* * *
By this time, we knew our father was on his way to us. He made it to Laredo, a border city we’d heard about on the news due to all the deportations of people who arrived seeking asylum from danger in their homelands, the separated families, parents and children torn from one another and placed in detention. But he was safe, only hours from where he began his first journey in this country with our mother and me. He called to say he’d made it to a migrant shelter run by some nuns where they let him rest. Someone there connected him with a volunteer group that told him buses and trains were too risky. Through their network they arranged a series of car rides and safe houses so he could cross the country. Till then, we waited. Our mother didn’t sleep much those nights, and sometimes I left the room I shared with my sister to sit with her on her bed and listen as she told me it was a scary thing to have all your prayers answered.
* * *
They delivered him to our mother’s employers’ gate. I saw him walking up the driveway. My brother and sister were at school, and our mother was in the main house. I went to him, but my last steps shrinking our gap were slow and heavy. He said my name. I could see he was nervous that I would reject him. I went to him and reached around his body for a hug. I am almost as tall as he is now, but I was small again and his scent came back to me; we were no longer in the driveway but in some apartment I hadn’t thought about in years yet no time had passed at all.
I led him to the main house and saw his eyes take in the proportions of everything, the softness and beigeness of the walls and upholstery, every rug and painting and decorative detail as he trailed me from room to room in the otherwise empty house and I called for my mother. Then she was in front of us, a laundry basket in her hands. She dropped it when she saw him, her face rumpling with a dry cry as he ran to her and held her and she made kittenish whimpers in the fabric of his shirt. In my waking memory, I’d never seen them like this, had no recollection of them touching or even speaking face-to-face, but an intimate familiarity came over us; I felt a river current, a serpentine wind, an artery of lightning pass through my parents and through me. I didn’t know how long they’d be like this, but it didn’t matter; I already felt the moment become eternal.
* * *
For now we still live in the cottage until we can save for a bigger place. You may have noticed I haven’t told you the name of the town. That’s because as long as we’re here, we’re vulnerable. Until something changes in the laws and the climate so that people understand we are not the enemy. Our family is whole now, but there is no day that passes without anxiousness that I may come home to find my mother or father have been taken into custody. Or that the one taken could be me.
Our father is doing handiwork and repairs for a friend of our mother’s bosses. When he’s not at his new job, just as my mother and sister have done, and my brother with the pages he handed over, our father has begun to tell me the story of him, of how our family came to be, which I’ve tried to write here, though the stories keep coming, so I know the book of our lives will continue to grow with truth and time.
It’s not that the sum of these pages can tell everything about us. There are things we will never share with one another, that will remain unnamed or unspoken. Things I save for private journals, like how I wonder if I will ever find the kind of love I want, a love that at least at its inception resembles what our parents felt when they discovered each other and trusted each other enough to travel to a new world together. There are innumerable joys left out of these pages. Sorrows too. A life rendered will always be incomplete.
Soon after our father arrived we went to a party in our old neighborhood and introduced him to our friends from the basement days. When a cumbia came on, he asked our mother to dance, and we watched our parents sway, finding each other’s rhythm as if they’d never fallen out of step, as if the past fifteen years were only a dance interrupted waiting for the next song to play. I wondered about the matrix of separation and dislocation, our years bound to the phantom pain of a lost homeland, because now that we are together again that particular hurt and sensation that something is missing has faded. And maybe there is no nation or citizenry; they’re just territories mapped in place of family, in place of love, the infinite country.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To the families who see aspects of their experiences reflected in these pages: You are my heroes. I wrote this book for you.
To victims and survivors of every kind of violence, and to the displaced and the disappeared: I carry you in my heart.