***
Nadia Okonkwo makes her phone call at ten in the morning on Damon's burner, standing out in the driveway because she wanted to be outside for it.
We give her the yard. Everybody goes in. But it's a small house and the windows are open and there's no way not to hear it.
She dials. She waits.
"Mom?"
And then there's a sound out of that phone I'm going to hear for the rest of my life.
It isn't words.
It's a woman three hundred miles away making a noise into a telephone at ten in the morning, and it goes on and on and on.
Nadia sits down in the gravel with the phone pressed against her ear.
"I know." She says it over and over. "I know. I know, Mama. I know."
Boulder's standing next to me at the kitchen window with his leg wrapped and the crutch shoved up under his arm, and there are tears running down into his beard.
When he catches me seeing it he doesn't do one thing about it.
"Four years," he says.
"Yeah."
"She called that tip line every week for four years." He wipes his face with the flat of his hand. "That's what her mama's saying out there. Every Monday. Every single Monday for four years, and they told her the same thing every time."
Throughout the day, the ladies try to find their families. At least, the ones who can try.
Belén Ferreiro's number is disconnected.
She dials it in the front room with six people pretending not to watch.
It rings twice and cuts to a recording. She dials it again, because everybody does, and gets the same recording.
Then she stands there holding the phone.
"It's the house number." Her voice comes out thin. "It's been that number my whole life."
Nobody knows what to say to her.
"Six years is a long time." She turns the phone over in her hand. "People move."
She sets it down on the coffee table very carefully, the way you set a thing down when your hands aren't reliable, and stands looking at it.
Lashes crosses the room.
She doesn't hug her. She stops a foot short and waits until Belén looks up at her.
"Okay. So the number's dead." Lashes keeps her voice level. "That's all it is. It isn't an answer. It's a dead number."
"You don't?—"
"I know exactly what you're doing, because I did it too." She doesn't blink. "You're standing there deciding they gave up on you. Don't. You've got no information. You've got a disconnected line, which means somebody moved house, and it’s as simple as that."
Belén's mouth is shaking.
