“Karina is doing excellent in school. Nando has a harder time but he’s a good boy. They both help me with Lance.”

“Who is Lance?”

“The boy I take care of.”

How could the kid’s name slip his mind? He heard Elena sigh and knew he’d disappointed her again. When they spoke, he felt she suffered through their dialogue. He almost wanted to hear her weep just to know she still felt something more. The last time he heard her voice wet with tears was when he was sent back to Colombia. When, after weeks of evasion, he called her and it was decided, though he no longer remembered exactly how, that Elena and the children would remain on the other side of the sea.

He’d like to be able to say he’d found absolution in the years he spent in the house helping care for Perla and Talia; when he managed to quit drinking and swore he’d throw himself off the roof if he ever let down his family again. Elena couldn’t return to see her mother as her breath and memory left her. He knew that when Perla looked at Talia in her final days, she saw her own daughter. Talia knew it too. She was a compassionate girl who let her face become a window to the life Perla and Elena knew before anyone else came along. Each day that Mauro worked in the lavandería after Perla no longer could, he thought of Elena, hoping she’d see how far he’d come in his atonement and think him worthy of being hers again.

He wished he could tell Talia the things she never knew, things she was too young to remember, in case, once she left him, she never returned.

Before departing for Texas, Mauro took Elena and Karina, who was just a baby, on a day trip. Elena had seldom been beyond the city periphery. Mauro told her he wanted to show her a piece of their history before they left for who knew how long. For years, he’d wanted to see the sacred lake that Tiberio had told him about during his years digging graves, the place the Muisca believed the birthplace of human life. They had no car, so they took a bus. Karina cried and cried. He took the baby from Elena so she could look out the window, watch buildings turn to lush grassland pitted with cows. Karina went quiet, her small form against her father’s chest. Her hair was growing in black and wavy. Her cheeks pinked, bundled so warmly she splayed like a star. Mauro had been the one to name her Karina. Neither Elena nor his first daughter knew it was a tribute to the mother who did not want him.

The bus left them at the base of Guatavita, where tourists and backpackers gathered. From there they made the hard climb up the hill path, Karina in his arms, to the mossy ridge where the shimmering lagoon came into view. He still remembered a calm unlike any he’d known before, not even in the sabana. Silence interrupted only by the conversation of birds. It was cold. Mist fell over them. He told Elena it was no wonder the Muisca venerated not only the water but the elusive sun, believing it to be much cleverer than the moon, more deserving of praise than even the Creator, Chiminigagua.