It had been Mauro’s idea to leave. Elena only followed.

How odd that in the end it was he who returned home and she who stayed.

Mauro called Elena from Perla’s house. He’d been living there since his repatriation, though Perla said he drank through most days and only left the room he once shared with Elena and Karina to go buy more liquor. Elena expected him to tell her to come home. Beg for it. She waited for his pleas, but they never came. Instead, he wept, “I failed you, I failed our family.”

It was easy to keep silent through the erratic phone connection. Echoed voices and delays that regularly splintered the conversation. She couldn’t tell if he wanted her to assure him, to forgive him, or to announce that she’d already booked a return to Bogotá for the whole family. Something in her hardened. She wasn’t sure she wanted to go back anymore. She pictured Mauro in the house the way her mother described him, a ghost of a man, and wondered if she could do better for her children in the north until they figured out what came next, if there was a way to reunite.

She would look back on those months for years, trying to understand how she came to the decision. Was it a slow negotiation, or did it occur in a blaze of clarity or capriciousness? Was it the pressure of the women of the Sandy Hill house, who, in the isolation of motherhood, became something like sisters, or at least how she imagined sisters would be if she’d ever had one. She would recall how the homesickness that tortured her through her first years in the United States dulled and toughened her to the idea of going home. What followed was an accumulation of days that bridged one life in one country to a second life in another one. What Elena did not realize was the bridge had dissolved behind her.

She wonders even now, if somewhere in Talia’s memory there is the hidden picture of the day her mother let her go.

Newark airport on a drizzly morning. The baby would travel with Gema, who Elena knew from the panadería on Market, and who, for two hundred dollars and with a letter of parental authorization, agreed to carry the baby on her lap for the flight to Bogotá and deliver her upon landing to Perla before going to stay with her own parents.

Elena packed a bag with clothes, diapers, and food. She’d stopped breastfeeding in preparation for the day. Since Mauro was sent away she’d worried the stress would make her lose her milk, but she never did. She found a bench near the window and sat with the baby alone, whispering in her ear that she was her love and her heart and they would say goodbye for now but the heavens would bring them back together soon. She used the same voice she used every day, one that soothed and anchored the baby’s gaze to her own. But today it was as if the baby understood every word, because Elena had forced herself to be truthful, and the child cried as she never cried before, screams that turned the heads of passersby, and Elena cried with her.