Infinite Country(47)

THIRTY


I started writing the chronicle of our lives because it’s important to leave a record. For us, if for nobody else, because everyone has a secret self truer than the parts you see.

One day in early September, just before she was to start at her new high school, I saw my sister sitting with our mother in the garden near the creek knoll. I could tell by the way they faced each other, the way our mother’s gaze never moved while Talia’s searched around, often fixing on the blades of grass she held between her fingers, that she was confessing what she’d already shared with me, the crime she committed back home, how they’d sent her to a prison for girls on the edge of irredeemable, how she’d wanted to hide this secret forever because she thought we couldn’t love her in spite of it, even when I told her I understood; we all have breaking points, we all have regrets and maybe more instances we don’t regret that society tells us we should. I told her I understood what it was to want to create justice to fix an injustice even if my justice could be considered a crime. I know what it is to hurt and to feel hurt on behalf of others. I tried to say this in my best Spanish and asked if she understood, if she believed me, and she said she did.

I didn’t let myself watch their entire exchange. I went to our living room, where my brother was sketching faces, and watched him until our mother and sister returned to the cottage.

I want to say that our family entered a new era, not just of reunification, but of truth-telling that began with our mother, who told me a few days before our sister’s arrival what happened to her years before when she worked at a restaurant, at the hands of the man who hired and paid her. Maybe I sensed something like this had happened to her because I didn’t react with tears. I only listened, and when she was through, her face slack as a sheet hanging in the rain, I held her and told her I was sorry for being too small to protect her, but she said it was the very reason she was telling me now, to protect me from something similar happening, and most of all, to defend me from silence. In time, she would tell my brother and sister, she said, and our father too.

That night I thought about how love comes paired with failures, apologies for deficiencies. The only remedy is compassion. I thought about this again when my sister told me of her crime and how she’d run away from her school on the mountain in order to catch her flight to this country, because she thought if we knew or if she asked to postpone the flight we’d change our minds about wanting her to live with us; how she hitched rides across the departments of Santander, Boyacá, and Cundinamarca, and slept beside strangers until she made her way back to our father, and before she left that final morning for the airport, she wrote a letter to Horacio, the man she burned, saying she was very sorry she hurt him and wished him a good life though she did not expect to be forgiven, and she asked our father to mail it for her, though the mail in Colombia was notoriously unreliable and there was no way to know if the envelope, which she’d addressed to the restaurant where he once worked, made it to his hands.



* * *




By this time, we knew our father was on his way to us. He made it to Laredo, a border city we’d heard about on the news due to all the deportations of people who arrived seeking asylum from danger in their homelands, the separated families, parents and children torn from one another and placed in detention. But he was safe, only hours from where he began his first journey in this country with our mother and me. He called to say he’d made it to a migrant shelter run by some nuns where they let him rest. Someone there connected him with a volunteer group that told him buses and trains were too risky. Through their network they arranged a series of car rides and safe houses so he could cross the country. Till then, we waited. Our mother didn’t sleep much those nights, and sometimes I left the room I shared with my sister to sit with her on her bed and listen as she told me it was a scary thing to have all your prayers answered.



* * *




They delivered him to our mother’s employers’ gate. I saw him walking up the driveway. My brother and sister were at school, and our mother was in the main house. I went to him, but my last steps shrinking our gap were slow and heavy. He said my name. I could see he was nervous that I would reject him. I went to him and reached around his body for a hug. I am almost as tall as he is now, but I was small again and his scent came back to me; we were no longer in the driveway but in some apartment I hadn’t thought about in years yet no time had passed at all.

I led him to the main house and saw his eyes take in the proportions of everything, the softness and beigeness of the walls and upholstery, every rug and painting and decorative detail as he trailed me from room to room in the otherwise empty house and I called for my mother. Then she was in front of us, a laundry basket in her hands. She dropped it when she saw him, her face rumpling with a dry cry as he ran to her and held her and she made kittenish whimpers in the fabric of his shirt. In my waking memory, I’d never seen them like this, had no recollection of them touching or even speaking face-to-face, but an intimate familiarity came over us; I felt a river current, a serpentine wind, an artery of lightning pass through my parents and through me. I didn’t know how long they’d be like this, but it didn’t matter; I already felt the moment become eternal.



* * *




For now we still live in the cottage until we can save for a bigger place. You may have noticed I haven’t told you the name of the town. That’s because as long as we’re here, we’re vulnerable. Until something changes in the laws and the climate so that people understand we are not the enemy. Our family is whole now, but there is no day that passes without anxiousness that I may come home to find my mother or father have been taken into custody. Or that the one taken could be me.