Stapled to the back of that page with a single rusting staple was a little white card, folded once, filled out in my mother's handwriting, which I would have known anywhere, in capital letters, the way she filled out school forms. Someone had written on it in blue ballpoint, in handwriting that was not my mother's, and then stamped it again in purple.
ADMITTED UNTIL: MAR 20 2011.
"What does that mean," I said. It didn't come out as a question. It came out flat, like I was reading it aloud.
My father let go of the newel post. He came the rest of the way into the kitchen and pulled out a chair from the table, my chair, the one with the wobbly back leg that he had been meaning to fix for two years, and he held it for me, and this time I sat in it, because my knees had decided for me.
"It means," he said, "that we came here to visit your Tía Jacinta in Queens, for six months, the three of us. You were twenty-two months old. It means that when the six months were over, we didn't go home." He sat down across from me. My mother didn't. She stayed against the counter with her arms wrapped around her own body. "It means you can't get an American passport, mija, because you are not an American citizen. And it means that if you leave this country tonight, you can't come back."
There is a thing that happens in the Galápagos that I had read about maybe a hundred times that spring. In 1977 there was a drought on Daphne Major, a tiny island in the middle of the archipelago, and the plants that the medium ground finches depended on stopped making small, soft seeds. All that was left were the big, hard ones, the kind you need a deep, strong beak to crack. Most of the finches died. Something like eighty-five percent of them. The ones that lived were the ones that happened to have been born with slightly bigger beaks, and the next generation of finches on Daphne Major had beaks that were, on average, a measurable fraction of a millimeter deeper than the generation before. Two scientists, a married couple, had been there with their calipers, measuring. They saw it happen in a single season. Evolution, which everybody thinks takes a million years, happening in one dry year, on one island, in front of two people who had decided to pay attention.