My baby was due in the next few weeks—that was FrannyB’s best guess—but Anna thought my baby would come late because of the shape of my belly. Though I’d felt glimmers of excitement and anticipation for this new life, my sickness had become inextricable from my pregnancy; both meshed into mere helplessness. Still, I conjured mental images of myself alive, the baby alive, all of us alive.

Omar called down to me. “Are you watching where we’re going?”

“No.”

“Sit up and watch.”

“I can’t.”

He lay down his paddle, crawled under the roof, and squatted next to me. “Are you hungry? Why are you crying?”

I didn’t know I had been. “What do you want to name the baby?”

Rainwater dripped off his raven-black hair, ran down his handsome face. “We can talk about that later.”

“Are you excited?”

“Of course I am, cariño.” He stared at me a good, long time. “In fact, I’ve already started my assignment, my letter to the baby. But now, Lily, you need to sit up.”

Something in his voice compelled me to push myself at least to my elbows, where I could watch both sides of the jungle slip past. Now the rain came down softly but steadily, as if the air had always been suffused with water that way.

“There are two sorts of rain,” he said. “Men’s rain and women’s rain. Men’s rain comes down fast and hard and it’s over quick, like their anger, or their sadness. Women’s rain falls all day, into the night, it just goes and goes, because women cry so much, for so long.”

From the river rose the sad, beseeching limbs of submerged trees. Rain pocked the surface evenly, constantly. Definitely women’s rain. “So that’s why I’m sitting up? To look at rain?”

“You need to watch, Lily. Listen. Think. Look around. Up, down, everywhere. Do you know how many turns we’ve taken since we left? And which way?”

“No.”

“We’ve taken two left turns. How much time has passed?”

“I wasn’t really—”

“Three hours.”

He took my hand and helped me stand in the canoe. I clutched the palm roof for balance, the taste of the rain electric on my tongue. With his paddle he pushed deep into the belly of the river as we swung around a bend into an oxbow lake, a vast area where the river had doubled back on itself. The water lost its urgency, spread out, stilled.

“Lily, listen. I know you don’t feel well. I’m sorry. But you don’t wake up alive in the jungle because you were smarter or trickier. You stay alive here because you paid attention.”

THIRTY-FOUR

The night falls very fast, the last birds scolding the day. We sleep in the canoe, his body wrapped around mine, the velvet sky beating with stars, constellations doubling in the river. My eardrums vibrate with stuttering volleys and cries too deranged to sort out. Bird? Mammal? Insect? Unknowable. Rough cawing, angry barks, the stone-on-stone grind of cicadas. Millions of mist particles sparkle in the light of our torch lashed to the prow of the canoe. Bats swoop from their roosts, haunting the faint light left in the sky. Hawk moths bigger than my hand skim the water, hunting for insects and small fish.