Samuel pushed the scratched helmet down over his head and fastened the pack of supplies to the back of the motorcycle. Dawn was just breaking through the jungle wall of trees. He was up earlier than usual and he had been plagued by vivid dreams the night before, but he loved this time of day—not day and not night either. This was the moment when time seemed most permeable, least urgent, when a hidden quality in the things around him could seep through to the surface. When the sun was completely over the horizon or completely hidden by it, time seemed as solid as bricks stacked up one by one, sealing him off from the rest of the world.

                The motorcycle started after a few forceful jumps. He strained his hand squeezing the throttle. He’d had it fixed so many times that he’d finally just given in to the fact that the bike was a piece of junk and it was deteriorating slowly but surely. In the course of his life, he had learned to accept many more difficult, more disappointing realities. Over the rutted dirt, he steered the bike, gaining speed when he hit the one-lane road that had been paved through the jungle by the oil companies. When the first foreign oil men had arrived on this side of the Andes twenty years earlier, he’d disappeared into the jungle with them. He was seventeen. An Uloa teenager with five years of Spanish and a high school education could make good money as a scout in those days. The oil men did not yet know the territory, the tribes who lived in the beyond had not yet started to fight them, and Samuel showed promise. They promoted him to lead a survey crew.

                He worked sixteen-hour days and got drunk every night. He took prostitutes when he found them in the distant town that was starting to build up around the foreign crews that flew in, gave orders to the natives, took pleasure in the women and the drugs, and flew back to their own country. One night, after two years of this life, Samuel decided it was time to go home. He left just after breakfast, two days before payday, while the others piled in the truck at the campsite to ride out to the field. He wrapped leftover rice in a banana leaf, stuffed it in his pocket, and walked nine hours to the main road, where he begged a ride back to the province where his family had always lived.

                The light now started to bleed onto the treetops, tinting them gold and pink. He continued traveling through a long, unpopulated swath of jungle. The little villages and towns that people had settled when the oil companies opened up the area were now mostly to the west and south of him. Beyond them the rainforest sloped upward toward the mountains, the Andean foothills. The river, his most enduring guide, was a half a kilometer away, flowing parallel to the road. He kept riding toward the bridge where he would cross it.

                Parts of one of the dreams came back to him then. A woman with long red hair and a graceful, athletic body walked alongside him through town, past his parents’ darkened window. Her freckled face was different than he remembered, but he knew her well. She kept telling him she was going to be late. “You’re already late,” he said. “Stop worrying about it.” He squeezed her hand because he still loved her in the dream, even as his consciousness reminded him he’d let her go long before.

                Why should he dream about her now, after eight years? He sweated under his helmet, in his palms, and in his groin. He had many more immediate, more important things on his mind. He’d never spoken of his lingering regret that she went back to where she came from.

                He gripped the accelerator even though the road was worsening. The elders would not start the search without him, but the rising sun beat urgently on his back. His ten-year-old girl was strong. Still, she was a child. He prayed she was simply on one of her journeys, not lost.

 

                When I get here, I do the first thing, which is to take a bath. You always have to do that first because it’s the first thing. It makes sense. Everything here makes sense.

                Passing through the mountains always makes you dirty. The mothers stand in the river with me. They help me wash my hair. At home with my papi, I can wash my hair just fine by myself. But when I get here, I am too tired. I just want to lie down in the dirt and take a long nap. But the mothers tell me I can’t. And I do it because they are the mothers and I am still learning.

                After my bath, the mothers feed me yucca soup, like my grandmother does sometimes at home. But the mothers are all naked and have no shame. The priest at my school would not like them. Some of them are very fat and others are very skinny, like they will break in two when they sit down. But still they are never shy. They kiss my cheeks and sometimes they laugh about the other side, and I feel invisible, even though I know it’s not true. Every single person knows I’m here. I wear my jeans and my favorite t-shirt, the one with the daisies on it. I am the only one who wears clothes. But sometimes they get really quiet and serious when they talk about the other side and then I feel like the sore thumb sticking out, even though I’m not naked.

                Every single person knows I’m here.

 

                When she heard the sound of the motorcycle, his mother appeared in the doorway of the thatched roof hut where he’d been born. She looked smaller than usual, as if she’d shrunk in the last five days.

                “You’re late,” she called out to him. She folded her arms over her chest. Her face was tight and dark as a raisin.

                “I’m here now,” Samuel told her, pulling the helmet off and setting it on the seat. “Are Juan and the others ready?”
                “Since daybreak,” she said.

                He kissed both her cheeks and tried to pass her in the doorway. Though she was tiny next to her son, she wouldn’t budge.

                “Mama,” Samuel said, a hint of pleading in his voice. There were no more words between them, but she relented. He saw she couldn’t look him in the eye. Full of masked anger and sorrow, he searched the two rooms as if he were looking for something, which he wasn’t. Not there.

                “Samuel!” he heard his brother, Juan, call to him. “Come on! We’re waiting!”

                His father was too frail to join the search, so his uncle, one of two shaman left in the village, performed the prayer. Samuel remembered when he last saw his daughter. He’d come home early from work to give her a ride out to the village and found her in the bathroom drawing red achiote stripes on her high, sharp cheeks. She knew it was forbidden to paint her face except during ceremony. He watched her without her knowing, wondering why she would defy her uncle.

                “It’s okay, Papi,” she called to him.

                He stepped out of the shadow, embarrassed. “My love, what are you doing?”

                She lathered a cloth with soap and scrubbed the paint off her face. “I just want to see what this stuff looks like in the mirror.” 

                “Won’t that dilute the power?” He stroked the top of her head.

                She shrugged and looked at her reflection. Her cheeks were covered with red suds. Her eyes, dark like his but round and wide set like her mother’s, took on an expression that was both ancient and intimate. 

                She answered, “It’d be good if we could use the power in more places than just the jungle.”

                As his uncle finished the incantation, the last thing Samuel could recall was the feel of her bony arms hugging him tight around the middle when he dropped her off at the village. He kissed the top of her head. She kept hanging on.

 

                Every time I come, I take a long walk with the old man. He shows me the same plants my great uncle does on the other side. I don’t know why we have to take this walk every time. I know all the special orchids and the cat’s claw, even though I am too young to use them to cure people. The old man says I am a fast learner, but I think it’s because my great uncle has taught me these things.

                What I really want to know about are the animals. The old man says I have to wait a little longer because the animals are very powerful and I have to be strong enough to understand their wisdom. But I have waited my whole life! On the other side, we don’t have many animals anymore, so I can’t find out about them there. My great uncle says lots of people, white people and my people, killed too many of them. People didn’t know that they would not come back. In the old days when there weren’t so many people, the animals always did. And some of the shaman, including the mothers, reminded people not to kill too many animals. But then things changed when outsiders came to the village, and people changed too. Uncle told me people didn’t know they were changing. The old man tells me snakes know when they change their skin and birds know when they change their feathers. If animals can know that, why can’t people? Maybe animals know it because their feathers and skin fall off into the dirt and they can see it. People don’t have feathers, though. Too bad.

                One time my uncle told me something strange. He said my papi changed but he didn’t know it. That made me really mad, I don’t know why. I told him my papi had always been the same. Uncle told me it happened before I was born. Well, I said, maybe. I crossed my arms over my chest. Uncle put his hand on my head softly, like he didn’t want me to be angry anymore. He smiled and looked sad at the same time. That made me confused. But I started not to feel so mad. I know Uncle loves my papi very much. I do too.

 

                The six men, Samuel, Juan, their uncle, two cousins, and Juan’s brother-in-law, sketched out a plan in the dirt. They would break into two groups of three: Samuel, Juan, and his uncle in one, the cousins and brother-in-law in the other. Samuel’s youngest cousin, Benjamin, was a jungle guide for a tour agency. He knew all the trails. Samuel’s uncle knew the sacred, unmarked places in the forest that could be reached only with a machete.

                “But did she have a machete when she left?” Samuel asked.

                “No,” his uncle said. “But if she was called there, she may have gone.”

                Samuel stared at the patch of dark clay where the others drew lines with their sticks. He could not show his anger to his uncle, though he thought his uncle was, ultimately, to blame. He seduced Sarita with his stories about the ancestors and the animals that changed shape and the cities in the mountains. But he never told her that that world was almost dead, and he refused to see that something new was struggling to be born. Samuel had sat with his uncle many times, eaten the root that gives the shaman visions and makes tourists vomit, and heard the trees call his name when he walked deep in the jungle. He could feel that something was changing, even if he couldn’t explain it. The cell phone antennae on the hills outside of town were part of it. The disintegrating oil pipeline to the north, too. The co-op of girls who made new prayer necklaces from the ancestors’ designs. The organic farm in his parents’ village. And there were more examples, more signs, but they did not reveal the whole picture, which was too complex for him, or perhaps for any one person, to comprehend. All he could say was that some days he woke up in utter despair; other days he woke up filled with uncomplicated peace.

                He knew his uncle would dismiss his feelings because he no longer trusted Samuel’s intuition. For this reason, Samuel did not now offer any suggestions but simply listened to his cousin and his uncle as they planned the search route. When Sarita was back safe and sound, maybe he would tell his uncle, without disrespect, that the jaguar could not lead the way back. But the problem remained that Samuel could not describe the way forward. He could only sense it when he was in the presence of his daughter.

 

                Today the old man is teaching me some new things about stones. Some of them are ordinary and you can just walk right by them. Other kinds you should pick up and put in your pocket. Some of them you are supposed to put in your hut by the door to make sure your mother and father, your sisters and brothers, and the other people in your family are safe in the house. Those stones are the ones that might have been people in the time before. Now that they are stones, their job is to keep an eye out for bad things.

                When I walked through the woods with the old man, I met my mother. She died in a car accident in some other country when I was a baby. I don’t remember her. One time, my papi showed me a picture of her. He is in the picture, too, and they are holding hands. My papi is tall, but she was a little taller than him. Her hair was long and wavy and red. I’ve only seen one other person in my whole life with red hair. That was the German lady who owned a hostel in town, where I live with my papi, except on some weekends when I stay with my grandparents in the village. But on TV I’ve seen people with red hair. There are plenty of people with red hair on TV. Anyway, I didn’t recognize my mother, but the old man did. I wasn’t surprised, though. The old man knows everyone. It doesn’t matter if they are alive or dead. That’s how it works on this side.

                When she walked down the path toward us, he gave me a little shove. I didn’t want to go. I wasn’t scared, I just didn’t care too much. Then I felt bad, because I thought I should care about my mother. The priest in school always tells us to honor our parents. So I walked up to her. She squatted down like I always do. Most white people can’t do that. She talked to me like I talk with my friends, not like most grown-ups. She spoke English, and I could understand even though I don’t know English. I spoke Uloa, and she understood me. I don’t know if she knew how to speak Uloa when she was alive. But I wasn’t surprised. The whole time, she had a little smile on her face. It was kind of a shy smile. It made me happy.

                Then she hugged me and she told me she had to move on, I don’t know where. I asked her if I could go too, but she said I have a lot of homework to do and my papi is waiting for me. When she said that, her smile disappeared and she looked strange. She looked very sad, but not in an ordinary way. She looked like ten crying people rolled up into one. But she wasn’t crying. Then I got very afraid. I didn’t want her to go. I wanted her to come back with me to the other side.

               

                His daughter had now been missing for almost forty-eight hours. His uncle would not let the search begin earlier because he thought Sarita might have been on a quest, though her usual journeys never lasted more than a day. Benjamin, who passed the village on his way home from a tour, got the word from Samuel’s mother that Sarita had disappeared again. He stopped by Samuel’s house, a couple of blocks from his in town, and gave his cousin the news.

                “Uncle wants to give it another day,” Benjamin explained.

                Samuel, standing at the front door in his underwear, passed his broad hand over his face. He’d been asleep when Benjamin knocked, even though it was still early evening. He’d gotten into the habit of going to bed right after dinner when Sarita stayed with her grandparents.

                “How long is he going to wait?”

                Benjamin answered: “If she doesn’t show up by daybreak, we’ll go out and look for her first thing tomorrow.”

                “You know how Uncle is,” he added. He raised and lowered one eyebrow and then the other, an expression that always made Samuel laugh when they were kids. Samuel said it looked like caterpillars were running across his face. But the joke hadn’t worked in years and Samuel gazed blankly at the half moon rising over the hills.

                Benjamin clapped him on the shoulder. “Go back to sleep. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

                Samuel shut the door and sat in a straight-backed, wooden chair by the uncovered window in the room where he cooked, ate, and helped Sarita with her homework. Her toys and books were piled in a corner. Her clothes were folded in an old chest his father had made for her.  He waited for an intuition about whether or not his daughter was safe. Nothing came. He continued to sit in the chair that made his backache, waiting for a sensation one way or the other. After a half an hour of nothing but back pain, he went to bed.

                He lay down and pulled the soft, worn sheet over his naked body. An occasional gust blew through the open window and chilled him. Although he’d slept there alone for years, he felt a searing loneliness. Sarita’s mother had slept there with him for two years and nine months, and then the three of them slept there together after Sarita was born. By the time Sarita was a year old, she’d stopped waking them up every couple of hours and would lie between them limp as a sack of corn for the entire night. In those days, he slept deeply and dreamlessly, but Sarita’s mother didn’t. In the morning, she would wake up irritable, and later in the day their argument, the only one they ever had, would start.

                He folded his hands behind his head and watched a spider work in a corner of the ceiling. He had thought they would pass through that phase the way they passed through Sarita’s nightly fussing and the other trials of new parents. In those days he couldn’t, no matter how much he loved her, marry her. When they stood together at the airport waiting for her plane to leave, they were both angry. “It’s not just for love, Samuel,” she said. “I wouldn’t have to fly home to deal with all of this visa bullshit if we got married.”

                “You wanted to see your parents anyway,” he said cruelly. At the time it was easy to be that way.

                The attendants called her flight, and she kissed and caressed Sarita, who cried and wriggled in Samuel’s arms. “No, no, my little love. Don’t cry,” she murmured. “I’ll be back very soon,” she said. She threw her bag over her shoulder and stepped into line. He was glad to see her go, but only because they both knew she was coming back.

                He rolled over on his side toward the wall and tucked his hands between his thighs. When he woke up from a nightmare as a kid, that was the only position that made him feel safe enough to fall back to sleep. He thought she would sleep soundly now if she were there with him, because he had now become a person who could marry a white woman. In fact, he had become a person who would marry a woman he loved, but many years too late.

                Juan, Samuel, and their uncle hiked for three hours along a narrow, disused trail. Carrying machetes, Juan and Samuel walked one in front of the other and hacked the vines and branches that obstructed the path. They shouted Sarita’s name every few minutes but got no response except the indifferent birds, which called to each other. Their uncle followed, occasionally giving a quiet command to turn left or right. At first, Juan and Samuel filled the heavy space with talk about their jobs, Juan’s wife and children, politics, who was drunk at the karaoke bar and which families were disputing which plot of land, but their uncle’s silence was weighty and judgmental. The idle chatter helped Samuel pass the time and forget his anxiety. But to his uncle, the search for Sarita was as sacred as her disappearance. And he made the rules.

                The rotten leaves and branches softened the trail under his feet, and the mud was slick and deep in some places. He and Juan wore boots they’d ordered off the Internet. His uncle walked barefoot. In a nylon backpack Samuel carried bottled water and a small first aid kit, things he knew they didn’t need. They could find water and antiseptic plants in the jungle. But for some reason he insisted on bringing his pack with him. He liked the weight on his back.

                Their uncle stopped to take a piss against a ceiba tree, and Juan sighed.

                “We should have gone out sooner,” he said.

                “Of course we should have,” Samuel snapped, though he wasn’t angry with Juan.

                “We’ll find her, Samuel.”

                Agitated, Samuel stamped his boots to shake loose the mud. The canopy kept the air cool but thick, and sweat beads rose at his hairline, around the collar of his shirt.

                “Your bike’s fixed?”

                “Barely.”

                “You need to dump that piece of crap and buy a new one,” Juan advised. “Hamilton Gutierrez wants to sell his. How long have you had that thing anyway?”

                “Ten years,” he replied.

                He’d bought it right before he met Sarita’s mother. At that point in his life, it was the most expensive thing he owned. He’d ride up to the cinderblock building where she worked in a small office for UNICEF and let the noisy engine run until she noticed him. The first week she simply frowned and walked past him. The second week she told him her name when he introduced himself. The third week they went for their first ride together. Even through his helmet he could hear her laughing and hooting, and when he dropped her off at the one-room apartment she rented in town, she told him it was a thrill. “I’ve never been on a motorcycle before,” she said, smiling as if she’d accomplished something important.

                “I’d like to take you again, if you like,” he said.

                “Thanks.” She gazed at him for a moment—he could still remember that look—and touched his chest. “Next week.”

                Although there was no use explaining to Juan, he couldn’t get rid of the bike. He’d have to keep riding it until it fell apart beneath him. 

 

                When my mother left, I was so sad. The old man knew it. He hugged me and told me I would get used to it. He told me I am learning well. I didn’t care. I didn’t tell him that. I believe what he teaches me. I know it’s the truth. But I still don’t know what to do when I go back to the other side. Will the stone people help me there? Or the animals? Will they help my papi? My papi is sad, even though he doesn’t tell me that. I just know. He is sad when he sees the drunk men lying on their faces on the sidewalks. And the kids who are even younger than me who sell chicles all day long. And the ones who steal. Those things make me sad too, plus seeing that my papi is unhappy. Sometimes I wish I was blind. Or I wish I could just watch TV all day or play with my friends like other kids. I don’t tell the old man or my uncle that because they are counting on me. And anyway, most of the time, I want to learn. I’m just afraid because it seems like I have to know how to fix everything that is broken.

                We take a walk into the city. When I first get to this side, I go to the jungle, because that’s where the old man and the mothers live. But we always visit the city because it is special and beautiful. Some of the buildings are made of clay, and whenever people want to they can make them into different shapes. Like a house or a school or a temple, or whatever they need. Other buildings look just like giant trees. Even though they are made of stone, they have real branches that grow out the top and the sides and make shade to keep the insides cool. They have iron pipes that come out from the bottom part and go into the ground. I think they are for bringing water up to the people that live in the tree-buildings. Sometimes water doesn’t come out of the faucets like it’s supposed to so the people get mad. They stand on the street and complain to the men in the white overalls and hard hats. The men tell them to have patience because it is a work in progress. The men go back to banging on the pipes, which look like silvery roots that glimmer in the sun.

                In the city people walk in the middle of the street because there are no cars. But they go at all different speeds like cars. The old man walks very slow and I walk very fast, faster than normal because I think it’s fun. The old man lets me play because he knows I’m still a kid and I make him laugh. But even though we walk at different speeds, we end up at the same place at the same time. That’s how time is here. No one wears a watch because they don’t work. And you don’t need one anyway because there are only a couple hours of day and night. Most of the time, the sun is just coming up or just going down.

                We go to a little restaurant where there is an old lady who serves us coffee. She is even older than the old man. It’s not regular coffee like the powder stuff my papi drinks or the cappuccino that tourists like that comes out of a noisy machine. It’s something else. The old woman lets me watch her when she makes it. First she smashes a root with a big hammer until it’s squishy. Then she puts water in one of those cappuccino makers, and the noise is so loud I have to plug my ears. Then she pours the water over the root and adds a sweet juice that comes from hibiscus flowers that grow outside the window. She tells me her grandmother made up the recipe, but she changed it over the years.

                The old man and I sit at a table on the street and drink the coffee. It’s delicious. He gives me a quiz on everything he has taught me so far.

                “Sarita, I am very proud of you,” he tells me at the end. “You still need to study the properties of chanca piedra, but next time I think we’ll be ready to start with the animals.”

                “Really!” I say and clap my hands. I am so excited I can hardly sit still.

                He laughs and then I laugh like someone is tickling me. Finally I try to calm down because I want him to know I am grown up enough to learn about the animals. “I promise,” I tell him, “I’ll do my homework when I go back.”

                “Good.” He sips his coffee and watches the people walking down the street. They float like leaves on a slow river. “Are you getting tired going back and forth?”

                Now I feel kind of afraid. “No,” I say. I don’t want him to tell me I can’t go back. I get worried because I miss my papi. My papi can’t come to this side and he must miss me too.

                “It’s okay if you are, Sarita. It’s normal. You’re job is tougher than mine, tougher than your uncle’s. You are living in a difficult era, my love.”

                “I can handle it. I’m growing up.”

                He nods. “Yes, you are.”

                Then I hear my name, really faint, the way it sounds when you try to scream with your hand over your mouth. But it gets a little louder. All of a sudden I am happier than I was when the old man told me I can learn about the animals.

                “Old man, I have to go now,” I tell him. “I can hear my papi calling me.”

 

                His uncle zipped his pants and turned his face toward the sky. “It’s so hot today,” he sighed. He noticed a gouge in the bark of a tree and ran his finger over it.

                “What is it?” Samuel asked.

                “Nothing,” his uncle said after a moment. “Let’s go this way.”

                They started off again, and Samuel swung his machete with more force. The rattle of cicadas and the crack of soft wood gave him a feeling of hopelessness. He blamed himself, though he could not have prevented her from walking out into the jungle. He couldn’t have kept her away from his family. Though they disapproved of her mother, they loved Sarita from the moment they laid eyes on her, and they were her kin. And even as a little girl, she showed a special understanding and her mother’s curiosity. Everyone had known this was her destined path.

                At noon the three men arrived at a fallen tree that bifurcated the trail.

                “Stop. Here,” Uncle said.

                “What’s here?” Juan asked.

                He did not answer. He scrambled up and over the tree trunk and suddenly lost his balance. Samuel lunged and clutched his uncle’s wrist, catching him before he fell.

                “What are we doing?” Samuel asked.

                His uncle righted himself on the other side of the log and waited for his nephews to climb over. “This is one of the places where Sarita and I make offerings.” He put his hands on his spindly hips and surveyed the area. “You cannot tell anyone about this place,” he warned them.

                “Well, she’s not here, Uncle,” Juan said.

                His uncle bent over and examined a small collection of stones arranged in the shape of a star. “But she was.”

                “What the hell is that?” Samuel asked. It was a sign of something. “Did she do that?”

                “Hey,” Juan called. He pulled something from under the log. “Is this Sarita’s?” He held up a blue rubber hair band.

                Samuel grabbed it out of Juan’s hand. “I’m not sure, but it could be. Maybe. Where else would it have come from?” Now the blood pulsed furiously through his neck. Maybe she was close by.

                Uncle made a tsk sound with his tongue. “She knows better than to leave remains.” He continued to study the stones. “We must keep looking. Let’s go to the next site.”

                Samuel put the hair band in his pocket and pushed forward into the jungle at his uncle’s direction. Over and over, he called Sarita’s name.

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