Yamira had a degree in economics but showed Elena how to clean houses. Elena asked what was so complicated about cleaning that it needed to be taught. She grew up working in a lavandería, and Perla kept their house as impeccable as a surgical ward. Elena couldn’t leave her bedroom each morning without her bed made, clothes folded, floor swept, everything in its place. Yamira insisted cleaning for Americans was different and if Elena wanted to get jobs that could earn her a hundred dollars a day in the right neighborhood, she would have to learn to use their chemical products, operate an American-style iron and vacuum cleaner. She’d have to learn to clean fast, too, unless she was being paid by the hour, in which case she could draw some tasks out.

Elena accompanied Yamira on several jobs, watched how she made the beds, buried under mounds of thick comforters, and arranged the decorative pillows. Elena thought gringo households were full of unnecessary objects. Children had more toys than fit on their shelves. The wives’ and daughters’ closets overflowing with clothes and shoes. Husbands and sons with more cables and gadgets than a laboratory.

Yamira cleaned in towns with smooth, wide roads and neatly flowered hills, nothing like the twisty uneven roads in Bogotá. Her clients lived behind gates or in houses wrapped with porches like a ballerina’s tutu. Sometimes clients were home as they cleaned, watching television, looking at the computer, or even napping as the women worked. Sometimes Elena and Yamira overheard conversations and arguments, babies crying with nobody to console them. Elena wanted to pick up those children, hold them close, but Yamira warned that employers preferred they remain invisible. Getting personal could get them fired.

When Mauro and Elena went to work, a woman who lived with her husband and two others in one of the upstairs bedrooms of Dante and Yamira’s house looked after the children for twenty dollars. They managed this way for months, content in that windowless basement with the portable heater Yamira lent the family to keep by the bed where they slept in a nest of heartbeats.

Some evenings, Mauro and Dante went to a bar a few blocks away, where other guys from the neighborhood gathered. Mauro had started drinking again but much less than before, so Elena didn’t bother him about it. He’d found a job in another factory. This one bottled hair spray in metal cans. It was under-the-table work, as usual, so sometimes the checks were smaller than expected, but they couldn’t complain. They didn’t have bank accounts. Every surplus dollar was wired home to Perla. When they were paid, if not in bills, they went to a check-cashing place on Central Avenue. That day, Mauro gave Dante his paycheck to cash while he ran another errand. When Dante later met him at the bar with the money, Mauro noticed bills missing.

Elena later heard from witnesses that Mauro tried to reason with him, but Dante denied taking any. How dare you accuse me of being a thief when I’ve given your family a place to live? If it weren’t for me, you’d be on the streets! They said Dante pushed Mauro first. Petrified of being in trouble with the police again, Mauro stepped back, but Dante came at him with a punch, then a second and a third, until Mauro was on the floor. Some cops patrolling around the way heard about a fight and came to look. Dante was a citizen, so the police let him go without charges. But they looked up Mauro in the system and discovered his previous misdemeanor in Delaware, the hearing he skipped, his undocumented status, and took him away.

Elena was told only that Mauro was kept on an “immigration hold,” then handed over to ICE, what used to be INS, who put him in detention. She believed he’d have to complete some penance, then be released to her. He might have to report to Immigration once a year like some people they knew, then they would be free to go about their lives undisturbed. She did not yet understand that Mauro would never be returned to them and was already marked for deportation.

EIGHT

At a café in Barichara, Talia watched tourists at tables hunched over guidebooks, staring into their phones, wearing leather and string necklaces, mochilas at their sides. They drank coffee and juice, connected to the Wi-Fi. The only Spanish Talia heard came from the television hanging above the bar counter. Among the hour’s top stories: a dozen girls escaped from a reform school in the mountains of Santander. They didn’t show pictures or give names, only reporting that four girls had already been located but another eight were still missing. Cut to Sister Susana standing in front of the guard gate, a microphone held to her face: “We are concerned for the girls’ safety and hope anyone with information will do the right thing and contact us or the police. Their families have been notified and are very worried about them.”

Talia was glad she’d swapped her prison sweatshirt for a T-shirt she’d seen hanging on a clothesline after the old man left her on the town fringe, but she still wore her school sweatpants, grubby from running and wear. She finished the soda she’d paid for with money he gave her before parting along with a bendición across the forehead as if he were a relative. She went to the café bathroom to wash her face, topknot her hair. When she came out, she saw a man had just sat at a table alone—maybe her father’s age or a little younger, definitely not a local—and decided to approach.

“May I sit?”

He motioned with his hand to the empty chair opposite him. She’d learned a little English in school and from movies and TV programs that weren’t already dubbed. When her mother put Karina and Nando on the phone, she was able to understand some of what they said, even if she could tell they spoke extra slow for her benefit.

“My name is Elena.”

He studied her as if she might pick his pocket in plain view. None of the typical blitzed tourist expressions of dazed joy and overstimulation. She could tell in the past ten seconds he’d already determined he was much smarter than she was.

“What can I do for you?”

She understood he was waiting for lies so she opted for a version of the truth. “I ran away from my boarding school. I need to get back to Bogotá. My father is waiting for me. I have no money. Can you help me?”

He may not have believed her but was intrigued enough not to shoo her off as tourists do to children begging outside restaurants for change. His Spanish was good, though he gargled his r’s rather than let them rest on his tongue and extended his vowels like some trench-coated villain. He said he was French. His name was Charles but he went by Carlos, since he’d been in Colombia for years already, obsessed with the country since he first heard about Ingrid Betancourt, held captive in the jungle, and kind of fell in love with her. He studied philosophy, worked a government job that was a slow eradication of his essence until he heeded his heart’s call to South America.

Talia acted fascinated though she was already sick of the other café people eyeing her as if she were some baby puta looking to pick up.

“Do you mind if we go somewhere else to talk?”

The guy looked uncertain but followed her out of the café to the cobblestone road. He wore jeans and a T-shirt under a denim jacket. On his wrist, a macramé bracelet in the national colors, the kind Colombian girls give their foreign boyfriends.

“Where is your girlfriend?”

A look now as if this Elena girl had come to entertain him. “I left her in Caldas.”

They settled onto a bench in front of a church on the plaza. He lit a cigarette and offered her one, which she took. Silence, until he slid his hand over hers. She was a virgin but had kissed four different boys since she turned thirteen. His hand was heavy and rough, but she didn’t push it away.

“Tell me, Elena. What do you want from me?”

“I need to get back to Bogotá. My father is waiting for me.”

“You just want bus fare?” He sounded disappointed.

She sensed he was a man yearning for purpose. If not for his whole life at least for that day. The sun was a buttery smear behind the mountainfold. In a few minutes, there would be no light.

“Do you have a car?”

“I do.”

“You could drive me yourself. It would be safer than taking the bus alone. You wouldn’t hurt me.”

He hesitated, maybe expecting her to beg or offer something in exchange. “I don’t like going on these roads at night. I rented an apartment here for the week. If your story is true I imagine you have nowhere else to stay. You can come with me, and I’ll take you home in the morning.”

She smiled thinly. “Can you also buy me some new clothes so I can change out of these dirty ones? I saw a store earlier. We can still make it before they close.”

* * *

His apartment was one room of stucco walls under wooden beams. They sat on the sofa, a picnic of empanadas and chorizo between them. She wore the new jeans, blouse, and sweater he bought her. They couldn’t find socks for sale, so he gave her a pair of his to wear with her prison sneakers, with their crusted canvas and gnashed soles. He’d wanted to take her to a restaurant for dinner. She explained that even though the news wouldn’t show her face, her picture had probably been circulated among the police stations of the region. She didn’t want to be spotted and turned over to the law when she was just trying to get home.

“Could I get in trouble for helping you hide?”

“They never do anything to foreigners. Besides, being charitable is not a crime.”

He liked this answer and poured her more wine, which she’d barely been sipping.