Why I Never Answered the Door
My story about the fear and paranoia that growing up in a mixed-status household brings.
[This story was originally published in The Memoirist.]
I was walking down the stairs when the phone rang. I picked it up reflexively.
“Hello?” I ventured.
My father appeared in the hallway.
“Is Rafael Andreu there?” a man asked.
I looked up at my father, who was shaking his head and mouthing the word “no.”
“Hello?” the man added.
“No,” I said.
“Are you lying for him? Is he there?!” the man accused.
I looked up at my father, who kept shaking his head.
“No, he’s not here,” I croaked.
“You know, your father is a liar. He can’t keep ignoring his obligations. He can’t avoid us forever.”
I kept quiet.
“Tell him to call Jim back, OK?”
“OK,” I said.
The man hung up. I placed the corded receiver back on its cradle on the telephone stand on the landing at the foot of the stairs.
“Jim said to call him,” I told my dad.
“I told you NEVER to pick up the phone,” my dad barked, his black bushy eyebrows steepled in a warning.
I didn’t pick up the phone for years after that. It would ring over and over, stop, and repeat, its trilling like a searchlight strafing the prison yard. Angry men were behind those rings. Men after my father. After us. Picking up the phone would make them real. It would mean they’d found us.
Maybe if we never picked up the phone, they would go away. But the ringing didn’t stop. Whenever the phone rang, my father, my mother and I would be still, like deer sensing a nearing predator.
When the phone stopped ringing, we’d slacken our bodies and let the held air out of our lungs. A reprieve.
The only time we’d get relief from the phone calls was when the phone company disconnected our line for lack of payment.
“Hey, I called you last night, but nobody picked up,” my childhood friends would say.
“Oh, yeah, I was probably playing Star Fox and didn’t hear it,” I’d fib.
“I tried calling you, but it said your phone was disconnected,” they’d say.
“Yeah, I think my parents’ check got lost in the mail or something,” I’d lie. “Should be up in a couple of days.” I never knew if that was true.
It happened so frequently that I tried to orchestrate interactions so that I’d always be the one calling them.
“Hey, wanna hang out later?” a friend might ask.
“I’m down.”
“OK, I’ll call you later.”
“Actually, I’m gonna be out for a while after school,” I’d say. “I’ll just call you when I get back.”
After a while, they’d ask me point blank, “Is your phone connected?”
I’d call them from the pay phone on the corner, cupping the transmitter cap when I wasn’t speaking in an effort to muffle the ambient noise, but it didn’t work. The phone was on the corner near Broad Avenue, a busy local road choked with cars and 18-wheelers.
“Are you calling from a pay phone?”
“I went to grab a sandwich at Blimpie’s, and there’s a pay phone right here,” I said as casually as I could.
After a while, my friends stopped asking questions, and I stopped cupping the transmitter cap.
I preferred the quiet, but I was ashamed.
The doorbell produced similar results. When it rang, we froze. The biggest difference was our black labrador would lose his goddamned mind, clicking and scraping across the hardwood floors and barking his head off. The commotion the dog created added to the tension.
My dad would sidle up to the front door, hunching over corners and looking through a sliver in the curtains to see who it might be. If we didn’t recognize whoever was at our front door, my parents would not answer. It could’ve been a man with a giant check with our names on it, and we still wouldn’t open the door.
Even if it were someone we knew, we were slow to open the door. My parents would squint and crack open the front door as if we didn’t trust our own eyes. Sure, they looked like family friends, but what if they’d been turned? Maybe their bodies got snatched or, worse, they were government spies!
To this day, I’m unnerved by a doorbell or a phone ring.
My wife occasionally scolds me for keeping my phone on silent since I sometimes miss calls from family and friends, but silent mode is the only way I can achieve peace. Otherwise, the unrelenting stream of robocalls would keep me in a state of perpetual anxiety, hearkening back to my childhood.
I didn’t know back then that my father was avoiding debt collectors. I didn’t know my parents and my sister were undocumented.
I grew up in New Jersey. I was American. I knew my family was from Argentina, but it never occurred to me they weren’t allowed to be here.
But what I didn’t know in my mind I felt in my chest—heart flutters, bronchoconstriction, the relentless expectation that the other foot would eventually, inevitably, drop. Of course it would. How could it not? The ringing of phones and doorbells served as reminders that those men were still after me.
Sometimes, enough time passes that I get lax. My caller ID doesn’t identify the caller as “Likely Spam.” It’s just a normal number. Maybe it’s the gym or a potential client.
I’ll pick up the phone.
“Hello,” I’ll say.
“Is this Pablo Andreu?” a man’s voice will ask.
And I’ll know deep in my soul that they finally found me.