Her brother and sister, she said, took her on outings to Manhattan, where she felt choked by crowds and buildings taller than their highest mountains, where the subway vibrations reminded her of the tremors she felt underfoot back home, Chibchacum adjusting his load; and to the beach, wide as a field and full of people, sand coarse and mottled with cigarette butts, the Atlantic water inky and cold.

Her English improved beyond television and movie dialogue. Her sister became her teacher, instructing her to read pages of novels aloud for an hour each night. On weekends, her family took her to the other town where their good friends lived and the adults, too, treated her as if she were a special thing, precious and symbolic as an emerald ensconced in gold. She worried they hadn’t yet figured out that she was ordinary, she told her father, exceptional only in her ability to do harm and to run away, and was terrified that someone would learn of her crime and time at the prison school and tell her mother.

The funny thing, she said, was that back home she felt she had so much to say, but in her new country everyone kept commenting how quiet she was. She even heard her mother describe her as shy. She worried she’d left her real self with her father and the girl who flew to the United States in her place, though she wore the same face, was someone else.

* * *

A few weeks after her departure, Mauro received a call from the police. They learned Talia had left the country. They knew the day and the hour, and he prayed they hadn’t searched security camera footage showing them together at the airport as he prepared to send her off. He was able to fake shock, which the police seemed to believe, since Elena had been the one to purchase the plane ticket. They asked if he’d heard from her. He said he hadn’t. They asked if he knew how to reach Elena, and he lied that they hadn’t spoken in years. And so the call turned to one of sympathy.

“I am sorry to have to give you this bad news,” the officer said. “Now that your daughter has fled the country to be with her mother, you may never see either of them again.”

* * *

Elena called to thank Mauro for the Virgin statue he’d sent, for the photographs and for the letter he’d tucked into the envelope with them. He waited for her to say more, but she was quiet. Then she thanked him for the years he’d cared for Talia. Said every day was a revelation of who she was as a young woman. Despite the distance and years apart, she’d somehow convinced herself she knew their daughter well. Now she understood that child was fiction. The daughter Elena was getting to know was smarter, wiser, as lovely and self-governing as a wildflower.

Without Talia between them now, Mauro worried the threads that bound him and Elena would fray to nothing. He felt a dam of urgency break in him.

“I’ll find a way back.” He didn’t know if she understood or if she would even believe him. He only hoped that when he made it to the other side, she would be waiting.

* * *

The apartment was packed and ready for its next occupancy. The boxes with the few things that mattered to them held in a storage unit where he’d paid the year in advance. After Talia left, Mauro did months of research. Enough time had passed since his deportation that he could apply for legal reentry. He submitted the paperwork and was approved for an appointment at the US embassy, which gave him hope that his past offenses might be pardoned. He took the day off and wore his best clothes, brought a file of photos of his family and copies of Nando’s and Talia’s birth certificates. He told the consular officer he had two US-born children and his deportation had caused substantial hardship on their mother. He’d read about another deported father in Nicaragua with a similar family situation who was granted a special waiver with the help of some advocacy group. But Mauro still had no sponsor waiting for him on the other side and now had nothing in Colombia proving any incentive to return. His request was refused. He could reapply, the officer said, or wait until his American children were old enough to petition for a parent visa, but the arrests on Mauro’s record made it unlikely he’d ever be granted entry again.

He considered other potential routes. First to the United States by way of Canada, but ruled it out when he learned the two countries share immigration information. A flight to Jamaica or the Bahamas since neither required visas of Colombians. Or by boat to Panama through the Darién Gap and San Blas Islands, by bus and train the rest of the way north. The more he stared at those borders on maps, the more absurd it seemed that outsiders succeeded in declaring possession of these lands with national lines, as if Creation could ever be divided and owned.

The best and most reliable route, he concluded, was through Mexico. He knew a man from his meetings, which he attended every night since Talia’s departure, who’d made the trip through the Chihuahuan desert successfully only to return to Colombia because he missed the wife and child he left behind too much. The journey was hard on the body, he warned Mauro. If you go that way, rest for many days before crossing. When you’re ready, dress like a gentleman on his way to church and pray one thousand rosaries. When you finish, you will be on the other side.

For months, he cut meals to save pesos. Sold his ruanas and trinkets leftover from Perla’s house to tourists at the flea market and took extra shifts at his job whenever he could. He turned the apartment back over to the landlord. Bought two plane tickets. One to Panama and from there, another to Mexico. The man who’d taken the desert route told him that from the capital he needed to head to the frontera and wait in a town named, of all things, Colombia. A man he knew there would help Mauro cross over. Entering the United States again without inspection or admission, as they say, could get him barred from the country forever.

It was worth wagering, Mauro decided, even if just to see his family one more time.

* * *

A dewy morning back in the same airport where he’d held his daughter before she left for her new life. He waited to board his own flight alone, this time as a free man and not as the prisoner he was when last returned to his country. Talia did not yet know that he was coming. He hadn’t wanted to share his plans, fearing his trip would be interrupted and he’d be forced back to Bogotá to begin the journey all over again.

He was not viewed as a criminal in any country but the one where his family lived. He would be safe until he arrived at the national line, and then he’d see how far his luck would travel. Until then, he guarded a new picture in his mind: Nochebuena. Their first as a complete family. Parents preparing a meal together for their three children, singing songs they used to sing, dancing the way they used to dance. Falling asleep with love in their hearts. The next morning, one of thousands with which they’d mend the years torn from their family pages, creating new stories in place of elisions. No more anguish of time lost. Nothing would matter but each new day and the ones to come.

THIRTY

I started writing the chronicle of our lives because it’s important to leave a record. For us, if for nobody else, because everyone has a secret self truer than the parts you see.

One day in early September, just before she was to start at her new high school, I saw my sister sitting with our mother in the garden near the creek knoll. I could tell by the way they faced each other, the way our mother’s gaze never moved while Talia’s searched around, often fixing on the blades of grass she held between her fingers, that she was confessing what she’d already shared with me, the crime she committed back home, how they’d sent her to a prison for girls on the edge of irredeemable, how she’d wanted to hide this secret forever because she thought we couldn’t love her in spite of it, even when I told her I understood; we all have breaking points, we all have regrets and maybe more instances we don’t regret that society tells us we should. I told her I understood what it was to want to create justice to fix an injustice even if my justice could be considered a crime. I know what it is to hurt and to feel hurt on behalf of others. I tried to say this in my best Spanish and asked if she understood, if she believed me, and she said she did.

I didn’t let myself watch their entire exchange. I went to our living room, where my brother was sketching faces, and watched him until our mother and sister returned to the cottage.