When they entered the building, a woman at a desk typed security passes on plain paper, and doled them out before they were whisked back into the limo and driven another two hours, first through a sparse village called Española and then up a cliff and onto a winding stretch of road, all the while plodding through dirt, the car bumping and jostling. Mara giggled. It felt like a roller coaster, the view breathtaking. Colossal red-cleft rocks jutting across the plateau from the switchbacks gave way to bright evergreen mountainous desert. They passed a Native American village the driver called San Ildefonso. On the side of the road, near a low, flat adobe home, a mangy dog lying in a patch of weeds watched them without moving or barking. Mara wanted to stop and look around, wanted to pet the dog. But the driver kept on.

Before they left the Indian village, Mara noticed a woman making a pot on her front porch. Mara smiled at the woman, who looked up, didn’t smile back. Mara didn’t know then she was seeing Chaiwa for the first time. The woman who would change her life.

They made a hairpin turn onto a one-lane suspension bridge crossing over a wide river.

“This is the Rio Grande, I assume,” her father asked the driver.

“They call it Otowi,” the driver said. “Place where the river makes a noise.”

Watching the water as they drove slowly across the bridge, Mara felt drawn to its immensity. Did it have a secret to relay? She listened, hearing only the rumbling sound of the engine.

“Here we are,” the driver said, nodding ahead. “Site Y. Your new home.”

Across the river, the limo slowed outside a sprawling chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. Squat, gray barracks and hutments lined the dirt roads. Dust clouded around their car, pluming at the windows as they pitched slowly toward the gate. Army vehicles everywhere. Mara sketched furiously, creating a kind of shadowed, ink-blot version of the new world she was seeing—a shantytown, rickety trailers, overflowing garbage cans, laundry on the wire. She glanced at her mother, who’d gone pale. Mara sketched her face, a look of pure horror.

Now, as she pulled into the outskirts of Silver City, Mara imagined her face bore the same expression her mother’s had years ago. Cars crashed. Fires. Trudy couldn’t have been shopping at the Walmart. The Walmart was burning to the ground. Trudy had to be with her son. In the mental ward of the hospital where he lived.

* * * *

But inside was much worse. Beds empty. Thick white sheets, threadbare blankets, bars on the windows. Nursing station, papers strewn, notebooks open, computers dead. Med carts untended in the hallways. Chairs gathered in a semicircle around a blank TV screen. Blankets and pillows piled on the floor in heaps. Flies buzzing on trays stacked atop a food cart.