As Mireya and Cali had promised, their mother didn’t live far across the river from El Paso, Texas. After Cali drove through downtown Juárez, he spent five minutes winding through dark neighborhoods before turning into Isabel’s driveway. He unlocked a padlocked gate to pull into the courtyard. The gate had been there before Mexico’s drug war. Juárez has long known big-city, border-town dangers.

The inside looked bigger than the outside suggested. In the new addition, an old-fashioned wood stove warmed and cheered the room.

The house wasn’t small, though it might seem poor by American standards: a graying, peeling sprawl of cinderblock, brick, and adobe. “It’s too bad they can’t fix up the outside, isn’t it?” Mireya said. “No one wants anyone to know that they have anything and attract attention.” Juárez sees plenty of robberies these days.

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Their mini-marshmallow stature and pre-intellectual chatter marked them as targets: those undersized, over-bright kids who get stuffed into lockers by eighth graders. Cassie made beeping noises. Talia talked so fast that the ends of sentences tumbled out ahead of the beginnings. Cami, one of only two seventh graders, smirked at both the chatty sixth graders and the only slightly less chatty adult: me. But during our eight-week Lighthouse Young Writers Workshop, I discovered they would all survive, because they’d learned to sublimate the horror of middle school by pouring it into creative writing.

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I woke in terror and opened my eyes to green tubular objects floating toward me — string beans, or slow-motion bullets. I yelled, startling my husband. When I snapped out of it I reassured Dale, “It’s only what always happens.” Meaning: “It’s only because night terrors are my thing, not because I’m traveling to Juárez,” although that was precisely the problem. I closed my eyes and pictured my breasts exploding. I wondered what Dale would do if I were shot. It was too much to contemplate. I asked God to keep me safe, and fell back to sleep.

We took a bus to El Paso’s old-fashioned, brick-and-mortar downtown.

I woke a short time later to catch a flight to El Paso with my neighbor Mireya. Before I left the house, I removed my engagement ring. Mireya, who used to live in Juárez, said, “I’m glad you left your ring at home.” No point attracting robbers with a diamond, especially one with sentimental value. I still wore my wedding band, an instinct from younger days when traveling solo meant constant sexual harassment.

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