Really she was from Bloomington; her family had only relocated to Gary when she was eight years old. She remembered Bloomington, remembered the school bus that pulled up to their corner was painted Hoosier red rather than standard-issue yellow. In Bloomington there’d been a rib place near a Toys’R’Us and her father would occasionally take her and Joaquin and Maro there on Saturdays when they had to tag along with him on siding jobs. After a lot of pleading sometimes her father would buy her a toy, a stuffed purple unicorn with eyes made from glittery confetti or those plastic bottles of suds with the wands that when dragged through the air swelled into a sleeve of an undulating bubble. At the rib place, Jasper’s, she’d drink Sprite mixed with iced tea, avoid the gross cole slaw, and marvel at the spectacle of men’s fingers slathered in barbecue sauce. When she first laid eyes on Gary, skyline materializing above the other side of an overpass through the Sentra’s back window, her first impression was of a quasi-medieval place,  girded with foundry stacks like outpost towers, hulking bridges that were the same shade gray as the clouds hovering above them, the city a fortress of bulwarks and battlements. Anyway, it became home, after a couple of years.

Villa Nueva she didn’t remember at all. Stood to reason, as she hadn’t set eyes on it since her eleventh month on the planet. Everything she’d seen with her own eyes following her first birthday was the MidWest. That was her country of origin, the fold of the world that truly birthed her. America otherwise was an abstraction, only slightly more concrete than the rumor of Guatemala. No flag is a match for the bunching of vowel sounds at the front of your mouth, or for how the class trip in sixth grade was to a place called “Worshington D.C.” Everybody knows that the greatest innovation of modern man is the motion offense, that paper mills give off a sulfurous scent, that in February afternoons the light comes in aslant and diamond-hard. And sure, English is a language, but more importantly it is a subject, assigned from the first day of elementary school to the last day of senior year, with teachers ranging from Mrs. Anderson to Mr. Tynan. The 4th of July involved sparklers; Halloween, princess costumes; Christmas meant fir trees.

She still recalled her father, maybe better than ever, now after not having seen him since Spring the previous year. Through autumn his letters would come; since then, they’d heard nothing. But she recalled the flecks of gray in his stubble, the white half-moons of the cuticles in his nail beds, the spiced scent of sweat after coming in the front door at the end of the workday. She remembered him and remembered this and more – here all her memory resided. Only those memories didn’t seem to want her anymore. They said it was time for her to go. Anywhere but here. For some of us there will come a time when a country stops being an abstraction.