I had called the airport and gotten through to customs and twice they had hung up on me. The lawyers I’d called all said there wasn’t anything they could do until I knew where she was. 

She had called me on her way to the holding cell. When she got off the plane and went through immigration she ended up getting a bad officer and he took her visa away. They had hung up the phone when she was in the middle of telling me what was happening.

I was on hold. It was raining. I had known the rain was coming before it started. I felt it in the knuckle of my ring finger a few hours before. I had broken it the first time when I was a teenager outside a punk show on a kid’s face before I knew how to properly throw a punch, then again in New York on a metal door, then again a couple years back on the head of a guy who had exposed himself to her, after I hit him a few times and the rage set in fully and I was swinging like a blind animal.

I could hear the rain hitting the roof.  I was still on hold. 

Before this call I had gotten through to customs and managed to tell them not to let her go without her medicine. The last thing the officer said before he hung up was, yeah she has it.

But they were lying because about an hour after that, I talked to an immigration officer who told me they were rushing her to a hospital. He didn’t say which one or what her condition was.

So I was on hold again and looking out of the window of our third-floor apartment. My car was parked down on the street. It was 25 years old. I had bought it from Jay a month before, using money I had gotten from selling some drawings to a very drunk man in Ohio at my art show. The drunk had kept calling me son.

But there I was, on hold and looking out the window. A man walked by my car, stopped, walked back to it. He must have seen the out-of-state plates, or seen how old it was and figured it was a safe bet. I watched him check the handles on the driver’s door as I listened to a radio song playing through static in the receiver. He found it locked and walked from door to door trying those handles too. I was stuck up there on the third floor on the phone.

“Hello,” it was a man’s voice, he sounded impatient.

“Yeah.”

I was through. I needed to say the right thing so I could talk to her. I watched the man down at the street pulling at the sunroof.

“Hello?”

“Yeah, I need to find out where my wife is. No one will tell me anything.”

He had some kind of jagged piece of metal or stick, and he had slipped it into the sunroof and the car was rocking with his effort.

“What is your wife’s name?”

I told him her name. I told him she wasn’t listed on the I.C.E. website. He put me on hold again. 

The man in the street had left my car. 

“Yeah, you’re Wallenstein?”

“Yeah, yes. Yes sir.”

“She is going back to Mexico at 7 a.m. tomorrow.”

“I need to talk to her. Can you put her on the phone?”

He hung up.

I was checking flights to Arizona. It was 2 AM at that point and the earliest flight didn’t get there till 11 AM, she would be gone. There was more talking and getting hung up on, more phone calls, more nightmare worry, more everything. Eventually I was able to talk to her. I told her I would get her back here.

The sunroof leaked every time it rained for the next year and a half that she was gone. It reminded me of that night, but everything else did too.

I would hear people completely removed from the realities of immigration argue both sides of it like it was something they knew; the wild panic of the right and the left pulling and pushing through theoretical fear. 

The sun, the ugly sand, the ugly hours, the blame we set on each other, the airports, the drained will and tired eyes and all that self-pity. We loved each other. We reminded each other of that and we reminded each other of our selfish faults too. All of it eroded so much in us, but she did, in the end, return. It was two years and I worked seven days a week for the duration to pay the government and the lawyers. It was a year after she came back that our relationship was over. In the end the minutia and enormity of other things claimed it. There was our endurance, but then again there was also everything else.

I broke my hand again a few weeks after she moved out.