Sleep evaporated from me—of course Omar wasn’t on the floor, this wasn’t Omar’s house, I didn’t know whose house it was. I sat up as the woman hurried away, the shapes of people following her out the door. There was no time to change, and then I looked down and remembered that I’d slept in my clothes. The bag I’d brought with me—I stumbled over it as I got up. I slipped on my sneakers and ran with the others into the morning dark.
Later I would learn that the raid lasted less than four minutes. Like the rest of the world, I’d see the picture of a screaming child with an assault rifle in his face, a soldier in riot gear carrying that rifle and demanding the person holding the boy let him go. By the time I made it to the gate of the house, that photo had already been taken by the one cameraman who, like my mom, had stayed across the street that night, and by the time the house’s gate clapped shut behind me, the raid was in its final seconds. My mother was still inside Ariel’s house, pepper spray searing her eyes as she groped the walls and tried to find her way back to Ariel’s bedroom, careening against other screaming people left in the wake of rifle-lugging soldiers, the last few of whom I would see run from the house and into waiting vans. But the very first thing I saw—what I later thought I must’ve dreamed, because I remember the whole street going quiet when that couldn’t be true, because I know he was crying, yelling for help, one small scream among dozens of others—was Ariel in the arms of a woman I’d never seen before, a blanket trailing useless from her side, his legs dangling and his feet hitting her knees as she ran into a van. He looked huge. His terrified wet face shined right in my direction as I stopped in the middle of the street, and I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, because I knew he was big enough, old enough to remember this, that when he would have the nightmares brought on by this moment, I would be in them.
The van door slammed—I thought I saw his skinny leg almost get chopped off by it, but that didn’t happen—and I found my voice. Wait, I screamed. Not No. Not Stop. Not Ariel. I screamed Wait like there was something I needed to ask him, and I ran after the van like a bus I’d missed. My arms reached out toward it as if that would help, my fingers splayed and clawing. I thought I had a chance to catch up—there was a stop sign at the corner—but clearly they were going to blow through it. The men already in front of me came into focus: other people running, trying to catch the vans and—do what? One of the men veered to the curb and grabbed a metal garbage can, hauled it up over his head and hurled it through the air. It landed near the ignored stop sign, garbage spewing in an arc and more flying out as the can rolled into the intersection. Something smashed into my back as I slowed down, and when I turned around, a couple dozen people ran past me, all of them with anything they could find in their hands. They charged down the street, launching debris at the vans as they sped away, and I leapt sideways, toward the fence surrounding Ariel’s house. People poured out from the front door, screaming and cursing, but none of them was my mother. I had no way of knowing she was in there, but I felt it somehow: no other place made sense anymore. A fire—seconds old—burned in another garbage can out front and someone ran up to it and kicked it over. I ducked beneath the carport, looking for another way in. I ran through the yard and around the house, darting between people with their hands digging at their eyes, all of them stumbling around like drunks. Sirens started up a few blocks away, and the yells from the front yard rose higher, sounded more organized. I stepped over a small bike with training wheels, the handlebars bent. A back door hung all the way open, the bottom hinge busted, and I rushed inside.
I’d never been in the house, but what I was seeing was not the way my mom knew it in the months leading up to that moment. Huge gashes at shoulder and waist height tore through the plaster in strips, exposing the wood partitions. The closet door in the room I’d entered stood propped up against another wall, ripped off, the closet’s contents gushing onto the floor. A trail of mud and orange liquid—more pepper spray—splattered ahead of me. I followed it deeper into the house. I stepped over plastic toys, slipped on sheets and blankets strewn across the tile. People ran around me yelling, He’s gone! What happened! They kidnapped him! He’s gone! at each other in English and Spanish, moved from room to room with purpose I didn’t understand.
—Stop, what the fuck’s going on? I screamed to no one and everyone.
Nobody answered, but a bald man with a mustache put his arms around me and squeezed me so tight I couldn’t breathe. He wept into my ponytail for a second or two, then ran outside. I pushed past people crying in the living room, all of them jockeying to find the front door, and I moved into a hallway toward what I figured might be Ariel’s room.