When she returned, Talia would see her father had a gift for her too. During the years when they were getting to know each other as father and daughter, when she was still in only Perla’s care, she glimpsed the ink on his forearm. She asked Mauro what it said because she couldn’t yet read.

“Karina.”

“Like my sister?”

He told her yes and watched her curiosity melt to hurt. Talia didn’t say so, but he knew she must have wondered why Karina’s was the only name written on his body. He could not explain there was no money to spend on tattoos. Karina’s name had been a whim, in the euphoria of the days after her birth, when he ran to the tattoo shop that had existed then around the corner and had his arm branded with his daughter’s and mother’s name. He remembered when he came home to show Elena. Skin tender and bloody, covered in ointment and a clear film. She brought his arm to her lips and kissed their baby’s name. The following year, when the three of them were in the United States, she would trace those same lines with her finger as if they held a kind of promise.

Now when Talia looked at her father’s arms, above the calloused hands she’d rub with her perfumed lotions every night when he came home from work as had been their ritual for years, she would see her brother’s name etched above her sister’s, and above Nando’s name, Talia’s own name in filigree script.

On his other arm, otherwise unmarked except for scars from his years working in the campo and those that followed in Ciudad Bolívar and Paloquemao and the United States, on the papery flesh over the veins of his wrist, was the name he should have imprinted himself with long ago. Elena. Though he would ask Talia not to tell her mother about it. He hoped one day to be able to show her himself.

Talia was not a sentimental girl. Not like Mauro, who the world might still consider young and vibrant but to his daughter was a melancholy old man. She might think his gestures soppy and insignificant rather than seeing, as he did, that once she got on that plane, he’d have little more than his family’s names carved into his arms.

The apartment, though small, would be too big for only him. The sight of his daughter’s empty room, those posters of gringo singers and bands she taped to the walls, would sting. He would return to his silence, something he’d gotten a dose of during her confinement, and the thought of the unending solitude that awaited him with her returned to North America was more than he would be able to bear. Some nights he even longed for the chaos he knew when he slept on the streets because, Mauro realized, it was a distraction from the echoes of his interior. He went to his meetings nearly every evening and hoped they would be enough to keep him from his former vices during the wilderness of time he’d be sentenced to after Talia’s departure.