Chapters (41)
- PART ONE
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- PART TWO
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- PART THREE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- THIRTY-THREE
- THIRTY-FOUR
- THIRTY-FIVE
- THIRTY-SIX
- THIRTY-SEVEN
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
He stood, went out the front, returned with a small shovel, pried back the wood that planked the doorway threshold, and began digging. Calliope turned away, stared instead at the corn girl, imagining a lifeless version of her—same black hair, honey-raw skin, bluish veins butterflying her forehead and cheeks and eyelids. She was holding her breath. She released it. Chance kept digging. Calliope considered telling him to stop.
A scraping sound. Metallic.
He was chanting as he’d done in the snow at the body of the Suuke, then pulled a bundle from the ground he brought to her, wrapped in a blanket identical to the corn girl’s. Calliope’s stomach coiled into a thick rope, knotted in her throat. The same cinching of space and air as in the hangar, her lungs compressing. But not with any machine or mythical creature. She was staring at her other daughter. What she’d seen in the black hole of her memory was real.
Though she knew what she’d been expecting to see, she was trembling, her voice shaking. “Where’s my real baby? What is this? What’d they do with her?”
Chance called out in Zuni and Malia rushed into the room. Had she been at the doorway listening the whole time? Had Calliope said anything to betray their lie? She wiped her eyes, turned from the volcanic rock in Chance’s hands. This had to have been some kind of strange ritual. This couldn’t be real. What had they done with her flesh-and-blood daughter? Why had they replaced her with a rock? It didn’t make sense. While Chance and his mother held a spirited conversation in Zuni, Malia’s hands flying to her face and in the air several times so it appeared as if she were signing or dancing, her hands little brown birds searching for a lost nest in the branches of a tree, Calliope stared at the corn girl. She wanted to go home.
But her home was buried under ash.
They’d stopped talking and were staring at her, their faces mirrors of each other’s, in both appearance and gravity. “Mujer, I need to show you something else.”
He handed Malia the rock baby, then stepped over the hole in the threshold and left the house again as when he’d gone for the shovel.
Calliope glanced at Malia and the rock baby, feeling not grief—but revulsion and anger. If Bisabuela or the Spirits had guided her to this place, what was the joke? What was she missing?