“It’s where he’s from. It must exist.”

“But I mean, come on, Lily, the jungle? Really? What do you know about living in the jungle?” She shook her head, knowing it was useless, I could see it on her face. And I hadn’t even told her about the jaguar. “You’re fucking nuts, okay, you’re fucking crazy,” she said quite seriously.

Even though a niggling part of me agreed with her, all I could do was smile.

“You can still change your mind, you know. He’ll get over it. You’re just another girl to him. Just walk away, come back to the Versailles.”

I pictured the South American–sized roaches scuttling in the sink; my hands chafed and bleeding from cooking and cleaning; my terrible loneliness, even with my friends. Omar was a new planet in my orbit, changing my gravitational pull.

Molly knocked back the dregs of her warm beer. “Can’t you just fuck him and leave it at that?”

“I love him, Molly.”

“Oh, please.” She rolled her eyes. “That is some shit I don’t want to hear about right now.”

I struggled to answer; Mark had broken up with her the minute they returned from their week away together. I sat up straight. “Sorry if you don’t understand.”

She picked at the label with her ragged fingernail. “Okay, I get it,” she sighed. “You found real love, and fuck me, maybe that’s just not going to happen for me.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

She waved me away. “Just remember, that top bunk will always have your name on it.” She got up and hugged me hard but fast. “Good luck.”

I started down the steps toward the street. Her face stayed hard and unsmiling as I turned to wave goodbye, but my joy could not, would not be diminished. No force on earth could have kept me from going to Omar on that sunny, windswept afternoon.

The jagged line of mountains that encircled me seemed to murmur, Yes, he is your life; the broken cobblestones under my feet whispered, This is your future; the laughing grandmas at the tamale stands nodded, Yes, go to him.

In return, everyone I passed got a smile from the mad-in-love teenage gringa on her way to her lover.

I never saw Molly or Britta again.

SIX

– MAY –

Passport in hand, my nose to the floor-to-ceiling windows of the Cochabamba airport terminal, I stood watching planes take off for La Paz or Santa Cruz, where passengers could connect to US flights; any of them could have taken me back home, or at least out of South America. Mentally I tried it: I flew back to Boston—to no place to live; to no one waiting for me; to a gray, rainy spring day; to rivers of pavement through forests of looming buildings; to everything good I had sabotaged.

An enormous canvas bag weighing one shoulder down, Omar stood at the far end of the terminal in a massive cargo door entryway, his lean body framed by the blue-eyed sky beyond him. He head-tilted for me to join him. That’s all it took.