Elena felt guilty for sending Talia to be looked after by Perla. Then Talia became her grandmother’s caretaker. Mauro said Talia acquired Perla’s best traits, tending to her gently, washing her so she wouldn’t be subject to the indignity of being bathed by Mauro. Talia dressed her. Combed her hair. Fed her, making sure Perla chewed and swallowed each bite so she wouldn’t choke, because the doctor warned that she would lose the reflexes needed for eating. She was like a baby, the doctor said, and like an infant, they’d have to keep her from harming herself.
The doctor told Mauro there was no hope for improvement. She would only decline, though Mauro never shared that with Talia. He didn’t want his daughter to see her grandmother’s condition as a death sentence. He didn’t want her to fear the body’s natural process as it was shutting down, preparing for its exit from life. He wanted her to see that as long as Perla took breaths and had a heartbeat, even if her own home and family felt unfamiliar to her, she was loved and valued and still so alive, and though they could no longer reach or understand her, and her expression became a blank, secretive mask, she would know through their touch and voices that she was safe and belonged there.
Mauro told Elena the official diagnosis was progressive supranuclear palsy and Karina went to the library and found as much information as she could. She brought home books they spread on the kitchen table in the cottage, looking at the diagrams of halved human brains while Karina read and explained their meaning. The disease, she said, was degenerative, with no cure. A slow erasure of everything that was recognizable about Perla to them and to her.
When she said goodbye to Perla and to her country, Elena had been left with the feeling that she’d deceived her mother. The feeling grew heavier when she chose to stay in the United States with Karina and Nando after Mauro was sent home. The fissure of not being present for the end of her mother’s days was one from which she knew she would not recover. She considered scenarios in which they could all be reunited. She could return to Bogotá to live in the house in Chapinero and care for her mother, but then she might never be allowed back in the United States. She would have to leave Karina and Nando behind, potentially with Toya or other friends from Sandy Hill. Or she would bring them back home with her so they could know there was a land where they truly belonged, and even if they’d never had the relationship Talia had with Perla, they would know what it was to have an abuela who loved them, and could get to know their father again too.
But then practicalities came to mind. Karina, like Elena, would have to wait years for a chance at permission to return to the only country she knew. If Nando and Talia were to return to the country of their births, they would have to leave their mother, father, and sister, and endure the same sentence of separation Elena lived. Every way she could imagine it, the family would be split. And so, Elena chose to stay.
On the computers her employers gifted each of her children, she sometimes opened the screen to a program Karina taught her to use, sliding the cursor over the earth until she found Colombia from above, narrowing in on the capital in the leathered altiplano, sweeping her finger over the roping mountains as if she were a bird coasting across the plateau, drawing in closer until she found her street, her house. She adjusted the image till it was as if she stood on the sidewalk outside the lavandería door, a dream she reenacted many times through technology, but when she showed her kids the picture of her home, they met her with puzzled expressions at how the decrepit building on the screen could be the place she so missed and loved.
Mauro said Perla died in her sleep. Elena knew it before he called. She felt an icy draft spread over her as she slept in Lance’s room with him curled into her the way her own children used to do. Her heart roused. She lost her breath and knew her mother was gone.
When Mauro found Perla in the morning, she looked peaceful, as if she’d just closed her eyes seconds before. She was cold and hard to the touch, but he couldn’t stop Talia from running into the room and throwing herself over her grandmother’s body.
He said he could feel Elena in the room with them, as if she were in the air or in the plume of light parting the curtains. Elena told him it was true. She had been there with them. Even as she lay in that twin bed with a boy who was not her own in a house that was not her own in a country that was not her own. For those minutes, as the one who gave her life, the one she created life with, and the life she created, held one another and her mother’s spirit slipped away, they were together again.