Gone in the Night

In honor of the asylum-seekers who fled for their lives from the unthinkable, only to be forced to leave once more, as our own government revokes their status and turns them out.

She was supposed to be hurrying.

Outside, she could hear the slamming of the car door as her husband put the final things inside, fitting them in like Tetris pieces around the boxes and the suitcases already crammed within the tight space of the vehicle they had purchased from the lot down the street for $1500, cash. She could hear the cry of her toddler, buckled in his car seat in the back, not understanding where they were going or why.

He wasn't alone in that. No one truly understood.

She was supposed to be hurrying.

She should have been out there already. Instead, she found herself standing in her bare feet on the cold laminate flooring, taking in everything around her open concept living room, dining room, and kitchen. Her dream home.

Memories of when they bought the house flooded her. It hadn’t looked like this then. The cabinets had been a dull brown then; now they were a crisp white, with only the occasional bit of peeling or dirty fingerprint. The countertops had been a discolored beige tile; now there was a slab of granite they had gotten on sale from her brother-in-law's store of reused stone. She always nagged her husband about using a cutting board so he wouldn’t scar it.

There, over by the doorway, there was a scratch in the paint. When they had brought in their new-to-them couch from Goodwill, they had stumbled, laughing, and the foot of the couch had run into the wall. The first chip in the white paint which she had spent a week painting. It had taken various coats of paint to cover over the pale pink that used to be there. They had thought there would be many more scratches to come over the years.

There wouldn’t be any, now.

She was supposed to be hurrying, but instead, she found herself rooted to the spot. Pink colored toenails, curling downward as though trying to dig into the soil beneath the foundation of their home. They always assumed one day they would replace the laminate flooring under her feet and the stovetop with the one burner that never really worked quite right.

There wouldn't be time for that, now.

Her husband had said, It's only things. We can replace them.

They weren't just things. There, by the bookshelf, was where her son had taken his first steps. Over there, the pantry, where he liked to hide and then burst out, startling her. There, on the floor, the stain from the dog's dishes; the dog who didn't live here anymore. The bathroom by the back bedroom was where she had taken the pregnancy test, then cried when the plus sign had appeared. The blanket on their bed, where they had made love, celebrating the life to come. The rocking chair, in her son's room, where she had nursed him as he had grown.

On the fridge was her son's first art from daycare, hanging with a magnet that had come in the mail, an advert for a local landscaper. Her son had spoken to the daycare workers in Spanish, but they hadn't understood him. Now she was trying to teach him English so they would know when he wanted something to drink or something to eat.

It didn’t matter now.

Not much of anything mattered, now.

Her unfocused gaze took in the picture frame over the fireplace they had never even used. Their family of three smiling, his parents standing behind them, their hands on their shoulders, faces stoic but proud.

They were gone now. Everyone was gone. Perhaps that was what kept her standing there. Everyone else had left already. Disappeared. By choice or not she didn't know. She didn’t like to think about it. Didn’t like to think about the mothers and the fathers and the grandfathers and the aunties and the children… Neighbors who had laughed with her as their bellies had swollen with child; travelers who had journeyed a great distance alongside her, dreaming of brighter futures in the land of opportunity; family who had offered tortillas and tomatoes even when they too had struggled to make ends meet.

Leaving their home years ago had been difficult, but inevitable. No hay vida en Guatemala, her grandmother had whispered to her across the old, wooden dining table. There's no future here. Your husband will be killed. You will be raped. Your children will be stolen to serve in the gangs. Go to the U.S., she had said. There's a possibility to live. 

It had been difficult to leave. The hardest thing she had ever done.

But this... this was possibly even harder. To find safety, hope, a community... and to have it all taken away, gone in the flicker of an instant, in the stroke of a pen, the blink of a cursor.

In her mind, memories played better than an old family video, faces and smiles and laughter and tears all mixing together, good times and bad times, celebrations and disappointments, all of it a whirl of moments. The prayers of her childhood swarmed through her mind, and she lifted her eyes to the ceiling. ¿Y ahora? What do we do? Where do we go?

They weren’t just things. They were echoes of days past, remnants of dreams and hopes. They were love and joy and happiness. They were new beginnings. They were answers to prayer.

But not anymore.

Because now, she was supposed to be hurrying.

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