All these years we’ve been watching out for the government and you’re ready to hand yourself right over, you told me. I let you think you won the argument, but the truth is I didn’t really want to go anywhere. I wanted to be convinced to stay.
TWENTY-FIVE
At the Palisades with my brother, I noticed crows swarming the river basin. I read somewhere that crows aren’t usually found in estuaries and are more inland prone. People marvel at the miracle of animal instincts for migration to ensure their survival. Hippos, zebras, and lions were imported to Colombia by drug lords for private menageries, then abandoned when the arrests and extraditions began. Some animals starved, others were given refuge, and still others found ways to roam free and populate hills and valleys with their offspring. They’ve adapted and thrive in terrain for which they have no genetic memory. Unless you believe, as our father told our mother long ago, that the first beings traveled every inch of this earth, claiming it as home for all creatures.
Our mother was captivated lately by the news story of a Colombian woman lost in the Amazon jungle for nearly forty days with her three children. The fruits they found had already been eaten by animals, so they dug for seeds and worms. By day, monkeys threw their shit at them. At night they covered in sticks and leaves, though rain still drenched them, sometimes flooding to their necks, and insects burrowed in their ears, noses, and eyes. The woman held her children close while creatures approached—owls, armadillos, snakes, maybe tapirs or animals whose names she didn’t even know. In the black jungle night, she couldn’t be sure. Once she heard an undeniable jaguar call and knew it could be their end. She prayed it wouldn’t track their scent and never heard it again. She believed the forest duende, said to be fond of mestizo children, made them get so lost they couldn’t find their own footprints and protected them now, though not from the ticks and maggots fattening on their blood that they pulled from their raw feet and open wounds. She told her story from a hospital in Putumayo, where she and her children were treated for hunger, dehydration, and parasites after an Indigenous fisherman saw them drinking water from a riverbank, thin as spirits, almost too weak to stand, as if the gentlest wave might sweep them away. Our mother seemed most affected that this woman had no idea hundreds of volunteers, police, and army helicopters upturned the jungle looking for them with no luck, that she and her children had traveled so far searching for a way out that they’d left the Colombian Amazonas and entered territory claimed by Peru, and once rescued, her husband confessed that with his family lost to the selva he’d already planned his suicide.
For months now, we’ve also seen news stories of other divided families, children separated from their parents at the southern border. I haven’t told anyone I dream of these children in particular, hear their cries, the eventual silence of capitulation, feel their ache of lost faith and unknowing. In my sleep, I am one of them. Our family didn’t cross any desert or river to get here. We came by plane with the right documents, now worthless. My life, like my sister’s and my brother’s, is a mishap, a side effect of our parents’ botched geographical experiment. I often wonder if we are living the wrong life in the wrong country. If the reason I have felt so out of place is because I, like the narco animals, have no biological or ancestral memory of this strange North American landscape or its furious seasons. These mountains and rivers are not mine. I haven’t yet figured out if by the place of my birth I was betrayed or I am the betrayer, or why this particular nation and not some other should be our family pendulum.
I looked over the bluff at the tidal ponds below and thought of lives lost to the crags and current. I clawed the rock I was sitting on, closed my eyes, felt wind scarf my neck, and imagined the feeling of hurling myself over.
“What do you think it will be like when she gets here?” my brother asked.
“We’ll have to look after her. Explain things. It might take a while for us to get used to each other.”
“What do you think will happen to us?”
“With Talia?”
“With everything.”
When he turns twenty-one, my brother can request to have our mother’s status adjusted. In applying, he will have to tell them where we are. The stakes are brutal. They could deny the request and instead come for her and for me. I wasn’t sure if this is what he meant with his question, so I said what I always say about our future.
“I don’t know.”
Then I asked myself more questions without answers: If I vaulted off this mountain what would the headline say? An undocumented girl fell to her death. Would they print my name, describe my life as a loss or as a waste? If the fall didn’t kill me, would anyone care to record the story of my survival? I pictured being saved by some gravitational reversal, sprouting wings that would carry me from this place until I found myself among other migratory beings, bound for somewhere that feels more like home.