All Good Children - Catherine Austen [93]
He takes a deep breath and stills. He flips down his visor and catches my eye in the mirror. I watch with amazement as my father’s face says, “Here we go.”
There’s a knock at Mom’s window. She rolls it down.
“Good evening, ma’am.” The guard has a thick accent I can’t place, some part of the world where the income is low. He takes us in with big brown eyes fringed in lashes so thick he looks like he’s wearing mascara.
“Good evening,” Mom says.
“Passports please.”
She passes him all four. “We have these too,” she says, holding up our id cards. He looks at the cards curiously. “These are first issue,” he says. “We just got ours up here. They’re a little different.”
“Really?” Mom asks.
He nods. “You’ll get the new ones when you renew, I expect.” He hands back the cards and looks through our passports so thoroughly I assume we’re the only car that’s passed his way today and he’s short on reading material. He opens each one and stares from the picture to the person three times, reads the description and stares back at the person, then flips through the passport to see where each person has been, which in all our cases is nowhere.
“Do you understand that you’re about to leave the country?” he asks.
“Yes,” Mom says.
“Where are you headed?”
“We’re going to visit my niece.” Mom clears her throat and forces a casual tone. “We have some papers for her from her mother. She died. My sister, I mean. Not my niece.”
The guard’s eyes move while Mom speaks, passing over each of us. “Do you understand that this is a one-way border at the present time?” he asks as he stares at Dallas.
“I do,” Mom says.
“And the only means of returning to this country is via your embassy through a reintegration process that takes ten to twelve weeks?”
“Okay.”
“And you are responsible for your food and lodging during the entire ten-to-twelve-week waiting period?”
“That’s fine.”
He taps our passports against his palm and says, “I have to run these against a criminal database and then you’re free to go. You have your car registration?”
Mom tugs the paper from her visor and hands it to him, still folded.
“Thank you.” He disappears into the building.
“I think he’s a zombie,” I whisper. “Did you see his eyes?”
“It’s hard to tell with adults,” Dallas says. “But he didn’t search the car.”
“No one cares if you take problems out of a country,” Mom says. “It’s smuggling them in that’s hard.”
“Do we have to do this again on the other side?” I ask.
She nods. “Just past those gates is another set of gates.”
“And past them?”
“We’ll see when we get there.”
The guard is back and he’s brought two friends, a tall black man with a pencil mustache and a stocky white woman with cropped blond hair. They stand with their hands clasped behind their backs while the mascara man approaches. “Mrs. Connors? Mr. Connors? We have reason to believe you’re harboring a minor who is not your child.”
Mom stares at him, dumfounded.
“You must mean Dallas Richmond,” Dallas says.
“Yes, sir. Is he in this vehicle?”
“No. Our son wanted to bring him, but he didn’t want to come.”
“Do you know his whereabouts?”
“I believe he went to Texas.”
“Step out of the car, please.”
They don’t take us into a room and shine lights in our faces, ask questions, check our stress levels. They stand us up at the side of the road, cold and isolated. It feels like they’re going to shoot us.
The tall guard and the woman search the car—under it, on top of it, inside it. They remove our bags and open each one, shift the contents around with gloved hands. They unroll my tent, pat it down, roll it back up. They flip down the backseats of the car and lift up the floor of the trunk to reveal a spare tire no one knew was there. They even check under the hood, as if we might have a six-foot kid curled around the engine.
The mascara man asks us about Dallas.
“I told him he’d have to