“We can sell the house and find another,” Elena said. But they both knew Perla would never allow it, stubborn as she was. Even with her chemical asthma from decades of working in the laundry she refused to close.

“Please trust me, Elena. It’s not yet time to go back.”

In Delaware, on the drive to the hospital through streets cottoned with snow, Elena tried to find the seam between earth and sky, but there was none. Talia started pushing her way out hours before, but Elena wanted to wait until the baby was absolutely sure it was her moment. There was no time left for an epidural. She didn’t have one when delivering her other children. Elena had only one ultrasound in the last nine months, early on at a clinic across the river in Blades that didn’t require insurance and where she had to pay cash. They couldn’t afford another, and she had no medical care beyond her instincts, but she didn’t worry. In Texas she’d had plenty of scans and checkups, and the doctors were always telling her something was wrong with her baby, that she would be wise to terminate or he might be born dead or close to it. She didn’t listen, and Nando was born small but perfect. Later she heard from other women who’d been told similar things and given birth to healthy babies too. She didn’t know she would have a daughter until the baby was in the doctor’s hands. With her previous births she’d bled like a slaughtered calf but not this time. The ease of Talia’s arrival stunned everyone.

On the day of her birth, their home was a small bedroom in an apartment above a pizzeria whose ovens below kept them warm on days the radiator blew out, the scent of dough and cheese filling their walls. The apartment’s true tenants were a couple from Pakistan. Mauro knew the husband from his janitor job at a local motel. He and his wife slept in the other bedroom and told Elena and Mauro to call them Mister and Madame. Mister worked as a front-desk attendant and Madame as a seamstress. Their teenage son died of leukemia years before, so his bedroom was empty and they sublet it to the family for one hundred dollars a week. Elena could only communicate with them in scrambled words and gestures. Mauro mostly took over with the English he’d learned at his jobs.

Nights were cold. The family wore their coats even to sleep, the children released from their blanket cocoons only for changing or to be fed. Karina was three. Nando, two. Madame looked after them so Mauro could stay in the hospital and hold the baby as Elena slept. She shared a room with another woman. The new mother of a boy. Elena noticed nobody came to visit them. She didn’t speak Spanish, but when they were alone she brought the baby to Elena’s bedside and they held each other’s children until her boy cried and they traded back.