The letters began immediately. Dozens at first, then hundreds, each day bringing more: from a Texas man telling her this was why we needed to build the wall. From a New York television producer asking for an interview. From an elderly woman despairing “this divided America in which we now live.” Nearly every day since her daughter’s body was found, she had opened the mailbox, then sat and read them, because that was her routine, that was how she tried to make sense of something so senseless. But now the mailbox was empty for the first time, and she had a new routine.
Laura Calderwood, whose daughter, Mollie Tibbetts, 20, was allegedly murdered by an undocumented immigrant and left to rot in a cornfield this past summer, closed the mailbox, walked up the steps to her house and turned on the stove. It was getting on toward 6, and she needed to get dinner going. The boys would be hungry.
There were two inside the house now. One was her son, Mollie’s younger brother, a high school senior named Scott. And the other was his friend, a courteous teenager named Ulises Felix. He was the child of Mexican immigrants. For years, his parents had lived and worked beside the man accused of killing her daughter at the same dairy farm on the other side of town, which they fled after his arrest, leaving behind not only Brooklyn, where they’d been for nearly a decade, but also Ulises, their 17-year-old son. He’d wanted to finish high school in the only town he’d ever known, and soon, remarkably, he had a new home – the home of Mollie Tibbetts – where Laura had promised to look after him in his parents’ absence.
She flipped on the television.
The news that day was what the news was every day in a country where the central political clash no longer revolved around a choice between candidates, or a question of big government vs. small, but rather an elemental battle over who gets to be an American. Should any immigrant – regardless of race, religion, nationality or circumstance – have that chance? Or should it be reserved for the few who might more quickly assimilate into the American majority?
Today, on the news, President Donald Trump was again making clear where he stood. Birthright citizenship was “ridiculous.” The caravan of Central American migrants marching through Mexico toward the United States was an “invasion.” In their numbers were “many gang members.”
And today, Laura was standing at a countertop cluttered with the letters from strangers who found her address online, in a kitchen heaped with hundreds more, dropping shredded rotisserie chicken and noodles into a pot of boiling water, when the front door opened.
“Uli?” she called.
“Yeah?” he replied, coming into the kitchen, hair dyed blond and wearing white sneakers.
“Are you hungry now?” Laura asked. “I’ve got homemade chicken soup and some garlic bread.”
She brought him a bowl of soup, and he took it, and they stood there for a moment.
“There’s some more if you want,” she said.
“Thank you,” he said, eyes going from the dinner table to his nearby bedroom, then back to the dinner table. He turned to walk with the bowl to his room, where he would eat alone on his bed, but Laura stopped him. Scott was downstairs. She was about to eat alone, too.
“Eat out here, if you want, Uli,” she offered, so he came back. They both sat at the table, as opinions of the caravan and immigration seesawed on the television.
“. . . we simply cannot tolerate the continued invasion of this country . . . ” a voice on the news program said.
They discussed his excitement about playing basketball that season, and little else, two people from two different Americas – one an immigrant, the other a native – whose lives were upended by the same moment of violence and then plunged into the center of another divisive national debate about immigration.
“. . . sending close to 5,000 troops to the border . . .”
Two people who were, each in their own way, mourning the loss of family members, with little in common beyond raw need. Two people now trying to translate this unspoken need into somethingfamilial, an effort increasingly complicated by their separate connections to the alleged killer, Cristhian Bahena Rivera.
Ulises stood. He took his empty bowl to the sink. He washed it, put it away quietly, then returned to his room. He closed the door behind him. At the table, Laura finished her meal in silence.
The stories almost always begin the same way. A son or daughter is dead, and an undocumented immigrant is blamed. Aggrieved and adrift, the parents search for meaning in it all, some finding what they can in obsession and hatred. “In mylife we’re going to find the trash who killed my kid,” said Scott Root of Council Bluffs, Iowa, whose daughter, Sarah Root, 21, was killed in 2016, allegedly by an undocumented drunk driver who was released after partially paying bail, then disappeared. Others find meaning in political transformation. “I became a Republican,” said Sabine Durden of Mineral Springs, Ark., whose son was killed by an undocumented immigrant in a traffic collision. And still others in activism: “My story needed to get out,” said Laura Wilkerson of Pearland, Texas, whose son, Josh Wilkerson, 18, was beaten to death in 2010 by an undocumented immigrant.
Then there is Laura Calderwood. Fifty-five, with curly blond hair and a halting gait, she is a lifelong liberal who didn’t abandon her politics. She feels anger like the others, but not toward an entire group of people. She’s not afraid of the demographic change remaking the country. But she does fear the deepening polarization. So she never goes to political rallies – never speaks publicly – because she believes that would just inflame things. Instead, she tries to live every day, including this one, just as she did before it all happened.
By late afternoon, Laura had finished up her shift at the grocery store, where she works in the catering department, and gotten into her white SUV. She drove through nearby Grinnell, pulling up to the public library, as always, seeking a sense of calm in its quiet. She went in and sat near the magazines, one of which she had been reading the afternoon of July 19, when her phone rang.
It was her son Scott. He was asking, “Did you know Mollie didn’t come into work today?” Laura quickly thought back to the night before. Mollie, who’d been dogsitting at her boyfriend’s house, was supposed to have come home for dinner but hadn’t. That wasn’t unlike Mollie, sometimes scattered, always losing something. But for her to miss work? Laura quickly reported her missing. The following weeks blurred: search missions, media reports, false ransom demands, death threats, misreported sightings, private fears. On and on it went, until Aug. 21, when police announced that a body was found, and those fears were confirmed, and Laura began a new life, this one saddled by public expectations.
Source Article from https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/midwest/ct-mollie-tibbets-mom-20181228-story.html
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