“No, I don’t understand one damn thing since I crashed. I’m in a coma, right? I’m in a hospital hooked up to monitors, and this is all a delusion? A figment of my broken brain?”

Her bisabuela laughed, wry and deep. She lifted her hands, rawhide and dappled with age spots, the way they’d looked when Calliope had kissed them last, folded them back into the coffin, buried her to the earth.

Bisabuela held out the clay bowl to Calliope’s face, motioned her to take it. Bébelo, mija.

Calliope looked into the bowl, reddish water. Clay water. “You’re dead, Bisabuela. How can I be here with you if I’m not dead too?”

Your journey is unfinished, mija. And Spirit is never gone.

Calliope winced. Spirit is never gone. The words recalled Kennewick Man, a nine-thousand-year-old nearly complete skeleton found along the Columbia River. And the source of Calliope’s falling out with her great-grandmother. For twenty years, tribes of the Northwest claimed he was the Ancient One, their ancestor. Scientists like Calliope had stolen him. Bisabuela was so angry, they had stolen him—for research. He was too important to science to be buried in the ground, his body could yield too many answers. But his journey was interrupted, tribal leaders had argued. He belonged to his people, and his people needed to send him back to the earth, allow his journey to continue, allow his Spirit to continue.

Calliope had sided with the scientists, had presented a paper theorizing possible waves of migration to the Americas because of Kennewick Man, whose head shape and bone carbon signaled an oceanic diet of marine mammals like seals found along the kelp highway—not the Columbia Plateau, where his bones were discovered. A forensic archaeologist at the Smithsonian who had “won” the right to study Kennewick Man argued that he was likely of the Ainu people—from coastal Asia, a maritime hunter-gatherer more like the Ancient Polynesians. If that were true, then modern American Indians had no claim to him. The newspapers declared Kennewick Man was finally “freed to release his secrets”—but Native peoples felt differently. Some “secrets” are meant only for the ground. You let those white coats disrespect us, Bisabuela had said. Human remains are sacred, mija. They are not science experiments. Calliope had devalued her people’s emergence story. Had sided with the white coats. With white people. With those who claimed the Americas were “the last continent to be conquered.” And Calliope had broken her bisabuela’s heart. Had she been forgiven at last?

“What will happen if I drink this, Bisabuela?”

Encontrarás tu camino. You’ll find a path.

“To Phoenix? Andres? Y Mamá? I need to find them, Bisabuela. I need to find my family. My living family, pues.”