A Word Filed Under Assent

Hale continues the matter for a week and orders the court to "locate appropriate resources." Ines knows what that phrase costs. There is no certified interpreter for the respondent's variety. There is no certification exam except in Spanish; the oral pass rate hovers below five percent, and it hovers there for one language only. The rest of the world's tongues arrive in her courthouse the way this man did — through someone doing their best and calling it a bridge. She goes home. She does not open the case file, which is nearly empty anyway. She opens the other folder. She keeps it in a drawer under the two FCICE score reports she failed on — 2001, 2003 — the way some people keep a scar where they can find it in the dark. Tonight she does not read the score reports. She reads the folder from the front, which she almost never does, because the front is where the oldest entry lives. It is a single line. A single word she wrote out phonetically because she had no orthography for it and no one to check it against. A Mam word. Beside it, a date: a spring day, eleven years before she started the folder proper. And beneath it, one label, in her small hand. *Assent.* She has never explained this entry, not to the reader of her own life, not to the therapist she saw for three months after her partner left, not to anyone. It sits among the beautiful griefs like a stone in a bowl of fruit. The grief with no verb. The courtesy that reads as evasion. The mother's *my son* that meant the dead one. And this — a word she rendered as *yes* because she needed it to be *yes*, because the docket needed it, because she was uncertified and afraid and the man's silence was easier to carry than the truth of it. He was deported. She saw the seam. She stitched over it and said nothing, and *nothing* is the one untranslatable she has never dared file, because there is no word in any language she carries for what she did that is also not a confession. She does not close the folder to that page. She turns forward, to the newest entry, the threat-that-was-also-a-vow from this morning, and she reads her own note — *no single English word holds a man promising and begging at once* — and she thinks about the man they brought in at four o'clock. The way he understood her Spanish and would not answer in it. She had thought, at first, that he could not. Now, in the quiet of her kitchen, she reconsiders. His eyes had measured the room the way a person measures a room they have been hurt in before. He *understood* the Spanish. He chose the other thing on purpose. That is not the same as not knowing. That is a decision, and a decision is a sentence with a subject, and she of all people should have heard it. She picks up her pen. She does not add him to the folder — he is not a case yet, only a face and an hour — but she writes, on a separate scrap she will regret keeping, the one honest note she can make: *The interpreter would note, if she had a voice for it, that she has done this before.* She underlines nothing. Some sentences do not survive emphasis. In the morning there is a message from the clerk. A linguist has contacted the court — saw the filing, the phrase *unidentified Indigenous language* — and offered to help identify the respondent's variety. His name is Daniel Okafor. He would like fifteen minutes. Ines reads it twice. *Help* is a word that translates cleanly and means three different things depending on who is paying. She thinks of the man's careful hands. She thinks of the drawer, and the date she has spent eleven years not closing. "Tell Mr. Okafor," she writes back, and then stops, because she is not the one who grants access, and wanting to be is the first small betrayal of many she can already feel lining up. She deletes it. She writes instead: *The interpreter will be present if the court requires her.* Then she puts the folder back in the drawer, under the two reports, and goes to work, where all day she renders other people's words exactly, in the first person, adding nothing — and carries, unrendered, the one that is still hers.