From their posture and somewhat bloated faces, the people nearest them—us—intuited that the news was bad. A few feet away along the fence, a woman let out a moan. There was a collective holding of breath as the uncle made his way, while guiding Caridaylis, to the spot from which Ariel had wished us a happy new year. People around me muttered preemptive Ay dios míos, and even my mom—so calm on the two-block walk there, so eager to greet her friends after work and to again not feel the need to introduce me to any of them—held her breath longer than was, to me, safe.
The uncle’s exact words are hazy to me, partly because I knew as he spoke them that his statement would end up outlasting that moment, recorded by dozens of camera crews, reported by dozens of writers. There’d be a transcript, and someday, if I ever needed to look it up, I’d be able to find it. So I could lift those words from a document now, put them here as what I heard him say, but even though that’s the fact of it, that wouldn’t be the honest way to tell it, because all I remember hearing—his voice isolated from all other noise like Ariel’s laughter on the first day of the year—was this: Our worst fear is here. Everything he said after this is lost to me because as he spoke, I looked over at my mother, who appeared to be melting. Her chin went toward the sky as she sank. I remember, more than anything, her scream. A long No with a softness to the vowel that told me she meant it in Spanish, though of course it means the same thing no matter which accent surrounds it. The wail ripped through her body, then the crowd surrounding her, then me: a scream fit for TV, and I felt them rush in—the cameras—their zooms finding and catching her.
She struggled against the arms of Myra and her other friends—it looked like they were trying to hug her. I reached out to grab her shirt and pull her to me, my hand squeezing between the shoulders of the women surrounding her, but she pushed herself forward, her upper body hanging over Ariel’s fence.
—So his mother died in vain, she screamed. She died for nothing! Nothing!
Someone yelled, ?Se?ora, por favor! But from elsewhere came a barked, No! Then more pushing, and Myra and the rest of my mom’s group began yelling, a ridge of sound rushing at Ariel’s house.
The uncle had stopped speaking and was also crying—or as close to crying as he would allow, his face suddenly red and blustery, hands rubbing against his eyes in wide passes. He walked to the fence, began grabbing the hands of the people there suffering with him, sputtering and nodding at us. This move made my mom worse. She fell to her knees, her hands still grasping the fence. When the uncle got to her, she pushed herself up again and squeezed his hand, said, No please, no.
The uncle nodded, wrapped his other hand around their joined fists, then released her to keep moving along the line of people. She reached after him, touching his back, her fingers trailing down it as he eased away.
—He can’t! Mami screamed. He can’t go back! Don’t let them take him!
Nothing she was yelling made any sense to me; I turned to Myra.
—Go back? I said.
I hadn’t had any more contact with her since meeting her three days earlier, but she slapped the side of my head the way my dad did whenever I talked back to him or said something he found especially funny or stupid.
—Are you deaf? she said. INS says his father has custody. They have two weeks until Ariel is deported.
This didn’t seem at all connected to the news we’d come to hear: the family had filed for political asylum on Ariel’s behalf—custody wasn’t part of any conversation I’d heard or seen on TV, not yet.
—Wait what? I yelled at Myra.
—They don’t have the right! she said.
I thought she meant INS, which if they’d weighed in meant they probably did have the right, but what I learned later was that Myra was trying—in the whirlpool of crying and the new chant of ?No se va!—to explain a legal technicality to me: Ariel’s U.S. family didn’t have the right to apply for asylum on his behalf in the first place. Only his legal guardian could do that, and so only his father, in Cuba and apparently staying in the capital as a guest of Fidel Castro, had the right to file the motion that his son be granted asylum. The paperwork everyone had spent the last few weeks talking about, which Tía Zoila had called bulletproof at Noche Buena, was all a waste of time.