In Elena’s dreams, she, too, tried to pull Omayra to safety, but the girl felt heavy and only sank deeper into the mud, telling Elena to let her go. Other times, Elena became Omayra, feeling the weight of her aunt’s clutches, her body tearing, her lower half sinking into what used to be her family home while rescuers pulled her arms and torso free, though she knew she wouldn’t survive without the part of herself she left below.
People blamed the government for letting the girl die just like they’d let the people of Armero be suffocated by the lahars without warning they were in danger with enough time to flee. They said the military took too long to arrive with proper medical supplies, and they made the decision to let Omayra sink into the mud rather than bring equipment to amputate her legs. Others argued it was an impossible task. She would never have survived either way. Many said Omayra was an angel or a prophet sent to remind us of the ways we commit treason against our country and one another. That there had been signs if only people had been willing to see them. The night before the eruption, the haloed moon smoldered red as an open sore, a divine alarm some would call it, Creation’s indicator of an impending temblor. But others made excuses, said the moon fire was just pollution, urban fumes painting the sky.
In her dreams now, Elena was no longer the girl trying to save another girl, or the dying girl herself, but a bird or a cloud watching from above. The drowning towns, citizens reduced to parts floating on the carbon tide. Parents and children crying out for one another, so many of whom never found each other again, and some of the recovered children adopted to foreign families in other countries and given new languages and new names. The impossible and unforgiving Andean volcanic chain. Elena could see it all from this distance.
TWELVE
Mauro was permitted visitors but only if they were “lawfully present” in the country. Elena couldn’t even bring him a bag with clothes to take back with him on deportation day. If she did, the immigration officers might see she was undocumented and lock her up, too, leaving their children orphaned to the United States.
On their few calls during his months of detention, Mauro’s voice changed. He became broken-breathed, throat gruff as if he’d spent the night screaming. But when Elena asked how they were treating him, he assured her it wasn’t so bad in there; he met men who were doctors and lawyers and engineers in their countries, others who came to North America and built highways and roads and schools. Several were in detention for over a year already, hoping to be granted a “voluntary departure” instead of being branded with deportation. If so, they could apply to come back without having to wait five or ten years like Mauro would due to his arrests.
Some of the Puerto Rican guards spoke Spanish to the detainees, reporting news of the world like the August blackout that knocked out power across the northeast, paralyzing traffic and airports, though the detention center had a generator, so they only experienced a slash of darkness and a few flickers, a brief respite from the ceaseless fluorescence inside those walls.
Elena spent the day of the blackout on a folding chair out on the sidewalk with the other neighborhood mothers, while the kids twirled in the spray of an open hydrant. The men had already pulled meats from the freezer, and were grilling over coals out back. By nightfall, the power was restored, but the residents of the house acted as if it were a holiday, with music and dancing in the grassless yard. Elena sat with her children and watched, quietly celebrating that the Moldovan man and his family had recently moved out.
During the years Elena and Mauro contemplated staying in the country and the threat of being caught and sent back, they thought only of their lives lived here or lived there, not a fractured in-between. It never occurred to them their family could be split as if by an ax.
Elena knew Mauro wanted a life for his family in the United States, but they never discussed the possibility of that life continuing without him. He told her once through the buzzing detention center phone line, “You should stay. No matter what happens to me or what I say later. Stay.” She pretended not to hear him. Instead, she told Mauro how fast the kids were growing. Karina was speaking in long, complicated sentences, making up stories for Nando as they sat by the window watching the street, telling her hermanito the pedestrians were magic people who at night ascended to the sky, danced across the stars, and trampolined off the moon. Nando listened, mesmerized, and Elena was grateful Karina somehow knew, at not even four years old, to entertain her brother so her mother could look after the baby.