Chapter 1

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The last night was the quietest.

Samuel Rafiq stood in the doorway of his bedroom and looked at the room the way a person looks at a photograph they are about to leave behind. The walls were still blue, the same blue his mother had painted them when he was eleven and wanted his room to look like the sea. He had been embarrassed by that color for years. Tonight, at eighteen, with his duffel bag on the bed and his backpack already zipped, he found the blue did not embarrass him anymore. It looked tender. It looked like something someone had done for him once, with love, for no reason except that he had asked.

From the kitchen, the smell of biryani came up the stairs and pulled him down.

His father was at the stove. Abbu had taken off his work shirt and was cooking in a white undershirt and the blue apron Samuel's mother had bought him, years ago, as a joke. The apron said KISS THE COOK in letters that had faded to the color of old gum. Abbu was not a man who looked natural in aprons. He was an accountant. His hands were precise and thin and usually holding a pen. Tonight his hands were holding a wooden spoon the size of a small oar, and he was bent over a pot of rice and lamb and saffron, muttering.

"The onions are not right," Abbu said, without looking up. "The onions are never right when I am in a hurry."

"Smells right," Samuel said.

"Smell is not the same as right."

Samuel came all the way into the kitchen. His mother was at the table, not helping, because she knew not to help. Maman had made the salad and then retreated with a cup of tea and the small white prayer book she kept in her cardigan pocket, and she was reading quietly, her lips moving, her eyes soft. When Samuel walked in she closed the book over her thumb to hold her place and smiled at him.

"Sit, azizam," she said. "Your father is performing."

"I am not performing," Abbu said.

"You are performing," Maman said, to Samuel, in the voice she used when she was tattling affectionately. "He has been performing for two hours. He added cardamom pods with tweezers. He counted them."

"Seventeen," Abbu said. "The number should be odd."

"Why?" Samuel asked.

"Because even numbers are for accountants and rice is not an accountant."

Maman laughed. It was a small, startled laugh, the kind that escaped her without her meaning to. Samuel had not heard it much this past month. This past month had been a long, careful silence between her and Abbu, not unfriendly, but careful, the way two people who used to be married are careful with each other when their child is in the room. They had been divorced since Samuel was fourteen. They lived ten minutes apart in the same Oakland neighborhood. They had agreed, without saying so, to be in the same kitchen tonight. The agreement was holding.

He had not said this out loud. It sounded, when he tried to say it, like a sentence someone else had written.

"Samuel," his mother said. "Come here."

He went to her. She put her hand on his cheek. Her hand smelled like rosewater and the lotion she had used since he was small, a lotion that came in a tin with a lid he had loved, as a boy, to pry off with his thumb.

"Sit with me," she said.

He sat. She kept her hand on his cheek for another second, then moved it, as though remembering he was eighteen and not eight, and laid it instead over his hand on the table.

"I want to pray over you," she said. "Now. Before we eat. Because after dinner there will be too much, and we will be tired, and I want to do this while I can see your face."

"Okay," Samuel said.

Abbu turned the heat down on the biryani and wiped his hands on the apron. He did not sit. He stood, respectfully, by the stove, his head slightly bowed. He was not a praying man, not in public, not in the way Maman was. He had not been to a mosque since before the divorce. But when Maman prayed in front of him he became still, the way he became still for the national anthem at baseball games, the way some people become still around the dead.

Maman closed her eyes.

"O Thou kind Lord," she said. "Thou hast created all humanity from the same stock. Thou hast decreed that all shall belong to the same household. In Thy Holy Presence they are all Thy servants, and all mankind are sheltered beneath Thy Tabernacle."

Samuel closed his eyes too.

"All have gathered together at Thy Table of Bounty," Maman went on. "All are illumined through the light of Thy Providence."

Her voice did not waver. She had said this prayer at weddings. She had said it at the memorial for her brother, Samuel's uncle Hossein, the year Samuel was twelve. She said it over hot food sometimes, without thinking, the way some families said grace. Samuel had memorized it before he had chosen to memorize it. It was in him the way the blue of his bedroom walls was in him.

"O God," Maman said, "make my son a shelter for those who have no shelter. Make him a listener to those who have no one who listens. Let him be soft where he would be hard. Let him be brave where he would be afraid. Protect his body. Protect his heart. Bring him home."

There was a silence.

"Ameen," Abbu said, from the stove.

"Amen," Samuel said, because that was the word he used.

Maman opened her eyes. They were wet but not crying. She kissed his forehead, quick, businesslike.

"Eat," she said. "Your father has been counting cardamom."

They ate at the small kitchen table with the salt and pepper and the crack in the tile. Abbu served Samuel first and served Maman second and served himself third. The biryani was very good. Abbu pretended, loudly, that it was not, and Samuel and Maman pretended, loudly, that it was not either, and they all laughed, and Samuel had three helpings. There was no television on. There was no phone on the table. There was just the three of them and a pot of rice and a small dish of yogurt and Maman's salad, which had pomegranate seeds in it because pomegranate seeds were what Maman put in salad when she wanted a meal to matter.

After dinner, Abbu washed dishes. He did not let Samuel help. He said, "This is my dish night. You get many dish nights where you are going. Tonight is mine."

Maman sat with Samuel on the back porch. The porch was small, concrete, with two plastic chairs and a potted lemon tree that was not doing well. The lemon tree had been Abbu's. When he moved out he had said, "Keep the tree. I don't have sun." Maman had kept it. It had produced exactly four lemons in four years. She watered it anyway.

The Oakland air was cool. A dog was barking three yards over. A plane was crossing the sky, high and silent, its red light blinking.

"That might be yours tomorrow," Maman said, looking up.

"It's going the wrong direction."

"They all look like they are going the wrong direction."

They sat for a while in silence. Samuel was aware of how short this silence was going to feel, later. He was aware that he would remember his mother's profile against the yellow of the kitchen window, the small half-moon of her earring, the way her hands lay in her lap palms up, the way they always did when she was thinking.

"I have something to tell you," Maman said. "It is not a big thing. It is a small thing. I want to tell you before you go."

"Okay."

"When I was twenty-one," she said, "I left Tehran. You know this."

"I know this."

"I left with my mother and my brother. My father stayed behind, because he thought it would be short, that we would come back. He did not come back. You know this too."

"I know."

"I got on a plane," Maman said. "I had a duffel bag. Green, like yours. It was my cousin's. He had been in the army. The zipper did not work well."

Samuel smiled, just slightly. "Okay."

"I tell you this because I want you to know that every family in the world is full of people who have gotten on planes and crossed things. Deserts. Seas. Borders. Rivers. It is not a rare thing, Samuel. It is the most common thing in the world. It is only rare to the person who is doing it."

She turned to him. Her face in the porch light was a face he had known every day of his life. He had never looked at it quite like this.

"The people you are going to meet," she said, "have been doing the oldest thing in the world. Do you understand me? You are not going to help the helpless. You are not going to save anyone. You are going to sit with people who are doing something human beings have always done. That is all. Be useful. Be small. Do not make yourself the story."

"Okay."

"Okay?"

"Okay, Maman."

She nodded once, as though she had been practicing this speech and was relieved to have gotten through it. Then she reached into her cardigan pocket and took out a small thing and pressed it into his hand. It was a prayer, folded, on a piece of paper the size of a playing card. He did not open it. He put it in his wallet.

"For when I am not there," she said.

"Okay."

Inside, Abbu had finished the dishes. He came to the back door and leaned in the frame, the apron gone, his white undershirt rumpled. He looked, for a moment, younger than he was, and Samuel saw, with a small pang, that his father was also a person who had once been eighteen and gotten on a plane.

"Samuel," Abbu said. "Come here a minute."

Samuel went. Abbu led him to the kitchen table and sat him down and sat down across from him and put both hands flat on the table like a man about to conduct a meeting.

"I have a speech," Abbu said.

"Okay."

"I have prepared it."

"Okay."

"I am going to say it and you are going to let me say it without interrupting."

"Okay."

Abbu cleared his throat. He looked down at his hands. He looked up.

"I do not pray the way your mother prays," he said. "You know this. I go to Friday prayers sometimes. Not often. I do not read the Qur'an every day. My father did. I do not. I am not a good Muslim, Samuel. I am a Muslim who is tired, and who works, and who loves his son. That is all I am."

"Abbu."

"Let me talk."

"Okay."

Samuel did not speak.

He paused.

Samuel was not going to cry. He was absolutely not going to cry. He pressed his thumbnail into his palm and did not cry.

"Okay, Abbu," he said.

"One more thing."

"Okay."

"Your mother is a better person than me."

"Abbu."

"She is. It is not a competition, but she is. She prays better and she loves better and she forgives better. You got the best of her. You got some of me too. The part of me you got is the part that shows up. You keep that part. You use it. You hear me?"

"I hear you."

"Good."

Abbu stood up. He went to the counter and opened a drawer and took out a small plastic container with a blue lid and put it on the table.

"Biryani," Abbu said. "For the plane. For tomorrow. In case you are hungry."

"They won't let me on with that."

"They will. I have checked. Solid food is allowed. No liquid. This is mostly solid. There is a little yogurt on the side in a separate thing." He produced a second, smaller container. "Under three ounces."

"You measured the yogurt."

"Of course I measured the yogurt. I am an accountant."

Samuel laughed. It was a clean, surprised laugh. Abbu smiled — a rare, full smile, teeth and everything — and then the smile sagged at the edges and became something else, and he turned away and pretended to look for something in a drawer that Samuel knew he did not need.

Later, when Abbu had gone home to his own apartment, and Maman had gone to bed, Samuel stood one more time in the doorway of his bedroom. The blue walls. The duffel. The backpack. On the nightstand, the small folded prayer from his mother and the small plastic container of biryani from his father, which he had insisted on refrigerating but which Abbu had insisted on leaving out because Abbu said a plane at five forty-five did not give refrigerated biryani time to come back to room temperature and cold biryani was a sin against the dish.

Samuel set his alarm for four-fifteen.

He lay down. He looked at the ceiling. He thought about Ronaldo, who he had not met yet, whose name he did not yet know. He thought about Maria, who he had not met yet. He thought about the young woman in the desert, whose name he would never know. He did not know he was thinking about them. He thought he was thinking about nothing, or about the airport, or about whether he had packed enough socks.

But the dead and the walking were already in him, already on their way toward him, and he was on his way toward them, and the blue walls of his childhood room watched him fall asleep the way they had watched him every night of his life, tender and without comment, for the last time.

In the morning, Maman drove him to the airport in the dark. She did not cry at the curb. She had promised herself she would not cry at the curb and she did not. She hugged him hard, both arms, and she said, "Eat something on the plane. I packed you an apple. It is in the front pocket."

"Abbu packed biryani."

"I know he did. Eat the apple too."

"Okay."

"Call me when you land."

"I will."

"Call me when you don't want to."

"I will."

She kissed his cheek. She got back in the car. She drove away. She did not wave because if she waved she would cry, and she had promised herself she would not.

Samuel stood at the curb with his duffel and his backpack and his ticket on his phone, and he watched her taillights disappear into the gray morning, and then he turned and walked through the sliding doors into the fluorescent cold of the terminal, and his service year began.

Tucson, when the plane landed, looked like a place that had been ironed.

Everything was flat and bright. The mountains stood up at the edges of the city as though someone had set them down as a decoration and then walked away. The air, when he walked out of the terminal, was the temperature of an oven door opening. Samuel, who had grown up in Bay Area fog and Bay Area sweaters, stood on the curb with his duffel at his feet and felt the heat enter his nose and his throat and his lungs the way water enters a boat with a hole in it — not dramatically, but with a seriousness that suggested consequences later.

A white pickup truck pulled up. It was dusty to the wheel wells. The driver leaned across the passenger seat and pushed open the door.

"Rafiq?" she said.

"Yes."

"Get in. AC's working today. It's a miracle."

She was in her late twenties, maybe thirty. Brown skin, black hair pulled back, a gray T-shirt with the organization's logo on the chest — a small stylized dove holding a key. She had a scar on her chin, a thin pale line, the kind people got from falling off bikes as children. Her name, she said, as Samuel climbed in, was Rosa.

"Rosa Delgado. I'm one of the field coordinators. I do pickups. I do water runs. I do most of the cooking at the office because the other coordinators are bad at it. Welcome to Tucson. You're the fourth one I've picked up today. How was the flight?"

"Okay."

"Okay meaning good, or okay meaning you don't want to talk about it?"

"Okay meaning good."

"Good. Buckle up. We've got a forty-minute drive."

The truck pulled away from the curb. Samuel put on his seatbelt. The AC was, in fact, working, though the vents made a noise like a small animal that wanted to be let out of a box. Through the windshield, the city flattened out into a long road lined with palm trees and billboards for personal injury lawyers and a chain restaurant promising the WORLD'S LARGEST MARGARITA. Rosa drove with one hand on the wheel and the other arm resting along the open window. She was not looking at him. She was watching the road.

"So, Samuel Rafiq," she said. "Oakland, right?"

"Right."

"What's your deal?"

"My deal?"

"Your deal. Why are you here. What did you study in high school. What do your parents do. Are you running from something. Are you running to something. The basics."

Samuel thought about this.

"I graduated in June," he said. "I deferred college for a year. I wanted to do service. I wanted to do it somewhere real. My parents — my mom is a nurse, my dad is an accountant. They're divorced."

"Noted."

"I don't know if I'm running from or to."

"Honest. Good."

"My mom is Bahá'í. My dad is Muslim. I'm — both, sort of. I was raised both."

Rosa glanced at him, quick, then back at the road.

"Both," she said.

"Both."

"How does that work?"

"Imperfectly."

She laughed. It was a short, surprised laugh, the kind people laughed when they had expected to be bored and were not.

"Imperfectly," she said. "Okay. I like you, Samuel Rafiq. I'm going to keep you."

The organization's office was in a converted bungalow in a neighborhood of other converted bungalows, some painted pink, some painted turquoise, most painted the color of dust. There was a driveway of white gravel and a front yard with a mesquite tree and a hand-painted wooden sign by the door that said, simply, LA CASA. The dove with the key was painted above the words, smaller than Samuel expected, as though whoever had painted it had not wanted the branding to take up too much room.

Rosa followed his gaze.

"Bahá'u'lláh," she said. “Notwithstanding His knowledge of what would befall Him, He arose to proclaim His message, suffered all tribulation and hardships from the people and finally offered His life as a sacrifice in order to illumine humanity—gave His blood in order to guide the world of mankind.”

"Who's the director?"

"Her name is Brigitte. You'll meet her at dinner. She's French-Haitian. She's been doing this for twenty years. She scares me a little and I have known her for four years. That's healthy, probably."

"Everybody," Rosa said, "this is Samuel Rafiq. He's from Oakland. He's the last one. Samuel, this is everybody. I'm going to let you figure out their names because I am bad at introductions and I want to go find coffee."

She left. Samuel stood there with his duffel.

"Hi," one of them said. A girl with dark curly hair and a nose ring and a denim shirt tied at the waist. "I'm Rosa. Different Rosa. Rosa Alemu. Hi."

"Hi," Samuel said.

"Sit anywhere," she said. "We've been here two hours. We have already exhausted all small talk. We have moved into the phase where we ask each other weird questions. Do you want to join the weird question phase, or do you want us to be normal again?"

"Weird questions," Samuel said.

"Thank God. Someone else who doesn't want to do normal. Okay. What's your weirdest fear?"

"My weirdest fear."

"Yes."

Samuel thought.

"Dentists," he said.

"That's a normal fear."

"Dentists whose gloves squeak."

"Better."

"Okay," said another one of them — a tall Japanese-American girl with a buzzed head and very long earrings. "I'm Maya. Maya Tanaka-Johnson. I'm going to South Africa in two weeks. This is my layover year of service. I'm only here for the orientation because our organizations are partnered. I'm only with you all for this week. Nice to meet you."

"Nice to meet you."

"Mine is accidentally calling a teacher Mom," Maya said, to Rosa Alemu, returning to the game. "It happened to me in fourth grade. I have never recovered."

"Oh, that's a good one."

The other four introduced themselves in a rolling, informal way as Samuel sat down on the edge of a couch. There was Idris Chen, a slight Chinese-Jamaican guy with wire-framed glasses and a soft voice, who was going to do hospice work — not here, in Oakland, of all places, starting in a month; he was also just passing through for orientation. There was Noor Hosseini, Iranian-American like Samuel's mother, with a wide face and a wide laugh and a braid down her back; she was going to Guyana to work on girls' education. There was Theo Bergman-Adeyemi, half-Swedish, half-Nigerian, freakishly tall, with the kind of blonde-streaked brown hair that looked chlorinated; he was going to Mongolia. And there was Sky Marshall-Patel, who Samuel almost did not notice at first because she was sitting on the floor cross-legged at the far end of the couch with her back against a chair and her eyes on her shoes. When she looked up he saw she was younger than the rest of them, maybe seventeen, freckled, with pale red-brown hair in a loose braid and the kind of face that went from forgettable to striking the second time you looked at it. She was going to Iceland, she said, to join her family, who had moved there as Bahá'í pioneers two years ago. She had come back to the States for her senior year. Now she was going back.

"My brother was supposed to do this program," Sky said. "My older brother, Tanner. He was going to do it the year he graduated but he went to college straight instead. He told me I should do it if I got the chance. So."

"So," Rosa Alemu said, gently.

"So here I am."

Of the seven of them, only Samuel and Rosa Alemu — the other Rosa, the volunteer Rosa, not the staff Rosa — were staying in Tucson for the full nine months. The others would scatter. They would stay in email touch. They had a WhatsApp group already, made that morning, called SERVICE YEAR COHORT which someone had renamed SERVICE WEAR BROCCOLI as a joke and then it had stuck.

Brigitte, the director, came out of one of the back offices at six o'clock and gathered them all at the long dining table.

She was a small woman, compact, with silver-black hair cut very short, and she wore a loose white linen shirt and blue jeans and a pair of reading glasses on a beaded cord around her neck. Her skin was the color of wet bark. When she spoke, her voice had a musical lilt to it — French, but not French-from-France, a rounder and warmer French, Haitian French, with the consonants lived in. She said hello to each of them by name. She had memorized their names from their applications. Samuel felt, when she said his name, that she had read his application carefully and was not fooled by it.

"Welcome," Brigitte said, when they had all sat down. "For some of you this is a stop on the way to somewhere else. For two of you, Samuel and Rosa, this is home for the next nine months. I am not going to talk at you tonight. We will do training properly tomorrow. Tonight I am going to ask you three questions, and we will go around the table, and you will answer them honestly, or you will lie, and either way I will know, and either way I will welcome you. Is that acceptable?"

"Yes," Samuel said, before he could think about whether it was acceptable.

"Good. The questions are these. One. Why are you here. Two. What are you afraid of. Three. What do you already know is going to be hardest for you. We will go around. Rosa, you start."

Rosa Alemu took a breath.

"I'm here," she said, "because my grandmother taught me to read. She was illiterate herself — she never learned — and she walked me to the library every Saturday when I was small because she said it was the one thing she could not give me that she wanted to give me. I want to be the kind of person who gives other people that. That's why I'm here."

"Afraid of?"

"Being condescending without knowing it. I think I will be. I am trying not to be. I am afraid I will be anyway."

"Hardest?"

"Rural Mississippi is not Ethiopian-American Oakland. I am going to be a weird black girl to everybody, and not the right kind of weird black. I am going to be read as an outsider by people I am trying to help. I know I am. I know it is going to hurt."

Brigitte nodded once. "Thank you, Rosa. Next."

Maya went. Then Idris. Then Noor. Then Theo. Then Sky, whose voice was so quiet Samuel had to lean in. Sky said she was afraid of failing her family. She said the hardest thing would be the dark — Iceland in winter had four hours of daylight. She said her brother had told her that was the part that would kill her if she let it.

Then it was Samuel.

"I'm here," he said, "because I have been told all my life that service is a spiritual practice, and I have never tested whether that's true for me or whether I was just repeating what I was taught. I want to know if it's mine."

Brigitte watched him without speaking.

A small silence.

"Go on," Brigitte said.

"I think — I think the hardest thing for me is going to be that I don't actually know how much I can take. I have never been tested. I have had a soft life. I have been loved. I don't know what I am under pressure. I don't know if I am a person who holds together or a person who breaks. And I am going to find out, and I don't know which one I am."

He looked at the table.

"That is a very good answer, Samuel," Brigitte said. Her voice was neither kind nor unkind. It was careful. "It is also a dangerous answer. Most people who come here wanting to find out whether they break end up breaking. The people who don't break are the ones who come here wanting to be useful. Do you hear me?"

"Yes."

"Do you hear me, though? Not with your head. With your stomach."

"Yes."

"We'll see," Brigitte said. "Welcome."

The next three days were orientation. Samuel filled pages of his brown cloth notebook. He learned the names of shelters and stations. He learned the basic vocabulary of asylum law — credible fear interview, Form I-589, one-year filing deadline, Title 42, parole, withholding, removal. He learned the names of countries whose nationals were currently being processed at the nearest port of entry — Honduras, Guatemala, Venezuela, Haiti, Mauritania, Senegal, Nicaragua, Cuba, Mexico, Ecuador, and an increasing number from Russia and China. He learned the vocabulary of trauma — hyperarousal, dissociation, the way grief could masquerade as anger. He learned what not to ask — do not ask what happened to you, do not ask why you left, do not ask about the journey unless they bring it up. He learned what to ask — are you hungry, are you thirsty, can I get you a blanket, is there someone I can call.

He learned about consultation. It was a word the organization used, with a capital C, and it came from Bahá'í practice, though at the office it had been stripped of its specifically Bahá'í wrapping and turned into a protocol anyone of any faith or no faith could follow. Consultation, Brigitte said, was the opposite of debate. In debate you tried to win. In consultation you pooled your information and then let the best idea emerge, and you did not care whose idea it was, because once an idea was spoken it belonged to the group. Consultation required that you not be attached to your own opinion. It required that you spoke frankly and heard frankly. It required that you assumed the best of the person across from you. "It is exhausting," Brigitte said, "and it is the only thing that works."

They practiced consultation in small groups. They were given made-up problems. Samuel was given a problem about a shelter with a leaking roof and a limited budget and three competing proposals, and he argued for the middle proposal, and then he listened to Rosa Alemu argue for the cheapest proposal, and he realized she was right, and he said so, and she smiled, and he felt the small strange feeling of having let go of something without losing it.

"Today's the day, Rafiq. You're going to Nogales. You're going to the shelter. You're going to be there for the next nine months. Eat a big breakfast."

"Okay."

"Are you scared?"

"Yes."

"Good," Rosa said. "If you weren't I would leave you here."

The shelter was a white stucco building on a dead-grass lot half a mile north of the border wall, and from its roof, on a clear day, you could see into Mexico. Samuel did not go up on the roof on his first day. He did not go up on the roof for two weeks. On his first day he did not raise his eyes higher than the faces of the people in front of him, because the faces in front of him were more than he knew what to do with.

The building had once been a small auto-parts warehouse. You could still see, on one exterior wall, the faded painted words A & R PARTS in orange letters that had aged to the color of rust. The organization had leased the building four years ago and converted it — a dorm wing with metal bunks along one long wall, a dining area with folding tables, a kitchen that was too small for the number of people who needed to eat, two bathrooms that had once been one bathroom, a medical room, a clothing room piled with donated T-shirts and jeans and children's shoes, and a front office with two desks and a laminated sign taped to the door that said BIENVENIDOS in careful hand lettering. The shelter could hold seventy people. On the day Samuel arrived it held one hundred and twelve.

Rosa walked him in through the side door, past a volunteer who was mopping, past a toddler who had fallen and was sitting on the tile looking up at the ceiling with the specific expression of a child deciding whether or not to cry. Rosa bent down, gave the toddler a small high-five, and the toddler decided, visibly, not to cry. She stood up and kept walking.

"That's Lupita," Rosa said. "She's two. Her mother is Maricela. They came three days ago. Her father didn't make it. Don't ask about the father. If Maricela wants to tell you, she'll tell you. Come on."

The dining area was loud. Samuel counted, roughly, forty adults and a great many children. The adults were eating beans and rice and tortillas off paper plates and drinking water from plastic cups. They looked up when Samuel came in, some of them, and then they looked away again. He understood, without being told, that they were tired of being looked at by new volunteers. He understood, without being told, that his face at this door was not unusual. Other young Americans had stood in this door before him. Other young Americans would stand in this door after him.

Rosa handed him a blue apron and a name tag.

"Kitchen first," she said. "You don't get to be in the front until you've done dishes."

"Okay."

"Don Javier runs the kitchen. He is from Guanajuato and he has cooked in this shelter for three years. He will tell you what to do. You will not tell him what to do. If you forget and tell him what to do, he will look at you with enormous sad eyes and I will not be able to save you."

"Okay."

"Go."

Don Javier was a small, wiry man in his sixties with silver stubble and hands like tree roots. He was standing at a stove with three enormous pots of something bubbling. He looked Samuel up and down once and pointed to a tower of dirty plastic cups in the sink.

"Lava," he said. Wash.

"Sí."

"Agua caliente primero. Luego jabón. Luego enjuagar. Rápido. Sin romper."

Hot water first. Then soap. Then rinse. Fast. Without breaking.

"Sí, señor."

"Muy bien."

Samuel washed cups. He washed cups for ninety minutes. His back began to hurt at thirty minutes and his back stopped hurting at sixty minutes and by ninety minutes his back had become a thing he did not have. He did not speak to anyone. People came in and out of the kitchen carrying dirty dishes. Don Javier said "gracias" each time and gave Samuel a small nod each time a tower got moved from the sink to the drying rack, as though Samuel were earning, one cup at a time, the right to be in this kitchen.

At ten-thirty Don Javier clapped his hands once and said, "Descanso." Rest.

Samuel dried his hands on the apron. His fingers were pruned and red. Don Javier handed him a cup of black coffee from a tall dented thermos and then, as an afterthought, reached into a pocket of his apron and produced a small foil-wrapped square of something, which he put on the counter next to the coffee. Samuel unwrapped it. It was a caramel candy.

"Para el ánimo," Don Javier said, and went back to his stove.

Samuel carried the coffee and the candy out the back door and sat on the concrete step behind the kitchen. The sun was ferocious. He drank half the coffee in one swallow. His stomach understood, from the coffee, that he had not eaten since breakfast at six. He unwrapped the candy. He ate it slowly, the way a person eats something he has been given without expecting to be given anything.

A figure came around the corner.

A young man. Brown skin, black hair cropped short, a faded red T-shirt that said PROPERTY OF LAKELAND COUGARS across the chest, though he was clearly not from Lakeland. He was Samuel's height. He was maybe a year older. He had a small scar on his lower lip and a larger scar, pink and healed, that ran from his right elbow up the inside of his forearm and disappeared under the sleeve of the T-shirt. He was holding a paper plate with nothing on it and a plastic cup with water.

"Perdón," the young man said. "¿Está ocupado?" Is this occupied?

Samuel scooted over.

"No, no. Siéntate."

The young man sat. He set the cup and the plate on the concrete next to him. He did not look at Samuel for a moment. He was catching his breath, though he had not been running. Samuel understood, without being told, that catching one's breath was something some of the people here had to do for no reason, or for a reason that was always there.

"¿Eres nuevo?" the young man said. Are you new?

"Sí. Hoy es mi primer día."

"¿De dónde eres?"

"Oakland. California."

"Ah. California."

"¿Y tú?"

"Honduras. San Pedro Sula."

They sat for a moment.

"Me llamo Samuel."

"Ronaldo."

They did not shake hands. They nodded to each other, the nod of two young men meeting on a concrete step. Ronaldo picked up his cup and drank from it slowly. Samuel noticed that Ronaldo's hand shook a little, very little, when he held the cup. He noticed and then he looked away, because he did not want Ronaldo to know he had noticed.

"¿Cuánto tiempo has estado aquí?" Samuel said. How long have you been here.

"Dos días."

"¿Y antes?"

Ronaldo did not answer for a moment. He was looking at the cracked concrete between his shoes.

"Antes, caminé."

Before, I walked.

"¿Cuánto tiempo caminaste?"

"Tres meses."

Samuel did not know what to say to that. Three months. He had been on an airplane this morning, six days ago. Before that he had been in his blue bedroom. The distance between his life and the sentence Ronaldo had just spoken was a distance he could not immediately cross in his head, and he sat for several seconds without speaking, because he knew that if he spoke too quickly he would say something stupid.

"Tres meses es mucho," he said, finally.

Ronaldo made a small sound. It was not a laugh. It was the sound a person makes when they have been given, by a stranger, a sentence they can accept.

"Sí," Ronaldo said. "Es mucho."

They sat.

"¿Tienes familia aquí?" Samuel said. Do you have family here.

"No. Mi madre está en San Pedro Sula. Mi hermana también."

"¿Hermanos?"

"Tenía un hermano. Se llamaba Josué."

Tenía. Past tense. Samuel understood, from the tense, what had happened to Josué. He did not ask. He had been told three days ago, in orientation, do not ask.

"Lo siento," Samuel said. I'm sorry.

Ronaldo nodded. He drank from his cup.

"¿Y tú?" Ronaldo said. "¿Familia?"

"Mi madre y mi padre. En California. Están divorciados. Soy hijo único." My mother and father. In California. They're divorced. I'm an only child.

"Hijo único. Suertudo."

Lucky.

He said, "Sí. Suertudo."

Ronaldo smiled. It was a small smile, crooked, and it had the scar on his lip in it.

"No te preocupes, gringo," Ronaldo said. "No te estoy acusando."

Don't worry, white boy. I'm not accusing you.

Samuel laughed. It was a small surprised laugh. He had not expected to laugh on his first day at the shelter, and he was aware, as he did it, that he might not laugh again for a while, and he allowed himself this one.

"Gracias," he said.

"De nada, hermano."

"Mañana. Si estás aquí mañana. Podemos hablar otra vez."

Tomorrow. If you are here tomorrow. We can talk again.

"Estaré aquí mañana," Samuel said. I will be here tomorrow.

"Bueno."

Ronaldo went back inside.

Samuel sat on the step one more minute. He looked at the wrapper of the caramel candy in his hand. He folded it, very carefully, into a small square, and put it in the front pocket of his jeans. He did not know, at the time, why he was keeping it. Later, going through his clothes at the end of the day, he would find it and feel a brief unexpected tenderness and not throw it away. Later he would put it in the front pocket of the brown cloth notebook. Later it would sit there, flat and foil-silver, for nine months. Later still he would look at it, on a plane home, and remember Don Javier, who was still alive, and Ronaldo, who he would never see again.

At the end of the day, after dinner had been served and cleaned up and the children had been put down in the dorm wing and the adults had gone off by ones and twos to the metal bunks that were not enough for all of them, Rosa Delgado found Samuel in the back office where he was sitting with a cup of water and his notebook open to a blank page.

"Well?" she said.

"Well what?"

"Well how was day one, Rafiq."

Samuel thought about Ronaldo. He thought about the caramel candy. He thought about the ninety minutes of cups. He thought about the toddler Lupita, and about Maricela, who he had not met, whose husband had not made it. He thought about the young woman, already dead in the desert, whose body he did not yet know he would find tomorrow.

"I think I'm going to be okay," he said.

Rosa looked at him.

"You think that now," she said. "Come back in a week."

RONALDO. HONDURAS. SAN PEDRO SULA. WALKED THREE MONTHS.

He looked at the line. He did not know, at the time, that this was the first line of a logbook. He thought he was just writing down a thing so he would not forget it.

He closed the notebook. He went to find the room where he would sleep.

Samuel had taken Spanish for five years.

Advanced.

On his second morning at the shelter, Samuel stood in the intake area with a clipboard and a paper form, and a woman of maybe forty was sitting in front of him telling him, in rapid Honduran Spanish, what had happened to her on the bus from Tapachula, and he was understanding approximately one word in four.

"Puede repetir, por favor," he said.

She repeated.

He understood approximately one word in three.

"Mas despacio, por favor."

She spoke more slowly, but more slowly in her own voice, which was still faster than any voice he had heard in AP Spanish. She used words he did not recognize. She used words that were not in the dictionary. She used words that were in the dictionary but that she was using to mean something other than what the dictionary said. She said chamba, which he thought meant job, but the way she said it meant something else, something angrier. She said hueco, which he knew meant hole, but she used it to mean a specific kind of hiding place he did not know the word for in English either. She said verguenza, which meant shame, but she said it as though it were a noun she was carrying in her pocket, a thing she could take out and set on the table.

Samuel wrote down what he could. He asked her to repeat. He asked her to slow down. She was patient with him the way adults were patient with children they did not know. After ten minutes of this a staff member named Lidia came up behind Samuel and put a hand gently on his shoulder and said, in English, "Switch."

Samuel stood up.

Lidia sat down. She said two sentences to the woman. The woman cried. Lidia produced a tissue, and another, and in five minutes had the form filled out, and in ten minutes had the woman laughing about something, which Samuel had not even known was possible, and in fifteen minutes had walked the woman over to the dormitory wing and introduced her to another woman and left her there, in safe hands.

Lidia came back. She was maybe thirty. She had black hair and a black shirt and no-nonsense glasses.

"Don't feel bad," she said, in English.

"I wrote on my application that I was advanced."

"Everybody writes on their application that they are advanced. I read your application. I would have written the same thing."

"I can't understand them. I can't understand anyone."

"You'll understand them in three weeks. I've seen it a hundred times. The brain catches up. Right now your brain is still playing conjugation tables. In three weeks your brain will stop playing conjugation tables and start listening for meaning. You'll hear the melody. You'll stop hearing the words."

"Okay."

"One rule."

"Okay."

"Never fake it," Lidia said. "Never nod as if you understand when you don't. They will know. They always know. And then they will feel like they are on their own, and we have failed them. If you don't understand, you say, 'Perdon, no entendi. Puede explicarme otra vez?' You say this a hundred times a day if you have to. Nobody here will judge you for it. They will respect you for it. Yes?"

"Yes."

"Go wash your face."

He washed his face. In the bathroom mirror he looked at himself. His eyes were bloodshot. He had slept about five hours on a metal cot. He looked, to himself, both very young and already slightly older than he had looked in the mirror in Oakland. He did not know how both could be true. He splashed more water. He went back out.

He did intake for the next four hours. He asked Puede repetir approximately forty times. He wrote down names he wasn't sure he had spelled right and double-checked them with the people sitting across from him. He learned, by the tenth conversation, that one of the ways people showed kindness to someone who was struggling to understand their language was to look at them very steadily and speak very deliberately and not change the subject abruptly. He learned that people who had walked for months to get here had a quality of patience that Americans did not have, not because they were naturally more patient but because they had survived situations in which impatience had cost them. He learned that almost everyone who came across the intake desk, at some point in the first two minutes, said "Gracias" to him for no reason that he had earned. He learned to say "De nada" without adding anything to it, because every time he added something — "Oh, it's nothing," "Oh, I haven't done anything yet," "Oh, you don't have to thank me" — the person across the desk looked at him as though he had just made the moment slightly worse. He learned to receive thanks. He had not known this was a skill.

That afternoon, at three, there was a break, and Samuel went to the back step where he had sat with Ronaldo the day before. Ronaldo was there.

"Gringo," Ronaldo said, lifting a hand.

"Ronaldo."

"Como vas?" How's it going.

"Mal," Samuel said. Bad. "Mi espanol es terrible."

"Si, es terrible."

Samuel laughed. It was a laugh with relief in it.

"Tu no ayudas," Samuel said. You're not helping.

"No es mi trabajo ayudar," Ronaldo said. "Es mi trabajo burlarme." It's not my job to help. It's my job to make fun of you.

He sat down. He had a plate today. There was rice on it, and beans, and a tortilla folded into quarters. He offered half the tortilla to Samuel. Samuel shook his head. Ronaldo insisted. Samuel took it. They sat and ate.

"Puedo preguntarte algo?" Samuel said. Can I ask you something.

"Depende."

"Como aprendiste ingles?" How did you learn English.

Ronaldo looked sideways at him.

"No hablo ingles."

"Si hablas. Ayer dijiste 'don't worry.'"

Ronaldo laughed. It was the first real laugh Samuel had heard out of him, a surprised laugh, slightly dry, like something cracking.

"Eso no es ingles," Ronaldo said. "Eso es television."

"Television cuenta."

"Tal vez."

"Dime."

Ronaldo chewed a bite of tortilla, thoughtful.

"Mi tio trabajo en Houston," he said. "Por dos anos. Antes de que lo deportaran. Regreso con un poco de ingles. Me enseno palabras. Me enseno a decir 'good morning' y 'thank you' y 'where is the bathroom.' Me enseno las groserias." My uncle worked in Houston. For two years. Before they deported him. He came back with a little English. He taught me words. He taught me good morning and thank you and where is the bathroom. He taught me curse words.

"Las groserias primero, claro."

"Siempre primero."

They sat.

"Que groserias sabes?" Samuel said.

Ronaldo told him. Samuel laughed. He corrected one of them. Ronaldo took the correction gravely, the way a student takes a note from a teacher he respects.

"Okay," Samuel said. "Te voy a ensenar una cosa." I'm going to teach you something.

"Que?"

Samuel thought. He did not want to teach a curse word. He wanted to teach something that mattered.

"'I see you,'" he said.

"I see you."

"Ai si yu."

"En ingles, cuando decimos esto a otra persona, no solo significa que la vemos con los ojos. Significa que la entendemos. Que la reconocemos. Que existe para nosotros. Es una cosa que se dice cuando alguien se siente invisible."

In English, when we say this to another person, it doesn't just mean we see them with our eyes. It means we understand them. That we recognize them. That they exist to us. It's something we say when someone feels invisible.

Ronaldo chewed slowly.

"Ai si yu," he said again, to himself.

"Si."

"Me gusta."

"Bueno."

"Gracias, maestro."

"De nada."

A pause.

"Ai si yu, gringo," Ronaldo said.

Samuel did not know what to say to that. He looked down at his tortilla. His eyes got hot and he blinked until they were not hot anymore, and by the time he looked up again Ronaldo was busy with his beans, pretending, kindly, not to have noticed.

He closed the notebook.

He slept. He dreamed in Spanish. Badly. But in Spanish.

On the morning of the water drop, it was still dark when Rosa came for him.

Four-forty, by Samuel's phone. He had not been sleeping. He had been lying on his back in the volunteer dorm, looking at the ceiling, which was the same kind of acoustic tile he had looked at in every classroom of his life, and he had been counting the small brown water stains on the tile — there were eleven — and he had been not thinking about anything. When Rosa's hand touched his shoulder he did not startle. He was already partly awake the way some people are partly awake at four in the morning when they know something is coming.

"Up," Rosa whispered. "Quiet. Don't wake the others. Meet me at the truck in ten."

He pulled on jeans and a long-sleeved shirt over his T-shirt. He pulled on hiking boots he had broken in over the past week walking to and from the shelter. He pulled on a baseball cap that had been his father's, navy blue, no logo. He put the brown cloth notebook into the pocket of his jacket. He put two granola bars in the other pocket. He filled a reused water bottle at the tap and carried it with him.

Rosa was standing by the pickup with a headlamp in her hand, checking a list on a clipboard. The bed of the truck was full of gallon jugs of water, maybe sixty of them, neatly strapped under a cargo net. The jugs glowed a pale blue in the security light on the eave of the shelter.

"You good?" Rosa said.

"Yes."

"You've had water?"

"Yes."

"You've eaten?"

"I have granola bars."

"Eat one now. Eat the other at nine. Eat when I tell you to eat. Do not run out of water. Do not go anywhere I do not tell you to go. Do not pick up anything off the ground unless I say so. Do not touch any body of water, running or standing, unless I say so. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"We are going to drive about an hour and a half. Then we are going to park. Then we are going to walk. The walk will be five, six hours total. In and out. You will not take off your long sleeves, you will not take off your hat, you will drink water every fifteen minutes even if you do not feel thirsty, especially if you do not feel thirsty. We are going to place water jugs at eleven predetermined points on a known migration trail. The points are marked on my GPS. You are going to carry your jugs and I am going to carry mine and we are going to do it as quickly as we can and we are going to get out. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"One more thing."

"Okay."

"We might find a person," Rosa said.

Samuel looked at her.

"Alive or dead," Rosa said. "It has happened to me four times in three years. If we find a person alive, we give them water and shade and we call for a medical response and we stay until help comes. If we find a person dead, we do not touch the body, we note the location, we take a photograph of the body from a distance, we call the authorities, and we wait. We wait because we do not leave the dead alone. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"Do you understand, though?"

"Yes."

"Okay."

She clapped him once on the shoulder. It was not a gentle clap. It was the clap of a person sealing a promise.

They drove in the dark. Rosa did not play music. She drove fast on the empty highway and then slower on a county road and then much slower on a dirt road that became less of a road and more of an agreement between the truck and the desert. The headlights pushed a cone of pale yellow into the creosote. Every so often a pair of animal eyes caught the light and vanished. The sky began to go from black to blue to a pale pink that was not yet pink, more the idea of pink, the color a piece of paper turns near a flame. By the time Rosa parked the truck, the sun had not risen, but the world had become visible.

She killed the engine. They got out. The silence was enormous. It was a silence Samuel did not think he had ever heard. In Oakland there was always a hum — freeway, a plane, a neighbor's generator, something. Here there was nothing. He could hear his own blood. He could hear Rosa's boots on the gravel when she walked around the truck. He could hear the elastic of her backpack strap snapping against her hip.

She loaded him up. Three gallon jugs for him — eight pounds apiece, twenty-four pounds total, in a soft backpack cinched tight. Four jugs for her. She carried a fifth in her left hand. She handed him a paper map and made him look at it with her by headlamp, tracing the trail with her finger, showing him the eleven points, telling him the landmarks — the dead saguaro with one arm, the shallow wash with the white rocks, the ridge with the two ocotillos growing close.

"If we get separated," Rosa said, "do not panic. You stay where you are. You do not try to find me. I will find you. I will always find you. Panicking kills people out here. Staying still saves them. Yes?"

"Yes."

"Put your sunscreen on now."

He put it on. She put some on the back of his neck where he had missed. She did not comment on the missing. She did it the way a mother does things for a son.

They walked.

They walked for an hour before the sun came up fully. It came up the way it does in the desert, not a dawn so much as a switching on. One minute Samuel was cool and the next he was not cool, and the next he was beginning to sweat under the long sleeves, and the next he was inside a temperature that he had to keep moving through because stopping would mean letting the temperature settle. They placed the first jug at the base of a palo verde, in a scrape of shade. They placed the second on a flat rock under an ocotillo. They placed the third, the fourth, the fifth. Samuel's shoulders hurt. His feet were okay. His hands were okay. The jug water sloshed in the pack when he moved. At the sixth placement, he took off his pack for the first time, and the relief was such that he sat down hard on a stone and laughed, a small helpless laugh, and Rosa handed him a granola bar and said, "Nine o'clock. Eat."

He ate.

"Water."

He drank.

"More water."

He drank more.

"Okay. Up."

They walked.

At the seventh placement — it was somewhere after ten — Rosa stopped.

She was about ten yards ahead of him. She had crested a small rise and gone down the other side, and Samuel had lost sight of her for a moment. When he came up over the rise himself, he saw her standing very still, her pack still on, one gallon in her left hand, the other hand raised toward him in the flat gesture that means wait.

He waited.

"Samuel," she said, not turning. Her voice was low but it was not a whisper.

"Yes."

"Come forward slowly. I need you to come up beside me. I do not want you to look past me until I say so. Come."

He came. He stopped at her shoulder. He did not look past her. He looked at Rosa's ear, which had a small silver stud in it, and at the strand of her hair that had come loose from her ponytail and was plastered to her temple with sweat.

"There is a person on the ground about thirty feet ahead of us," Rosa said quietly. "She is not moving. I am going to go check. I need you to stay here. Do not come closer until I tell you. If I tell you to come, you come. If I tell you to stay, you stay. If I tell you to go back to the truck, you go back to the truck. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"Stay."

She walked forward. Samuel did not look past her, not yet. He looked at the ground at his feet. He looked at a line of ants carrying a seed. He looked at a small round stone that was pink on one side and gray on the other. He held his breath and then he let it out because holding his breath was stupid, and he breathed, and his breathing was very loud to him in the silence.

Rosa stopped and knelt and took off her pack and set her jug down carefully. She was out of Samuel's line of sight now because she had gone down behind a small hump of ground. He could see only her back and the top of her head. She was doing something. He could not tell what. He could hear her voice, low, murmuring. He could not hear what she was saying.

After a minute she came back, slowly, up the rise.

"Come," she said.

Samuel came.

The young woman was lying on her side. Her face was turned slightly into the sand. Her hair was dark and long and partly across her cheek. She was wearing a red zip-up hoodie with a white drawstring and black leggings and white sneakers with pink stripes, the kind of sneakers you could buy at a Ross or a Marshalls for twenty dollars. One of the sneakers was untied. She was young. She was maybe twenty. Samuel did not think she was older than twenty. There was a black hair elastic on her wrist. Her hand was curled near her mouth as though in sleep.

She was dead.

Samuel understood, before he understood anything else, that she was dead. He had never seen a dead person before. He had been to one funeral — his uncle Hossein's — but the casket had been closed at that funeral out of the Muslim custom his uncle's widow had chosen, and so Samuel had not seen him. He had never seen a dead person. And now he was looking at one. And she looked, from a certain angle, asleep, and from another angle not asleep at all, and his mind was trying to go back and forth between the two and his body had decided not to wait for his mind and he turned around and took three steps and vomited into a bush.

He vomited the granola bar. He vomited water. He vomited until there was nothing left to vomit and then he dry-heaved twice, quietly, and then he wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist and stood up.

Rosa was not looking at him. She had knelt again by the young woman. She was doing something on her phone. Samuel realized, after a moment, that she was taking photographs, the way she had said she would — from a distance of about four feet, several angles, no flash. Her face while she did this was unreadable. It was not hard. It was careful, the way a midwife's face is careful.

"Come here," Rosa said.

Samuel came. He did not look at the young woman's face this time. He looked at her sneakers. At the untied lace.

"I am going to call this in," Rosa said. "I am going to call Border Patrol, because this is their jurisdiction whether we like it or not. They are going to send someone. It is going to take them an hour, maybe two. We are not going to leave her alone while we wait. We are going to sit, a respectful distance away, and we are going to wait. You and I are going to wait. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"Are you going to be okay?"

"Yes."

"Samuel."

"Yes. I will be okay."

"Sit down before you fall down."

He sat down. Rosa called. She spoke into the phone briefly. She gave GPS coordinates. She said "female, no ID visible, approximately twenty to twenty-five years of age, no obvious trauma, appears to have been deceased some hours, possibly overnight." She listened. She said, "Yes. We will wait." She hung up.

She sat down beside Samuel. They did not sit close to the young woman. They sat about thirty feet away, in the shade of a mesquite, where Rosa had decided they could still see her but not intrude.

"Drink," Rosa said, and handed him a bottle.

He drank.

"You want to know her name," Rosa said.

"Yes."

"We won't know it today. Maybe not ever. Most of them we never know. If she had a pocketbook or a wallet it is not visible. Sometimes they carry their IDs inside their clothes for safety. Sometimes whoever she was walking with took it so it couldn't be used to identify her, which I know sounds terrible but sometimes that is what the coyotes do. Sometimes her family in Guatemala or wherever she came from will file a missing persons report and a DNA match will be made in a year or five. Sometimes they won't, because they do not know where to file. Sometimes she will be buried in Tucson in a cemetery with a number for a name."

"Rosa."

"Yes."

"What do we do for her. Right now. What do we do."

Rosa looked at him. Her eyes were dark and clear and a little tired.

"You are asking me a religious question," she said.

"Maybe."

"I am Catholic, Samuel. I am a bad Catholic, but I am a Catholic. I was raised that when you find the dead you pray for them. I do not know if you are Catholic. I do not remember what you said you were. But I am going to say a prayer for her, quietly, in Spanish, because that is what I know how to do. You are welcome to say one in whatever your tradition is. Or to not say anything. Or to sit."

"Okay."

He took a breath.

He said, in his head, the prayer his mother had said over him in the kitchen.

O God. Make her a shelter. Make her a listener. Let her be soft where she would have been hard. Let her be brave where she was afraid. Protect her body. Protect her heart. Bring her home.

He did not say "my son." He said "her." Out loud he said nothing, because he had not said the prayer out loud; he had said it in his head; and when he finished he opened his eyes and Rosa was looking out over the desert, still praying, her face quiet, and he waited for her to finish.

After a while a small wind came up. It moved the young woman's hair very slightly. It moved her hair the way a hand moves a child's hair. Samuel put his face into his hands then, and he cried, not loudly, not in a way that shook him, but steadily, for maybe three minutes, while Rosa sat beside him with her hand flat on the sand and did not touch him and did not speak. When he was done he wiped his face on his sleeve and picked up the water bottle again and drank.

"Samuel," Rosa said, quietly.

"Yes."

"You did well."

"I threw up."

"Yes. You threw up and then you sat down. You did not run. You did not collapse. You did not try to take a photograph of her for your phone. You did not ask me anything stupid. You did what you were supposed to do. I am not flattering you. I would not flatter you right now. I am telling you what is true."

"Okay."

"One more thing."

"Okay."

"You are going to feel like crap for several days. You are going to not be able to eat. You are going to lie awake. You are going to see her sneakers every time you close your eyes. You are going to wonder if there was something you could have done, even though there was nothing, even though she was dead before we came over that rise. That is going to happen. Do not fight it. Let it happen. Write it down. Call your mother. Call me. Do not be alone."

"Okay."

"Good."

The Border Patrol truck came at eleven forty-five. Two agents got out. They were polite. They knew Rosa. They called her by her first name. One of them, a young Latino man with a close haircut and sad eyes, stood for a moment by the young woman and took off his cap. He crossed himself. He put his cap back on. He went to work.

Rosa and Samuel placed the remaining four water jugs on the way back to the truck. Samuel did not remember placing them. He placed them. They did the work. They got back to the truck at two in the afternoon. Rosa handed him a fresh bottle of water and a tangerine from a plastic bag she had kept in the cooler, and she said, "Eat this now," and he ate it now. The tangerine was cold and acid and almost unbearably alive in his mouth. He ate it in four bites and sat in the passenger seat and cried again, a little, silently, while Rosa drove them home, one hand on the wheel, the other reached across the console to rest, briefly, on his forearm, before she put it back on the wheel.

At the shelter, she did not make him work the rest of the day. She took him to her small office and sat him down and made him eat a bowl of rice and beans and a piece of bread. She made him drink a Gatorade. She checked on him twice. At five, she told him to go lie down in the volunteer dorm, and he did. He lay on the metal cot and looked at the ceiling and counted the water stains, which were, as he had thought last night, eleven.

Later, around eight, he pulled his notebook out from under his pillow. He opened it to the page where the names were. Under Jean-Baptiste, he wrote a line. He wrote it slowly. He wrote it in careful block letters.

NOMBRE DESCONOCIDO. MUJER. APROX. 20 ANOS. SUDADERA ROJA. ZAPATILLAS CON RAYAS ROSAS. ENCONTRADA 14.3 MILES NORTE DE LA FRONTERA. LA VI.

He closed the notebook. He put it under his pillow. He lay back down. He did not sleep for a long time, and when he did, he dreamed about a red hoodie on a clothesline in a yard he had never seen, and a woman he could not see hanging up more laundry in the sun, and he woke up crying quietly at three in the morning, and then he slept again until dawn.

The brown cloth notebook had been given to him by his cousin Leila.

Leila was a graphic designer in Los Angeles, five years older than Samuel, and she had come up to Oakland for Samuel's graduation in June with a bag of presents she had chosen too carefully — a pen that was too expensive, a card that said too much, a small envelope with a hundred-dollar bill in it, and the notebook, which had been wrapped in brown butcher paper with no card. When Samuel had opened it, Leila had watched him unwrap it and then said, almost apologetically, "I didn't know what to put in it. I didn't know what you were going to use it for. So I just left it empty. Sorry."

"It's great," Samuel had said. "I love it."

"I got it at a bookbinder in Silver Lake. The cover is linen. The pages are cotton, I think. Acid-free. She said it would last a hundred years."

"A hundred years."

"If you wanted it to."

Samuel had put the notebook in his duffel that night and not thought about it again until the first night at the shelter, when he had written Ronaldo's name on the first page.

Now, five days later, after the day in the desert, he sat on his cot in the volunteer dorm at nine at night, and he opened the notebook, and he looked at what he had.

There was a list.

RONALDO. HONDURAS. SAN PEDRO SULA. WALKED THREE MONTHS. MARICELA. HONDURAS. LUPITA, AGE 2. MARTA. GUATEMALA. THREE SONS IN HUEHUETENANGO. JEAN-BAPTISTE. HAITI. ARRIVED VIA CHILE AND PANAMA. NOMBRE DESCONOCIDO. MUJER. APROX. 20 ANOS. SUDADERA ROJA. ZAPATILLAS CON RAYAS ROSAS. ENCONTRADA 14.3 MILES NORTE DE LA FRONTERA. LA VI.

Five names. Or four names, and one sentence that stood in for a name. He read them through. He read them through again. He closed the notebook. He opened it. He picked up his pen.

RULES.

1. One name per line.

2. Write the name the way the person says it. Not the way the form says it.

3. If they tell you something about themselves you can write, write it. Small. Their words if you can remember them. If they tell you not to write it, do not write it.

4. No judgments. No opinions. No guesses. If you don't know something, leave it blank.

5. Read through the list once a week. Say the names out loud to yourself. Pronounce them right. Make corrections if you have been pronouncing them wrong in your head.

6. Do not show this notebook to anyone. It is not for anyone else. It is for them, and for you.

7. If someone leaves — is deported, is moved, passes through — do not cross them out. Leave the name. Add a note if you know where they went.

8. If you lose it, it is lost. Do not make a copy.

He looked at the rules.

He thought about rule eight.

8. If you lose it, sit with that. Do not pretend it did not happen.

8a. Do not pretend anything did not happen.

He closed the notebook.

He slept.

The next morning he woke up and the sheets were tangled at the foot of the cot and his mouth tasted like he had been chewing pennies. He brushed his teeth. He showered in the small volunteer shower with the plastic curtain that was missing three rings at the top. He ate two pieces of toast at the long dining table where ten or eleven other people, most of them migrants, were already eating. He said good morning in Spanish to each of them. He did not eat fast. He chewed his toast. Maricela was at the far end of the table with Lupita on her lap. Lupita was eating a banana in that two-year-old way where half of it ends up in the mouth and half of it ends up on the shirt. Samuel smiled at Lupita. Lupita, mouth full, gave him a small serious nod, as though she were granting him an audience.

Samuel began, that day, to work on the logbook deliberately.

He did intake. That day there were seventeen new people — a Honduran family of four, a Guatemalan couple with a baby, a young Cuban man who had been stuck in Nicaragua for eight months, two Venezuelan sisters, a Salvadoran grandmother traveling with her grandson, and a man from Cameroon who spoke French and some English but not Spanish, and who had a ticket to a brother in Houston if he could just get to Houston. Samuel wrote down the names on the intake forms. He also wrote down the names, separately, in his own notebook, on his own time, at the end of the day, from memory. He double-checked the spelling with the intake forms to make sure he had it right. Then, next to each name, he wrote one small thing.

Every night, at nine, he opened the notebook. He added the day's names. He read through the list. He pronounced each name in his head, carefully, making sure he was saying it right. He had, already, caught himself twice saying Jean-Baptiste with an American accent that was not quite how Jean-Baptiste had said it. He had practiced. On the third night, when he saw Jean-Baptiste in the dining hall, he had said "Bonsoir, Jean-Baptiste" in a better accent, and Jean-Baptiste had looked up in surprise, and then smiled, and said, "Bonsoir, mon ami." Samuel had carried that "mon ami" around in his chest for the rest of the evening, like a warm thing wrapped in a cloth.

On the fourth night, after he had closed the notebook and put it under his pillow, he lay awake thinking.

He did not have a good answer.

She had taken a sip of water and put the pitcher down.

"Now," she had said, "who wants garlic bread."

Samuel had not thought about that moment since that night. Tonight it came back to him whole. He understood that the logbook was him doing the thing Brigitte had described. He understood, also, that the logbook was something he had needed before he had known he needed it. He understood that the logbook was a small ritual he was making for himself, and that rituals were what got people through things.

His mother had rituals. She had the small white prayer book in her cardigan pocket. She had the rosewater. She had the way she opened her palm and laid it down when she was thinking. His father had rituals. He had the counting of cardamom, and the three dishes nights a week he had cooked for Samuel after the divorce, and the way he had spelled Samuel's name on the labels of the Tupperware — SAM — in block capitals, always. Samuel had realized, at seventeen, that his father had never once addressed him as Sam to his face; he was always Samuel; but on the Tupperware his father called him Sam, and Samuel had understood that the Tupperware was a private language between the two of them, a joke they had never needed to explain.

He turned off the light. He slept.

On the sixth day of the logbook, a new family came in. A mother and a father and two children — a boy of eight and a girl of five. They were from Venezuela, from Maracaibo. The father, Víctor, was a dentist — had been a dentist — who had not practiced in two years because the clinic had closed, because there had been no anesthetic to buy, because there had been no patients who could pay. He had a quiet voice and big careful hands. The mother, Yohana, had been a teacher. The boy was Sebastián and the girl was Camila. They had crossed the Darién Gap with the two children. Samuel had read about the Darién Gap in the New York Times. He had read about it in the way one reads about remote places — geographically, analytically. Now he was sitting across from a man who had carried his five-year-old daughter through it on his back, and the man was holding his wife's hand under the table, and the man was crying quietly without making any noise, the way men who have been crying in private for a long time cry when they are finally allowed to.

Víctor shook his head.

Yohana said, "Do you have, perhaps, a book in Spanish? For Sebastián. He has not read a book in two months. He is a boy who reads."

"I will find you one," Samuel said. "I will find you one tonight."

He went, after his shift, to the staff room. He had not noticed before, but there was a small shelf above the coffee maker with a handful of donated books. Most were in English. There were three or four in Spanish. He pulled them down. Two were romance novels with covers that featured women holding swords and men holding each other's shoulders, which was probably not for an eight-year-old. One was a Spanish translation of Charlotte's Web — La telaraña de Carlota. Samuel felt a small, surprised tug. He had loved Charlotte's Web. He had loved it badly, as a boy. He had cried when Charlotte died. He had cried both times his mother read it to him.

He brought La telaraña de Carlota to Sebastián that evening. Sebastián was sitting on a bottom bunk, very quietly, by himself. His sister Camila was asleep on the top bunk. His parents were in the dining area.

"Hola," Samuel said.

"Hola."

"Te traje un libro. Si lo quieres. Es mi libro favorito."

Sebastián took the book. He turned it over. He opened it. He read the first page silently, his lips moving.

"Lo conoces?" Samuel said. Do you know it.

"No."

"Es sobre un cerdo y una araña."

"Un cerdo y una araña."

"Sí. Son amigos."

Sebastián looked at him. His face was skeptical in the way eight-year-olds' faces can be skeptical. The skepticism was a kind of armor. Samuel understood this and did not push.

"Okay," Sebastián said, finally. "Lo leeré."

"Bueno."

Samuel left him with it.

The next evening, when Samuel came by, Sebastián was on page ninety-two. He did not look up when Samuel came in. He was reading. He was reading the way a boy reads when a book has decided to be his book. Samuel did not interrupt him. He stood in the doorway for a moment and then walked away.

Maria came in on a Wednesday.

She came in on the back of a pickup truck that had driven her the last twenty miles from the border after the volunteer driver, a retired lawyer named Phil, had picked her up at a gas station where she had been sitting with her two children on a bench for four hours with a paper bag that had nothing in it. Phil had put the children in the cab and let Maria sit in the bed of the truck because the bed was the only clean place, and she had insisted, in fast Spanish and with a small stubborn smile, that she would take the bed, that the children needed the cab, that the wind was fine, that she was fine, that she had been in the wind before.

Samuel was in the front office when they arrived. He was doing paperwork with Lidia. It was four in the afternoon. He heard the truck pull up. He went to the door. Lidia came with him.

Maria was thirty-one. She had black hair tied back with a red elastic. She was wearing a purple T-shirt and jeans that were too big for her and sandals that were falling apart at the soles. The two children were a boy, six, named Darío, and a girl, four, named Valeria. Darío had a stuffed animal tucked under his arm, a small gray dog with one ear that had been partly chewed off. Valeria had nothing. Valeria was crying, quietly, not loudly, the way a child cries who has cried so much already that the crying has become a kind of low hum.

Lidia stepped forward. She did most of the speaking. Samuel stood beside her and watched. He understood his job. His job at this moment was not to speak but to hold space with his body so that the four people standing in the parking lot understood that two people cared about them instead of one.

Lidia took Maria inside. Samuel went to the kitchen. Don Javier was there. Samuel said, "Don Javier, tenemos una familia nueva. Tres. La madre, dos niños. Hace horas que no comen." We have a new family. Three. The mother, two children. They haven't eaten in hours.

Don Javier was already moving. Samuel knew, without being told, that the way Don Javier cooked for people who had just arrived was the way his own grandmother had cooked for Samuel when he had come home in the third grade with a fever and had not wanted to eat — firmly, without asking what you wanted, small portions first, something warm, something soft, and if you finished that, there was more, but not yet. Don Javier made two small cups of a corn drink, thick and sweet and warm, and a small plate of rice with a little shredded chicken and a little avocado, and a tortilla. He pointed to a tray. Samuel took the tray.

By the time Samuel got to the intake room, Lidia had gotten Maria to sit down. The children were at her feet. Samuel put the tray down. He knelt. He handed Valeria one of the cups of corn drink first, with both hands. Valeria looked at her mother. Maria nodded. Valeria took the cup. She drank. She stopped crying. She did not stop crying because of the drink. She stopped crying because she had a thing to do with her mouth other than crying, and her body accepted the substitution. Samuel understood this, watching it happen, and he understood, also, that he had no business understanding things like this yet, and he tucked the understanding into the part of himself that was building all day long.

He handed the second cup to Darío. Darío said "Gracias" in a voice that was much older than six.

Samuel stood up. He took a step back. He let Lidia do the intake. Maria answered the questions. She was careful. She was fast. She had been through an intake before, in Mexico, Samuel guessed. She had her papers. She pulled them out of a Ziploc bag inside her T-shirt where she had been keeping them against her skin. There were three documents. A birth certificate. A police report from Guerrero. A faxed letter from a lawyer in Acapulco. The documents were battered but intact.

Lidia read them. Samuel watched Lidia's face. Lidia's face, which usually had the composed attention of a woman at a desk, went still and then went carefully still, and Samuel understood that the documents said something Lidia had not expected even though she had thought she was expecting everything.

Lidia took a breath.

"Maria," Lidia said, in Spanish. "You have done a very brave thing to come here. I want you to know that we are going to help you apply for asylum. I am going to get you in front of a lawyer. I am going to get your children fed and bathed and put to bed tonight. I am going to find you a bunk. I am going to find you a bunk near the bathroom because Valeria is going to need the bathroom in the middle of the night and I do not want you walking all the way down the hall in a strange place."

Maria nodded.

"I am also going to say," Lidia said, "that what happened to you is not your fault. I am saying that because you need to hear it. I can see in your face that you have not heard it said. I am saying it. It is not your fault. Do you hear me?"

Maria looked at her.

"Sí," Maria said.

"Again."

"Sí."

"Once more."

"Sí."

Lidia took Maria's hand and held it. Maria, who had not cried in front of the children, who had not cried in front of the volunteer driver Phil, who had not cried in front of the kitchen or the office, began to cry now, with her hand in Lidia's hand, quietly, in a controlled way, her shoulders barely moving, her face not making a sound. Lidia did not let go. The children, at her feet, looked at her. Darío put his hand on his mother's knee.

Later that night, after Maria and the children had been fed and bathed and put to bed in the bunks Lidia had promised, Lidia came to find Samuel. He was sitting in the back office. He had not opened the logbook yet. He was just sitting.

"Samuel," Lidia said.

"Yes."

"I want to ask you to do something."

"Okay."

"Maria needs help with her asylum application. The lawyer who does pro bono for us is going to come on Friday. Between now and Friday, somebody needs to sit with Maria and gather her story and help her organize the facts so that when she meets the lawyer she is not going to have to start from zero. This is partly a paperwork task and partly — partly a listening task. I think you should do it."

"Me?"

"Yes."

"Lidia, my Spanish is —"

"Your Spanish is fine. It is better than you think. Where it is not fine, Maria will forgive you, and I will be down the hall. I want you to do this because Maria is going to need someone to tell her story to many times over the next year, and the first telling matters, and I think she will be able to tell you."

"Why me."

Lidia looked at him.

"Because you are a boy," she said, "and she has told her story to women, and I think she needs to tell it to a boy."

Samuel did not know what to say to that.

"Okay," he said.

"Tomorrow morning. Ten o'clock. After breakfast. I will tell her. You will sit with her in the back room. I will be down the hall. If you need me, come get me. If she needs a break, give her a break. Do not rush her. Do not interrupt. Do not fix. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"And Samuel."

"Yes."

"Write down what she says. Every word. In her words, not in yours. For the lawyer. Use your notebook."

"Okay."

He slept.

In the morning, after breakfast, he went to the back room. Maria was already there. She had put on a different shirt. She had brushed her hair. She had not put on makeup, but she had done the small things a woman does when she knows she is about to sit down with someone. She nodded at him when he came in. She said, "Buenos días."

"Buenos días, señora."

"María, por favor."

"María."

"María. Voy a escribir lo que usted me diga. Voy a escribirlo con sus palabras, no con las mías. Voy a escribirlo para el abogado que viene el viernes. Si quiere que pare, paro. Si quiere un descanso, lo tomamos. Si quiere no hablar, no hablamos. Estoy aquí para escuchar. Solo para escuchar."

María. I am going to write down what you tell me. I am going to write it in your words, not mine. I am going to write it for the lawyer who comes on Friday. If you want me to stop, I stop. If you want a break, we take a break. If you do not want to speak, we do not speak. I am here to listen. Only to listen.

María took a breath.

"Gracias," she said. "Entonces escucha."

Then listen.

Samuel opened the notebook.

María talked for two hours.

She talked about her husband, Ernesto. She had met him when she was twenty. He had been a bus driver. He had been a good bus driver. He had loved old cars. He had loved merengue. He had loved their children. He had not been a political man. He had not been anything except a man with a family and a route and a uniform and a small house near the highway.

She talked about identifying the body at the morgue. She talked about the morgue worker who had shown her the body — a kind woman with a hairnet, whose name she did not remember — and how the kind woman had made her stand behind a curtain while they uncovered only Ernesto's face, because the rest of him was not to be looked at. She talked about walking home from the morgue and finding that somebody had been inside her house in the three hours she had been gone. Nothing had been stolen. A single thing had been moved. A framed photograph of her and Ernesto, on their wedding day, had been taken off the wall and laid face-down on the kitchen table. That was all. That was the message.

When María finished, she put her hands flat on the table. She was not crying. She looked at Samuel.

"Listo?" she said. Done?

"Sí, señora. María. Listo. Gracias."

"Gracias a ti."

"Yo no hice nada."

"Hiciste algo. Escuchaste."

"Sí."

"Es algo."

"María, no sé qué decir."

María, I don't know what to say.

"Bueno," María said. "No digas nada."

Good. Don't say anything.

"Okay."

"Okay."

They sat.

Samuel laughed, a surprised laugh.

"Soy bahá'í," he said. "No tenemos sacerdotes."

I'm Bahá'í. We don't have priests.

"No importa," María said. "Habrías sido bueno."

It doesn't matter. You would have been good.

She stood. She smoothed her shirt. She walked to the door.

At the door she stopped. She turned around.

"Samuel."

"Yes."

"Tell your mother I said thank you."

"My mother?"

"Whoever raised you to listen. Whoever that was. Tell them thank you."

She went out.

Samuel closed the notebook. He put his face into his hands. He sat that way for ten minutes.

That night, in the logbook, next to María's name, he wrote one sentence.

One good person. At the end.

He did not write his own name. He did not think he was that person. He was not sure who that person was. He wrote it as what she had said.

He closed the notebook.

He went to find Lidia.

"I listened," he said.

"Yes."

"I want to do it again. With other people. If it is useful."

Lidia looked at him for a long moment.

"It is useful," she said. "But Samuel. Only if you can carry it. Not everyone can. If you cannot, you tell me. If you cannot and you do not tell me, you will be useless to me and to them. Yes?"

"Yes."

"Okay. I will think about who next. Go to bed."

He went to bed.

He did not sleep for a long time.

He did not know whether he agreed. He did not know whether María had meant it as a compliment or as a description. He thought about his mother, in the kitchen, praying. He thought about his father, who did not pray, but who showed up. He thought about the small framed photograph, laid face down, on a kitchen table in Guerrero.

He closed his eyes.

He slept.

Father Luis Ignacio came on Tuesdays.

He came at three in the afternoon, always. He drove a small gray Toyota Corolla with a dent in the back passenger door that he said had been there when he bought the car and that he was not going to fix because the dent had become, to him, a feature of the car's soul. He wore a black shirt and a white collar and a pair of gray slacks that were a little shiny at the knees and a pair of black Rockports that were scuffed at the toes from walking on desert trails. He was sixty-two years old. He was five feet four. He had thinning white hair and eyebrows that had gone, over the years, from black to salt-and-pepper to gray to a surprising white. When he laughed, which he did often, his whole face participated. He had lived in Tucson for thirty years. He had been a parish priest for twenty of them. He had been a chaplain at the shelter on Tuesdays for six.

He was Mexican-born. He had grown up in Guadalajara. He had entered the Society of Jesus at twenty. He had studied in Rome. He had taught theology at a university in Mexico City for ten years before asking to be sent to the border. "The border came to me," he had told Samuel, in their second conversation. "In my dreams, for three years. I dreamed of a wall. A child was trying to climb over it. I woke up. I wrote to my superior. He sent me here. I have not dreamed of the wall since. Now I dream of tortillas. I think the dreams are telling me I am in the right place."

Samuel had met him on his fourth Tuesday at the shelter. Father Luis had come into the dining hall while Samuel was wiping down tables, and he had sat down on the corner of a table and said, without preamble, "You are new. Where are you from?"

"Oakland."

"Are you Catholic?"

"No."

"Are you anything?"

"Bahá'í. And Muslim. Sort of."

Father Luis's face had done something — an opening, a brightening, a slight cocking of the head.

"Bahá'í," he had said. "And Muslim. At the same time."

"My mother is Bahá'í. My father is Muslim. My parents are divorced. I was raised both."

"And what are you."

"I don't know yet."

"Good answer. Sit. Come here. Sit with me for a minute."

Samuel had sat.

"I am Father Luis. I come on Tuesdays. I do not try to convert anyone. I am a chaplain, not a missionary. If anyone wants to talk to me, they talk. If not, not. I sit with the dying. I sit with the frightened. I say prayers with those who ask. I ask no one to pray. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"Good. Then we are going to be friends, I think."

And they had become friends.

Every Tuesday, Father Luis would come in at three, make his rounds through the dining hall and the dorms, greet the families, sit with the ones who wanted to sit with him, and by five-thirty he would find Samuel, wherever Samuel was, and he would say, "Samuel. Walk with me. Ten minutes." And Samuel would put down whatever he was doing and walk with Father Luis around the parking lot, or down the dusty road a hundred yards and back, and they would talk.

The conversations had started small. They had become, by the seventh Tuesday, something else.

On this particular Tuesday — it was six weeks into Samuel's service year, and it was early October, and the nights were beginning to turn finally cool — Father Luis found Samuel in the clothing room. Samuel was folding donated jeans onto a metal shelf, sorting them by size. Donated T-shirts lay in a heap on the floor waiting to be folded next.

"Samuel," Father Luis said, leaning in the doorway. "Leave the jeans. Walk with me."

"Okay."

They went out the side door. The sun was low. The air smelled like dust and cooling mesquite and, very faintly, someone's cigarette. They walked the length of the parking lot and onto the dirt road.

"How are you," Father Luis said. It was not a how-are-you in the American way. It was a question.

"I don't know how I am."

"What do you not know."

Samuel thought.

"I don't know if this is changing anyone," he said.

"Ah."

"I don't know if any of what we are doing here is changing anyone. I mean — it is changing me, I think, it is doing things to me I cannot name. But them. The people who come through. I don't know. We get them meals and beds and sometimes a lawyer and then they go. Some get asylum and some don't. Some of the ones who don't get asylum go back to the countries that were trying to kill them. We do not stop that from happening. I don't know, Father. I don't know what we are for."

Father Luis did not answer for a long time. They walked. He had a small limp in his left hip. Samuel had noticed it a few weeks ago and had not asked about it. A car passed on the main road, a hundred yards off, kicking up dust.

"Samuel," Father Luis said, finally. "Can I tell you a story."

"Yes."

"When I was in seminary, in Rome, I had a teacher. His name was Father Tomaso. He was eighty years old. He had spent twenty years in the Philippines. He had known Mother Teresa personally, when he was young. He had known her well enough to be slightly impatient with her, which is the way you know someone has actually known someone. Do you follow me."

"Yes."

Father Luis chuckled. He took a breath.

"You should have seen our faces, Samuel. We were outraged. One of the boys — an Italian boy, very passionate — said, 'Father, how can you say that. We are Jesuits. We are called to serve. We are called to change the world.' And Father Tomaso said, 'You are called to serve. You are not called to change anything. You are not powerful enough to change anything. Only God changes things. You are called to serve because service is how you become the kind of person who can be in the room when God is changing things. That is all. Service is not for changing the world. Service is for changing you, so that you are not a problem when the change comes.'"

Father Luis stopped walking.

"I have thought about that sentence for forty years, Samuel. It has not stopped being true. It has gotten more true every year."

Samuel thought about this.

"So I'm here to change me," Samuel said.

"You are here because you are here. God is doing something. You are in the room. That is the whole deal. You do not have to understand it. You do not have to produce outcomes. You do not have to be useful in the way your parents' generation was useful. You have to be in the room, and you have to not be a problem, which is actually very hard. Do you know how hard it is to be in a room and not be a problem? Most men cannot do it. It is why we have so many wars."

Samuel laughed. It was an involuntary laugh.

"Samuel," Father Luis said.

"Yes."

"I want to ask you something. I have been thinking about it. Can I ask you something."

"Yes."

"You say your mother is Bahá'í and your father is Muslim. Tell me what that means to you. Not what it means theologically. Not what it looks like on the outside. What it means inside you."

Samuel walked a few more paces. He thought.

"It means," he said, "that I grew up with two rooms in my house. A small prayer room in my mother's house with a chair and a window and my mother's prayer book on a little table. And a rug in the corner of my father's living room that he rolled out sometimes on Fridays. Two rooms. They weren't the same. They weren't different. I moved between them. I learned — I learned not to be surprised by the existence of either one."

"Yes."

"I learned that people pray in different ways. I learned that praying is something real. I learned that the words matter less than that the words are being said. I learned that my mother, when she said a Bahá'í prayer, meant exactly the same thing as my father, when he said a prayer in Arabic. They were looking at the same thing. They were just — they were naming it with different tongues. My mother would say this is the oneness of religion. Bahá'u'lláh taught that. My father would say, in a different mood, that God is greater than any religion. That all religions are trying to describe the same mountain from different sides. He was quoting someone. I don't remember who. Maybe Rumi."

"Maybe Rumi."

"It means I have never felt safe inside any one religion. And I have never felt lost outside of all of them. I have felt — I have felt like the religions were rooms in a house that belonged to me. I could go in. I could come out. I could sit in any of them. They were all mine. I could not be kicked out because I was not in."

Father Luis was nodding.

"That is a very Bahá'í way to describe it," he said. "I hope you know that."

"I know."

"Samuel. Do you know that Bahá'í idea of unity is one of the things that I have found myself borrowing from, in this work, without permission?"

"What do you mean."

"This place," Father Luis said, waving his hand back toward the shelter. "This shelter. It is run, officially, by an ecumenical organization. But the heart of it, the organizational heart of it, is Bahá'í. Brigitte is Bahá'í. Her husband was Bahá'í. The way they run meetings — what they call consultation — is Bahá'í. The quote on the wall in the office. Do you know the quote I mean."

"Yes."

"So powerful is the light of unity that it can illuminate the whole earth. I know that quote. I know where it comes from. I have read some Bahá'u'lláh, Samuel. I have read him slowly. I think he is a remarkable man. I think he said things that my own church is going to be grappling with for another three hundred years before it catches up. Please do not repeat that to my bishop."

Samuel laughed.

"I won't."

"I mean it, Samuel. One of the reasons I come here on Tuesdays, in addition to the work itself, is that this place is being run on a kind of spiritual physics that I have not seen in many other places. People who disagree sit down and they pool their information and they let the idea win that is best, regardless of who said it. That is so simple, Samuel. It is so obvious. And yet nobody does it. The Jesuits do not do it. The bishops do not do it. The United States Senate does not do it. Here in this shelter we do it every Wednesday morning at nine, and because we do it, we are able to feed a hundred people in a building that is designed for sixty. It is like, Samuel, it is like we have discovered a small engine that runs on honesty. And the world is full of engines that run on ego. And the engine of ego is loud and hot and breaks. And the engine of honesty is quiet and it does not break."

"Yes."

"Your tradition gave that engine to me. I will tell you frankly. I have stolen from your tradition. I am not sorry."

"You don't have to be sorry."

"I am not."

They walked.

"Father," Samuel said, after a moment. "Can I ask you something."

"Yes."

"Have you ever wanted to stop doing this work."

"Often."

"Why haven't you."

"Because I would not know who I was if I was not doing it."

"That doesn't sound like the right reason."

"It is not the right reason. It is my reason. Let me tell you the right reason. The right reason is that I believe, Samuel, that every person who walks through that door is Christ, and that if I turn one of them away I have turned Christ away, and I am a priest, and my whole life is organized around the proposition that I do not turn Christ away. That is the right reason. I do not always feel it. Some days I am exhausted and I look at a new arrival and I think, oh, no, another one, and I am ashamed of myself. The right reason is there even on the days I do not feel it. It is the scaffolding. The scaffolding holds you up when the feeling does not."

"So you just — have scaffolding."

"We all do. Yours will come. It will not look like mine. Yours will look like a pair of religions you grew up inside of. It will look like your mother's hand. It will look like your father's food. It will look like the names in your notebook. You have a notebook. Brigitte told me."

"She did?"

"Do not be embarrassed. She was proud of you. She thinks you may be one of the ones who are going to make it."

"Make it?"

"Make it. Come out the other side still yourself. Many do not. Some harden. Some give up. Some stop caring because caring hurts. The ones who make it are the ones who build scaffolding. Your notebook is scaffolding. Your letters home — you write letters home?"

"I call. I haven't written."

"Write. It is different. The hand knows things the voice does not know."

"Okay."

They had reached the turn in the dirt road where they usually turned back. Father Luis stopped. He turned. The sun was behind him. It lit up his white hair into a kind of halo, which Samuel noticed and felt silly for noticing and decided to notice anyway.

"Samuel," Father Luis said. "Is service changing anyone?"

"I don't know."

"Is it changing you."

Samuel thought.

"Yes," he said.

"Say more."

"I was — I was nervous, before I came. I was nervous about coming here. Not because I thought I couldn't do it, exactly. I was nervous because I thought I would come here and I would find out that I was a fraud. That my faith was something I had inherited and not something I could stand inside of. That I had been borrowing a life. That when I was tested I would turn out to be empty."

"And?"

"I am not empty."

"Good."

"I mean — I don't know what I am. I'm not saying I'm full. I'm saying I'm not empty. There is something in there. I don't know what it is. I think it might just be — I think it might just be the people who raised me. I think I am made of them. My mother. My father. My grandmothers. The women at the Bahá'í community feasts when I was small. The uncles at the Eid parties. I think I am made of them, and as long as they are in me, I am not empty. When I am in the shelter, listening to María, or pouring water for Doña Estela, or handing Sebastián a book, I am — I am them. My mother is in me listening. My father is in me showing up. I am — I am the delivery system. That is what I am. I am a boy whose job is to deliver what I was given."

Father Luis did not speak for a moment. His eyes had gotten slightly wet. Samuel saw it and looked away.

"That is the most Bahá'í-Muslim-Catholic-everything thing I have ever heard," Father Luis said, after a moment. "Come. Turn around. I have to get back to the car. I am saying the five o'clock Mass tonight at San Xavier and I cannot be late."

They turned around.

"Samuel," Father Luis said, as they walked back.

"Yes."

"Keep writing in your notebook."

"I will."

"And Samuel."

"Yes."

"When something bad happens — and something bad will happen, it always does — come find me. Tuesday. Any Tuesday. You do not have to wait for the bad thing. But when it comes. Find me."

"I will."

They parted at the shelter door. Father Luis got into his little gray Corolla with its unrepaired dent and drove off, one hand raised out the open window. Samuel watched the Corolla go until it turned onto the main road and was gone.

Scaffolding.

He underlined it. He closed the notebook.

He lay awake for a while. He thought about his father's rug in the corner of the living room. He thought about the way, when his father had rolled it out and said the Friday prayer, he had not invited Samuel to join him, but he had not forbidden Samuel from watching either. Samuel had watched. He had watched his father put his forehead on the rug. He had watched his father's shoulders rise and fall with the breath of the prayer. He had not been allowed to say the prayer with him, because Samuel had not been formally taught, and his father had said, "You will learn when you want to learn. I am not going to teach you something you are not ready for." And Samuel had not learned. And yet he had absorbed, just by watching, something about what it meant for a grown man to put his forehead on a rug.

He fell asleep.

In his sleep he saw his father's forehead, and his mother's open hand, and the small framed photograph of María and Ernesto laid face down on a kitchen table in Guerrero. He did not understand why the three were in the same dream. He slept through the understanding.

Samuel called his mother on Sunday nights.

He had called her every Sunday night since the first week, at seven-thirty Arizona time, which was seven-thirty Pacific because Arizona did not observe daylight saving time, which meant that for half the year Samuel was in the same time zone as his mother and for the other half he was an hour ahead of her. It was September now. They were an hour apart. Samuel had to remember this on Sundays because it was easy to forget.

He called from the back patio of the shelter. There was a small plastic chair out there, and a small table someone had put together out of scrap wood, and a pot of basil that no one was watering but that Samuel had started watering in the second week. The basil had gone from sickly to cautiously happy. On Sunday nights Samuel sat in the plastic chair and watered the basil and dialed his mother on FaceTime and waited for her face to appear.

The first call, in the first week, she had cried. Quietly. Briefly. Not enough to embarrass either of them. She had said "Oh, Samuel, your face, you look tired, are you eating" and she had said it in the voice Samuel recognized as the voice of a woman who was not going to cry on the phone even though she was already crying on the phone. After that, they had settled into a rhythm. She did not cry anymore. She asked questions. She told him small news from home. She kept her face bright.

Tonight, the eighth Sunday, Samuel was not sure what he was going to say.

He had been not-sure all day. He had been not-sure through breakfast and through the morning shift in the kitchen and through the afternoon helping Rosa Delgado unload a donation of children's shoes that had come in from a church in Phoenix. He had been not-sure through dinner. He had sat across from Sebastián at dinner, and Sebastián had said, "He terminado el libro," I finished the book, and Samuel had said, "Ya lo sé. Bien hecho. Hay más libros en el mundo. Vamos a encontrarlos," I know. Well done. There are more books in the world. We will find them. And Sebastián had smiled, and Samuel had smiled, and even then, in the middle of a good moment with a reading boy, Samuel had not-sure in his chest.

He did not know how to tell his mother what he had seen.

He dialed.

She picked up on the third ring. Her face came into focus on the screen. She was in her kitchen. She had a mug of tea in her hand. She was wearing a gray cardigan over a navy T-shirt. Her hair was in a loose braid over one shoulder. She looked at him and she smiled the small careful smile of a woman who had decided, before the call, to smile that way, and Samuel was aware, with a small pang, that she had been preparing for this call all day, the way he had been preparing for it all day.

"Samuel jan," she said. "Ghorboonet beram."

May I be sacrificed for you. It was an expression. It did not mean what the words meant.

"Hi Mom."

"You look thin. Have you lost weight."

"Maybe a little."

"A little."

"Don Javier is feeding me. I am eating. Mom."

"Okay. Okay. Tell me. How was this week."

He told her. He gave her the safe version. He told her about Sebastián finishing Charlotte's Web. He told her about Doña Estela and the forty-two grandchildren. He told her that Lupita, who was two, had begun, that week, to smile at him whenever he came into the dining hall, and that smiling at Lupita was the single best part of any of his days. He told her about Rosa Delgado, who had become a kind of older sister, and about Lidia, who had become a kind of older sister to Rosa. He told her about Father Luis. He talked for ten minutes. His mother listened. She did the listening thing where she smiled with her eyes and not her mouth. She did not interrupt.

He stopped.

"Samuel."

"Yeah."

"What are you not telling me."

He looked at the basil. The basil had a small new leaf at the top of it. He had not noticed the leaf before.

"Mom."

"Yeah, Samuel."

"I don't — I don't know how to say any of the other stuff."

"You don't have to say it. I am not asking you to say it. I am asking you if you have things you are not saying. You have things you are not saying. That is okay. I am your mother. I can tell."

"Yeah."

"Is it bad."

He thought.

"Yeah. Some of it."

"Are you safe."

"Yes."

"Are the people around you safe."

"Yes. Mostly. Yes."

"Are you sleeping."

"Mostly."

"Are you eating."

"Yes."

"Are you praying."

He paused. His mother had never, in his whole life, asked him this question. She had prayed around him. She had prayed over him. She had said prayers at her own dinner table that he sat at. She had never asked him if he was praying. It was against her practice. She believed, and she had told him, and she had told him more than once, that prayer was a private thing between a soul and God, and that a mother did not monitor her son's relationship with God.

Now she had asked.

He answered honestly.

"Not out loud," he said. “Rest thou not for a moment, seek thou to draw no easeful breath.”

“If mercy were not manifest, this attribute of God would not be realized.”

“To illustrate this, think of man as endowed with two kinds of sight; when the power of insight is being used the outward power of vision does not see.”

"The Abdu'l-Bahá prayer."

"Yes."

“Fear ye God, O concourse of the foolish, and do not inflict tribulations upon those who have willed naught but that which God hath willed.”

"Mom."

"Yes."

“No man can obtain everlasting life, unless he embraceth the truth of this inestimable, this wondrous, and sublime Revelation.”

"Samuel. Listen to me. Can you listen."

"Yes."

"Every person has things they cannot un-see. Your grandmother had them. Your grandfather had them. I have them. Your father has them. We do not talk about them because we do not need to. They live in us. They do not kill us. They become part of what we are. The things you cannot un-see will not destroy you. They will become what you are. It is okay. It is a hard thing to hear at eighteen. It is true. You will carry them. You will not be alone in carrying them. Every human being who has ever been alive for any length of time is also carrying them. You have joined the human species, Samuel. Welcome."

He laughed, a small, wet laugh.

"Welcome to the human species," he said.

"Yes. Welcome."

"Thanks, Mom."

"Samuel."

"Yes."

"Are you going to eat tonight."

"Yes."

"What are you going to eat."

"There's leftovers. There's chicken and rice and some tortillas."

"Okay. Good. Eat something. Eat a real plate. Not a piece of bread standing up. A plate. Sit down with it."

"I will."

"And drink water."

"I will."

"And call your father this week. He has been asking about you. He is pretending he has not been asking about you but he has been calling me twice a week to ask about you. This is ridiculous. He should just call you himself. I have told him this. He says he does not want to bother you. I told him he should bother you. Call him."

"I will."

"And Samuel."

"Yes."

"I love you. I am proud of you. Eat something."

"I love you too, Mom."

She made a kiss at the camera. She pressed her hand to the screen briefly, the way she had done every Sunday since the first call. He pressed his hand back. The image of her palm was briefly blurry and then sharp again. He hung up.

He sat with the phone in his lap for a moment. He looked at the basil. The new leaf was the size of his pinky nail. He looked at it for a long time.

Then he got up. He went inside. He made himself a plate — chicken and rice and tortillas and an apple he found on the counter. He sat down at the long dining table with it. Nobody else was there. It was eight-thirty; the children had been put down; the adults were in the TV room watching a telenovela. Samuel ate his plate. He ate it slowly. He chewed. He did not get up with the plate half-finished. He did not read his phone while he ate. He just ate.

When he was done, he washed his plate and his fork and his cup. He dried them with the dish towel. He put them away.

Dear Mom,

I did not know how to tell you on the phone. I want to tell you now. I am going to tell you.

Three weeks ago I went with Rosa on a water drop in the desert. We placed jugs of water along a migration trail. We found a young woman. She was dead. She had a red hoodie and white sneakers and a hair elastic on her wrist. She was about twenty. She had no ID. We did not know her name.

I threw up. Rosa called Border Patrol. We sat with her for about an hour. We said prayers. I said the prayer you said over me in the kitchen, except I changed "my son" to "her." I do not know if that is allowed. If it is not, I am sorry. I did it anyway.

Mom, I want to tell you that I understand something now that I did not understand before. You said to me on the porch, the last night, that getting on a plane and crossing is the oldest thing in the world. I did not know what you meant. I have started to know. I walked in the desert with a woman who was also, once, a young woman of twenty with dark hair and cheap shoes who was walking somewhere. I do not say this to be dramatic. I say this because I understand now that you are part of what I am, and that what I am doing here is walking with people who are doing what you did, in a different direction, with different paperwork, and that the thread between you and them and me is — is the thread.

I do not know if that makes sense. I hope it makes some sense.

I love you. I am eating. I am praying, in my head, a lot. I am writing names down. I am getting better at Spanish. Father Luis, the priest who comes on Tuesdays, told me to write a letter because the hand knows things the voice does not. I did not know what he meant until I started writing this. I know now.

I miss you. I miss the lemon tree on the porch. I miss my blue walls. I miss you saying ghorboonet beram when I come in the door. Please tell Abbu I will call him this week. Please tell him I am okay. Please tell him I ate the biryani on the plane and that I cried a little because it was so good and because he had packed it. I did not tell him that. I will tell him. But please also tell him, now, because he has probably been wondering.

I am going to keep going.

Your son.

Samuel.

He closed the notebook. He did not tear the pages out. He did not plan to send the letter. He would write it again, on a separate piece of paper, and mail it, in a week or two, when he had time to go to the post office. For now the letter was in the notebook. It was in the right place. The notebook was the place where the things lived.

He lay down. He closed his eyes.

He slept.

Two days later, on Tuesday — it was Father Luis day — Samuel called his father during his lunch break. He sat on the back step where he had sat with Ronaldo and with caramel candy and with tortillas. He dialed. Abbu picked up on the first ring.

"Samuel."

"Abbu."

"You are calling me in the middle of the day. It is the middle of the day. Are you all right."

"I'm fine, Abbu. I'm on a break. I have ten minutes. I wanted to call. I have been meaning to."

"Okay. Okay. I am in the office. I will step out. Give me one second."

Samuel heard the sound of his father pushing back a chair. A door opening. A door closing. The ambient office noise receded.

"Okay," Abbu said. "Samuel."

"Abbu."

"How are you."

"I'm okay. I ate the biryani on the plane."

"You ate it?"

"All of it."

"Good."

"It was good, Abbu. It was very good."

"It was okay."

"It was good. I cried a little."

There was a pause.

"Samuel."

"Yeah."

"Why did you cry."

"Because. Because you packed it. Because you counted the cardamom. Because it was cold and it did not matter that it was cold. I don't know, Abbu. I cried. I am telling you. I cried."

Abbu did not say anything.

"Abbu."

"Yes."

"Mom said you have been calling her to ask about me."

"She told you that."

"She told me."

"I have not been calling her to ask about you."

"Abbu."

"I have been calling her to discuss logistics."

"Abbu."

"Okay. I have been calling her to ask about you. Don't tell her I admitted it."

"Too late."

"Damn it."

They both laughed. Samuel wiped his eye with his thumb. He was surprised to find it wet.

"Abbu. You can call me. You don't have to call Mom. You can call me."

"I did not want to bother you. You are doing important things. I did not want my voice in your ear."

"Your voice in my ear is a good thing, Abbu. It is what I want. You can call me any time. I mean it. Any time. Even if I am working. I will see the call and I will call you back as soon as I can."

"Okay."

"Okay?"

"Okay, Samuel."

"Promise me."

"I promise. I will call you. At a reasonable hour. Not too often. I am a dignified man. I will not be one of those fathers."

"Be one of those fathers."

"Do not push me, Samuel."

"Abbu."

"Yes."

"I love you."

A silence.

"I love you, Samuel."

"Abbu."

"Yes."

"The showing up thing. What you said. I have been doing it. I am — I am doing it."

"Tell me."

"There is a boy here. His name is Sebastián. He is eight. He is Venezuelan. He just finished Charlotte's Web. In Spanish. I gave it to him. I am going to find him another book. That is showing up. Right? That is it."

"That is it, Samuel."

"Okay."

"That is the whole thing."

"Okay, Abbu."

"Samuel. One more thing."

"Yes."

"Eat."

"I am eating, Abbu."

"Good. Go. Go back. They need you. I am at work."

"Okay. Bye."

"Bye."

The letter came on a Thursday.

It came in a manila envelope, the kind with a red string wound around a little cardboard disc. It came from the immigration court in Tucson, addressed to Ronaldo Joaquín Mendoza Aguilar, care of La Casa Shelter, 1412 North County Road, Nogales, Arizona. It came in the morning mail, along with eleven other envelopes for eleven other people, and the front-office volunteer that morning — a retired school librarian named Peggy, who volunteered two mornings a week and who was very careful with mail — sorted it into the small wooden pigeonhole marked MENDOZA, R. and did not think about it until Ronaldo came to check the pigeonhole after breakfast.

Samuel was in the dining hall when it happened. He was wiping tables. He had been wiping tables for ten minutes, in the unthinking way one wipes tables, and he looked up when Ronaldo walked by on his way to the front office and he said, "Gringo," across the room, the way he said it every morning, and Ronaldo said, "Gringo," back, and smiled, and kept walking.

Three minutes later, Samuel heard a sound.

It was a sound he did not, for a second, recognize as a human sound. It was a low sound, a kind of animal sound, coming from the front office. It was a sound he had heard once before, he realized, standing very still with the rag in his hand — once before, in the back room where he had sat with María, before María had gotten the sound under control. Now it was coming from a different throat. A male throat. A younger throat.

Samuel dropped the rag on a table and ran.

Ronaldo was sitting on the floor of the front office with his back against the wall. His knees were up and his head was between his knees. The letter was open on the floor in front of him. The manila envelope with the red string was beside him. Peggy, the retired librarian, was kneeling next to Ronaldo with one hand on his shoulder and the other hand lifted as though she had just been about to say something and had realized there was nothing to say.

Samuel knelt on the other side. He did not touch Ronaldo. He looked at Peggy. Peggy looked at him. Peggy said, in a very low voice, "It's a denial. Asylum denial. He has to report for removal."

Samuel looked at the floor.

"Ronaldo," Samuel said, softly.

Ronaldo did not look up.

"Ronaldo. Soy yo. Soy Samuel."

Ronaldo did not move.

"Ronaldo. Estoy aquí. No tienes que hacer nada. Estoy aquí."

Ronaldo. I'm here. You don't have to do anything. I'm here.

Ronaldo's shoulders were shaking. It was the controlled kind of shaking that men's shoulders do when they have been crying for a long time already on the inside and have only just begun crying on the outside. He did not lift his head. He did not speak.

He waited.

After a few minutes, Ronaldo lifted his head.

His eyes were red. His nose was running. He wiped his nose on the back of his wrist in a way that was not elegant and was not meant to be elegant. He looked at Samuel.

"Sam," he said.

"Ronaldo."

"They said no."

"I know."

"They said — they said I did not establish credible fear. They said my fear was general, not specific. They said I was not targeted as an individual. They said — they said being a young man in San Pedro Sula was not — not a protected category."

Samuel had sat in on enough paralegal sessions now to know what those phrases meant. The asylum system drew a line between generalized violence — being in a dangerous country — and individualized persecution — being specifically targeted for membership in a protected class, which included religion, political opinion, race, nationality, and membership in a particular social group. Being a young poor man in a neighborhood controlled by a gang, threatened and extorted but not in a targeted way the law could recognize, fell on the wrong side of the line. Samuel knew this. He also knew it was arbitrary, and he also knew it was cruel, and he also knew that knowing both those things did not change what the letter said.

"When," Samuel said.

"Tres días. Miércoles."

Three days. Wednesday.

"Okay."

"I will go back."

"Ronaldo."

"I will go back to San Pedro Sula. To my mother. To my sister. And then — and then I don't know. I don't know, Sam. I don't know where I go."

"Ronaldo."

Ronaldo put his head back between his knees.

Ronaldo nodded into his knees.

"But," Lidia said, "I am not going to lie to you. Motions to reopen do not always succeed. Most of them do not succeed. You will have to report for removal on Wednesday. You will have to go. We cannot stop the removal. We can fight after. We will fight after. But you have to go on Wednesday. We are going to drive you. Rosa and Samuel and I. We are going to drive you to the processing center. We are going to be with you. You are not going to be alone."

Ronaldo nodded into his knees.

"Do you understand me, Ronaldo."

"Sí," Ronaldo said. It was small.

"Sí."

Lidia looked at Samuel. Samuel understood, from the look, that Lidia was asking him to stay with Ronaldo while she made the phone calls that needed to be made — to the lawyer, to the supervisor at the processing center, to Ronaldo's mother if Ronaldo wanted her called, to Brigitte.

Lidia got up. She went.

Samuel stayed.

After another few minutes Ronaldo lifted his head again. His face was less red. He had gotten, in the way men get, to the controlled side of his grief. He looked at Samuel.

"Sam," he said. "I am embarrassed."

"No."

"I am embarrassed for you to see me like this."

"Ronaldo. I threw up in a bush in the desert three weeks ago. Rosa had to hand me a tangerine. Do not be embarrassed. It is your turn."

Ronaldo laughed. It was a small dry laugh, half a cry, and it came out more like a cough.

"Okay, gringo."

"Ronaldo."

"Yes."

"Do you want to stand up. Do you want to sit in a chair. Do you want to walk outside. Do you want to stay on the floor."

Ronaldo thought about it.

"Walk," he said.

"Okay."

They got up. They walked out the side door. Samuel kept his hand, lightly, between Ronaldo's shoulder blades, the way Lidia had kept her hand on the shoulder of a woman he had watched her walk to a dorm once. He had not known he was going to do this. He did it. Ronaldo did not shrug it off. They walked to the back of the property, past the loading dock, past the compost heap, past the chain-link fence that marked the end of the lot and the beginning of a scrubby field. They stood at the fence. They looked out over the field.

They did not talk for a while.

"Sam."

"Yes."

"My mother. She does not know."

"You want to call her."

"Not yet. I have to — I have to be able to say the words without crying. If I call her and I am crying she will think I am dead."

"Okay."

"I will call her tonight."

"Okay."

They looked at the field.

"Sam. Can I ask you something."

"Yes."

"You said your mother is Bahá'í. Your father is Muslim."

"Yes."

"Do you pray."

"Yes."

"Will you pray for me."

Samuel looked at him.

"Yes," he said.

"Now."

"Now?"

"Yes. I am Catholic. I am — I was — I am. But I am tired of my prayers. I have said them all this week already. I want to hear someone else's prayers. Will you pray. Out loud. Something. Anything."

Samuel took a breath.

He had never prayed out loud.

He had prayed in his head, sitting on cots, sitting on steps, sitting in trucks. He had said the prayer his mother had said over him, in his own silent voice, thousands of times in the last two months. He had never said a prayer out loud in his life, in front of another human being, who was looking at him, waiting. He realized, standing at the chain-link fence, that he had prayed plenty without doing what was now being asked of him, and that what was now being asked of him was a different kind of thing, and that he was going to have to do it anyway.

He closed his eyes.

"O Thou kind Lord. Thou hast created all humanity from the same stock. Thou hast decreed that all shall belong to the same household. In Thy Holy Presence they are all Thy servants, and all mankind are sheltered beneath Thy Tabernacle. All have gathered together at Thy Table of Bounty. All are illumined through the light of Thy Providence."

He paused.

"O God. Make Ronaldo a shelter for those who have no shelter. Make him a listener to those who have no one who listens. Let him be soft where he would be hard. Let him be brave where he would be afraid. Protect his body. Protect his heart. Bring him home."

He stopped. He opened his eyes.

Ronaldo's eyes were closed. Tears were running down his face. He was not making a sound.

"Bring him home," Ronaldo said, after a moment. "That is what I wanted. I wanted home."

"I know."

"I am going home, Sam. I am going home. That is what the letter is making me do. I am going home. But it is not my home. My home is not a place I can live. So I am going to the place that is my home and that is not my home. Do you understand."

"Yes."

"You understand."

"I understand, Ronaldo."

They stood at the fence.

"Thank you for the prayer," Ronaldo said.

"You are welcome."

"It is the same as mine. Different words. Same thing."

"Yes."

"Father Luis says this."

"He does."

"I have been listening to Father Luis on Tuesdays. Not the whole time. Sometimes."

"Me too."

"He is a good man."

"Yes."

"Sam."

"Yes."

"On Wednesday. When we go. Will you sit in the van with me."

"Yes."

"Not Rosa. Not Lidia. You."

"I will sit next to you."

"In the back."

"In the back."

"Okay."

They walked back inside.

The next three days went by the way days do when a thing is coming. Ronaldo ate. He did not eat much. Samuel made sure he ate something at every meal. Samuel made sure, without being told, that he sat next to Ronaldo at breakfast and lunch and dinner. On the second day, Ronaldo called his mother. He stood in the parking lot with Samuel's phone and he talked to her for twenty minutes. Samuel, who had stayed nearby at Ronaldo's request, could not hear the words, but could hear the rhythm — the long silence while she absorbed, the short phrases back, the small breaking in her voice that Ronaldo was clearly trying to soothe, and finally the soft ending, the I love you, the tell Josefina, the tell my cousin, the we will see each other soon, the goodbye. Ronaldo handed the phone back to Samuel with a hand that was not shaking. He nodded once. He went inside.

On the night of the second day, Ronaldo came and sat on Samuel's cot. He had in his hand a baseball cap. It was blue, faded, with a small patch on the front of a jaguar. It was a cap for a Honduran league team Samuel did not recognize. Ronaldo held it in both hands.

"Sam."

"Yes."

"I want to give you this."

"Ronaldo, no."

"Please."

"Ronaldo. You wear that cap. That is your cap."

"It is my cap. I have had it for three years. It was my brother's. It was Josué's. I am giving it to you. Take it."

Samuel took it.

"I also have this," Ronaldo said. He took out of his pocket a small plastic pendant on a little loop of string. It was a Virgin of Guadalupe. Her robe was chipped on one side where the plastic had cracked. "For luck. Amigo. For luck."

"Ronaldo."

"Take them both. They are for you. I do not want them to go back. They belong here now. They belong to you."

Samuel took the pendant. He closed his hand around it. It was warm from Ronaldo's pocket.

"Thank you, Ronaldo."

"De nada, hermano."

"No. No. Gracias. Gracias por todo."

"Sam."

"Yes."

"Put the cap on."

Samuel put the cap on. It fit. It was just a little big. Ronaldo looked at him and smiled, a full smile, a rare smile.

"It suits you," Ronaldo said.

"Thank you."

"Ai si yu, gringo."

"Ai si yu, Ronaldo."

On Wednesday morning, they drove to the processing center. Rosa drove the van. Lidia sat in the front passenger seat with a folder of documents on her lap. Ronaldo and Samuel sat in the back. Samuel sat on Ronaldo's left. Ronaldo sat by the window. He watched the highway go by. The sky was pale blue. The mountains had snow on the tops, new snow, early for the season.

Ronaldo did not talk for the first twenty minutes. Samuel did not talk either. Samuel had learned, in two months, not to fill silences.

"Anything."

"Tell me about — tell me about your mother."

Samuel told him. He told him about the lemon tree on the porch. He told him about the small white prayer book in the cardigan pocket. He told him about the way his mother, when she was thinking, opened her palm and laid it in her lap. He told him about ghorboonet beram. He told him about the Iranian New Year, Nowruz, which he had celebrated every year of his life, with a table of seven specific things laid out on a cloth. He told him about the way his mother cried at the end of the year when she set the table, quietly, in the kitchen, always a little, because her own mother had set the same table in Tehran in 1977 and the table was, in some way, the same table.

Ronaldo listened. He was looking out the window.

"Tell me about your father," he said.

Samuel told him. He told him about the rug. About the cardamom. About the KISS THE COOK apron. About the Tupperware with SAM in block letters. About the biryani on the plane. About the three dishes nights a week after the divorce. About the way his father, who was not a religious man, had still, always, whenever his mother had said a prayer at the table, gone still the way a man goes still for a flag or for the dead.

Ronaldo listened.

"You are lucky, Sam."

"I know."

"I do not say this to make you sad."

"I know."

"I say this because I want you to know that you are lucky. I want to tell you, before I go."

"Ronaldo."

"Yes."

"Tell me about your mother."

Ronaldo told him. He told him about her hands, which were always cold, which was a family joke. He told him about the way she had raised three boys on a laundry lady's salary, and how she had made him, at thirteen, stand at the clothesline with her every Saturday morning, and how she had taught him how to fold a shirt so that when he grew up he would not be embarrassed in front of a woman. He told him about Josué. About the day Josué had died. He did not elaborate. He did not need to. Samuel listened. Samuel nodded, slowly, and he put his hand, briefly, on Ronaldo's forearm, and then he took it away, and Ronaldo did not stop talking but he looked, for a moment, at where Samuel's hand had been, and then looked back out the window.

They arrived at the processing center at eleven-fifteen.

They left. Samuel and Ronaldo were alone in the van.

They did not talk.

Ronaldo was sitting very straight. His hands were on his knees. He had put on the clean shirt Lidia had brought him. He had combed his hair. He looked, Samuel thought, like a young man about to give a speech. He looked like a young man about to do a hard thing.

"Sam."

"Yes."

"I am going to go now."

"Okay."

"I am going to get out of the van. I am going to walk. If I sit here I will not be able to get out."

"Okay."

"Do not walk with me."

"Ronaldo."

"Do not walk with me. It will be worse if you walk with me. I will go. You stay here. You stay in the van. You do not get out. You do not look."

"Okay."

"Promise me."

"I promise."

"Sam."

"Yes."

"Thank you."

"Ronaldo."

"Thank you."

Ronaldo opened the door. He got out. He closed the door. Samuel heard the sound of the door closing. Samuel, through the window, did not look. He kept his eyes on the dashboard in front of him. He kept his eyes on the small crack on the dashboard where the plastic had split from heat. He counted the cracks. There were three. He counted them. He counted them again.

He heard Ronaldo's footsteps on the gravel. They walked away. They grew fainter. They were gone.

Samuel stayed in the van.

He did not know how long. Maybe three minutes. Maybe seven.

Rosa came back. She got in the driver's side. She looked at Samuel. She did not speak.

"Take your time."

He took the notebook out of his back pocket. He opened it to the first page of the logbook. He found Ronaldo's name. RONALDO. HONDURAS. SAN PEDRO SULA. WALKED THREE MONTHS. It was the first name on the list. It was the first name he had ever written down. It was the name that had taught him what the notebook was for.

He took his pen out of his front pocket.

DEPORTED.

The cap was his brother's. He gave it to me. He taught me to say the curse words wrong. He taught me what a friend is.

He closed the notebook.

Lidia came back. She got in the passenger seat.

"It is done," she said. "He is through. He was — he was brave."

"I know," Samuel said.

"We are going to fight the motion to reopen, Samuel. I want you to know. We are going to fight."

"I know."

Rosa put the van in drive. She did not turn on the radio. She pulled out of the parking lot. She turned onto the highway. The mountains were still there. The snow was still there.

Nobody spoke.

Samuel held the notebook on his lap. He did not open it again. He looked out the window. He was wearing the cap. It was a little big. It was the right size. He had on the small plastic Virgin on a loop of string around his neck, under his shirt, where it was warm against his collarbone.

The van drove.

Rosa, who had not looked at him the whole drive, glanced in the rearview mirror once. She met Samuel's eyes. She did not say anything. She did not have to. He understood, from the look in the mirror, that Rosa, who had done this drive before, who had made this drive many times, who had sat in this van with other young men before Ronaldo and other young women before the woman in the red hoodie, was with him. She was in the van with him. She was not going anywhere.

He nodded at her, in the mirror.

She nodded back.

They drove.

They drove the whole hour back to the shelter in silence. They did not turn on the radio. They did not talk. They did not open the notebook. They did not check their phones. They drove. The desert went by. The mountains stayed where they were. The sun moved, slowly, across the sky, the way it always did.

When they pulled into the shelter, Rosa parked. She killed the engine. Nobody moved.

Samuel sat in the back seat with the notebook on his lap, and the cap on his head, and the pendant under his shirt, and he did not get out, and nobody asked him to get out, and nobody told him it was time to go inside.

He sat in the silence.

The silence went on for a long time.

It was in this silence — the silence of the van, of the parking lot, of the desert around them, of the two women in the front seat who were not looking at him and who were waiting for him without waiting — it was in this silence that Samuel understood, for the first time, what he had come here to do. He had not come here to change the world. He had not come here to save anyone. He had not come here to prove himself. He had come here to sit in silences like this one, with people, and to not leave, and to not fill the silence, and to not run from it, and to carry it, afterward, with him, forever, without complaint, because the silence was holy, and the silence was what the world gave you when you were allowed to sit with someone at the edge of their life.

He understood this. He did not say it out loud. He did not have to.

He sat in the silence.

Eventually Rosa opened her door. She got out. She stood for a moment by the van, and then she went inside.

Eventually Lidia opened her door. She got out. She stood for a moment by the van, and then she went inside.

Samuel sat in the back of the van for a long time by himself. He did not cry. He had cried already, quietly, inside, during the drive. He did not cry now. He held the notebook. He touched the cap, with his fingertips, once.

Then he opened his door. He got out. He walked to the shelter door. He put his hand on the handle.

Before he went in, he looked up. The sky was blue. There were three small clouds. There was a jet, very high, leaving a thin white line.

He went inside.

That night, he did not write anything more in the logbook. He had already written what there was to write. He lay on his cot with the cap on the pillow beside him and the pendant on a string around his neck and the notebook under his pillow, and he thought about Ronaldo, who was at this moment on a bus, with a number, going south, back to a country he could not live in. He thought about his mother in a kitchen in Oakland. He thought about his father at a desk in Fremont. He thought about Father Luis and Sebastián and María and Doña Estela and Patrice and Lupita and Jean-Baptiste and the young woman in the red hoodie whose name he did not know. He thought about the six other young people from orientation, scattered now across the world — Rosa in Mississippi, Maya in Soweto, Idris in Oakland, Noor in Guyana, Theo in Mongolia, Sky in Iceland. He wondered if they were each, tonight, lying on cots like this one, thinking about rooms they had walked into and rooms they had walked out of and people they would not forget.

He wondered if any of them were wearing caps.

He wondered if any of them had been given pendants.

He wondered if any of them were learning, as he was learning, that a service year was not a year you performed on the world. It was a year the world performed on you.

He closed his eyes.

O Thou kind Lord. Thou hast created all humanity from the same stock.

Bring him home.

Bring them home.

Bring us all home.

He slept.

In the morning, before the sun came up, Samuel woke. He did not know why he had woken. The dorm was still. The other volunteers were breathing the slow breaths of sleep. He could hear, very faintly, the hum of the refrigerator in the staff kitchen down the hall. He lay on his back. He looked at the ceiling. He counted the water stains. There were still eleven.

He got up. He put on jeans and a sweatshirt. He put on the cap. He went outside.

The sky was indigo turning to gray at the edges, in the way the sky did over the desert when the dawn was an hour out. The air was cold. He could see his breath. He walked to the back of the lot, past the loading dock, past the compost heap, to the chain-link fence where he had stood with Ronaldo three days ago. He put his hands on the fence. The metal was very cold. He looked out at the field.

He thought about the van. He thought about the silence. He thought about Ronaldo walking away in clean shoes.

He looked at the sky. The gray was turning to a thin rose at the eastern horizon. A single bird crossed over, calling once. He did not know what kind of bird. He had not learned the birds of the Sonoran Desert yet. He would learn them. He had another seven months.

He stood at the fence until the sun came up.

When it came up, he went inside, and he washed his face, and he brushed his teeth, and he went to the kitchen, where Don Javier had already started the coffee, and Don Javier looked at him and said, without comment, "Siéntate. Cómete algo. Es tu primer día otra vez."

Sit. Eat something. It is your first day again.

Samuel laughed. It was a small surprised laugh. He sat. Don Javier put a plate of eggs in front of him. And a tortilla. And coffee.

"Gracias, Don Javier."

"De nada, niño."

Samuel ate.

Someone came into the kitchen. Samuel looked up.

It was Sebastián. He had a book under his arm. It was not Charlotte's Web. It was something else. Samuel did not recognize the cover.

"Sam."

"Hola, Sebastián."

"Mi mamá me dio este libro. Lo compró en México. Me dijo que ya estaba listo para leerlo."

My mom gave me this book. She bought it in Mexico. She said I was ready to read it now.

"Qué es?"

Sebastián turned it over. It was a copy of El Principito. The Little Prince. In Spanish. Samuel smiled.

"Ah. Buen libro."

"Lo conoces?"

"Lo conozco."

"¿Es triste?"

Is it sad?

Samuel thought.

"Un poco," he said. "Pero también es — es hermoso. Es muy hermoso."

"¿Llora alguien al final?"

Does someone cry at the end?

"Tal vez."

"¿Tú lloraste?"

Did you cry?

Samuel looked at the boy. He had the book under his arm. He had his breakfast plate in his other hand. He was eight. He was reading. He was asking Samuel, at six-thirty in the morning, a question about whether a book was sad.

"Sí," Samuel said. "Lloré."

Yes. I cried.

"Okay," Sebastián said. He sat down. He opened the book. He began to read.

Samuel ate his eggs. He drank his coffee. He watched Sebastián read. He did not say anything. Sebastián did not say anything. The day went on around them. The shelter went on around them. The world went on around them.

And Samuel, for the first time since the young woman in the red hoodie, since the van, since the gravel and the door closing, felt something settle in him. It was not peace. He did not think it was peace. It was something simpler. It was a small quiet weight, like a hand on the top of his head. It was the weight of being where he was supposed to be.

He did not name it.

He just ate his eggs.

He ate his eggs, and the boy read his book, and the coffee was warm, and outside the sun was fully up now, and Samuel understood that this was, in fact, the whole work. The rest of the year would be variations. There would be more Ronaldos. There would be more Marias. There would be more desert and more vans and more silences and more prayers. But the core of it was this — the kitchen, the eggs, the boy, the book, the quiet — and he had been given it, and he would not refuse it, and he would not waste it, and he would not forget it.

He finished his plate. He carried it to the sink. He washed it. He dried it. He put it away.

He went to find Don Javier. He said, "Don Javier. ¿Qué necesitas hoy? ¿Cómo puedo ayudar?"

Don Javier turned. He pointed to the stack of onions in the sink.

"Pica," he said. Chop.

"Sí, señor."

Samuel put on the apron. He picked up the knife. He began to chop.

[END OF PART 1 — TO BE COMBINED WITH PART 2 FOR FULL BOOK]

[CONTINUING FROM PART 1]

The morning after I drove Ronaldo to the processing center, I didn't get out of bed.

The light came into the little room I'd been given above the shelter, slow and gray and then too bright, and I watched it move across the cracked paint of the ceiling. There was a water stain up there shaped like a country no one had named yet. I stared at it. I tried to make it be Honduras. I tried to make it be nothing. My chest felt like someone had reached in and taken something out and then closed me back up again without telling me what they had removed.

Five forty-five came. Then six. Then six-thirty. I heard the back door bang downstairs, Rosa's voice, the hiss of the coffee urn that had a loose valve and always hissed. I heard the refrigerator cycle. I heard a truck rattle past on the road. I heard a dog bark somewhere, twice, and then stop.

I did not move.

I had been moving for eleven weeks. I had been moving since I got off the plane in Tucson with my duffel and my journal and the earnest, useless heart of a boy who thought he was coming to help. Moving from cot to kitchen to clinic to van to desert to cot again. Moving through the names in the intake book. Moving Ronaldo's plastic bag of belongings from a shelf to a van to a waiting room bench and then watching him walk through a door I was not allowed to follow him through.

Now I was not moving. Now I was a body in a bed looking at a ceiling.

My phone buzzed. I turned it face down without reading it. It buzzed again. I pulled the pillow over my head.

I had written DEPORTED next to his name. I had pressed the pen so hard the paper tore. I remember standing in the parking lot of the processing center afterward and not being able to find my car keys even though they were in my hand. I remember a woman offering me a bottle of water and me taking it and not drinking it. I remember driving back to Nogales in the dark and missing the turnoff twice.

What I could not remember was the sound of his voice. Already. Already the exact pitch of it was leaving me, the specific way he said my name, *Sa-mu-el*, three syllables, with the little lift at the end. I could remember that he had a scar on his left eyebrow where a dog had bit him when he was seven. I could remember that he liked Coca-Cola more than Pepsi and that he made fun of me for not being able to tell the difference. I could remember that he had a sister named Miriam and a mother named Xiomara and that his father was dead.

But his voice. His voice was already going.

Someone knocked on my door.

I didn't answer.

The knock came again. Then Rosa's voice, low, patient, already annoyed. "Samuel. I know you're in there. I know you didn't sleep. Get up."

I didn't move.

"Samuel." A pause. "I'm coming in in thirty seconds whether you say yes or not. I've got a key. Don't make me use it."

I sat up.

I sat up because Rosa had been running this shelter for twenty-two years and because she had a particular way of saying *don't make me use it* that turned your spine into a thing that wanted to stand. I sat up and I pulled my jeans on over my boxers and I opened the door and she was there in her sweatshirt that said DIOCESE OF TUCSON 5K 2011 and her hair wet from a shower and her eyes on me in that way she had, which was not sympathy and not pity but something harder and more useful than either.

"Come downstairs," she said.

"Rosa—"

"Come downstairs. You don't have to work. You have to eat."

"I'm not hungry."

"I didn't ask."

She turned and walked away and I stood in the doorway in my bare feet and watched her back go down the stairs and I felt something in me that was not quite anger but shaped like it, a hot thin thread of it, because she had no right. She had no right to pull me up out of the bed where I was allowed to be destroyed. She had no right to make me go downstairs and put food in my mouth and smile at the volunteers. She had no right to keep being alive in the normal way when Ronaldo was on a bus going south and I was here and the sun was coming up over the Santa Ritas like nothing at all had happened.

I went downstairs.

I went because I was eighteen and Rosa was fifty-seven and she had earned every right she wanted to take.

The kitchen smelled like eggs and onions and the particular industrial coffee that came in five-pound bags from the Catholic Charities warehouse. Three volunteers were prepping the morning meal — Carla from Phoenix, a college student named Ben who'd come in on a church bus, and a new woman I didn't know whose name tag said HOLLY. They looked up when I came in. They looked at my face and then looked down at their hands and went back to chopping.

I had become the boy whose friend got deported. They all knew. The shelter was small and the story had moved through it overnight like smoke.

Rosa put a plate in front of me at the little staff table in the corner. Eggs, beans, a tortilla, a wedge of orange. A mug of coffee that was more milk than coffee, which was how she made it for me because she'd decided early on that I didn't know how to drink it black.

"Eat," she said.

"Rosa, I don't think I can—"

"Eat, Samuel. One bite. Then another one. Then another one. That's all eating is. You know how to do it."

I picked up the fork. My hand was not steady. I scooped a little of the egg and put it in my mouth and chewed and swallowed and I thought I might cry but I didn't. Rosa sat down across from me with her own plate and she ate and she did not look at me and she did not speak and this, somehow, was the kindest thing anyone had done for me in twenty-four hours.

I ate half the eggs. I ate the orange. I drank the coffee.

"Good," she said, without looking up. "Now. Today you are on laundry."

"Rosa, I don't—"

"Laundry, Samuel. Sheets off every bed in the men's dorm. Pillowcases. Towels. You'll run it through the washer and then the dryer and then you'll fold it and stack it in the linen closet. You won't talk to anybody. You won't have to. The machines make enough noise that nobody will try. At noon you'll come eat lunch. After lunch you'll do it again with the women's dorm. At five you'll eat dinner. At seven you'll come to my office and you'll sit with me for fifteen minutes. Then you can go upstairs and do whatever you want."

"I can't."

She looked up at me then. Her eyes were the color of strong tea and there were lines around them that I had not noticed before, and I understood — or thought I understood — that these lines had been made by looking at things like me, boys like me, for twenty-two years.

"Samuel," she said. "Listen to me."

I listened.

"You are not going to feel better today. You are not going to feel better tomorrow. I am not going to promise you that you will feel better next week. What I am going to tell you is that you are going to get up every morning and you are going to eat the food that is put in front of you and you are going to do the work that is given to you and sometime — and I don't know when — you will realize that the thing inside of you that you thought was broken is not broken. It's just changed."

I stared at the plate.

"And the other thing I'm going to tell you," she said, "is that what happened to Ronaldo is not your fault. You did not make the immigration judge. You did not make the asylum law. You did not make the border. You drove him. That is all you did. You drove a boy who had been kind to you to a place he did not want to go, because he asked you to, because he did not want to go alone. That is not a failure, Samuel. That is one of the hardest things a person can do, and you did it, and you didn't run off the road, and you didn't say anything stupid, and you came back and you wrote his name in the book with the correct word next to it. You did the work. The work is what we have."

"It didn't *work*," I said. My voice came out strange. "Rosa, it didn't work. He's gone. He's going to get back to Honduras and the gang that tried to kill him is still there and—"

"I know," she said.

"So what is the point? What is the point of any of this?"

She was quiet for a long time. A long time. Long enough that I heard the hissing coffee urn cycle off, and the refrigerator cycle on, and Carla laugh at something Ben said.

I looked up.

"Say that again."

"We do it because it's worth doing," she said. "Not because it works. If we did it only when it worked, we would have given up twenty years ago and everyone who came through that door would have slept outside. Some nights we save a life. Some nights we don't. Some nights we feed a boy for a week and then he gets deported anyway. We still fed him. That is not nothing. That is not nothing, Samuel, and if you decide it is nothing, then you will not survive this work, and I need you to survive this work. We need people who survive this work. Go do the laundry."

She stood up. She picked up both plates. She carried them to the sink.

I sat at the table for a long time.

Then I got up and went to the linen closet and I took the big canvas cart that we used for sheets and I wheeled it down the hall to the men's dorm, and I stripped every bed. There were fourteen beds. Fourteen sets of sheets. Fourteen pillowcases. I did not think about Ronaldo's bed, which was not there anymore because we had stripped it the same morning he left. I did not think about anything. I piled the sheets in the cart and I wheeled the cart to the laundry room and I loaded the big industrial washer and I added the detergent and I closed the door and I pressed the button.

The machine hummed.

I sat down on the floor with my back against the dryer and I cried.

I cried for about ten minutes. I don't know why ten. I was counting, for some reason, watching the little green digital clock on the washer control panel, and at ten minutes I stopped. I wiped my face with the bottom of my t-shirt. I got up. I started loading the second washer with towels.

I did this all day.

At seven that evening I went to Rosa's office. She was at her desk doing paperwork in a pool of yellow lamplight. She did not look up. She pointed at the folding chair across from her desk. I sat.

We did not talk.

She did her paperwork. I sat. For fifteen minutes. The clock on her wall ticked. Outside the window I could hear the shelter at night — the dishwasher, a kid laughing, somebody's phone playing a tinny song in another language. After fifteen minutes Rosa looked up.

"Same time tomorrow," she said.

I nodded.

I went upstairs. I lay on my bed in my clothes. I slept. I did not dream, or if I did, I did not remember it.

And the next morning I got up and I ate and I did the laundry and at seven I sat in Rosa's office for fifteen minutes.

And the morning after that.

And the morning after that.

*

Father Luis came by on the fourth day. I was in the laundry room. He stood in the doorway with his hands in the pockets of his black clerical pants and he watched me fold a pillowcase for a while before he said anything.

"Until you understood."

"Until I stopped being angry about it."

I folded another pillowcase. The edges would not line up. I started over.

"What's the point?" I said.

"Of folding sheets?"

"Of any of this."

Father Luis came into the laundry room and sat on the folding table, which creaked under him. He was a small man but the table was small too. He was maybe sixty. He had been a Jesuit for thirty-seven years and he had been in Nogales for eleven of them and before that he had been in El Salvador and before that in Chicago and before that in a seminary in St. Louis where, he had told me once, he had been the worst student in his class in Hebrew.

"The point," he said, "is that you are here, Samuel. That is the point. You are here, and Ronaldo is not, and the temptation is to think that because he is not here, your being here has failed. But that is not how it works. The point is not the result. The point is the presence."

"Rosa said something like that."

"Rosa is smarter than me. Don't tell her I said that."

I almost smiled.

"I keep thinking," I said, "about how I told him it would be okay. The night before his hearing. I said it was going to be okay. I said the judge would see. I said—" My hands stopped folding. "I said God would see."

Father Luis was quiet for a moment.

"And now you are thinking that God did not see."

"I'm thinking I lied."

"No," he said. "You said a thing that you needed to be true. That is not the same as a lie. A lie is when you know a thing is not true and you say it anyway to make someone do what you want. What you did was pray. You prayed in the only language you had at the time, which was the language of reassurance. You prayed with him. You prayed for him. And the prayer was not answered the way you wanted. Welcome, Samuel, to the oldest problem in the history of faith."

I looked at him.

"Does it ever stop hurting?"

"No," he said. "It gets different. It does not stop."

He stood up from the table. He put his hand on my shoulder for just a second — light, and then gone.

"Come to Mass on Sunday," he said. "You don't have to take communion. You don't have to do anything. Just sit in the back. I'll save you a seat."

"I'm not Catholic, Father."

"I know. I'm not asking you to be. I'm asking you to sit in a room where people are trying."

He left.

I folded pillowcases until dinner.

*

On the fifth day I opened the logbook for the first time since Ronaldo.

DEPORTED.

I looked at Ronaldo's name for a long time. The ink had bled a little where the pen had torn through. I had almost torn the page.

I turned the page.

*I do not know if this book is a prayer or a grave. Maybe it is both. Father Luis would know. I'll ask him.*

*The pillowcases do not want to be folded.*

*I miss him.*

I closed the notebook.

I slept.

*

By the end of the first week after Ronaldo, I was doing more than laundry. Rosa added kitchen prep. Then intake paperwork in the afternoons. By the second week she had me back on the phones, taking calls from people looking for relatives, from lawyers, from the consulate. I answered in my careful Spanish and I wrote down names and I did not, anymore, promise anybody anything.

I had stopped saying *it will be okay*.

I had started saying *I will write this down*.

It was not a big difference. But it was a difference.

On the eighth night, at seven, I came into Rosa's office for my fifteen minutes. She was not at her desk. She was in the chair across from it, the chair I usually sat in. She was holding a mug.

"Sit," she said, pointing at her own chair.

I sat.

"Tell me one thing that happened today," she said. "Just one."

"Maria got good news," I said. Before I even thought about it. "Her preliminary hearing went well. The lawyer said—"

"I heard," Rosa said. "Keep going."

"She was laughing. I hadn't heard her laugh before. Her little boy was trying to teach me a song. I don't remember the words."

"Keep going."

"That's it."

"That's not it," Rosa said. "That's not nothing, either. That's what today was. A woman laughed in this building. A boy tried to teach an eighteen-year-old gringo a song in Spanish. The building is still here. The boy is still in the building. The woman is still in the building. These are facts, Samuel. You are allowed to keep these facts. You don't have to choose between grieving Ronaldo and noticing Maria. Your heart is bigger than that. Mine is. Yours is."

I looked at her.

She was sixty in that light. She was older than my mother. She had a son my age in the Navy and she had a daughter in Phoenix who did not talk to her for reasons nobody at the shelter knew. She had buried a husband fourteen years ago. She had buried her own mother the year before I came. She knew, I understood in that moment, everything she was telling me. She knew it the way you know a river when you have built your house on its bank and watched it flood three times.

"Okay," I said.

"Okay," she said.

I got up to go.

"Samuel."

I turned.

"Tomorrow," she said, "wear a clean shirt. I'm putting you back on intake."

I nodded.

I went upstairs.

*Maria laughed today. Her son tried to teach me a song. I will learn the song.*

I closed it.

I slept, and for the first time since Ronaldo, I dreamed, and the dream was not about him, and when I woke up I felt, for one second, guilty about that, and then I got up and put on a clean shirt.

It came on a Tuesday.

The news, I mean. The good news. The kind of news that was so rare in that building that when it came, everyone stopped what they were doing and stood very still, as if the news were a bird that had landed on a branch and would fly if anyone moved.

Maria had been at the shelter almost as long as I had. She had arrived in early September with her two children — Diego, who was seven, and Luz, who was five — and a small blue backpack that contained, as far as I could tell, everything they owned. She was from a town in the Guatemalan highlands that I had looked up on a map exactly once, and she had fled it after her husband had been murdered by men who thought he had talked to the police. She had not talked to the police. Neither had he. But the men had not cared about the distinction, and after they had killed him they had come to the house where she and the children lived with her mother-in-law, and they had said things to her, and she had packed the blue backpack that night.

She had walked. With a five-year-old and a seven-year-old, she had walked, for pieces of the distance, and she had taken buses for other pieces, and she had crossed the river holding Luz on her hip and Diego's hand, and when she had presented herself to U.S. Customs and Border Protection at the port of entry at Nogales she had said the word *asylum*, which was the word we had told every Central American we met to say, the one magic word, the one that was supposed to turn a lock.

It had turned a lock. It had turned it into a different kind of locked.

She had been held for three weeks in family detention. Then she had been released to the shelter, pending the outcome of her credible-fear interview and her preliminary hearing. She had worn a tracking device on her ankle the whole time. She did not complain about it. She called it *la pulsera*, the bracelet. She said she was lucky to have it, because it meant she was not locked up, and she could see her children, and she could cook food for them in the shelter kitchen, and she could braid Luz's hair in the mornings.

She had been lucky.

We all knew, everyone in the shelter knew, that *lucky* in Maria's case still meant that the asylum case was an uphill climb so steep it was almost vertical. The rates of approval for Guatemalan women fleeing gang violence were terrible. Her lawyer — a volunteer from Tucson who drove down twice a week in a dented Subaru — had been honest with her. He had told her it might not work. He had told her to prepare both outcomes.

Maria had told him she could only prepare one outcome, because if she prepared the other one she would lose her mind, and she could not lose her mind, because her children needed her to have a mind.

The lawyer had nodded. He had gone back to work.

*

On the morning of the Tuesday, Maria was in the kitchen.

She was always in the kitchen. It had become her job, unofficially, because she was a better cook than any of us and because she liked the work and because cooking kept her hands busy when her brain was trying to eat itself. She was making pozole that morning. The big pot on the industrial stove. The smell filled the building all the way to the dormitories on the second floor.

I was at the front desk doing intake paperwork. A new family had come in the night before — a father and three boys, from Michoacán — and I was filling out their forms in my careful Spanish, getting the accent marks right, spelling Michoacán the way the father wanted it spelled. The father watched me write. He watched me the way a person watches someone cut their hair. With full attention. Ready to flinch.

The phone rang.

Rosa answered it in her office. I could hear her voice, the low tone, the way she said *sí*, *sí*, *sí*. Then a pause. Then *ay Dios mío* in a way that was not bad, that had the wrong pitch for bad.

Then Rosa was in the doorway of her office with the phone still against her ear and she was looking at me and her eyes were wide and her mouth was doing a strange thing, half-smile, half-something-else.

"Samuel," she said. "Go get Maria."

I put down the pen.

"Is everything—"

"Go get Maria. Now."

I went.

I walked to the kitchen and Maria was stirring the pozole with the big wooden spoon, her dark hair pulled back in a kerchief, her sleeves rolled to the elbow, Diego coloring on the floor under the prep table, Luz sitting on a stool at the counter with a piece of tortilla in her hand.

"Maria," I said, in Spanish, "Rosa wants you. On the phone."

She looked up. She looked at my face. Something moved in her own face, quick, a flicker of fear — the reflex, after months, after years — and then she controlled it. She handed me the wooden spoon.

"Keep stirring," she said. "Don't let it stick."

She walked out of the kitchen.

I stood over the pot. Diego looked up at me from the floor.

"¿Qué pasó?" he said.

"Nada," I said. *Nothing.* "Tu mamá va a volver."

He went back to coloring.

I stirred the pozole. The bubbles came up slow. The smell was incredible — hominy and pork and chilies and lime and a broth the color of old honey. I stirred, and I listened, and in the distance, down the hall, I heard Rosa's office door close, and then, about forty seconds later, I heard a sound that I did not, at first, recognize.

It was a sound I had not heard inside that building in three months.

It was a woman screaming with joy.

Not screaming. That's not the right word. It was a cry that started in the chest and came up through the throat with a sob inside it and broke apart on the way out — a sound like you make when something has been clenched in you for years and the hand lets go. I knew right away. I knew before I heard the words. Diego knew. He stood up from the floor. Luz put down the tortilla.

Maria came into the kitchen.

"Nos dieron el asilo. Nos lo dieron. Dios mío, nos lo dieron."

*They gave us asylum. They gave it to us. My God, they gave it to us.*

I turned away. I turned away because it was too much to look at and because the pozole was going to stick if somebody did not keep stirring it, and I stirred the pozole, and I stirred it, and I stirred it, and behind me Maria was saying thank you in Spanish and in K'iche' and in a third language I did not know, maybe just her own, the language of her mother perhaps, the language a person invents when the official languages are not enough.

Rosa came in. She stood in the doorway. She did not cross herself but she looked like she might. She looked at Maria on the floor with her children. She looked at me stirring the pot.

"Samuel," she said, "leave the pozole. I've got it. Go help Maria."

I turned off the flame.

I went to Maria. I went down on one knee next to her on the kitchen tile, which was red and cracked and not very clean. I did not touch her. I did not know if I was allowed to touch her. She reached out and she took my hand. She held it hard. Her hand was rough from the kitchen and strong from the kitchen and trembling.

"Samuel," she said.

"I'm here."

"Samuel, Samuel, *gracias a Dios*, Samuel—"

"I know," I said. "I know."

"You wrote my name in your book," she said. She had switched to Spanish without noticing. "Rosa told me. She said you write all our names. You write what happens to us."

I nodded. My throat had closed up.

"What are you going to write next to mine?" she said.

I thought about it. I had not, in that instant, thought about the book at all. But now I thought about the page — her name, *María de los Ángeles Xajil Pérez*, which I had practiced writing in my careful cursive because she had asked me to get it right, and the blank space next to it where for all these weeks I had not known what word would go.

"Asilo," I said. *Asylum.*

She squeezed my hand.

"Write *granted*," she said. "Write it in English. Write the whole word. Not just a stamp. The whole word. So anyone who reads the book will know."

"I will," I said. "I promise."

*

We moved her out three days later.

Asylum had been granted, but it did not come with a house. What it came with was a legal status — a slip of paper, and later a card — and the right to work, and a long uphill road into a life she would have to build from nothing in a country she had never seen before in a language she did not speak well. The shelter could not keep her forever. The shelter was transitional, by design. What it could do was connect her to a program run by a Catholic-adjacent nonprofit in Tucson called *Casa de Esperanza*, which had transitional apartments for recently-approved asylees and a staff that helped people navigate the first six months of a new life.

Maria did not have much to load.

The blue backpack. A plastic trash bag of donated clothes for her and the children. A cardboard box with the kitchen things she had used at the shelter — a wooden spoon, a small comal, a jar of the dried chilies she liked — that Rosa had given her.

"You keep these," Rosa had said the night before, putting the spoon in the box. "You are going to a new kitchen. You should bring your hands with you."

I helped carry the boxes to the van. It took four trips, which was three more than necessary; I did not want to stop. Diego carried his own coloring book in his arms. Luz carried a stuffed rabbit somebody had donated to the shelter three weeks earlier that she had latched onto and named, for reasons known only to her, *Galleta*. Cookie.

When everything was in the van, Maria stood in the gravel parking lot in the November sun. She was wearing a denim jacket that had belonged to a woman named Anita who had passed through in October. She had her tracking bracelet still on. The court order to remove it had been processed but the appointment to actually cut it off was three weeks away, in Phoenix. She looked down at it.

"It doesn't matter," she said, to nobody specifically. "I don't care anymore. Let them watch."

Rosa laughed a small laugh. "Let them watch."

Maria turned to me.

"Samuel," she said. "Come to Tucson. When I am settled. You come and have dinner. I will make you something not pozole. I will make you the thing I make best. *Chiles rellenos*. I bet you have never had a real one."

"I haven't."

"I thought so. You come."

"I will."

She hugged me.

She was small, Maria, smaller than me by a head. Her hug was fierce. It smelled like kitchen and soap and a little bit of fear, which I do not think ever completely left her, not in the time I knew her, and I do not know if it ever will.

"Thank you," she said. Quiet. In my ear. In English, which she spoke badly but had practiced for this moment. "Thank you, Samuel. Thank you, thank you, thank you."

"You did it," I said. "Maria, you did it. Not us. You."

She got in the van. She buckled Luz in next to her, Diego on the other side. Beatriz climbed in the driver's seat. The engine started. Rosa and I and two of the volunteers and Father Luis, who had come that afternoon specifically to see them off, stood in the gravel. The van backed up. Maria waved. Diego waved. Luz held up *Galleta* and made the rabbit wave too. The van pulled out onto the road. Dust rose up behind it and hung in the sun.

The van went around the bend by the big mesquite and it was gone.

We stood in the parking lot for a minute. Nobody said anything.

Everyone turned. Everyone went inside.

I stood there another moment.

I said it like the word Maria had asked me to write. The whole word. Not a stamp.

Then I went in too.

*

That night I opened the logbook.

I found Maria's name. I had written it out with such care, her full name, the accent on the *í* in *María*, the full middle name *de los Ángeles*, the K'iche' surname.

**ASYLUM GRANTED.**

I underlined it.

*Diego, 7. Luz, 5. Stuffed rabbit named Galleta. She will make me chiles rellenos in Tucson someday. This page is a page I will come back to when I cannot remember why.*

I closed the book.

I sat on my bed a long time.

The book, I understood, was not a record of results.

The book was a record of *presence.*

I had shown up for both of them. I had driven one to a door I could not follow him through, and I had helped carry the other one's boxes to a van, and in both cases I had been there. I had, in Father Luis's words, not left.

The presence was the point.

I thought I might, finally, be starting to understand what Rosa had said. Not all the way. Not enough to live on forever. But enough, tonight, to sleep.

I slept.

In the weeks after Maria left, something in me changed.

I did not announce it. I did not understand it, at first. I only noticed it, the way you notice that a door in your house which had always squeaked has stopped squeaking, and you cannot remember when it stopped, and you are not sure you oiled it, and yet there it is, swinging quietly on its hinges, and the house is different now, a little, in a way you feel before you can name.

The change had to do with how I helped.

Before, I had been trying to help by doing. By moving. By problem-solving. A person came in, and I wanted to find them a bed, a lawyer, a phone call, a ride, a relative, a future. I wanted to build them a staircase out of the hole they were in. I did not, I see now, actually listen to most of what they said, because I was too busy in my head listening for the piece of information that would let me *do* something. When somebody told me about their cousin in Kansas City, I was already planning how we could reach the cousin in Kansas City. When somebody told me about the coyote who had robbed them, I was already deciding how we could report the coyote. I was a lever and a wedge. I was an eighteen-year-old American boy who had been raised to believe that problems had solutions and that the solutions had steps and that the steps could be taken one at a time by a sufficiently earnest person, and that an earnest person was what I was.

After Ronaldo, I could not do that anymore.

Because the staircase I had built for him had gone nowhere. Because the earnest steps I had taken had ended in a bus to the south. Because the problem had not had a solution, and my being a lever and a wedge had not turned the lock, and I had to sit, finally, with what the work actually was when the work was stripped of the fantasy that I could fix it.

What was left was listening.

I started listening.

I started, without deciding to, simply sitting with people for longer. A woman came in, from Chiapas, whose husband had been killed in front of her — and before, I would have immediately gone into paperwork mode, would have started asking about her documents and her dates and her route. Now I sat with her at the intake desk for forty minutes and I let her tell me about her husband. His name was Óscar. He had fixed radios for a living. He liked cumbia and he could not sing but he sang anyway, in the kitchen, in the mornings. She had three photographs of him on her phone. She showed them to me. She told me about each one. In the third photograph he was standing in front of a blue wall with a small gray parrot on his shoulder and he was laughing because the parrot had just said something obscene. The parrot's name, she said, was *El Presidente*, because he had opinions about everything.

I wrote all of this down.

I began to think this was what the logbook was for.

Not names and fates. Names and truths.

I cried a little when I wrote this. I did not mind anymore that I was crying.

I wrote about other people. A man named Jorge who had built houses in Tegucigalpa and who had shown me, one afternoon in the courtyard, the correct way to hold a hammer. A woman named Nidia who had been a schoolteacher and who could recite the Constitution of Honduras from memory. A boy named Felipe who was sixteen and traveling alone and who had played soccer for a youth team and who had a way of smiling that suggested that someone, somewhere, had once told him he was beautiful, and he had believed them, and he had not yet been persuaded otherwise.

My logbook filled up fast. I went to the dollar store in Nogales and bought another one. I started a second volume.

*

Rosa noticed.

Of course Rosa noticed. Rosa noticed everything.

She came up to me in the courtyard on a Saturday afternoon. I was sitting at the picnic table with an older man named Don Beto — from Veracruz, a fisherman, now too old for fishing, had tried to cross to join his daughter in Oregon — and we had been sitting there for, I don't know, an hour. Maybe more. He had been telling me about the Gulf of Mexico in the 1970s. The size of the fish then versus now. The names of the captains he had worked for. A storm he had been in, in 1982, when he was twenty-three, that had killed six men he knew.

Rosa came out with two cups of coffee and set one in front of each of us and sat down on the bench next to me and said, in English, "Don Beto is a great storyteller. You should have heard him last week about his wife."

Don Beto laughed. "I haven't told him about my wife yet. He's still a boy. I am working up to it."

"Samuel is not a boy anymore," Rosa said.

I looked at her.

She did not look at me. She picked up her coffee and took a sip. Don Beto said something about his wife, a little, a small story about how she used to pretend to be afraid of spiders even though she was not afraid of spiders, because she liked watching him be brave about them. Then he said he was going to lie down for a while, and he got up, slow, and went inside.

Rosa and I were alone at the picnic table.

"You've changed," she said.

"Have I."

"You know you have. Don't be falsely modest. It's a cheap look on you."

I laughed a little. The laugh came easier than it used to.

"You were all hands when you got here," she said. "Your hands were everywhere. Your face was sometimes there. Sometimes not. Now you're all face. Your hands have caught up with your face."

"I don't know what you mean."

"Yes you do. You've slowed down. You look at people now. Before, you looked at problems. Now you look at people. It's a different kind of work. It makes you better at the job."

"I'm still doing the paperwork."

"Yes. But you're doing it after. Not instead of."

I thought about this.

"Rosa," I said, "can I ask you something."

"You just did. But yes."

"Did I—" I stopped. I started again. "Before. When I was—all hands. Was I doing harm?"

She thought about it. I appreciated that she thought about it. She did not hurry to reassure me.

"No," she said eventually. "You weren't doing harm. You were doing less good than you could have. There's a difference."

"What's the difference."

"Harm is when you leave somebody worse than you found them. Less good is when you leave them the same when you could have left them a little better. A lot of people in this work do only less good for twenty years and never notice. The fact that you noticed means something about you. The fact that you noticed so fast — three months — means something more."

"I noticed because of Ronaldo."

"Yes," she said. "You noticed because of Ronaldo."

We were quiet.

"Is that worth it?" I said. My voice was smaller than I wanted it to be. "Him, for the noticing. Is that a trade I should be okay with?"

"No," Rosa said. Flat. Immediate. "It is not a trade you should be okay with. You do not get to be okay with it. You carry him. You carry him all your life. And you get better at the work because you carry him. Both are true. They do not cancel each other out. The world does not work that way."

I nodded.

We drank our coffee.

"Samuel," Rosa said. "Can I ask *you* something."

"Yes."

"What are you going to do. After this."

"After this?"

"After the service year. May. You'll go home. You've got college offered up, your mother told me. What are you going to do."

I had been thinking about this. I had been thinking about it more than I was letting on. I had an acceptance letter on a table in a house in Oakland, for a college in New England that my mother had circled the date on. I had a plan that had been made a year ago by a version of me who did not know anything.

"I'm going to college," I said.

"Good."

"I don't know what I'm going to study. I had said political science. I think now—I think maybe political science and religion. Or theology. One of those."

"Smart boy."

"I don't know if I want to do this work," I said. "I don't know if I'm strong enough."

Rosa laughed. A real laugh. "Samuel, honey. Nobody is strong enough. We are all barely strong enough. You have watched me be barely strong enough every day for three months. You think I wake up strong? I wake up tired. I wake up and I drink my coffee and I go to work because the work is there. That is all strength is. That is the only strength there is."

"But you've done it for twenty-two years."

"And I have quit in my head about four hundred times. I have packed bags in my head and driven away in my head. And every morning I have been here. That is what it looks like, Samuel. Don't romanticize it. It is not heroism. It is a choice you make one morning at a time, and some mornings you almost don't make it, and the trick is just to pick up the coffee."

"Rosa."

"Yes."

"Thank you."

She turned her head and looked at me then. Straight on. Her eyes were that color of strong tea and they were very steady.

"You're welcome," she said.

We drank our coffee until it was cold.

*

At night I wrote in the logbook.

Every night. It had become the hinge of my day. Before, I had written when I had something to say. Now I wrote whether I did or not. If I had nothing to say, I wrote *I have nothing to say tonight. Here is what the building sounded like.* And I described the sounds. The refrigerator. The pipes. The Spanish laughter from somebody's phone in the men's dorm. The wind through the gap in the window I had never fixed.

I closed the book. I turned off the lamp.

I slept.

I went back out on water drops in the middle of November.

The first time, I had gone out as a passenger, a boy in the back seat, scared and quiet and staring at his own hands. I had seen a body. I had not been able to sleep for three nights afterward. When they had asked me to go again, a week later, I had said no. I had said no for weeks.

In November I said yes.

The volunteer coordinator — a quiet man named Dale who worked for one of the humanitarian aid organizations that partnered with the shelter — blinked at me. Dale was maybe forty. He had a sun-cracked neck and the quiet of a person who had done the work long enough to have stopped making jokes about it.

"Plan them how," he said.

"I can read maps," I said. "I've been going over the route maps with Javier in the evenings. He's been teaching me the canyons. The drainages. Where the migration corridors have shifted this fall. I can plot drops. I can check the GPS coordinates against the terrain. I can plan routes that are safer for the volunteers, and I can plan drops that are more likely to actually reach people."

Dale looked at me. He looked at me for a long moment, the way a carpenter looks at a board he is considering for a particular spot in a particular joint.

"All right," he said.

That was it. That was how I became, for a little while, a planner.

*

Javier was a man from Tucson who had been running water drops for nine years. He was a retired high school Spanish teacher who had started doing it after his wife died and his kids moved to Denver, and he had, he told me one afternoon in a deadpan voice, "nothing else going on and a perfectly good truck." He was lying, in the way that people who do hard things sometimes lie. He was doing it for reasons that went down further than that. But he was not interested in talking about them, and I respected that, because I was not interested, either, in talking about why I was still there instead of on a plane home.

He had been teaching me the maps for about a month.

The route maps were topographic maps, large, photocopied onto bigger-than-normal paper and marked up with pens of different colors. The migration corridors, the known travel routes, were in red. The water drop locations — where gallon jugs were left along the trails, in the shade of specific rocks, at specific coordinates — were in blue. The known desert features — the canyons, the drainages, the box canyons where people died because they could not climb back out, the places where phone signal came in, the places where it did not — were in green.

Javier had taught me the ground. The paper. The logic.

"The coyotes know the old routes," he said, "and Border Patrol knows the old routes, so the people on foot are pushed to the new ones. Last fall they were coming through here." He tapped a ridge. "This spring through here." He tapped a drainage. "Now, this late fall, we think they're going through this country. Higher. Longer walks. Colder nights. We move the water to where they are. Otherwise we're leaving jugs for nobody and the nobody dies a mile from us."

I listened.

I took notes.

I started marking up my own copies of the maps in pencil at night. I memorized the ridges. I memorized the washes. I memorized the names of the canyons — Arivaca, Peñasco, Bear Valley, the long unnamed drainages east of the ranch country that Javier simply called *el vacío*, the empty. I walked some of them in my head when I could not sleep. I learned to read the topo lines the way a musician reads a score. The narrow lines where the land squeezed together. The wide open intervals of flat.

By the second week of November I was sitting in on the planning meetings at Dale's office in Green Valley. I was the youngest person in the room by a quarter century. I was the only person in the room who had been doing it for less than two years. I sat quietly. I listened. Now and then I spoke, about a route, about a drainage, about a GPS coordinate that seemed too close to a wash that flooded when it rained.

Dale looked at me the first time I spoke up. He did not look impressed. He did not look unimpressed. He looked, I realized afterwards, the way Rosa looked at me — the way people who have been in this work a long time look at people who are new to it. He looked like a man who was deciding whether to spend his time on me. He looked like a man who was deciding that, for now, yes, he would.

*

On the morning of the day I remember specifically, we went out in three trucks.

It was mid-November, cold at dawn, warm by ten. The sky was that particular high-desert blue that you forget about and then you see it again and you cannot believe the world contains a color like this for free. We drove south and west out of Green Valley. We got off the paved roads. We were on Forest Service land for a long time, then BLM land, then a corner of the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, then a stretch of ranch country where the road was, formally, not a road, just a set of tire ruts that people had been using for thirty years and which nobody owned and which the ranchers tolerated.

There were four of us in my truck — me, Javier, a woman named Pat who had been doing water drops for fifteen years, and a new volunteer named Adam who was a young man from Phoenix who had come down for a weekend and who, I could tell within fifteen minutes, was the version of me from September. He sat in the back seat and he talked too much and he asked questions whose answers he had not earned yet. I did not judge him. I remembered. I answered his questions when I could. I let Javier answer them when I could not.

We drove for two hours. Then we parked. Then we loaded our packs.

Each pack was heavy. Gallon jugs, four to a pack. We each carried four or five. We had food and water for ourselves, and first aid, and radios, and in my pack I carried, additionally, a small spiral notebook with the drop coordinates written out in my own handwriting and a pencil and a compass and two maps, the main route map and a detail map of the drainage we were working. Javier carried the GPS and the satellite phone. Pat carried additional medical. Adam carried additional water jugs because he was young and fresh and did not know what he was in for.

We walked.

We walked in single file. Javier at the front. Then Pat. Then me. Then Adam. We walked south and east along the edge of the drainage and then down into it. The sun came up over the ridge. The shadows were long and cold. The creosote smelled sharp. I had learned, by November, to love the smell of creosote. It meant I was in the country I was supposed to be in.

At the first drop site, Javier stopped.

Javier looked at me.

"What do you notice," he said.

I looked around.

I looked at the ground. I looked at the brush. I looked at the tracks in the sandy bed of the wash.

"There's been traffic through here recently," I said. "Two different groups, I think. One about three days ago — see how the footprints are sort of rounded at the edges. The wind has worked on them. The others—" I crouched. "These others are fresher. Maybe last night. Five or six people, looks like. One of them was limping."

Javier looked at the ground.

"How do you see the limp."

"The one set of prints. The right foot is deeper than the left. He's putting more weight on the right side than the left. So the left foot is hurt."

Javier nodded slowly.

"You see that by yourself?"

"I read it in a book you gave me."

"Good," he said. "You read the book. Most people don't read the book."

We kept moving.

Second drop. Third drop. Pat kept the pace. Adam was breathing hard by the third drop. Javier gave him a handful of salt tablets and a long look and said nothing. At the fourth drop — which was up a ridge, a harder one, maybe a mile of climb — Adam said he was fine and then, at the top of the ridge, sat down hard on a rock and put his head between his knees and said, "I'm fine. I'm fine."

Pat took his pack off him without asking. She distributed the jugs among the three of us. I took two extra. Javier took two extra. Adam sat on the rock. He looked embarrassed. He looked close to tears.

"Hey," I said to him. Quiet. "It's okay."

"I'm sorry, I—"

"Adam. It's okay. This is your first time. Everyone does this. I did it my first time. I sat in that exact position on that exact kind of rock and my head was between my knees and Javier gave me a look and Pat took my jugs, and that was in much easier country than this. You are doing okay."

He looked up at me. He was maybe twenty.

"Really?"

"Really."

He stood up, slow. He wiped his face on his sleeve.

"I'm going to keep going," he said.

"We're going to keep going together," I said.

We kept going.

*

At the sixth drop we found a footprint that was not like the others.

It was a small footprint. Very small. The size of a child's shoe.

I crouched. Javier crouched next to me. We did not speak. Pat, behind us, saw what we were looking at, and she came up and she crouched too. Adam stood back a little. He did not know yet what this footprint meant. I knew. Javier had told me.

A child's footprint in this country meant a family. A family with a child this small meant they were moving slowly, because a child this small could not keep the pace that adults could keep, which meant the family was probably behind the group, which meant they were more exposed, which meant if anything had gone wrong they were the ones it had probably gone wrong for.

Javier looked at the print for a long time.

"Day old," he said. Quiet. "Maybe day and a half."

"So they're probably through."

"Probably."

"But."

"But if they're not."

We looked at each other.

I wrote the note. Javier watched me write it and then added two sentences at the bottom in a Spanish that was more rural than mine, that used words I would not have thought to use. He folded it. He put it under a jug.

We kept going.

*

We did not find the family.

We did not find anyone.

The rest of the drops went without incident, and we hiked back to the trucks, and we ate sandwiches sitting on the tailgates, and we drove back toward town in the long golden light of the late afternoon with the windows down and the dust of the unpaved roads coming in.

Nobody had died, that day, under our care. Nobody had been rescued. Nobody had been found. We had left water and first aid and handwritten notes in Spanish under rocks, and we had read footprints, and we had carried jugs up ridges, and we had not, as far as we knew, changed the outcome of anybody's life.

I thought about this on the drive back.

I thought about Ronaldo.

I thought about him, for the first time in a couple of weeks, without crushing grief. Grief, yes. Still. Always. But it had changed shape. It had become something more like a presence inside my presence. He was with me, out in that country, on that ridge, at that drop. He was with me in my packing of the water jugs and in my reading of the footprints. He had not been a boy who would have been out here with a pack doing water drops. He had been a boy on the receiving end of water drops. He had, somewhere in Honduras on his way north, in his first attempt the year before he had tried again, drunk water left under a rock by someone exactly like me.

*

When we got back to the shelter that night, it was dark.

Rosa was in her office. She looked up when I came in. I must have looked tired. I must have looked different. I don't know what I looked like. I was not paying attention to what I looked like.

"Long day," she said.

"Yes."

"You find anybody."

"No."

"You leave them what they need."

"We left what we had."

She nodded.

"Sit down," she said.

I sat down.

"Tell me about it," she said. "From the beginning."

I told her. I told her about the drops, and the canyons, and the footprints, and the child's shoe, and the note under the rock. I told her about Adam on the ridge. I told her about Javier saying *you read the book.* I told her everything.

She listened. She did not write anything down. She did not interrupt.

"I don't know if that's the right word."

"It's the word. You've become useful, Samuel. Before, you wanted to be useful. You wanted it the way a boy wants it, which is a desire for yourself more than for the work. Now you are useful. The work is moving through you. You are an instrument of it. Do you feel the difference?"

"Yes."

"Good. Now go to bed."

I went.

*We went out today. We did not find anybody. We left four extra jugs at drop six because of a child's footprint. Javier taught me how to read a limp. I thought of Ronaldo. I thought of him without breaking. The grief is inside me now instead of on me. I am not sure if this is worse or better. I am sure that it is different.*

*The desert is beautiful and it is trying to kill people. Both are true. Both are always true. I do not know what to do with this except to keep going out.*

I closed the book.

I slept, and I dreamed about the country we had been in, and in the dream I saw the child whose footprint we had seen, and he was walking, and he was okay, and a woman was holding his hand, and they were finding the orange markers, and they were walking north, and they were fine, and I do not know if this was a true dream or a false dream, and I have never known, and I have kept it anyway, because it was mine.

My mother came for Thanksgiving.

She had asked, at the start of the service year, whether she could. I had said yes and meant yes and then spent the following three months quietly hoping she would decide it was too far. She did not decide it was too far. She booked the flight in October. She sent me the confirmation as a screenshot with three hearts underneath. My mother was fifty-two years old and she used three hearts the way other people used punctuation.

She flew into Tucson on the Tuesday of Thanksgiving week. I drove up to get her in one of the shelter vans. I had not seen her since August.

I stood at the arrivals curb at the Tucson airport and I waited and I was nervous in a way I had not been nervous in a long time. I was nervous because I did not know what she would see when she looked at me. I had lost weight. I knew this. My pants were loose at the waist. My face had changed — I had seen it in the bathroom mirror one morning that week and had not recognized, for a second, the set of the jaw. I was nervous because she knew me, and because she was going to know right away.

The automatic doors opened and she came out pulling a small roller bag and wearing the long black coat she had bought in Paris in 1998 that she still insisted was the best coat she had ever owned, and she saw me, and she stopped on the sidewalk, and she dropped the handle of her bag, and she put her hand over her mouth.

"Sam," she said. Through her hand. "*Sam, azizam.*"

She came to me. She put her arms around me. She was shorter than me by a foot — my mother had always been small — and she held me tight, and for a long moment she did not let go, and I felt her shoulders shake once, twice, and I understood that she was crying, and I understood that I was not going to cry, because I had spent three months learning not to cry until the right time, and this was my mother's time.

"Mom," I said. Quiet. Into her hair. "Mom, I'm okay."

"You are not okay," she said, also quiet. Her English had thickened with the tears; her Persian accent, which usually only came out on specific words, came out on most of them. "You are thin. You are so thin. You are so tired. My God. My God, my boy, what have they done to you."

"Nobody's done anything, Mom. I'm okay."

"You look like your grandfather. You look like your grandfather after the Revolution, when we left Tehran. You have the eyes. *Khoda ro shokr.* Thank God you are here. Thank God I can see you."

She pulled back. She looked at me. She cupped my face in both of her hands the way she used to do when I was a child. Her eyes traveled over me. I could see her cataloguing — the cheekbones, the circles under my eyes, the faint beard I had grown and had not, until that moment, been aware of.

"A beard," she said.

"A little."

"A beard."

"Mom. It's fine. I shave. Sometimes I forget for a couple of days."

"*Azizam.*"

She dropped her hands. She picked up her roller bag. She looked at me once more, and then she looked away — visibly composing herself, the way she had always composed herself, folding the emotion into a drawer inside herself and closing the drawer.

"Okay," she said. "Where is the car."

*

I had rented us a little motel room in Nogales for the three nights she was in town, because I did not want her sleeping in the volunteer quarters and I did not want her going back and forth to Tucson every day. The motel was a perfectly adequate place with a pool she was not going to use and a breakfast bar with waffles she was not going to eat, and the woman at the desk called her *honey* in a way that made my mother's eyebrows lift about a millimeter.

We had dinner that first night at a Mexican place on the main drag. My mother looked at the menu the whole time. She asked me questions about the shelter. I answered them, carefully, not lying, not telling her everything. I told her about Rosa. I told her about Father Luis. I told her, when she pressed, about Ronaldo. I told her the basic facts. I did not tell her about the DEPORTED. I told her he had been deported. Those are not the same story.

She was quiet for a long time after I told her.

"And this boy," she said eventually. "You were close with him."

"Yes, Mom."

"Like a friend."

"Like a friend."

"Samuel. Have you been grieving."

I looked at my plate. There were beans on it. I had not eaten them.

"Yes," I said. "I have been."

She reached across the table and she put her hand on my wrist. She did not say anything. She held my wrist. In Persian households it is not common to touch in public. My mother had always been half in the American way and half in the Persian way and she had chosen, in that specific moment, the American way, and I understood that she had chosen it for me.

"I am here," she said.

"I know."

"I am here for three days. Four days. I will sit with you. I will not ask you questions you do not want. I will not say anything. I will just be here. *Bebakhshid*, Sam. For anything I said or did not do. I am sorry. I am your mother and I am here."

"Mom, you didn't do anything."

"I let you come," she said. "I let you come alone to a place like this. At eighteen. *Eighteen*, Sam. And I told your father I was proud of you. I was. I am. *Bacheye man.* But also I let you come, and I did not know, I did not know, what it would do to you, and I should have known, because I have been eighteen, and I have lost someone, and I know how it cuts into you when you are that age, it cuts in a way that never fully closes. *Forgive me, azizam.*"

"Mom. There is nothing to forgive."

"Let me say it anyway."

I let her say it.

*

The next day, Wednesday, I brought her to the shelter in the afternoon.

Rosa met us at the front door. Rosa was wearing her shelter sweatshirt and her hair was in a braid and she was drying her hands on a dishtowel. She and my mother looked at each other for about two seconds and then they embraced as if they were old friends, which they were not, which they had not been until that moment.

"Mrs. Rafiq," Rosa said.

"Leila. Please. Leila."

"Leila. Thank you. I am so glad you came. Your son is—"

"I know," my mother said. "I know."

They looked at each other again. Something passed between them — some recognition, woman to woman, mother to mother. My mother had met Rosa before only on video calls. Now they stood in the doorway of the shelter and they looked at each other the way two people look at each other when they have each been, separately, in charge of keeping the same boy alive.

"Come in," Rosa said. "Come in, come in. Let me give you the tour."

Rosa gave my mother the tour.

The tour was brief and frank. Rosa did not hide anything. She showed my mother the men's dorm and the women's dorm and the kitchen and the intake desk and the small exam room where Dr. Chávez — a retired physician from Tucson — saw patients twice a week. She introduced my mother to the residents who were present. My mother said hello in Spanish, which she did not really speak but which she had been practicing on her phone for three months in preparation, and an older man from Oaxaca complimented her pronunciation, and my mother went pink in the cheeks.

When the tour was done Rosa and my mother sat at the picnic table in the courtyard and they drank tea. Rosa had made the tea specifically for my mother — a black tea with cardamom that Rosa had found at a Middle Eastern market in Tucson. My mother closed her eyes when she drank it. Then she opened them and she said, "Rosa, this is the correct tea."

"I hoped."

"It is correct. Thank you."

They sat. I sat at the end of the table with my own cup. I listened. They talked for a long time. About my mother's coming to America at six. About Rosa's own mother, who had come from Sonora at sixteen. About the different ways of losing a country. About the way one's children grow in the country they were born in and not the country you come from, and how the children you have cannot know what you have left, not really, no matter how much you tell them.

My mother looked at Rosa.

My mother looked at me.

My mother began, quietly, to cry into her tea.

I had not, in my life, seen my mother cry in front of another woman. I had seen her cry alone — through a door, once, the night my father moved out when I was twelve. I had seen her cry at my grandfather's funeral. I had seen her cry at the small shrine she kept in the corner of her bedroom with her prayer book and her photograph of her grandmother. I had not seen her cry in a public courtyard in front of a woman she had known for an afternoon.

"You do not have to pretend here," Rosa said.

"I see that," my mother said.

*

On Thanksgiving itself, Rosa and the volunteers cooked a big meal at the shelter. A turkey, somehow — Dr. Chávez had donated it — and mashed potatoes and stuffing and a dozen pans of tamales the residents had made the day before. My mother sat between me and Father Luis. She charmed Father Luis. He charmed her back. They discovered within ten minutes that they had both, independently, read the poetry of Mary Oliver, and the two of them talked Mary Oliver across the turkey with a specificity that made me, for about twenty minutes, feel like the least-read person at the table.

After dinner my mother asked Father Luis a question I had not been present for the asking of. She asked it quietly, when I had gone to help clear plates. When I came back she was looking thoughtful and Father Luis was nodding.

"Samuel," Father Luis said. "Your mother has asked if we could go to Mass tonight. The late Mass at the parish. I had not offered because I did not want to impose. But I would be very glad to take her. Would you like to come?"

I looked at my mother.

"Mom, you're not Catholic."

"I am not Catholic," my mother said. "And you are not Catholic. Father Luis is Catholic. It is, apparently, his holiday as well. I would like to sit in a room, tonight, and be quiet. Will you come with me?"

I came.

*

The parish church was on a dusty street on the outskirts of Nogales on the American side. It was small — maybe a hundred pews — and the walls were painted a faded blue and the altar had a carved wooden crucifix behind it that was, Father Luis told us as we walked in, about a hundred and fifty years old and had been made by a craftsman in Hermosillo whose name was lost to history.

It was a late Mass, a silent Mass — a Thanksgiving Mass of contemplation that Father Luis's parish did every year on the evening of the holiday for people who wanted to sit and be quiet and think. There were maybe thirty people in the pews. An old woman in a black mantilla near the front. A family in a middle pew, the children leaning against their parents, already half-asleep. A man alone in the back with a baseball cap in his lap.

Father Luis processed in with two servers. The Mass was in Spanish. It was, as advertised, mostly silent — long silences between the prayers, a silent reading of the Gospel with the congregation following along in their missals, a silent offertory with only the small sound of the bread and wine being placed on the altar.

I did not understand most of the words.

I understood what the room was doing.

I sat on the wooden pew between my mother and Father Luis — Father Luis was not concelebrating, he was just sitting with us, a break from his duties — and I felt the silence of the room settle on my shoulders like a weighted blanket. The old woman in the mantilla prayed without moving her lips. The children in the middle pew were fully asleep now, their mouths open. The man in the back cap had his head bowed and I could see, from where I sat, that his shoulders were shaking, gently, in a way that I recognized.

I had come to recognize it.

I looked at my mother next to me.

She was looking at the crucifix at the front of the church. She did not look unhappy or happy. She looked like someone who had not sat in a church in a long time and was remembering how. Her hands were folded in her lap. Her mouth was moving, very slightly. I listened. I listened hard. I was three inches from her and I could just barely hear.

She was praying in Persian.

Under her breath. Just the Persian. A prayer I did not know — not by name — but I recognized the rhythm of it, a rhythm from my childhood, a rhythm from the little shrine in the corner of her bedroom. She was praying in Persian in a Catholic church in Nogales, Arizona, on Thanksgiving night, with her son next to her and a Jesuit priest on the other side of her son, and the crucifix in front of her, and in the back of the church a man was crying, and in the middle pew a family was asleep.

I did not, at the time, know what the prayer was. Later, at the motel, I asked her, and she told me.

It was a prayer my grandmother had taught her when she was five. A prayer for her children.

I had been in the Bahá'í community and around my mother's faith all my life, and I had also been around my father's Muslim practice in the years before the divorce, and I had been in other people's prayer rooms in other configurations in other places. But I had not, before that night, sat in a silent space with my mother actively praying next to me in Persian, and I had not, before that night, understood how faith — whatever faith, however it was named — was a thing you could do quietly in any room, with anyone around you, without permission, without announcement, without embarrassment, just because you had been given the words once by somebody who loved you, and you had kept them.

I thought about my logbook.

We walked out into the cold desert night and the stars were large.

"For what."

"For letting me come."

"Mom."

"No. Thank you. Thank you for being the boy who would come and do this thing and then let his mother come. You have always been a good son. I want you to know that I see it. I see you. Goodnight, *azizam.*"

"Goodnight, Mom."

*

She went home on Saturday.

I drove her to the airport. We did not talk much on the drive. We were both saving ourselves, I think, for what would come after. At the curb she hugged me and she did not cry this time and she said, "Call me every Sunday. I do not care what time. Persian time, American time, shelter time. Call me."

"I will."

"And Samuel."

"Yes, Mom."

"I have thought all week about what to tell you. I have not found a thing good enough. So I will only tell you one thing. *Khoda hafiz.* Go with God. And if you cannot go with God — because some days you cannot, I remember — then go with the people who are going with God. They will carry you. Do you understand me."

"Yes, Mom."

"Good. Goodbye, *azizam.*"

She kissed me on both cheeks. She walked into the terminal. She did not look back, because my mother had grown up in a country you did not look back at, and she had, in her own way, taught herself over forty years not to do it.

I drove back to Nogales alone.

"I'll wash my hands," I said.

"Do that," she said.

I did.

I wrote in the logbook that night.

*I do not know what I am doing here. I know it is correct that I am here. Both can be true.*

I closed the book. I slept.

The men came in three trucks on a Thursday afternoon in early December.

It was a cold day. The kind of cold that catches you in the high desert when there's no cloud cover — the sun was bright, the sky was that shocking blue, and yet your breath came out in visible puffs and your fingers went stiff if you left them out of your pockets too long. I was in the courtyard helping Don Beto wrap the tomato plants in old bedsheets to protect them from an overnight frost that was predicted. Don Beto was an old fisherman who did not know anything about tomatoes and neither did I, but Rosa had announced that morning that the plants were going to die without protection, and had produced an armful of old sheets from the linen closet, and had handed them to us, and had told us to figure it out. We were figuring it out.

Don Beto was telling me a story about a man in his village in Veracruz who had grown tomatoes the size of fists, and who had refused to share the secret of his fertilizer with anyone, and whose wife had finally told another woman at the market that the secret was fish guts mixed with ash, and how the man had not spoken to his wife for six months after this betrayal of his gardening mysteries, and how this had been, in the village, a famous long joke that went on for years.

I was laughing.

Then I heard the engines.

Three trucks, big trucks, pickups with lift kits and fog lights and one of them with an American flag mounted on a pole in the bed, came around the corner of the road and slowed as they passed the shelter and pulled into the gravel lot at the front. They parked in a row. Doors opened. Men got out. There were, I counted without wanting to count, seven of them. All white. All men. Most of them middle-aged. Two of them younger — in their twenties, maybe. All of them in tactical-looking clothing. And — I saw this and I did not, at first, believe I was seeing it — four of the seven were openly carrying rifles. Slung over shoulders. Not pointed at anything. But present. Present in the way a thing is present when its entire reason for being present is to be seen.

I stopped laughing.

Don Beto followed my gaze. He saw what I saw. He said, in Spanish, quietly, "Ay."

"Don Beto—"

"Go. Now. Tell her. I will stay in the courtyard. I am an old man. They will not bother an old man. Go."

I went.

I walked fast into the shelter, through the back door, through the kitchen — where Maria was not, because Maria was in Tucson, but where two other residents were, Doña Julia and a woman named Esperanza, doing the prep for dinner. They saw my face. They stopped chopping.

"Stay in here," I said. "Lock the back door. Don't come out. Some men are here."

"¿Qué hombres?" Doña Julia said.

"Just stay here. Lock the door."

I went to Rosa's office. She was on the phone. She took one look at me and said, "I'm going to have to call you back," and hung up. She stood up.

"What."

"Seven men. Three trucks. Four of them have rifles. Out front. Just parked."

She closed her eyes for one second. Then she opened them.

"Get Father Luis on the phone. Tell him we might need him here. And call the sheriff's non-emergency. Tell them the situation. Don't call 911. Non-emergency. Tell them there are visitors on our property who are armed. Tell them we are a non-profit and we are requesting a welfare check because we have undocumented persons on site and we want a uniformed officer to be present during the conversation. Got it?"

"Got it."

"Then come out. Stand behind me. Do not speak. Do not make eye contact with them. Do not make any sudden movements. Your hands are out of your pockets and at your sides the whole time. Understand?"

"Yes."

"Good. Samuel. Deep breath. This is not new. I have done this before. Follow my lead."

She walked past me. She walked out of her office. She walked down the hallway toward the front door with that particular steady walk she had, the same walk she used to cross the courtyard to deliver bad news, the same walk she used to come into my room on the morning after Ronaldo. She walked like a woman who had decided a long time ago that her body was not going to show fear to anyone who had not earned the privilege of seeing it.

I made the two phone calls in thirty seconds. Father Luis said he was on his way. The sheriff's office said they would send a deputy. I went out front.

*

Rosa was standing on the small concrete landing just outside the front door. She had her arms folded across her chest. She was in her shelter sweatshirt. Her hair was in a braid. She had, I noticed, picked up her reading glasses from the office and put them on top of her head like a headband — a tiny, specific gesture that I understood was her way of making herself look, for this moment, like the school principal she had at one time been, many years ago, before the shelter, when she had taught fifth grade in Douglas, Arizona.

The man in front was in his fifties. He had a gray goatee and mirrored sunglasses and he was not visibly armed — which was not reassuring, because it meant he was the one who talked, which meant he was the leader, which meant everyone else was there to be his threat. He was chewing gum. He had a phone in one hand. He was, I realized after a second, filming.

"Afternoon, ma'am," he said. Loud. For the camera. "We're here on behalf of the American Patriot Watch. We're doing a community welfare check. We've had reports that this facility is harboring illegal aliens. Are you the person in charge?"

Rosa said nothing for three seconds.

"Your name?"

"Rosa Delgado."

"Miss Delgado. Ma'am. We'd like to have a conversation about what's going on here."

"This is private property," Rosa said. Calm. Even. "You are on my gravel. I am happy to have a conversation with you from the road. I will not be having one on my gravel. Please take five steps back, all of you."

The man in front smiled. He did not move. Behind him, one of the armed men — younger, maybe twenty-five, with a beard and a baseball cap — shifted his weight. The rifle on his shoulder shifted with him.

"Ma'am," the man in front said. "We're just here to talk. No need to be unfriendly."

"I am being entirely friendly," Rosa said. "I am asking you, politely, to step back off my gravel. This is the second time I am asking. I will not ask a third time. I will wait for the deputy. Your phone is recording you not complying with a lawful request from a property owner. You might want to take that into account."

The man in front stopped smiling.

"You called the cops?"

"I called non-emergency for a welfare check. Because I have residents on site who are frightened, and I have seven armed strangers in my lot, and I do not think the situation benefits from escalation, and I want a neutral witness. You might want to use the time, before the deputy gets here, to go back to your trucks and collect yourselves. But you do you."

He stared at her.

She stared at him. Over the top of her reading-glasses-as-headband. Her arms folded. Her weight even on both feet. The air was absolutely still.

I stood three feet behind her and I had my hands at my sides and I did not move. I could hear my own heart. I could feel, in a dim way, Don Beto behind me somewhere — he had, apparently, not stayed in the courtyard; he had walked around the side of the building with a pair of pruning shears in his hand and was standing at the far corner of the shelter, just in view, and was pretending to trim a bush. I loved him for it. I did not look at him.

The man in front made a decision. He took one step back.

"All right," he said. Loud. Still for the camera. "Out of respect for the lady. We'll talk from here. Miss Delgado, we've got a few questions for you about the operation of this facility—"

"I don't answer questions from armed strangers," Rosa said. "I will answer questions from law enforcement. You are not law enforcement. You are men with guns standing on the gravel of a Catholic-affiliated humanitarian organization. I am the director of this organization. My residents are not illegal aliens. They are asylum-seekers, most of whom have open cases with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and many of whom have legal tracking devices on their ankles because that is how the U.S. government keeps track of them while their cases are pending. You are welcome to Google 'asylum-seeker' on your phone while you wait for the deputy. It is a legal status. It is granted by the United States of America. They are here legally. I am operating legally. You are the only people in this conversation whose legal status I am wondering about."

I watched the man in front's jaw tighten.

"Don't lecture me, ma'am."

"I am not lecturing you. I am giving you the legal situation of my residents because it seems to be why you are here. Now. Is there a specific concern you would like me to address, or are you here to be filmed standing in a gravel lot with rifles."

One of the younger men behind the leader made a small sound. It might have been a laugh. The leader turned his head a fraction of an inch. The laugh stopped.

"We've had reports—" the leader began.

"From whom."

"Concerned citizens."

"Which concerned citizens."

"Miss Delgado, our sources are confidential—"

"Then your reports are not reports. They are rumors. I cannot address rumors. I can tell you what I actually do here, which is run a shelter for women, children, and men who are processed through legal ports of entry, who are released to us by the Department of Homeland Security pending their hearings, who follow a curfew, who check in with their tracking devices twice a day, and who do not, as a group, commit a single crime in this county, as the sheriff's department will confirm. I pay my taxes. I file my 990. My books are open to the IRS every year. I have been doing this for twenty-two years. Now I will ask you for the third time to leave my gravel."

The deputy pulled up.

He pulled up in a sheriff's department SUV with the light bar on but the siren off. He was a big man. He was in a tan uniform. He parked the SUV at the edge of the lot, got out slow, hitched his belt, assessed. He had been, I gathered right away from the way he moved, here before. He had been to this shelter before on calls. He knew Rosa. He nodded at her.

"Miss Delgado."

"Deputy Ramírez."

"What do we got."

"Seven gentlemen who stopped by to chat. Four of them are armed. I asked them to step back off my property. They have partially complied. I called for a welfare check because I have frightened residents inside. I would appreciate if you could help these gentlemen get back to their trucks."

The deputy turned to the leader.

"Sir," he said. "Afternoon. I'm Deputy Ramírez with the Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Office. I'd like to ask you and your friends to step back to your trucks, please. I need to see some ID from everybody, and I need the rifles to stay slung. Nobody touches a rifle. We're going to have a conversation. Nice and slow. Everybody puts their phones down for just a minute. Nobody's getting arrested unless somebody makes a bad decision. Understood?"

The leader started to say something.

"Sir," the deputy said, "that was not a question. Step back to the trucks."

The leader stepped back.

The other six followed.

"I am okay, Deputy. Thank you."

"I'll handle it from here. You might want to go inside."

"I'll watch from the doorway, if that's all right."

"That's all right."

Rosa stepped back. I stepped back with her. We stood just inside the front door and she held the door open a foot and we watched. Deputy Ramírez walked to the seven men. He collected their IDs. He ran them on his shoulder radio. He talked to them for a long time, too quietly for us to hear. At one point the leader gestured animatedly. The deputy raised a hand. The leader stopped gesturing. At one point the deputy appeared to give the leader a lecture — I could not hear it, but I could see it, the deputy's face, the small headshake, the finger pointing back at the trucks. After about twenty minutes the seven men got back in their three trucks. They started the engines. They backed out. They drove away.

The deputy came to the door.

"Miss Delgado," he said.

"Deputy."

"You've got a standing offer from the sheriff, as you know, to come by for coffee anytime. I'm going to repeat the offer in a more forceful way. He would like to come by this week. With me. Without a uniform. Just to sit with your residents for an hour so they see a uniform — I mean, a face that goes with the uniform — in a friendly context. Would that be okay."

"That would be very okay, Deputy."

"Thursday work."

"Thursday works."

"Good. I'll be in touch. Miss Delgado. You were calm as a cucumber out there. I don't know how you do it."

"Practice, Deputy."

He almost smiled. He touched the brim of his hat. He went back to his SUV. He drove away.

*

Rosa closed the front door.

She turned to me.

She put her hand on the wall. She put her forehead on the wall. Just for a second. I saw her shoulders rise and fall in a deep shaking breath.

Then she straightened. She turned around. Her face was composed.

"Well," she said. "That was unpleasant."

I could not speak.

"Samuel," she said. "Samuel, breathe. Come on. Deep breath. It's over. Nobody got hurt. You did everything right. You made the calls. You stood behind me. You kept your hands where they were supposed to be. Good job. Samuel. Breathe."

I breathed. I had not, I realized, been breathing. My legs were shaking now, in a way they had not shaken during it. I leaned against the wall.

"Rosa. I thought—"

"I know."

"I thought one of them was going to—"

"I know. They weren't. They weren't, because they didn't want to. That kind of man wants to be seen. He wants to be recorded. He wants to be on a video on the internet. He does not actually want to shoot anybody today. That's a real thing and it's also the only thing keeping men like that from being worse than they are. You have to understand how they work, Samuel. The camera is the leash. The camera is everything. He wanted a fight that looked good on film. I did not give him one."

"You—"

"I gave him a middle-aged brown woman with reading glasses on her head telling him to Google 'asylum-seeker.' I gave him nothing for the video. I made him look like exactly what he was. He has already taken the video off his phone. I promise you. It is already gone. That was the point. You rob them of the footage, they have no meal. Okay?"

"Okay."

"Are you going to throw up."

"I don't think so."

"Are you going to cry."

"I don't know."

"Okay. Go upstairs. Sit on your bed. Take fifteen minutes. Then come down and help with dinner."

I went upstairs.

I sat on my bed.

I did not cry. I did not throw up. I stared at the ceiling at the water stain and I breathed in and out and I thought about what had just happened, and what had almost happened, and what might not even have almost happened but which had felt like it, and I thought about Rosa standing on the concrete landing with her arms folded and her reading glasses on her head and her voice not raised.

I went back down.

I helped with dinner.

"Don Beto. You were supposed to stay in the courtyard."

"I had pruning shears. I was ready."

"Don Beto."

"I was ready, boy."

He looked at me. He was seventy-two. He had pruning shears in his back pocket still. He had, I understood, gone out around the side of the building and positioned himself at the corner because he had intended, if anything had gone wrong, to come around the corner with the shears. He would not have done anything useful with them. He would have been shot. He would have made himself a target, on purpose, to pull the attention away from Rosa and me for the three seconds it would have taken someone inside to call 911.

He had been ready. That was what he was telling me. He had been ready.

I hugged him.

He patted my back. He muttered, in Spanish, something I did not catch but which sounded like a blessing.

*

*Seven men with rifles came today. A deputy came and told them to leave. Rosa did not raise her voice. Don Beto had pruning shears in his back pocket. I stood behind Rosa and I did not move and I made two phone calls. Nobody was hurt. The video they wanted does not exist. The shelter is still here. The residents ate dinner.*

I closed the book. I did not sleep for a long time. I did, eventually, sleep.

I called my father the next day.

I had not called my father in almost three months. Not since Eid in September, a short awkward call where he had said *mubarak* and I had said *mubarak* and he had asked me how the weather was and I had said fine and he had asked me what I was eating and I had said rice and beans and he had laughed in a slightly forced way and said *well, son, you are having the real experience at least.* And we had hung up.

My father was a civil engineer in San Diego. He had come to the United States from Karachi when he was twenty-one to go to graduate school at UC San Diego. He had met my mother at a Parks and Recreation English-as-a-second-language class in 1999, when he was twenty-six and she was twenty-four, even though neither of them had actually needed the class. He had married her in 2000. They had had me in 2007. They had divorced in 2019. He had moved to his own apartment in Mission Valley. He had dated, for a while, a woman named Afshan who I had met twice and liked, and who had left him after two years because — as my mother had put it, not unkindly — *your father is not somebody who can be known.* He lived alone now. He was fifty-one. He worked too much. He called me every other Sunday. He sent money to help with college when I had not asked him to. He had supported my service year financially even though he had not understood it.

I sat on the concrete stoop behind the shelter at nine o'clock at night. It was cold. I had a blanket around my shoulders. The sky was black and the stars were sharp the way they are in the desert in December. I had his number pulled up on my phone. I had been sitting there for forty minutes not pressing the button.

The thing with the men had shaken something loose in me. Something I had been keeping where it was. I could not get it to go back to where it was.

I pressed the button.

The phone rang. It rang four times. I thought it would go to voicemail. He picked up on the fifth ring.

"Samuel."

"Dad. Hi."

"Hi, son. You are — is it late there? It is late there."

"It's nine. It's fine. Is this a bad time?"

"No. No, it is not a bad time. I am—I was going to eat. I have not eaten. I was about to make something. What do you need, son. Are you okay?"

"I'm okay. Dad. I just — I just wanted to call."

There was a long pause.

"Okay," he said.

I could hear him, in the pause, adjusting. My father was a man whose calls from me always had a purpose. School. Money. Scheduling. Logistics. A call with no purpose had not, in years, been a thing between us. He was, I understood, on the other end of the line, setting down whatever he had been holding, turning off whatever he had been listening to, sitting down in a chair.

"Okay, son," he said. "Talk to me."

"Dad. Something happened here yesterday."

"Are you hurt."

"No."

"Is anybody hurt."

"No."

"Okay. Tell me."

I told him.

I told him about the men. About the trucks. About the rifles. About Rosa and the reading glasses on her head. About Don Beto and the pruning shears. About the deputy. About the way my legs had shaken after, not during. About how I had stood behind Rosa and not moved and had thought, for one full second, that a man in a baseball cap was going to shoot her, and how my body had made a decision in that second — a decision I had not consulted with my body about — to stay where I was instead of moving to the side, and how the body's decision had turned out to be the correct one because the deputy had arrived and nobody had shot anybody, but the body's decision had been the right one even if it had turned out to be the wrong one, because I had been standing where Rosa had put me.

I told him all of it.

He listened.

He did not interrupt. My father, in normal circumstances, was a man who interrupted. He was an engineer. He was trained to hear the beginning of a problem and start solving it before the sentence ended. This is how he had been my father for eighteen years. This is why our phone calls had, since the divorce, become difficult, because the thing I had wanted from him in my teenage years was not solutions but listening, and he had not known how to do the second thing, and neither of us had, for several years, found the patience to teach him.

He listened now.

He listened for, I don't know, six minutes. I rambled. I repeated myself. I told the story out of order. I came back to details. I told him, again, about Rosa's reading glasses, and the way it had been a choice she made, a costume thing, a *this is who I am in this moment* thing. I told him about Don Beto and the shears.

When I stopped, there was silence on the line.

"Yeah, Dad."

"I need to tell you something. I am sitting down. I am listening to you. I do not know what to say. You are telling me a thing that I do not have the right words for. Give me a minute."

"Okay."

I waited.

In the desert behind the shelter an owl called somewhere far away. I could hear my father breathing, a thousand miles away in a condo in Mission Valley with a view of a freeway, holding his phone to his ear.

"What bird."

I said nothing.

"You were five. Five. And I stood in the yard with the sparrow in my hands and my son looking at me and I did not know the answer. I had a PhD in civil engineering. I had read the Quran. I had, at that time, read books by other people's theologians. I had read the Bahá'í books your mother kept on the shelf. I did not have an answer. I stood in the yard and I did not have an answer and I was afraid that if I did not answer you would decide then, at five, that I was not the father you needed. I said something stupid. I said, 'Sometimes birds get hurt, son.' You looked at me like I had disappointed you. You were five years old and you looked at me like I had disappointed you. I have never forgotten that look."

"Dad."

"Let me finish, son. I have wanted to say this for a long time. I am saying it now."

"Okay."

My father, I realized, was crying.

My father did not cry. I had seen my father cry exactly twice in my life — at the funeral of his own father when I was fourteen, and at the moment my mother had told him she wanted a divorce, which I had overheard from the next room when I was twelve. My father was crying a third time now, into a phone in San Diego, while his son sat on a concrete stoop in Arizona in the cold.

"Dad."

"I am here, son. I am listening. Go on. Tell me anything you want."

"Dad, I — I thought you would lecture me."

"About what."

"About — going home. About this being too much. About how you and Mom should not have let me come. I thought you would lecture me about safety. About how the service year is a luxury of privilege. About how I should be home studying. I've been not calling you because I've been afraid you would say those things."

"Samuel."

"Yeah."

"I am not going to say those things. Some of them I have thought. Most of them I have thought, if I am honest. But I am not going to say them. Because I have seen, in the way you told me the story of the men with the rifles, what this year is making you. I have heard your voice for the last six minutes and your voice is the voice of a man. I do not know when you became a man. I did not see it happen. I was not in the room. I am sorry I was not in the room. *Beta.* My boy. I am so sorry I was not in the room. But you are a man now. And I will not lecture a man. A father can advise a man, and a father can pray for a man, and a father can tell a man a story from the back yard when the man was five years old and broke his father's heart by asking a question his father could not answer. That is what a father can do."

I was crying now. Quietly. The tears were going down into the blanket around my shoulders.

"Dad."

"Son."

"I am glad I called you."

"I am glad you called me, Samuel."

"Dad, I—"

"Samuel. Listen. One more thing."

"Okay."

"I see now. I see what I did not see before. I see that your heart was always ready for this. You were born with it. You asked me about the bird at five. You asked me about homeless people in San Francisco at seven. You asked me, when you were ten, why the kids at school were mean to a boy because of his family's accent, even though you and I had accents too, and you asked it in a way that was not about you — you asked it because you were trying to understand what was wrong with them. Do you remember that. You asked me, 'Papa, why are they like that.' I said, 'People are afraid of people who are different.' And you said, 'Then we should not be afraid. We should be the people who are different and not afraid.'"

I did not remember this.

"I do not remember that, Dad."

"I remember it. I have remembered it for eight years. I repeated it to your mother, once, and she cried, because she said, *this is why I married you, because you would remember a thing like that about our son.* We had forgotten how to love each other by then. We had not forgotten how to love you. I want you to know that. I want you to know that your mother and I loved each other in the language of loving you, and even after we could not love each other anymore in the other languages, we still loved each other in that one. And we still do. *I love your mother in the language of loving you.* And that is maybe the only language left between us, and it is a sufficient language, son, it is enough, it has held you up, I hope."

"Dad."

"Yes."

"It has held me up."

"Good," he said. "*Alhamdulillah.* Good."

We were both quiet for a long time.

"A little."

"Every day she threw garbage on him when he walked past her house. For months. Every day. Because she hated him. Because her family hated him. Every day he walked past her house and every day she came up to the roof and she threw garbage on his head. And one day he walked past and she did not throw anything. He stopped. He asked the neighbors. He said, 'Where is the old woman who throws garbage on me every day. I do not see her.' They said, 'She is sick.' And the Prophet, peace be upon him, turned around and he went to her house and he sat with her for three days and he helped her through her sickness. And when she was better, she became a Muslim, because of this. But the point, Samuel, the point my father told me when I was a boy, the point is not that she became a Muslim. That is the legend. The point is that he went. The point is that he went to the house of the woman who had thrown garbage on him. The point is that he sat with her. Do you understand."

"Yes, Dad."

"The point is that he sat with her. The point of your year in Arizona, Samuel, is not whether the immigration system changes. It will not change because you sat in Arizona. The point is that you sat. The point is the sitting. The point is that in the future, all of your life, you will be a man who sat. You will have been someone who sat. That is the achievement. That is what you will have to give. This is what your grandfather gave me when he taught me the story. I have not been a man who sat, Samuel. I have been a man who engineered. I am proud of what I have engineered. But I am prouder of you, son, because you are going to be a man who sat. *May God make me half the man my son is.*"

I was openly crying now.

"Dad. Stop."

"I will stop."

We were quiet.

"Okay, Dad."

"And, Samuel."

"Yes, Dad."

"Your mother. When you go home. Forgive your mother some things that maybe you have not forgiven her for. She is a good woman. She has loved you well."

"Dad, I don't—"

"You know what I mean. It doesn't matter. We both know what I mean. We all have things. Forgive her some of them. And I will forgive her some of mine. That is a thing we can do. We do not have to be married to do that. *Allah yajzik khayran.*"

"I love you, Dad."

"I love you, son. *Fi amanillah.* In the care of God. Goodnight."

"Goodnight."

I hung up.

I sat on the stoop in the blanket for another twenty minutes. I did not cry more. I just sat. The owl called again. A truck went past on the road with its high beams flashing through the mesquite. A coyote somewhere, far off, yipped once, and three others answered.

*

I wrote in the logbook that night.

*I think faith is not the answer to the question about suffering. I think faith is the decision to keep asking. I think my father, in his engineer's way, had been telling me this for years, and I had not been listening, and I listened tonight.*

I closed the book. I slept. I slept well, for the first time in a week.

The idea came from Rosa, which made sense, because almost every good idea at the shelter came from Rosa.

It was mid-December. The residents had been through a strange stretch — the Thanksgiving celebration had been the big public event of the fall, but then the aftermath had been heavy. Two families had had their asylum hearings go badly. A man from Guatemala named Cristóbal had been denied and had been transferred to detention while he appealed. An older woman from Michoacán had lost her case entirely and was waiting, with a kind of terrible calm, for her deportation date. The shelter in December was quieter than it had been in September. Not because fewer people were there — there were more — but because everybody was carrying a little more weight on their shoulders, and when you carry weight, you talk less.

Rosa announced the gathering at the morning meeting on a Tuesday.

"We are going to do a thing on the solstice," she said. "A quiet thing. A gathering. Not Catholic. Not any one thing. Everybody is invited. Residents, volunteers, staff. We will sit in the dining room. Anyone who wants to read something, or sing something, or say something, can. Anyone who does not want to can sit. The only rule is we are quiet between. We listen. We do not applaud. We do not comment. We only listen. Then somebody else goes. We do this as long as anybody wants to. Then we eat together. Father Luis has offered to be there. I have asked Maria to come back for it. She is driving in from Tucson. She will bring the children."

There was a quiet murmur in the room.

"Is this a Mass," somebody asked.

"No," Rosa said. "A Mass has a particular form. This is just — a gathering. A gathering on the longest night. You can think of it as a prayer gathering. You can think of it as a concert. You can think of it as a meeting. You can think of it as a party. I do not care what you think of it as. You should come."

"Why the solstice," somebody else asked.

Rosa considered.

Nobody had any more questions. The meeting moved on.

*

On the evening of December 21, we pushed the tables in the dining room to the walls and we brought in every chair we had. Rosa put candles on the little tables along the walls — real candles, glass-enclosed, borrowed from the Catholic church — and she turned off the overhead fluorescents. The room went into that orange-and-shadow light that candles make, the light that is, I realized, the oldest light in the human experience, the light our species knew for most of our history before electricity, the light of sitting together in a dim place on a cold night.

Maria arrived with Diego and Luz at six.

"Galleta has a mustache," I said.

"¡Sí!" Luz said, proud. "Le dibujé un bigote."

Diego hung back, more reserved than I remembered. He was seven. He had started first grade in a real school in Tucson. He was carrying, in his hand, a folded piece of paper.

"Diego," I said. "I hear you are in school."

He nodded.

"Do you like it."

He nodded.

"Is it hard."

"Sí," he said. Firmly. "Muy difícil."

"The English?"

"Sí."

"The English is difficult. I understand. I have been learning Spanish for three months and I still say the wrong words half the time."

He smiled a very small smile.

"What's that paper," I said.

"I wrote a poem," Diego said, quietly. "My teacher told me to. She said for the — for this party. Mom told her what it was. Mom told my teacher. My teacher said, *write something, bring it.* So I wrote something."

"Can I hear it now, or are you going to read it to everybody."

"For everybody," Diego said. "I will read it to everybody."

"Good," I said. "I will listen."

*

The room filled up.

Residents came in, quietly, one and two at a time, and they sat in the chairs along the walls and in the rows in the middle. Volunteers came. Rosa sat at the front in a folding chair, turned sideways so she was part of the circle rather than its speaker. Father Luis sat next to her. He had come in his clerical blacks but without his collar — a small deliberate choice, I thought, for a space that was not a parish. Dr. Chávez was there. Javier from the water drops was there. Dale from the planning meetings was there. Don Beto was there, in a clean shirt, with his hair combed. There were about forty of us.

Rosa began, simply.

"Thank you for coming," she said. "Tonight is the longest night. We are all going to sit here with each other for a while. People will read and sing and speak as they wish. The only rule is that we are quiet between. We do not clap. We listen. We let it be in the room for a minute. Then the next person goes, when they want to. Nobody is required. I will start. Then it is whoever wants to."

She opened a small notebook she had brought.

She closed the notebook.

She did not explain it. She looked into the room. The candles were on the tables. The faces were the faces I had come to know over three months. The silence came down.

We sat in it for a minute.

Then Father Luis stood. He had, in his hands, a small missal with a leather cover that had been taped together where the binding had split.

"I am going to read a psalm," he said. "Psalm 130. It is a psalm that the Church has used for centuries on the longest nights. It is called *De Profundis*. Out of the depths. I will read it in English."

He read.

"Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice. Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplication. If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities — Lord, who could stand? But there is forgiveness with you, that you may be feared. I wait for the Lord. My soul waits. And in his word I hope. My soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning. More than those who watch for the morning."

He stopped. He sat down.

We sat in the silence.

I felt something move in the room. A wave of stillness. Several people had their hands folded. Several had their eyes closed. The old woman who had been denied her asylum case was sitting in the back, and I saw, from across the room, that tears were going quietly down her face. She was not wiping them. She was letting them go.

She sang.

She sang in Spanish, *a cappella*, a hymn I did not know but which many people in the room evidently did, because I saw lips moving silently around me. Her voice was high and thin and not trained, but the melody was simple, and the words were about a lantern, about a hand holding a lantern on a dark road, about how the hand that held the lantern was the hand of a mother who had died, but the lantern was still somehow there, still somehow being held, by something larger than the hand. She sang it all the way through. Then she sat down.

The silence came back.

A man from Honduras stood up. I had been in intake with him three days earlier. His name was Elver. He was in his forties. He had crossed with a brother who had not made it — a brother who had died somewhere in the Sonoran Desert in October and whose body had not been found. He had told me the story at intake and I had written it down. He stood now with his hat in his hands.

He did not read. He did not have a prepared thing.

Elver sat down. He had his hat in his hands. He did not cry. He looked, I thought, relieved. He looked like a man who had been carrying his brother's name in his mouth for weeks and had finally set it down in a room with other mouths and other ears and was, for the first time since October, not alone with it.

I was thinking this when Diego stood up.

He was seven. He was wearing a little collared shirt that was too big for him. He had his folded paper in his hand. His feet did not reach the floor when he sat in the chair; now that he was standing he was clearly the smallest human in the room. He looked at his mother. Maria, at the other end of the row, nodded once.

Diego unfolded the paper. He took a deep breath.

"*The night is long but I am not alone. My mother is with me. My sister is with me. Galleta is with me. In the desert I was afraid but we walked. In the shelter I was afraid but they gave me food. In the new house I was afraid but there is a window and I see the moon. The moon is the same moon that is over my grandmother in my country. My grandmother is looking at the moon. My grandmother is looking at the moon at the same time I look at it. This is what the moon is for.*"

He stopped.

He folded the paper.

He sat down.

Nobody said anything.

I could hear a candle guttering on one of the tables. I could hear, outside the window, the wind in the mesquite. I could hear Father Luis, next to Rosa, breathing out a long slow breath. I could hear Maria, at the end of her row, begin to cry — not loudly, just a soft sound. Luz was asleep already in Maria's lap, her head against her mother's shoulder.

I sat in the silence. I felt the moon out there. I felt the moon over Ronaldo. I felt the moon over Honduras. I felt the moon over my mother in Oakland. I felt the moon over my father in San Diego. I felt the moon over my grandfather's grave in Tehran, which I had never visited. The same moon. The same moon over all of these people tonight. Diego had it right. The moon was what the moon was for.

After a while, when it felt right, I stood.

I had not planned to. I had not prepared anything. I had a book in my bag — Rosa had asked me at some point in the week if I might read something, and I had told her maybe, and I had brought my copy of my mother's prayer book, a small one she had given me before I left, with a worn red cover, but I had not decided whether I would actually read from it. I stood, and I walked to the little space at the front, and I opened the book, and I found a passage, a short one, that my mother had read to me the day before I left Oakland.

"I am going to read," I said, "a short passage. It is from my mother's faith, which is the Bahá'í Faith. She read this to me before I came here. It is about unity. I am not going to say much before or after it. I am just going to read."

I read it.

I read a single short passage, maybe forty words, a passage about the oneness of the human family, about how the light of the soul comes from a single source and is broken into colors only by the prisms of our bodies. I read it slowly. I did not look up while I was reading. When I was done I looked up.

The faces looked back.

Father Luis was looking at me with an expression I can only describe as *glad.* Rosa had her hand over her mouth. Maria, still crying quietly, was nodding. Diego, the small boy who had written about the moon, was watching me solemnly the way children watch other people who are trying.

I closed the book. I sat down.

The silence came back.

After a minute Maria stood up.

"I am going to sing a song. It is a song from my country. It is a lullaby. My mother sang it to me. I sang it to Diego. I sang it to Luz. I am going to sing it tonight for my brothers and sisters in this room who also have mothers. I am going to sing it for my mother, who is still in my country, who I may not see again. I am going to sing it for Samuel's mother, who I have not met but who I know is a good mother. I am going to sing it for all of you."

She sang.

She sang in Spanish, a lullaby that rose and fell in a slow melody I had not heard before. Luz in her arms did not wake. Maria sang for maybe two minutes. Her voice was strong. Her voice was the voice of a woman who had walked with her two children across a continent and had not, in the process, lost her singing voice, and I understood in that moment what a miracle that was, what an achievement, that there were still people in this world who could walk across a continent with their children and could still, at the end of it, in a dim room in Arizona on a solstice night, open their mouths and sing.

She finished. She sat down. Luz did not wake.

*

The room went quiet for a long time.

Nobody else stood up.

It was not that there was nothing more to say. It was that the room had, collectively, found a shape, and we were all sitting inside that shape, and we were not ready to break it. The candles burned. The shadows moved slowly on the walls. Somebody's breathing in the corner was steady and audible. Somebody else, softly, was crying. Nobody went to them. Nobody needed to. The crying was part of the room.

*What is happening is that each of us is, in our own language, looking at the same thing. The thing is the dark. The thing is the longest night. The thing is the human life and the question of what to do with it. And we are all looking at the thing, and we are all speaking our own names for it, and we are letting the other names be in the room with our names, and the names do not cancel each other out, they just — they add to each other. The room becomes more of a room because there are more names in it. The dark becomes less dark because there are more languages in which to call the dark dark.*

*This is faith. This is what it is. It is not the belief in a particular set of propositions. It is the willingness to sit in a room with other people's belief in their particular sets of propositions, and to let your own belief sit next to theirs, and to understand that they are not enemies, they are neighbors, they are in the same room on the same night, looking at the same dark. The faith is the sitting. The faith is the room.*

I did not say any of this out loud.

I wrote it down later. I wrote it down in the logbook. I wrote it all down, as near as I could get it, and I have been trying to get closer to it ever since, in the years since, and I have not, yet, gotten closer to it than I did that night sitting on the folding chair in the dining room of the shelter in Nogales on the longest night of that year.

*

After a long time, Rosa stood up.

"Thank you," she said. Quiet. Just those two words.

She gestured to the door of the kitchen.

"Come. Eat."

We ate. We had a simple meal — Maria had brought tamales from Tucson, and the shelter kitchen had made beans and rice and a hot chocolate thick with cinnamon. We ate in the same room, with the candles still burning. We talked quietly. The mood of the gathering did not break; it only became denser, more conversational, more ordinary. People moved around. People hugged. Diego fell asleep with his head on the table and his mother moved him, carefully, to a folding chair, where he curled up and slept with Galleta the rabbit clutched to his chest.

I talked with Maria for a long time in a corner. She told me about her new apartment. She told me about Diego's teacher, who was Mexican-American, who had been, Maria said, *a gift sent from God.* She told me about her English class at night and about how she had finally, the week before, successfully ordered a pizza on the phone entirely in English, and how the boy who brought the pizza to her door had spoken Spanish to her and she had felt, ridiculously, cheated, because she had wanted a monolingual English exchange, and she had, laughing about this in the apartment afterwards with Diego, realized that this was a kind of progress — that her problems had gotten stupider, and her problems getting stupider was a kind of arriving.

"Samuel," she said, at the end of our talk. "I brought you something."

She pulled from her purse a small package wrapped in tissue paper.

"Open it later. Not here. Okay?"

"Okay."

"It is nothing much. It is from my apartment. It is something I have made. I want you to have it. Promise."

"I promise."

She hugged me. She went to collect her children. They drove back to Tucson — Rosa had arranged for them to stay overnight in a motel on the shelter's dime, because she did not want Maria on the road late — and they left, and the gathering began to wind down, and people went to their rooms, and Rosa and Father Luis and I sat at one of the small tables with the candles and we drank the last of the hot chocolate and we did not say much.

*

Later, in my room, I unwrapped Maria's gift.

*Dear Samuel. I am a woman with two children and nothing to give. But I have hands that remember the stitches of my mother and her mother. I give you this. It is not much. It is the thing I have. I wish you to carry it. I wish you to remember that you did not just write my name in your book. You helped me walk into the new country. God keep you. Your friend, Maria.*

I sat on the bed a long time.

I folded the cloth. I put it in the back of my logbook, pressed between the last page and the cover. It was, I thought, the correct place for it. The book held the names. The cloth held my name as written by somebody else. The book and the cloth together were a small completeness. They faced each other when the book was closed.

I turned out the light.

I slept.

My last days at the shelter were in May.

The winter had turned into spring in that slow, surprising way that the Sonoran Desert turns. In February the mesquites had still looked dead, in March they had greened overnight, in April the ocotillos had bloomed red on the ridgelines, and in May the saguaros had put out their crowns of white flowers and the air in the courtyard had that high clean smell that the desert has for about three weeks a year before the heat comes down. I had been at the shelter for eight and a half months. I had been expecting this week for a long time and I was, now that it had arrived, not ready.

"Friday."

"To Oakland."

"Yes."

"Your mother coming to get you at the airport."

"Her and my aunt."

"Not your father."

"He's flying up Saturday. For the weekend. Then back to San Diego."

"Good," she said. "Both of them. Together. That's something."

"It's something."

She folded a t-shirt and put it in my duffel bag. She had been, all afternoon, half helping me pack and half telling me stories about boys and girls who had packed in this same room over the last twenty-two years. There had been one, a boy from New Jersey, who had forgotten an entire second suitcase in the closet and had called from the airport weeping, and the suitcase had been mailed back to him the next week, and the boy was now a doctor in Newark who sent Rosa a check every December. There had been a girl from Seattle who had, on her last day, cut all her hair off in the bathroom with kitchen scissors because she said she did not want to go home looking like the person who had arrived, and Rosa had, calmly, offered to even it out for her, and had done so. There had been, there had been, there had been. The room had seen many people.

I was only one of them.

I took this, finally, at the end, to be a kind of gift. I had not, at any point, been unique. I had been one in a line. That meant Rosa knew the shape of this week before I did. That meant the week could be held.

*

On Wednesday afternoon Rosa asked me to meet her in her office.

I came in. She was at her desk. She had a small object in front of her wrapped in a bandana.

"Sit down, Samuel."

I sat.

She unwrapped the bandana.

It was a small wooden cross. About four inches tall. Carved from a dark wood — mesquite, she told me later — and worn smooth from years of handling. The arms of the cross were slightly uneven, in the way that handmade things are uneven. There was a small hole at the top, like the cross had once hung from a string.

"My grandmother made this," Rosa said. "In Sonora. In 1942. She was seventeen. She made it for my mother before my mother crossed the border. My mother carried it with her. She gave it to me when I moved out to go to college. I have had it for thirty-nine years. I want you to have it."

I could not speak for a second.

"Rosa, I can't. I can't take this. This is your family."

"I know what it is. It is mine to give. I have decided."

"I'm not—Rosa, I'm not Catholic."

"I know."

"I'm not Christian."

"I know that too."

"Then—"

"Samuel," she said. "Listen to me. The cross is not a Catholic object. It is a Catholic object, and it is also an older object. It is a shape two sticks make when they cross. It is a shape a person's body makes when they stand with their arms out. It is a shape my grandmother carved in 1942 because she did not have money for a silver one and her daughter was crossing a border and she wanted her daughter to carry something her hands had made. I am giving you this cross as a human being, from my hands to yours, from my family to yours. It is not a theological object in my hand right now. It is a thing my grandmother made. I am asking you to carry it."

I looked at her.

"Why me," I said.

"Because you have been my boy for nine months," she said. Her voice was steady but her eyes had gone wet. "Because you are the son of a Bahá'í mother and a Muslim father who came to me in September with his hands in his pockets and his eyes too big for his face and who I did not know if he would survive the first week. Because you survived the first week and then you survived every week after that. Because you wrote the names. Because you drove Ronaldo. Because you went out on water drops and you came back and you kept going out. Because you stood behind me on the concrete when the men came. Because you read a prayer from your mother's tradition on the solstice without being asked. Because you have, in nine months, become a young man who I would want to work with for twenty more years, and because you are not going to work with me for twenty more years, you are going to college, and I need you to go to college, and I need you to take with you a thing that I have given you from this place. The cross is a form. Take it in the form your traditions allow. Take it as a family heirloom from a family that has adopted you. Take it as a reminder of the work. Take it as two sticks that cross, nothing more. Do not tell me you cannot take it. Take it, Samuel. Please."

I was crying.

I took the cross. It was heavier than it looked. The wood was warm from her hands. I held it in both of mine.

"Rosa."

"Don't, Samuel. I can't. Don't say it. Not yet."

"Okay."

"Now. Your turn."

"What."

"You have something for me. I know you do. Give it to me."

I had.

I had not known I was going to until I had. I had decided, the night before, lying awake, that there was only one thing I had that was worth giving. I reached into my backpack. I pulled out the logbook. Both volumes. The black composition notebooks. Volume one and volume two. Four hundred some names, and all the words next to them, and in the back of volume two the embroidered handkerchief Maria had made me, pressed between the last page and the cover.

I set them on her desk.

"Rosa. I need you to keep these."

"Samuel. These are yours."

"I know they're mine. That's why I can give them to you. I want them to live at the shelter. I want them to be here. I want the names to be on the shelves here with the other names. There is a locked cabinet in your office where you keep the files for the closed cases. I want them in that cabinet. I want them to be part of the shelter's archive. I don't need to take them home. I have what they taught me in my head. The names need to be here. If I take them home they are a souvenir. If they stay here they are a record. Please."

She looked at the notebooks.

She ran her hand over the cover of volume one. She did not open it. She didn't need to. She had read the entries over my shoulder many times. She knew what was in them.

"Samuel," she said. "These are sacred."

"I know."

"Yes."

"Okay. Samuel."

"Yes."

"Can I hug you now."

"Yes."

She came around the desk. She hugged me hard. She was a small woman and her hug was not small. She put her face against my chest — I was much taller than her; I had grown an inch since September, inexplicably — and she held on for a long time. Her shoulders shook. She did not pretend otherwise.

"My boy," she said. Into my shirt. "My boy. My boy. My boy."

"Rosa."

"Go. Finish packing. Do not come back in here tonight. Do not come in here tomorrow morning. Eat breakfast and take the shuttle. I will not be outside. I cannot do that outside. I would not survive it. I will say goodbye to you tonight. At the group dinner. Then I will hide, Samuel. I will be in my office with the door closed. Do not come knock. Do not make me say it again in the morning. I cannot. Do you understand. *I am asking you*."

"I understand, Rosa."

"Go."

I went.

*

We had the goodbye dinner Thursday night.

It was, by design, not a big affair. The residents who wanted to come came. The volunteers who wanted to come came. There were about twenty-five of us around three pushed-together tables in the dining room. There was no speech program. Rosa had been firm about that. We ate Maria's tamales — Maria had sent them up from Tucson with a volunteer who had driven from there — and a big pan of enchiladas that one of the residents named Yolanda had made, and a cake that Don Beto had somehow talked his way into baking, a *tres leches* cake that was, he announced proudly, his wife's recipe and the first time he had baked one since she had died in 2011.

The cake was, honestly, not very good. It was a little dry. The top had been decorated by Don Beto with blue frosting spelling out the words *SAMUEL ADIÓS Y GRACIAS*, the letters all different sizes, the S in SAMUEL written backwards. Everyone ate it and everyone said it was wonderful and Don Beto, sitting at the end of the table, glowed.

Father Luis was there. He sat next to me. He ate three pieces of cake. He had, I had learned over the course of the year, a specific weakness for anything with sweet condensed milk.

"You are going to miss this food," he said to me, through a mouthful.

"Father, I am going to miss this food a lot."

"The food is one of the main things we have here."

"One of them, yes."

"You remember to cook for yourself in college. You remember to keep a real pot. You remember to chop an onion. Do not live on sandwiches. Sandwiches are the death of the interior life. The interior life needs a hot meal."

"I will remember."

"Good."

He looked at me sideways. He had a small piece of cake on his chin. I did not mention it.

"Samuel," he said. "I am going to miss you."

"Father, I am going to miss you."

"I want to tell you one thing. I know you will go home and you will think many things and you will, over the years, sort all of this out in your head. I want you to remember one thing I am going to say to you now and I will not explain it and you will have to figure it out."

"Okay."

"Desolation is a poor teacher if you learn only its language. But desolation is the best teacher if you let it teach you also the language of consolation. Do you understand."

"Not really."

"Good. You will. That is Ignatius. That is my order. I will not say more. Remember the sentence. Call me in five years. Tell me what you have done with the sentence."

"Okay, Father."

He put his hand on my shoulder. He left it there a long time. Then he removed it. He finished his cake.

*

After dinner Rosa came to me.

She put her hand on my arm.

"Samuel."

"Rosa."

"I am going to my office now. I am going to close the door. I want you to have a good flight. I want you to call me on the phone when you get to Oakland. I want you to write to me sometimes. Not every week. But sometimes. So I know you are alive. Do you hear."

"Yes."

"Take care of yourself."

"I will."

"Samuel."

"Yes, Rosa."

"You were worth it."

She squeezed my arm. She turned. She walked down the hallway to her office. She closed the door.

I watched the closed door for a minute.

Then I went to my room and I finished packing and I wrote in the logbook — I had asked to keep it one more night, and Rosa had said yes — and in the morning I took the shuttle to the airport, and I saw her in the window of her office as the shuttle pulled out, just the silhouette, not the face, watching, and I did not wave, because she had asked me not to, and she did not wave either, because she had asked me not to, and the shuttle turned the corner by the big mesquite, and the shelter was gone.

The night before, in the logbook, I had written the last entry.

I landed in Oakland on a Friday afternoon in late May.

My mother was at the curb. My aunt Shirin was at the curb. They were in the little red Honda my mother had driven for ten years. My mother had put flowers on the passenger seat — a bouquet of yellow ones that I could not name, because I had never been a person who could name flowers, but which were yellow and bright and were, I understood, her idea of a welcome. She had also, I saw as I got in, hung a small string of plastic flags — the kind you see at parties — from the rearview mirror. She had decorated her car. For me. My mother, who did not decorate cars.

She hugged me at the curb for a long time. Aunt Shirin, at the wheel, waited patiently. My aunt was my mother's younger sister. She had come from Los Angeles for the week. She and my mother had a specific bond that had become closer after the divorce, and I had a specific fondness for her, and I had not seen her in three years.

"*Azizam*," my mother said. Into my hair. Into my ear. "*Azizam.* You came home. *Alhamdulillah.*"

"Mom, I came home."

"You are even thinner."

"I am not thinner, Mom. I am the same. I gained weight in April. Rosa told me I did."

"I do not believe Rosa. I will feed you myself. Get in."

I got in.

The drive from the airport to our house in Oakland was forty minutes. My aunt drove. My mother sat in the back seat with me and held my hand the whole way. She did not speak much. Neither did my aunt. The Bay Bridge went by. The sun was low over the water. I looked out the window and everything was, strangely, normal. The same freeways. The same billboards. The same exits. It felt, for about ten minutes, as if I had been gone for a long weekend.

Then I felt the wooden cross in my pocket — I had put it in my jeans pocket for the flight, wrapped in the bandana Rosa had given it to me in — and I thought of Rosa, and I thought of Ronaldo, and I thought of Diego's poem about the moon, and I understood that normal was a costume, that normal was a thing Oakland was wearing because Oakland was Oakland and had not known what else to wear, and that I was wearing a different costume inside now, and that the two costumes would have to figure out how to be in a room together.

*

My father came up on Saturday morning.

He drove up from San Diego instead of flying. He had said he wanted to drive. My mother had said, on the phone the week before, *Shahab, it is a seven-hour drive, fly,* and my father had said *I want to drive,* and my mother had said *that is fine, Shahab,* in a particular tone, and I had, from the couch, listened and understood that my mother and father were now capable of having small brief conversations on the phone and not dying, and that this was new, and that my being at the shelter had, for complicated reasons, made it possible.

He arrived at ten. He parked on the street. He came up the walk with a bouquet of flowers for my mother — a small awkward bouquet, too formal, pink roses, the kind you buy at a gas station because you forgot earlier — and a duffel bag and a paper bag from a bakery in San Diego that he said was the best in the city, that had, he said, a particular pistachio cookie that he had wanted me to try.

"The dining room. Last year. A pale green."

"It suits."

"Thank you."

They were, in that moment, two adults who had known each other for twenty-six years and who were, in careful good faith, trying to be in a room together without drawing blood. I saw this. I had not seen it before. In my childhood the two of them in a room together had gradually become, over the years, a thing I had stopped wanting. In adolescence it had become a thing I had actively avoided. Now it was a thing I could look at. It was a thing that had — because of me, I understood, because of what they had both decided to do for me — been reconstituted.

I did not say thank you.

I did not, at eighteen, know how to say thank you for something like that.

*

We had dinner that night — the four of us, my mother, my father, my aunt, and me. My mother cooked her lamb with saffron rice. The saffron rice she made was, by my conservative estimate, one of the great foods of the Bay Area, not because Oakland was short on saffron rice but because my mother put something in hers — a particular pinch of cardamom, a particular amount of rose water — that made it my mother's and that made it, for me, the single dish that had always, in every mood and every season of my life, felt like coming home.

We ate in the dining room. My aunt had set the table with the good plates, the ones my mother had brought from Tehran in 1989, the hand-painted ones that came out for holidays and nothing else. We ate. My father complimented the rice three times. My mother did not say much. My aunt carried the conversation. She asked me questions about the shelter. She asked good questions. She had, I knew from my mother, read about the shelter on the internet and had gone down a research hole and had, in my absence, become something of a small expert on the immigration situation at the border, because she was the kind of person who loved me and who, loving me, was not content simply to worry about me, but had instead learned about the thing I was doing.

I answered her questions.

I answered them carefully. I did not tell every story. I told some. I told the story of Don Beto, because it was a story I could tell at a dinner table with an elderly aunt and an estranged father and a tired mother. I told the story of Diego's poem about the moon. I told them about the solstice gathering in the most general terms. I did not tell the story of Ronaldo. I did not tell the story of the men with the rifles. Those were not dinner stories. Those were not, yet, anything that could be in words at a dining room table without breaking the table.

My father listened. He listened the way he had listened on the phone after the men. He listened, for the first time that I could consciously remember, as a witness rather than a problem-solver. My mother watched him listen. I saw her watch him. I saw her face do a thing when she realized that my father was listening — a small thing, a slight softening of the mouth — and I saw her decide, as a personal matter, to accept that the man on the couch, the man at her dining room table, was a slightly different man than the one who had moved out six years before.

My aunt saw all of this too. My aunt saw everything. My aunt was a social worker in Los Angeles; she specialized in seeing.

After dinner my father offered to wash the dishes. My mother did not refuse. My father stood at the sink in a shirt with his sleeves rolled up and my mother dried, and my aunt and I sat at the table and drank mint tea and pretended to talk about something else so the two of them could do the washing and the drying without our eyes on it.

Nobody hugged. Nobody cried. Nobody said, *I have missed you.* It was not that kind of evening. It was a quieter one. It was the kind of evening where two people who had once been married and were no longer married and who both loved the same son did the dishes together in silence at the sink of the house they had once shared, and neither of them said a word, and neither of them needed to.

At nine o'clock my father stood up. He had to drive back the next day. He was staying at a hotel by the airport. My mother had not offered the guest room. He had not asked for it. They had understood each other, on this point, without needing to discuss it.

"Thanks, Dad."

"I will see you soon. Come to San Diego this summer. We will go to the beach. We will eat fish tacos. It has been too long since you have had a real fish taco in this country."

"Dad. I have had Sonoran hot dogs. I have standards now."

He smiled a small smile.

"We will discuss your standards," he said, "in San Diego."

He hugged my mother, briefly, at the door. He hugged my aunt. He went.

*

After my father left I sat with my mother in the living room for a long time. My aunt had gone to bed. The house was quiet. My mother made us another pot of tea. We sat on the old sofa that had been in my life longer than I had. I put my head on her shoulder, the way I had when I was small. She stroked my hair.

"Samuel," she said.

"Yeah, Mom."

"Your father has changed."

"I know."

"I did not know he could."

"I didn't either."

"I am glad. *Alhamdulillah.* I am glad for you. I am a little bit glad for me. Mostly I am glad for you."

"Thanks, Mom."

"I have something for you. Upstairs. On your desk."

"What is it."

"Go look."

I went up.

My bedroom was exactly as I had left it nine months before. I had made a small clean-up before I left — the bed made, the desk cleared, the posters straightened — and my mother had, I saw, kept it that way. My books were in the same arrangement. My cross-country medal from senior year was still hanging on the doorknob. My globe was still on the dresser.

On the desk, centered, was an envelope.

I opened it.

I sat at the desk.

I sat for a long time.

I took out the wooden cross Rosa had given me and I set it on the desk next to the letter. I took out the small embroidered handkerchief Maria had made me and I set it next to the cross. I took out a pen.

I opened my laptop. I opened a new document.

I wrote four letters.

*

The first was to Father Luis.

*Dear Father Luis,*

*I am home. The last few days have been strange in a way I was not expecting. I keep having a feeling like I am wearing my body wrong. I think this is normal. I thought you would be the person to tell this to.*

*You gave me a sentence to carry. Desolation is a poor teacher if you learn only its language. But desolation is the best teacher if you let it teach you also the language of consolation. I have been turning this over for a week. I am going to keep turning it over. I will report back in five years as you requested. I may report back sooner if I figure something out. I may also report back sooner if I get stuck.*

*Thank you for the Mass on Thanksgiving night with my mother. Thank you for the psalm on the solstice. Thank you for eating three pieces of Don Beto's bad cake and making him think it was the best cake you had ever had. These are, I think, the kinds of things I will remember longest. These and your shoes, which were terrible. Father, your shoes.*

*Your friend, Samuel.*

*

The second was to Rosa.

*Rosa,*

*I am home. I slept ten hours last night. My mother made rice. The cross is on my desk. I keep touching it. I think it is going to be on my desk for a long time.*

*I do not know how to thank you. I do not know how to begin. So I will not. I will only tell you what I am doing, and I will keep telling you, and over the years you will see that the thanking is a thing I have decided to do with my life and not a thing I will try to say in a letter. I am applying this fall for something called the Jesuit Volunteer Corps for after college. I have not told anybody else. I am telling you first. I do not know if they will take me. I do not know if I will take them. I know I am going to spend my life in some version of this work. I know the reason is you. Do not argue with me about this. You do not get to argue with me about this. I have decided.*

*I miss you. The shelter. The dining room. The laundry room. Don Beto. Please tell everyone hello.*

*Your boy, Samuel.*

*

The third was to Maria.

*Dear Maria,*

*I am home in Oakland. My mother and I ate your tamales from the solstice — you sent some extra back with me, I did not tell you — I ate them on Saturday. They were even better than in Arizona. I do not know how this is possible but it is true.*

*The handkerchief you made is on my desk. It will be on the desk when I go to college. It will be on the desk in my dorm room. I will write SAMUEL next to your embroidered SAMUEL. I will write it in a book. The book will have my name twice. Once in my handwriting and once in yours.*

*Please tell Diego that I have not forgotten his poem about the moon. Tonight there is a moon over Oakland. Diego is right. It is the same moon. I will look at it tonight and I will think of him and Luz and Galleta.*

*Kisses for the children. Blessings for you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.*

*Your friend forever, Samuel.*

*

The fourth was to Ronaldo.

I had no address.

I knew only what he had told me — that his mother's name was Xiomara, that his sister was Miriam, that they had lived in a barrio in San Pedro Sula whose name I could not remember, that his father was dead. I had tried, through two different organizations, to track him after his deportation. I had gotten nothing. The trail ended at the processing center in Nogales. The world after that was Honduras, which was large, and my arms were not long enough to reach it.

I wrote to him anyway.

*Ronaldo.*

*I do not know if you are alive. I hope you are alive. I hope you are in Miriam's kitchen tonight. I hope Xiomara is making you something. I hope the men who threatened you have forgotten your face.*

*I wrote your name in my book. I gave my book to Rosa. She has put it in a cabinet in her office with the names of everyone else. Your name is in that cabinet. Your name is in this letter. Your name is in my mouth tonight. When I say this letter out loud — which I am going to do, in a moment, because I do not know how to send this letter any other way — your name will go up into the air from my bedroom in Oakland, California, USA, and it will travel, and it will find you, in the way prayers travel, which is not a way I fully understand, but which I believe in more than I did when we met.*

*I am sorry. I am sorry I told you it would be okay. I did not know. I loved you the best way an eighteen-year-old American boy knows how. That is not a great way. You were generous with me anyway. You taught me things that have become the scaffolding of my life. I will keep teaching them, through myself, to everybody I meet, forever.*

*If you are alive, brother, hold on.*

*If you are not, brother — then names are prayers. I will keep saying yours.*

*Samuel.*

*

I did not send the letter to Ronaldo.

I could not send it. I printed it out. I folded it. I put it inside the cover of the new notebook I was going to start — the next logbook, the first one of the rest of my life. I put it in the front of the notebook. On the first page. Before any of the other names.

Then I stood up and I walked to the window.

My bedroom had a window that faced west. My parents had bought this house when I was three because of this window. From the window you could see, on a clear night, across the rooftops, the lights of San Francisco across the Bay, and the dark mass of the water, and, on a really good clear night, a little slice of the Bay Bridge. Tonight it was clear. The lights were there. The Bay was dark. The bridge was there. Above the city, the moon was up.

It was the same moon as Arizona.

It was the same moon as Honduras.

It was the same moon as Tehran.

It was the same moon as Karachi.

It was the same moon Diego had written about in his moon poem, the same moon his grandmother in Guatemala had looked at at the same time he did, the same moon Father Luis saw when he walked back from the church to the rectory at night, the same moon Rosa saw out of her office window when she worked late, the same moon Maria saw from her Tucson apartment, the same moon Ronaldo might or might not be seeing from wherever he was in Honduras if he was still, against every bad odd, alive.

I stood at the window a long time.

"I am not the same. I hope I never am again."

I closed the notebook.

I turned off the light.

I went to sleep.

THE END

----------

AUTHOR'S NOTE

The United States has a long and painful history with its southern border, and the humanitarian situation described in this novel, while fictional in its specifics, is grounded in the reality of shelters, water drops, asylum cases, and small daily acts of service that people of many faiths — and of no faith — continue to carry out along that border and elsewhere around the world. I have drawn inspiration from the actual work of organizations like the Kino Border Initiative, No More Deaths, and the Jesuit Refugee Service, and from the many young people who give a year of their lives to service after high school or college.

The Bahá'í Faith teaches the oneness of humanity — the truth that we are, all of us, members of a single human family, no matter our nationality, creed, or circumstance of birth. It teaches that the elimination of every form of prejudice is not optional but essential to the spiritual progress of the individual and the collective maturation of humanity. It teaches that service to others is among the highest forms of worship. These principles are not slogans; they are a lifelong, daily practice, and they are most real when they are lived quietly, in the ordinary work of attending to strangers, of remembering names, of refusing to forget.

A "service year" — whether with a Bahá'í-inspired program, a Jesuit one, AmeriCorps, the Peace Corps, or simply a year of work with a local nonprofit — can be one of the most formative experiences of a young person's life. It is not a résumé line. It is a shaping. It is the discovery that one's own small presence, faithfully offered, is worth more than one could have known. Readers considering such a year should take it seriously, prepare for it with care, and understand that what they encounter there will not be something they fix; it will be, if they let it, something that re-makes them.

The names in Samuel's logbook are fictional. The practice is not. Names are prayers.

— The Author Crimson Ark Publishing