Mom’s voice startled me. “Stop biting your fingernails,” she said. She lit a second cigarette while we continued to wait. “He said not to touch anything—that includes your mouth.” For quite some time I tried to remember our arrival, tried to find the exact memory of my mother putting together a bed, making it, and putting me under the blankets. But I couldn’t remember any of that. All I remembered was that at one point the night before I had a dream where I crawled out of bed and into the darkness of the unfamiliar house, and I grabbed at a doorknob that wasn’t there, tripped over boxes that cluttered the short and narrow hallway that led straight to the kitchen and small living room where a man’s voice spoke to me, telling me to go back to bed. I’d asked who he was but he didn’t answer. He guided me back to my room, his boots echoing down the hallway.

At the noise of a truck and its engine cutting off, Mom said, “Finally,” and she stood from the table. When the man came down the driveway and up the stairs and stepped over that gap, I knew at once it hadn’t been a dream. The man Mom called about the jar was the man who put me to bed last night. He was dark like Mom, and unlike Mom he had long black hair, and little black whiskers on his upper lip. He wasn’t fat, but he had a pudge to him I hadn’t noticed in the dark, and his jeans were faded and baggy. He wore a red-and-black flannel button-up.

“Gwus,” Mom said. “This is Frick. He’s a medicine man.”

“He was here last night,” I said to Mom, and then to Frick I said, “I saw you.”

“Who do you think hooked up the woodstove?” Frick asked.

I thought Mom.

“Let me see your hand,” Frick said.

I held my hand out to him and he took it and rubbed my palm. He let go and talked to Mom about the jar. “It’s bad medicine,” he said, and Mom wondered who would put it here. Frick had no answer. “Could have been anyone on the rez. I’ll take care of it.”

He left the house. I wondered why you couldn’t throw it away, wondered how Frick would handle it. I asked Mom, and she got all annoyed.

“You can’t throw it away,” she said. “Frick’s a Native doctor. It needs to be properly disposed of.”

I asked why again, and she said that what I’d found had been meant to hurt me. To hurt us.

“But I feel fine,” I told her, to which she said, “Just in case.”

Soon Frick opened the door and said he was ready for us. Mom took me outside and to the back of the house and down into the woods where a tree had four cloth flags hanging: red, white, black, and yellow.

“It’s the four directions,” Mom told me.