Another part of her, however, felt more like a cop.

“Why the oh-so-serious expression?” her mother said.

Alicia was a tangle of emotional knots, and the words seemed trapped inside her. She laid her handbag atop the table, the lipstick tube concealed from her mother. She reached inside, removed her wallet, and opened it. The billfold was empty.

Her mother could not contain her disapproval. “Alicia, how many times have I told you never to go around without a dollar to your name?”

“Mom, please.”

“You should always have a little cash. What if you had a flat tire or an emergency?”

“If there’s an emergency, I have a fully loaded nine-millimeter pistol. Mom, can you please just listen?” It was a tone she rarely used with her parents, and her mother was clearly taken aback.

“Okay,” her mother said quietly. “I’m listening.”

Alicia reached into the photo section of her wallet and removed a colorful piece of paper currency that was pressed behind plastic. She laid the bill on the table between them, facedown. “Do you know what this is?”

It required only a cursory glance for the recognition to kick in. “It’s an Argentine banknote. Twenty pesos. But why is it torn in half?”

Alicia took the bill, and with her elbows on the table, she held it at eye level. The smooth natural edge was between her right thumb and index finger. The rough edge, where the note had been torn down the middle, was in her left. “Six years ago, just a few days after my twenty-first birthday, a woman gave this to me.”

“Who was she?”

“I’d never met her before. She found me on campus after one of my classes and asked if she could speak to me. I had nothing else to do, and she seemed nice enough. So we sat down at one of the picnic tables on the lawn and talked.”

“What about?”

“At first, it seemed that we weren’t really talking about anything. She told me that she had a friend whose daughter was thinking about enrolling in the spring, and she wanted to know how I liked the university, what campus life was like, that kind of thing. It was all about me. Too much about me, actually, and after a while I started to feel a little uncomfortable with the personal nature of the questions. I came up with an excuse to leave, and that was when she admitted that she wasn’t just scouting out the campus for the daughter of a friend. She said she’d come all the way from Argentina just to talk to me.”

Her mother suddenly showed more concern than curiosity. “Why on earth would she come that far just to talk to you?”

“That’s what I wanted to know. She said she knew my family back in Argentina.”

“Really? Your father’s side or mine?”

It was a simple enough question, but suddenly Alicia was having second thoughts about this entire conversation. She’d avoided it for years, out of respect, love, and probably a host of other emotions that she might never fully sort out. Fear had certainly been part of it-fear of the truth. But it was too late to turn back now. She searched within and found the strength to say it. “Neither.”

Her mother let out a little nervous chuckle. “What do you mean, ‘neither’?”

“She told me that she didn’t want to ruin my life, that she was not trying to upset me, that she would not make me into another victim by turning my world upside down.”

“Victim of what?” Graciela said, seemingly annoyed. “This woman sounds like she was crazy.”

“I had the same reaction. I didn’t want to hear any more, but the interesting thing is that she never really came right out and said anything directly. Even so, I somehow sensed what she was implying. In hindsight, I think she wanted me to figure things out for myself, rather than dump a lot of painful information in my lap.”

“Figure what out for yourself?”

Alicia laid the torn Argentine peso on the table, facedown. “Before she left, she took this bill from her purse and tore it in half. She kept part of it for herself, and she made a point of giving me this half, the one with the handwriting on it.”

Alicia turned the bill faceup. Directly on the bill, in blue ink, a message was handwritten in Spanish. The translation read: “The military is taking our children. Where are the Disappeared?”

Alicia’s mother showed no reaction.

“I kept the bill, and over the next few months I did some research on this.”

“What kind of research?”

“Being raised in Miami, I realized that I didn’t know much about the country of my birth. It turns out that I was born during Argentina’s Dirty War, which I had heard of but never really studied.”

“Plenty has been written about it.”

“I know. But it wasn’t until I met this woman and had this torn banknote in my purse that I started to learn about los Desaparecidos-the Disappeared. It was so amazing to me, how everyone was afraid to talk about what the military was secretly doing to people who opposed the regime. Some of the Disappeared were left-wing extremists.”

“Terrorists. Like the ones who set off the bomb that killed your father’s first wife and daughter.”

“Yes, I know about that. But others were just ordinary people who spoke out against the government: trade unionists, social reformers, human-rights activists, nuns, priests, journalists, lawyers, teachers, students, actors, workers, housewives, and on and on. Some were guilty of nothing. They were simply accused or suspected of being a subversive or conspiring to undermine the ‘Western Christian way of life.’ It was like Nazi Germany, except that in the case of Argentina, the rest of the world stood by until the very end and let it happen. Even within the country, practically no one had the courage to say or do anything, except for the mothers of the disappeared children. They met secretly in churches, they organized, they marched in the town plazas with little white nappies on their heads and carried photographs of their missing children. They put themselves at risk to make the public aware of the fact that people were disappearing and that the military dictatorship was behind it.”

Alicia paused to catch her breath, then gestured toward the torn Argentine peso on the table. “And one of the ways they got their message across was by writing notes like this on money. It was a way to make sure that the word would spread from one person to the next, all across the country.”

“That was all a very long time ago,” her mother said in a quaking voice. “And it has nothing to do with our family.”

“It was probably the implication otherwise that got me so angry and made me tell this woman never to contact me again. And you know what? She promised to respect my wishes. She said I would never hear from her again. Unless…”

“Unless what?”

Alicia took the tube of lipstick from her purse. She opened it, but the lipstick was gone. Inside was another torn Argentine banknote. Alicia unrolled it and laid it flat on the table beside the other half. The ripped, jagged edges fit perfectly, like the pieces of a puzzle. Said Alicia, “She promised never to contact me again, unless she could prove all of the things that she wanted to tell me.”

“What kind of proof is this?” her mother said, scoffing.

“This was the tube of lipstick that was stolen from my purse. I got it back today.”

“From who?”

“The same woman who came to see me before.”

“She stole your lipstick?”

Alicia’s expression turned very serious. “Notice how the lipstick has been removed. Only the tube is left.”

“Yes, I see that. Who would do something like that? She must be absolutely crazy.”

“No. She actually did something smart.”

“I don’t see how stealing lipstick can be smart.”

“It was ingenious, actually-if the purpose was to collect my saliva.”

Her mother halted, as if the big picture were suddenly coming clearer.

Alicia said, “What kind of proof do you think there might be in my saliva?”