“But don’t you worry,” the kind-voiced lawyer says. “We’ll fix this even if it takes a few years.”
“Years?”
“Oh, one or two. Can’t imagine more than that. Prosecutorial discretion maybe. Jeanine, was it? I love that name. I’ll get started right away.”
And then the kind-voiced lawyer says the same thing the not-so-kind-voiced lawyers have said before Jeanette hangs up: “Bill you for the hours later, or do you want to place a credit card on file?”
It’s a disappointment, maybe it’s selfish, but Jeanette holds on to the word dear like a blip of accidental humanity caught in a stranger’s throat, a version of the dust that drifts in a sunbeam that lands across her bed.
She slips into a dress. She tiptoes past the kitchen. Jeanette can hear Ana’s pen scratching the paper in violent strokes. Her probation officer: he, too, will sit at her kitchen table. He, too, will scratch pen on paper. Pen on paper. It all comes down to paper.
Jeanette knocks on the door of the neighbor on Ana’s mother’s other side. “Do you know the woman who lives next door?” she says to the mustached man who holds a forty-ounce. Jeanette points toward the neighbor’s house.
“All I know is she cleaned my buddy’s house for twenty bucks once. Nice woman. But poor lady can’t even afford a decent outfit. Damn shame, if you ask me. What with all the men might could’ve took care of her.”
Jeanette looks down at her own outfit, at the bra straps budging from her tank top, at her dirty shoes.
Just as the mustached man is about to close the door, he pauses. “Hey,” he says, pulling a phone out of his pocket. “I just remembered. You said her kid is looking for her? A friend of mine’s wife is the principal at the elementary school near here. Bet you the kid goes there. Maybe she knows something.”
Jeanette stands in the street and dials the number. She looks back at the mustached man, smiles and nods. He watches her. And Jeanette thinks of how she wants to ask him to shut the door but she’d never ask him to shut the door. She doesn’t ask for things she wants. Two rings and a woman with a cigarette-husky voice answers. A dog barks in the background. A baby cries. Jeanette attempts to explain.
“I’m sorry, who are you?”
“I’m … a member of the community. I am worried that Immigration officers may have left a student, from your school, behind … alone … when they took her mother.”
“Oh,” the woman says. “Yes, I’ve heard of this happening before. Have you called the police? What is the student’s name?”
The man at the door slides his thumbnail over the tab of his beer. He looks at the nail. She can taste the beer, memory on the tongue. Why is it that men can be “hard drinkers”? Suave and smooth, leather and whiskey. Her father. A woman who can’t stop is simply a mess. Irresponsible.
“I—Ana,” Jeanette says. She’s not sure why she opts not to tell the woman Ana’s last name.
“I see,” the woman says. There is a muffled sound, then shouting: “Delilah, put the dog down! What’d I tell you about—”
“I’m sorry to bother you—” Jeanette says, ready to end the call. She assumes everyone wants the other person on a call to end it.
“Ana, you said? Well, I’ve got near seven hundred kids this year. I must know ten Anas. Do you have the number of the police? I can get you the number of the police.”
“I’m so sorry to bother you,” Jeanette says again, and ends the call.
The man asks for her phone number as she turns to leave, and Jeanette doesn’t answer but instead thinks cleaning caddy. She thinks arched eyebrows and she thinks impossible choices and she gets the sensation that Ana’s mother already knows about her, already knows she will disappoint. She thinks impossible choices and she remembers, remembers so deep it hurts, why she never thought mother of herself. “I’m sorry,” she says, and she’s saying it to every mother in the world, but the man at the door doesn’t understand; he is not a mother and he is just nodding.
It starts to rain as Jeanette makes her way back to the house, and she sees Ana peering out the window. For some reason the image of a tiny face through a rain-smeared window, a tiny face so full of expectation, makes her remember: She has missed her NA meeting. Jeanette stops, looks up. Will she tell her PO? He will want to know why, and he will assume it’s because she doesn’t want to get better, doesn’t want to let go of Mario, doesn’t want to see another day. She will tell him she’s missed a meeting but will not miss another one, and he will be disappointed and he will not believe her, but she is used to disappointment. She is used to disbelief.
Jeanette doesn’t rush back. She lets the rain patter down around her, soak through her clothes, run into her shoes. It feels good to punish herself. To stand shivering and cold in an empty street. Her sponsor told her once that the only love she knows what to do with is the kind of love that breaks a person over and over again.
Wet, squeaking through her house and leaving muddy imprints, she walks past Ana drawing still, drawing a house, drawing a bird. Jeanette takes the phone to her room. But she doesn’t call Mario. She closes her eyes and tries to remember the opiate rush, the watery calm, the hit to the brain, delicious sleepy coasting. His voice in her ear: “Don’t you feel every molecule that surrounds you? Everything is holding you now.” She doesn’t call him after she’s called the cops. She doesn’t call him even when the police car pulls up and she hears Ana open the door and call her
