Corto, calvo, tuco. En San Salvador era mecánico; trabajaba en tornos. Eso decía su cédula de los 70s. No sabe su nombre. Dice que lo olvida.¹

I read him his name from his ID card, and he smiles, head bobbing in recognition, the creases of his eyelids wrinkling upwards like long curling tails. “Dios le pague,2” he says. 

This man and I are not related, but at the doctor’s office, they ask me if I’m a family member, a granddaughter. His eye shape—the swoop, the curling tails—reminds me of my mother’s. I cook him plátanos. I fold his clothes. “Dios le pague.”

He lives with another man, a refugee from Liberia. They can’t stand one another; whenever one finds out I’m doing something for the other, he gets angry.

I hear my name and scurry down the hallway. 

“Where is my rice?” he bellows. “Why do you take so long?”

“I’m sorry, it’s almost done.”

“Is this your first time cooking? The rice last night tasted bad. Cook it better this time, and make sure you give me enough.” 

“I’m sorry. I’ll do my best.”

In every room of the house, even the shared spaces, there’s a portrait of an older man. When I ask, the Liberian man says it’s his father. He’s dressed sharply in a highlighter-green suit, cylindrical hat sitting proudly atop his head, but his eyes are wide and frightened, face contorted in a cross between fear and disgust. 

“My father is late,” he tells me.

“Mine too.” 

Mami worked two jobs to pay my private school tuition, took care of the laundry and the cooking, and my father and me. When I was little, he was warm and present, so she says. I’m not sure when that person vanished,      only that by the time I got old enough for memory to crystallize, he was mostly gone. 

“Mom is a princess.” My father says this casually one day as he’s walking me to elementary school. I’m sure it was after a fight, after she lambasted him for being useless and then apologized to his retreating back. “She’s just unhappy because she has to do things for herself now. When she lived in South America, she didn’t have to do anything.”

Alone with these men and their ghosts, their silent house, I replay a memory, watch it open like a cracked window: I’m twenty-four or twenty-five, sitting at the dining table with Tita, my mother’s mother. I tell her I like girls. 

She’s silent for a moment, then shakes her head forcefully. “No. No es natural.”

I try to explain something, that this isn’t a choice, that the way I’m thinking of it at the time, it’s not even who or what I want to be. Words start to come out, stutter, stop. 

She looks up at me, her eyes watery with age, or tears, or both. “Things will be harder for you.” It comes out like a plea.

For some reason, every time I think about it, this scene plays out in my childhood apartment in New Jersey, but I know that can’t be true. By this time, Tita is living in the Poughkeepsie house with my parents; my dad is still alive. Mami cooks for Tita, washes her clothes, bathes her. I’m dating a guy they like for me; he’s half-Mexican, has a stable, boring government job.

“I can’t marry him,” I tell Tita. I know that then, even though it’ll be a couple years before the knowing seeps into me enough to tell him and everyone else.

“Pero mijita,1” she says. “He’s a good person. He comes from such a good family.”

Nombres desconocidos, nombres desaparecidos. Unknown names, disappeared names.

My mother tells me a story I haven’t heard before: Once, when she was twelve, my grandfather and some of his professor friends from la Universidad de Chile took her with them to Valparaíso. They were out on a boat when the anchor broke. One of the men dove down to recover it and quickly came back up, his face white. The ocean floor, he said, was littered with skulls and bones. Some of them were bodies still, their hands pointing up towards the surface, suspended as if in prayer. At night, the air thickened with the sounds of helicopters and small airplanes. 

Tío Daniel, an uncle of Mami’s cousin Albertito, had worked for the Allende administration. They shot him, execution-style, at home; he was hiding in the bathroom. Blood ran up the walls to the windowsills, dried in ribbons. They hung there like a garnish for weeks until someone quietly wiped them away. “You’d think all of that would have turned Albertito anti-Pinochet,” she says, “but it didn’t.”

In the Museo de La Memoria, there’s a hall with a touchscreen. Press a button, and a thousand faces of the dead appear, each suspended in its own little square. I type in Tita’s last name and the town her family is from, Linares, Pikun Mapu. I find a cousin who was killed there, a funcionario, a socialist. 

They vanish like memory.

For months, I keep my move to Australia a secret from my family, until the day I leave, I relent to Mami’s request to send a text to the family group chat. They explode with guilt and anxiety: “What about your mother? What will she do without you?”
“Good luck, Anna. I hope this works out.”

Mami and I argue relentlessly about the Trump administration, about Project 2025, about the future of our country. “They’re incompetent,” she says. “And people are fighting back.” But before I leave for the airport, she looks at me, something quietly clicking into place, tracks of the past and present aligning at once. “Váyase no más1. Dad would’ve told you to leave.”

Long after I was old enough to do it myself, she’d make my bed, grumbling all the while about how any daughter of hers could be so dejada². Her love a reverse mirage, what I could not see, what all along was near enough to touch.

¹ Just go.

² Dejada: Chilean slang for disorganized, lazy.