When she first got to Mexico, baby deportee, the strawberries had made Ana sick. Or maybe it’d been something else. She was sick all the time at first. Doña Nancy said to her: me too.

They were lost or abandoned or there had been some mix-up. Or this was on purpose. A kindness? A cruelty? A trick? They’d been dropped off over the border in Mexico instead of flown to El Salvador and no one kept track of them. Everyone assumed they were traveling north. Straight off the train tracks and biding time in a city along the path. They just lay low and ducked migra like the rest, knowing they’d make their way back. The first thing her mother had done was call a cousin who lived in Irapuato. The cousin found Gloria this job. She made hardly any money, nothing even close to what she’d earned in Miami, but they had a room. Her mother told her she’d save so Ana wouldn’t have to hop trains or walk miles, if she could help it. Burn money on a van, on the most expensive guide. Months whipping by. Years. Doña Nancy: “Who’d want to leave such a beautiful country?” As if anything were about beauty. Or want.

Her mother wasn’t the doting type but Ana knew her mother loved her. Because, look—she, too, cried sometimes talking about the kids playing, about all the other possible lives if x or y had happened instead of z. Saying, I’m so proud of you, all the ways you help me. Gloria loved to dance but she didn’t go to dance clubs as she had in Miami anymore. And whenever Ana spied Nancy in the bathroom, carefully applying eyeliner for a night out with Roberto or her “ex-pat” friends, Nancy jiggling her hips to a radio song with a shot of tequila in her hand, she wanted her mother to be Nancy too. She wanted to grow up even faster so maybe she could set her mother free.

Her last year in Mexico, Gloria got sick. Fast, like one day blood in a tissue and the next there they were, the two of them, huddled in a dark IMSS hospital. (Nancy had paid a doctor to see her even though she had no papers but let them know she couldn’t pay long-term.) Doctor saying, Why’d you wait so long? Saying, I don’t know, there’s not much we can do, would the patrona pay for chemo? I don’t know, it’s so advanced.

Walking her mother down a hallway, holding her oxygen tank. Helping her onto a bus because Nancy was working and couldn’t pick them up. How her mother placed a hand in her lap. Whispered thank you, and Ana wasn’t even sure for what.