In her handbag, an envelope of cash her father withdrew from the bank. Her heart quivered as the airline employee studied her passport picture, then scanned the bar code. Talia had seen enough movies to write her own scene of a police stampede surrounding and removing her in handcuffs. But nothing like that happened. The woman returned Talia’s passport with a boarding pass tucked inside and wished her a good trip.

Relief, but only temporarily, because she still had to get through customs and security. Her first time flying since her arrival as a baby. She felt dispirited. The composure she’d practiced in the taxi all the way to the airport, clutching her father’s hand on the vinyl upholstery between them, was gone. Mauro must have sensed this because he led her to a column along the corridor, held her close, and whispered that she was safe, nobody would take her away. She would get on that plane, and in a few hours she would be in her mother’s arms.

“What if I want to come back?”

“You can. You have two places to call home.”

A goodbye is always too brief, or maybe she’d been saying goodbye since she came to Colombia, aware for as long as she’d collected memories that her place there was only provisional.

“What if I don’t love my mother the way I love you?”

“You will. You do. When you see her you will remember.”

“And my brother and sister?”

“They are a part of you too.”

“I don’t want to go.” This came from some unknowable place but now felt truer than anything. “Don’t make me leave you.”

Her father was quiet. He knew that if she stayed the authorities would come for her and send her back to the school on the mountain or another one like it. And even after she completed her sentence, restlessness would never leave her until she returned to her point of origin. She could not leave, but she could not stay.

His eyes were dry, but she knew it was because he’d learned to cry without tears. They said all the things a father and daughter say to each other when they are not sure when or how they will ever see each other again.

How many years would pass between this moment and that one?

How would they be changed by a life apart?

She already felt aged by the day. No longer fifteen but as if she’d lived a decade more and understood, though she didn’t yet know how, that this would be the morning she would dream of, guard in her palms like a loose pearl during her future loneliness.

How stupid she was to think leaving would be as easy as handing over her ticket and finding her seat on the plane. She did not yet know she would mourn this morning like a death.

Mauro watched her as far as the airport perimeters would allow. When she reached the front of the line and gave her passport to the customs agent, she turned and saw him peering from the corner along the last visible stretch of airport tunnel. She had to go on without him. He would stay at the airport until her plane was in the clouds, he’d said. Her phone was programmed to dial him with a single touch should she be detained. They’d prepared in every way for the worst possible outcome, but everything was happening faster than expected. The agent waved her on. At the security checkpoint, while others were asked to step aside to have their bags individually examined, she passed through with ease. Her father was out of sight, but she knew he was still close.

* * *

From her window seat the city unspooled, dissolving like salt in water. The exquisite madness of the cordilleras, bottle-green valleys devoured by doughy clouds until there was nothing to see but white and more white. When the pilot announced they’d left Colombian airspace, a man a few rows back started singing the national anthem but only made it through the first verse about goodness coming from pain, not to the parts about battles and bloodshed. Over the blue ribbons of the Caribbean she managed to sleep. When she woke, the plane was shaking in descent over another gray city. No mountains. Only flatness winged by obsidian rivers scabbed in concrete and steel.

* * *

The night before, she’d told her father she was afraid she and her family wouldn’t recognize one another at the airport.

“You will know them when you see them, and they will know you.”

She drifted through immigration and out of the baggage claim area, past another agent who took the paper form from her hand without any questions and through to a hall packed with excited faces, many holding signs, balloons, flower bouquets.

“How will they know me?” she’d asked her father, when they’d only ever seen her face crammed into the inches of a photograph or screen.

How will they know me?

* * *

In the end that was also a beginning, there was recognition beyond features and gestures. A love born before any of the siblings, that delivered her from her father back to her mother.

The mother held her child, both wanting to express everything with their embrace. Her mother’s arms were sinewy around her ribcage. She was shorter than Talia had believed. Her scent—powder, violets, something else—familiar yet new. Her earrings pressed hard against her daughter’s cheek, as she hummed, mi hija, mi hija, like a song.

Her brother and sister cloaked them with their bodies.

Her mother’s employers sent them to receive Talia in a big chauffeured car that waited for them outside the airport. Her sister and brother muttered to each other in English in the back seat. Her mother sat at her side, held her hand, reached for her face to kiss her cheek. Talia stiffened, remembering she was in a car full of strangers who were also her family. They told her that the next day there would be a party for her at the home of some friends in the town where they’d lived for many years. Everyone was excited to meet her.

She took in New Jersey, level and highwayed. So many lanes and cars, square buildings and a hazy horizon. Far from Colombia with its equatorial pulse and steepled mountains. She tried to restrain her tears, but they fell fast.

Her mother stroked her hair. “It’s too much,” she said. “I’m sorry. I should have known. We will take it slow. Tranquila, mi amor. No llores.”

* * *

Their home was a small house behind a larger one. A swimming pool sat in between. A boy watched from a window as the car pulled into the driveway. They showed her the bedroom she’d share with her sister, painted alabaster, windows overlooking rosebushes, no brick panorama like the one she left that morning. How would she sleep there, one night, a dozen nights, the hundreds or thousands of nights that would spread before her in an endless calendar of days waiting for something, she didn’t know what. Another departure? Another arrival? She was no longer sure where her journey began or where it should end.

TWENTY-NINE

Mauro waited in the airport for almost twelve hours, long after Talia’s plane left their soil and landed in that foreign space. She called when she arrived at her new house, her voice laden with uncertainty though she kept saying, “It’s beautiful here, Papá. So beautiful.” She thought her father was back at their apartment, but he was still by the checkpoint where he’d left her, watching other families in their last seconds together before parting. For the first hours after her takeoff, despite the solace of knowing that she hadn’t been detained, he worried there would be some malfunction or even a bomb threat; a reason for her plane to have to loop around in the sky and return home. Even after the airline employees told him her flight had landed safely in the United States he waited on a plastic bench with a shameful wish that she’d decided, instead of going home with her family, to take the next flight back to him.

They were thoughts that came with the heartsickness of separation. He knew such fantasies well, from their earliest incarnations when he was sent to the campo by his mother to when he found himself in the detention center and when the Americans dispatched him back to his country alone. His daughter had left him, but she still came to him in his sleep, asking him to tell her stories about the lake, about Chiminigagua, about the ancestors, begging him to bring them with him when he arrived to meet her in the north.

At first, her calls were frequent. Daily. Sometimes twice, in the morning and before she went to sleep. She reported everything about her new life, gossiping affectionately about her mother and her siblings. She suspected her mother was a little frightened of her. Not because she might be dangerous, but as if she were some breakable object, like a centuries-old museum artifact on loan between nations.