When my father finally spoke, he had no trace of a Jamaican accent and no Jamaican diction at all. He sounded like a stranger.
“You children go on ahead. I will see you later.”
I speed through the rest of the story. My father spends the rest of that evening drinking with his new actor friends. He drinks too much. On his way home, he rams his car into a parked police car. In his drunkenness he tells the police officer the whole history of our coming to America. I imagine he monologued for this audience of one. He tells the policeman we’re undocumented immigrants, and that America never gave him a fair shot. The officer arrests him and calls Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Attorney Fitzgerald’s brows are furrowed. “But why would your father do that?” he asks.
It’s a question I know the answer to.
CHARACTERS
Patricia Kingsley, 43
Samuel Kingsley, 45
ACT TWO
SCENE THREE
Interior bedroom. A single queen-sized bed with headboard dominates the space. Perhaps a picture frame or two. The floor on Samuel’s side of the bed is overflowing with books. Stage right we see an opening to a hallway. Samuel and Patricia’s teenage daughter is listening, but neither Samuel nor Patricia knows it. It’s not clear that they would care if they did.
PATRICIA: Lawd have mercy, Kingsley.
She is seated on the edge of her bed. Her face is in her hands. Her speech is muffled.
SAMUEL: It don’t mean nothing, man. We going to get a good lawyer.
Samuel Kingsley is standing on his side of the room. He is hunched with his face in shadow. A spotlight shines brightly on the single sheet of paper he holds in his left hand.
PATRICIA: And how we a go pay for a lawyer, Kingsley?
SAMUEL: Lawd, Patsy. We figure it out, man.
Patricia takes her face out of her hands and looks at her husband as if she’s seeing him for the first time.
PATRICIA: You remember the day we did meet?
Samuel slowly crumples the paper in his hand. He continues to do this throughout the scene.
PATRICIA: You don’t remember, Kingsley? How you came into the store, then you kept coming back day after day? That was so funny. One day you buy something and the next day you return it until you wear me down.
SAMUEL: Wasn’t no wearing down, Patsy. It was courting.
PATRICIA: You remember all the promises you make me, Kingsley?
SAMUEL: Patsy—
PATRICIA: You say all me dreams would come true. We going have children and money and big house. You say me happiness more important than you own. You remember that, Kingsley?
She rises from the bed and the spotlight follows her as she moves.
SAMUEL: Patsy—
PATRICIA: Let me tell you something. I didn’t believe you when we started out. But after a time I change my mind. You a good actor, Kingsley, because you make me believe all the pretty things you say to me.
The paper in Samuel’s hand is fully crumpled now. The spotlight moves to his face and he’s no longer hunched. He is angry.
SAMUEL: You know what me tired of hearing about? Me tired of your dreams. What ’bout mine?
If it wasn’t for you and children them, I would have all the things I want. You complain ’bout house and kitchen and extra bedroom. But what ’bout me? I don’t have any of the thing them that I want. I don’t get to use my God-given talent.
I rue the day I walk into that store. If it wasn’t for you and the children, my life would be betta. I would be doing the thing God put me on this earth to do. I don’t want hear nothing more ’bout your dreams. Them not nothing compared to mine.
BUT I DON’T TELL ATTORNEY Fitzgerald that part—about how my father’s wife and children are his greatest regret because we got in the way of the life he dreamed for himself.
Instead, I say, “A few weeks after he was arrested we got the Notice to Appear letter from Homeland Security.”
He looks over one of the forms I filled out earlier for the paralegal and gets a yellow legal pad out of his desk drawer.
“So then you went to the Master Calendar Hearing. Did you bring a lawyer with you?”
“Only my parents went,” I tell him. “And they didn’t bring a lawyer.” My mom and I talked about it a lot before the appointment. Should we hire a lawyer we couldn’t really afford, or wait to see what happened at the hearing? We’d read online that you didn’t really need a lawyer for the first appointment. At that point my father was still insisting that everything would miraculously work itself out. I don’t know. Maybe we wanted to believe that was true.
Attorney Fitzgerald shakes his head and jots something down on his legal pad. “So at the hearing, the judge tells them they can accept Voluntary Removal or file for Cancellation of Removal.” He looks down at my forms. “Your younger brother is a U.S. citizen?”
“Yes,” I say, watching as he notes that down too. Peter was born almost exactly nine months after we moved here. My parents were still happy with each other then.
My father didn’t accept the Voluntary Removal at that hearing. That night, my mom and I researched Cancellation of Removal. In order to qualify, my dad needed to have lived in the United States for at least ten years, have shown good moral character, and be able to prove that being deported would cause an extreme hardship on a spouse, parent, or child who was a U.S. citizen. We thought Peter’s citizenship was going to be our saving grace. We hired the cheapest lawyer we could find and went to the Merits Hearing armed with this new strategy. But as it turns out, it’s very difficult to prove “extreme hardship.” Going back to Jamaica will not put Peter’s life in danger, and no one cares about the psychological danger of uprooting a child from his home, not even Peter himself.