years old, her hair cut short and her chin up, unsmiling and beautiful. My father's business registration, for a workshop called Cerámicas Quizhpe on a street called Avenida de las Américas. A stack of envelopes with Ecuadorian stamps, all in the same shaky handwriting, from Abuelita. Iker's birth certificate from Danbury Hospital and his little blue passport, which I opened and looked at for a long time, at my brother's round face at four years old, and the eagle, and the words that meant he could go anywhere he wanted and come home.
And at the very bottom, under everything, a photograph. My mother, younger than I am now, maybe fifteen, in a school uniform, standing on the deck of a boat with a lot of other girls in the same uniform, all of them laughing, the sea behind them. The back said, in faded pencil, Puerto Ayora, 1995.
"You went," I said. "You went to the Galápagos."
"With my school. One time. The nuns took us. Eleven days." She reached over and touched the edge of the photo without picking it up. "I saw the blue-footed boobies dance. I saw a marine iguana sneeze salt. I saw the old tortoise, Lonesome George, before he died. I came home and I told my mother I was going to be a biologist and live on a boat. She laughed at me. And then I became a teacher of biology instead, which was close. For six years I taught fifteen-year-old girls in Cuenca about Darwin's finches."
"You never told me."
"No."
"You sat with me on the back steps and taught me the birds and you never once said you'd been there. You let me tell you about it like you'd never heard of it. Like it was my thing."
"It was your thing." She looked up. "Maya. It was. You found it by yourself. I gave you a book of birds from Connecticut, from the library sale, for a dollar. That's all. You found the islands by yourself, in the school library, in fifth grade. You came home with a book about the finches and you told me all about the beaks, the drought, the big seeds and the small seeds, and I stood in this kitchen and I listened to you, and I couldn't breathe. Because I knew. Even then. I knew where you were going to want to go, and I knew you couldn't." She shook her head. "If I told you I'd been there, you would want to know why I never went back. And then you would want to know why we never went anywhere. And then."
"And then I'd know."
"And then you'd know."
Out in the yard my father yanked up something with deep roots and fell back on his heels with it in his hand.
"Why did you leave?" I said. "Really. Not for a better life. Really."