The socorristas saw a hand reaching from the debris, and discovered a girl plunged to her neck in earthen sludge. Divers went under and saw her legs locked beneath the roof of her house, held in place by the grip of her dead aunt. Survivors kept vigil as rescuers tried to figure out how to save her from the hardening mud without amputating her lower half. The girl, named Omayra Sánchez, spoke to journalists who filmed the brown water trickling into her mouth, her eyes blackening with each passing day, asking people to pray for her, telling her mother and brother through the TV cameras that she loved them. She was hopeful even as the country watched her dying on their screens.

In Elena’s dreams, she, too, tried to pull Omayra to safety, but the girl felt heavy and only sank deeper into the mud, telling Elena to let her go. Other times, Elena became Omayra, feeling the weight of her aunt’s clutches, her body tearing, her lower half sinking into what used to be her family home while rescuers pulled her arms and torso free, though she knew she wouldn’t survive without the part of herself she left below.

People blamed the government for letting the girl die just like they’d let the people of Armero be suffocated by the lahars without warning they were in danger with enough time to flee. They said the military took too long to arrive with proper medical supplies, and they made the decision to let Omayra sink into the mud rather than bring equipment to amputate her legs. Others argued it was an impossible task. She would never have survived either way. Many said Omayra was an angel or a prophet sent to remind us of the ways we commit treason against our country and one another. That there had been signs if only people had been willing to see them. The night before the eruption, the haloed moon smoldered red as an open sore, a divine alarm some would call it, Creation’s indicator of an impending temblor. But others made excuses, said the moon fire was just pollution, urban fumes painting the sky.

In her dreams now, Elena was no longer the girl trying to save another girl, or the dying girl herself, but a bird or a cloud watching from above. The drowning towns, citizens reduced to parts floating on the carbon tide. Parents and children crying out for one another, so many of whom never found each other again, and some of the recovered children adopted to foreign families in other countries and given new languages and new names. The impossible and unforgiving Andean volcanic chain. Elena could see it all from this distance.

TWELVE

Mauro was permitted visitors but only if they were “lawfully present” in the country. Elena couldn’t even bring him a bag with clothes to take back with him on deportation day. If she did, the immigration officers might see she was undocumented and lock her up, too, leaving their children orphaned to the United States.