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and open it to the G’s. I feel my heartbeat speed up. I already looked him up on the Internet, of course, before I came, but I didn’t find anything. Not so much as a trace of him in the first thirty pages of Google search results. After that, I told myself just to wait. To exhibit some patience. As soon as I got here, I could get my hands on a phone book. I could see if he was listed and go from there.
    I tuck my hair behind my ears as I scan the names. I almost can’t bear to look, but I can’t stand not to. I back away and jiggle my arms a little, like a runner getting ready to crouch down into the starting blocks. Come on, Mira, I tell myself. I approach the book again. Then I read: Gallardo, Ana. Gallardo, Benjamin. Gallardo, F. O. Gallardo, Ignacio. Gallardo, M. Gallardo, Tula. Gallardo, Tulia. Gallardo, Ynez. Eight Gallardos in all. None of them Gatún, and none matching the address I have.
     
     
     
    It’s hard to imagine my mother in this place, more than twenty years earlier. What did Panama look like when she lived here? Through the window, in the distance, there’s a sliver of what appears to be the ocean. In the space between two buildings, the tiniest patch of blue, glinting in the moonlight.
    I can’t say why, but the sight of the water makes me think of the time, one summer, when my mother and I drove to the dunes along Lake Michigan, in Indiana. It was supposed to reach ninety-nine degrees that day, the latest in a string of four days that the temperature in Chicago had skyrocketed to near or over a hundred. Everyone in the city was going crazy, and my mother and I were no exception. We had taken to sleeping in the basement, where it was cooler, my mother stripping down to her bra and underwear and splaying herself on top of an old comforter she’d laid out on the floor. We spent an entire afternoon in the frozen-food aisle at Jewel, walking up and down, up and down, opening the freezer doors every so often to stick our faces in and pretend that we were looking for the perfect bag of peas or that we were actually considering buying French bread pizza. After a few hours of this nonsense, a manager strode toward us and handed us both paper applications, saying pointedly, “If you’re going to spend this much time in my store, you might as well be on the payroll.” My mother, I remember very clearly, said, “Thank you. That’s the easiest interview I’ve ever had,” and took the application, stuffing it in her pocketbook.
    The next day, my mother had a new plan.
    “We need to get out of here. We’re driving to the dunes,” she said when I came upstairs for breakfast. It must have been a weekend, if she was home from work.
    “The where?”
    “You know the dunes.”
    “In Indiana? Yeah. I didn’t hear you. I thought you said we were going to the doom.”
    “If we stay here any longer, that’s exactly where we’ll be going.”
    She told me to wear my bathing suit under my clothes, and after that, we were off. In the car and on the road. I don’t remember anything in particular about the car ride, but I do remember pulling into a parking lot and walking into a huge, shimmering sea of golden sand. Mounds and mounds of it unrolling as far as I could see, rounded and windswept, the valleys lost in shadows.
    “This is so cool,” I said. When I had said I knew what the dunes were, I meant by reputation only. I had heard of them, but I had never seen them in person.
    “It better be cool. Or at least cooler than where we were. That was the whole point.”
    My mother beckoned me to the beach, where hundreds of other people with the same idea were stretched out on oversized towels or splashing near the shoreline or kayaking farther out. We owned none of the usual beach accoutrements, so we just took off our clothes and got in the water, dunking ourselves under, heads and all, until we started to cool off enough that we felt sane again. My mother floated on her back for a time, her hands