“My mom said we had to come in the back of the car trunk for me even though sometimes I miss my grandma and I had a dog in El Salvador.”

“I had a dog when I was little.”

“What was the dog’s name?”

“Matilda.”

Ana giggles and lays back. “Can you be my babysitter forever instead of Jesse?”

She knows her mother is right. She knows nobody is coming for Ana. Barefoot, she makes phone calls in the morning, T-shirt bunched at her hips, huddled in the hazy light of her room. She is not surprised to find the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services offices closed on Sunday mornings. But she is surprised the woman who answers the ICE hotline can’t find Ana’s mother in the system by name and asks for an Alien Registration Number in a monotone.

“You’re talking about an unaccompanied minor? Central America?”

“Well, no. The mother.”

“Oh, that’s good. Surge of unaccompanied minors. But if she’s got a guardian, then she’s probably in family detention. You got the alien minor’s number?”

“No, she’s—”

“Oh, well you can visit our website for more information.” The silence, when the woman hangs up, is unbearable.

Jeanette finds the numbers of immigration lawyers who are much more eager to speak. They are attentive. They have questions. How is she doing? they ask. How is she holding up? It’s a question Jeanette is used to. Her answer—“Fine”—is automatic.

“Oh, if only I had a dime for every mother taken away who can’t contact her kid, detention guards not even listening when she says she left a kid behind,” says one lawyer, whom Jeanette imagines for no reason as near retired and kind. It’s the dears she sprinkles: “Immigration is a civil matter, dear. It’s not criminal court. There’s no guaranteed phone call. There’s no public attorney.”

Jeanette can only squeak out an answer. Ana is at her kitchen table, drawing on blank sheets of printer paper. Jeanette has no crayons, no markers. Ana said she preferred a blue pen anyway.

“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.