Mauro took the morning off to bring Elena and Nando home from the hospital. He was about to leave them to try to make the afternoon shift when he got a call that the moving company’s office had been raided. Mauro was sure the police would arrive at their door—having found his address in the company’s files—and arrest and send them back to Colombia. Elena wanted to think him paranoid but in her exhaustion didn’t argue, even as she worried that the baby was too small to be on the move and the stress could be dangerous for him. She watched Mauro pack everything they could carry, confused about why being returned to their country now felt like such an abysmal fate. They’d made the decision to stay in the United States together, prolonging their departure for the birth of their son, but they never said for how long. In her mind, it was only as long as the conditions were bearable. Now they were on a bus to another strange place, where another man, whom they knew only by name, a friend of one of their Houston neighbors, was willing to give them a place to stay.

Elena watched airplanes hit the World Trade Center from a Spartanburg motel room. The man who was to meet them at the bus station never appeared. Mauro took to the phone to call everyone he knew on the east coast to see if they had any idea where he and Elena might go, where they could live with their two babies, make a life, at least for a while.

She waved at Mauro, motioning to the TV screen. “It’s not a movie. It’s happening right now.”

But his eyes were fixed on the paper in his lap, scribbled with names, places, and phone numbers.

As the second plane hit, Karina was tucked among bed pillows, and Nando, asleep in his mother’s arms. Elena wondered if she was hallucinating.

Soon both towers collapsed in a ruffle of smoke. She thought of the water tumbling over the falls at Tequendama or Iguazú. For a moment she forgot she was not looking at one of the world’s natural wonders but at a catastrophe of human design.

SIX

Talia was born on the coldest day of the year, Mauro and Elena’s third winter in the new country though their equatorial blood was still not accustomed. They lived then on the edges of Hookford, a small and unfriendly Delaware town, after a year spent in South Carolina, where Mauro found work at a pet-food plant and saved enough to buy an old minivan from another worker. There, the family occupied a room in a barn converted to employee housing, its slats and roofing pocked and sagged by punishing summer rains. On the communal TV, they watched the United States shower bombs over Afghanistan. Mauro and Elena were born of domestic war but felt uneasy in a newly injured America, mourning its three thousand dead, so full of angst and vengeance.