“How could I have hurt you so much? I regret. So much. That I could ever have placed a hand on you.”

Jeanette wants to cry, too, but is always afraid that if she lets it happen, she will never stop. That if she lets the pain seep, she will need something, someone to stop the bloodletting. Only one way to kill pain. And then the weight of it: the daily exercise, sobriety. How it drags at her feet, keeps her chained to herself.

Jeanette shakes her head no because when Mario speaks the words, then they are real. Then she is the battered ex-girlfriend, she is the fists-to-the-face that really happened. That other life that feels so distant now. All she can feel when it’s just two voices across an expanse is the knowing that still survives. The body her fingertips memorized, the universe of a relationship. All its language and borders and landscapes. A geography she studied for years and still does not understand: a man who pummels a fist into her side the same day he takes in a kitten found lying in the crook of a stairwell during a rainstorm. Nobody knows about the fights that got physical. Nobody knows these phone calls still happen. She thinks of Ana in the next room, listening to the credits. Thinks how even the best mothers in the world can’t always save their daughters.

Ana wakes in the night and comes to her bed. Asks if she can sleep there instead. They lie faceup, blinking into the darkness.

“I couldn’t sleep,” Ana says. “I miss my mom.”

“Oh, sweetie.”

“When is she coming home?”

Jeanette runs her fingers through a tangle in Ana’s hair. “Soon, I’m sure.”

“When did she say she’s coming home?”

“Oh, soon, soon.” Jeanette tries to change the subject: “What did you mean when you said you came to this country twice?”

Ana turns. A small lump in the bed. A tiny cocoon. “I came when I was a baby. I don’t remember. Then when I turned four, we went back to El Salvador.”

“Why?”

“They made us.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. The government people.”

“So then you came back?”

“In a car trunk.”

“What do you mean?”

Jeanette’s eyes adjust to the dark. She turns, too, and can see Ana’s face, brown and smooth. A little button nose. Stringy hair spread around her like a crown. She smells as children often do, a sharp, sweaty sweetness.

“We had to hide in a dark car trunk to come back. Only sometimes we could poke our heads through the back car seats to breathe.”

Jeanette searches for words, thinks of the weight of Ana’s story and tries to find an appropriately serious response. But Ana fidgets and yawns, seems to give the moment little importance.

“She said we had to do it for me.”

“What?”