The boat was where we’d left it. In just six days, a dozen vines had grown around it in tight loops and had it on lockdown. Once the men chopped the boat free, Omar dumped it over, releasing into the river a family of small green snakes coiled into a cozy pile in the bottom.

MiddleEye and the men dropped the bags of poultice into the boat and left without ceremony of any kind, not a goodbye, not even a backward glance. The jungle closed behind them as if the entire experience had all been a dream.

The river coursed swollen along the bank, stronger and higher by several feet than when we arrived. Omar made a bed out of the soft bags of leaves under the thatch awning that tented one end of the canoe and settled me there.

“Take off your dress, Lily.”

“Really?” I considered begging him to give me a few hours’ break. Each treatment was like painting on misery.

“Come on. You need this stuff on you all the time.”

With a sigh, I peeled off my dress and tried to get comfortable on the bags; the hot breath of the river prickling my skin. Stained in lighter and darker patches of sage by the poultice, my skin looked like beech bark.

Omar kissed my bald head, dipped his hand in one of the bags, and spread green goop across my shoulders. Tears seeped from my eyes.

“Your skin is looking better,” he said.

I didn’t care if he was making it up. The words comforted me and I loved him for saying them. He rinsed his hands in the river and pulled out a beat-up sheet of notebook paper from his back pocket. His capital-lettered sentences filled the pages.

“I finished this while you were sleeping,” he said, sitting on the gunwale, bare feet touching my swollen belly. “You know you slept for almost two days, right?”

I smiled. “You did your assignment?” I felt like a wet grub, shivering under cool, green mud.

He cupped my cheek, kissing me tenderly before he cleared his throat and read:

“ ‘Dear Baby Boy,

“ ‘I am your proud father, a native Amazonian. Your mother is a beautiful American seamstress who loves the jungle life.’ ” (A little smile to me here.) “ ‘I am learning English for you, because your parents want to give you knowledge, to make you understand what choices are in your life, because the world is different from when I am a baby boy. I know that with my strength, and the soul and kindness and magic of your mother, you grow to a man who can survive any world, the jungle world, the civilizado world, the Ayachero world, and the world of any tribe in Bolivia, even the ones who kill on sight. They do not kill you, because you are high up in the trees as they pass under, you hide in holes only you know exist, your arrows fly sooner than theirs, you run faster, the anaconda dies from your machete before he can close his jaws on your flesh, and always, dear one, your stomach is full from your own cleverness—’ ”