Part Five: What She Said
I had not spoken to my parents since the night the gate closed.
Hearing her voice was something I was not prepared for, which is perhaps obvious but was not obvious to me until the moment it happened — the way the body did not wait for the mind to process history before responding to a familiar voice.
“She is with us,” my mother said. “She is well. She is safe.”
“How—” I could not form the sentence. “You were at the hospital? How did you—”
“We were looking for you,” she said. “We heard you were in the city. We came to find you. The hospital — there was confusion. We didn’t realize—”
I stopped listening to the explanation, which was already fragmenting in my mind because none of its parts made sense.
“I’m coming to get her,” I said.
There was a pause.
“Elena,” my mother said. “You should think carefully. You are very young. You have no stable situation—”
“I’m coming to get my daughter.”
“She is well here. She has a proper—”
“I am coming. Today.”
I took a bus to San Isidro Tlajomulco. It took four hours.
When I arrived at my parents’ house, my father opened the door.
He looked at me with the expression he had used the night he said I was no longer his daughter — the expression of a man who had made a decision and was maintaining it.
He told me that he had consulted a lawyer. That the situation was complicated. That I had no stable address, no documented income, that I was very young, that Valentina was thriving. He used the word thriving.
He said that if I tried to take her by force, there would be legal proceedings.
I was twenty years old and I had a hundred pesos in my bag and four hours of bus travel between me and Mexico City and no lawyer, and the man in the doorway had the specific confidence of someone who understood how power worked.
I screamed at him. I said things I had no capacity to measure or moderate. I tried to push past him. He closed the door.
I stood on the step for a long time.
Then I did something that I have examined from every angle in every year since, that I have tried to justify and tried to condemn and have never fully resolved: I left.
I told myself it was temporary. I told myself I would come back when I had resources, when I had a lawyer, when I had something he couldn’t close a door against.
I told myself Valentina was safe and I would come back.
I came back three months later with money I had scraped together and the name of a legal aid organization. My parents’ house was locked and appeared empty. A neighbor told me they had moved to Guadalajara.
I filed every report I could file. I hired a low-cost lawyer who took the case seriously and then took another case more seriously and then the communication became sporadic and then stopped. I looked for them in Guadalajara, in the address the neighbor had heard, and found a different family living there.
They had disappeared.
And the business was still in its early stages, and Valentina’s trail was cold, and I was twenty years old and building something that I told myself was for her, that I told myself would eventually produce the resources to find her, and the years began to accumulate.
