Calliope had put on the black yoga pants and sweatshirt she’d brought from Tía’s and the camper’s trusty hiking boots, tired of wearing a dress in the night air. She found Mara out back, smoking homegrown tobacco. Chance was inside packing. The corn girl was asleep. Calliope stood beside Mara, breathing in the sweetly pungent smoke. “I didn’t realize you smoked.”

“Old habit. I quit, but tonight it smelled so good.” She breathed out a puff of smoke. “I’m too old, really. Guess I’m nervous.”

Again, Calliope resisted the urge to ask Mara how her chest felt. She’d nearly died. Calliope still didn’t understand how the Medicine clan had saved her without the use of a hospital. She added it to the mile-long list of what she didn’t understand but had come to accept.

Like the rock baby still buried in the threshold of Malia’s house, which Calliope still stepped gingerly over or around, or avoided altogether by coming in through the back door. She could’ve sworn she could hear a faint heartbeat through the floorboards, as through a fetal heart monitor, a telltale heart. She was half tempted to dig it out each day and check for a rotting corpse. But she never did.

When Mara recovered, Calliope had told her what she’d learned from Arlen and what had become of her rock baby and Amy’s body—or rather, what had unbecome of them. Mara had a less difficult time accepting the reality. “I knew my mother wasn’t crazy. I knew Chaiwa had been right all along. Lizard’s Tail was true. Only this time, I was Chaiwa. We all were.” She said this through tears, her voice part amazed, part desolate. “I’m the one who left Trudy.”

Calliope thought of Susana, the note she left: turned to stone. She’d watched her beloved Reina become a rock before her eyes. Only now that she’d given birth to a rock child did Calliope begin to comprehend the confusion and grief that had taken her friend’s life. What had caused the few people they’d encountered to seem so insane, like the hunter. They were shell-shocked. In some ways, Calliope still felt shell-shocked, like she was wandering through a dream. She was still waiting to awaken.

At Mara’s insistence, they’d buried the rock of Amy Denver behind the house, and that’s where Mara was now smoking, beside Amy’s grave.

“She should be going with us,” Calliope said.

Mara nodded, stubbed her cigarette out in a small clay ashtray, set it on the back porch. Their silence filled with the chirping of night insects. It was summer come early, the buzzing of cicadas in the wild grasses. Mara finally spoke. “I’m sorry I barged in on you like that. I didn’t realize you and Chance were …”