Behind her, the pigtailed girl who had gone in with her was thrashing and crying out. “I’m stuck! I’m stuck!” she wailed.

Her brother, holding himself afloat beside her, leaned over his tire and pulled at her arms. Water lapped over the little girl in spurts. Her head bobbed in and out of the water.

Ana froze, unsure whether to turn back and swim the feet that separated her from the girl. But one of the older women, closer, made it to the girl and pulled at her from the other side.

“My feet!” the girl cried. “The river is eating me!” She splashed and wailed each time her head went under.

“Quiet!” the older woman whispered loudly. “Stop yelling!”

Others along the ant trail of tire and body stopped and looked over. But slowly, as if an escalator had restarted, the bodies moved forward again. Standing still meant the current pushed the group further askew of the bushes for which they aimed. Ana began to kick again too. She reasoned there was no use in dooming herself if another was helping the girl. But there was an ugly calculation in her decision too—she also reasoned that there was no use if the girl couldn’t be helped. She tasted her own tears, or maybe sweat, her own salt. The sound of legs paddling and splashing. The pigtailed girl quieting. The whole night too quiet. She’ll be okay. Snaking her way forward. She could make out the shore, could see a bank and the patchy grass that framed it. Soon she would touch ground in the country that made her, expelled her. But Roma, Texas, meant nothing to her. Would Miami? Miami without her mother. She was crying again.

Ana was so young when she had first traveled to the United States. She could no longer make out the real memories from those instilled by her mother’s stories. Could no longer tell what had actually shaped her from what she’d been told had shaped her, should’ve shaped her. Somebody else’s story. She could close her eyes and see the trunk of the car, musty and hot, pinpricks for light and air over a piece of cardboard that covered her.

Of her actual life in the US, though, she remembered more. She’d lived first in an apartment somewhere else in Texas with three other migrant families, sharing a twin bed with her mother. Then a friend had told her mother about a job working for a housekeeping company in Miami. So they had traveled by bus, Ana splayed on her mother’s legs so they’d only have to purchase one ticket.