The words stopped. All that María could see on the page was smeared black ink. Her tears added to her aunt’s long since dried tears and ink smudges and then made fragments of the sentences unreadable. She dabbed at the fresh drops of water, hoping the words wouldn’t be lost. She wondered why she had been named after a Brazilian child from her aunt’s past. She wondered why her aunt had never told her, why her aunt said these stories were key to her identity, why, so many different why questions. And how and when. She picked up the photo her aunt had laid on the bed stand. Her thoughts and nightmares were congealing in her mind. Sunsets, sunrises, sirens. They were all there. She saw the blood in the sky. She heard the terrified screams. She had been there. The elusive dream that had haunted her was written in detail in the brown book she held on her lap. ‘It isn’t really a dream, though, is it?’ she asked herself. ‘And I wasn’t named for someone. I am the someone. But who am I now?’

Pictures of the memory that had been repressed by her toddler mind struggling for survival, the hidden past that crept out only at night when she was most vulnerable, it all rushed past her. She saw the images flutter and ran to pick them up before they scattered forever. She grabbed for a pen from her purse and turned to a blank page in the book she held on her lap. She wrote in a slanting, hurried scrawl. She wrote the nightmare that she had always wanted to forget but could never remember.

I’m walking down a hill with my hand holding someone else’s in the quiet thrill of our group. We sit in the grass, watch the sky grow darker. The grass is cold and it feels damp. The sky is strange; I couldn’t really say the sun was setting. It is falling, exploding. The sky, a dark purple, frames the magenta sun. Sparks shoot out of the sun like fingers pulling away that deep purple sky. The sun sinks and the other kids around me panic. I hear sirens in the distance, they are screaming at me for looking at the sky. Then I see the sun fall behind the trees. As soon as the trees eat the sun, the sirens grow louder.

She completed her entry. But her thoughts still swarmed. She must have always awoken at this point of her nightmare. She sank her head into her hands, propped her elbows on her knees. Wept. María wept for the life she could have lost. Wept for the brother she did lose. For the parents. And her thoughts repeated, embedded themselves into her mind: ‘Who are my parents? Who are these people who’ve said they’re my parents? Why didn’t they tell me? What else did they keep from me? Who am I and why am I still alive and all those others are dead?’

María’s sobbing and hiccupping woke Carla from her fitful nap. Carla knew what María had read and had expected the reaction to an extent. But she knew more than what was even on the pages. She knew how she had pulled María from Giomar’s wooden embrace. Carla knew the terror she felt, the sickness, the vomit in her mouth that she had swallowed. What Carla didn’t know was how she held María to her chest and sobbed for the loss of childhood, innocence, idealism. Her own and Giomar’s. Giomar, who took money home to his mamá. She carried María further into the mass of the confused and stricken children. She counted the ones who were bleeding. She wanted to save the ones who were dying. She screamed as she saw the police officers force the two oldest boys into their car. She learned later how they were demanded to kneel at the edge of the long dock and to hold their hands behind their backs and to look at the officers who leveled their guns and found the two never-shaven faces in their sights. And how they fell backwards into the water and tinted it with red ripples.

Carla startled María when she spoke. “María, my María, how precious you are to me. And to your parents here. Yes, to them as well.” She saw the confusion and the anger surfacing in María’s eyes. “I should explain to you. Your parents were my co-workers. I knew I couldn’t be the mother that you needed. I knew by then that I was sick with this blood disease. I didn’t want to deprive you of another family.” Carla told María how she carried her to Ron and Arlene’s house and stumbled into their side door. María’s ragged dress was still fresh with Giomar’s blood when she put her into Arlene’s arms; but her eyes were dry with no sign of tears. A month later, Ron and Arlene paid the requisite bribes to the officials to bring María home with them. Back in the States, they legally adopted her and raised her as though she had never been anywhere outside of middle class suburbia.

María still shook her head, disbelieving, angry, joyful, grateful, but most of all confused at what she heard and read. She drank another cup of water. She didn’t know whether to hug her aunt, whether to run into the solitude of the bathroom, whether to gather her purse and jacket and leave, whether to step outside the room and find her parents and question them. She didn’t know.

Carla reached toward María and told her to stand nearer to the bed. She grasped her hand in hers, looked at María’s reddened eyes, and saw the trails that her black mascara had drawn down her cheeks. She squeezed María’s hand as tightly as she could and wished she was not tied down with IV tubes. She wanted to gather María in her arms again and to whisper that life would be all right. She was grateful to feel María’s hand tighten around her own. María would be fine. She was strong.

Nurse Vicki poked her head inside the room. “Five more minutes, ladies,” she said. Carla and María stayed in the same position for the rest of the time they had left. Carla was exhausted from talking and reliving the memories from which she had often tried to hide. María didn’t want to think or feel until she could remove herself from the setting and the atmosphere of her aunt’s room that she felt was pregnant with the sentimentalism and emotionalism from which she often fled. It was too much for her. The dream and the realization. She was thrown into a crisis of identity, value, truth, justice, apathy or sympathy or indifference. She knew she had to choose.

María rode home with her parents in silence. They guessed what Carla had told her. Ron explained to María the technicalities of her adoption, the difficulties bringing her home, the joy they felt when they introduced their new baby to his mother. He told María that now there were four instead of only three who knew her origins. Arlene told her that she loved her, that she was sad they had to introduce a nebulous pain into her life. They understood that María would need time to process, to sort, to think, and finally, to feel. They believed that their daughter, who had learned to hide how she felt from such an early age, would finally understand that basic layer of humanity. They had hopes for her to experience profound empathy. But they also wanted to keep her in suburbia, in the safety of the well-lit streets and relatively honest policemen. She had suffered enough injustice. She had colored her beautiful pictures brown for long enough. There was no need for her to return to the dirty shantytowns, to the cracked begging bowls, to the bloodstained dress that they forever linked with Brazil.

María listened to them. She considered their explanations, their ideas, their misgivings and hopes. When they dropped her off at her apartment, she took out her pen and loose-leaf paper. She identified the names of the feelings she had experienced, just as she had been taught, and wrote them on the paper in a straight list. Then she crumpled it, shredded it, swore at the bits of paper that could never hold the words that would never be able to explain. It took María several hours to completely cease her intermittent crying. She called in sick to work. She hadn’t slept.

Instead of sleeping, María had planned. She searched through her checkbook, balanced it, planned ahead, wrote schedules, wrote ideas. Carla had given the brown book to her as she left the room and she found within it all of the schemes that Carla had developed of how to save the millions of street children. She walked to her computer, turned it on, and typed a sentence that glared at her from the page: Until the chaotic economic and social conditions that cause desperately poor parents to "lose" their children to the streets are reversed, childhood for the vast majority in Brazil will continue to signify a period of adversity to be survived and gotten over as quickly as possible, rather than a time of nurturance to be extended and savored. She printed it, font size set to 48, and taped the banner along the border of her room.

She imagined how she would be spending her nights if she had not been found behind the pillar. She read online journals, newspapers, magazine articles, encyclopedias. She knew the plight of the impoverished girls and women of Brazil. She read somewhere that from the age of seven or eight, the girls were assigned child-tending and domestic tasks to keep them close to home. Some were told tales of organ harvesters who would sneak up on them at night, murder them, and bring hospitals the organs that had not been rotted after their short lives spent sniffing glue. María thought she would be like the girls who were quick and savvy, who made themselves extremely useful to their mothers in dealings with the "somebodies" of the street, the shopkeepers, coffin makers, and clinic doctors. Some became prostitutes. Others were street-wise and cunning, like the Artful Dodger of Oliver Twist. María imagined that her mother rarely knew where she was, that her brother had been the only one to take care of her, that if she hadn’t been rescued by Tía Carla, she would not have survived the streets. What could a two-year-old have known about survival?

Every night, María fell asleep reading the banner. She memorized it. The only day of work she missed was the Friday after her visit with Tía. She couldn’t afford to miss any work if her ideas and planning were going to come to pass. María had worked at the same job, in the same cubicle, in the same gray obelisk office building for three years. It was her well-paying, mindless job that provided her rent, food, and necessities. She took up the second job at the food bank she had been considering for several months. Her reasoning was different now, though. Before, María wanted the job so she could set money aside for her “rainy day jar” and buy Gucci clothing every few years. Now, María set money aside for plane tickets. After Carla recovered, María met with her regularly. Carla helped María process what she had been told. Eventually, María was able to write how she felt. Carla showed María the few photos of her from when she still lived in Brazil. She looked at some of her childhood pictures that her mother had saved. She saw the ones scribbled in browns and grays and sometimes cried over the pain that she had hidden, even from herself. They pored over the brown book together and hatched new ideas. Even though she did not remember her life on the streets, María wanted to return to Brazil to see those who could be the children of the ones had known as a toddler.

Two years later, María had completed an intensive Portuguese course and bought a plane ticket to Brazil. She packed her trinkets in a box ready to be stored in her parents’ garage. She packed her clothes and supplies in the largest suitcase she could find. She stuffed her briefcase with letters and books and her laptop computer. She placed a brown, leather book at the top of the briefcase. Carla had recommended a book by George Bernard Shaw to María, and in it was the following, which María had copied into the first page of her book: “The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that is the essence of inhumanity.” When María’s family and friends sent her off at the airport, one of them asked why she was leaving.

“What do you think you’re going to be able to accomplish in only a few months?” he asked. “From what you’ve told me, the situation looks hopeless. There are so many and—”

“If I can help only one child, that will be enough. Isn’t one life worth as much as I can give?” María interrupted him.

Carla overheard the brief conversation, and after María walked past the airport security, she took the young man aside. “I have a story you need to hear,” she said.

María watched out the window of her plane. She saw the houses growing smaller than the Lego homes she had built when she was younger, saw the cars shrink to matchbox size, and realized that now her world was going to become much larger.