Calliope closed her eyes, inhaled deeply, then cupped Susana’s face with her hands. “Amiga? Qué pasó? Are you hurt?” She searched her friend’s copper-penny eyes, watching the ensconcing crow’s-feet shrivel and shrink-wrap around them. When Susana didn’t respond, Calliope tried again, “Voy a la casa, al baño. Ven conmigo?”

Susana’s gaze dropped; she retraced circles in the mud. When she still didn’t answer, Calliope told her she would be right back, and, holding Eunjoo, strode up the red porch steps that covered the length of the anterior. Tonight, in the eerie shadows, the steps cracked like teeth from the mouth of the house. Inside, she called for Reina, but the women’s farmhouse, the house she and Andres loved, wore the same pattern as Calliope’s and Eunjoo’s. Untouched. A picture, static and unmoving. The women had bought the old farmhouse inexpensively ten years before and restored it. They’d spent their weekends tearing out floors and knocking down walls, refinishing the hardwood floors, rebuilding the kitchen.

Calliope led Eunjoo toward the bathroom, calling again, “Reina? Are you home, amiga?”

Wind through branches. Chicken scratches.

“What’s wrong with your friend?” the girl asked. “Is she sick?”

“I think so.”

“Did she lose her family, too?”

Calliope nodded, sucking in her breath. The smell of pee caught her throat again, churning her stomach. During her first trimester, both with Phoenix and with the twins, she’d held unlit candles to her nose in a constant vigil of nausea. Her mother’s pots of garlicky pinto beans forever on the stove roiled her gut, and the small tin of eucalyptus-lavender wax protected her the way vinaigrette boxes that aristocratic women once filled with perfume-soaked sponges defended them from city odors, from waste and filth and death.

“Will you help her find them, like you’re finding mine?” the girl asked.

Calliope didn’t know how to answer. She cleaned Eunjoo with feminine wipes she’d found in the medicine cabinet, pulled Phoenix’s dinosaur chonies from the backpack, and helped Eunjoo slip each skinny, knobbed leg in, then lifted them over her nalgas and hips. The girl said nothing about boys’ chonies. Calliope figured that Eunjoo could do this on her own, but she helped the girl anyway, a pair of Phoenix’s elastic-waist jeans and a T-shirt, rolling the cuffs and sleeves. She checked the faucet. No running water in the South Valley either. She couldn’t wash Eunjoo’s pee clothes, so she took them outside and hung them on the porch, then handed Phoenix’s backpack to Eunjoo, who put it on her back. She was a miniature Phoenix, a beautiful, moon-faced impostor.