The swirling figures hovered near her, outlined in blue. Maybe that's why my dad always had a cigarette, she thought. He was lonely, even when he was with Callie or Warren. Or me. She remembered her father's blue smoke reaching from the motel room, and she wondered whether, now that she was gone, he was lonely or relieved or so high he couldn't think.

"And you got something in your hand. I mean, like you're holdin something," Michael said, staring at the cigarette.

"Like a finger," she whispered. "Like babies hold somebody's finger."

"Yeah." Michael sucked on his own smoke. "And the finger gets shorter, and the ash keeps your hand warm." He lay beside her and buried his face in her neck; then he kissed her, and she tasted her own sweat and the dirt from the fields. She thought her belly would move, would protest, but when he ran his hand down her back, tracing her spine, she felt nothing below her ribs. Only his mouth again, warm and smoky.

She pulled off her jeans, scared. If we do it now, then in a couple weeks I can tell him I'm pregnant. He can get used to the idea.

He rolled on top of her, and she fit her arms around his neck. Their cheekbones slid together. That was what she liked, the first time he lay on top of her, the slants of bone beside each other, the smooth skin. Until his heart beat loud, and his chest seemed to open and bloom against hers.

But now she couldn't breathe at all. Something was sliding back over her lungs, her heart, and she pushed at him for a second. He said, "What? You scared? Didn't we like, do the wild thing before? I always pulled out, right? I was so fuckin drunk I can't remember."

Elvia tried to breathe again. Did the baby have lungs? Did sex feel like this before? This didn't hurt. It felt hot, but separate from her, like she was watching someone else in the ceiling shadows. It wasn't like the arroyo, when she'd tasted his neck and thought of their braids tangled together on the sand. This time, it was like being in a movie she couldn't see. Then he pushed himself away from her, and she felt warmth seeping onto her thighs, like blood.

She kept her face close to Michael's ribs. He'd say she couldn't be pregnant, he'd pulled out. What if that wasn't him, on her thighs? What if it was blood? From the baby's-cushion? Didn't babies grow in blood, at first?

She waited until he fell asleep, then pulled her jeans up over the moisture. She had to pee. From the edge of the room, she saw Hector sleeping in the truck bed.

Her bare feet were swollen and burning on the cooled sand. She hurried toward the derelict swimming pool and crouched beside an old water pump in a shed. She saw no blood on her thighs. She ached between her legs now, too.

Flickering lighters floated inside the dry pool, and two girls rose up the steps like zombies.

"Where you from?" the thinner girl shouted angrily, standing in front, folding her arms.

"Nowhere," Elvia said, recognizing this gang question from school.

"You one of the Mexicans?"

Elvia didn't know what to answer. She didn't know what she was in their eyes. "No."

"You sure?"

"My mom's Mexican," Elvia said, trying to keep her voice strong.

"Shit. I'm talkin about them," the girl said, pointing at the graffiti all over the pool sides, the shack, and the nearby cement wall. THA MEXAKINZ. A line was drawn through MECCA.

"She talks like a gabacha," the larger girl said.

"Where you from for reals? Lift up your shirt," the thin one said. She raised her shirt with one finger, and Elvia saw MECCA tattooed in dark blue letters on her flat stomach.

"Nothing on my stomach. I'm pregnant," Elvia blurted out, afraid.

"So?" The biggest girl lifted her shirt and said, "I'm on my second and I work faster than you." The letters of MECCA were faded and stretched into pale blue wavers. Elvia recognized her voice. Tiny. She had been across the vines. "She's the one with Hector, Lena."

Lena studied Elvia. "You stayin in Mecca?"

"No." Elvia thought, I never had anyplace, or anyone, I cared about enough to want it in my skin. I'm out here floating around. "Does it hurt? The tattoo?" She thought of her father's dragon, how she'd touched it when she was small.

"I can put your vato's name on your arm. If you don't got a barrio," Lena said.

"You want his name on you? Just remember, when he turns asshole, it's hard to burn that shit off." Tiny laughed, then showed Elvia her forearm, where she had an angry raised scar like a fat worm.

Elvia thought, A tattoo would remind me of someone. A place. "Nobody's name. Could you do a picture?" She glanced at the dark caverns of the motel.

"You sleepin there? Damn. I'll do you a small one for free," Lena said.

When they got to the tiny wood-frame house lit by candles, an old woman squinted at the door. "Tranquilina?" she called.

Lena made Elvia sit in a chair. Herbs hanging from strings were everywhere. Elvia took her shirt off, touching her left shoulder blade. She said slowly, "Luna is moon, right? And a kind of moth?"

Lena said, "Abuela's from Guadalajara. She says palomas de la luz. Doves of the light."

The windshield, the white moths dipping over her; Michael's story about the sparkling dust on their wings, then on his mother's eyelids. "Three of them," she whispered. "Three moths."

The alcohol on her shoulder blade was stinging cold. The only clean skin on my whole body, she thought, sitting hunched over in the chair. Shoulder blades are like handles. I must have held her bones, when she carried me around. When I was a baby.

When the needle pierced her skin, she felt an answering tingle inside her, a cricket scuttling over her hipbones, even scarier than the burning on her shoulder. "Calmate," Lena hissed.

The cricket feet answered the pain, step for step, until Elvia was numb with fear, until she was prodded from her haze by Patsy saying, "She got a firme design. I never seen it before."

"Firme?" Elvia whispered.

"Cool," Lena said, rolling her eyes. "Here. It won't look real good for a couple weeks."

She handed her a mirror, but all Elvia could see was red skin coated with Vaseline. She couldn't see the moths yet, their colors. What was on her skin now, what was inside her skin? Had she painted a memory of leaving into the baby even before it was born, the ink going into her blood and straight to the tiny feet climbing the ladder of her ribs?

It seemed she had just fallen asleep when he woke her. The sky and water were lavender, heavy with heat. Her shoulder was crusted and throbbing, and, when she was alone, she rubbed the grandmother's salve on the tattoo. She waited, still, for the cricket feet again, but she felt nothing. Maybe she'd imagined them, to take her mind off the pain.

The sun turned the fields and sand brilliant white, and the workers staggered down the hallways, dropping boxes, adjusting bandannas. She recognized Tiny and Lena now and said "Hey" through the leaves. Hector and Michael stopped cutting to look at her, and the girls laughed.

"He doesn't know," Elvia whispered into the tendrils. "The moths were for me. Thanks."

"Damn, you're crazy," Tiny said, working her way to a different row. "No wonder you hang with crazy vatos." Everyone clipped furiously, moving much faster than they had the day before. "Friday," Hector said, racing away, too. Elvia worked alongside Michael, breathing the winy dust. The hours passed in a blaze of heat, salt in her eyes, dust drying her nose, and her feet and hands feeling swollen as cactus pads. If I find her, will I have to do this forever, just to stay with her? She clipped the grapes, remembering her father pointing to the date palms and saying, "You want to work like that? See why I make sure you stay in school? I want you to have a good job someday. Not like a Mexican." Then one day he added, "Not like me. Workin in the sand with pipes ain't any better. I'm just as dark as them. Right?"

She reached for the grapes again and again, the fruit itself hot and swollen as her fingers, her eyes. The bandanna smelled like her own chile breath. The sun, the dusty leaves, the pale green fruit-everything blurred as if she were moving underwater, just trying to stay alive.

The sun was still high when the block of vines was finished. The man at the scale spoke to Manuel, who gave Hector and her cash for their boxes and Michael's. Hector went to find Michael, who was with Guapo.

She was holding seventy dollars. I can buy what I want at the store anyway. I don't need my dad or Michael or anyone else right now. Tiny and Lena folded their paychecks, slid them into pockets. Tiny said, "Be careful. Watchate, huh? For you and . . ." gesturing to Elvia's belly.

Then they got into an old station wagon with several other women. I never had girlfriends, but I had sisters at Sandy's. We painted fingernails all the time. Lena and Tiny would be laughing, putting makeup on, combing each other's hair for Friday night. Like a family.

Michael was sketching again, leaping into the truck and announcing, "TJ tomorrow. Camp in the desert tonight, away from here."

In the open desert south of the Saltan Sea, she left Highway 86 and headed slowly down a faintly marked road. Hector said, "There's a checkpoint for illegals on the highway. What if la migra got your mom? Way back then? What if she had to go back home?"

Elvia looked at the smoke trees and creosote bushes; just this, all the way to the border. "Maybe they caught her, but why didn't they catch me?" she said. "Why wasn't I with her?"

Under a salt cedar, they ate the tamales and empanadas again, and Elvia laid her head in Michael's lap, staring at the stars. The cicadas were furious now, making the night hum as if a giant generator were parked somewhere in the sand. "My dad said Tijuana's crazy. What if we don't find her? Then we come back?"

"Back where?" Michael said. "I'm goin to Rio Seco, so I can brew the medicine you want to try. And I'll make that hundred bucks from Caveman. All I got left is forty."

"Cause you gave half yours to Guapo," Hector said, and Michael only grinned.

Hector lay down in the truck bed, his map folder under his head. Michael bent his head to Elvia. "You see the baby smoke trees, down that arroyo?"

Elvia nodded at the small puffs of silvery gray. Michael said, "The smoke tree drops the seeds, but they have to get beat up by rushing water, like knocked into rocks and all, before they can take root. So the babies are always like way downstream from the mom."

She thought about his mother's moths, about the coyote dropping palm tree seeds in the desert; this was why she'd loved him, back in Tourmaline. "So you're saying forget Tijuana?"

He shrugged. "I'm just sayin sometimes that's how it's gotta be."

This is a good time to tell him, she thought. About the baby. But he said, "You hear something?" He stood up. She thought she heard faint barking, hoarse, maybe a dog. "Get up in the truck," he whispered, and when she lay down, opposite Hector, he said, "Shhh." He paced around the clearing. She heard only the millions of cicadas.

Elvia awoke with a start when Michael said "Hey" and poked at her shoulder blade.

She screamed at the pain, felt a scurry of cricket feet in her belly, and sat up. Dawn made the salt cedar into a fountain of light. Michael said, "How'd you get hurt?"

She held her breath. The feet stopped. Do you try to run away when something hurts me? she thought. Do you run like a hamster around and around my belly? A damn exercise wheel?

"Elvia?" Michael said. "Somebody beat you up in Mecca?"

She lifted her tee shirt, and he said, "Damn."

"Moths," she said. "Are they like the ones your mother caught? For the dust on their wings?"

He took in a sharp breath. "They're cool. I don't know if they're like something real or not."

In the truck's side mirror, they were small, puffy. One was yellow, one green, one blue. She let her shirt fall. She liked imagining them, hovering above the windshield, a glimmering blur. Michael said, "I heard shooting last night."

Hector nodded. "We're way out here in the Chocolate Mountains. Navy gun range."

Michael looked east toward the sunrise and said, "Something weird out there, too. Not coyotes. Like a bird, screamin all raspy. I never heard anything like it. Stopped a while ago."

He started the truck and drove down the faint dirt road until they saw a dark heap in the sand, like a pile of clothes. Hector said, "Shit. La migra didn't get him. The desert did."

Michael said, "Look under the cedar tree. That's who was callin."

Four people lay under the branches. Elvia followed Hector and Michael to the unmoving shapes, and she saw that one of the bodies was a woman, curled on her side, her brown face pulled tight and shiny and hard as a doll's, her eyes just as unblinking.

god of the hearth.

"Bajanse," the coyote hissed, and they all crouched down, motionless under the thick stand of brush that still held the day's heat and smelled of tar and sage. Serafina breathed light and fast as a baby. She heard rustling jackets and breaking branches as another group trudged up the path to the top of the hill. Then she heard the whine of the helicopter like a wasp.

The beams circled like lightning, making her dizzy, but the coyote said, "Don't move." She wanted to run, before the icy light touched her head. The running feet and whipping blades pushed dust into her nose, her mouth. You are in California. You are breathing it again. Eating this dirt, Uncle would say. Don't move. Don't move. The helicopter hovered at the top of the hill, and they heard someone else yell, "Bajanse!" An American. Then more Americans shouted, and Serafina shrank down into the bark of the large bush.

But the shouts faded, truck doors slammed, and after a time, the coyote said, "Andale. Move now." Her legs buckled from fear and the blood stung when it moved again inside her skin.

When they reached the top of the hill, they saw the trucks receding down the dirt road. "Sensors," the coyote said. "Migra plants them in the dirt, and somebody stupid trips them. Then they wait at the arroyo. I always wait until they're finished. Go."

Florencio whispered to her in Mixtec what was said in Spanish. She could understand the coyote some of the time. She walked behind Florencio, the darkness like the inside of a shuttered room. They moved along dirt roads, through ravines that left Serafina breathless with fear. The steep crumbling banks, the branches catching on her shirt-she remembered everything now from the last time, even while she walked. A hole torn in Florencio's jacket let a patch of white tee shirt show through-a ragged floating star. She tried to follow it.

They hiked for hours and hours without stopping, upward through forests. She smelled pine resin under their feet. The dirt road was littered with branches and stones. "Where are we?" Florencio asked once, ahead of her, and she heard the coyote laugh.

"Where I take you, indio," he said. Then, after a time, he said, "Los Pinos."

Even in the blackness, she was afraid of the eyes. Like before, in California. She was afraid every moment she moved. She wanted a room again, a room she could never leave. If she found Elvia, and found a place, she might never go outside the door.

Except for corn, she thought, trying to comfort herself. She was so hungry her stomach felt as small as the mano between her breasts. I would grow corn in the back yard, behind a fence, where no one could see me watering the plants. I wouldn't need anything else. Tortillas and masa and atole. I would have a chicken for eggs.

She stumbled on a root in the path. Her head hurt, a stabbing pain. She was afraid of the eyes of la migra, of eyes that might be hiding in the gullies or caves. She was afraid of the coyote, Ramon, when he stopped and stared at them all, then listened in the darkness. Once more they heard people running, after they'd crossed a highway like a river of black asphalt. They ducked down in the brush near the road, smelling urine and trash and stagnant water, and they heard a radio. Static, harsh, and spitting. When it was quiet again, Serafina looked at Florencio near her, his eyes like wet black stones, his mouth open. The coyote seemed to know where he was going. "Walk," he said to them again. "I never get caught. They look for you indios all the way to Temecula, and I never get caught. Go."

On the highway above them, a lit sign read SANTA YSABEL 29. She could read santos' names.

They didn't talk all night, only grunted when they tripped on stones or passed under thorny manzanita on a thin trail. They headed into brush so dry and heavy that she smelled the fragrant oils on her sleeves after she pushed through the branches. The night grew cool, paler, and she could see Florencio's back more clearly than the star patch.

"Tin'u xini," she whispered to him once, and he looked up. The stars here are the same as they are at home, she thought. But not as bright, as if the air is different.

The coyote's thin, papery face floated beside her suddenly, and he gestured for Florencio to pass, then the Tiltepec men. Jose and Jesus and Guillermo. Their eyes were on the trail. The coyote said, "Speak Spanish, india. You better not complain."

She was silent. He said, "The one with three fingers isn't your husband. And the others aren't your brothers. Verdad?"

Serafina kept walking, hearing him just behind her. "You aren't married. Answer me."

She took a breath, trying to remember the right Spanish pronunciation. "Where are we?"

"We are still in Los Pinos. We will sit down for a minute and eat. Then walk again. Wherever I tell you to walk."

His voice was soft behind her. She smelled ashes now, old smoke hanging in the air. She saw a small clearing ahead, a flat place inside the trees. He knew where they were going. He said, "Sit down and give everyone some food. Ten miles to Descanso."

They sat on stones blurry in the slight haze of dawn. Serafina passed around the bolillos and pan dulce. The coyote sat apart and shook his head when she offered him food. "I don't need to eat," he said. She watched the men leave one by one to pee. She chewed her dry roll, drank the water Florencio offered. The coyote took something from a small bag, and then he bent over a match flame.

She saw the small glass pipe. Like the one Larry and Warren had passed between them, she thought suddenly, the same tiny red ember that glowed strong with sucked-in breath. She remembered how Larry's eyes had been clear and kind, his mouth twisted in a smile, his frame stretched over the couch while she cleaned sometimes. But when he smoked outside with Warren, his body and eyes and mouth and anger moved constantly, like restless dry wind.

She had imagined Larry returning to the duplex. Was he relieved that they were gone? Had he grinned and gone back to the red place, Colorado? Or had he found Elvia in the parking lot or a hospital, fed her hamburgers, told her Serafina was a bad mother?

Serafina let the crumbs fall from her fingers. The coyote stared at her. He ate smoke.

When Florencio came back, the coyote grinned at Jesus. "Where are you going?"

"To piss," Jesus said, hesitantly. The coyote laughed.