A few hours later Yamira reported that her sister knew of an available room in Sandy Hill. For now, they’d have to share it with another family until a space of their own opened up. It wouldn’t be so bad, Yamira said. She and Dante had lived in a house like that when they first arrived in New Jersey from Arizona. There would be plenty of food and people to help look after the children until Mauro was released from detention and they were able to find something better.

Talia was still the quiet one who watched her mother as if she understood everything. At night, after her brother and sister fell asleep, Elena whispered her fears as she fed her. She’d stopped writing letters, but she and Perla spoke twice a month. She didn’t say she was on her own, that she and the children shared a room with a Moldovan man, his Peruvian wife, and their infant daughter, deaf from birth. The two families slept on mattresses along opposite sides of the narrow cellar, the only clear space away from the boilers and loose wires, separated by a curtain of sheets. They could hear everything from the other side, but at least the material suggested privacy, even if a breeze of movement revealed the man slept naked, the child between her mother and the wall.

A summer night, after they’d all gone to bed, the Moldovan man pulled the sheet from where he lay on his family’s mattress and stared at Elena, his wife and daughter rolled to their wall. Elena’s children were asleep. She hardly slept though, and noticed the man didn’t either, stirring and groaning through the night, often rising to pace the room. He watched her. Elena wondered why until he slid his free hand under his blanket and she detected the motions of masturbation. She hid herself with her blanket, turning to her own wall, sheltering her children with her body. Even as he moaned beside his wife and daughter, Elena did not scream at him for his obscenity, reasoning, however foolishly, that she didn’t want to be responsible for causing hurt to another family.

Each night that followed, she made sure to cover up and face the wall, though she still sometimes heard his stifled gasps, and once, when his wife woke up and asked what was happening, Elena heard him tell her, “You’re dreaming. Go back to sleep.”

Elena’s nightmares returned. They started when she was six years old but left her consciousness when she met Mauro. Since the eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano, Elena had visions of her street and home flooded in mud and ash just as happened to Armero and the surrounding villages even though scientists said nothing like that could happen on the fault line of Bogotá. The tragedy happened only one week after the M-19 attacked the Palace of Justice, leaving more than a hundred dead or missing. Elena remembered the news images of the mudflow killing thousands upon thousands, turning the landscape into a sea of cadavers and torn limbs.