At the hour that Jesus was laid in His tomb the sun set and the temperature dropped immediately as it does in the desert. The crowd began to disperse, slowly and quietly. Sofi and Doña Felicia led Loca—who only weighed eighty-five pounds by then and was very, very tired (although it had been one of her stronger days)—on Gato Negro back home.

No, no one had never seen a procession like that one before.

It was nearly six months later, and things went on pretty much business as usual around Tome, except that in Sofi’s home they were quiet as they had never been before. The animals did not wander much inside no more. Loca was too weak to go out and tend to them.

And even though she didn’t, she wasn’t too lonely for the royal bird, or the dogs or Gato Negro, since, just around the Equinox, the Lady in Blue started coming to visit her, walked right into Loca’s little room when no one was around one day and stood next to her bed on the same spot where el Doctor Tolentino used to stand and take out small bloody masses from Loca’s body until she asked him not to no more.

This was not the woman Loca had known down by the acequia, by the way. This lady looked like a nun. In fact, she was a nun. But she didn’t smell like nothing so Loca was not sure if she was a present nun or a past nun or maybe hasta una future subjunctive nun. Loca tried to find out by asking trick questions about la Esperanza, who also visited her occasionally, and questions about la Caridad and la Fe, who never did, but the Lady in Blue did not seem interested in talking about nobody besides La Loca and just making her feel better when she couldn’t get out of bed no more.

Even if it was during the day when she came by, the nun-carried a lantern; and on one afternoon, she pushed aside her manta, and opened up her habit to show La Loca the horsehair vest beneath that cut into her delicate white body, and that’s when Loca decided that alive or not, the Lady in Blue must be related to Francisco el Penitente. But when she asked the nun if she knew el Francisco, the nun confused her more by saying only that yes, she had known a few.