The road signs for Barbosa became more frequent. Aguja pulled into a gas station and as he fueled up, they listened to a pair of viejos at another pump arguing about the peace accord recently ratified by Congress. One man in a sombrero vueltiao, face shriveled as old fruit, said the guerrillas would never abandon the monte or their criminal activity, that they were made only for battle. The other man, wishbone-legged, insisted that if only to end the massacres of the last decades, a meager treaty was better than none at all. “Talking about the past, the violence, is like digging up the dead,” he said. “The pursuit of peace is the only way to give those who died a proper funeral.”

Aguja returned the gas nozzle to its cradle. “You hear that, ni?a? You’re leaving our country when things are starting to get good.”

“Just because I’m leaving doesn’t mean I won’t come back.”

“Sure you’ll come back, but you’ll be different.”

In the gas station bathroom, she found a urine-coated floor, shit-lined toilet rim. A stench like death. At the facility, Talia was often made to clean lavatories. It was supposedly old-fashioned to assign labor as castigation, but the nuns must have been nostalgic. If a girl was caught cursing or breaking some rule, off to the toilets she was sent to scrub caked menstrual blood and stains from the graying bowls. Talia never cared though. She was used to cleaning. She’d grown up in Perla’s lavandería until it went out of business and Mauro rented it to a dog groomer that went out of business too.

When her grandmother lost control of her body, forgetting how to speak, to eat, and everything else, Talia was the one who changed the liners of her underpants and washed her clothes when she soiled them. It didn’t bother Talia. Her father said it was a gift to care for someone who once took care of you, and love can cure what medicine can’t.

Together, they nursed Perla. Talia tried to wake her sleeping mind with the stories she’d raised her on, like the one about the boy Perla knew in childhood who ate seeds and grew watermelons in his belly that a farmer cut out of him every spring and then sewed him back up for the next harvest. Or about Eutémia, the distant cousin who brushed her hair so much that vanity turned it blue and she had to cut it all off.

Talia’s favorite story was of Don Ismael, who lived on the banks of the Río Magdalena and could wave his hands in the air to make rain start or stop in order to control the river swells and floods. Talia longed for his powers, wishing he could restore her grandmother’s memory, resurrect her dying body the same way he could draw water from the sky.

* * *

When she returned to the motorcycle, she found Aguja waiting, hands at his sides, and got the feeling this might be goodbye. He’d already taken her as far as he agreed. She pulled the French guy’s wallet out of her pocket and handed it to him.

“I was thinking we could go a bit farther together,” he said. “Chiquinquirá is only about fifty kilometers south. My mother will kill me if she finds out I was so close and didn’t stop to light a candle in her name. You can come with me if you want. I mean, it’s still on your way. From there I’m sure you can find a bus to take you to the capital.”

Soon it would be dark. Night in the mountains was nothing like in the city, forever aglow with eight million lives, car beams, apartment windows, and streetlights.

“I’ll go with you, but I can’t pay any more than what I’ve already offered you.”

“I know.”

He mounted the motorcycle, and Talia arranged herself around him once again. When they returned to the road, silenced by the engine throb and rumble, she rested her cheek against his shoulder blade, shutting her eyes to the wind.

EIGHTEEN

Someone recommended Elena for a cleaning job in a town flanking the Hudson. It was a big house down a forested road, up a winding path behind an iron gate. Ivory-shingled with coned roofs, somehow inspired by chateau architecture without being completely tacky. The bosses were a married couple with generations of money behind them and a son who seemed to hate everyone except Elena. Soon the couple asked her to swap cleaning to be his nanny instead. It went so well that they asked Elena to move in and outfitted the cottage at the back of their property for her family. It was bigger and had more bedrooms than any basement or apartment she and the children had ever lived in. Residing in the bosses’ town also meant a better school system for her kids.

Her charge, Lance, is now twelve. Every morning, Elena helps him get ready to take the bus to a school for children like him, and waits for him by the gate every afternoon when he gets dropped off. He doesn’t speak much, but when he does there is a lot of yelling. He doesn’t like to be touched by anyone, even his parents, but he will hold Elena’s hand.

Karina and Nando treat him like another sibling since he doesn’t have any of his own. No friends either. He likes when Nando walks with him around the yard or sits in the grass, sketchpad in hand, and shows him how to draw flowers and birds. With Karina, he likes to observe the fish and turtles in the pond, listening to her give each a name and imagine a family story in which all species are kin.

Sundays are family days, but sometimes Elena’s employers call on the intercom, asking for help with their son, frustrated the books they’ve read and experts they’ve consulted provide no code with which to decipher the enigma of their son, his rages that only subside in Elena’s presence. Once, Se?ora Tracy told Elena she wonders if the universe gave her a son like Lance because her husband was married to another woman when she met him. She asked Elena if she thought life collected debts as it went along. She thought of her son as a half-bloomed flower and tried fertility treatments for many years, like her husband wanted, as if her body were a catalog and they were placing an order for a new, improved child. Sometimes Tracy weeps for hours in her room, and other days she asks Elena to take photos of her cooking or posed on the sofa reading, and then she posts these photos on the internet for strangers to admire. Elena hears her employers tell people that Elena loves Lance as if he were her own son. It’s true. She does love the boy. But her love for her own children is different, marrowed beyond bloodlines, picked from their terrain, dusted off their mountains. In their dark eyes and amber skin she sees her cloud-cast city; her ancestors, her mother, everything her family has ever been and ever will be.

Elena sent Talia back to live with Perla with the idea that she would raise the baby for a little while until Elena could send for her return. When you leave one country for another, nobody tells you years will bleed together like rain on newsprint. One year becomes five and five years become ten. Ten years become fifteen.

She never thought that when she left on the plane with Mauro it would be the last time she saw her mother in the flesh.

When Perla started forgetting her words, Mauro asked if he could take her to a doctor. But Perla thought every ailment could be solved with polvos from a curandero or pills from a creative pharmacist. One saw a doctor only when giving birth or near death. Mauro found a doctor who agreed to come to the house. Perla protested through the examination, but when the doctor asked her to name her grandchildren, not even Talia’s name came to memory. That night she collapsed as she walked from her bedroom to the bathroom. When Mauro found her on the floor of the hall, he said she looked not shaken or hurt but bewildered, and as he and Talia knelt by her side it was clear she’d forgotten where she was and who they were.

Elena felt guilty for sending Talia to be looked after by Perla. Then Talia became her grandmother’s caretaker. Mauro said Talia acquired Perla’s best traits, tending to her gently, washing her so she wouldn’t be subject to the indignity of being bathed by Mauro. Talia dressed her. Combed her hair. Fed her, making sure Perla chewed and swallowed each bite so she wouldn’t choke, because the doctor warned that she would lose the reflexes needed for eating. She was like a baby, the doctor said, and like an infant, they’d have to keep her from harming herself.