Calliope stooped down to hoist the bags over her shoulder. Eunjoo reached for a bag, and Calliope grabbed Phoenix’s Lightning McQueen backpack. Phoenix’s rock collection lay on the tiled foyer floor. He must have been working on it before he left. She should take it to him. But it was so heavy. Instead, she grabbed one smooth turquoise stone and stuck it in her duffel bag. At the front door, she sensed a terrible heaviness. In the air, a strange metallic smell, and the sky, ashen as wind-blown forest fires. The lava rock xeriscape shadowed into animal shapes that seemed to bleed, reminding Calliope that the indigenous people of this land had buried their dead’s bones dipped in ocher. At one ancient time, when the Sleeping Sisters were still wild beasts, the ancient lava had flowed all the way to her house, to her neighborhood and beyond. The lava had encased the desert floor for eons, had chiseled the earth, but the volcanoes had been silent for years.

She and Eunjoo shoved the bags into the trunk and turned toward Eunjoo’s house. Eunjoo gripped Calliope tighter. Did she too sense danger? The relentless kicking in Calliope’s belly reminded her of bones rattling. Two babies, fighting each other in the carved gypsum of her womb like cave flowers, dangling undone.

“I’m scared to go in,” Eunjoo squeaked, her voice a small bird’s. “They were fighting.”

“Who was fighting, chica?”

“My mommy and daddy.”

Calliope’s pulse sped. “Did something happen when they were fighting?” What if there’d been a domestic dispute gone violent?

“I was playing with my dolls. There was an earthquake. I went downstairs, and they were gone.”

Calliope couldn’t leave the girl outside. She hesitated a moment, then reached out and set the girl above her protruding stomach. She seemed so light, almost feathery. A bird. How different from Calliope’s own solid, heavy son, grown too large to hold.

Eunjoo wrapped her legs around Calliope, then lay her head down on the woman’s shoulder as if relieved of a tremendous weight, a child’s inclination to sink into a mother, even though they’d never met before. Calliope thought of the time she lost her son at the chile festival in Old Town. He’d gone looking for a carnival ride and lost sight of his mama for a split second. A split second on repeat. Calliope had that same sinking feeling now, unable to see or feel or hear anything except where are you, where are you? A seesaw-sick swishing, falling-and-falling kind of feeling. Only now, it wouldn’t go away. Numbness did not take over. She was half-numb half-sick, and it lingered.