She wrote her letters at night, as Karina slept and Mauro listened to a small radio he bought, repeating words and sentences the newscaster said until they felt right on his tongue. At his job, he’d already picked up far more vocabulary than Elena. He tried to teach her some, but she didn’t see the point in pushing herself since they would eventually go home.

They did not consider themselves immigrants. They never thought that far ahead and were young enough to believe none of their decisions were permanent. They saw themselves as travelers discovering new frontiers. Their visas were for six months, though issued at different times, so Mauro’s would expire several weeks before Elena’s. They’d had to purchase return tickets for January as a condition of their visas, but with the hours Elena spent alone with Karina every day, the date felt further and further away.

“I’m tired of this,” she told Mauro one night when he returned from his job. “We’re not seeing America. We’re not doing anything here.”

“I’m working every day for our survival and to send money back to your mother. You call that nothing?”

“Why don’t we go home? We have a house to live in. We have the lavandería to run. I feel so alone here. We never should have left.”

On nights when Mauro sat by the window drinking the cheapest liquor he could find, his back turned to Elena even as she called him to bed, she considered leaving without him. She could take the baby and return to her mother, the house in Chapinero, the barrio where everyone knew her name.

Things improved when Mauro found them a small apartment in Northside Village. A woman on the floor above paid Elena to watch her children while she went to work at a plastics plant. They monitored the calendar as weeks and then months passed and their visa expiration dates approached, debating whether to overstay or to return home. Elena was surprised it was now Mauro who was ready to go back. He was tired. The daily furniture hauling was becoming too much even for him. The men he worked with called him esqueleto, their own bodies thick from working in factories or fields. Compared to them he was skinny as a nail, more bone than muscle, limbs like arrows in leather sheaths. He resented the idea of becoming what some called illegal, as if just waking up another day in North America made a person a felon. He missed their city, knowing where they’d sleep each month, the fragrances of Perla’s lavandería and the fruit stacks at Paloquemao. He even missed Bogotá’s chaos, the city’s brittle air in contrast to the strangling boa of Texas heat.

“Here we will always be foreigners,” he told Elena. “We’re Colombians. So is our daughter. It’s where we belong.”

Elena nodded. Their return seemed to be decided.

But then she said, “Mauro. I’m pregnant.”

In Houston, Mauro worked with many men who’d navigated the southern borderlands by foot, some four or five times. They came from different nations, passing through the corridor of the Americas, sometimes intercepted and sent back to their countries within days while others were held for months in camps with no walls, only tarps shielding them from the prickly southwestern sun and frigid night. Still, they returned, even as the journey became harder, the hazards more vicious, convinced this land offered more than theirs had already taken from them. Mauro and Elena arrived under different circumstances, but Mauro knew the consequences were the same if they didn’t leave when their visas expired. Without an adjustment or amnesty, a deportation order would come.