At gatherings in the homes of Mauro’s coworkers, when the men passed around beers or tequila, or when talking to people from the neighborhood, no matter their nation of origin, when asked why they came to this country and stayed they all said the same thing: more opportunity. For themselves, for their children, for their queridos back home whom they were able to support with money earned in the United States. It became true for Elena and Mauro too. What they earned in one week in Texas was more than what Mauro and Elena made in a month working at the market and her mother’s laundry combined. Mauro had no education, and Elena didn’t attend university because she was expecting Karina. With a devalued currency, theirs was a country where it felt impossible to get ahead if one wasn’t born to a certain class, rich or corrupt, or talented and beautiful enough for fútbol or farándula.

If Mauro and Elena ignored the exit date stamped on their passports, the option of returning to the United States would be closed for at least five or ten years, at which point they might be able to apply for reentry. That they’d received visas in the first place, without American sponsors and with the quota on Colombians admitted to the country each year, had felt like the intervention of saints. If they stayed, they’d be limited to their existence in North America until it came to its inevitable conclusion. Unless one won the green card lottery, but they were too scared to apply to take the chance. Political asylum was just as elusive. Coming from a place that gringos regularly stereotyped as a death trap didn’t mean they could prove they were unsafe without a documented history of threats. The perils of poverty didn’t count, only a demonstrated danger of physical harm. Since they never received letters vowing to kill or dismember their families, they weren’t deemed worthy of government protection. A good attorney might have been able to argue that even if one was not important enough to be a murder target it did not mean that person couldn’t be killed at any second. But they didn’t know how to find a trustworthy lawyer, having been warned about con-artists who preyed on people like them, self-proclaimed miracle workers promising citizenship in a year, who charged upfront, then vanished.

There also existed the possibility of Elena and Mauro seeking citizenship by each marrying other people, since they weren’t already married to each other. The woman upstairs whose children Elena babysat had married a white Texan for this purpose. They only saw each other for appointments at the immigration office. She’d had to pay a few thousand already, and the rest was due in installments, but she never had to have sex with him and already had a green card in hand. The way she described it, marrying someone else as just a matter of paperwork didn’t seem unreasonable to Elena, but Mauro refused to consider it.

They were careful. Scared even to play the radio too loud, not wanting to give anyone a reason to complain. They’d been told immigration officers only arrested people when tipped off. SWAT teams raiding apartment buildings, restaurant kitchens, or factories. Bulletproofed and body-armored officers with no-knock warrants, storming homes, breaking down doors if needed, as if the people inside were planning a bombing or a coup. They might take you away or if you were lucky, let you go with just a warning, but you’d be entered in their database, called for annual check-ins, and classified as deportable.

Mauro and Elena could always go home. Their old lives would wait for them. Yet staying under such conditions would prevent them from ever being able to visit Perla without losing the life they were beginning to make in the north. If they remained without adjusted status, they’d need to dissolve into the population, praying the laws changed, for amnesty or asylum.

Mauro passed time spinning bottles, flipping coins, pulling cards from a deck, searching for signs, a way to make the decision for his family to stay or to go. But there was no card for keeping Elena and her mother apart. No card for a life sentence of uncertainty. No card for forfeiting one country to bet on another. No card for regret.

* * *

Nando was much smaller than their daughter had been when she was born. Elena was sure it was the American diet, which somehow fattened a person while depriving them of nutrition. Mauro was in the room for the birth but was afraid to come back to see them in the hospital because he’d heard from neighbors of someone being arrested when visiting a dying relative, detained and swiftly deported. They heard such stories often. Mauro and Elena knew they would have to behave more perfectly than any natural-born citizen even if their complexions would always arouse suspicion. They were both people who followed the letter of the law, but once they overstayed they shuddered at the sight of police, who could ask point-blank for their government ID, and they’d have to admit they had none. For every deportation horror tale, there was another about someone receiving sudden amnesty, asylum, or a pardon so they could apply for residency, and they were filled with hope. And now they had a son who was different from them, with double the possibilities for his future.

Mauro took the morning off to bring Elena and Nando home from the hospital. He was about to leave them to try to make the afternoon shift when he got a call that the moving company’s office had been raided. Mauro was sure the police would arrive at their door—having found his address in the company’s files—and arrest and send them back to Colombia. Elena wanted to think him paranoid but in her exhaustion didn’t argue, even as she worried that the baby was too small to be on the move and the stress could be dangerous for him. She watched Mauro pack everything they could carry, confused about why being returned to their country now felt like such an abysmal fate. They’d made the decision to stay in the United States together, prolonging their departure for the birth of their son, but they never said for how long. In her mind, it was only as long as the conditions were bearable. Now they were on a bus to another strange place, where another man, whom they knew only by name, a friend of one of their Houston neighbors, was willing to give them a place to stay.

Elena watched airplanes hit the World Trade Center from a Spartanburg motel room. The man who was to meet them at the bus station never appeared. Mauro took to the phone to call everyone he knew on the east coast to see if they had any idea where he and Elena might go, where they could live with their two babies, make a life, at least for a while.

She waved at Mauro, motioning to the TV screen. “It’s not a movie. It’s happening right now.”

But his eyes were fixed on the paper in his lap, scribbled with names, places, and phone numbers.

As the second plane hit, Karina was tucked among bed pillows, and Nando, asleep in his mother’s arms. Elena wondered if she was hallucinating.

Soon both towers collapsed in a ruffle of smoke. She thought of the water tumbling over the falls at Tequendama or Iguazú. For a moment she forgot she was not looking at one of the world’s natural wonders but at a catastrophe of human design.

SIX

Talia was born on the coldest day of the year, Mauro and Elena’s third winter in the new country though their equatorial blood was still not accustomed. They lived then on the edges of Hookford, a small and unfriendly Delaware town, after a year spent in South Carolina, where Mauro found work at a pet-food plant and saved enough to buy an old minivan from another worker. There, the family occupied a room in a barn converted to employee housing, its slats and roofing pocked and sagged by punishing summer rains. On the communal TV, they watched the United States shower bombs over Afghanistan. Mauro and Elena were born of domestic war but felt uneasy in a newly injured America, mourning its three thousand dead, so full of angst and vengeance.

In South Carolina they became used to stares, absorbing hisses from locals of Go back to where you came from while Mauro and Elena pretended not to understand. Sometimes when Mauro was out alone, someone would mutter terrorist at him, as if he were one of the hijackers whose faces plastered the news.

At a gas station, Mauro went inside to buy his Saturday Powerball ticket. Two starchy men followed him out to his car, walling him between their bodies and truck.

“Where you from?” one said, more accusation than question.