Chapter Three

“She was refused her stay,” Lidia, our lawyer, states, leaning forward on her desk. It’s the morning after the ICE raid, and I’m in Lidia’s office. “Your mom’s last visit—two months ago—they told her to start preparing to leave.” She sighs. “It was a courtesy, actually. Even giving her this much time. The officers know her by now. They like her.”

“You’ve got to stop it! Call them up! Tell them it’s a mistake!” I pace the small room and keep bumping into the coffee table stacked high with folders.

“Calm down, Rania. Please.”

“But I’m supposed to graduate in three weeks! Why now?”

“Rania! You’re making me dizzy.”

I drop down in a chair, my backpack mounded on my lap. I’d barely slept. Once the sun pushed through our blinds, I jumped out of bed, my mouth tasting as if it were filled with ash. Numb, I managed to drag Kamal to school, then text Fatima, who skipped our first class to meet at our favorite diner, so I could tell her that they’d taken Ammi away. We sat in the booth sipping coffee, raw, bewildered.

Now I ask Lidia, “They told her this when she did her last check-in?”

“Yes. You’ve had a removal order hanging over you for years. That’s what we’ve been fighting.”

So that’s why Ammi was late and strange that day. Ammi had always told me that even though we were denied asylum the first time, and again during our merits hearing, our appeal was going well. The board would surely understand. Look at who she was! The widow of a brave journalist. An impeccable background. A university degree. English-speaking. Posh English, even! “We’re the kind of immigrant they want.” Snap-shut, she’d sing, after a meeting with Lidia. “Just a few technicalities.”

When I explain this to Lidia, she looks at me sadly. “She told you that?”

I nod.

“And you believed her?”

That ash taste in my mouth again. “Why wouldn’t I believe my mother?”

Lidia takes a long draw from her mug with a silver bombilla, a straw, and sets it down. I’ve always liked Lidia, with her head of black curly hair, same as Ammi and me. She speaks in a quick, mash-up accent—Spanish and Southern—since she’s from Argentina, but she moved to Tennessee with her family as a teenager. “You should have seen me next to all the debutantes!” she laughs. “I didn’t fit in one bit.” The drink is mate, she’d once told me, which fuels her through hectic days.

I ask, “She was lying to me?”

“Not exactly lying. Just minimizing.”

There’s a heat growing around my cheeks, tightening my scalp. “What do you mean?”

“There have always been problems with her case. Getting testimony from others that she truly had to flee—”