Hoatzin chicks differ from their parents. When young, hoatzins have two claws on each wing. The claws go away once the chicks mature into adults, but as children they can climb trees with their wing claws, jump into water and claw themselves out, fight predators if they need to. They are beautiful birds, the hoatzin, my favorite of all the birds. They have bloodred irises crowned by sea-blue plumage. They have red crests that rise up like crowns. This is how I picture my daughter, flying through these gates to me, shedding handcuffs and perplexing Immigration officers as she expands her wings and flaps them viciously, as she rises past the walls, past the chicken wire, past the guard booth. This is how I see her coming to me, arms spread, sun in her belly, royalty made of delicate bone and feather and laughter. My daughter, knowing she is royalty and ready to spread her killer claws.

4

HARDER GIRL

Jeanette

Miami, 2002

Johnson’s lips were rubber clams. His breath was stale and hot, though the sand pricked cold against Jeanette’s back. She turned her head when he tried to kiss her again, as if by looking away, nothing was happening, nothing but the ocean at her side. It’s never really dark in Miami Beach, even on a moonless night. Ocean Drive dripped its neon across a dying street, across a concrete wall, over sand dunes, all the way to shore. Eerie exit-sign green, Barbie-doll pink: they were awash in the palate of a night all wrong.

Jeanette spotted the hand first. Bloated, palm up, on the wet sand. Skin purple-red like a heart carved out of the body. She cheered it on, even. Yes, my little heart, run to sea and leave this moment. Then she followed the lines and angles, and a fuller graph appeared: an arm as the water receded, bobbing breasts as the water rushed back.

“Holy fuck,” she whispered. Shock gave her strength she couldn’t muster a moment before. Jeanette dug her heels into the sand and pushed Johnson off.

He tumbled onto his side, onto his elbow. “What the fuck?” He followed her gaze: water receding, body. “Fuck!”

They scrambled to their feet. Jeanette’s tank top was bunched under her armpits. Her nipples poked through a mesh purple bra. She pulled her top down and her denim shorts up from her ankles. They stepped closer to the water’s edge but stopped before the body like an invisible perimeter held them back.

Johnson said the obvious. Something like, “Holy shit. It’s a dead body.” The body was of a woman, perhaps in her forties, perhaps in her sixties. It was impossible to tell.

“What do we do?” she managed.