Chapter 7

The citizenship ceremony was held on a gray Tuesday morning in a federal building downtown, the kind of room built to make an occasion feel smaller than it was — folding chairs, a flag in each corner, a judge who’d clearly given the same speech enough times that his cadence had worn smooth as a river stone. Marisol stood in a line with sixty or seventy other people, Mexicans and Filipinos and a Korean family with three small children who fidgeted through the whole ceremony, and when her turn came to raise her right hand and repeat the oath, the words came out of her steadier than she expected, though she couldn’t have said, afterward, whether that steadiness came from conviction or simply from thirteen years of practice keeping her voice level while everything underneath it moved.

Efraín sat in the gallery in his one good shirt, the collar slightly too tight, and when she looked over at him mid-oath he was not looking at the judge or the flag but at her, with an expression she’d seen exactly twice before in her life — once the day the can first rang and fell off its post above the coffee rows, and once the night she killed a man for the first time and he said the single word he’d always said instead of anything larger.

Afterward, on the courthouse steps, he held her certificate in both hands like something that might blow away if he wasn’t careful with it.

“Your mother would not have believed this,” he said. “A country that gives you paper saying you belong to it.”

“Guatemala gave me paper too, eventually. It just didn’t mean the same thing.”

“No.” He folded the certificate carefully back into its envelope. “This one you didn’t have to bleed to keep.”

She didn’t correct him, though the thought crossed her mind, briefly and without much weight, that she wasn’t entirely sure that was true yet.

The war had been on the television every night for months by then, a fixture of the apartment’s evenings the way the radio had once been a fixture of evenings on the mountain — background noise that occasionally demanded full attention and then released it again. Marisol watched it the way she suspected most Americans did, with a kind of low-grade unease that never quite resolved into anything nameable, footage of young men her own age moving through jungle that looked, in the gray flicker of the television, almost nothing like the jungle she remembered and almost exactly like it at the same time.