“What do you think it will be like when she gets here?” my brother asked.

“We’ll have to look after her. Explain things. It might take a while for us to get used to each other.”

“What do you think will happen to us?”

“With Talia?”

“With everything.”

When he turns twenty-one, my brother can request to have our mother’s status adjusted. In applying, he will have to tell them where we are. The stakes are brutal. They could deny the request and instead come for her and for me. I wasn’t sure if this is what he meant with his question, so I said what I always say about our future.

“I don’t know.”

Then I asked myself more questions without answers: If I vaulted off this mountain what would the headline say? An undocumented girl fell to her death. Would they print my name, describe my life as a loss or as a waste? If the fall didn’t kill me, would anyone care to record the story of my survival? I pictured being saved by some gravitational reversal, sprouting wings that would carry me from this place until I found myself among other migratory beings, bound for somewhere that feels more like home.

TWENTY-SIX

As a child, Elena’s mother told her about the condor that lived deep in the cordillera, so lonely that he flew down to the valley in search of a wife. He found a girl tending to goats in her garden and asked if she would be his wife. The girl said she loved her home too much, she never wanted to leave it, and for this reason she knew she would never marry, but she didn’t mind because she couldn’t stand the thought of leaving her parents behind. The condor said he understood because he’d once had parents he loved until they left him alone in their nest and flew away. The next day, the condor returned and again asked the girl to be his wife. Again, she refused. This time the condor said he would leave but asked the girl if she would please first scratch a painful itch for him. He lowered himself so the girl could reach his shoulders to scratch beneath his feathers, but as she did so, he took flight with the girl still holding his back and flew to his cave in the mountains. Once there, he pulled out some of his own feathers, decorating the girl to make her his bride. At home, the girl’s parents cried with worry over their missing child. A green parrot that lived nearby heard their wails, approached, and told them: “If I am able to bring your daughter home, do you promise you will always let me eat fruit from your trees and take shelter in your garden?” The parents agreed, so the parrot left to search for the girl. He found her atop a sharp peak living with the condor. By now, she’d grown her own feathers and birthed half-avian chicks that died. She was no longer human but something else. As the condor slept, the parrot took the girl back to her family. Upon her return, her feathers fell out and soon she was the girl she’d once been, happy and at peace in her home. The condor was furious and came looking for her. But the parrot was waiting in the garden where he’d been permitted to live, and when the condor tried to eat him, the parrot gathered all his might and pushed straight through the other end of the condor’s body. The condor tried to eat the parrot again and again, but the parrot escaped each time out the other end, until the condor decided to tear the parrot apart with the force of its beak and crescent talons, swallowing the meaty bits, but each morsel swept through the condor’s body, emerging in the form of smaller, brightly colored birds. And this was how the land came to be populated by parrots from the scarlet macaws to the tiny golden parakeets people like to keep in cages in their homes.