What did you expect?”
Scott rose to his feet, lowered the toilet cover to sit, and took a break, studying the sink and the tub, both of which were awaiting his attentions.
“Did Araceli really do all of this? By herself?” Scott asked. He looked at his hands, which smelled of bleach. “You made breakfast, and dinner last night. Maureen’s doing the baby’s laundry. I’m cleaning the fucking toilets. I can’t believe that one woman did all of these things.”
“Yeah,” the elder Torres said. “And she did them well.” He examined his son’s work on the toilet, and added, “Don’t forget to scrub down on the sides. You need to get back down on your hands and knees to do it right.”
For the next few days Scott and Maureen remembered Araceli in their muscles, and in their wrinkled and bleached hands, until the tasks became familiar and routine and her prominent place in their memories began to fade, very slightly.
23
“Somebody paid your bail.” The guard named Nansen, who had carried Araceli to safety just yesterday, looked a little disappointed. “Ten grand, paid in full.” Araceli walked through the jail corridors for what she hoped was the last time, trying to imagine who her benefactor might be—a man, a tall man, a gringo? Would his act of kindness present additional complications? After her clothes were returned to her at the Inmate Reception Center, she walked through one last set of doors into a room where the guards didn’t care about her anymore, a waiting area with plastic chairs and the feel of a seedy bus station. Standing in the middle of the room, with the lost look of a passenger who had missed his connection, was a thin, white-haired, and pale man of about fifty with ruddy, cratered skin, in a brown tweed jacket and a white cotton dress shirt that dangled over the top of his jeans.
The attorney opened his arms in greeting. “Araceli! I’ve been here for over an hour. I’m Mitchell Glass. From the South Coast Immigrant Coalition,” he said. “We paid your bail.”
“Why?” Araceli realized, of course, that she should say thank you, but her need to understand what was happening outweighed any pretense. There was a moment of awkward silence while Glass considered the question.
He explained, in slow and condescending English that sped up and was less condescending after Araceli frowned at him, that the coalition had received the funds to free Araceli from a group called the Immigrant Daylight Project, a large circle of benevolent and open-minded people from Manhattan, Austin, Santa Monica, Cambridge, and many other places. “Usually they pay bail for people who are in immigration detention. So they can get out and live among free people while they appeal the verdict. Out of the shadows and into the daylight. Get it? The directors thought that, given the attention to your case, they would pay your bail too. Plus, it wasn’t a huge amount.”
“¿Y qué tengo que hacer?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Glass said. “These people just want you to be free while you fight your case.”
Araceli did not know it, but not long after her second arrest the Daylight Project had sent off a flurry of emails and posted letters calling on its members to “help throw a wrench in the prison-industrial complex” by “emancipating Araceli N. Ramirez, the latest member of the fastest growing sector of the incarcerated population”—undocumented immigrants. The group’s fund-raising literature was a bit heavy-handed with its use of slavery metaphors, and included broken chains on its logo and references to the Underground Railroad in its brochures. But they dealt almost exclusively with those in federal detention and their decision to pay Araceli’s bail caught Ian Goller and his office completely by surprise. It had been ages since the Orange County District Attorney’s Office had a defendant whose fate worried faraway liberal crusaders. Generally speaking, alien inmates without family members on the outside stayed inside the big house, there was no habeas corpus for them, no writs, no appeals, no purchased freedom.
For the moment, however, Araceli was a happy and unlikely beneficiary of the Bill of Rights, as free of overbearing authorities as the New Englanders who stood up to King George, a startling fact which she confirmed by scanning the street and the parked cars as she walked toward the jail’s parking lot. No one is following me. Qué milagro. The sun is shining on my face. Daylight. She wanted to ask about her public defender, but instead Glass told her