Since they came to the north, there were moments when Elena considered taking the children and leaving him. But she convinced herself every woman experiences the same temptation. Real love, her mother once told her, was proven only by endurance. Elena’s impulse was always to stay, to remain a complete family. No matter where or how they lived, she was certain their chances of survival were better together than apart.
SEVEN
The landlord arrived unannounced. Weeks after Talia’s birth someone anonymously reported seven people living in the apartment above the pizzeria when only two were on the lease. Mister and Madame tried to keep the landlord in the living room, but he made his way to the second bedroom and found Elena and the three children asleep on the pullout couch by the window overlooking the alley. Mauro was in the shower. There was only one bathroom for them all, and Mister and Madame asked the family to bathe within certain hours of the morning or night so as not to disrupt their routines. When Mauro emerged, dressed with hair damp, he found Karina and Nando crying. The baby, however, was silent, eyes following as her father and Mister and Madame tried to reason with the landlord, as if she knew before anyone how all this would turn out.
The landlord called it unlawful occupancy, because of the number of tenants and because three out of the family of five did not have permission to be in the country. He said he could not risk being fined by the city, that harboring “illegals” was some kind of crime, he suspected, though Mister and Madame insisted that wasn’t true. He warned the couple that if they tried to hide the family in their home, he would change the lock on the door and have them evicted.
“You are good people,” he told them. “Don’t let yourselves be taken advantage of.”
Elena didn’t understand most of the conversation as it was being said. Mauro explained it later. How the landlord agreed to give them one week to find somewhere else to live before penalizing Mister and Madame. This was a special consideration, the landlord emphasized, because they had a newborn.
On his day off Mauro went to search for a place for the family to stay. He’d already asked his coworkers at the motel if they knew of anyone renting out an efficiency or a room or a trailer and came up with nothing. Next, he’d try the crew at the paper warehouse he used to sweep and then the factory where he once packed boxes of scented candles. They couldn’t go back to spending nights in the car. Not in this cold. They’d coped before, in spring and summer months when they made their way up the coast from South Carolina looking for a place to settle, washing in gas station bathrooms. Elena spent hours in parks or shopping malls with the children while Mauro hunted for work.
Before leaving that morning, he kissed Elena and each of the children. The new baby was on her chest, Karina and Nando curled at her sides, still sleeping. Since Talia’s birth, Mauro had kept his word. Not one finger of alcohol. Radiant with sobriety, he’d hold the baby, singing songs from their childhoods already fading from memory.
“I’ve had a premonition,” he whispered, wreathed in muted light. “Better things are coming for our family. I feel it as certain as the sunrise.”
In the bedroom long after he’d gone, Elena remembered the days when their love was new, taking hold like wildfire though safely contained by the mountains skirting their natal city; before they became infected by that dream more like a sickness, that their life in Colombia was no longer good enough for them. That somehow, they deserved more.
If there was a time to return home, Elena thought, it was now, but in the past two weeks alone, a car bomb ignited at an elite social club frequented by government officials just blocks from the house in Chapinero, killing thirty-six, the deadliest attack the country had seen in years, and another bomb in Neiva targeting the president took sixteen lives. No country was safer than any other.
A woman was found dead in the dumpster in the lot behind the motel where Mauro and Mister worked. It happened the previous night as they slept. Elena watched the Spanish TV news after everyone left the apartment for the day. As with the bathroom, the family could only use the kitchen when Mister and Madame were not, which wasn’t easy, since Madame spent her evenings cooking. Elena sat Karina and Nando at the kitchen table to eat canned noodles and held the baby close. The reporter said the victim was a motel guest, though the room wasn’t registered in her name. She might have been a prostitute. It was known that many passed through. Businesspeople stayed at the nicer chain hotels up the highway. This motel was nobody’s first choice. Mauro mopped the lobby and halls and bedroom messes too filthy for the motel maids to handle on their own. One of his coworkers must have found the woman’s body. Elena thought about the dead woman all day as she waited for Mauro to return. She wondered about her family, those who loved her, if they lived in the United States or elsewhere. How sad, Elena thought, that her life’s end had been discovered frozen among trash.