“But For God’s Sake, everybody here loves you. Omar loves you like a brother.”

“One day you will understand, over.”

I sat next to him on the platform. His face was creased with anguish. “What’s your real name? Your Tatinga name?”

“I’m sorry, Lily, to say that I cannot answer you. It is the only thing that is mine, over.”

I nodded, wondering what was truly mine. I knew it was nothing I could touch.

Suddenly all business, he pushed himself to his feet, grabbed the empty sacks, and threw them over his shoulder. I followed him all the way down to the bank of the river, a hollowness banging in my gut. It felt like a father was leaving me, and there was nothing I could do to stop him.

He tossed the empty bags into the belly of the boat and climbed in. One hand on the tiller, he yanked at the motor’s rusty chain before settling himself on his well-worn seat. It rumbled to life on the first pull; water churned and smoked under the turning blades. Jamming his ancient golf cap down over red-rimmed eyes, he cast a lingering look over the village that steamed in the early-morning mist.

“Lily, are you happy here? Because I have enough room here, in the boat today, with empty bags and no supplies, to take you to San Solidad, over.”

I burst out, “How can you even ask me that? I can’t leave Omar.”

Part of me wanted to fall to my knees, moaning with desire for refrigeration, electricity, movies, sherbet, Snickers bars, roads, malls; the heartbreaking miracle of the familiar. I stroked my belly through my gunnysack dress, the memory of the gun still shaping my hand, the taste of Omar’s kiss on my mouth, his dear voice reading his assignments playing in my head. Howler monkeys called in the distance, a sound that always presaged a soaking rain.

For God’s Sake waited patiently. I thought, I’m going to stay. I’m going to survive this place.

“You don’t have to say yes to my idea, young Lily. I remember how it was with my wife in the earliest days. In fact, I would be so surprised if you said yes and climbed into this boat right now. No one would be more surprised. But you are not too young to think about your own ca’ah. Maybe it’s good to actually choose this place, to choose any place, over.”

TWENTY-FIVE

– SEPTEMBER –

We cut the motor, the air hot as breath. Under high, dark passages, past trees wreathed with strangler figs, a swift current swept us along a slender vein of water. Omar crouched at the bow of the boat, his body bent in a C of concentration as he read the secrets in the channels of brown and black water beneath us, of the strange whirlpools and eddies, the spinning logs that looked like animals that sank and mysteriously rose some distance away. Nuts and rotting fruits floated swiftly by. A three-foot ashen tube—an abandoned wasps’ nest—bobbed past. Every now and then, Omar stood, gazing out into the maelstrom of thickened fleshy leaves at the shoreline; just the subtle shift of his weight steering the canoe into a slightly different slipstream before he squatted again, pulling the soft water behind him with a leaf-shaped palm-wood paddle.