One afternoon, exhausted but happy after a day of sewing, I took my time on the steep stairs to our hut, bringing in Anna’s daily present of mashed grubs and leaves that she’d left on the first step. Just inside the door, I turned around and saw them.

My clothes.

My only T-shirt and pair of shorts, still ripped and wrecked, but washed and carefully ironed, were folded in a neat pile on the mattress. I picked them up, smelled them: they still held the odor of hot stones. I ran outside and a short way up the hill, a shout stuck in my throat. I turned in a slow circle: there was no one around. Smoked meat hung motionless from a metal rod over a fire, the knotted spine of a capybara glistened like a row of crude pearls in the haze of the afternoon. One of the dogs, her back leg ripped open by a wild boar during the last hunt and pieced together courtesy of FrannyB, lay resting in the shade, ignoring the flies that sucked at the corners of her eyes. Only the still, fetid heat greeted me.

I climbed the stairs back to the hut. Tenting the mosquito netting around me, I crawled onto the mattress, dragging the small pile of clothes under the net next to me. I held the little bundle close to my chest, like I was hugging a piece of my old self, my child self, someone I was starting to forget, or let go of. Still, I wondered: Who had done this? Was it Anna? Doña Antonia? One of the other women? And why? And just as mysterious, if not more so: Why did I have no desire to put these clothes on? I liked the weird dress I’d sewn out of burlap lentil sacks and odd polka-dot linen. I thought about what Anna said, about all my gringa treasures, and it hit me that she was right; I could leave, I had a country to go back to—an immense, beautiful country with seasons and laws and ribbons of highway, libraries and museums, restaurants and ice cream and colleges—but I didn’t want to go.

Because I had Ayachero treasures, too—Omar, of course. And now, the women expected me to join them in the morning to do what needed to be done, and they were grateful for my sewing. Beya’s belief that I was a shaman was laughable to me, but the delusion felt magical, like anything was possible, and always, the jungle enthralled as much as it repelled.

I was still lost—in countless ways I didn’t know what I was doing—but I was beginning to be found, too.

TWENTY-FOUR

Squinting at a purple orchid several yards away in the mid-story, arms out straight, I tried to steady the pistol with both hands. For God’s Sake stood just behind me, observing my technique. We’d been practicing all morning at the Tortoise Beach and I was yet to hit anything remotely close to a target.