The Secret Side of Empty (25 page)

“Listen, it’s going to be okay,” says the cop. “I’m going to need you to come with us now, and we’ll have someone talk to you. Then they’ll call your mom and talk to her about next steps.”

I stand there, too shocked to say anything or even to move. He puts his arm on my elbow. I start walking to the door. I try to look at everything, wondering if it’s the last time before they deport me. Because, of course, this is it. They’re putting my name into some system and it’s going to spit out that I don’t belong here. And I’ll be on a plane out of the country before I know it.

They put me in the back of a cop car. I figure we’re going to the police station, but they keep going, past the street it’s on to the highway. After about twenty minutes, he pulls up to a medical center. He parks and we walk to a door labeled “Primary Screen-ing Center.”

Inside it looks like a doctor’s office. Someone comes out to get me and I sit inside a room like an examining room. I wonder if they’re going to want to give me a physical or something.

Eventually, after what feels like an hour, a woman comes into the room. She’s got short blond hair, a patch of it shaved by her left ear. She’s got cargo pants and biker boots and a grown-up-looking pink blouse. She looks like she hasn’t decided if she wants to hang on to adolescence or go on with adulthood.

“So, hey. I heard you like to be called M.T. Can I call you that?”

“Sure.”

“So you know why you’re here.”

“Not really, no.”

“You know we got a call that you’d made some statements about harming yourself. And when the police officers responded, they felt maybe you needed to be assessed. Do you understand?”

“I guess.”

“Look, I know this is scary, but the best way for this to be over is for you to just talk to me straight, okay? Our job here is to decide whether you’re in trouble or not.”

In that case
. . .

“I’m fine.”

“Funny thing, that statement. It turns out that most people who are
not
fine say they
are
fine. So we’re going to need to talk a little bit more than that, okay?”

“I guess. My mother must be freaking out.”

“We all just want to make sure you get any help you need. If you need any. So, anyway, what about your mom? Do you want to tell me anything about her?”

“No.”

“Okay. So what do you want to talk about?”

“I want to talk about going home.”

“You like it at home?”

“I guess. It’s fine. I’m seventeen. Do you talk to a lot of seventeen-year-olds who like it at home?”

“I talk to a lot of everybody. But let’s focus on you. How are things at home?”

“Fine.”

“I’m getting a lot of ‘fine’s out of you.”

“Because that’s how it is.”

“So you want to tell me why you told your best friend that you wanted to kill yourself?”

There it is. Chelsea. I can’t believe it.

“That’s not what happened.”

“She just made that up?”

“She misunderstood.”

“Tell me how someone misunderstands, ‘I want to kill myself.’”

“I never said that. Not those words.”

“What
did
you say?”

“Nothing. We were just talking about next year and I was kind of trying to explain how everything is going to be different. She’s going to college.”

“But not you?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Jesus, is that grounds for being held here?”

“I’m just trying to understand what’s going on.”

“Nothing is going on.”

“You keep saying that.”

“I don’t know how to convince you otherwise.”

“Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe if you stop trying to convince me and just start telling me what’s up, we’ll get somewhere.”

I just stare at the little patch of shaved hair by her left ear.

She stands up. “Okay, listen, there is a bunch of paperwork associated with this kind of hold. So I’m going to send in a nurse to ask you some questions. Child Protective Services will probably be here in a few hours. And I need to have you assessed by a psychiatrist, too. So it’s likely that you’re going to be here overnight.”

“
What?
Overnight?”

“Yeah, I’m sorry, I know it’s a bummer. But we can’t get through all the assessments we need to get through right now. It’s Saturday night.”

“But then I can go home tomorrow?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Let’s worry about that tomorrow.”

“What do you mean
you don’t know
?”

“It depends on the assessments, the determinations we make about whether you’re a threat to yourself.”

“And if you decide I am?”

“We can hold you, yeah.”

“How long?”

“Let’s not worry about that, okay? Just talk to the nurse and let’s do this one step at a time.”

She takes me down the hall to another room. This one has a bed in it. It’s got no sheets. A silver toilet sits in the corner.

“This is a cell,” I say to her.

“It’s just a place where you can rest for a while if you want.”

“I don’t want to be here.”

“I know how this can feel. Let’s just have you talk to the people you need to talk to. You’ll be fine, okay?”

I sit on the bed. I can’t believe I’m in this terrifying place.

I
talk to nurses. I talk to Child Protective Services. I talk to a guy with an impossibly large mole on his face. I tell them what I think they want to hear. Finally, the lights go out in the room. I put my head down. I’m cold, but they won’t give me a blanket. I tuck my arms up into my shirt. I close my eyes. Sleeping is impossible. I wonder about my mother, what a mess she must be. I imagine Jose thinking I am some sort of criminal, that I did something wrong and that’s why the cops took me away. And maybe they’ve all been put into their cells already now that I was stupid enough to bring us to the attention of the police. Maybe they’re all sleeping on a cot in a detention center somewhere too. I am such a loser. It is all my fault.

I imagine Nate seeing me here. It feels like years ago that I was shopping for the fabric for my prom dress. Now I won’t make it to prom. I won’t make it to graduation. I won’t make it anywhere I want to go. I thought I had seen the worst of how things could be, but now I managed to make them even more of a mess.

In the morning, they bring me breakfast. Even if it didn’t look so gross, I couldn’t eat it. I drink the little container of orange juice.

Finally Patch comes back.

“Hey,” she says. Like we’re about to go to the mall together or something.

“Hey,” I say.

“I wanted to see how you were doing this morning.”

“I want to go home is how I’m doing.”

She laughs. “I get it. But let’s just go through things again, okay?”

“Okay.”

“I know it’s a pain, but I just can’t help but feel like there is something you’re not telling me.”

“There isn’t.”

“There is. You weren’t saying good-bye to your friend because she’s going to college four months from now.”

“I was.”

“I don’t think that was it. Do you see why that sounds like you’re going to kill yourself? A lot of people who are about to commit suicide say their good-byes.”

“That’s not what I was doing.”

“The way I see it, you’ve got a lot of the signs. Fatigue and loss of energy. You told Dr. Warren about that. Withdrawal from family and friends. Loss of interest in activities. The way your grades are plummeting. So I want you to tell me what’s up.”

She’s relentless. She won’t stop. Maybe if I tell her a little something, she will go way already. Or better yet, let me go away.

“I am sad, I’m frustrated, but I’m not going to kill myself.”

“You don’t think about it?”

“No. I mean, I don’t want to say yes and then you lock me up in here forever. I don’t think about it like I actually want to do it. I just want a solution.”

“To what?”

“To a lot of things.”

“Like what? Give me one.”

“I can’t.”

“Why?”

“Because bad things could happen to me and to my family.”

“Like what bad things?”

“Like, if I tell you about us . . . are you going to arrest me?”

“Arrest you for what? Have you committed a crime?”

“I think so, yeah.”

“If you want a lawyer, we can make sure you talk to one.”

“I don’t think a lawyer could help me.”

“Why?”

I might as well. She knows already anyway. I just want to get it over with.

“I’m illegal.”

“Illegal? You mean undocumented?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t care about your immigration status. That’s not a crime anyway. Is that what you meant when you said ‘crime’?”

“Yeah. But, wait, you seriously don’t care about my immigration status?”

“No.”

I can’t believe it
.
I put my face in my hands and the sobs come hard. Sudden. I feel the fear washing out of me, leaving me more tired than I’ve felt in a long time, but a little exhilarated, too. After a few more sobs, I’m not sure I’m going to be able to suck air through my nose again. I’ve never said this out loud before, and certainly not to someone who probably has the number to the people who could have me kicked out of the country programmed into her cell phone. I’ve imagined—dreaded—this moment a thousand times, but I’ve never thought it would be like this, with her saying that my immigration status doesn’t matter to her.

She puts her hand on the back of my shoulder. That makes me cry some more.

“Is that why you don’t want to talk to us?”

“You’re going to tell the cops about me and they’re going to deport me and my whole family.”

“We’re here to help. We don’t do that. You want some water?”

“Yes.”

She gets me some. It feels good, so cool going down.

“So now you want to tell me what’s up?”

“That’s what I meant when I was talking to Chelsea. That her life could go forward but not mine.”

“Because you’re undocumented. But you didn’t tell her that.”

“I can’t tell her that. I can’t tell anyone.”

“But you told me.”

“Because I figured I was done anyway. Might as well.”

She laughs. “You’re never done. So no one knows?”

“No.”

“That must be a pretty heavy thing to carry around.”

“I guess, yeah.”

“So do you want to die?” she asks.

“No. Look, to be honest, yes, I’ve thought about it, just kind of running all the options through my head. But not because I have a plan or because I want to die. I just want it stop being so hard. Do you understand what I mean?”

“Yeah.”

“Can I go home, then?”

“Yeah. I’m going to let you go today. But let’s talk a little longer first, maybe about some options. A little bit of a plan for you, okay?”

“Okay.”

M
Y
FATHER
PICKS
ME
UP
IN
THE
BORROWED
CAR
. I
T
IS
A
CHEERY
, sunny afternoon, which makes his mood all the darker. I reach for the backseat passenger’s side door, but he pushes open the front-seat door. “Up front,” he says. I get in.

He starts driving, his jaw twitching. He’s on the highway before he says anything. I wonder how far away he feels he needs to drive before he lets me have it good. I brace for a smack. I am on high alert, willing my face-covering reflexes to be faster than his hand.

“You think this is funny?”

“No.”

“You know we could have all gotten deported because of this?”

“I didn’t mean for anything to happen.”

“You didn’t mean. You didn’t
mean
. That’s your excuse for all your selfishness.”

“I just was talking to a friend of mine. She misunderstood me. It got out of hand.”

“Oh, okay. So now you’re telling people about our private business.”

“No. I was just telling her that I was sad that she’s going away to college and I won’t see her.”

“I suppose you’re telling these people lies about me, that I don’t treat you right?”

“You
don’t
treat me right.”

“Is that what you’ve been telling them?”

“I didn’t say anything about you.”

“Because you know if you get me deported, that means your mother and your brother go, too. Even if they let you stay.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You better watch your step. Keep your mouth shut. These people in this country are not your friends.”

“Are
you
my friend?”

“You don’t know anything. You want to stay here so much. For what?”

“Don’t you understand that I’ve never been anywhere else? Is it so weird for you to get that this is where I grew up? I wouldn’t know anything, not enough Spanish to make it in school, not the money, not the system, not how to get a job. Nothing.”

“All I know is that you never learn. Let me tell you something. Things are not going to end well between you and me.”