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Now she sits alone and remembers.

She sees, over and over, the specters of Tomás Arroyo and the moon-faced woman and the old gringo cross her window. But they are not ghosts. They have simply mobilized their old pasts, hoping that she would do the same and join them.

But for her it took a long time.

First, she had to stop hating Tomás Arroyo for showing her what she could be and then forbidding her to ever be what she might be.

And he knew that she could never be that, and in spite of knowing it, he let her see it.

He always knew that she would return home.

But he let her see what would become of her if she remained.

She had to purge herself of this hatred. It took her many years to do so. The old gringo was no longer there to help her. Arroyo was not there. Tom Brook. He might have given her a child by that name. She had no right to think this. The moon-faced woman had taken him with her toward their nameless destiny. Tomás Arroyo was over.

So the only moment she had left was when she crossed the border and looked back at the two men, the soldier Inocencio and the boy Pedrito. Behind them, she now thought she saw the dust marshaling itself into some kind of silent chronology that told her to remember; she had come back to her land without memory, and Mexico was no longer available, Mexico had disappeared forever, but across that bridge, on the other side of the river, a memorious dust insisted on marshaling itself for her, on crossing the frontier and sweeping over the shrub and the wheat fields, the plains and the smoky mountains, the long deep green rivers that the old man had pined for, right up to her walk-up apartment in Washington, D.C., on the shores of the Potomac, the Atlantic, the center of the world.

The dust blew and told her that she was alone.

She remembers.

Alone.