Hot Little Hands (27 page)

“You what?” he shouted over the music.

“She has a kid,” Akiko repeated. And the two girls laughed.

“Whoa,” the guy said, “that's wild.” He grinned approvingly, like she was doing it for a social practice class or a performance project. Then he went and talked to someone else.

And so Sabina's book had been out for a couple of years by the time Amelia found it under her pile, and tried to read it aloud to Henry one night at bedtime.

“Rainbow Cake & Yoo-hoo, and Other Balanced Meals,”
Amelia read off the cover. Then she opened the book.

“I love sugar cereals,”
the first chapter began.
“I love sugar cereals so much that the year I experienced my first bout of real freedom—I was eleven and my parents went away, and left us in the care of a crazy babysitter who was a junior at Vassar and had a penchant for giving herself acupuncture—I decided I would eat sugar cereal for every meal every day of that week. This was not an easy feat. Not because of Jasmine. She was in the bathroom carefully sticking needles into her temples. But because of my older brother Sergei. Who had a sweet tooth. And a proclivity for getting cavities. And who could never keep a secret. And who found me one day, outside in our tree house, devouring a bowl of Trix—”

“What's sugar cereal?” Henry asked. “What's devouring? Where are the pictures? What's—”

Amelia gave up and reached for one of his regular books, the one about the lighthouse and the children of New York. She left Sabina's book on the blanket beside her. She planned to finish the chapter when she got into her own bed that night but, as usual by that stage, she was too tired to do anything, and she fell asleep before she'd finished calculating how many hours she had of quiet before Henry was up again, singing in the living room. One second she was staring at the alarm clock, counting, and then her eyes were closed and the book fell out of her grasp and slipped down between the headboard and the wall. She found it there months later, wiped the dust off, and put it on the bookshelf. She would get to it later on, she decided, when she had more time.

G
allagher is working on his anger issues. Ellis has an infant son who is finally sleeping through the night. Skolski went to Penn State (so did his brother, his father, and his uncles) and he is very upset about the Sandusky scandal. Miller doesn't think men benefit from being married; he himself never resolved a single argument with his, thank God, ex-wife. The Albanian is excited to watch the fight tonight. Morris is on the phone with the relative of an elderly Romanian woman in a wheelchair. Coots is thirty-three and unmarried and, when in conversation, he involuntarily moves his lips as the other person is talking. He's the one fingerprinting me.

“Am I in trouble for something?” I ask as he uses his thumb to press mine down onto the screen.

“I'll explain later,” he says.

Out in the main area, with the line of officers sitting up behind the counter, and the rows of travelers sitting and waiting, Coots lifts my suitcase onto a long table and pulls surgical gloves onto his hands. He unzips the case and flips it open. Inside, my clothes are a tangle of T-shirts and cutoffs, and most of my shoes have escaped the plastic bags I shoved them into. Everything looks like it's peppered with sand. “Wow,” I say. “It was much neater when I left Istanbul. It must have got shaken up on the plane.”

He ignores me. He pulls my hand grinder out of the case, opens it, and sniffs it. “What's this for?”

“Coffee.”

He puts it on the table and holds up a scrap of paper. “Whose phone number is this?”

“A girl in Istanbul.”

“If I called this number right now, who would answer?”

“I guess that girl.”

“What's her name?”

“I don't know. She was chatting to me and my friend at a museum. She gave us her number in case we needed anything while we were in Turkey.”

“What did you need?”

“I think she meant if we needed advice about places to go.”

“This isn't a whole lot of clothing. Where's the rest of your clothes and belongings?”

“Some of it's in London, and some of it's in San Francisco. Oh, and I have a few things in LA, too.”

“You can pack this up now,” he says. “Bring it into that office when you're done.”

“Okay, but what for? What's happening now?”

“For an interview.”

“I'm a bit worried I'm going to miss my connecting flight. It boards in an hour.”

“Then you better hurry up.”

Are you there?
I text my sister.

Hey!
she responds a minute later.
You back in SF?

No I've been stuck at immigration for an hour. Maybe they think I have drugs or something from Turkey.

Maybe they heard your music and consider it an act of terror?

Haha maybe I'll show them a pic of your face and request political asylum.

“No phones,” Gallagher calls to me. “Put it away.”

Coots is sitting behind a desk when I come in. The office is bare except for the desk, two chairs, a desktop computer, and a window on the wall that I assume is a two-way mirror.

“Do you speak English well enough to understand me?” he says as I sit down.

“Sorry?”

“This is the interview,” he says. “The interview is beginning now.”

“Oh, can we start again?”

“Do you speak English well enough to understand me?”

“Yes.”

“Do you understand what I've said to you?”

“You mean, the question about whether or not I speak English?”

“Yes.” He lowers his chin toward his chest and glares at me from beneath his eyebrows. “Do you understand me?”

“Yes.”

“Where were you born?”

“England.”

“Are you a citizen of England?”

“Yes.”

Then he asks me if my mum is, if my dad is. He asks where my family resides, and if any of my relatives live abroad. “What is the purpose of your visit to the United States today?” he asks.

“Just a visit, I guess.”

“Which country or countries did you visit before your arrival today?”

“I was in Turkey for two weeks. Before that I was in Cyprus, at a conference. And before that I was in London for a month. And before that I was in San Francisco.” He's typing all my answers into the PC.

“Am I in trouble for something?”

“I'll explain it later. You used to live here.”

“Yes, I lived in California for six years.”

“What type of visa did you have at that time?”

“An E. E-40, I think?”

“That's not a visa category.”

“Oh. It was a student visa. Whatever the code is for that.”

“What line of work are you in?”

“I'm an editor-at-large for a film journal, and I teach now and then, at a few different universities.”

He asks me if I'm married, if I have any kids. He asks if I have a boyfriend. “Well—” I shift a little in my chair. “Kind of. I don't really know.”

“You don't know if you have a boyfriend?”

“Yeah, because—” I stop talking and his lips stop moving. “I don't know how much information you need. I was playing music with this guy, Lars. We thought we needed a fuller sound, so we could try to play bigger venues. So we got this guy Jacob to play trumpet with us. He's amazing, super talented. Lars made a rule that nothing could happen between me and Jacob because of the band, but then we did kind of start hanging out. Then we accidentally missed a few rehearsals and showed up late for a pretty important show. So then Lars said he'd wasted years of his musical life on me, and he left the band and started a new one. They're really bad, I saw them play. It's all kind of disastrous.”

Coots stopped typing thirty seconds ago. “So, you do not have a boyfriend.”

“Well—” I look at my reflection in the two-way mirror. If I'd known I was going to be interrogated today I might have boarded the airplane wearing something other than an oversized
NEIGHBOURS
T-shirt I usually wear to bed and a pair of tights. I look back at him. “Yeah, I guess not. I guess now I don't have a boyfriend or a band.”

The interview goes on, with Coots's lips moving as I talk, his typing ceasing when I'm only halfway into each of my answers. I'm waiting for him to realize that I'm not hiding anything, and let me go catch my flight, but it's hard to convince someone of your innocence when you don't know exactly what their suspicions are. At one point, Miller comes in and puts a stack of papers on the desk. The first page has a photo of me on it, and even upside down I can see it's a printout from the UC Berkeley website. Featuring the Amy Winehouse–style eye makeup everyone was trying and failing to pull off in 2006.

“There's more information online,” Miller says, “but I'm sure she'll be happy to tell you
all
about it.” He goes and stands in the doorway behind me. Coots leafs through the pages.

“Why didn't you mention any of this?”

“I did. Earlier, at the counter. That's why I initially came to the US. To get a PhD in cinema studies.”

Coots types something into the computer. I'm feeling relieved, like the pages will legitimize me in his eyes, so I am completely blindsided when he tells me the interview is over and I will not be going on to San Francisco, that I will be on this evening's flight back to Istanbul, or I will be going to jail.

“But I have a visa.”

“We just canceled your visa.”

“Why?”

“Because you have an intent to immigrate.”

“What?” I turn and look at Miller. His face is a blank, inscrutable wall, like the faces of all the officers here. I turn back. “What does that mean?”

“It means you're trying to make the United States your permanent home.”

“But I'm not. My family's in London. I'm about to apply for postdocs in Britain and Germany. I have evidence of that in my inbox. Can I show you?”

“No,” he says. “It won't make a difference. You're going back to Istanbul tonight.”

My vision grows dark and furry around the edges. I feel like I'm about to throw up, which surprises me. I haven't thrown up from anything but alcohol since I was fourteen. I keep expecting to wake up and find that I'm still on the airplane, up over the Atlantic, my head on a stranger's shoulder, dreaming this whole thing up.

“You can't just send me back to Istanbul.” My voice is getting higher now. “I don't know anyone there. I was traveling with a friend, but she's gone back to London.”

“Well, you can buy a ticket to somewhere else from there, or you can visit the US embassy in Turkey and see if they'll issue you another visa. But I doubt they'll do that.”

“I just got off an eleven-hour flight. You can't put me on another eleven-hour flight back to a city where I don't know anyone.”

“That's exactly what we're doing.”

“Can I please speak to the branch manager?”

“This isn't a bank, ma'am,” says Coots.

“Ha!” Miller says behind me.

“Can I please speak to the manager of the—Secondary Questioning Room?”

“She's leaving,” I hear Morris say outside the door. She comes in and stands over me. Morris is dressed like all the officers here: a short-sleeved navy shirt with a
HOMELAND SECURITY
patch on the sleeve, navy pants, a belt that holds a baton, a torch, and a gun in a holster. A nametag that reads:
MORRIS.
She has the stoniest facial expression of them all.

“What?” she says.

“I don't understand what's going on.”

“Nothing's ‘going on.' We're not letting you in.” She keeps looking at where my top is slipping down off my shoulder, and I keep pulling it back up.

“But I haven't broken any laws.”

“We looked at the dates of your visits, and it's clear that you've been coming in and out of the US for a while now, even after your school program was over.”

“But is that illegal if I was issued a visa and adhered to the rules of that visa?”

“I don't have time for these mind games,” she says.

“I'm not trying to play games. I have things in San Francisco. I have a storage unit. I have furniture I need to sell.”

“You shouldn't have purchased furniture in a country you apparently don't intend to immigrate to.”

“My computer's in San Francisco.”

“Have someone send it to you.”

“I don't understand,” I say. “I'm a law-abiding citizen. I mean, not of here, but of the world. I'm a law-abiding world citizen and I've never even been warned about this.”

“Well, lucky for us we caught you this time. When's that flight to Istanbul?” she asks Coots.

“Ninety minutes,” he says.

“I can't go back to Istanbul,” I say. “I feel like you think I'm some kind of wayward vagabond, but I don't just show up in cities unprepared and alone.”

“The flight to Istanbul's free, because the airline's obligated to take you back when you're not permitted entry. You can purchase a ticket to England for tonight instead, but it can't stop anywhere in the US on the way. I'm guessing it'll be around three thousand dollars at this point.”

“I can't afford that.” I start to cry.

She turns to Coots. “Print her up.”

Gallagher wants pretzels. Ellis has peanut butter pretzels, but Gallagher doesn't want that kind. The Albanian thinks Skolski should come watch the fight with him tonight, but Skolski thinks it will be too late after he gets home and cleans up. Also, Skolski doesn't really want to watch the fight. Ellis is meeting his wife for a late dinner. They're getting a babysitter. Ellis really likes his babysitter. She's sixteen and really great; the kids love her and she's helping Ellis plan a surprise birthday party for his wife. Miller's seen a photograph of the babysitter and his guess is that Ellis's wife doesn't like the babysitter as much as Ellis does. Ellis stares solemnly at his computer screen while Miller and Skolski laugh.