John Myer knew it was true. He pulled at the oar, dragged the choppy sea and heaved with gritted teeth. Fatigue heavy through his flesh. Not clear yet, but close.

He was forty-six years old.

SOMETIMES IT HELPS TO OPEN ALL THE WINDOWS

Samanta was concerned about her mistress. For weeks now the señora rarely left the house. They no longer went together to the flower market or to the bakery for cherry pastries, no longer took walks down to the water in the evening, no longer visited the offices where her businesses were run and the managers and accountants and clerks there greeted her with great respect and manners, pulling out and offering their chairs, even to Samanta. The señora was still a beautiful woman and often courted and always invited to the most fashionable soirées and salons in Valdivia. But she would not attend or be courted any longer. Her fine silk dresses hung sadly in the robe. Samanta believed the señora’s malaise had ruined one of the lemon trees in the courtyard. She feared for the health of their well water.

Thankfully (Samanta had been praying to the Virgin) the señora did finally take a walk one day and was gone for most of it. The sun and air would do her great good, Samanta thought. She opened all the windows in the house and all the cupboard doors, and beat the rugs and swept and mopped the floors. She aired the blankets and pillows and she wiped every shelf clean of dust and she chose the brightest tablecloths and cushions for the house. And as she did, Samanta softly repeated the Indian chants her mother had taught her when she was a child, the ones she could only ever whisper in case her father heard them sung, for which crime mother and daughter would both be beaten. The chants were ancient, in the language of her mother’s people from the mountains (which Samanta could not otherwise speak or understand), and they dispelled bad spirits and called on the good. She’d always felt the truth of them and was certain the Virgin understood, too. It was never a simple thing, to air a dark home.

Her mother would say, ‘An open heart has no secret compartments.’

Samanta lit smudge sticks and chanted the prayers and brushed the smoke over every wall, drawing loops and sweeping arcs, concentrating on the corners that never received sunlight (where the bad spirits cowered). She went to all three floors and through every room, out onto the balconies too, and even up into the attic with its terrible spiders’ webs. She could feel her good work giving breath back to the sad house.