Above us, around us, the rain ceased as abruptly as it had begun; the jungle night steaming and hissing. I’d come to find that, even in the middle of the dry season as we were, it rained torrentially at least once a day, if only for a quarter of an hour. We listened to the sounds of water running off the thatch, chortling into thin braiding streams on muddy paths. The leaves above us dripped endlessly, creating their own rain.

“Come on, Lily,” he said, taking my hand. “Let’s get settled at the longhouse.”

As we walked together through the hot night mist toward the glowing ovens on the hill, I tried to think of ways to lighten things between us. “Do you want to know your next assignment?”

He smiled and squeezed my hand. “Sure.”

“This time, write about the Tatinga. Anything you can think of.”

“Okay, Teacher, but I think I’m doing all the work here, and you just sit back and laugh at my English.”

“I don’t do that—” I burst out, until I saw he was kidding.

“Just trying to even things up. For every assignment I do, you tell me a Lily secret. About your American life.”

“When’s that due?”

“Now,” he said with a laugh. “Come on. You owe me.”

“All right,” I said, his hand warm and alive in mine. “When I was a kid, I used to go through all the clothes that came into the shop to be dry-cleaned, and I would keep everything I found in the pockets. All the money, jewelry, buttons, anything. If anyone asked, I swore I never found anything. It got me used to this idea that stealing was kind of okay. Weird, right?”

“What’s dry cleaning?”

“It’s—” I had to laugh. “It’s this way of cleaning fabric with chemicals.”

“What’s wrong with soap?”

“Nothing. It’s—oh, never mind.” Grinning at each other, we climbed the stairs of the longhouse. Before we entered the main room, every corner cheerfully lit by gas lamps, I pulled him around to face me. “When will you leave?”

“In a few days. As soon as we finish the platform.”

“Okay,” I said, pulling him toward me, trying in vain to ward off the chill that flooded me when I thought of myself alone in this place. “Okay.”

THIRTEEN

In the daytime, the main room of the longhouse was a lively gathering place, with a busy kitchen and dining area, foodstuffs kept in the series of four storerooms—each with real walls, a ceiling, and a door—on the far east end of the structure. At night, it became a crash pad for the dispossessed: Paco, families in the midst of rebuilding their huts, single men, visitors from other villages passing through, anyone temporarily or even permanently homeless.

The night of the funeral, Paco slept in a hammock between Omar and me, a heavy little teardrop shape. In the corner of the room, the woman who had been nursing the piglet slept curled up with it on the floor, both of them snoring, while I lay awake. Her skirt was hitched up. I could see she wore no underwear; this made me sad and afraid, though no one else seemed to have noticed. After a time, I couldn’t bear it and got up and tiptoed over to her, gently pulling her skirt down to cover her. She didn’t budge.