Star in the Forest

There is a forest behind my trailer, through the weeds and under the gate and across the trickly, oily ditch. It is a forest of very, very old car parts, heaps of rusted metal, spotted orangey brown, with rainbow layers of fading paint, and leaves and vines poking and twisting through the holes. Birds and snakes and bugs sometimes peek out from the pipes and hubcaps. My neighborhood is called Forest View Mobile Home Park. I think this must be the forest they’re talking about.
On the day Papá was deported, that’s where I went.
The police had pulled him over a week earlier, and while he was in jail, Mamá was on her cell phone all the time.
Deportado, deportado, deportado, she said, in a hushed, dangerous voice.
Deportado, she said to my aunts Rosa and Virginia and María.
Deportado, she said over the phone to Uncle Luciano in Mexico.
Deportado meant Papá would be sent back to Mexico, and it would be very, very hard for him to come back.
The day before he was deported, I saw Papá at the jail. He stared at me through the scratchy plastic divider. The phone shook in his hand. He said, “Goodbye, Zitlally.” Then he whispered, “Ni-mitz nequi.” I love you.

He looked strange in the blue jumpsuit, and even stranger because he was crying, right there in front of the other prisoners and their families and the guards. But my tears stayed hidden under a stone inside a cave inside me. I worried that Papá thought I wasn’t sad because my face was dry when I said goodbye.
The next day, alone in the car part forest, I felt tears pushing out like a geyser.