Рон Рэш - The Best American Short Stories 2018

They let her store: her clothes, her broken leather sandals, a plastic comb, an elastic hair band. They let her keep: the silver wedding ring she still wears even though her husband died four years ago. They take: her pocketknife (no weapons), a sleeve of Maria cookies (no food), a tin of Vaseline (no reason).

In the morning, there’s a count. In the evening, there will be another. The guards yank the beige sheet off her bed, balloon it dramatically in the air. “Forty-eighteen, clear!” They move down the line.

It’s a warehouse, this place: cement floors, fluorescent tube lights in the ceiling, flyers taped to the painted cinder-block walls—ads for phone services, for immigration attorneys, for psychologists. She takes it all in.

After the inspection, she returns to the processing desk, near the front of the facility. Through the windows she can see a chain-link fence topped with a confection of barbed wire and, just beyond it, an open field speckled with wildflowers and long grass and a few broad trees.

“My son?” she asks the woman sitting at the desk. “Gabriel Rivas? Did he get here yet?”

The woman consults her computer. “Sorry,” she says. “No one by that name.”

She stares at the woman, unsure of what to say.

“Did you check the family area?” the woman asks.

They get one hour to eat. Hash browns and syrup for breakfast. Chicken broth and French fries for lunch. Turkey cutlets and potato dumplings for dinner. So many potatoes. It’s a world made of potatoes. There is water to drink, but it tastes like chlorine, and it makes her nauseous.

They take showers in the trailers. The guards control when the water turns on and when it turns off. Soap bubbles skim across the floor.

In the bathroom, which is in a separate trailer, she wads up toilet paper and stuffs it into her underwear. A woman next to her notices.

“Talk to Esme,” she says. “She’ll hook you up.”

She finds Esme in the dayroom, watching TV. Esme offers to sell her a tampon for a dollar, money she doesn’t have.

Esme is unsympathetic. She purses her lips. “At least you got your period,” she says. “Many of us don’t, you know, after what they do. We get pregnant instead.”

She marks the days on her arm. A small dot on the inside of her wrist becomes a trail, then a winding chain.

Periodically, new people arrive, escorted by border-patrol agents. A few every week. She watches them with their tattered backpacks, the children with stuffed animals in their arms. When the weather turns cold, people are wrapped in foil blankets as they trudge up the walk.

“Did you see a little boy?” she asks every new arrival. “A boy who looks like me?”

The people glance at her with weary, red-rimmed eyes. Some of them shake their heads. One after the other, none of them him.

What if she’s forgotten what he looks like? What if she’s gone crazy? What if he’s here, lying in one of those cribs, and she sees him every single day without realizing he’s her son? What if it’s been too long? What if memory fails? What if everything fails, and getting through life is simply learning to cope with the failure? No, she scolds herself. Don’t think like that. Don’t let yourself give way.

A woman named Alicia arrives from El Salvador with her six-year-old daughter in tow. They sleep in the bed together. They shower together. The girl won’t leave her mother’s side.

“She’s nervous,” Alicia says, as if there’s a need to explain. “It was a terrible trip.”

“Yes.”

“We’re going to find her father in Minnesota.”

“But this is Texas.”

“Is it far?”

And how, she wonders, does she answer a question like that. Is it far? Everything is far from here, even if it’s only across the street.

She meets with a lawyer, a man in a stained tan sports coat. She asks him how long she’ll be here. She asks him what happens after this. “ Eso depende ” is his answer to both. Then: “Tell me everything. They’ll need to determine if you qualify for asylum, if you have credible fear.” And though she doesn’t want to relive it, she tells him about the day, a few months ago now, that the boys—boys whose mothers she knew from the neighborhood—pushed her off a moving bus and dragged her across a busy intersection, how she kept scrabbling her legs under her to try to stand, and how they kicked her to keep her down. How nobody helped her, how nobody stopped them because nobody knows how to stop boys like that. How they made her kneel in the alley behind the fruit store while they held a gun to her head and all took turns, how they put the gun in her mouth and made her suck that, too, and how when they were finished they said, “You’re in the family now, bitch,” and laughed.

“Why do you think they targeted you?” the lawyer asks.

“I was alone.”

“You’re not married?”

“Not anymore.”

“And you’re pretty.”

She narrows her eyes.

“And men—”

“They were boys.”

“Even more so. We have an expression here: Boys will be boys.”

She feels a rising anger.

“If we go back,” she says evenly, “they will do it again.”

“We?” he asks. “Is there someone else?”

“My son,” she starts, but her voice breaks. She clenches her fists. She digs her nails into her palms, determined not to cry.

At night, lying in her bunk atop the beige sheet, she imagines running back the way she came, retracing her steps through the dirt and the weeds until she finds him standing in the overgrowth somewhere, hungry and cold. She wants to gather him up, to hold him close, to smell the apricot-sweetness of his skin, to feel the fuzz of his ear against her cheek, to say I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry—for what? Had she wanted too much? Safety for herself and for him? Was that too much? It hadn’t seemed like it at the time, but if she hadn’t wanted it they never would have left, and if they had never left she never would have lost him. She wouldn’t have lost everything.

Often now, she wants to scream. Sometimes she does, and then the guards come to restrain her. They hold her arms behind her back. They drag her down the hall and put her in a room, a colorless box with spiders in the corners, until she calms down. But that’s going in the wrong direction. The scream is for help, not for hindrance. Why don’t they understand? The woman in the box next to hers is there because she threw up. To throw up is to disobey orders. You disobey, you get the box. The guards think: The smaller the box, the more we can control them. But everyone else knows: The smaller the box, the more out of control people become.

One day, when the air is damp and the sky is mottled and gray, there’s a protest. People outside hold signs that say ILLEGAL IS A CRIME and SEND THEM BACK WITH BIRTH CONTROL. People hold American flags over their shoulders like capes. Superhero Americans. She imagines them at home in their living rooms, a bowl of dog food by the door, a cup of cold tea that has steeped too long on the counter. She imagines them laying the poster board on the floor, uncapping markers, drawing the letters, coloring them in.

Esme lost her baby. She left that part out.

“She had a miscarriage a few weeks after she got here,” a woman named Marta tells her. “ Gracias a Dios that she didn’t have to carry it to term. Her body released its own pain.” Marta stops and shakes her head. “They don’t take care of nobody in here, see. They don’t care who we are. It’s easier to fuck somebody than to give a fuck, you know?”

One morning, a woman in a pale-pink T-shirt approaches her in the cafeteria while she’s getting a tray.

“I heard you were looking for your son,” she says quietly.