"Every year I said, next year we'll figure it out," she said. "Next year there will be a law. Every year there was going to be a law. There was a program, when you were a little girl, for children who came young. The Dreamers, they called them. I cried when I heard it on the radio, I thought, Maya, this is for Maya. When you were old enough to apply, it was closed. The courts. Back and forth, back and forth, open, closed, open, closed. I followed every case. I read every article. I used to read them in the bathroom at the houses I clean, on my phone, on my break, with the door locked. And I thought, I'll tell her when there is something to tell her. I won't just give her the bad part. I'll wait until there is a door, and then I'll tell her about the room and the door at the same time." She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. "There was never a door. So I never told you about the room."
I sat there.
I should say that I was very angry. I was. I was angrier than I had ever been in my life, angrier than I knew I could be, a kind of anger that sat in my chest like a stone and made it hard to swallow. But it was strange, because the anger kept changing direction on me. It would point at her, and I would think about her standing outside the bathroom listening to me sing and deciding to let me walk into a wall, and I would want to throw the shoebox across the room. And then it would swing around and point at the men in the market with the hammer, and then at the man behind the glass, and the courts, back and forth, back and forth, and the radio, and the lady in tennis whites in Ridgefield telling my mother, who taught Darwin to girls in Cuenca, that her grout was dingy. And then it would swing around and point at me, for being so stupid. For never asking. For believing in a fire.
"I'm not going to forgive you today," I said finally.
"No," my mother said. "I know."
"I might not forgive you for a long time."
"I know, Maya."
"But I'm not leaving. And I'm not going to stop talking to you. I can't. I need you to tell me things. I need you to tell me everything. Every single thing, from now on. That's the deal." I put my hand flat on the shoebox. "No more not yet. You don't get to decide when I'm ready anymore. I'm ready now. I've been ready since seven o'clock this morning, because you didn't give me a choice."