Distance Between Us

“I won’t be gone long.”

“How long?” I wanted to know. I needed to know.

“Not too long,” Mami replied, closing her suitcase. She was going to a place most parents never come back from, a place that had already taken my father, and was now taking my mother.

The United States.

My sister, Mago; my brother, Carlos; and I grabbed our bags of clothes and followed Mami out the door of the little house we’d been renting. Mami’s brothers were packing our belongings for storage. Just as we were about to step into the sunlight, I caught a glimpse of Papi. My uncle was putting a photo of my father into a box. I ran to take the photo from my uncle.

“Why are you taking that?” Mami said as we headed. down the dirt road to Papi’s mother’s house, where we would be staying while Mami was gone.

“He’s my papi,” I said, and I clutched the frame tight against my chest.

“Your grandmother has pictures of him at her house,” Mami said. “You don’t need to take it with you.”

“But this is my papi!” I said. She didn’t understand that this paper face behind a wall of glass was the only father I knew.

Papi had left for the United States two years before. He wanted to build us a house-a real house made of brick and concrete. Even though he was a bricklayer and could build a house with his own hands, he couldn’t find work in Mexico because of the weak economy, so he’d left to go to the place everyone in my hometown calls El Otro Lado, “The Other Side.” Three weeks earlier he’d called Mami to tell her he needed her help. “If we’re both here making dollars, it will be faster to buy the materials for the house,” he’d said, then they would come back to Mexico to build our house.

But in the meantime he was leaving us without a mother.

Mago (short for Magloria) took my bag of clothes so I could hold Papi’s photo with both hands. The dirt road was full of rocks waiting to trip me, but that day I was extra careful because I carried my papi in my arms, and he could break easily.

My hometown of Iguala de la Independencia in the southern state of Guerrero is surrounded by mountains. My grandmother lived on the edge of the city, and as we walked to her house, I kept my eyes on the closest mountain. It was big and smooth, as if covered by green velvet. During the rainy season a circle of fog wrapped around its peak, like the white handkerchief people tie around their heads when they have headaches. This was why the locals had named it the Mountain That Has a Headache. Back then I didn’t know what was on the other side, and Mami didn’t either. She’d never been anywhere outside of Iguala. Until that day.