At 6:10 that evening, I sat on my bed with my laptop open to a flight-tracking website and watched a little yellow airplane icon lift off from JFK and start to crawl down the coast toward Guayaquil. I didn't know which seat was Joaquín's. I had been assigned 23F, a window. I hoped he had it. I hoped he looked out.
There was a knock on my door, and Iker came in without waiting, in his still-damp swim trunks, smelling like chlorine and Mrs. Gwynne's sunscreen. He climbed onto the bed next to me and looked at the yellow plane on the screen.
"Mami told me," he said.
"What did she tell you?"
"That you were born in a different country. And that's why you can't go. And it's nobody's fault." He frowned at the screen. "Except it kind of is somebody's fault. It's just not yours."
"Yeah," I said. "That's about right."
"I have a passport," he said. "It's in the drawer. I didn't even know. I've never even been anywhere. I'd give it to you if I could." He looked up at me with my mother's eyes, very serious. "Can I give it to you?"
"No, bobo," I said, and pulled him in under my arm, damp trunks and all. "It's got your face in it. Nobody's going to believe I'm a nine-year-old boy."
"You could wear a hat."
I laughed, and then I cried, finally, for the first time all day, with my brother's wet head under my chin and a little yellow airplane crawling across the screen toward the equator without me in it.
Tía Jacinta came up from Queens on Sunday on the Metro-North and a cab, carrying a tray of humitas wrapped in foil and a manila envelope, and she walked into our kitchen and put down the humitas and took my face in both hands and said, in Spanish, "Ay, your mother. Your mother, your mother, your mother," and kissed me on the forehead three times, hard, like she was stamping something.
The manila envelope had another piece of paper in it. I was starting to understand that my life was going to be made, from now on, out of paper. This one was a printed notice from the United States government, with a bar code and an eagle and a long receipt number in the corner, dated August 2011. Tía Jacinta had filed it when I was two and a half. It was a petition, a sister petitioning for a sister. It said, in the bureaucratic way of saying it, that my mother existed and that someone who was a citizen had asked for her, and that the government had written this down, and that she was now standing in a line.