“Jairo has been dead for a long time,” one guy said.

“Who got him?”

“Police. Who else?”

By the time Mauro arrived at Perla’s house, he was already drunk on stolen aguardiente and it wasn’t long before he vanished to the streets with his shame.

During his years with Elena, Mauro went from a boy who slept among crates in a cold warehouse to a man who slept with his prometida in a soft bed under a roof, a baby between them, to a father who took his family across the sea to uncertainty. He never imagined he’d once again sleep in parks and plazas until poked awake by police, taking cover from rain under flattened cardboard and chased out of alleys.

Every few weeks he would return to Perla’s door. She fed him. Gave him a place to rest and wait out the rain, or money so he could go to one of those places in El Centro where they rented bunks by the night. Perla let him see the baby and hold her if he washed his hands many times and cleaned under his nails. Sometimes Perla convinced Mauro to lower to his knees so they could pray together before the Christ in the foyer and ask for mercy. He begged Perla not to let Elena know the state he was in, that he had destroyed their life together and was destroying it still.

Was it the disease or guilt that kept him on the streets, sometimes sleeping on the pavement across from Perla’s house so he could watch the closed door knowing the baby was safe inside and that he hadn’t returned to his country alone? He’d become unrecognizable to himself when he caught his reflection in shop windows, invisible to those he passed on the sidewalk with their averted eyes, shifting to avoid grazing his dirty clothes. He thinned from days spent walking, wandering, searching for places to sit, to rest, hunting in trash cans for food, engaging the charity of street vendors who sometimes offered a free meal. He remembered how Elena hated the northern winters. How they shivered and warmed each other, their children in their arms. How much colder he felt with nothing but fabric and skin to comfort him, wind knifing his joints and webbing his face.

As the baby grew, Mauro stayed close. Those were years when he and Elena rarely spoke. When she must have wondered if he’d died or at least found another woman. But he was close enough to watch the baby leave the house nested in the stroller every morning before Perla opened the lavandería and in the evenings after she closed. So delicate in how she rolled the child along, sidestepping bumps in the concrete that she never noticed Mauro huddled on the ground, draped in a blanket, shadowed in soot.

One day the child emerged walking, guided by her grandmother’s hand in a pink coat, black curls peeking from her hood, wearing white booties smaller than his fists. He wanted to call after Perla, tell her the vagabundo they’d shuffled past had been him, but it’d been so long since he’d spoken, heard his own voice. He forgot his words.