the deportation. Maria’s parents can appeal, but they’d have to do it from outside the country.”
“And that’s not going to help,” I said.
“I know,” Lotz said. “It doesn’t look good.”
“But he also said Maria’s situation might be different because she was born here. However, she shouldn’t come forward if the authorities don’t already know about her. And I don’t think they do…unless her parents told them.”
Maria shook her head. “I know my parents. They wouldn’t have said anything. They’d want me to stay here and not go back with them. They talked about that often. They kept saying it didn’t matter what happened to them as long as I could stay here and find a better life. But I need to talk to them.”
“I know. My friend the lawyer said they wouldn’t let you in, and even if they did, they’d probably lock you up too. But I think we can call your parents, and you can talk to them.”
“Really?” Maria said. “Please, let’s do that.”
“Okay,” Mr. Lotz said. “Let’s go to the office.”
The Thing You're Good At Page 4
