Andrea’s people cut the grate, broke the lock, and opened the basement door, and I went down the stairs before anyone told me I could. The concrete steps were uneven and the handrail was a length of pipe bolted loosely to the wall, and I went down them in the dark holding the pipe with both hands, feeling my way with my feet, moving toward the yellow light and the shape I had seen through the glass. Someone behind me had a flashlight.
Somewhere above us Mateo was still talking, his voice carrying its practiced reasonableness even into the basement of the house where he had kept my daughter for five years. She was in the corner furthest from the door, pressed against the wall with her knees drawn up, blinking at the sudden flood of light the way people blink when they have spent a long time in near-darkness and their eyes no longer trust bright things. She was wearing a man’s flannel shirt several sizes too large and the burgundy shawl I had given her when she was sixteen, the one I had watched her pack into her suitcase when she moved into the apartment with Mateo, the one I had assumed was lost when everything else was lost.
I crossed the room and went down on my knees on the concrete floor in front of her and I did not say anything for a moment because I could not. I simply looked at her. The face that had lived in my memory for five years as it was, full and young and quick with expression, was thin now in the particular way that sustained malnutrition thins a face, the cheekbones too prominent, the temples hollowed, the skin with the grayish quality of something kept from sunlight for too long.
But the eyes were hers. The precise dark brown of them, the particular quality of attention in them even now, even after everything, looking at me with the desperate caution of someone who has learned that hope is sometimes a cruelty. “Mamá,” she said.
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