The best and most reliable route, he concluded, was through Mexico. He knew a man from his meetings, which he attended every night since Talia’s departure, who’d made the trip through the Chihuahuan desert successfully only to return to Colombia because he missed the wife and child he left behind too much. The journey was hard on the body, he warned Mauro. If you go that way, rest for many days before crossing. When you’re ready, dress like a gentleman on his way to church and pray one thousand rosaries. When you finish, you will be on the other side.
For months, he cut meals to save pesos. Sold his ruanas and trinkets leftover from Perla’s house to tourists at the flea market and took extra shifts at his job whenever he could. He turned the apartment back over to the landlord. Bought two plane tickets. One to Panama and from there, another to Mexico. The man who’d taken the desert route told him that from the capital he needed to head to the frontera and wait in a town named, of all things, Colombia. A man he knew there would help Mauro cross over. Entering the United States again without inspection or admission, as they say, could get him barred from the country forever.
It was worth wagering, Mauro decided, even if just to see his family one more time.
* * *
A dewy morning back in the same airport where he’d held his daughter before she left for her new life. He waited to board his own flight alone, this time as a free man and not as the prisoner he was when last returned to his country. Talia did not yet know that he was coming. He hadn’t wanted to share his plans, fearing his trip would be interrupted and he’d be forced back to Bogotá to begin the journey all over again.
He was not viewed as a criminal in any country but the one where his family lived. He would be safe until he arrived at the national line, and then he’d see how far his luck would travel. Until then, he guarded a new picture in his mind: Nochebuena. Their first as a complete family. Parents preparing a meal together for their three children, singing songs they used to sing, dancing the way they used to dance. Falling asleep with love in their hearts. The next morning, one of thousands with which they’d mend the years torn from their family pages, creating new stories in place of elisions. No more anguish of time lost. Nothing would matter but each new day and the ones to come.
THIRTY
I started writing the chronicle of our lives because it’s important to leave a record. For us, if for nobody else, because everyone has a secret self truer than the parts you see.
One day in early September, just before she was to start at her new high school, I saw my sister sitting with our mother in the garden near the creek knoll. I could tell by the way they faced each other, the way our mother’s gaze never moved while Talia’s searched around, often fixing on the blades of grass she held between her fingers, that she was confessing what she’d already shared with me, the crime she committed back home, how they’d sent her to a prison for girls on the edge of irredeemable, how she’d wanted to hide this secret forever because she thought we couldn’t love her in spite of it, even when I told her I understood; we all have breaking points, we all have regrets and maybe more instances we don’t regret that society tells us we should. I told her I understood what it was to want to create justice to fix an injustice even if my justice could be considered a crime. I know what it is to hurt and to feel hurt on behalf of others. I tried to say this in my best Spanish and asked if she understood, if she believed me, and she said she did.
I didn’t let myself watch their entire exchange. I went to our living room, where my brother was sketching faces, and watched him until our mother and sister returned to the cottage.
I want to say that our family entered a new era, not just of reunification, but of truth-telling that began with our mother, who told me a few days before our sister’s arrival what happened to her years before when she worked at a restaurant, at the hands of the man who hired and paid her. Maybe I sensed something like this had happened to her because I didn’t react with tears. I only listened, and when she was through, her face slack as a sheet hanging in the rain, I held her and told her I was sorry for being too small to protect her, but she said it was the very reason she was telling me now, to protect me from something similar happening, and most of all, to defend me from silence. In time, she would tell my brother and sister, she said, and our father too.
That night I thought about how love comes paired with failures, apologies for deficiencies. The only remedy is compassion. I thought about this again when my sister told me of her crime and how she’d run away from her school on the mountain in order to catch her flight to this country, because she thought if we knew or if she asked to postpone the flight we’d change our minds about wanting her to live with us; how she hitched rides across the departments of Santander, Boyacá, and Cundinamarca, and slept beside strangers until she made her way back to our father, and before she left that final morning for the airport, she wrote a letter to Horacio, the man she burned, saying she was very sorry she hurt him and wished him a good life though she did not expect to be forgiven, and she asked our father to mail it for her, though the mail in Colombia was notoriously unreliable and there was no way to know if the envelope, which she’d addressed to the restaurant where he once worked, made it to his hands.