Infinite Country(45)

* * *




The night before, she’d told her father she was afraid she and her family wouldn’t recognize one another at the airport.

“You will know them when you see them, and they will know you.”

She drifted through immigration and out of the baggage claim area, past another agent who took the paper form from her hand without any questions and through to a hall packed with excited faces, many holding signs, balloons, flower bouquets.

“How will they know me?” she’d asked her father, when they’d only ever seen her face crammed into the inches of a photograph or screen.

How will they know me?



* * *




In the end that was also a beginning, there was recognition beyond features and gestures. A love born before any of the siblings, that delivered her from her father back to her mother.

The mother held her child, both wanting to express everything with their embrace. Her mother’s arms were sinewy around her ribcage. She was shorter than Talia had believed. Her scent—powder, violets, something else—familiar yet new. Her earrings pressed hard against her daughter’s cheek, as she hummed, mi hija, mi hija, like a song.

Her brother and sister cloaked them with their bodies.

Her mother’s employers sent them to receive Talia in a big chauffeured car that waited for them outside the airport. Her sister and brother muttered to each other in English in the back seat. Her mother sat at her side, held her hand, reached for her face to kiss her cheek. Talia stiffened, remembering she was in a car full of strangers who were also her family. They told her that the next day there would be a party for her at the home of some friends in the town where they’d lived for many years. Everyone was excited to meet her.

She took in New Jersey, level and highwayed. So many lanes and cars, square buildings and a hazy horizon. Far from Colombia with its equatorial pulse and steepled mountains. She tried to restrain her tears, but they fell fast.

Her mother stroked her hair. “It’s too much,” she said. “I’m sorry. I should have known. We will take it slow. Tranquila, mi amor. No llores.”



* * *




Their home was a small house behind a larger one. A swimming pool sat in between. A boy watched from a window as the car pulled into the driveway. They showed her the bedroom she’d share with her sister, painted alabaster, windows overlooking rosebushes, no brick panorama like the one she left that morning. How would she sleep there, one night, a dozen nights, the hundreds or thousands of nights that would spread before her in an endless calendar of days waiting for something, she didn’t know what. Another departure? Another arrival? She was no longer sure where her journey began or where it should end.





TWENTY-NINE


Mauro waited in the airport for almost twelve hours, long after Talia’s plane left their soil and landed in that foreign space. She called when she arrived at her new house, her voice laden with uncertainty though she kept saying, “It’s beautiful here, Papá. So beautiful.” She thought her father was back at their apartment, but he was still by the checkpoint where he’d left her, watching other families in their last seconds together before parting. For the first hours after her takeoff, despite the solace of knowing that she hadn’t been detained, he worried there would be some malfunction or even a bomb threat; a reason for her plane to have to loop around in the sky and return home. Even after the airline employees told him her flight had landed safely in the United States he waited on a plastic bench with a shameful wish that she’d decided, instead of going home with her family, to take the next flight back to him.

They were thoughts that came with the heartsickness of separation. He knew such fantasies well, from their earliest incarnations when he was sent to the campo by his mother to when he found himself in the detention center and when the Americans dispatched him back to his country alone. His daughter had left him, but she still came to him in his sleep, asking him to tell her stories about the lake, about Chiminigagua, about the ancestors, begging him to bring them with him when he arrived to meet her in the north.

At first, her calls were frequent. Daily. Sometimes twice, in the morning and before she went to sleep. She reported everything about her new life, gossiping affectionately about her mother and her siblings. She suspected her mother was a little frightened of her. Not because she might be dangerous, but as if she were some breakable object, like a centuries-old museum artifact on loan between nations.

Her brother and sister, she said, took her on outings to Manhattan, where she felt choked by crowds and buildings taller than their highest mountains, where the subway vibrations reminded her of the tremors she felt underfoot back home, Chibchacum adjusting his load; and to the beach, wide as a field and full of people, sand coarse and mottled with cigarette butts, the Atlantic water inky and cold.

Her English improved beyond television and movie dialogue. Her sister became her teacher, instructing her to read pages of novels aloud for an hour each night. On weekends, her family took her to the other town where their good friends lived and the adults, too, treated her as if she were a special thing, precious and symbolic as an emerald ensconced in gold. She worried they hadn’t yet figured out that she was ordinary, she told her father, exceptional only in her ability to do harm and to run away, and was terrified that someone would learn of her crime and time at the prison school and tell her mother.