Here is for families. Here is for mostly mothers and their children. The lawyers call it family detention. The papers they won’t translate call it Texas Regional Residential Center. I am alone. I don’t know where my daughter is—I hope still in Florida, safe somehow, or on her way here, if safe in Florida is not an option. I pray for her every night. I pray on the concrete floor at the side of my bunk until my knees are raw and tender and I can barely stand. Some nights, my knees bleed. There is a smear of red beside my bunk. I call the smear Ana. Ana is my daughter’s name. I fear I, too, am losing my mind. I don’t know why I am here and I am alone and I am praying to a god I’m not sure exists but if she exists she is surely a bird, surely a migrating bird doing battle, surely she will break these walls.

Dear Ana, I am sorry. I tried to save you. Dear Ana, I am sorry. I thought I could give you a better chance. Dear Ana, I do not know if I made your life worse. I do not write any of this.

I found my first bird book in the craft room. The women can go to the craft room with their children. There are tables like the tables in the cafeteria. There are crayons, markers, yarn, paper in different colors, safety scissors, glue. There are flyers on the walls about sexual assault with bold letters spelling KEEP DETENTION SAFE! There is a bookshelf with books and puzzles on a floor made of foam. The first bird book was called El mundo secreto de los pájaros. El mundo secreto de los pájaros said it was for middle-grade readers. There were pictures of all the birds it described. I still come here, to the craft room, when I am saddest. I read the book on the foam floor. I read it on the foam floor and I lie on my back and I feel the foam give way beneath me. I think, how soft Ana’s skin. How like bird down, her hair.

At first, I couldn’t stop talking about the canyon wren of North America. The canyon wren builds a pathway to its nest with thousands of stones. Imagine it, a pebble stone path winding through the canyons, the desert, and at the end a nest full of wriggling baby birds crying out for their mother, their mother who is hopping in the distance, pebble to pebble to pebble. I am a mother. I am a pebble in the distance. Or just another person with a problem in a world too full of problems to care much about one more person behind a wall, sitting in a children’s craft room, reading a children’s book. I am a pebble.