“Buenos días,” she said, two words she’d never before uttered to me. Still, she didn’t meet my eye.

“Hola,” I said, pushing myself to my feet.

“This is for you.” With great ceremony, she placed a shallow stone bowl filled with red embers on the flat oven top.

“Thanks,” I said. “My fire was out.”

She finally looked at me, her expression set, determined, but I also caught a trace of fear. “You know what this is—the jenecheru? Do you understand what I’m giving you?”

“Fire?”

“The fire of the hearth. The jenecheru. It’s something offered to a new family member,” she said, kneeling, her face hidden now as she scraped out with my broom what wet wood remained from the belly of the oven. “It’s sacred.”

“I’ve lived here six months. What took you so long?”

“You speak to Beya. She does what you ask. I don’t know why.”

“She does what she wants.”

She pushed herself to her feet with a groan and faced me. “You don’t know what she’s capable of. The men have never been gone this long. The women are afraid she’s done something. Will you protect us from her?”

“What . . . would she do?” I touched my belly protectively, instinctively.

“You think she’s so kind, always there to help. You weren’t here years ago when she let babies die, babies we needed her powers to save, or when she cursed the river. For months, no one caught a fish.”

We stared at each other for several moments until she broke away and poked at the fire; the coals sputtered the dry wood alive. “So don’t forget, you’re with us now, okay? You are Ayacheran. And you can never let this fire go out, understand? It lasts your whole life.”

“Then you’ll have to help me fix the cracks in the top of this thing. Otherwise”—I shrugged—“the sacred fire will go out the next time it rains.”

She cocked her head at me as if to say, Are you fucking with me?, then bent down and peered at the slab of clay as she ran her rough brown hands along it, frowning at the cracks and chips. With a grunt, she lifted off the heavy top, tucked it under one arm, and started up the hill. “Come on,” she called back. “I’ll show you how to fix it.”

Weeks later, my fire still burned, as if Doña Antonia’s assignation of its sacredness were real and the coals would burn for Omar and me forever.

THIRTY

The next day, I sat with Doña Antonia, Paco, Anna, Claudia and her new baby sister, and a few of the other women at the shore, preparing a dozen small piranha for dinner. The amount of meat was tiny and a lot of work to get to, but it was a delicious fish. Alberto, a sweet, quiet twelve-year-old—too young to go hunting with the men and never happy about it—had taken his small dugout to the Tortoise Beach that morning and speared a big catfish along with the piranha. We’d completely run out of peccary, even smoked meat, so everyone was grateful. FrannyA remained in the clinic, sleeping, FrannyB at her side. She’d been in pain when she awoke, but Beya had left her a small dose of the toxin and that seemed to help and set her back to dozing.