Chapter 1: The Dinner Table Debate
The chandelier over the mahogany table threw hard shards of light across the linen, the silver, the trembling rim of the water glass. Ben stabbed at his steak and dragged the knife through it like a man gutting something he hated. The blade squealed on the china. Nobody at the table reacted to the sound anymore. It was just the noise their dinners made.
"Did you hear what that socialist said about our border patrol?" he asked, not looking up.
Abby's fork hovered mid-air. A bite of potato hung off it, cooling. She'd been watching the chandelier's reflection swirl in her wine, and somewhere behind her eyes a voice was still talking, calm and low, about children. About dignity. About how a country's worth gets measured in what it does to the smallest people in it.
"I heard him," she said.
Ben's jaw worked. He was short enough that the chair's high back made him look like a boy playing at being a judge, but the receding hairline and the permanent pinch of contempt aged him back up. "He called them kids. He called gang members kids."
"He called one of them a kid. The eight-year-old."
Mor set her fork down with a small, exact sound. Her dark curls were pinned off her neck for dinner, and the chandelier light made the olive of her skin look almost gold. She looked at her husband, then at her sister-in-law, then back down at the plate. She had more to say than either of them and said none of it.
"Since when did an eight-year-old need a lawyer to be called an invader?" Ben said, and laughed at his own cleverness. "That's the trick, you see. You say child and suddenly nobody's allowed to ask about the father. The father who put her on a bus. The father who paid the coyote."
Abby laid the fork down. The potato stayed on it, untouched, going gray at the edges. "Her father's dead, Ben. That's why she was on the bus."
"That's what they told him to say."
"Who's they?"
"The people who want you to feel exactly like this." He pointed the knife at her, blade first, then remembered himself and turned it sideways. "You're proving my point right now. That's what he does. He makes you feel things so you stop thinking."
Heat climbed Abby's throat. She reached for the wine instead of answering, and the glass shook in her hand, and she hated that it shook. Across the table Mor finally looked up fully. Her eyes were the kind that missed nothing and reported even less.
"Carlos de Leon isn't a wizard," Abby said at last. "He read a report. He cited it. You know, numbers. The thing you like."
"I like numbers that add up."
"These did."
"And you checked?" Ben's eyebrow climbed. "You watched the whole stream?"
The silence that followed had weight to it. Abby understood, distantly, that she'd walked into the trap and that the trap was the point. She'd watched the whole stream. Twice. She'd watched it once at the kitchen counter with the volume low, and once later, in bed, with Jacob already asleep beside her, the laptop balanced on her knees. She wasn't going to say any of this.
"He made some good points," she said.
Mor made a small noise. It might have been a cough. It might have been something else.
Ben set the knife down and folded his hands like a man about to pray or about to explain something to a child. He'd done this on television for years. He did it now to his own sister, and the chandelier made a cold white ring on his forehead.
"Name one," he said.
"Name one what?"
"One good point. Go ahead. I'll wait."
Mor stood and gathered the plates. She did it without asking, the way she did everything in this house, smoothly and without being seen. "There's coffee," she said. "Or tea, if you'd rather."
"Neither of you is leaving this table until she names one."
"Ben." Mor's voice was level. "She's a grown woman."
"She's my sister."
"She's also your guest, and she's eating my food, and I'm clearing the plates." Mor stacked them. The silver rang softly together. "Since when did a family dinner turn into a debate stage?"
Ben sat back. His expression did something complicated, half irritation, half the old hunger to be admired. He'd married Mor because she was the one person who never seemed impressed by him, and it had taken him years to notice that this was not the same thing as loving him.
Abby found her voice while he was off balance. "Fine. One point. He said the way we process these kids causes damage we'll be paying for in twenty years. Trauma that doesn't heal. That's not opinion. That's a pediatrician he had on."
"Pediatricians can be political."
"That's not a counterargument."
"It's a counterobservation."
"That's not a word." Her fork had found her hand again. She didn't remember picking it up.
Ben smiled. He liked this part. "We can argue about whether it's a word, but that's the whole game, isn't it? He says he's helping. He raises a little money, makes a little speech, and you all go home feeling good about yourselves while nothing changes. He's not helping those children. He's helping his subscribers feel like they are."
That landed, and it landed clean, because there was a version of it that Abby had worried about alone in her own kitchen at eleven at night. She sat with it. Mor came back with two mugs and set one down at her place without sitting.
"He did help," Abby said quietly. "There was a family. Their case worker saw the stream. The deportation got stayed."
"For one family."
"One family is not nothing."
Ben picked his steak back up. "One family is a rounding error. And he knows it. That's why he picks them. One family, one stream, one video clip that gets shared ten thousand times. It's not compassion. It's content."
Mor sat down at last. She wrapped both hands around her mug, and her eyes went to Abby's, and held there, and for a second the two of them understood something identical and unsaid. Abby felt it land like a hand on her back. Mor was more conservative than any of them, she voted like her mother taught her to, and she was also a doctor who had spent a decade in emergency rooms watching people at their worst and their most human. Which meant she was not, in fact, as far from Abby as both of them had always assumed.
"I watched it too," Mor said.
Ben's head came up.
"You watched it?"
"He came up on my feed. I watched twenty minutes." She sipped. "He's not stupid, Ben."
"Nobody said he was stupid. Stupid would be easier." He said it flatly and went back to cutting, and Abby saw, for the first time in years, that her brother was angry in a way that had nothing to do with any of the words he was using. He kept stabbing. He kept not eating. The steak on his plate was in ribbons.
Mor said, "Do you actually know what happens to those children in those facilities?"
"I know what happens to the ones who never get there because their parents are dead."
"That's not an answer." Her voice stayed soft. "That's a jump. I asked you a question."
"I know everything I need to know. I read the briefings."
"Reading a brief and lying down with a child who won't sleep, those are different things."
Ben stopped cutting. The table went quiet enough that the chandelier hummed, all its little bulbs humming faintly against the dark. He looked at his wife the way he looked at callers he was about to hang up on. Then he looked at Abby. Then he laughed, short and dry, and picked up his wine.
"Since when did an eight-year-old need a lawyer," he said again, quieter this time, as if the sentence were a coin he could flip until it came up heads.
"She doesn't need a lawyer," Abby said. "She needs her mother. The lawyer is what you give a child when you've taken the mother."
"See, that's a good line. Did he write it for you?"
The wine went warm in her throat. She should have said no. She should have said it was her own thought, and it mostly was, but she had heard something like it on the stream, and now it was tangled up with her own voice and she couldn't tell them apart anymore. That was exactly what Ben meant. She knew that too. Knowing it didn't untangle anything. It just gave the knot another string.
"I'm going to say something," Mor said, "and you're both going to let me finish." She set her mug down. "I've delivered babies in this city for eleven years. I've held the mothers of undocumented families, and I've told them things they didn't want to hear, and I've never once met one who wanted anything for her kid except what you want for yours. I don't care about the politics of it. I care about the kid. And if your problem is the man who said it, then your problem isn't with the child, and you should be honest about that."
Ben's mouth opened. Nothing came out.
Abby stared at her sister-in-law and felt something shift in her chest like furniture being moved in a room she thought was empty.
Mor stood again and took her mug to the kitchen. Her footsteps were quiet on the tile. The conversation had nowhere to go after that, so it went there, and the three of them sat in the hum of the chandelier and the cooling wreck of the meal and didn't touch anything for a while.
Ben finally said, "What's the matter with you two?"
"Nothing's the matter," Abby said, and slid her chair back, and the legs grated on the wood exactly the way she wanted them to.
She cleared her own plate and carried it out. In the kitchen Mor was standing at the sink with her back to the room, not washing anything, just standing, both hands braced on the edge of the counter, and Abby came up beside her and set the plate down and neither of them said a word. Mor's profile in the window glass was calm. Her jaw was not.
"He does that," Abby said.
"He does."
"You'd think after ten years I'd stop letting him."
Mor turned her head. Up close her eyes were dark and steady, and something about her expression made Abby feel entirely seen, which was strange, because nobody in this family had ever looked at her that way. "He does it to me every day," Mor said. "You just build up a callus. Or you don't."
In the other room Ben rose and banged around with the wine bottle and the remote. The television came on. One of the panel shows, the volume too loud, the way he liked it. His voice floated in over the anchor's and then overrode it.
Abby drove home with the windows down. It was late and the streets were nearly empty and the cool air on her face didn't do what she wanted it to. She kept hearing Carlos's voice, that slow unhurried way he had of saying a thing once and then letting it sit. She kept hearing the question Mor had asked. She kept feeling the small clean shock of being agreed with.
Jacob was asleep when she got in. The bedroom was dark and smelled of him, of laundry and the mint of his lotion, and she undressed by the light of her phone and slid in beside him and lay facing the wall for a long time with her heart going too fast for no reason.
Across the city Mor Shapiro put the kitchen back in order. She loaded the dishwasher and wiped the counter and set the last of the glasses upside down on the rack. Ben had fallen asleep in his chair in front of the panel show, mouth open, the remote on his chest, and she watched him for a moment from the doorway and then went up alone.
She showered. She dried her hair. She got into bed and lay in the dark on her side of a very large mattress, and the house was so quiet she could hear the refrigerator cycling two floors down. Ben's snoring started around midnight. It always started around midnight. It was, she had come to understand, a kind of apology and a kind of insult at the same time.
She lay listening to it and thought about the show she'd watched on her phone. The man on it had a face she wouldn't have noticed in a crowd, except his eyes were kind, and kind was rare in her house. He wore a plain shirt with the sleeves rolled and his forearms were dark and thick and he used his hands when he talked, wide and slow, like he was shaping something for her out of the air. He didn't shout. He never once raised his voice.
She thought about the way he'd said dignity. Just the one word, early in the stream, before any of the politics. Dignity. He'd said it like it was a fact about people, given, not earned, not up for debate. Mor had spent eleven years in hospital rooms where dignity was the first thing to go and the last thing anyone fought for. She'd never once heard a man say the word like it weighed what it should.
Ben's snore caught, hitched, resumed. She heard, without meaning to, her own words from dinner: I don't care about the politics of it. I care about the kid. And then under them, from somewhere deeper and more honest, the sound of her husband's knife on the plate.
Her hand had already found the waistband of her underwear.
She didn't decide to do it. She realized she was doing it, which was different. Her fingers moved in the slow circles she'd learned she liked years ago, back when she still bothered with him, back before the circles were the only thing on offer. Her body warmed toward her own touch the way a room warms toward a lamp. She kept her breath even so as not to wake him. She kept her eyes closed.
She tried, briefly and dutifully, to picture Ben. The image wouldn't hold. It never held anymore. What came instead, uninvited and unwelcome and staying anyway, was the stream. The rolled sleeves. The dark forearms. The hands carving the air.
She added his voice to it. The unhurried low register, the way he never said more than he meant. She hated herself for it a little and did it anyway. She moved faster. She put him in the chair at the table and herself across from him, and then the image shifted without asking her permission, the way images do when you're close, and he was beside her, leaning in, close enough that she could feel the warmth coming off him, and his hand was on her hip, and it was big and warm and it stayed there like it had all the time in the world.
She bit the inside of her cheek. The bed creaked once under her shoulders and she froze, and Ben snored on, and she relaxed and started again.
She thought about how he'd listen. That was the thing she couldn't stop thinking about, of all the things. Not the politics. Not the border. The listening. Nobody in her house listened; they waited, they corrected, they talked over. But the man on the screen had listened to a woman he'd never met, a woman in a detention facility, while she cried, and he had not looked at his notes and he had not looked at the camera. He had just looked at her.
Mor came with her hand pressed flat and hard between her legs and her teeth in her lip and her eyes squeezed shut, and it was fast and sharp and over too soon, the way it always was when it was real, and for a few seconds afterward she lay perfectly still and felt nothing but her own pulse hammering in her ears.
Then the shame came up, on schedule, warm behind her eyes. She wiped her hand on the sheet and told herself it meant nothing. She told herself she'd watched the stream for twenty minutes and the man was a stranger in a laptop and her husband was asleep seven feet away and this was just biology and a bad night. She believed maybe half of it.
Ben snored again, long and rattling, and did not turn.
She lay on her back and stared at the ceiling and let the dark settle. Somewhere down the hall her phone lit up once on the nightstand, a notification from a politics feed she'd followed years ago and never unfollowed. She didn't roll over to check it. She knew, the way you know weather coming, that she would watch the whole stream tomorrow.
The notification sat unread until breakfast, and then it sat unread through breakfast too. Mor poured her coffee, answered two messages from the hospital, and drove to work with the phone face down in the cupholder. She did not watch the stream that day. She also did not unfollow the feed, which she noticed, and which she chose not to think about.
Abby watched it on Tuesday.
She told herself it was research. Jacob came home at seven and she had dinner on the table and the show playing low in the other room, some documentary he liked about bridges, and after he'd gone up she poured a glass of wine and opened the laptop. The stream was three hours and forty minutes long. She watched forty minutes and then went to bed, and lay awake, and got up at one, and finished it.
By Friday she had watched all four of his most recent ones. She knew his dog's name. She knew he had a daughter, sixteen, whose photos never appeared. She knew the tattoo on his left forearm, the one he got young and half-regrets, which he'd described as a mistake he'd paid for in high school and never once considered removing.
Jacob asked, on Thursday, why she was so quiet.
"Tired," she said.
It was true enough.
They had tickets to a fundraiser in Tampa, one of Jacob's firm's things, black tie, the kind of night she used to look forward to. She bought a dress. She did not think about who might be in the room until the program was emailed over on Friday afternoon and a name appeared in the third paragraph.
Keynote remarks, it said, by Carlos de Leon.
She read that line four times and then closed the laptop and put on the kettle.
Jacob drove. The ballroom sat on the ninth floor of a hotel with a view of the bay, and the lamps were turned low and gold, and every woman in the room had clearly spent the afternoon on her hair. Abby wore deep green, a high neck, a waist that had cost her two weeks of salads. She did not admit to herself that she'd chosen it for anyone.
Dinner was salmon. The speeches started at nine.
Carlos came up to the lectern in a dark suit with no tie, sleeves rolled to the forearm, and the room went quiet the way a room does when someone on stage is comfortable. He did not use notes. He talked for eleven minutes about a woman he called Elena, who had fled a house in Hialeah with two children and one bag, and about the shelter that took her in, and about the ninety percent of women who never get to a shelter at all. He never raised his voice. When he finished, the ballroom stood up, and the pledge cards came around, and by the end of the night the total went past two million dollars.
Abby clapped until her hands stung.
She and Jacob drifted toward the bar for the last hour. Jacob found a partner from his firm and got into a long conversation about a lease. Abby stood beside him with her wine and watched the room, and the room was full of people she had known for years who all looked slightly toned down at this hour, tired, human.
Carlos moved through the crowd near the far doors. He shook hands with a man in a bow tie, then a woman in pearls, then a cluster of three. People leaned in when they talked to him and he leaned in when he talked to them. It was not a performance. She'd watched enough performances in her life, and she knew what one looked like close up.
He looked up, and across forty feet of carpet, he looked at her.
It lasted maybe a second and a half. She had time to feel her whole face go hot, which was ridiculous. She turned back to Jacob and said something about the drive home, and Jacob said something about the parking validation, and when she looked again Carlos was talking to a different cluster and she decided she had imagined it.
She hadn't.
He came over twenty minutes later, while Jacob was at the bar. He came the long way, past two tables, so it wouldn't look like a beeline.
"You're Abby," he said.
She had a wine glass and nothing to do with her hands. "Yes."
"Ben's sister."
"Yes." Her voice came out flat and stupid. "Sorry. Do we know each other?"
"Not yet." He smiled, and it was a real one, unhurried, with the whole face. "I recognized you from a photo. He posted one at a family thing a few years back. You haven't changed much."
"I've changed plenty."
"Fair." He glanced toward the bar, where Jacob stood with his back turned. "That your husband?"
"Yes. Jacob."
"Does he know who I am?"
"Does anybody ever actually know who anybody is?"
Carlos laughed, low and easy, and she felt the sound land somewhere below her ribs. "How'd you hear about tonight?"
"Jacob's firm buys a table every year."
"Lucky firm."
"Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"Say things that mean nothing."
He tilted his head, and looked at her for a second longer than the joke required. "All right. Then can I ask you something?"
"Go ahead."
"You been watching my show?"
The room kept going around them. Somebody dropped a fork three tables over. Abby took a sip of wine that she didn't need and set the glass down on a passing tray, because her hand had started doing that thing where it shook.
"I've watched some," she said.
"How much is some?"
"Enough."
"That's not an answer."
"That sounds like my brother."
"That sounds like a person who's been in a debate club." He said it without heat, and it was not an insult, and she found herself smiling anyway, which annoyed her. "I'm not fishing. I ask because the analytics are public and I look at them. There's one stream getting viewed a lot from an IP in your neighborhood. It's the one where I had the pediatrician on. I figured maybe it was Ben hate-watching."
"He doesn't hate-watch. He doesn't watch at all. He thinks you're beneath him."
"He's right. I'm beneath everybody. It's the floor I stand on." He said it flat, deadpan, and then broke and grinned.
Abby put a hand over her mouth, and the laugh came out the side of it anyway. She hadn't laughed like that in front of a stranger in years.
"You should come on," he said.
"On what?"
"The stream. Next week. I'm in Florida all week, I've got a studio set up in a rental, it's just me and a camera and a decent mic."
"You're serious."
"I'm extremely serious."
"Why?"
"Because you watched three hours and forty minutes of a show you were told to hate, and you did it from a house where that's a punishable offense." He shrugged. "People who change their minds are interesting. People who change their minds slowly are more interesting. I don't need you to agree with me on anything. I'd just like to hear you."
"I'm a conservative."
"That's fine. So was my mother until she was fifty."
"And then she wasn't?"
"And then she wasn't." He reached past her for a napkin and dabbed at a spot of coffee on the tablecloth, and the movement put him close enough that she smelled his soap, clean and cheap, nothing expensive about it. "Tuesday. Seven o'clock. Two hours, maybe less. I'll send you the address. Bring Jacob if it helps."
"It won't help."
She heard herself say it before she'd decided to, and it hung there between them.
Carlos straightened up. He didn't smirk. He didn't take the opening, and she noticed that he didn't, and she filed it away. "Then don't," he said. "Tuesday, seven. It's a yes or a no, and no is fine."
Jacob appeared at her elbow with two fresh drinks. He looked Carlos over the way he looked at opposing counsel. "Jacob Roth."
"Carlos de Leon." Carlos shook his hand, and meant it, and then stepped back and gave them both room. "Nice to meet you both. Thanks for coming out tonight. It matters."
He was gone before Jacob could figure out how to be territorial about it.
"Who was that?" Jacob asked, watching him go.
"You know who that is."
"I know the name. I don't know why he was talking to my wife."
"He was being polite."
"At length."
"At length," Abby agreed, and drank.
The parking garage smelled of wet concrete. Jacob nattered about the lease conversation the whole ride down and the whole drive home and she said yes and mm and that's wild at the right intervals, and the whole time she held her phone in her lap with the screen dark, running her thumb along the edge.
He'd written the address on the back of a napkin and pressed it into her hand when Jacob wasn't looking. She had it in her clutch.
At home she undressed and took off her makeup and brushed her teeth and lay down beside her sleeping husband, and then, at ten past one, she got up and went to the kitchen and stood at the counter in the dark with the napkin under the fridge light. Tuesday, 7 pm. An address in St. Petersburg, over the bridge.
She set it on the counter and stared at it and made a cup of tea she didn't drink.
She texted Mor at 1:22 a.m. because there was no one else on earth to text.
You awake?
The reply took eight minutes.
Yes. Everything okay?
Abby typed and deleted three versions.
You remember that guy from dinner. The stream.
Another three minutes went by. Then: I remember.
He was at the fundraiser tonight. He invited me on his show.
A long minute with three dots, then the dots stopped, then started again.
What did you say?
Nothing yet.
What are you going to say?
Abby looked at the napkin. She looked at the dark window and her own reflection in it, thirty-three years old, a green dress folded on a chair in the next room, a husband asleep down the hall who had never once asked her a question that cost him anything.
She typed: Yes.
Mor answered almost immediately.
Okay.
Just okay?
I don't know what the other word is. But okay. Send me the address. Just in case.
Abby didn't ask what just in case. She sent it, and put the phone down, and stood in the dark kitchen for a while longer with her tea going cold. Then she went back to bed, and before she slept she lay on her back and looked at the ceiling and let herself want something out loud, only in her own head, which was the only place in the whole house she could.