Talia rolled the passenger window down to release the dank truck air, then rolled it back up to keep out the bugs. Every hour through the bleed of green hills, the old man pulled over to rag-wipe grime from the windshield. They spoke for stretches, then fell quiet. In the talking part, he told her he used to drive cargo for a yanqui fruit company till accused of skimming shipments. He swore to her he never pocketed a single banana.
“We’re all innocent,” she said. Sometimes she believed this.
After some time, without lifting his eyes from the road, he told her, “Whatever you’re running from must be serious. You’ve got no money and no phone and haven’t asked to borrow mine to let anyone know you’re okay.” When this failed to prompt a confession, he tried again. “You can trust me. I’m a wonder at keeping secrets.”
“My grandmother who raised me is dying of a disease that stole her memory, so now she’s lost in time and everyone is a stranger.” All of this was fact except that her grandmother was already dead and Talia would have given her lungs for Perla to take another breath in this world. “My parents won’t let me visit her out of revenge because she never approved of their marriage. They took my phone and my money. I had to run away just to see her before she leaves this life. She may not recognize me when I arrive, but she will know in some part of her that someone who loves her is with her.”
He brushed a tear from an eye, admitting his greatest regret was having left his wife, the mother of his daughters, for another woman. When he realized his error it was too late. She wouldn’t take him back. He was on his way to Aratoca to see her, still hoping for forgiveness.
“What does your other woman have to say about that?”
“Nothing. She died.”
They drove past signs for towns she’d only ever seen on maps and knew she would never see again. The truck came to a checkpoint, slowing to a stop.
“Military now,” the old man remarked, “but not so long ago it was guerrilla, like there’s a difference. The worst part is these kids have no manners.”
A young camouflaged soldier approached his window. “Where are you headed?”
“Aratoca. We live there.”
He tipped his machine gun toward Talia. “Who’s the girl?”
“My niece.”
The soldier stared at her. “Is that true?”
“He’s my father’s brother.” Her mind flashed with the portrait of another life, one with aunts and uncles and cousins, a life she never knew.
The soldier stepped back, letting the mouth of his weapon slide toward the earth, signaling ahead to the other officers barricading the road to let the truck through. The downhill road smelled of gasoline, smoke, wet soil. She remembered when the police came for her at home. She’d asked if she could pack some clothes, but they’d said there was no need. She’d thought of running then, but there was only one way out of the apartment building and the officers were blocking it. Then the long drive up the mountain. One of six recently sentenced girls carted like livestock, wrists bound by plastic cuffs. The van windows blackened with paint but the scent of the unencumbered earth told her she was far from home.
TWO
The social worker described the compound like a summer camp, a small boarding school in the hills of Santander. A retreat, even if operated by the government. There were academic classes so the girls wouldn’t fall behind when, time served, they were free to return to their normal schools. She told Mauro he should be grateful his daughter wasn’t treated the same as girls from lower estratos, comunas, or invasiones, the ones usually sent to rougher facilities. Talia, she said, could pass for middle class, and this is why she was sentenced to only six months, given a path to redemption, even as Mauro argued this was a country of not second but hundredth chances for the chosen; a nation of amnesiacs where narcotraficantes become senators and senators become narcotraficantes, killers become presidents and presidents become killers.
Mauro knew what it was to be locked away. He’d never spoken of it with any of his children, with Elena or Perla. Men corralled in a warehouse cold as a meat locker. The rationing of showers and blankets and food. The dream of release, not to Elena or the children, but to the land the gringos threatened to banish him to as if it were a return to hell.
Home.
When she was small Talia often asked her father the meaning of the word. Home. Sometimes she understood it meant a house or an apartment, the place a person returned to at the end of a long day. The place where one’s family lived even if they left it a long time ago. The place one felt most comfortable. All of these notions contradicted her first sense of it. Home, to Talia, was a space occupied by her grandmother Perla. A place Mauro came to visit when she and her mother, Elena, over the international wires, permitted it.