By Jeffree Morel

Eloise could never understand why her nanny Virginia was illegal.

What was it about her, exactly, that was illegal? Was it the spicy meals she cooked, with curried chicken and fries so fresh she could still see the salt and grease glisten before sticking the first in her mouth and having to blow—hot-hot-hot—before letting the inner fluff touch her tongue? Was it the cigarettes she smoked on the windowsill with the air conditioner, so the smell wouldn’t stick on the carpets like Daddy worried about? Or was it the thick Spanish accent in her voice, full of unpredictable emphases and rolled r’s like a cat’s purr—r-r-r-rrrr—that could trick her to sleep within seconds of starting a bedtime story?

Whatever it was, Eloise knew it was serious the day she heard Virginia talking to Daddy about hiding from the ICE men while transferring buses downtown.

“That’s…concerning,” said Daddy. “Is there another route you can take? Or maybe we can scrounge some extra for you to take an Uber…?”

“Oh thank you, thank you, but I don’t know, I don’t know…” muttered Virginia as she clutched the floral dress fabric over her heart with one hand and rooted through her purse for her cigarettes with the other.

“What will the ice men do if they catch you?”

“Eloise! Don’t ask things like that.”

Why not? Eloise wanted to ask, but recognized her father’s tone, the warning one that already told her what the answer would be: It’s not polite. Polite according to who? If it was the same people who decided Virginia was illegal, Eloise decided she didn’t much care what they thought. But Daddy was Daddy, and for now she had to listen to him if she was going to have any fun. Anyway, he was in a hurry like usual, like most adults who weren’t Virginia.

After he’d left, as they played House in a pillow fort with her stuffed animals, Eloise said through the blue bunny to Virginia playing the brown bear, “I’m worried about you.”

“Mi?” the brown bear tucked his plastic nose to the stars-and-stripes ribbon around his neck. “Worried for what?”

“What if the toy store says you’re illegal,” said the blue bunny, “and they recall you like my Hello Kitty?”

“Eloisito!” Virginia clicked her tongue.

“What would they do to you though?”

“Oh…” Virginia scanned over her shoulders. “Probably just send me back to where all my bear brothers and sisters live… Or keep me in a warehouse for Dio knows how long…”

“No!” screamed Eloise, forgetting the bunny. “You can have my bed if you need to, and I’ll sleep on the floor.

“Eloise, let’s…” Virginia wouldn’t look at her now, so Eloise balled her hands in fists and shot up, upsetting the blanket ceiling above them.

“I mean it!” she said. “I like sleeping on the floor. Sometimes I do it just for fun.”

“You’re so… generous Eloise. I feel… safer with you on my side. But no matter what happens, remember, your Virginia will always love you.”

“Why, what’s going to happen?”

Virginia sighed, the kind of sigh adults always did when they didn’t want to explain what Eloise knew they knew. She started folding the fallen blanket into a perfect square, staring off at the window covered in handprints and cheek-streaks glowing from the orange sunset beyond the neighboring high rises. “I’m going to make dinner—that’s what’s going to happen. Your favorite. What do you say to that?”

Eloise didn’t say anything. She hated when her favorite foods or toys were used to try and make her forget, at least until after she had her first fry again and the flavor melted away all memory of whatever had been bothering her—for a while.

Virginia never took her up on the offer to spend the night, and her father never did scrounge up enough to help her afford an Uber. About a month later, she didn’t show up for their playtime as scheduled, even as Daddy kept calling and complaining “this isn’t like her.”

“Maybe we could go where she lives,” said Eloise, “or downtown and ask the ice men.”

Her father didn’t say anything to this, but brought Eloise to his work instead, leaving her in the reception area with the stinky coffee machine and a bunch of boring magazines. By next week he found her a daycare to go to, where after her first lackluster snack-time a couple other kids approached and asked if she wanted to build Lego walls with them.

“No,” said Eloise. Why, she wondered, would she want to play with other kids? She was too mature for that.

Her father picked her up last that night, after all the other kids and every counselor except one had gone home. 

“I miss Virginia,” Eloise said on the car ride, speaking up from the backseat.

“I’m sure she misses you too.”

Eloise leaned her forehead against the window and watched the red and white lights blurring by.

That night, she snuck out of her room and slept beneath the dripping AC unit, nose smooshed into the smoke-perfumed carpet.

~~~~~

Jeffree Morel is an author and nature educator based in the Pacific Northwest, specializing in speculative fiction, personal essays, and poetry blending the mystical and ecological. His fiction and poetry have also appeared in the South Seattle Emerald, Rabble Review, Tethered by Letters, Works Progress, F(r)iction, and Weber: The Contemporary West. His poetry blog is Foraging for More on Substack, and his poetry chapbook Ego Killers is available on Lulu.