She tasted one bean, curled on her palm. The baby will be Michael's brown and my brown, his hair and my hair, his blood and my blood. Cahuilla and Mexican, Mexican and white. I can't give it to someone else. What if it's a girl, and white kids call her beanorita? I have to be around, tell her who her parents are, her grandparents. "You're a California baby," I'll tell her. Yeah. Mexican and Indian and desert-tanned white. Beanoritas don't pick grapes. People like me and maybe your grandma pick them. Indians don't all wear feathers and skins like in the movies. Indians like your dad live right up there on the mountain. Your grandpa does. Your other grandpa lives in the desert. Maybe you can meet him someday.

And one grandma lives right here. With us.

I have to be the real mom. The real mom is the one who takes you for shots. Hugs you for your bad dreams. Suenos malos. The first and second levels. I can do this. I can do laundry and doctors and hugging. Sandy taught me how to hug. I hugged Jeffrey, and the little dime-eyed girl. I hugged Michael. I can hug my baby.

She watched Sandy come up the driveway from Enchantee's house, her pale round calves under her skirt, her light brown pony-tail sideways in the wind. She's the one Tia Dolores talked about, Elvia thought. She's real enough for me right now.

The grandpa on the mountain, she thought, nervously driving the Honda past the dump and through the canyon. And maybe your father. I don't know.

Smoke came from the adobe chimney, and Michael's grandfather Antonio stood in the doorway as if he'd heard the car. He lifted a finger in greeting. When she got inside, he was sitting at the table with a turtle-shell rattle and a piece of paper. "He knew you would come. He left you a note. Ventana is way out in the desert, near the border."

E-I am in Ventana and other places. Why be around and you don't need me? Nothing for me to give you. Tell my grandpa the turtleshell rattle is for the baby. Cause if I die they burn it. It was mine when I was little. Can you put dust on my moms stone. Sometime. You know. Maybe I'll see you.

Moth dust, she thought. "He called me Mukat," she said. "Is that 'Mother'?"

Antonio sighed. "He wasn't talking to you, then. Mukat is part of the creation, part of us. Cahuilla people. He didn't tell you the story?"

"No." Elvia held the rattle, feeling the palm seeds move inside. "He told me other stories."

"Mukat holds the sky in place with his hand. His fingerprints are there. You can see them at night. The stars." When she stood up to leave, he said, "You come up here anytime. I'll teach you and the kid about acorns. Teach you how to use the rattle."

She drove to the cemetery, got out and touched the plaque, but the leaves looked undisturbed, as if no one had slept there recently.

"But how come you only had one kid, if you know everything about it?"

The waiting room for the ultrasound appointment was empty, and Elvia was nervous. Sandy said, "I guess you don't think what I did was hard enough, compared to what you just did. Living where you were, with your dad and then at the river."

"The wild life," Elvia said, looking out the window at the bird of paradise bent in the wind.

"Okay." Sandy looked at her watch, then at the ceiling. "When I was pregnant with Rosalie, Ray fooled around. He slept with some woman who gave him gonorrhea. You heard of that?" Elvia nodded. "It scarred me up. I couldn't have any more kids." She pulled at her lips with her teeth again. "Finding that out was the hardest thing I've ever done, and that's all I can tell you."

"Scarred up inside?" She didn't want to picture it, especially imagining the ultrasound going through her stomach, showing what? Her sack? Her bones? The baby's bones? "Did you ever tell Rosalie? Is that why she doesn't want to hang around here? Or get married?"

"Rosalie never asked me anything," Sandy said, sadly. "She finds it in a book. And no, she doesn't want any babies. Not for a long time."

"All Callie ever said is you're only a place. A place to put their thing."

Then Sandy laughed. "I don't believe that. I think there are nice men out there."

Elvia folded her own arms. "I think Stan the social worker has a crush on you."

"I haven't even thought about him." Sandy pursed her lips, and her smile went lopsided.

When it was her turn, the technician put warm jelly on Elvia's skin and then pressed the remote-control thing into the slime. She had told Sandy to stay in the other room.

When her heart beat fast, the belly-thumping began in earnest. Don't get mad at me, she thought, this is for you. But there was nothing to see on the screen, just a bunch of spiderwebby-looking veils and dark spots, until suddenly the woman pointed and said, "Spine."

An unclasped bracelet of pearls, lying curved and waiting for a wrist. Then the bracelet moved. The baby moved. The technician moved the remote on her belly, pushing hard, and Elvia saw the baby's head, small as a Ping-Pong ball, outlined in ghostly white and full of frightening black.

"Do you want to know the sex?" the technician said. "I need to make a note for the doctor."

"I guess. I just want to know everything's okay," she whispered.

"I can't tell you that. The doctor will talk to you when she gets these. But I'll give you pictures of some of the things we can see today."

"Okay," Elvia said. She thought she saw white-pea toes, but she wasn't sure. She couldn't stop staring. What if Michael and I really messed up? In the old days, if something was wrong, you didn't have to see terrible things before they were even born.

In her bedroom, she studied the arrows the woman had drawn to-a knee? A curve of skull?

But what was inside the skull? Had she hurt the brain, or the heart?

She slept, the pictures in her hand. When she woke up, she went out to the kitchen table and silently laid the pictures before Sandy. She stared at the baby. Everything looked fine.

"Even if I go to college someday and you help me take care of it . . ." Elvia laid her head on the table. "Why did she leave me?" Her voice hurt her throat, tearing hard.

"That's the child's point of view," Sandy said, her own voice shaking. "That's how you see it, and it has nothing to do with you. It's inside them. The ones who leave. It's what they did." She held Elvia tightly, her knobby wrists hard on the side of Elvia's head. "You have to think about yourself now. Not your belly. Your own heart. What you can and can't do."

"I thought about it already. I can do it. But I need help."

Sandy nodded, but she was quiet. And when Sandy went outside and picked up the hose, Elvia felt strangely calm. She looked at the pictures again, the ghost baby.

She made a plate of cheese and crackers and apple slices and sat down to watch TV. Sabrina the Teenage Witch. All the kids in high school worried about parties and cheerleading and science class. I have to go back there, she thought. Next year. And the baby will stay with Sandy during the mornings. Then I will come home.

Shykim came while Elvia was at school. He was one, with eyes light as amber in a brown face, and a thumb purple from sucking. Sandy said his mother had left him in his crib for two days, and a neighbor found him. He freaked out around five o'clock, when Elvia was doing her English, and Sandy said, "Les told me he falls asleep every time they drive. We can't do that yet."

Elvia took him, hoping he didn't kick her in the belly, and held him carefully while she got into the Honda. He banged the steering wheel with his hands, his hard little feet on her thighs, and suddenly his legs would collapse, and she'd hold him up until he caught the grip again.

Sandy sat in the passenger seat, staring at the gas pedal and brake. "Ray always got nervous, and then he'd talk real loud like I was deaf," she said, watching Shykim pound the wheel.

"My dad was patient," Elvia said. "He started showing me how to drive when I was three."

Grit from the wind peppered the windshield, and Shykim stared in wonder at the leaves flying across the glass. Sandy said, "After we go back to Dr. Josefa again, you see her once a month or so. If everything's okay. Then you can take a childbirth class. They give you a free car seat."

"I know. Three girls in my class already have other kids." Shykim bounced on her thighs, and the baby kicked from inside. A strange feeling-like stones landing all over her. "This girl Tiffini, she's giving up her baby so she can go to college. Marisol was on her case. She said only the mother can raise the kid right."

Sandy shook her head. "Pretty obvious that isn't true by what we see at my house."

"But how could you really love a baby that wasn't yours? I mean, love it for life?" Shykim backhanded her with flailing arms, then banged his chin on the wheel and didn't even cry.

"If the baby lived with me, it would be mine. For then. That's how I always looked at it."

"But it wasn't. Yours."

"After I-was sick, from Ray, I told myself I'd take care of any kid like it was. Big or little. Boy or girl." She propped her knees on the dash. "You sound like your dad. We had this conversation when he first found you. He said I couldn't love you like he did."

Elvia felt a hard fist in her throat. She handed Shykim back to Sandy and went inside. She studied her desert stones, then put them on the windowsill. She listened to Shykim fuss in the crib all night, his diaper rustling, his sucking sometimes so hard he whistled.

pinkeye.

No clues in the truck. Larry yelled at Warren, "Go inside and watch somebody screw!" He didn't want Warren standing there in the Sands parking lot grinning, so proud he'd been keeping an eye on the truck for a few days.

He'd been walking along the fucking railroad tracks forever. Every piece of broken glass glittering like diamonds and cubic zircon-shit. Ellie'd explained the rocks to him all those times, sitting next to him on the couches where they'd lived. Diamonds are the real thing. The earth makes them, with heat. They're just coal. But a guy could buy a cubic zircon and maybe a girl couldn't tell the difference. Totally fake. "How do they make those, Dad?"

Huh? How the hell should he know? Larry tried to think of all the rocks he'd lifted, all the sand he'd shaken out of his boots.

Ellie would sit there with magazine ads, showing him jewelry. "Look-tanzanite, amethyst, alexandrite. Here's tourmaline. Who looked at those rocks and knew you could cut them up and make something sparkly?"

Larry saw the palm frond tails in the truck bed. He opened the dash, but nothing was there except a purple hair thing. All his old stuff. And a pack of Marlboros. Ellie didn't smoke. A receipt for Taco Bell in Rio Seco.

Ellie must be looking for Sara. Maybe she'd still be in Rio Seco. He held the Marlboros. Sandy Narlette, the foster lady? She didn't smoke, either. Someone else did-a guy. A guy needing steel-toe surgery.

But Ellie'd brought the truck back. Warren said she'd told him to say she was sorry. Sorry.

Driving fifty-five, nice and careful, through the valley and the Sandlands toward Rio Seco, he gripped the wheel, the smell of smoke and oil and himself coming off the black ridges under his palms. He'd thought it was wrecked: either Dually had trashed it and lit it on fire, or Ellie had crashed it into a ditch. He hadn't wanted to picture her face bloody from the cracked windshield.

That was the scary shit. The only part he couldn't do. How he hooked up with Callie.

He'd been cool with Ellie at first, two beds in the Sands, heating up chili on the hot plate, pouring milk in the Cap'n Crunch every morning before school. Then she woke up before dawn one day whimpering like a dog, trying to be quiet, he could tell. "I can't see," she finally said, and he told her, "Hell yeah, you can't see cause it's four in the damn morning."

When he turned on the bedside lamp, he saw her eyes swollen and crusted shut with yellow gunk, like she'd been beaten up and then somebody poured glue on her lashes.

He panicked. Never seen anything like that. Was she fuckin blind? All he could think was, I bet that foster mom would know what to do.

But he wouldn't say that to Ellie. He put a wet washcloth on her face and told her he'd go get some medicine. But when he left the Sands, door locked tight behind him, he realized the only place he'd seen a doctor was the emergency room all the way in Indio. He stopped at the Cabazon Market down the highway for a pack of Tareytons and a beer to clear his mind, and Callie came up next to him while he held a jar of Vicks, wondering if Ellie just had a cold, if you could put Vicks near eyes. "Hell, no," Callie said, hands on her skinny hips when he asked. "Sounds like pinkeye. No big deal. I'll come help you out."

He bought her a few beers, some tequila the next night, and like every time, you get drunk or smoked or whatever, you do it in their motel room or the truck or wherever, and then they cry. All the ones he'd ever met-Sara, Callie, the redheaded woman under the Bronco. He thought of his mother-getting out of a truck, crying, the snow falling or the wind blowing and she'd come up to the front door with her black eyelashes smearing oil onto her cheeks.

Pinkeye-no big deal. He'd thought Ellie was blind. All that scary stuff about having a kid-pinkeye that disappeared, coughs that got quiet with NyQuil, fevers and homework and going to the laundrymat on Sundays. He could handle that. What got scary was Ellie's face getting beautiful, guys staring at her, her staring at him like a statue when she asked about her mother. He coasted down into Rio Seco, remembering Sara's blue eye makeup that last time he'd seen her. Made her look blind. Or half dead. What if she was dead, after all this time? Wherever she'd gone, it couldn't have been easy for her. He drove toward Yukon Street without thinking, but when he saw the duplex, he didn't stop. She wasn't here. He didn't want to knock, to see a slice of the same dark linoleum and curtains like nubbly thick dust, think of all the doors and floors and rooms he'd lived in.

Wherever. Good place to go. Where would Ellie be? Who did she love? A guy? No. Who?

The woman he'd wanted to call for help sometimes. Sandy Narlette.

He tried to remember where it was. Lemon groves. Topaz Street. Driving nice and slow, nothing for a cop to notice, he cruised up through the blooming trees with white star-flowers along the road. Then he saw the mulberry tree, remembered all the kids playing in the roots, eating Crackerjacks, Ellie's hair in a ponytail. Her face when she saw his truck, when she saw his tattoo.

He stopped at the curb, remembering that first day, Sandy Narlette like a mother mockingbird and he was a crow. Wanted to peck him on the back, chase him out. But he had the information from social services. She let him sit on the steps and talk to Ellie.

Why? Why had he come for her?

He didn't want her crying in some stranger's house, fighting for food, wondering every day why somebody who shared her blood didn't give a shit. But when he got here, to Sandy Narlette's, he knew that wasn't how it was. Ellie had been under the mulberry tree.

No one was there now. Clothes jumped on the washline in the yard. Her black tee shirt, her baggy jeans. Ellie was here.

He saw Sandy Narlette coming out of the screen door, in her jean shorts and tee shirt, hair in a bun, a total mom type. Not a mockingbird, diving onto his back, but a statue, like that saint woman in front of the church he'd passed today, on Palm Avenue. Standing there holding a dishtowel while he walked up the driveway.

"She's fine."

"Yeah? She been here all this time?"

"No. She was with a group of kids."

"Boys?"

"Two. And girls, too."

He could see her holding something back. He didn't even know her, didn't know how to get an answer out of someone like her.

"She was worried about you being mad."

"I'm her goddamned father." He didn't say the rest-I'm supposed to be mad. I'm supposed to take care of her.

Sandy's eyebrows raised up like women's did. He heard a kid murmuring in the house, like when Jeff used to wake up. Making bird noises. "She wants to stay here, for a while anyway. She just wanted a stable place for . . ."

"I was doing my best, okay?" He could tell she was holding back. "I would a killed anybody even looked at her wrong. I was trying to keep her safe. Hell, when the truck was gone, I thought she was dead." He felt his eyes go hot red. Fuck if he'd cry. He looked past her face, all soft and melted at the corners of her mouth, like she knew everything, everything about pinkeye and kids and stone-faced teenage girls. The doorbell was the same, that kind that lit up at night like a fiery ember in the plastic plate. The same as when he'd sat here in the evening trying to get to know his kid.

cabazon.

"Your father came here after you left for school," Sandy said. Shykim cruised around the table, grabbing wooden spoons and spatulas, smacking imaginary ants.

Elvia calmly got a stack of cookies, then stayed at the counter, remembering the smoothness of the dragon on his arm when she finally touched it. "He knew I'd be here?"

Sandy bit her lips, leaving tooth marks that slowly disappeared. "He said he thought you might be dead at first. He was crying."

"Crying?" Elvia tried to picture her father with tears instead of an angry squint. "He came from Florida? When I went out there to give him back the truck, he was gone."

"He didn't say where he'd been. I asked him where he was living and he said, 'Same old place.' I asked him if he'd gone away before, and he said, 'I didn't go far enough.' Then he left."

"What does that mean?" Elvia sat down on the couch. "Not far enough from me?"

"I don't think so," Sandy said, helping Shykim up. "He came, right? He said he couldn't believe you ran away, and he wanted to make sure you were okay."

She wasn't running back. She just wanted to see him. Tell him she was sorry.

She left before dawn. On the highway, she felt an exhilaration mixed with fear. When I see him, he won't believe how I can drive. Then she thought, He'll see my stomach. The baby.