The playground is in the courtyard, at the center of the building. The ground is concrete, or plastic grass. On one side, our bunks. On the other are the classrooms, the medical unit, the common room, and a library that has hardly any books, some computers, mostly just binders that read SELF-HELP LEGAL or KNOW YOUR RIGHTS. I browsed them once. I understood very little. Every section of the building is called a camp and labeled with an animal and a color: red bird, green frog, and so on. Nobody refers to their room that way. Nobody says they live in an animal.
There are a dozen children at the playground today. Thank God the children don’t wear same-colored sweatpants and oversized shirts and can run in their full plumage. Blue shorts and red shirts and black skin and brown hair and green eyes and whirling laughter. Not all the kids are like this. Some of them sit on the concrete ledge, feet swirling sand, just watching. Some of them avoid the playground altogether and spend time trailing their mothers, the adult in them sprouting, ready to emerge in all its hardness. Ana, she is all questions and laughter. She likes to color, she likes to play soccer in the dirt, always has Band-Aids dotting her skinny legs. She likes to make up stories to pass the time. The babysitter knows her more than I. The babysitter is where she spent all her time until I finished work every night. The hurt rises, always surprising me when I least expect. I have to look away from the slide, the sand, the oil burning in the distance.
Do you think she will remember this? the woman on my left says in Spanish. We are on the bench and her child is a toddler and she is wearing yellow shorts with white daisies and she has just four front teeth. She is sitting in the sand throwing handfuls in the air while a guard stands to the side. The guard looks through her. The guard is a woman and she looks like me.
What is her name? I say.
Gladys, she says. Do you think she will remember this?
No, I lie.
I lie because I know they can detain us for months. I know this because another detained woman told me so. She is working with activists who are trying to get her out. The activists told her kids are not supposed to be detained more than twenty-one days, but the Obama administration is arguing that kids with their parents are different from kids without their parents and so the twenty-one days doesn’t apply. It’s all incredibly confusing. The woman has another daughter who is a US citizen. She just wants to get to her. Mothers with US citizen children have a better chance but still …
Which one is yours? the woman beside me says.
She is not here, I say.
What do you mean? She fidgets with her shirt.
I left my daughter with someone, I say. She was not picked up.
Then why are you here? She frowns at me.
I don’t know, I answer truthfully. They transferred me from Florida. I don’t know why they brought me to the family facility. I have no family with me.
You are lucky, she says. You are lucky your child will not remember this.
Your daughter won’t remember this, I say. I want to hold her hand but I don’t. She won’t remember this, I say again.
We all know that last week, this woman and her daughter were placed in an isolation room for two days. The isolation rooms are in the medical unit. They are meant for people with TB and other such diseases, but the guards use them for punishment. The guards punished the woman after a bed raid. These raids are unannounced; they often wake us in the middle of the night, scaring the children. The guards found the woman had hidden snacks in the room. She worried because her daughter has lost so much weight since landing here. She said the isolation room smelled of antiseptic. She said the isolation room had a smiling zebra painted on the wall.
In my bunk I have started a letter to Ana. I have scratched it into the metal above me with a paper clip. It starts Dear Ana, I am sorry. That’s all I’ve written. Dear Ana, I am sorry.
Here is a bird fact from Around the World in Birds: An Encyclopedia. You can find it under the entry “Bird Suicide.” In Jatinga, India, after the long monsoon months, come dark, foggy nights. On the darkest, the foggiest of these nights, hundreds of birds begin to descend the night sky, attracted to the lights below. The villagers capture them on bamboo poles. They are diving to their deaths, these mostly juvenile birds. Wildlife experts have studied the bird suicides of Jatinga, India, and they can’t find a scientific explanation. I imagine myself standing in the middle of a field, a field like the one behind my childhood home in Sonsonate, in El Salvador, and I look up and there are hundreds of baby birds raining down on me: hill partridge, green pigeon, emerald dove, necklaced laughing thrush, black drongo, burrowing parrot, burrowing parrot, I am covered in birds.
I tell you this because I threw a sheet over the chicken wire fence that contains us. I didn’t care if I got in trouble, but none of the guards saw. I wanted the sheet to land on the spikes, to make a softer place, a nest. I did not want a
