In Houston, they quickly understood they were not guests but boarders, tenants. The man who took them in was not a cousin but a friend of a friend from the fruit market to whom they paid rent and who otherwise didn’t want anything to do with them. Mauro found work moving furniture while Elena kept the house clean and washed and ironed the man’s clothes. She would have cooked for him, too, but he padlocked the fridge and said they had to find their own meals elsewhere.

Neither Mauro nor Elena had ever seen the sea except in pictures and from the airplane from which they could only make out a desert of blue. A few weeks after their arrival, to ease her homesickness, Mauro fulfilled an old vow of showing Elena the ocean, taking them to the beach in a place called Bolivar, which seemed a promising omen. Elena had bought bathing suits for herself and Karina before leaving Colombia. The elastic pinched, but she didn’t care. The sun had never tickled so much of her body.

They walked across the burning sand until the Gulf pooled at their waists. Mauro held Karina, gliding her toes across the current. Elena palmed the water. In her hands it was transparent, but around them it was all brown, tinted by silt and as murky as the Río Bogotá, nothing suggesting the turquoise waters Mauro had promised.

In Bogotá’s interminable autumn, Elena’s complexion blanched. In Texas she goldened, her hair feathered her temples, whipping with humidity around her neck and shoulders. At the request of his new boss, Mauro buzzed off his long hair, which sharpened his features as if by a blade. They sweated through their clothes those first weeks in Houston. At sea level for the first time in their lives, they underwent a metamorphosis, an inverted soroche of breathlessness, headaches, and ravenous hunger while their ears took in English, English, all the time English, and if they heard Spanish, it was with no accent like their own.

Phone calls to Perla were brief and expensive, so Elena tried to send a letter to her mother every week, though each one took days to write and weeks to arrive. She didn’t want to tell her mother the mundane details of her life in the house while Mauro worked. The hours she spent pushing the baby in a secondhand stroller around a desolate park because the man they were staying with turned off the air-conditioning when he went out and didn’t allow them to use the television or computer. She didn’t want her mother to worry or ask what the point of going abroad was if one had to live in worse conditions than at home, so she filled her pages with commentary on the velvety warmth of the Houston summer, plum sunsets, and the luxury of so much daylight. She told Perla about Mauro’s job, which earned him an hourly wage plus tips, since gringos loved to reward good service, and about people they met as if they were already dear friends, not single-encounter acquaintances they were likely never to see again. It was not the working vacation she imagined. She thought during Mauro’s time off they’d explore the North American terrain they knew only from movies, but all Elena had seen, besides the day at the beach, were highways, roads, and bayous lining flatness upon flatness.

She wrote her letters at night, as Karina slept and Mauro listened to a small radio he bought, repeating words and sentences the newscaster said until they felt right on his tongue. At his job, he’d already picked up far more vocabulary than Elena. He tried to teach her some, but she didn’t see the point in pushing herself since they would eventually go home.

They did not consider themselves immigrants. They never thought that far ahead and were young enough to believe none of their decisions were permanent. They saw themselves as travelers discovering new frontiers. Their visas were for six months, though issued at different times, so Mauro’s would expire several weeks before Elena’s. They’d had to purchase return tickets for January as a condition of their visas, but with the hours Elena spent alone with Karina every day, the date felt further and further away.

“I’m tired of this,” she told Mauro one night when he returned from his job. “We’re not seeing America. We’re not doing anything here.”

“I’m working every day for our survival and to send money back to your mother. You call that nothing?”

“Why don’t we go home? We have a house to live in. We have the lavandería to run. I feel so alone here. We never should have left.”

On nights when Mauro sat by the window drinking the cheapest liquor he could find, his back turned to Elena even as she called him to bed, she considered leaving without him. She could take the baby and return to her mother, the house in Chapinero, the barrio where everyone knew her name.

Things improved when Mauro found them a small apartment in Northside Village. A woman on the floor above paid Elena to watch her children while she went to work at a plastics plant. They monitored the calendar as weeks and then months passed and their visa expiration dates approached, debating whether to overstay or to return home. Elena was surprised it was now Mauro who was ready to go back. He was tired. The daily furniture hauling was becoming too much even for him. The men he worked with called him esqueleto, their own bodies thick from working in factories or fields. Compared to them he was skinny as a nail, more bone than muscle, limbs like arrows in leather sheaths. He resented the idea of becoming what some called illegal, as if just waking up another day in North America made a person a felon. He missed their city, knowing where they’d sleep each month, the fragrances of Perla’s lavandería and the fruit stacks at Paloquemao. He even missed Bogotá’s chaos, the city’s brittle air in contrast to the strangling boa of Texas heat.

“Here we will always be foreigners,” he told Elena. “We’re Colombians. So is our daughter. It’s where we belong.”

Elena nodded. Their return seemed to be decided.

But then she said, “Mauro. I’m pregnant.”

* * *

In Houston, Mauro worked with many men who’d navigated the southern borderlands by foot, some four or five times. They came from different nations, passing through the corridor of the Americas, sometimes intercepted and sent back to their countries within days while others were held for months in camps with no walls, only tarps shielding them from the prickly southwestern sun and frigid night. Still, they returned, even as the journey became harder, the hazards more vicious, convinced this land offered more than theirs had already taken from them. Mauro and Elena arrived under different circumstances, but Mauro knew the consequences were the same if they didn’t leave when their visas expired. Without an adjustment or amnesty, a deportation order would come.

As Elena and the baby slept, Mauro held his family’s three passports, running his fingers over the dates printed on each visa, Karina’s baby photo pressed onto the page. They’d had it taken in a shop near the house in Chapinero. The storeowner droned that she was too tiny to go on a plane and it was unnatural to make an Andean child cross the sea so soon. He warned she’d acquire an incurable vertigo from breeching their altitude so early in life that would haunt her no matter where she went.

Later, Mauro and Elena laughed about the shopkeeper’s insistence. But he wondered about the baby who was coming. Elena was sure it would be a boy. Mauro didn’t know if she said so because she thought it was what he wanted or needed to hear, as if every man felt the primal urge to father a son. He thought of his own father who was no example to follow. Mauro worried he wouldn’t have anything to teach a son about how to be a man but at least he could give him a life in a new land rather than tow him back to their pasts, even if it would cost them in ways they could not yet imagine.