Alice said, “You think the police here are likely to speak English?”

The car stopped and Joel approached even as the policeman opened his door and climbed out, looking curious but unhurried.

Tom said, “Let’s just hope we find out before Joel gets himself shot.”

She laughed, and he had been joking, but within seconds it didn’t seem that way. Joel talked and the policeman stared at him in unhappy confusion, but then Joel seemed to reach out and the policeman slapped his hand away and put his other hand on his gun.

Alice gasped, “Oh my God, what is he doing?”

Tom shook his head, but stepped through the group and called out, “¡Señor!” And as he uttered that word, one of the few he knew in Spanish, it reminded him of something from the morning of the crash, a Spanish name, someone he’d never known. He slipped off his backpack and reached inside, into the pocket of his torn cargo pants, and smiled when he found the thick paper still folded there.

He took it out, the boarding pass that belonged to Miguel Fernandez, who it already seemed had died in another age. The policeman still had his hand resting on his gun, but he looked at the pass in Tom’s hand and reached out cautiously to take it.

Joel stared at Tom. “I had this covered—you know, you don’t have to—”

The policeman glared at Joel and pointed a warning finger, the meaning of which was clear enough that Joel took a nervous step back.

Once he was satisfied that his point had been made, the policeman looked down at the boarding pass again and studied it for a second. Then the truth sank in and he looked up at Tom with astonishment and said something in Spanish.

Tom nodded, and gestured to the whole group.

The policeman made the sign of the cross and shouted something to the woman on the porch, who responded by letting out a little cry and throwing her arms up in the air. She rushed to the gate and started to pull some of the girls in and toward her door, gesturing then for the boys to follow with the stretcher.

The child came along the road, running, a priest running alongside him. And the priest shouted something good-humored to the policeman, who in turn pointed him toward Tom as he replied.

The priest gave Tom a look of total shock as he said, “I’m Father Francisco. You were in the plane that disappeared?”

“Yes. We’re the only survivors. We crashed in the mountains more than a week ago. We came downriver, in rafts. I think we’ve traveled a long way. We don’t even know what country this is.”

“Then let me be the first to welcome you to Brazil. But where you crashed is a mystery. You came all this way by river?”

“We walked through the jungle first.”