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Papi came home with a dog whose kind we had never seen before. A black-and-white speckled electric current of energy. It was a special breed with papers, like a person with a birth certificate. Mami just kept staring at the puppy with a cross look on her face. “It looks like a mess!” she said. “Take it back.”

“Mami, it is a gift!” Papi shook his head. It would be an insult to Mister Victor, who had given us the dog. The American consul wanted to thank us for all we’d done for him since he’d been assigned to our country.

“If he wanted to thank us, he’d give us our visas,” Mami grumbled. For a while now, my parents had been talking about going to the United States so Papi could return to school. I couldn’t understand why a grown-up who could do whatever he wanted would elect to go back to a place I so much wanted to get out of.

On their faces when they talked of leaving there was a scared look I also couldn’t understand.

“Those visas will come soon,” Papi promised. But Mami just kept shaking her head about the dog. She had enough with four girls to take on puppies, too. Papi explained that the dog would stay at the end of the yard in a pen. He would not be allowed in the house. He would not be pooping in Mami’s orchid garden. He would not be barking until late at night. “A well-behaved dog,” Papi concluded. “An American dog.”

The little black-and-white puppy yanked at Papi’s trouser cuff with his mouth. “What shall we call you?” Papi asked him.

“Trouble,” Mami suggested, kicking the puppy away. He had left Papi’s trousers to come slobber on her leg.

“We will call him Liberty. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Papi quoted the U.S.A. Constitution. “Eh, Liberty, you are a lucky sign!”

Liberty barked his little toy barks and all us kids laughed. “Trouble.” Mami kept shaking her head as she walked away. Liberty trotted behind her as if he agreed that that was the better name for him.

*  *  *  *  *

Mami was right, too—Liberty turned out to be trouble. He ate all of Mami’s orchids, and that little hyperactive baton of a tail knocked things off the low coffee table whenever Liberty climbed on the couch to leave his footprints in among the flower prints. He tore up Mami’s garden looking for buried treasure. Mami screamed at Liberty and stamped her foot. “Perro sin vergüenza!” But Liberty just barked back at her.

“He doesn’t understand Spanish,” Papi said lamely. “Maybe if you correct him in English, he’ll behave better!”

Mami turned on him, her slipper still in midair. Her face looked as if she’d light into him after she was done with Liberty. “Let him go be a pet in his own country if he wants instructions in English!” In recent weeks, Mami had changed her tune about going to the United States. She wanted to stay in her own country. She didn’t want Mister Victor coming around our house and going off into the study with Papi to talk over important things in low, worried voices.

“All liberty involves sacrifice,” Papi said in a careful voice. Liberty gave a few perky barks as if he agreed with that.

Mami glared at Papi. “I told you I don’t want trouble—” She was going to say more, but her eye fell on me and she stopped herself. “Why aren’t you with the others?” she scolded. It was as if I had been the one who had dug up her lily bulbs.

The truth was that after Liberty arrived, I never played with the others. It was as if I had found my double in another species. I had always been the tomboy, the live wire, the troublemaker, the one who was going to drive Mami to drink, the one she was going to give away to the Haitians. While the sisters dressed pretty and stayed clean in the playroom, I was out roaming the world looking for trouble. And now I had found someone to share my adventures.

“I’ll take Liberty back to his pen,” I offered. There was something I had figured out that Liberty had yet to learn: when to get out of Mami’s way.

She didn’t say yes and she didn’t say no. She seemed distracted, as if something else was on her mind. As I led Liberty away by his collar, I could see her talking to Papi. Suddenly she started to cry, and Papi held her.

“It’s okay,” I consoled Liberty. “Mami doesn’t mean it. She really does love you. She’s just nervous.” It was what my father always said when Mami scolded me harshly.

At the back of the property stood Liberty’s pen—a chainlink fence around a dirt square at the center of which stood a doghouse. Papi had built it when Liberty first came, a cute little house, but then he painted it a putrid green that reminded me of all the vegetables I didn’t like. It was always a job to get Liberty to go into that pen.

Sure enough, as soon as he saw where we were headed, he took off, barking, toward the house, then swerved to the front yard to our favorite spot. It was a grassy knoll surrounded by a tall hibiscus hedge. At the center stood a tall, shady samán tree. From there, no one could see you up at the house. Whenever I did something wrong, this was where I hid out until the punishment winds blew over. That was where Liberty headed, and I was fast behind on his trail.

Inside the clearing I stopped short. Two strange men in dark glasses were crouched behind the hedge. The fat one had seized Liberty by the collar and was pulling so hard on it that poor Liberty was almost standing on his hind legs. When he saw me, Liberty began to bark, and the man holding him gave him a yank on the collar that made me sick to my stomach. I began to back away, but the other man grabbed my arm. “Not so fast,” he said. Two little scared faces—my own—looked down at me from his glasses.

“I came for my dog,” I said, on the verge of tears.

“Good thing you found him,” the man said. “Give the young lady her dog,” he ordered his friend, and then he turned to me.

“You haven’t seen us, you understand?”

I didn’t understand. It was usually I who was the one lying and grown-ups telling me to tell the truth. But I nodded, relieved when the man released my arm and Liberty was back in my hands.

“It’s okay, Liberty.” I embraced him when I put him back in his pen. He was as sad as I was. We had both had a hard time with Mami, but this was the first time we’d come across mean and scary people. The fat man had almost broken Liberty’s neck, and the other one had left his fingerprints on my arm. After I locked up the pen, I watched Liberty wander back slowly to his house and actually go inside, turn around, and stick his little head out the door. He’d always avoided that ugly doghouse before. I walked back to my own house, head down, to find my parents and tell them what I had seen.

*  *  *  *  *

Overnight, it seemed, Mister Victor moved in. He ate all his meals with us, stayed ’til late, and when he had to leave, someone from the embassy was left behind “to keep an eye on things.” Now, when Papi and Mister Victor talked or when the tíos came over, they all went down to the back of the property near Liberty’s pen to talk. Mami had found some wires in the study, behind the portrait of Papi’s great-grandmother fanning herself with a painted fan. The wires ran behind a screen and then out a window, where there was a little box with lots of other wires coming from different parts of the house.

Mami explained that it was no longer safe to talk in the house about certain things. But the only way you knew what things those were was when Mami leveled her eyes on you as if she were pressing the off button on your mouth. She did this every time I asked her what was going on.

“Nothing,” she said stiffly, and then she urged me to go outside and play. Forgotten were the admonitions to go study or I would flunk out of fifth grade. To go take a bath or the microbios might kill me. To drink my milk or I would grow up stunted and with no teeth. Mami seemed absent and tense and always in tears. Papi was right—she was too nervous, poor thing.

I myself was enjoying a heyday of liberty. Several times I even got away with having one of Mister Victor’s Coca-Colas for breakfast instead of my boiled milk with a beaten egg, which Liberty was able to enjoy instead.

“You love that dog, don’t you?” Mister Victor asked me one day. He was standing by the pen with Papi waiting for the uncles. He had a funny accent that sounded like someone making fun of Spanish when he spoke it.

I ran Liberty through some of the little tricks I had taught him, and Mister Victor laughed. His face was full of freckles—so that it looked as if he and Liberty were kin. I had the impression that God had spilled a lot of his colors when he was making American things.

Soon the uncles arrived and the men set to talking. I wandered into the pen and sat beside Liberty with my back to the house and listened. The men were speaking in English, and I had picked up enough of it at school and in my parents’ conversations to make out most of what was being said. They were planning some hunting expedition for a goat with guns to be delivered by Mister Charlie. Papi was going to have to leave the goat to the others because his tennis shoes were missing. Though I understood the words—or thought I did—none of it made sense. I knew my father did not own a pair of tennis shoes, we didn’t know a Mister Charlie, and who ever heard of hunting a goat?

As Liberty and I sat there with the sun baking the tops of our heads, I had this sense that the world as I knew it was about to end. The image of the two men in mirror glasses flashed through my head. So as not to think about them, I put my arm around Liberty and buried my face in his neck.

*  *  *  *  *

Late one morning Mami gave my sisters and me the news. Our visa had come. Mister Victor had arranged everything, and that very night we were going to the United States of America! Wasn’t that wonderful! She flashed us a bright smile, as if someone were taking her picture.

We stood together watching her, alarmed at this performance of happiness when really she looked like she wanted to cry. All morning aunts had been stopping by and planting big kisses on our foreheads and holding our faces in their hands and asking us to promise we would be very good. Until now, we hadn’t a clue why they were so worked up.

Mami kept smiling her company smile. She had a little job for each of us to do. There would not be room in our bags for everything. We were to pick the one toy we wanted to take with us to the United States.

I didn’t even have to think twice about my choice. It had suddenly dawned on me we were leaving, and that meant leaving everything behind. “I want to take Liberty.”

Mami started shaking her head no. We could not take a dog into the United States of America. That was not allowed.

“Please,” I begged with all my might. “Please, please, Mami, please.” Repetition sometimes worked—each time you said the word, it was like giving a little push to the yes that was having a hard time rolling out of her mouth.

“I said no!” The bright smile on Mami’s face had grown dimmer and dimmer. “N–O.” She spelled it out for me in case I was confusing no with another word like yes. “I said a toy, and I mean a toy.”

I burst into tears. I was not going to the United States unless I could take Liberty! Mami shook me by the shoulders and asked me between clenched teeth if I didn’t understand we had to go to the United States or else. But all I could understand was that a world without Liberty would break my heart. I was inconsolable. Mami began to cry.

Tía Mimi took me aside. She had gone to school in the States and always had her nose in a book. In spite of her poor taste in how to spend her free time, I still loved her because she had smart things to say. Like telling Mami that punishment was not the way to make kids behave. “I’m going to tell you a little secret,” she offered now. “You’re going to find liberty when you get to the United States.”

“Really?” I asked.

She hesitated a minute, and then she gave me a quick nod. “You’ll see what I mean,” she said. And then, giving me a pat on the butt, she added, “Come on, let’s go pack. How about taking that wonderful book I got you on the Arabian Nights?”

Late in the night someone comes in and shakes us awake. “It’s time!”

Half asleep, we put on our clothes, hands helping our arms to go into the right sleeves, buttoning us up, running a comb through our hair.

We were put to sleep hours earlier because the plane had not come in.

But now it’s time.

“Go sit by the door,” we are ordered, as the hands, the many hands that now seem to be in control, finish with us. We file out of the bedroom, one by one, and go sit on the bench where packages are set down when Mami comes in from shopping. There is much rushing around. Mister Victor comes by and pats us on the head like dogs. “We’ll have to wait a few more minutes,” he says.

In that wait, one sister has to go to the bathroom. Another wants a drink of water. I am left sitting with my baby sister, who is dozing with her head on my shoulder. I lay her head down on the bench and slip out.

Through the dark patio down the path to the back of the yard I go. Every now and then a strange figure flashes by. I have said good-bye to Liberty a dozen times already, but there is something else I have left to do.

Sitting on the bench, I had an image again of those two men in mirror glasses. After we are gone, they come onto the property. They smash the picture of Papi’s great-grandmother fanning herself. They knock over the things on the coffee table as if they don’t know any better. They throw the flowered cushions on the floor. They smash the windows. And then they come to the back of the property and they find Liberty.

Quickly, because I hear calling from the big house, I slip open the door of the pen. Liberty is all over me, wagging his tail so it beats against my legs, jumping up and licking my face.

“Get away!” I order sharply, in a voice he is not used to hearing from me. I begin walking back to the house, not looking around so as not to encourage him. I want him to run away before the gangsters come.

He doesn’t understand and keeps following me. Finally I have to resort to Mami’s techniques. I kick him, softly at first, but then, when he keeps tagging behind me, I kick him hard. He whimpers and dashes away toward the front yard, disappearing in areas of darkness, then reappearing when he passes through lighted areas. At the front of the house, instead of turning toward our secret place, he keeps on going straight down the drive, through the big gates, to the world out there.

He will beat me to the United States is what I am thinking as I head back to the house. I will find Liberty there, like Tía Mimi says. But I already sense it is a different kind of liberty my aunt means. All I can do is hope that when we come back—as Mami has promised we will—my Liberty will be waiting for me here.