On the computers her employers gifted each of her children, she sometimes opened the screen to a program Karina taught her to use, sliding the cursor over the earth until she found Colombia from above, narrowing in on the capital in the leathered altiplano, sweeping her finger over the roping mountains as if she were a bird coasting across the plateau, drawing in closer until she found her street, her house. She adjusted the image till it was as if she stood on the sidewalk outside the lavandería door, a dream she reenacted many times through technology, but when she showed her kids the picture of her home, they met her with puzzled expressions at how the decrepit building on the screen could be the place she so missed and loved.

Mauro said Perla died in her sleep. Elena knew it before he called. She felt an icy draft spread over her as she slept in Lance’s room with him curled into her the way her own children used to do. Her heart roused. She lost her breath and knew her mother was gone.

When Mauro found Perla in the morning, she looked peaceful, as if she’d just closed her eyes seconds before. She was cold and hard to the touch, but he couldn’t stop Talia from running into the room and throwing herself over her grandmother’s body.

He said he could feel Elena in the room with them, as if she were in the air or in the plume of light parting the curtains. Elena told him it was true. She had been there with them. Even as she lay in that twin bed with a boy who was not her own in a house that was not her own in a country that was not her own. For those minutes, as the one who gave her life, the one she created life with, and the life she created, held one another and her mother’s spirit slipped away, they were together again.

NINETEEN

You already know me. I’m the author of these pages.

There is more to the story of me, but this is what you need to know for now: I’ve had borders drawn around me all my life, but I refuse to live as a bordered person. I hate the term undocumented. It implies people like my mother and me don’t exist without a paper trail. I have a drawer full of diaries and letters I never sent to my grandmother, my father, even to my younger sister that will prove to anyone that I am very real, most definitely documented; photos taped to our refrigerator, snapshots taken at the Sandy Hill house or other friends’ fiestas, the Sears portraits our mother used to dress us up for every year, making us sit on bus seats still as statues so we wouldn’t wrinkle to have a perfect picture to send back to her mother. Don’t tell me I’m undocumented when my name is tattooed on my father’s arm.