Some houses were bigger than others. In one case, the current housekeeper had just been fired. In another, the lady of the house told Elena her husband demanded she do the cleaning herself but she would hire her if she promised not to tell anyone and be gone before the husband returned from work. In another home, the patrona made Elena wear slipcovers over her shoes. In another, no shoes were permitted at all. One man insisted Elena clean everything with bleach, which made her so dizzy she’d often have to lie on the bathroom floor, cheek to tile, until she could see clearly again. Some nights, she coughed through her sleep. Hands calloused, fingertips inflamed. Back sore and feet blistered from treks to each house to the bus station and back home. But the money. It was everything.

From her cleaning pay, she was able to set some aside to pay a lawyer she found through Toya to help her apply for a green card. He asked for only five hundred up front and collected the rest in monthly installments, which she could save by washing and folding clothes for other residents of the Sandy Hill house at the coin laundry. But after nearly a year of payments and nothing to show for them, Elena went to the lawyer’s office to inquire about her case’s progress and found his office had been vacated.

She cleaned the house of a woman who learned Spanish during a school exchange in Sevilla. She loved to practice and sometimes invited Elena to sit with her as she ate lunch. She told her about the boyfriend she had in Spain who she still thought about, found on the internet, and dreamed of contacting. Elena felt she could trust this woman the way she trusted her. She told her what happened with the lawyer, hoping she might have advice since she was married to a lawyer, though her husband worked at a bank. She explained the family’s situation, how Mauro had been sent back. It was the first time she’d ever gotten so personal with a boss, but this woman struck Elena as compassionate, how she straightened her house before Elena arrived to clean and always apologized for her son’s messes. She was surprised to learn Elena had three children, since she’d never mentioned them, including a boy exactly her own son’s age.

“Can I ask you a question?” the woman said.

Elena thought it would be something about Mauro’s case. Maybe his deportation story sounded too far-fetched.

“Why do your people have so many children when you can’t afford to take care of them?”

The way she said your people—gente como tú—with a biting gringa twang, confused Elena, since she thought of herself as a woman, a mother, just like the patrona.

“My husband and I live comfortably, but we have made a conscious and, I believe, responsible decision to have only one child so we can provide a good lifestyle and education for him.” She touched Elena’s hand. “I understand accidents happen. But did you ever consider… other options?”

“No, se?ora. Never.”

A few weeks later, the woman accused Elena of stealing and fired her. The missing object in question was a necklace her husband had given her for an anniversary. Elena said she hadn’t seen it, but the woman insisted on searching her pockets and bag, fingering the lining as a customs officer might do. She found nothing because Elena had taken nothing. But the woman kept her last paycheck as compensation anyway.

* * *

Elena worried something might happen to her before she made it home from work each day. A police interception or an accident. Something that would separate her from her kids. If she could cut her commute and avoid buses, she would be safer. She rented an apartment above a liquor store in the town where she cleaned houses, across the hall from an Irish couple with a daughter Karina’s age. She enrolled the children in school and paid the Irish woman to pick them up each afternoon and look after them until she came home.

The church down the street had a food pantry and donated a sofa bed and coats for the winter. The children weren’t even baptized, but the priest didn’t mind and told Elena to come back if she ever needed him. One day she went to his office in the Rectory and told him her children’s father had been taken long ago and she and Karina were still vulnerable. If they came for them, she feared what would happen to Nando. She’d heard of parents deported and their citizen kids left behind, sent to foster care, trafficked, or left homeless.

The priest told Elena that whenever she felt a threat, she could come to the church for sanctuary. The deporters couldn’t touch them there, and they would be safe. He gave her his private number and told her the children should memorize it. But, he warned, sanctuary was not secret. By law the church would have to inform officials they were there. It wasn’t a decision to take lightly, he said, because once you enter, you can’t leave until your miracle comes. It’s another kind of limbo. One without daylight or fresh air.

Karina and Nando already knew to fear police. To them, regular cops and ICE were one and the same. They understood they were not as free as other people walking on the street and could be flagged for their complexions. Elena had received advice early on from the residents of the Sandy Hill house and made it the family protocol: See a police officer on the street, find a way to dip into a store or turn onto another corner and out of sight. Police are not your friend. Even the cordial ones. Yes, they are there to help people in danger just like you’re taught in school, she’d tried to explain to her children, but in this country some people think the ones they need protection from are us.

SEVENTEEN

At the prison on the mountain, the staff brought in a woman who took a few girls into a room where they sat cross-legged on floor cushions. The lady was rich enough that she wore diamonds and told the girls she’d traveled to India and the Far East, studying different techniques for altering one’s consciousness. A girl asked what that was supposed to mean, but the lady said never mind, she’d show them if they were willing to close their eyes and listen. She spoke in a soft voice, told the girls to picture themselves far from the prison walls, letting their imaginations take them somewhere they felt completely free. She suggested the beach, described the white foam and lapping waves, soft sand under their feet, until a girl called out that most of them had never been anywhere near an ocean.

Then the lady told the girls to pretend they were birds flying over their mountains and valleys on a day with no clouds so they could see every grassy pleat, indigo lake, and river twine. The towns below were pastel and bone-colored formations squaring churches and plazas. Cattle-freckled pastures, the plastic-sheeted nurseries where orchids and roses are grown for export; cars and buses taking people from their jobs to their families.

“A busy world, a peaceful world,” the woman said. “You are a part of that world.”

She instructed the girls to imagine themselves light, almost weightless, carried by their long feathers, hollow avian bones.

“Now return to your lives in the present.”

She had them note the hard ground beneath their cushions, discomfort and tension in their hips and knees. The stiffness of their spines from cold seeping into the old unheated prison-school building so they existed in a permanent low-grade shiver.

“Remember where you are right now,” she said, as if they could forget. “Take in your heaviness, your loneliness, how far you are from everyone who cares about you. Think about what brought you to serve your time. It is your crime and the decisions that led to it that will keep you shackled to toxic soil and prevent you from soaring as you are meant to do.”

Some of the girls sighed, bored by another obvious tactic to get them to feel regret. Talia wondered why the staff cared so much about contrition when they were already being punished. She asked to use the bathroom. The meditation lady gave her a disappointed stare but nodded.

“I have to go too,” said Lorena, who was there for setting her bedroom on fire after her mother wouldn’t let her go to a party.

Soon everyone was saying they had to piss. A group effort to reclaim what little power they had on that mountain, or just to make their day more interesting. Later, Sister Susana called Talia to her office. She’d heard Talia initiated the bathroom revolt during the meditation workshop.

“You want me to be sorry for having to do what is only natural?”

“I’ve been reviewing your file. It’s time for you to write a letter of apology to the man you hurt. I think it will be healing for both of you.”

“I don’t need to be healed, and I don’t need to be forgiven.”

“Write it anyway.”

“He’s the one who killed a defenseless animal for fun. I did what was fair.”

“It’s not up to you to decide who deserves retribution.”

“Then why is it up to a judge and now you how to discipline me?”

Talia remembered that meeting when she trapped Sister Susana with the pillowcase the night the girls fled. The old nun who thought she knew it all.

She never wrote the letter, but Horacio’s face started coming to Talia’s mind more often. She’d look out the dormitory window, worrying how she was going to get out of there and make it back to Bogotá in time for her flight, and suddenly his face would obscure her vision; skin raw, eyes swollen shut, and she’d try to will him out of her head, wondering if the others were right: she was as much of a beast as he was.

* * *