On her last morning on board, she dressed with care and latched her trunk tightly so that nothing, no sleeve, no village dust, no errant memory could spill out when the porter came to carry it to the deck. Then she sat in silence for a while. Her bunkmate, Fausta, had left her bedclothes tousled and unkempt. No doubt she was already on deck, craning for a glimpse of Buenos Aires. If Leda didn’t find her in the crowds, she might never see her again, a strange thought after twenty nights of sharing quarters with a woman who wasn’t kin, whom she’d never met before the voyage. Strangers. Strangeness. These two things filled the crossing to América. She wondered what her mother would say if she were here, in this stuffy little room with her. Here you are, then, or It smells like a sty in here, or For God’s sake, Leda, straighten your hat. She told herself that she would see her mother again one day, as well as her father and cousins and uncles and aunts and her great-grandmother’s ceaseless dragonfly hands—though none of it was true: in the years and continent to come, Leda would see many things that would astound her, break her into pieces, and reassemble her in shapes she hadn’t known a human soul could inhabit, but she would never see her family again.She was sitting on the trunk that had accompanied her from home.
