Just William

by Lucy S.

I asked him if his real name was William or if he’d changed to the English version of his original name. He said no, that had always been his name, even as a child in El Salvador. I don’t know why, after all the struggles, all the notes taken, the calls made, I somehow can’t remember or find his last name anymore. Maybe it is in one of my spiral notebooks stacked on the high shelf.

I am almost positive that he said the city that he came from was San Miguel, more to the south. Why was I not more careful; why did I not keep better notes? How could I forget? He lived with his grandmother in her small place after his mother headed north to the U.S. when he was a month old. That would have been around 1980, when the death squads were on the rampage. Did she leave for that reason? Or did she need to go somewhere to make enough to send money home to her mother and baby?  Some of these questions I asked after we had talked enough.  He often did not have the answers.

It was just the two of them, William and his grandmother. They slept in the same bed. They had little money. Sometimes, he told us, she would all of a sudden say, that’s it, we’re taking the bus out to the beach.  They would ride out there and stay for a couple of days, sleeping on the beach. He laughed remembering this and said with a far off look that his grandmother was funny. When he was eleven, his mother paid a coyote to bring him north to be with her. His grandmother kept crying and crying when she said goodbye to him.

He said that when he saw his mother, he didn’t feel anything in particular for her because she was a stranger. By then, she had married and had two daughters, both U.S. citizens. She enrolled him in school somewhere in East L.A.  The story was that at some point, she obtained legal residency for herself but not for William. I used to wonder why she did not “bother” to get his. How ignorant and self-righteous I sometimes have been in my advocacy, as if I knew her reasons or what the truth really was. A version of a story gets repeated a few times and pretty soon, it has worn grooves in our minds.

When he was sixteen, he and some friends stole a car parked on the street one night. And here, I always want to add, “William was so passive and afraid; it wasn’t his idea; he was just with them and went along with it.”  This may be true. But I also know that I am always trying to retrospectively protect him, always trying to keep people from judging him harshly. This crime landed him in the California Youth Authority detention system for three years.

Sometime during those years, he and Rose began corresponding. (Her name is longer and more unique than that, but I will call her Rose here, and sometimes she used that name as a shorter form of her full name.) He was a friend of her cousin who was in there, too. After the CYA released him, he ended up in the Mojave Desert town of Lancaster instead of with his mom, who was by then divorced. His now ex-step-father lived out there by then. And Rose was there.

Later, they lived together with her mother, father, brothers, and sister for a little while. But that was the year that my cousin (Rose’s mom) left her husband for her boyfriend. They all scattered. My cousin, her boyfriend, and two of the kids had nowhere to live. Sometimes they slept in their car. Rose and William likewise had nowhere to live and no car. They finally ended up at the cheap motel on Sierra Highway, but at almost $40 a night with taxes and fees, it was not cheap, night after night.

I was afraid they’d soon be out on the street. Getting together the money each day from Rose’s grandma or, rarely, me (calling it in), or occasionally her dad, left them and me and others on edge.  I went to see them in that dark room that smelled wet and moldy from the swamp cooler. I remember being irritated that Rose had her two Chihuahuas with her – Romeo and Juliet. They weren’t supposed to have them in there, and their frequent high-pitched barks were bound to be heard soon. And they were mean little dogs, always trying to bite me.

Rose called me her tía.  For years, we had been aunt and niece, in part because her mother was an only child, but most of all because she had lived with us before and we had become close. But her story will come later.

The dog-couple parted when I brought Rose and William to live with me. Juliet was borne away with us, and Romeo was left a bachelor with someone else. We lived three hours’ drive from Lancaster, out in a semi-desert, hilly rural area that was a half hour drive to towns with stores and other services. Rose was already an alcoholic (sometimes an aggressive one), so this distance from any stores made it so much easier for me to have them there with us. My oldest, Justin, was seventeen when they moved in. Jonathan and Kevin were thirteen. Sean was nine; Ryan was four. The three older kids shared a bedroom, and the two younger kids shared a sort of bedroom – a walk-through den, really, but it worked. William and Rose slept on the pullout sleeper of the sofa. Matt and I were separated yet again – separated in the same house, as always, because nothing else was economically possible. We moved back into the same room to give them the living room.

On good days, they would sit on a couple of chairs they’d place under the huge pine tree just before it got dark.  They’d talk quietly and laugh and each smoke a cigarette or two. I liked to see them out there through the window when I stood at the sink. Sometimes the kids and I went out when it got darker and played basketball using the driveway light. Rose and William would cheer us on or make jokes. Sean spoke with a certain formality and almost a British accent for some reason, and Rose would always say things to him like, “Hey, my bloody mate!” with her own donned matching accent.

On other good days, they’d make salsa from the tomatoes and jalapeños we grew. Or we would play Pounce, a fast-moving card game, with them, and we would catch William cheating. Or William would help Matt with the patio footings we had to redo because we found out that the posts holding up the cover hadn’t been supported properly, so the concrete had to be cut with a special saw and new footings had to be dug and poured, one by one. Or we’d watch a movie together. Or we’d just talk.  One time he swore to the kids that he'd seen a mermaid at the beach back in El Salvador. Just a popped up head in the water and then the flash of the tail on the mermaid's way back down into the sea. Their lack of belief frustrated him.

On bad days, I’d be on the phone for hours trying to sort through the system to see how we might resolve William’s immigration situation. He said his mother had his birth certificate and wouldn’t give it to him. I don’t even know if this was true.  But documents in El Salvador were in general not easy to get when William was born. At some point, we found out that a letter had been sent out to an address where his mother no longer lived, instructing William to appear in court to determine his immigration status. He had missed the date.  Attorneys said this was not good.

On other bad days, William and Rose argued. I usually didn’t know what started the arguments, but I would catch pieces. Sometimes she said he was jealous and hell no, she wasn't going to be controlled by him.  He so often ended up locked in the bathroom, crying hard. She’d knock on the door. Sometimes she’d get mad and say things like, “Why do you have to act like a fucken little baby?” At times I tried to talk with them about their problems, but it embarrassed William, and Rose preferred to talk with me by herself. I always wished I had more wisdom. Sometimes he would say, “Then I’ll just leave,” and she’d say, “Go ahead. What are you waiting for?” And a bit later, she’d say again, “I thought you said you were leaving.” One time I discovered that he’d gone walking off at night. Matt took his truck to look for him, driving through so many dirt roads until he found him.  We kept telling them that he could never do that again, that there were packs of dogs out there at night and that he could get so lost.

They were living with us on 9/11.

Finally they moved back to Lancaster. Rose’s mom and her boyfriend had managed to rent an apartment. They would be back in a town, no longer isolated. And the kids and I were leaving on a long driving trip soon, and I didn’t know how I could leave them out there with no vehicles. I drove them back to Lancaster. Rose gave me her favorite movie, “Girl, Interrupted,” as a memento and a thanks. Her mom soon wanted them out and they ended up with her dad in a room he was renting in someone’s house. One night, they were drinking and ended up in an argument. Rose said there was no reason why he couldn’t at least use a fake social security number and try to get some work. He thought she was talking to a guy on the phone. He walked off into the night.

Later, we found out that William had opened an unlocked car door in an apartment complex parking lot and taken a broken Game Boy. He was looking in another car when a police car pulled up.  The police officer asked William if he’d been in any other cars, and William said yes, the one he’d taken the portable video game system from. He said he had wanted to bring something back for his girlfriend.

County jail would have released him early, but immigration moved him right into their facilities. There were more consultations with immigration attorneys, but they said nothing could be done. He sent a card to Rose’s grandma’s address – the only one he knew – thanking us all and saying that the time he had lived with us had been the happiest in his life. Writing this now, I am thinking that his grandmother deserved that more than us. They sent him back to El Salvador, where his grandmother was by that time dead, and where he didn’t know anyone except more distant relatives.

During this time, we moved to the Midwest. Rose called me late one night to say she’d run into William’s sister at a store and that the sister had said, “Did you hear about William?”  Rose said no. He’d been shot in the head and killed.

What I struggle to come to terms with is that even as he was with us, right in our midst, it was as if a torrential river tore him away, a river that did not soak us or threaten us directly at all. We walk on dry land through some parted Red Sea of life and he was somehow with us - but not really? Not fully?  He did not have documents granting him safe passage as he moved through his days. He lacked papers that allowed him a “right” to be in the safe corridor with us. We could hold his hand, but we could not save him from the force that ripped him apart. And yet he was with us; he was flesh and blood as we were; he ate with us; he talked and laughed and cried. What were these documents compared to his living reality in our midst?

Why were we dry and safe – why were we in when he was out? What did we do to deserve this inclusion and what did he do to deserve that exclusion?