No Autobús

A July 4th FTR

"No autobús. No Mas. Estoy serio. No mas!" That's a text I sent Zoila yesterday. She's a combination of proud, noble, selfless and up until a day or so ago, confident that her papers, her twenty-five years in LA and her Dios would protect her from ICE. I say ICE and it feels like weak tea. I want to say Gestapo. I want to draw correlations between this and the “disappeared” in Argentina. I want everyone to know that what we have found so horrific in our historic imaginations is happening right here, right now. Forget everyone, I want to smack myself in the face, and scream "Wake up!" Half of me is ready to sell my house and move to another country, but most of all, I don't want to be one of those Jews in 1937 Germany, saying, "Don't worry, they just need to get it out of their system. I mean how far can they really take it?”

I said I'd get her at eight this morning, and am waiting outside her building on the dot. At 8:05, I text her, "Estoy aqui." I wait five minutes for a response. Nothing. I call. She doesn't answer. I call my ex, whose Spanish is a whole lot better than mine. She says she just talked to her ten minutes ago and that Zoila said she's waiting for me in front. At that moment 92% of me starts to panic.

It is July 4th. Independence Day for this crazy, conflicted country. This powerful and very new nation built on the brilliance and hard, hard work of immigrants and I am sitting in my car, suddenly terrified that a fifty-year-old God fearing Guatemalan woman, whose kids were born and raised here, has been snatched off the street and thrown into an unmarked van by masked government agents in the ten minutes that she was waiting for me to pick her up. And the worst part of all is that my fear is justified.

I wait two more minutes and call Karen back. I've got that thing in my voice. That helpless child lost at the fair, sound. There's still a part of me that thinks she's fine, but the part that doesn't is much more persuasive. Karen hears my terror and that’s all she needs. Her parents were holocaust survivors and she is predisposed for it all to end at Auschwitz. Then, about ten gasps into the conversation I see Zoila come out her front door. I feel a wave of relief as if I just found out a tumor on my lung is benign. It is eight in the morning on July 4^th and this is how it feels to go and pick up your long time housekeeper in Los Angeles.