Lately when they spoke on the phone, Mauro told Elena the news abroad showed a United States scorching with civilian massacres as bad or worse than Colombia’s ghastliest days of warfare, where ordinary American citizens were more heavily armed than any guerrilla or paramilitary fighter ever was. And was it true—he asked—the stories of cities contaminated by the water supply, children killed by police with impunity, communities left to fend for themselves against natural disasters as bad as the earthquakes and mudslides their land endured? How could people still think of gringolandia as some promised land knowing those things happened there?

She rarely remembered any danger when she thought of her homeland. Lies often accompany longing. But it was worth something that she’d never been hurt or had to hide from anyone the way she’d had to do in the United States. Her birthplace had its own bigotry, inequality, terrorism, oil spills, water contaminations, and poverty just like in the north. But every nation in the Americas had a hidden history of internal violence. It just wore different masks, carried different weapons, and justified itself with different stories. She couldn’t guarantee to Mauro or to anyone that this country was safer than any other, or even that it offered more advantages or opportunity. Not anymore. She could only meet Talia with the love she’d been guarding for fifteen years. Her daughter had two countries to call home. Where she made hers would be her choice. If she ever decided to leave, Elena made a silent promise to let her daughter go.

She’d sustained herself on reverie of her family reunited in the north. Now that her youngest was due to arrive in a few days, a new dream took shape: that of returning with her children to Colombia, possibly on the day they’d spent years wishing for, when they were each granted permission to travel freely, to navigate the routes between their nations without fear of detention or exile. There, she saw Mauro waiting for them at the airport, ready to fold them into his wings.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Across the sabana, Talia’s city came into view. The unexpected harmony of russet buildings, avenues the color of shrapnel shining with recent rain. She guided Aguja from her place behind him, lips close to his ear. They passed the old house, barricaded and papered with construction permits. An announcement of imminent demolition. She led him to her and Mauro’s current address, the third-floor apartment opposite the widow who shared her stews with neighbors. Aguja parked his motorcycle along the sidewalk. Talia had no key, so she rang the building bell, but there was no response. She could only wait until her father came home from work and hope that in the meantime nobody recognized her.

They went to a park a few corners away. An elderly couple on a nearby bench fed crumbs to pigeons at their feet. Across the plaza, a young woman strollered a child. Talia didn’t know any of these people but somehow felt acutely connected, tethered to the wooden bench, the concrete beneath her feet. A sense of her life’s incompletion had led her this far, but now she wondered if she wasn’t meant to live anywhere but Bogotá.