In the other country, she would have a sister and a brother. No longer a lone child caring for her grandmother’s health and her father’s heart.

In the other country, there would be no boy like Aguja sleeping beside her, who felt familiar the first time she saw his face, who knew hers too.

He was right. In the other country there would only be strangers and she would be a stranger, too, even to her own family. Her father would wait in Colombia, perhaps forever, for a daughter and a family who had learned to live without him.

What would have happened if she’d not gone to meet Claudia at the restaurant by El Campín that day, if there had been no kitten, if she hadn’t been in the alley when the cooks took their break, or if the man had shown mercy or indifference, left the creature alone rather than make the decision to kill, and if Talia, instead of reacting in fury had hung back in horror? His small yet barbaric act had showed Talia her own darkness, and she would never be the same. What if she’d never escaped her prison school and instead completed her sentence of just a few more months? At eighteen, after demonstrating reformation, they said her crime would be erased from her record. It would be something she could forget if she tried. But Talia was impatient as thunder. She wanted to believe her mother’s love unconditional but was afraid if Elena discovered what she’d done, what she was capable of and where her crime took her, she’d change her mind about having her long-distance child live with her. Sometimes Talia was grateful Perla died when she did. If she’d lived to see her beloved granddaughter sent to prison, it would have killed her.

Talia stood up and went to the stream, shallow and clear unlike the curdled arteries of the Río Bogotá. She squatted by the downed reeds, running her fingers through the waterline, skimming pebbles settled into the embankment. Her father once told her that river stones are good luck for journeys because waterways are peopled with spirits traveling between worlds, grazing those stones, leaving them as talismans for the living.

TWENTY-TWO

A flock of buses brought pilgrims to the basilica the next morning. Talia and Aguja watched the crowd thicken. He asked Talia one last time if she was sure she didn’t want to come instead of waiting on a bench. She was sure, she said, and watched him make his way to join the faithful. Perla had never been to the basilica but always lit candles and went to Mass on the Virgin’s feast days. She kept a statue of the blue-caped Santa María in her white veil on a table next to her bed. When she was small, Talia pretended it was a statue of Elena and her even if the baby in her ceramic arms was a boy. After Perla died, when Mauro sold the house and they prepared to move into an apartment, he packed the statue in newspaper, but the movers lost it and they never saw it again. Talia cried because she felt the statue, despite the Virgin’s chipped hand and missing nose, carried a piece of her grandmother, and without the house or the dust of her remains, which they’d sent to Elena, there was nothing of Perla left.