Ambassador (7 page)

“Okay,” said Gabe. In his grogginess this sounded only slightly odd. “What's going on?”

“Frankie's mother is coming by to pick you up and bring you here,” she told him, her voice careful and brittle.

Gabe became fully and completely awake at this news. He hadn't seen or spoken to Frankie's mom since the destruction of her backyard and everything in it, and he had been hoping to avoid her for as long as possible.

“What's going on?” he asked again. “Where are you?”

She told him.

*  *  *  *

The doorbell rang.

Frankie's mom was tall and always prickly cold. The two of them did not say much on the drive to the ICE detention center. This wasn't surprising. Frankie's mom never said much. ICE stood for “Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” apparently. They drove to this icy place in a pocket of icy silence.

Gabe stared out the window. He wasn't sure he could speak if he tried. His brain and the rest of him seemed disentangled from each other.

The waiting room inside the detention center was a small place with a gray carpet, ten dingy-looking chairs, and a guard behind a counter. The guard was a woman who looked and sounded like old leather, the way serious cigarette smokers usually looked and sounded. She was polite enough. She didn't ask for Gabe's birth certificate, though he had brought it with him just in case he needed to prove where he was from.

Once the guard called his name, Gabe went through a large metal door that looked like it wasn't supposed to open, not ever. The door shut behind him with a sound that suggested it never would open again.
You are not welcome here,
the door said in its heaviness.
But now you can't leave.

Gabe met his father in a small room. They sat down, facing each other, a thick glass barrier between them. Dad wore an orange jumpsuit and handcuffs on a long chain that connected to cuffs at his feet. He took very small steps to get to his chair.

“I brought the diapers,” Gabe said first, and quickly, without saying hello. For some reason it seemed important to say that first and to say it in English. “I gave them to the guard in the waiting room.”

His mouth and his brain still didn't feel connected. He tried to ask what happened, but he wasn't sure how.
Mom hadn't explained it all. Gabe wanted to know where she and Andrés and Noemi were, and why they weren't all right there, and he didn't know how to ask any of that either. He wanted to know if the twins were wearing tiny orange jumpsuits.

“I didn't stop at a stop sign,” Dad said. He said it as though that were an adequate explanation. Gabe just blinked, because it wasn't really. “Not completely. I was sure that I did, but the officer said I didn't come to a
complete
stop.”

“Okay,” said Gabe. “That's something you can get arrested for?”

“No,” said Dad. “But if you come to their attention, then they check your documents. And we don't have any. Your mother used to. She had a visa at first. But I don't. Never did.”

He was trying to explain and trying to apologize and trying to understand himself how this had happened. Gabe knew that much, at least.

“We never meant to stay,” Dad went on. “We figured we were nomads, your mother and I, and I always thought that by now we'd be in some other part of the world. But I had a friend who wanted to open up a restaurant here, so we came to help him out. We brought Lupe. And then we had you. Two kids kept us in one place for longer
than we planned. Then we made the place home. I never thought we'd make a home somewhere with no defenses against howling arctic winds, you know? But we did. We stayed here.”

He paused. Gabe nodded once to keep his father talking.

“They'll let your mother go soon,” Dad went on. “Her and the twins. Tonight or maybe tomorrow morning. I don't know. But they'll
release her on recognizance
.” He said the awkward, official words slowly. The syllables obviously tasted bitter to him. “They still
want
to deport her, but that'll take months to happen. More than a year, maybe. And she doesn't have to pay a bond now, luckily. They'll let the three of them go.”

He said this in a reassuring way, or at least he tried to, but Gabe noticed immediately that his father hadn't said anything at all about himself.

“What about you?” Gabe asked. “When do they let you out?”

His father smiled with only half of his mouth, the way he did whenever the car broke, or when anything else broke, or when snowplows scraped the streets clean of a blizzard but blocked the driveway with a two-foot wall of solid ice and slush that the landlord was supposed to shovel but never actually did. It was Dad's
this sucks
expression.

“Me, they will throw out of the country. Immediately. Tomorrow morning.” He paused to let that sink in. It didn't really sink in. Gabe just stared at him. He went on. “I don't get months of hearings and paperwork like your mother does because I've hopped the border before. I was a kid, first learning how to ride a motorcycle around the world. I got caught right away and sent home. So this is my second time getting deported, and there's no way to contest a second time. Not for ten years. In a decade I'll be allowed to ask permission for reentry, but not until then. Not even with four children on this side of the fence. And we can't all go south. They won't
let
us all go south. All this is going to take a long while to untangle, and we're going to rack up some mighty big phone bills between now and then. Maybe you can mow a few lawns this summer, earn extra cash to buy some long-distance phone time?”

Dad tried to maintain his half-smile, but he looked stricken. Whatever he felt right then, he was clearly trying hard not to feel it. His voice was half kidding, half serious, and entirely ashamed to tell Gabe that he would have to pitch in to pay for international phone bills.

Gabe needed to make that expression leave his father's face immediately, so he did the only thing he could think of. He leaned forward and spoke with the sort of earnest
mock formality that Dad had used when he gave him a hammer of wisdom and truth.

“Every restaurant in this city will rise up in protest and demand your return,” Gabe said in solemn promise.

Dad laughed, surprised. “Tell them not to give up hope,” he answered. “Tell them that my spoon and saucepan will return to the kitchens of this city. Tell them to tighten their belts and be brave.”

“I'll tell them,” Gabe promised. “Somehow they'll endure other cooking while you're gone.” Neither one of them joked about what Mom's cooking was usually like.

The leathery guard told them that time was up.

Dad's face got tense again. “Tell Lupe—something. Tell her I wish I could see her before I have to go. But I can't.”

“She could still come visit you today,” said Gabe, confused.

Dad gave him a warning look and dropped his voice. “Better not.”

Gabe understood the warning, if not the reasons for it. He nodded. His father seemed to relax.

Gabe did not relax. His face hurt; all the muscles clenched with tension like they did whenever he and Frankie watched a horror movie.

I'm the ambassador of this entire world,
Gabe thought.
All of it. But nobody here knows that. I can talk to aliens thousands of light-years away, but we'll need to scramble for cash so I can keep talking to Dad by phone.

He said good-bye to his father through the glass barrier.

On the way home Gabe began to unfreeze and unclench. He tried not to. He wasn't sure what would happen if he let himself feel the way he actually felt.

Frankie's mother actually spoke on the drive back. “Your sister Guadalupe is at my house already. You should all stay there for dinner and then stay the night. There's also a Pack 'n Play for the twins to sleep in. I'm sorry that Frankie isn't home. He'll be in California for the rest of the summer.”

“I know,” said Gabe. “He told me.”

Her voice was still sharp, like ice sculptures carved with chain saws, but it seemed to have emotion in it somewhere. She really did sound sorry.

“Can you drop me off at home first?” he asked. “I need to feed the pets before coming over.”

“Of course,” said Frankie's mom. She pulled up in front of Gabe's house. “I'll see you at dinner. I have to go back to work for the rest of the afternoon, but hurry over as soon as you can. Hopefully your mother and the
toddlers will be out before dinner, and your mother will need the help. I understand that the little ones listen to you more than they listen to Guadalupe.”

She made a point of pronouncing Lupe's full name with a Spanish accent, which made it leap out and away from everything else that she said.

“The twins don't listen to anyone,” said Gabe, “but I'll hurry. Thank you for the ride. And for everything.”

“This was the plan,” she told him. “Taking refuge at our house has always been part of your emergency plans. See you at dinner.”

The car drove away. Gabe went inside.

In the kitchen, on the card table that Gabe's father used as extra counter space, Gabe found the cane sword, the varja hammer, and a Post-it note from Lupe.

Emergency Plan #23
, read the note.

“Isn't number twenty-three the one about ghost pirates?” he said to himself. “Or else disappearing family members. That would make more sense.” She probably wrote it to let him know she was over at Frankie's house, but he knew that already.

He fixed himself some cereal as a late lunch. This was a sorry meal after the greasy magnificence of his breakfast—the last meal his father had cooked in this kitchen before leaving to run errands, get arrested, and get deported.

Gabe shut the door on that thought and finished his cereal.

He heard the plaintive scratching noises of unhappy pets and brought food dishes up to his room. All three pets expressed their unhappiness to him when he got there. Garuda's complaints were the most subtle. He stood and stared with silent reproach. The fox and the bird were both louder.

“Sorry, everyone,” said Gabe. He checked his closet for the Envoy and found only an empty aquarium. “The Envoy isn't here, which means that it's probably in the basement, which means that the basement might still be filled with hazardous physics. So you all have to stay here.”

Sir Toby tried to make a break for it anyway when Gabe left the room. Gabe gently nudged the fox back with his toe and shut the door. He hated keeping them confined. He hated the whole idea of confinement.

Gabe went all the way downstairs to find the Envoy.

The wire frame in the basement had grown larger and more complicated since that morning. Red sparks constantly exploded from it, and most of those sparks joined a spiraling vortex of dust motes that fell through the dryer's open door and disappeared there.

The Envoy scooted around the whole mess, working furiously.

“Not done yet?” Gabe asked, stating the obvious.

The Envoy made a mouth.

“No,” it said. “Not done. And I don't understand the problem! The black hole should have completely dissipated by now. It should have ejected all the substance it had absorbed already—except for your entangled particles, because we sent those elsewhere. But it hasn't collapsed. It won't collapse. Nothing I do will make it collapse. It's as though something is working against me, deliberately keeping this open. I don't like that idea.”

Gabe didn't like that idea either. “How dangerous is it?”

“I have it contained to the clothes dryer,” the Envoy said. “The rest of the house should be safe.”

This wasn't actually an answer. “Should be?” Gabe pressed.

“Should be,” said the Envoy. It scooted quickly back and forth. Red sparks flew.

Gabe sat on the steps to watch warily. “My parents are getting deported,” he said, his voice flat and gray in his own ears.

The Envoy stopped working, clearly unsure how to respond. “I'm so very sorry!” it said. “Sympathies. Condolences. This is terrible.”

“I also dreamed about the Embassy this morning,” Gabe went on, his voice still flat and gray.

“That part is good news,” the Envoy said cautiously. “Though I'm sorry that I've been unable to prepare you for your arrival in advance. Protocol does get testy about that.”

“I noticed,” said Gabe.

The conversation ended when red sparks burst from every joint of the wire frame at once.

The Envoy sputtered something in a different language and a different voice. It sounded like creative cursing.

“We'll have to talk later,” it said, using Mom's voice again. “I should focus on my struggle with this appliance to keep it from killing us.”

Gabe climbed down from the staircase and carefully approached to get a closer look at the misbehaving contraption. Then everything went wrong.

The dryer imploded. The frame around it collapsed. Sparks appeared and disappeared again, just as quickly.

The Envoy scrambled away from the chaotic mess. It shouted something, but Gabe couldn't hear through the sudden rush of air. The Envoy's mouth reached out like a hand. Gabe took it, and the two of them raced up the basement stairs while the basement behind them ceased to exist.

Gabe realized that the pets were all upstairs, trapped
in his bedroom. Every single one of Dad's emergency plans demanded a quick exit in case of fire or poltergeist or any other circumstance in which the house itself had become dangerous. They didn't have an emergency plan for black holes in the basement, but the principle was the same: Get out. Get out now. Let firefighters fight their way into the burning house to rescue pets. Let exorcists fight their way into a haunted house. Get out.

Gabe hated that rule. He still followed it.