“There are a lot of buses here, I don’t like it.”

He’s scared to death, Tali realized, and she wanted to hug him, but there was nothing in the boy’s attitude that authorized her to touch him. He’s like his father that way, she thought; they’re both like cats.

“Around here we call buses micros. They’re a little different.”

She wasn’t going to make him feel better with that, but at least it was true.

“Let’s go to the water, okay?”

He doesn’t want to be far from his dad, thought Tali. Gaspar held his hand out to her and she took it, surprised. Back in the car he was still quiet, but at least he looked out the window: before, his head had hung down. Juan said nothing, just lit a cigarette and smoked it slowly, filling his lungs with smoke as if the heat wasn’t enough.

The rest of the day was calm and silent even though the beaches at the lake were full of people. Gaspar received cheers and applause when he was able to float free of the safety of his father’s arms, and although he didn’t eat much at lunch, he did agree to play with some boys carrying spades and buckets who invited him to dig trenches. Stay close, where we can see you, Tali told them, and the boys said yes, ma’am and settled in less than three meters away. Juan swam far out in the lake, and Tali, alone under the sun umbrella, finally felt calm. She was ready now to listen to what Juan had to tell her. Because, she realized, he did have something to tell her. Juan was not her occasional lover. She was no mere river witch. They were both members of the Order. They could pretend to forget that, but not for very long.

Gaspar was still digging his hole—a real crater, said the other boys’ mother, who was keeping a close eye on them. A car radio was playing a melancholic chamamé; a fat woman was strolling along the shore with a black dog that leaped up at her and made her laugh; two young men were storing their fishing poles, bait, and catch in the back of a pickup: they’d soon be putting the fish on a grill somewhere. Tali recognized a man who had come to ask for protection two months back, and whom she had let enter the temple and pray to the saint, alone; she had blessed his skeleton figure with wine and ash. She also recognized a woman who had come to have her cards read, asking about her daughter: Tali had seen her dead, drowned, and she’d said so. One of the many girls the military had murdered and thrown into rivers, their eyes eaten by fish, their feet tangled in vegetation: dead mermaids with bellies full of lead. Tali didn’t lie, she wouldn’t give false hope. The fathers and mothers of young people who’d been disappeared by the dictatorship sought her out; they wanted, at least, to know how their children died, if their bodies were in a pit of bones or underwater or in a secret cemetery. The woman didn’t look at her now: she was playing with a little girl. Was this the dead girl’s daughter? She remembered that afternoon: it was raining, the sky was black. Unafraid of the lightning, the woman had left anyway, and Tali had watched her run down the dirt road. Then she’d gathered up the cards in the deck and had sat drinking mate, looking out at the dark gray day, watching the way the wind shook the peach tree and the other trees off in the distance, by the river. Ka’aru, she thought. She needed to speak more Guarani. She was losing the language, spending too much time alone.