Men in uniforms stood guard with guns, and this felt familiar from other places she had travelled, just as the musk of the official inside the terminal, who waved her toward an endless passport-control lineup, tugged her back to places where people didn’t use deodorant or shower as often as they did at home, where the scents of the body were normal. At long last, the man with the metal stamping machine stared at her photograph and visa and asked her the purpose of her visit. He did not ask if she had a police record. In the early days, after she’d left Montreal, this was a fear. She hadn’t been convicted but had been fingerprinted and charged. Once, driving up to a border crossing into New York state, the uniformed man in the booth had asked, Have you ever been charged with anything? She’d said, Yes, but I was cleared. It was a mistake. He had taken her passport and disappeared, returned, asked her to come with him. She’d waited for two hours in a small room, so late for an interview in Syracuse that the whole exercise grew pointless.
