Permanent sweat stains scored dark semicircles in the armpits of FrannyB’s short-sleeved camo shirt. Her army pants fit snugly around generous hips and disappeared into high rubber boots. Her friend was dressed precisely the same way; on her, the clothes draped from her delicate frame, exaggerating her ethereal figure. “Sorry to meet under these circumstances,” FrannyB continued. “Just a terrible, terrible thing, this loss. But that’s the jungle for you, I’m afraid. Brutal place.”

The crowd was once again losing its form, spreading out like a lake. Tossing her buzz-cut blond head with a melodramatic gesture—FrannyA in her wake—FrannyB threw herself back into the job of herding everyone into a procession of sorts, eventually huffing her way to the front of the line.

With a nod to Omar and me, Anna, Franz, and Claudia walked past us; the crowd parted for them. The parents carried between them a small wooden box painted white. In it were a heartbreakingly small pair of shorts and shirt neatly folded, along with a few of Benicio’s possessions: a broken miniature car, a bicycle tire tube fashioned into a slingshot, some marbles, a fish hook, and a few ancient, water-warped baseball cards. Jungle flowers had been woven into a chain that graced the perimeter of the box.

Clutching a rosary to her chest, face crumpled in agony, Anna held one side of the box, Franz the other. Anna’s father, a tiny man with stick legs and white hair, played a mournful tune on a ukulele as the group made its slow trek to the shore. Omar kept a strong grip on my hand as we walked; I was grateful. I thought of the nephew he had never met—would never meet—and the decisions Omar had made for that to be the case, and suddenly felt so much older than my nineteen years, as a dawning of such a thing as consequences to life decisions formed vaguely in my mind.

Anna began to cry openly now, and so too did the other women, in sympathy and terror for the random cruelty the jungle was capable of, knowing in their hearts it could have been their child, and might be their child the next day, week, year, second. Claudia and the other children, infected by the grief all around them, began to wail as well, until just about everyone, including myself, was crying for every hurt that had ever befallen them.

Together we walked the length of the village, past every hut and oven and sleeping dog, down to the narrow strip of beach where the boy was taken. Anna’s father finished his song as we walked on the cinnamon-colored sand. Long, deep grooves had been gouged by the bodies of the giant tortoises who gathered there to mate and lay their eggs, their arms creating carved arcs on either side. I saw no jaguar tracks, but they could have been erased by the turtles’ great, sweeping flippers. In the stultifying stillness, the arms of the jungle drooping over us, we came to a stop at an open hole dug several feet deep in the muddy bank. Franz and Anna kneeled and lay the box down next to it, pushing themselves back to their feet with great effort.