Elena found a job mopping and cleaning bathrooms in a restaurant a few towns over. The owner was young, spoke Spanish learned while surfing in Nicaragua, and was pleasant except that he didn’t pay Elena for her first month on the job, saying it was customary to work for free during the “trial period.” She asked the guys in the kitchen if this was true, but they wouldn’t say. One month without income indebted her to many others. With a loan from Carla she was able to pay for the basement in the Sandy Hill house and Lety, who cooked meals for residents who contributed to the grocery bills, let Elena and the kids eat on credit.

That night: white-breath cold, shop windows scalloped in frost, the town tinseled for the holidays. The restaurant closed to the public for a private party. At the end of the shift, after Elena did her final wiping-downs and pushed her buckets into the supply closet, she gathered her things from her locker and heard the boss call her from his office. She held her coat and handbag against her stomach and followed his voice. Before she could ask if something was wrong he shut the door behind her, closed the space between them, swishing his tongue in her mouth. She tasted alcohol, moved back, but he swept the coat and bag from her hands and pushed her against the wall. He spoke in English she didn’t understand, lifting her shirt, tugging her bra so the strap carved into her shoulder and her breasts fell out. He pinched and bit as she pushed him away, sailed her shirt over her head blinding her, angled her to the desk, pants at her knees, and tore into her from behind. Elena. Small, birdlike, as Mauro used to say, who brought three children into the world, shocked into pain far beyond the flesh.

Grunting until his final spasms. She still cannot say how much time passed. Minutes maybe, but she was already gone, soul departed, searching for remnants of who she’d been just minutes before. When he removed himself from her, she felt him cover her back with her coat. She pulled up her pants, her stretched underwear. She managed to ask why.

Without meeting her eyes he said, “I don’t know. I’m not usually attracted to mothers.”

She walked to the bus stop, scalp burning from where he pulled, propped onto her hip the whole ride because it hurt too much to sit, weeping into her sleeve. The next morning, when she went to pick up the children from Toya’s, she told her what happened as plainly as she could. Toya had been in the United States much longer, and Elena hoped she’d have some advice or wisdom. She heard her own voice as if it belonged to someone else. Toya walked to her stove, turned the heat on under the kettle, and leaned against the counter.

“Amiga, I’m sorry to say these things happen all the time. Try to forget it.”

“What do I do about the boss?”

“Nothing. You can’t report him. The police won’t believe you. They could ask for your papers and arrest you because you don’t have any. They’ll send you back to your country and split up the kids because Nando was born here and Karina wasn’t. Go back to work and get your money. Start wearing a wedding ring. Don’t be alone with him. And if he tries again, remember it will soon be over.”

If she’d spoken to anyone but Toya that day, she might have gone about things differently. But Elena trusted her to watch her children, and so she trusted her counsel too. She decided never to speak again of what happened in the restaurant even if she relived it in her mind without end. Not to Mauro, to Perla, to anyone. Instead, she lit a candle every night to the devotional card of the Virgen de Chiquinquirá her mother gave her before leaving for the United States. She begged not to become pregnant and cried when her period finally came.

* * *

It was Talia’s first Christmas and Elena’s first without Mauro since they’d met. The restaurant gave bonuses for the holidays. Elena was able to buy toys for Nando and Karina. She sent the rest to Perla to buy something for the baby and set some apart for Mauro for when he turned up at the house.

Her calls with Perla got shorter. She couldn’t bear to lie to her mother, tell her everything was all right when it wasn’t. Normally Perla would put the baby on the phone before hanging up, but Elena was afraid of passing her pain to the child, as if contagious even by sound. She felt a liar, a conspirator to the man who abused her because she protected him with silence. Now she understood why he chose her.

Elena and the children celebrated Nochebuena with the other residents of the Sandy Hill house who’d all pitched in to buy a Christmas tree, decorated with homemade ornaments and paper garlands, and between them prepared a feast. They’d just finished eating when Elena’s phone rang. She heard Mauro’s faint voice, his first call in months.

“It sounds like a great party.”

Elena ached to confess that despite the guitar strums and villancicos he heard sung in the background, she was drowning without him, but she knew in his own way he was drowning too. She put the children on the phone so they could hear their father and imagined the things he might be saying to them, watching their expressions of glee and confusion. Papi, they said over and over. Es Papi.

Elena remembered a story Perla told her in the months before she and Mauro left Colombia. They were sweeping the lavandería as they did every evening after locking up. Elena worried about leaving her mother alone. The workers they hired were undependable, rarely lasting more than a few weeks. Perla told her about a mother and daughter who lived alone together like they had before Elena met Mauro. The mother and daughter were very close, loved each other very much, and had no family but each other. One day they were walking together on the road when they were confronted by a wicked man who macheted them both to death. The daughter had lived a pure life, so she went straight to heaven. But the mother had lived a longer, more complicated life, so she waited in limbo, looking up to heaven, and one day spotted her daughter in all her eternal glory. She called for her daughter to lower her hair so she could climb it and join her in the upper world. The daughter dropped her braids, her mother climbed, and the two were overjoyed at being reunited. The mother thought her daughter had saved her from languishing in the void, Perla had said. She didn’t know she’d already been purified, that her daughter was only waiting until it was the mother’s turn to be called home.

FIFTEEN

Mauro’s sobriety was still a fragile thing. He sometimes squandered months of it for a few blurry days that would leave him feeling sick down to his liver. He didn’t yet feel ready to return to live with Talia and Perla but visited often, and saw that in his daughter’s eyes he was becoming more familiar, someone she looked at with delight. He no longer resembled those she called “outside people,” who wiped windshields at intersections, or the unsheltered day-sleepers on sidewalks and patches of dead grass. Sometimes he brought Talia flowers, which she’d pull apart petal by petal, or a peluche when he could afford it. Her favorite was a small yellow bear that she took everywhere until she dropped it during an outing with her grandmother. At least that’s what Perla told him. He brought her a pink bear as a replacement, but she didn’t love it in the same way.

In one of his meetings Mauro met a man who asked if he did handiwork. He said he managed an apartment building near El Retiro. They were looking for someone to do maintenance and repairs around the property.

Mauro appeared at Perla’s door in a new uniform, said he had a good job and was ready to live in the house again, that he could pay more than his share and help with the lavandería before and after his shifts. He saw how Perla was struggling. Fewer customers and other supposedly loyal ones who never paid their long-running tabs. Perla was becoming sick too. Her breathing laborious, coughing fits that produced dots of blood. But she refused to see a doctor. Mauro, not wanting to disrespect her, didn’t insist.