S is for Simon whose poor heart just stopped.
Katniss flips the guard over, zip-ties his wrists.
“Javier,” says the Prophet. “Estoy buscando a Javier.”
The children clamor and mill. A hurried meeting is held in the cage. The eldest children take charge.
“Nosotros queremos salir,” says one. We want out.
“Yes,” says the Prophet. “We’re here to save you. Simon.”
But Simon has gone deep down into himself.
S is for Simon whose body has dropped.
The Prophet calls to Katniss to get the keys and open the cage. She rifles Simon’s pocket, swings wide the gate, and then the children are pouring out, surrounding them, pulling at their clothes, clapping them on the back.
We’re children too.
A small heavyset boy with a bowl haircut takes Simon’s hand. He has the kindest eyes Simon has ever seen.
“Yo soy Javier,” he says. “Juice box. Juice box.”
*
He was born in a limbo camp on the other side of the border, the youngest of four. His parents had been there for sixteen months already, waiting for an interview. Blue tents and shipping containers, makeshift scoop lights dangling, the ground carpeted in empty plastic water bottles. If you climbed the camp’s one tree, you could see America across the Rio Grande. Every day you lined up for water, for food. Every day you lined up to talk to the lady with the clipboard. How much longer? Each child in Javier’s family had one outfit they kept in a ziplock bag. These were their interview clothes, ready at a moment’s notice, in case the lady with the clipboard said today was the day.
Spring came and went. Javier’s sister sickened and died when dysentery swept through the camp. Summer became fall. Javier started eating solid food. His first tooth came in. Finally the lady with the clipboard called their name. Today would be their interview for admittance to the United States of America. The children clamored as Mama and Poppy opened their ziplock bags, oohing at the bright colors of Mama’s dress, the sheen of Poppy’s suit. They stayed with their tía Maria as their parents hurried to the fence line and disappeared. Hot hours passed. The children waited as the sun crested and started to go down, the olders running wild.
When Mama and Poppy came back, they were smiling. Mama and Tía Maria cried and held each other. The judge had heard their case. Tomorrow they were going to America.
They settled in El Paso. Javier’s father got a job as an auto mechanic. His mother found work in an industrial laundry, cleaning hotel uniforms and gowns from the hospital. Javier’s brothers went to public school, riding the city bus back and forth. They were happy. Then something went wrong with their paperwork. A notice got lost in the mail, and they missed a deadline to file for permanent status. His father put on his ziplock suit and went downtown to see a judge, who remanded him to custody and began deportation proceedings. That night, Javier’s mother packed the children and took them to their tío Christopher’s house. She worried that ICE was looking for them. She quit her job at the laundry and found cash work as a maid in a motel, moving them into a one-bedroom apartment behind a grocery store. Javier turned four. He had a musical laugh and a brain for numbers.
Just before Christmas his father was deported. Sheriff Roy had been elected the month prior, and suddenly you had to be careful walking down the street. Sheriff’s deputies would raid the supermarket at random hours, trying to catch mothers shopping for groceries and fathers buying Huggies on their way home from work. After the elementary school on the east side got raided, Javier’s mother took the kids out of school. From then on, Javier spent his days at the neighbor’s watching SpongeBob.
When he turned seven, the neighbor was snatched up at a nail salon. A week later Javier’s mother got a new job, working on the estate of a very rich man. She put Javier in the car and drove the ninety minutes to Marfa every morning before dawn. On the way, she helped him practice his English, singing to songs on the radio. For eight hours, if the master wasn’t in, he would roam the grounds, looking for lizards and climbing the stone walls. His mother brought him water and beans and tortillas for lunch. If the master was there, Javier would lie in the shade under his mother’s car and read. He made stick people, tying the sticks together with grass and giving them names. His favorite was always Paolo, which was his father’s name. They spoke on the phone every few days, his father washing dishes now in a restaurant in Juárez. He was still appealing his deportation, but a resolution didn’t look good. When Paolo last spoke to a lady on the phone, she offered a hearing date five years in the future.