I do not want my child here, where every child has a cough and the guards run their eyes over curves, hungry. I do not want my child here but I do not want her alone thousands of miles away. I want my child safe. If safe were a place, it would look nothing like any of the options, and I want to scream but I swallow, I want to claw but I smile, because I need to seem good. Because I need to seem worthy of something, something, some solution.

Don’t worry, the man says. She’s an alien too. She’ll go with you.

What do you mean? I say.

She’ll go to Mexico with you.

I am from El Salvador, I say. I am crying now.

To El Salvador then, he says.

What will happen to us? I say.

I think about how the orange of the bird on the wall is like the orange of my smock, my pants. How the orange could be the sun. How the bird could have swallowed the orange sun. A belly of sun.

You are in deportation proceedings, the guard answers. You know this.

So when will we go? I say. To El Salvador. When will we go?

It’s a process.

But why am I here if I will go? Why am I here if I will be deported anyway?

It’s a process, he says.

Beside the playground there is an open “recreation” space for the adults. Often the women will go there when the children are in school. Or sometimes a few women will take turns watching several of the children at the playground and the others will go on their own. I sit at a table with the other Salvadoran women. Beside us, another table, Guatemalans. Beside them, a table with fewer women: half Haitians and the other half I’m not sure. I think Chinese. The sun feels good on my skin after the cold of the office. Texas heat is different from Florida heat. Florida heat licks the skin. After work, I would wait for the bus that took me to the town house where I lived with Ana. I was always drenched by the time I got on the bus. I got used to the taste of sweat, licking my lips in the sun. I got used to waiting.

You look like you’ve been crying, says a woman named Maura. She looks so young. She has three daughters but only two are here with her.

I have been crying, I say.

She doesn’t ask why. She rubs my back.

Ánimo, says another woman, Alegra, who survived a bullet to the back. She was selling vegetables at her stand when the military started shooting at protesters. Ánimo, she says. Ánimo. Be strong.