But also, everyone and everything that Caridad had ever given her heart to had gone away. There hadn’t been but two instances, Memo and Corazón, but two were enough. Then, of course, she had lost both her sister Fe and her older sister Esperanza, in a way.

Esperanza only in a way, because everyone knew Esperanza, stubborn as she had always been, was still around. She was not only around to La Loca, appearing occasionally by the acequia, and to other people, like Sofia and doña Felicia in their dreams, but she really talked pretty plainly to Caridad. So it was hard for Caridad to miss her older sister, having become closer to her after death than in life.

But Fe, who had stroked Caridad’s brow so tenderly on that night of restoration when she had returned to the living after her encounter with the malgora, was really dead. And you couldn’t bring back something that was so dead no matter how much you sat on your ankles before your candles and incense and prayed for a word, a sign, no matter what you did.

No, she would not take a risk and let beautiful Esmeralda die, too, just because of her apparently fatal touch. Doña Felicia was always teasing Caridad about becoming more and more like her sister Loca, afraid of people, but maybe La Loca was on to something all along.

So, every night Caridad, whose sleeping patterns tended to extremes—either she did not sleep at all, or she slept for days and even weeks at a time, usually before or right after making a prophecy—pacified her yearning by simply keeping an eye on the little home of Maria and Esmeralda. It’s not like she thought anything bad was going to happen to them. She didn’t keep her vigil because of that. It just made her feel good to be close by, the way Francisco el Penitente felt good being close by to her. Yes, she had always known that he was there. How could she not feel his own nearby yearning for the impossible, which was so akin to her own?

As for Esmeralda, she continued to see Caridad like the long-lost cousin she thought her to be at first. You might say she had a natural love for Caridad, which grew immediately once she found out that Caridad was kind of a medicine woman. The words “medicine woman” never came from Caridad’s lips, of course. Esmeralda knew that Caridad was still too young to understand her gifts so she didn’t mind when Caridad shied away from her when she went to visit while Maria got massaged by doña Felicia.

Caridad always let her into her little trailer without saying more than “Hi. How you doin’?” She gave Esmeralda a good tea, cota or something like that, and a little piece of sweet bread if she had it, also without saying much.