Florencio gets bored with Betsy’s exercises. I tell him to bring a book he’d like to learn to read. The next week he shows up with a small black book with a black plastic cover. New American Bible. I want to tell him I meant that he should bring a story, but when he begins to read hesitantly from the tiny type on the onionskin paper, a peaceful glow comes over him, and I feel sheepish that I almost complained about his choice of reading. We work through several weeks of this until he says, “Next week, you bring book.”
The first snow has carpeted the streets the following Tuesday. I make my way to the public library slowly, enjoying the muffled stillness, the sparkles under the streetlights. The snow is showing off, reminding me of its arresting beauty. I look up and watch it glimmer on its way down. It sprinkles my cheeks and instantly melts into me, into every other time it’s drifted down to make me feel alive, like wonders still happen.
The library door opens with a whoosh, and inside all the crinkling magic dissipates in the recycled air. I’ve brought my school’s copy of The Alchemist’s Confession. The passage I want to read with Florencio, one of my favorites, is bookmarked with a piece of composition notebook paper.
I walk up to the second floor. The space is heavy, funereal. Have I come on the wrong day? All the volunteers are there. Betsy is crying, tears streaming down her face with no sound.
“Where is everyone?” I ask. They look at each other, and no one says anything.
Finally Betsy speaks up. “There was an ICE raid. They hit several companies in the area. Got a lot of our guys. A few are okay, but they’re afraid to come.”
“Florencio?” I ask, my hand tightening around the green cover of the book I’d brought to share with him.
Betsy’s face crumples. “I’m sorry, Luisa. I’m so sorry.”
I don’t go to school the next day, or the one after that. I’ve turned eighteen, and they can’t make me. My mother leaves for work too early to know.
I know it is only a matter of time before what happened to Florencio happens to me too. A cop will ask me for identification, maybe, or I’ll try to get a job under the table and, without the right papers, I’ll get found out. And if not me, then my mother. So instead I will melt into this bed, a creaky little cot my mother bought secondhand at the Salvation Army when we found our next place after the basement. It folds in half for easy storage, although we never store it. I imagine it has magical powers and I can fold it with me in it, and it will take me someplace better. Like the smoke from the old dream, maybe.
My mother comes home from work mad. The school has gotten through to her and reported my absences. I try to explain about the senselessness of all of it, but she doesn’t understand either. She’s hopeful too, not American every-problem-has-a-solution hopeful, but I’ve-seen-worse hopeful. “We came here to succeed, not to stay in bed. Work or study, but stay home? No,” she says. It is as stern as I’ve ever heard her.
The next time I can bring myself to go to ESL, I find out from Betsy how to get in to see Florencio in immigration detention. I don’t tell my mother I’m going, because she’d burst into flames if I told her I was going to a jail, a place where I have to show ID to be allowed in, a place where they could just as easily open the doors and put me in for the same exact reason Florencio is in there. But I need to see him, and so I go.
He looks even smaller behind the thick yellowing glass partition that separates inmates and visitors. A flare of anger bursts through me as I see him in the orange jumpsuit, hands shackled together. They have him in a jail with people who have hurt people, who are dangerous. This man—this boy—who glows when he reads Genesis and thrills when he deciphers a new billboard does not belong here.
I sit across from him. “This is some bad luck,” he says in Spanish, his face twisted into a half grin.
“That’s an understatement,” I say in English. He hasn’t heard the word, and I do my best to explain it to him.
“Ah, that’s a smart word. We don’t have that word in Spanish. Estos se las saben todas.” I laugh. It is a common immigrant’s saying, something close to Americans have it all figured out.
“I don’t know about that. They put you in here. They obviously don’t know everything.”
He waves his hand as best he can through his bindings. “Ah, don’t worry so much about me. Remember what I told you the first day we had class?”
“That you liked home.”
He nods. He continues in Spanish, “I came to earn money. My mother is getting old, and I wanted a better life for her. I didn’t do everything I wanted to do, but I did something. I will be happy to see her.”
I nod.
“You brought the book?” he asks.
I pull it out of the big inside pocket of my winter coat.
“This glass is dirty. I won’t be able to read through it. You read it to me,” he says.
I draw in a long, stilling breath. I close my eyes and try to find the peace I felt on the walk to the library through the snow, the moment in which silence and magic seemed to suspend everything else, the moment Florencio was already gone but I didn’t yet know it. Maybe in that instant, things were good not just because I didn’t know, but because everything was possible. Or because it was in the loss of Florencio, in the negative space he left, that I saw that trying is
