He began to walk. The sun beat down. It was exactly the way that she had described: The sand dunes. The dance hall. The lonely street that led directly west to the grove of mesquite, and the tree with a double trunk, twenty meters high, the tree that everyone knew. Walk five hundred paces north. There was the friendly shack. The garden that her aunt tended, housing chickens and peppers. And yes, there she was, near the fence, her hair swept back, hanging laundry in the breeze.

He had not known what he felt for her, this person bred from different soil. He had not known home could also be a second place, far from the land of one’s birth. A long time ago, he had thought it was not possible.

When Adela saw him, her face showed only surprise. Then there was something else, ancient and deep and of the earth. He recognized it inside himself. And he knew, finally, how to name it.

41

April 1974

TWO THIRTY A.M. ON HIS NIGHTSTAND ALARM CLOCK. THE NEIGHBOR’S white light shone through his window, but his mind was still filled with the images of his not-dream. He had sweated through his nightclothes. He rose to use the bathroom, shuffling stiffly past Anika’s room, past his son and daughter-in-law’s door, making himself remember other images that were not not-dreams, things that he had seen on the television just that night: Cronkite reporting the South Vietnamese air strikes. The Hearst girl’s voice on the audiotape. An American Indian with a single tear in his eye, seated on a paint. For some reason, when he needed other memories in the middle of the night, when he needed to ward off the not-dream, the television pictures came to him most easily.