Now she was lost. The labyrinth of streets, the government buildings, the idea of asking strange Americans about her daughter-she was as lost and afraid as before, when she'd panicked and sat down on Larry's green couch. And Florencio wouldn't even leave camp, for fear his luck was used up. Rigoberto said she was wasting her time. How could she think clearly when she picked oranges every day until the citrus oil covered her arms and her full bag felt like a person on her shoulder? And the wind blew every afternoon, whirling through her head with the wild rustling of palm fronds and eucalyptus, brushes sweeping away her thoughts. The government had a building for children, she was sure. For lost children. Americans lost their children all the time. She could buy false documents from Alfaro-Araceli said an identification card was fifty dollars-and then present herself at a government counter to ask about Elvia.

Rigoberto said, "Waste fifty dollars for that? For someone to tell you, yes, your daughter is living with someone else. In a house. With a bed."

Last Sunday, she had slept through Alfaro's honking taxi call, and Rigoberto hadn't awakened her. She'd opened her eyes in the shack, covered with fine sand from the fierce gusts, not sure where she was. Then she remembered the wind from before, when she and Elvia had watched through the window as palm fronds and newspapers and tumbleweeds cartwheeled past them.

In the hot plywood near her face, thousands of woodchips glowed in the afternoon sun. What did Elvia remember? Serafina remembered her own mother taking her to the river, showing her the round stones she said used to be jagged, before water took away what it wanted and made sand. She remembered her mother's hands over hers on the metate, on the mano.

She had to make money for the documents, and make offerings to those who could help her.

Before dawn, she stood outside at Araceli's place to shape breakfast tortillas. Behind her, the sunflowers and tobacco still reached green and tall, but the October wind bent wild oats and foxtails to the ground and loosed their sharp seeds through the camp. Between gusts, it was quiet in the arroyo, but not like San Cristobal. For long moments, all Serafina would hear was an eerie hawk cry or the clink of Araceli's pot lids. But behind those sounds, a helicopter hovered somewhere, car engines raced down a distant street, trailing sirens.

When she wasn't in the orange trees, she was here-tortillas in the morning, sauces for dinner. Araceli paid her cash each night. She had made mole coloradito for Florencio and Rigoberto after that first Sunday, when she had carefully picked all she needed from the Mercado Aparecida bins. The new mano was rough in her fingers, and the ancho chiles ground into a paste looked so much like darkened blood that she had to close her eyes.

But she ground harder and harder, adding the tomatoes, then the raisins, peanuts, and almonds, the thyme, marjoram and cumin, peppercorns, and last, a bit of chocolate and sugar. When she mixed in the broth, smoother and thicker, the fiery smell rose into her nose and mouth and she breathed it in to erase everything. Everything.

Everyone else could smell it, too. She added the chicken pieces, and when Florencio and Rigoberto had dipped tortillas into the sauce, several other men stood near her lean-to clutching dollar bills and asking for just a small plate, their eyes hollow with memory.

Because Araceli cooked large amounts of food, but nothing that tasted enough like home, Florencio said, their bellies were full when they headed to the groves, but their hearts still ached. He took Serafina aside and said, "None of us is going home. Maybe for a long time. Maybe forever. We have to do what we can here. Do you have enough mole for them?"

Then Serafina thought, Araceli will pay me. I know it. I can do this every day.

For three weeks now, she'd awakened long before dawn, just like at home, and made more than a hundred tortillas, turning them on the hot metal griddle Araceli had placed over the fire. The new plywood shelter was held up by a pole and a pepper tree. To the thick bark, Araceli had affixed a picture of La Virgen de Soledad, the patron saint of Oaxaca, her pale face above the gold-embroidered black robe severe and serene at the same time. Underneath, Araceli put fresh flowers in a soda bottle: wild mustard, sunflowers, and yerba buena she grew in a coffee can.

"I brought the seeds from home," Araceli said to Serafina. "Yerba santa, epazote, and aguacate. The last time I went back, I knew I needed them. But I can't mix them like you do."

Serafina finished the last of the tortillas as the men crowded around the grill, and Jesus said, "Chilaquiles today, no?"

She nodded. She'd made everyone's favorite breakfast with the leftover coloradito. Torn tortillas, the red sauce, and white cheese in layers. Everyone ate so quickly that the only sounds were Don Rana's motorbike and the truck rumbling up the grove road.

When Serafina was in the trees, the wind began and she closed her eyes against the grit rising from the furrows. She did not need to see the oranges anyway; she could feel for them by bumping her fingers until she plucked hard and mechanically dropped the fruit into the sack. Today was Friday. They worked Saturday, too, and then Don Rana would pay them. On Sunday, she would wash all the clothes in the canal, hang them on the ropes Florencio had strung between the trees, and hope the wind didn't take them. Rigoberto said the wind had a name. Santa Ana. She thought of all the places here-Descanso, San Jacinto, Los Angeles, Rio Seco. Everywhere seemed like Mexico, with the same names and plants and faces, if you stayed out of sight. There were camps all over California where you could disappear. Now everyone was talking about Santa Maria and Guadalupe, where Rigoberto said they would have work in the strawberries soon.

But she didn't want to leave. She was making a plan now, slowly. She could find work here, maybe she could cook somewhere. She could buy the falso documents, pay someone to translate at the government buildings. She had even thought about looking in bars this Sunday for Larry. He wasn't a child. He might be easier to find. Larry Foley. She could remember only parts of him: the eyes green as new corn, their corners laced with red when he smoked in the truck with his friend; the hands veined with engine oil; and how he'd laughed and swung Elvia.

She wasn't paying attention when the whirling dust devil came from a barren field left fallow between groves, whipping her hair around her face like a strangling mask for a moment. She held on to a nearby tree, choking on the dust, sure that los aires, the spirits everyone talked about in San Cristobal, were trying to tell her something. All this wind was a bad sign. Back home, the air was calm and quiet and damp. Rigoberto said, "It's just Ana. Does that make you feel better? They named a wind after a santo?"

She heard a high whine, and the dust dervish spun away from her and zig-zagged crazily across the road, picking up speed, and then disappeared into the grove.

Don Rana stopped his motorbike in front of her. "The trees-they kill it," he said slowly, nodding at the dust devil. Then he motioned for her to get on the back of the motorbike.

Serafina didn't move. Her head burned black, and she looked at the gun on his hip. No. This couldn't happen to her again. The arroyos, the hard hands clubbing her on the head . . . There was no sense in running. The motorbike idled along beside her. If he wanted sex, why didn't he go to the Tejana women who came every Saturday to the end of the ravine and lay down on blankets for ten dollars? No. She wouldn't even look at him.

But Don Rana said, "You have to cook, no? Mixtecos work better when they eat." He spoke slowly and she understood. "Plenty more work after dark. Goddamn wind slows us down."

She was still afraid, the whole time they rode through the grove roads, leaving roiled clouds of dirt behind. But when she got off the motorbike near camp, Rana said nothing, just hunched over and whirled away.

When she got to Araceli's, the older woman shook her head. "Nobody has any money yet, and I didn't see Alfaro today. We have to make do with this." Serafina glanced inside one pot at the rice flavored with bits of onion and a sheen of yellow cumin. Araceli pointed her knife at a pile of nopales, and Serafina sheared off the tiny red spines with her own knife.

The ruby-red fruit of the nopales by that back fence, the jelly she'd made for the old woman . . . Could she possibly be there? That first Sunday, Serafina thought she'd smelled the oatmeal scent of years before; back then, the old woman never answered the door. But she crept out at dawn to water. Could she leave a note on the door? An offering of jelly for the old woman? She looked up the hill at the green trailer sitting half hidden near a Cottonwood. An offering of nopales to Don Rana? She knew he could speak English. Maybe he could write, as well.

Don Rana sat outside his trailer with two other men, all wearing pointed cowboy boots and western shirts with pearl buttons. They stared at Serafina when she approached. Their eyes were light as toasted bread, their norteno faces suspicious.

"Fucking indios," one of them murmured.

"I brought you some food," she whispered, knowing she couldn't ask him anything now.

"Nopales? Shit, I ate enough cactus in Sinaloa." They all joined his laughter. "I wouldn't touch that fucking green pile now. Crazy Mixtecos. I only eat meat." He put the plate on the ground, and a small dog came out from under the trailer and sniffed the rice.

"Remember the fireworks?" Rigoberto said, when she told him what had happened. "Do you?"

Serafina nodded. When they were small, the government had taken away half of the land around San Cristobal, sold it to someone. The people got on a bus to Oaxaca City and camped out on the church steps in the square. The second day, soldiers came and set off fireworks all around the church, calling it a celebration but accidentally hitting two men with rockets.

"We weren't invisible at home," Rigoberto said. "We were irritants. Tin cans in the road. Shoot at them. Run them over. But here, we are invisible."

Jesus said, "Except when someone stumbles on us by accident." He scraped the bottom of the rice pot. "Then someone kicks the can to the roadside. He cannot send soldiers. Not here."

Rigoberto shrugged. "Why should he? We don't own the land. We only move across it. Back and forth."

Serafina remembered the smell of the fireworks, the deafening sound, the older women screaming, the soldiers laughing. But when they were scattering off the steps, her mother had pulled her inside the church. "Here," she said, shoving Serafina in front of the Virgen. Furtively, her mother rubbed something over Serafina's face, then knelt and prayed silently, her lips moving. When the shouting outside grew louder, she pulled Serafina up, and Serafina smelled the pollen of lilies, saw the yellow stain on her mother's fingers.

Yellow, she thought all night. My rice wasn't yellow enough, not like the marigolds and gladiolas under the feet of la Virgen de Soledad. Florencio watched her while she sat on the bed, combing her hair. Rigoberto left, probably for the Tejana women. She had heard him tell Jesus, "I don't want children. I can't afford it. So I have to pay. The Tejanas cost money, but a mother is much more expensive."

Don Rana and his friends had spat the word. Mixtecos. The visiting priest who had come to San Cristobal only once a month had hated Mixtecos, too. He would stand in the church, glaring at the villagers. The church walls were an affront to God, he said.

The old priests had ordered the church constructed over the tombs of dead Mixtec rulers, on the very wall of mosaic stones over the burial grounds. Serafina had often stared at the east wall. In the moss-black niches where statues of Spanish santos looked out, her uncle had pointed to garlands of flowers and grapes for fertility carved into the stone. On either side, El Sol y La Luna gazed at each other. The sun, god of man, and the moon, goddess of woman. The priests had been oblivious, her uncle said, to the Mixtecos laboring on the facade.

She felt Florencio's hands on her shoulders, resting cautiously. Larry's lips had frightened her, rough mustache bristles and pressing teeth. But she'd kissed Elvia a hundred times, loving the feel of her lips on her child's skin.

Then she had tried to kiss the hands of Santa Catarina. The night she lost her baby.

The rice had to be gold for an offering. She would do everything right on Sunday. When Florencio turned her toward him, she made the sign of the cross, quickly, her thumb to her forehead and breast, shoulder to shoulder, and then she kissed her own thumb, her lips soft against the thumbnail.

Florencio embraced her now, and she wasn't afraid. She let her lips go soft against his. She felt his mouth warm on the scar at her temple; then he kissed her jaw, lightly, not hurting the pebble of memory inside.

Amarillo. She ground the yellow chiles guajillo with white onion, with cinnamon and cloves and cumin and garlic. When she added the rich gold chicken broth, the mole was bright as beaten gold. She dropped in a pinch of masa. Corn. Her offering. Remember? Please. That was all she had been able to say.

Don Rana was alone. She saw his nostrils flare when the plate was set on his wooden picnic table. The mole amarillo filled the plate like a hot sun. "What do you want?" he grumbled. "Please, write," she said carefully. "In English." "English? Fucking Mixtecos. You can't even write Spanish. You want English? For who?" He bent his head to the plate and took a spoonful of the sauce, and when he looked up, his lips gleamed. "For who?"

Mrs.-My dauter and me live here 12 year pass. Did you seen her? I am her mother. I will come here. Sunday next.

"Sign it," he said, watching her carefully after he handed her the notebook paper. Serafina looked at the penciled words, the square letters. The old people at home had always signed with their thumbs. Her own mother had been so happy when Serafina wrote her name, the last year of school. She took the pencil and wrote under Sunday: SERAFINA ESTRELLA MENDEZ.

When Alfaro's taxi came, Rigoberto shook his head. "I don't have money to waste," he said. Florencio said, "I have to repair these." He held up the canvas bags, and she took a long breath and got in beside Araceli. Their eyebrows shot up. "You can't go around the city alone," Florencio said. "I will-"

She shook her head. "I can do this without you." She closed the taxi door.

After she and Araceli had bought supplies at Mercado Aparecida, Serafina went inside the American market called Vons to buy something they would all think foolish. A magazine. A woman on the cover with smooth yellow hair and pink fingernails. One hand rested on a pumpkin, the other on a boy's shoulder, and all three were grinning.

In the taxi, Araceli watched her silently. Serafina opened the magazine, trying to remember how she'd felt that day so she could say the right prayers now. She looked at the pink cheeks and blue eyes and hands placing bowls of salad on wooden tables. We are not from another universe, she thought, staring at the pumpkins with carved faces. We use pumpkin seeds in moles. We eat the same food. We both have gods. La Virgen, you are here. Even if Elvia is eating food at a table like this, she prayed, please let me see her again.

Walking into the bare yard of 2510, looking at the boarded-up windows, she surreptitiously scattered pale masa around the two cement steps and below the window, hoping the ground would accept. Then she carried the bowl of amarillo she had reheated over the fire only a short time ago, and left it on the old woman's steps. Tucking the note underneath, she laid beside it a sprig of wild yellow mustard.

mukat.

Elvia really was the past. She couldn't believe it. The Indian man in the office said, "No, the customer from number eleven has been gone for nearly three weeks. I have not seen him." He frowned. No red kiss rested between his brows. Then he closed the door.

She stood underneath the neon, a scroll of dull white worms in the sun. The Sands Motel. The pink night-lit sign had been exciting when her father first brought her here three years ago. He'd gunned the truck on the freeway and sung along with Sammy Hagar-"I can't dri-i-i-ve, fifty-five!" Then he looked over at her and grinned. "But I will for you. So you won't get scared. So you won't ever have to see cops."

He looked for me for months before he found me. Even if he didn't always act like he wanted me. But he never left. She touched the door to number 11. I'm the one who left. What did Callie say? "You think this is a bad life? Nobody touches you. You don't have no marks, okay?"

But now I have a brown line under my bellybutton. What would he say if she found him, if he saw her belly now? "Get rid of it?" She'd have to tell him she couldn't. He might say, "Give it to the foster mom-Sandy. She's good with kids."

She was good with me. And school starts next week. Elvia wanted to wake up in sheets, eat Corn Pops, get dressed in clean clothes, and go to class. Be bored in English, look forward to Science. Come home and put her papers on a table. Eat chips.

Kips, kips. Doggie. She didn't want the crazy Callie life, or the crazy Michael life. She stared at the doors, like red sticks of cinnamon gum. Number 12 was open. Boots were outside.

Elvia parked at number 9 and crept near the door. Asshole Warren. She could hear his voice. He was talking to the TV. "Fuck she did, Leeza," he said, and then, "Oh, man," when Elvia knocked on the metal jamb. "You're alive."

"No shit, Sherlock," Elvia said. "Where's my dad?" His face was blank and unshaven, and she thought, Why isn't he at work? "He went to Florida, right? Tell him I brought the truck when he comes back. I'm leaving the keys with the lady in the office."

"Florida?" he shouted. "What the hell? I ain't seen your dad. He took off lookin for that guy Dually. He thought Dually stole his truck. And you."

Elvia studied the beer cans on the rug. "Me?"

"Yeah. He said Dually must be lookin for payback. The girlfriend owed him. Took off the day the truck disappeared." Warren peered out the door. "Holy fuckin shit. You took the truck."

Elvia looked away from him, the pinkish skull like rose quartz, the few black hairs gathered into a ponytail. "I stole myself. Tell him I'm sorry. About the truck. About everything."

She opened the glove compartment, looking for the purple velvet scrunchie. A magazine fell out, tied into a tube with Christmas ribbon. A note said, Elvia. I can't be your real mother. Not even your fairy godmother. But backup mother is fine with me. Look at page 109.

Warren said, "I can't fuckin believe it." Elvia tucked the magazine into her backpack and went to the motel office. She didn't see the woman with the red kiss and long skirts and sad eyes. She dropped the keys through the door slot, figured she could walk to the bus station in Tourmaline. Five miles. That couldn't bother the baby. She used to run that far two weeks ago, when everything was different.

On the bus, she watched the smoke trees fly past. My dad's in the wind-your dad's in the trees. He says baby trees have to live downstream from their mother, but this is for real, not a story. I can't live with my dad, or with Michael. Not at the river. Not at Dos Arroyos. I have to go back to Sandy's.

Does she want me to give it up to a family? Every time Elvia thought of the trilobite tracing its feet across her, inscribing something inside her, on her bones, she didn't think she could really leave the baby with someone else. When the baby found out, when the child or teenager found out, "Your mom couldn't handle you, couldn't take care of you," she knew just how it would feel. The way she'd felt in the foster homes. Like a hollow, ripply husk, like the waxy pale insides of a pomegranate, the ones she'd seen picked clean by ants and dried by the sun.

Sandy wasn't home. Elvia looked under the green pot for the key. No note inside. Back on the steps, she looked at the wild tobacco bush near the arroyo. The yellow tube-flowers really looked like macaroni. Michael had smoked wild tobacco since he was ten, drunk jimsonweed tea many times. What would dreaming do to your brain? The third level? So far inside yourself you could see people from your past, from your actual memory, inside your cells?

The wind ruffled rose petals onto the driveway. She opened the ribbon-tied magazine.

Melanie Griffith, a boy, and a jack-o-lantern with an intricately carved face. Grinning. She wants me to learn how to cook? How to put on makeup? Elvia turned to page 109. A little red baby the size of a Barbie doll lay on its mother's bare chest, the tiny black-haired head like a stone pendant at her collarbone. Elvia couldn't believe how small the arms and legs were, bent like a frog's. The baby's skin was so thin you could almost see the blood pulsing inside.

"Miracle of survival," the article read. "This baby was born early, at only 23 weeks, and her very life depended on her parents' love. They held her, skin to skin, for seven hours a day to calm her, to help her grow. And their devotion worked."

Elvia touched the photo. The baby could have fit into her father's hand. Her tiny fist reached through a wedding ring.

Fist. Her baby had fists. Feet. Twenty-three weeks. That was why Sandy gave her this. April-it was halfway through September now. About twenty-two weeks. Or more. The baby didn't look like a trilobite floating around inside her, with blind eyes and nubs and tadpole feet. The baby looked like this. A person. A squirming, pirouetting, hand-tracing person.

A white truck parked at the curb, with designs on the doors. Powder-puff painted trees and lettering: ANTUAN'S LANDSCAPING. Hector got out, and Elvia laughed with relief. "You drive?" she called to him.

Then she noticed his haunted red eyes, his scratched face, his arms black with scabs. "Me and Michael been working trees for this guy AnTuan. Trying to save money for the baby. But Caveman and Michael got a motel room and mixed the medicine with speed. When mano woke up, Caveman was gone with the red bowl. And the money . . ." Hector wiped his face, and she saw palm bark shreds on his hair. "Mano drank too much of that stuff. He's in the trees with his chete, yelling shit nobody can understand. I can't talk to him."

She hurried to the truck, and Hector drove into the foothills, steep streets lined with jacaranda trees. "This guy Darnell hired us, but Michael took off with his truck. We been up in Grayglen all day, and Darnell showed up. Says he's gonna have to call the cops cause Michael's 5150."

Pulling into a long driveway, Hector pointed to a large Spanish-style house. Six palms were trimmed like shorn pineapples, and Michael dangled near the house, slashing at fronds, shoving off the trunk with silver gaffs flashing as though he were some kind of bird.

A black guy stood in the driveway next to an old truck. "You his wife?" he said. "He's ballistic. I didn't even know he spoke English. We hired them off the street, thought they were Mexican."

"Wife?" Elvia said, watching Michael wave the machete. "He said that?"

"Look, I'm Darnell. I own AnTuan's. I don't know why he stole my truck, but here he is stone trippin, talking about, 'My lady's gone, the truck's gone, my money's gone.'"

Michael's braid flew around his shoulders. He didn't look down, didn't see her. Darnell's arms were scratched, too. He said, "I got three girls. You're havin a baby-I'll cut him some slack about the cops. But he needs to quit. The homeowner's gettin nervous, and I'm liable."

A blond woman, cell phone at her ear, watched them from the front door. She could be calling the police, Elvia thought. Michael would go to jail for being high, if nothing else. Elvia stepped around the fronds, woven almost like rough baskets as they'd fallen. "Michael," she called, as close as she could get under the rain of bark. He slashed with the machete, and only three fronds were left on the tree, standing up like electrically charged hairs. "Michael!"

He glanced down, and his mouth opened. "Mukat!" he cried, voice thick like a stranger's. He was five or six levels away from her, from earth. "Mukat!" he cried again, mouth stretched thin in amazement, both hands going to his head as if he felt pain, and he fell backward, the machete flying over Elvia's head, the rope around his waist catching him, slamming him into the trunk.

Elvia put her arms around the tree. "Get the machete," she shouted to Hector, putting her feet on the wedge-steps of spongy gray bark. She had climbed this kind of palm with Rosalie, in vacant lots. Michael was dangling upside down. The bark rubbed against her belly, and Hector climbed under her.

"Lower him," Darnell called, standing on the grass with two Mexican men and a blanket.

Elvia wrapped one arm around the trunk, shoving her other hand into Michael's armpit, trying to pull him sideways. Once Jade had gotten scared halfway up a palm tree, and Elvia got her down. But she was eleven then, and not pregnant. And Michael might be crazy-he might hit her. But his eyes were closed, blood striping his neck. He was so heavy.

Hector was just below her, bracing his knees around the other side of the trunk. Her foot brushed his shoulder. He cradled Michael's back with his arm just under hers, then cut the rope with the machete. They both sagged under Michael's weight, and the bark dug inside her thighs. "Slow," Hector whispered.

Darnell shouted, "I'm a firefighter. I've done this before." He had climbed under Hector. "Let him down on me." He grabbed Michael's knees, and Elvia let go.

They laid him on the blanket, and Hector reached up to help her down. Her skin hurt, her chest hurt, and she knew there were bark imprints on her belly. She steadied herself against the trunk, knowing if she'd had to choose, to let Michael fall or fall herself and hurt the baby, she would have let go.

The blond woman came running onto the lawn and said to Darnell, "Oh, my God, I called 911. Is he okay? I can't speak Spanish. Tell his wife I'm so sorry."

Elvia crouched beside Michael and he opened his eyes, dark as oil, covered with a film of red. "Mukat," he said, struggling against Darnell, who was trying to look at his arm.

"I think it's broken, but it's like he doesn't even feel it," Darnell murmured.

Red lights and sirens twined through the trees. "Who's Mukat?" Elvia whispered to Michael, but his eyes flickered in their sockets and he turned away.

The paramedics pushed everyone aside, and Michael fought the restraints. Darnell helped get him on the gurney, and the doors closed. Darnell said to Elvia, "County General. He's trippin big time. You're his next of kin, right?" He frowned. "What was he callin you?

Mukat. "I don't know," she said. "Maybe an Indian word." Next of kin? His grandfather. And the baby. His blood family. She looked at Hector, his arms marked with the scratches of palm bark and devotion, his eyes on her.

The blond woman approached Darnell and said nervously, "These are your workers, right? My husband hired you. I just called him at his office, and he said to make sure and give you this-for your trouble." The woman's eyes were hidden by her sunglasses. She pushed an envelope toward Elvia. "Habla ingles?" she said. "So sorry."