Elena thought of destinies she and Mauro might have fulfilled if not for all the wrong turns. If he hadn’t argued with Dante, had let him keep those extra dollars, considering it part of their rent for the basement that was a haven for their family.

Fifty dollars. A fortune to them then, but for Mauro, it was also a question of principle and pride. But was it really? Not when Elena considered what it cost them. Maybe Dante hadn’t taken it. Maybe it was Mauro who had miscounted or misplaced it.

One of the alternate lives she imagined was if they’d never left Colombia. If their pull toward new frontiers had taken them only as far as another city. And seeing it was not as they hoped they could have returned to her mother’s house, which Elena grew up believing was meant for her and the family she would one day have.

Would they have stayed together if Mauro had not been forced to leave?

Would he have stopped drinking for good and kept the family afloat?

All five of them. And maybe Talia wouldn’t be the last child but an older sister to one more.

They could have lived in the house with Yamira and Dante a while longer until, with both their incomes, they would have saved enough for their own place. A small house with a yard for the children to play in. They were starting to build a community, and in that house of strangers found something like extended family. But from the day Mauro fought with Dante, even though the police would make him pay for the crime, Elena and the children were no longer welcome. If ICE showed up at the house to take Elena as a collateral arrest, Dante said it could endanger the other undocumented residents, who could then be taken too. It would be safer for everyone if she moved away. Yamira came down to the basement to tell Elena she’d tried everything to convince her husband otherwise, but he was so hardheaded, there was no point insisting. Especially because what Dante said was true. But she knew of shared houses that turned over tenants regularly up the parkway in Passaic County. She’d make a few calls and see if she could find a room for Elena and the children.

A few hours later Yamira reported that her sister knew of an available room in Sandy Hill. For now, they’d have to share it with another family until a space of their own opened up. It wouldn’t be so bad, Yamira said. She and Dante had lived in a house like that when they first arrived in New Jersey from Arizona. There would be plenty of food and people to help look after the children until Mauro was released from detention and they were able to find something better.

* * *

Talia was still the quiet one who watched her mother as if she understood everything. At night, after her brother and sister fell asleep, Elena whispered her fears as she fed her. She’d stopped writing letters, but she and Perla spoke twice a month. She didn’t say she was on her own, that she and the children shared a room with a Moldovan man, his Peruvian wife, and their infant daughter, deaf from birth. The two families slept on mattresses along opposite sides of the narrow cellar, the only clear space away from the boilers and loose wires, separated by a curtain of sheets. They could hear everything from the other side, but at least the material suggested privacy, even if a breeze of movement revealed the man slept naked, the child between her mother and the wall.

A summer night, after they’d all gone to bed, the Moldovan man pulled the sheet from where he lay on his family’s mattress and stared at Elena, his wife and daughter rolled to their wall. Elena’s children were asleep. She hardly slept though, and noticed the man didn’t either, stirring and groaning through the night, often rising to pace the room. He watched her. Elena wondered why until he slid his free hand under his blanket and she detected the motions of masturbation. She hid herself with her blanket, turning to her own wall, sheltering her children with her body. Even as he moaned beside his wife and daughter, Elena did not scream at him for his obscenity, reasoning, however foolishly, that she didn’t want to be responsible for causing hurt to another family.

Each night that followed, she made sure to cover up and face the wall, though she still sometimes heard his stifled gasps, and once, when his wife woke up and asked what was happening, Elena heard him tell her, “You’re dreaming. Go back to sleep.”

* * *

Elena’s nightmares returned. They started when she was six years old but left her consciousness when she met Mauro. Since the eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano, Elena had visions of her street and home flooded in mud and ash just as happened to Armero and the surrounding villages even though scientists said nothing like that could happen on the fault line of Bogotá. The tragedy happened only one week after the M-19 attacked the Palace of Justice, leaving more than a hundred dead or missing. Elena remembered the news images of the mudflow killing thousands upon thousands, turning the landscape into a sea of cadavers and torn limbs.

The socorristas saw a hand reaching from the debris, and discovered a girl plunged to her neck in earthen sludge. Divers went under and saw her legs locked beneath the roof of her house, held in place by the grip of her dead aunt. Survivors kept vigil as rescuers tried to figure out how to save her from the hardening mud without amputating her lower half. The girl, named Omayra Sánchez, spoke to journalists who filmed the brown water trickling into her mouth, her eyes blackening with each passing day, asking people to pray for her, telling her mother and brother through the TV cameras that she loved them. She was hopeful even as the country watched her dying on their screens.

In Elena’s dreams, she, too, tried to pull Omayra to safety, but the girl felt heavy and only sank deeper into the mud, telling Elena to let her go. Other times, Elena became Omayra, feeling the weight of her aunt’s clutches, her body tearing, her lower half sinking into what used to be her family home while rescuers pulled her arms and torso free, though she knew she wouldn’t survive without the part of herself she left below.

People blamed the government for letting the girl die just like they’d let the people of Armero be suffocated by the lahars without warning they were in danger with enough time to flee. They said the military took too long to arrive with proper medical supplies, and they made the decision to let Omayra sink into the mud rather than bring equipment to amputate her legs. Others argued it was an impossible task. She would never have survived either way. Many said Omayra was an angel or a prophet sent to remind us of the ways we commit treason against our country and one another. That there had been signs if only people had been willing to see them. The night before the eruption, the haloed moon smoldered red as an open sore, a divine alarm some would call it, Creation’s indicator of an impending temblor. But others made excuses, said the moon fire was just pollution, urban fumes painting the sky.

In her dreams now, Elena was no longer the girl trying to save another girl, or the dying girl herself, but a bird or a cloud watching from above. The drowning towns, citizens reduced to parts floating on the carbon tide. Parents and children crying out for one another, so many of whom never found each other again, and some of the recovered children adopted to foreign families in other countries and given new languages and new names. The impossible and unforgiving Andean volcanic chain. Elena could see it all from this distance.

TWELVE

Mauro was permitted visitors but only if they were “lawfully present” in the country. Elena couldn’t even bring him a bag with clothes to take back with him on deportation day. If she did, the immigration officers might see she was undocumented and lock her up, too, leaving their children orphaned to the United States.

On their few calls during his months of detention, Mauro’s voice changed. He became broken-breathed, throat gruff as if he’d spent the night screaming. But when Elena asked how they were treating him, he assured her it wasn’t so bad in there; he met men who were doctors and lawyers and engineers in their countries, others who came to North America and built highways and roads and schools. Several were in detention for over a year already, hoping to be granted a “voluntary departure” instead of being branded with deportation. If so, they could apply to come back without having to wait five or ten years like Mauro would due to his arrests.