Imbolo Mbue - Behold the Dreamers

“What am I going to do?”

“You’ve got to trust me.”

“It’s not that I don’t trust—”

“Did I not help you apply for a student visa for your wife to come here and go to school? I got your whole family together in New York, my brother. Got you this close. The least you can do is trust me that, Inshallah, we will win this case and you’ll get a green card.”

Jende’s mouth dried up.

Bubakar asked if he had any other question.

“When do I have to be in court?” he asked softly, dreading the response.

Bubakar said he didn’t know — he’d received only a letter of explanation today but Jende should be getting the Notice to Appear, with a court date, soon enough.

“You have any more questions, my brother?”

Jende said no; he could think of nothing more to say or ask.

“Call me anytime with any questions, okay? Even if you just want to talk.”

Jende hung up.

He dropped his phone on his lap.

He did not move.

He could not move.

Not even his mind could move; the ability to create thoughts deserted him.

What he’d lived in fear of the past three years had happened, and the powerlessness was worse than he’d imagined. If not for his pride, he would have cried, but tears, of course, would have been useless. His days in America were numbered, and there was nothing salty water running out of his eyes could do.

Upper West Siders strolled by. MTA buses stopped by. A chaos of kids on scooters rushed by, followed by three women — their mommies or grandmas or aunties or nannies — cautioning them to slow down, please be careful. Mighty would soon be done with his piano lesson. The nanny would be calling in about twelve minutes to ask Jende to bring the car to the front of the teacher’s building. What should he do in those twelve minutes? Call Neni? No. She was probably on her way to pick Liomi up from his after-school program. Call Winston? No. He was working. It wouldn’t be right to call him with bad news at work; besides, there was nothing he could do. There was nothing anyone could do. No one could save him from American Immigration. He would have to go back home. He would have to return to a country where visions of a better life were the birthright of a blessed few, to a town from which dreamers like him were fleeing daily. He and his family would have to return to New Town empty-handed, with nothing but tales about what they’d seen and done in America, and when people asked why they’d returned and moved back into his parents’ crumbling caraboat house, they would have to tell a lie, a very good lie, because that would be the only way to escape the shame and the indignity. The shame he could live with, but his failings as a husband and father …

He looked out the window at the people walking on Amsterdam Avenue. None of them seemed concerned that the day might be one of his last in America. Some of them were laughing.

That night, after he’d told Neni, he watched her cry the first tears of sadness she’d ever cried in America.

“What are we going to do?” she asked him. “What do we have to do?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “Please dry your eyes, Neni. Tears are not going to help us right now.”

“Oh, Papa God, what are we going to do now?” she cried, ignoring his plea. “How can we keep on fighting? How much more money do we need to spend now that it’s going to be a court case?”

“I don’t know,” he said again. “I’m going to call Bubakar soon to discuss more. The news hit me so bad … it was as if someone was pressing a pillow against my face.”

They would have to use the money they had saved, they agreed. All of it: the couple thousand dollars they had put away by sticking to a monthly budget and which they hoped to one day put toward a renovation of his parents’ house, a down payment on a condo in Westchester County, and Liomi’s college education. If they had to get rid of their cable and Internet and take second jobs, they’d do that. If they had to go to bed hungry, they’d do that, too. They would do everything they could to remain in America. To give Liomi a chance to grow up in America.

“Should we tell Liomi now, so he can be prepared if we have to leave?” Neni asked.

Jende shook his head and said, “No, let him stay happy.”

SHE DRAGGED HERSELF THROUGH THE CITY, FROM WORK TO SCHOOL TO home, because she needed to carry on as if nothing had changed, as if their lives hadn’t just been opened up to unravelment. She couldn’t summon a smile, sing a song, or string together two thoughts without the word “deportation” finding its way in there, and yet she propelled herself forward the morning after the news, dressed in pink scrubs and white sneakers for a long day of work, an overloaded backpack strapped on her shoulders so she could study at work while the client slept. Fatigued but unbowed, she traveled every day that week from Harlem to Park Slope to Chambers Street, even though she had a headache so vicious she groaned on subway platforms whenever trains screeched toward her. Once, on her way to work, she considered getting off the train to run into a Starbucks bathroom and have a good cry but she resisted the urge, because what good had all the tears done? What she needed to do was start sleeping better, stop staying up all night dreading the most horrid things that had not yet happened. We’ll take it as it comes, Jende said to her every day, but she didn’t want to take it as it came. She wanted to be in control of her own life, and now, clearly, she wasn’t, and simply thinking about the fact that someone else was going to decide the direction of her future was enough to intensify her headache, leave her feeling as if a thousand hammers were banging on her skull. This helplessness crushed her, the fact that she had traveled to America only to be reminded of how powerless she was, how unfair life could be.

Six days after the news, her headache abated — not because her fears had diminished but because time has a way of abating these things — but new symptoms cropped up: loss of appetite; frequent urination; nausea. The symptoms could mean only one thing, she knew, and it wasn’t something to cry over. And yet when she told Jende about them, she burst into tears, her joy and despair so mingled she seemed to be crying tears of joy out of one eye and tears of despair out of the other. She couldn’t join him in laughing in amazement at the fact that it had finally happened, just when they had stopped worrying about whether it was ever going to happen after almost two years of trying. She couldn’t marvel at how wonderful it was to get good news at a time like this, but she hoped she would be happy soon, as soon as she could eat without throwing up and get through a day without feeling like a movable lump of hormones.

“Mama,” Liomi said to her one morning as she packed his lunch, “please don’t forget we have the parent-teacher conference today.”

Tell your teacher I cannot come, she wanted to say, but she looked at him sitting at the dinette eating his breakfast cereal, peaceful in his ignorance in the way only a child could be, and she knew she had to go to the meeting, because Jende was right — they had to keep him happy.

“Liomi’s a good student,” the teacher said to her by way of opening the conference, after she arrived fifteen minutes late from work. Neni nodded absentmindedly. Liomi was a good student, yes, she knew — she sat with him most evenings to do his homework. She didn’t need to attend a meeting to hear this, not after having spent ten hours attending to a bedridden man while her stomach churned from not having eaten lunch because of a lack of appetite. It had been about as awful a day as any other to be a home health aide: Every time the man had coughed and asked for his spit cup to deposit yellow globs of phlegm, her nausea had returned and she had rushed into the bathroom to throw up the water and crackers she’d had for breakfast.