A baby slept in the crib against the wall. Elvia bent to see the tiny chest rising and falling fast as she could blink. She smelled vinegar, milk, salt.

"That's my baby," a little girl said.

She was about three, with blond hair curled thin as spiderwebs around her ears. She wore Pull-Ups hanging low. "And that's my brother." She pointed to a two-year-old standing near the bed. His diaper was heavy and long as a white beavertail behind him. These kids, they'd look better naked, Elvia thought. Naked, and their moms could hose them off when they peed or pooped. At least they wouldn't have to carry it around all day.

"That's mine," the little girl said then, pointing to the chips, and Elvia handed her the open bag. She had silvery tracks on her red-hot cheeks, like traces of fairy dust.

The boy cried, "Chip!" Jeffrey examined the trucks and dolls lying near the TV. The little boy grabbed the bag, and the little girl chased him to the kitchen. Lee said, "Get back in there and share them chips! You know better than comin in here when I'm real busy. Shut your door."

The little girl closed the door. She stared at Elvia, letting the chips fall on the floor, her hands splayed stubborn as a doll's. "How old's your baby him?" The little girl settled next to Elvia, stretching out her short legs.

Elvia was startled. Then she saw Jeffrey concentrating hard on a truck with no wheels. "He's not my baby. But he's a year and a half. Older than your little baby."

"He sleeping. My baby." The girl put her back against the wall like Elvia, legs stiff, thumb in her mouth.

They watched TV kitchens and laughing people. Elvia heard her father outside. He hates being inside. I hate it, too, but nobody asked me. I get to be the pretend mommy again.

She could smell chemicals threading through the air now, like incense sharpened with burning metal. The little girl eventually slumped to her side and put her head in Elvia's lap. The boys ate all the chips, picking the smallest triangles like confetti off the floor, and then they lay beside her, too. The baby hadn't stirred, but Elvia could hear his raspy breath. All the breaths rose around her like slow crickets caught in the children's throats.

Pretend you're the mommy. She arranged the sticky-sweet arms and legs around her, pale and sweating, shiny as candy canes with the red stripes sucked off. I don't want to be the mommy yet, she thought desperately. She tasted Cool Ranch on her tongue, felt a swaying under her ribs.

She must have fallen asleep for a minute. The acrid air pushing under the door stung her eyes open. Elvia moved the arms and legs as gently as she could, trying to breathe. Lee's baby was awake and snuffling, his round head bobbing against the crib bars. She picked him up. His arms and legs were soft and wet as damp paper when she carried him out of the room.

"Hey," Callie said from the couch. "Come sit down. I see a bottle right here. And I was gonna do your hair, Ellie, cause it looks a mess."

The air was better near the open door, and Elvia gave the baby his bottle. He snorted and snuffled. Callie swayed behind Elvia, her voice faster and happier now. "Don't that feel good?" Callie said, loosening the braids, stroking the brush bristles gently around Elvia's skull. "I always wanted somebody to brush my hair, cause it feels nicer when somebody else does it, huh?"

Elvia stared at boxes of Red Devil lye. Callie's voice tumbled like spilled soda. When she was sketching, she would talk all night, about what she would cook if she had money and how men were different animals. "I mean with different blood, sweetie," she'd say. "Like lizards."

Now she said, "Seventies stuff, you can find bell-bottoms at the thrift store if you look hard enough. Cheap, I mean real cheap." The baby finished his bottle and, instead of being satisfied, started to scream. "Take him to his momma. I'll get a diaper."

Elvia went slowly to the kitchen. Lee hovered over the stove, tiny blue crowns of flame under the pots. The shimmering air enveloped Elvia, prickled her ears and lips hot. She said, "Here."

"Just put him down for a sec, cause I gotta do one more thing," Lee said. "He'll be okay."

"I don't feel good," Elvia whispered, taking off the sodden diaper, and Lee laughed.

"You sure look Mescan to me," she said bitterly. "I wish you were. You could hook me up with somebody in Tijuana. What I need's over the border. They're hoggin the good stuff."

Elvia turned to leave. Callie came in, Jeff sleeping on her shoulder. Lee's baby was rocking on his hands and knees, his moon-white butt in the air. "Here's the diaper," Callie said. "We're on our way, cause I bet Larry's half dead now. He was half dead when I met him. Tequila, see, that's not the best thing for him, but he likes the taste."

Elvia couldn't breathe. Lee turned from her stirring to take the diaper. The baby's eyes were gleaming circles of wet in the dim light from the burners. Elvia moved outside, to the cool dry night past the front door.

The cars were darkened hulks except for a pinprick of light from the other man's cigarette. He leaned from a window, pointing down the slope, a flat rush of smoke pouring from his beard.

Her father was asleep in the cab. When they saw his head thrown back, his goatee pointing out like stiff fingers, Callie said, "Well, shit, what a lightweight. Always afraid somebody's gonna rip off this old truck he's had since creation, and now he's knocked out . . ."

"I'll drive," Elvia said.

"Just cause your dad's been lettin you fool around on our street don't mean you're good enough to get us down that slope."

But Elvia shoved her father toward the passenger side. She found his keys and threw the beer bottle on the road, hearing the dull pop and trickle. "We gotta get home, and you can't drive at all," she told Callie. "How come you never learned? You like other people takin you places?"

Callie drew her head back. "Well, shit, no, I don't. But nobody ever taught me."

Elvia started the truck, the engine mumbling under her. She could smell Callie beside her, the vapor on her hair and arms.

"Nobody taught me cause we left Arkansas when I was little, ended up in Blythe, okay, pickin crops and our car broke down. Been tryin to get to LA, but this damn number ten freeway takes you through the desert forever. I keep stoppin in places like Tourmaline."

Elvia moved the gearshift, and the truck eased down the dirt slope. Then the house roof leaped toward the sky in a shower of light. The explosion thumped the truck door, reached in to knuckle-burn Elvia's cheek.

Elvia's father knocked his head on the door frame. "Shit," he said. "What the hell?"

"Shit, oh shit, she blew it up," Callie said, holding her neck, wrapping her fingers around it like a collar.

The dark car raced down the knoll and past them, no headlights, a black cockroach skimming the dirt and heading off the mountain. The house was burning like a lone jack-o'-lantern.

"Go!" Elvia's father said, hitting the dash. "Drive home, goddamnit. Go, Ellie!"

"Fuck, the cops gonna smell it when they come," Callie said. "But I seen all the boxes in his car. Lee and them kids wouldn't fit-they weren't in there. Go back up there, Ellie, go on."

Elvia imagined the kids in the bedroom, their pale arms and legs twined around each other as she'd arranged them when she'd stood up. She pushed her foot carefully on the gas and turned the wheel, and the truck rumbled up the slope toward the waves of heat.

"Shit, I forgot about the kids," her father said. "What the hell were you and Lee doin?"

"Cookin," Callie said, eyes red and wide.

Elvia turned the wheels as he had taught her to do to park on a hill. The hot air was a scalding tongue on her arm. She opened the truck door to look for someone, anyone, who'd gotten out. The heat forced her into a crouch, and then the little girl's tiny figure floated like a moth past the tree. Her hands came first-then her arms gray, her hair singed, her cheeks red.

"My mommy told me run. She get my brother and my baby."

But the house was falling in on itself, fierce traces of blue streaking the flames. Elvia saw the girl's eyes shining empty and silver as dimes.

Her father grabbed the girl and pushed Elvia into the truck. He started it, spinning the wheels, as Elvia pulled the girl onto her lap. The hair curled black near her small ear, her thumb was in her mouth, her eyes closed to the embers floating in the sky while the truck roared down the hill.

san cristobal.

Even after all these years, the hurt was so fresh Serafina felt a sting like nopales spines along her ribs each time she thought of her daughter. Every day, when she washed the lime water from the corn, the husks rose to the surface like small translucent fingernails. When she whirled the wooden molinillo to beat smooth her uncle's hot chocolate, she smelled Elvia's palm, where she let candy melt before she licked it. And when she washed shirts in the stone basin and saw a wasp float past, its legs dangled loose like Elvia's when she used to sleep carried in Serafina's arms. Then the pain was so strong that she rocked back on her heels. Her daughter's legs dangled, didn't cling tight, because she trusted her mother to fly her safely to bed. And instead I left her, cried Serafina.

Back then, she had tried to sit up, to see the Nova, but the police car turned the corner and she banged her head on the door handle. When the pain inside her forehead receded, the men were pulling her from the back seat and walking her slowly toward a building.

"Green card? ID? You got ID?" a green-shirted man said inside, and she swayed.

"Habla, habla," he said impatiently.

"My dotter," she said.

"Her doctor must be down south," the policeman said.

The green-shirted man was la migra, she realized. Immigration. He led her by the handcuffs into a small room. Tears slid down her throat like hot beads while he rolled her fingers over ink, the way her father and uncle had always signed their names. But I can make letters, she thought, confused. Then in a large room filled with men in work-stained clothes, a man spoke to her in rapid Spanish. She shook her head. He said, "Ahh-Mixteco?" He pointed to the green bus outside. "El camion."

Then she saw herself in the bus window and wanted to smash her own face. The bus lurched down the highway. She touched her pocket. She still had the lighter from the Nova and two silver barrettes that had fallen from Elvia's hair earlier. Elvia must have awakened by now-she would touch window glass this dark, whispering for her mother. Serafina rocked forward, hitting her forehead on the metal edge of the bus seat. Elvia would cry. She would scream for her mother. Na! Na! Who would find her? What if no one found her, and the sun rose, and inside the hot car Elvia's sweat evaporated and her breathing grew dry and short?

Serafina's own breath buckled in her chest. No. No. She kept the screams inside her throat, so no one would hear. As soon as this bus left her over the border, she would come back.

She saw only carpets of flat dark, then scattered lights and outlines of rugged mountains. How could she plot her trail back to Rio Seco? She had come here in a car trunk; she had seen only blackness, smelled only oil, felt each piece of gravel pinging against the metal box.

The Nova had felt like that, when it moved forward, like the dark car trunk, with sickening jerk and groan. How had she thought she could drive? Elvia was curled on the black seat, her small hand flung out as if waiting for a gift. She swallowed another scream and glanced at the men. One knee was spiderwebbed with oil; one neck was burned into red mesh from outside work. Their work boots or tennis shoes were splayed, their grimed hands uncomfortably still, their heads thrown back in uneasy sleep. They would return to their jobs. She would follow them.

When the bus descended from the mountains, she saw the tangle of signs and city lights. The men began to talk: Tijuana, Tijuana. The blinding lights of the border stations loomed like a row of open refrigerators, and then the bus was past them. Serafina felt the pains ricochet between her hips, as if she were having Elvia again. Her fear always gathered there now, lived in those belly muscles. She stood and pushed with the men. Let me out. I have to go back.

The stream of men filed past the green shirts and onto the asphalt beyond the chainlink fence, and then they floated away like dandelion spores. Serafina followed two men in blue coveralls and baseball caps who strode with purpose along the fence.

She could barely walk without the warm fingers pinching cloth behind her arm, without the chubby legs holding her waist and the braids touching her shoulders with each step. Elvia's hands at her knees every day, her nose a damp knob when she hid her face at the bend of Serafina's legs. She had never been away from her daughter longer than the hours sleep had separated them with dreams, and even then their hands and hair touched on the sheets.

She stumbled, holding the fence, and someone called, "Borracha," thinking she was drunk. She followed the men toward the levee that separated them from California.

The bank was crowded with people arguing and comparing, women selling tortillas and tequila for courage. Night was the time to cross. She had stood here before, with her brother Rigoberto, when he wanted to cross the wire. Serafina had shaken her head, saying she would stay with their mother in the hills near the dump. But after Rigoberto had gone, Serafina folded herself into a priest's car trunk, her mother looking down with a face pinched and stricken under her black rebozo. Everyone was dead, she said. How could Serafina leave her, too?

She turned slowly now, looking back toward the hills that led to the dump, five miles away. No, she told herself. She didn't even know if her mother was still there. And she knew Elvia was in the car, sobbing by now, crying for her to come back.

She heard only rushing blood in her head. The two blue-coveralled men clambered up the metal wall in a surging wave of backs, and then they were gone, dropping off with thuds. A woman was lifted up nearby, her pink blouse like a floating carnation. Serafina clawed herself up the metal wall, fitting her feet and fingers into the grooves, pausing at the top, so dizzy she nearly fell. Would someone shoot her up here? She saw the maze of arroyos and ravines, and dropped onto the dirt of the other side. She followed the dust of rubber soles and ashes, the sounds of running. The trails were lighter than the soot-scarred dirt, the lines stark as if a giant finger had carved them for these feet.

She kept the pink blouse-back in sight, wanting to follow a woman. Branches scratched her arms. They were running down a tunnel of brush into a ravine, where she heard shouts echoing. Bodies came from behind her, knocking her hard into the crumbling dirt wall. Sand filled her mouth and she spat in the rustling. Thumping blades dipped close like giant wasps, and she ducked into a damp hole in the arroyo bank, curling herself there for a long time.

When the helicopter faded to faint whirring, and more voices emerged from their own holes and bushes, she began to run again. She saw only black shapes cartwheeling past her and out of the canyon's mouth, like sheets of burned paper blown by the wind. She ran faster, trying to leave the dank moisture of the arroyo, and in the open space flashlight beams danced like blue needles. The white headlights of the truck that roared across the plain pierced her eyes, her chest, pinning her down like sharpened broom straws.

They sprawled on their bellies, in a pinwheel shape, and Serafina could smell the beer breath of the man next to her. His eyes were slanted fierce and red as chiles. La migra counted them. Then the Bronco jostled back to the same dirt road just inside the fence. Two of the caught men laughed as if it were a game, but the chile-eyed man cursed, spitting on the floorboards. Serafina's teeth were coated with dust. While she lay in the dirt, the Nova's lighter poked her thigh and she thought, I should just die, die now, and then I would be an angel. I could be in the Nova in a few seconds. Elvia wouldn't be afraid. I would be there with her.

She stood on the dirt road near the border station, the Bronco rumbling away. She wasn't an angel. She was the worst mother in the world. Her own hands on the steering wheel, her own eyes distracted. Her own fault, all of it. She prayed that Elvia was still sleeping, that she wasn't afraid, that the hedge shaded the car. She struggled off the fence and walked.

"Puta," someone whispered when she passed. "Puta mixteca."

Makeup like a whore. She had forgotten the eyeshadow and lipstick. She had wanted to look like a magazine woman. Her jeans cut into her waist. She clambered up the levee again, where fewer people were shifting at the edge. No tiny warm hands to pat her, shape her, steady her. No narrow chest resting against her collarbone, heart tapping against her own. She wasn't connected to the slope at all, and her body careened down into the foot-pounded darkness again.

She knew it was a different arroyo, but she breathed the same dust, the soot-black earth of campfires and shoes and running. A faint line of light hovered on the horizon, so she knew she was heading east, and a few voices echoed from further up the ravine. Then the hard arm shot out from a crevice and snapped around her neck like a clothesline.

One man knelt on her legs, and the other ripped her blouse open. "Dinero," he said, tearing at her bra, where women kept their money. He slapped at her breasts, and Serafina screamed.

"Nobody cares if a fucking pollo screams. People can hear you but they don't care. You don't need to cross now. You can stay here, where fucking Indians belong. Scream some more."

It wasn't enough that one lay on top of her, grinding her back into the earth. The other one waited at her head until her eyes rolled back and then he struck her skull, sideways, over and over. Other women screamed, whirling seagull cries, and more shoes scraped hurriedly past the crevice. The man she couldn't see hit her again, the bones of his hand like a shovel, and she heard nothing after that.

When she woke, she couldn't see. She felt her blood seeping into the ground. She felt her soul leaving, floating from beneath her breastbone, and then she wasn't tethered to the earth.

She was eating the earth. She lay on her face, her teeth grinding the grains of stone left from the thousands of footsteps rushing the other way.

When she tried to shift her legs, she felt the sharp poke of metal. Her jeans were bunched around her knees. She tried to pull them up, but her left arm didn't work at all. The fingers on her right hand were too weak on the stiff cloth, and she felt the air on her thighs. Something sharp at her hip. Her knuckles brushed the barrettes. She slid them up her leg. She couldn't see. It was all she could do to rub the barrettes until the silver warmed her fingerprints under the black of la migra's ink and the drying blood of her own face, fading to nothing.

She had awakened in white sheets, a tiny brown hand on her shoulder, the knuckles brushing her cheek. She was dead, she'd thought joyously, and Elvia was here with her. She reached for the small hand, but the fingers were hard and thin as cinnamon sticks. Not baby-plump. Then her mother's face hovered nearby, creased and brown as a walnut. Her mother's joyous cry rang out, just as Serafina's liquid happiness drained back into her chest.

She couldn't move. Her head was hollow as a dried-out gourd. This was the bed where she'd been born. In Oaxaca. Her mother called, "La Virgen has brought her back! My daughter!"

Serafina moaned then at the cold hands of the statue, suffused with red, at the car hidden in the hedge, a forehead pressed against the window. Her mother bent low and soothed, "Who? Who? There is no Elvia here. Don't worry-no one will hurt you now. You are home."

Adobe walls-home in San Cristobal. Not the plywood of Tijuana. Her mother said, "Cueh cu-y! Dead! Alba's son Gabriel found you like a little animal, your mouth full of dirt. He carried you up to the dump. Your head was covered with blood. Your hair was hard as stone."

Serafina felt plaster around her left arm and splinters of pain in her side. "Your ribs were broken," her mother said, touching the tightly wound strips of cloth. "Your arm was broken, and your ankle. We took you to the clinic in Tijuana, and the doctor said you might never awaken. So I borrowed money from Alba and brought you home."

Her head hurt so much that black filled her eyes, like rising smoke. "Elvia," she tried to say. A nun might have taken Elvia inside the church to wait for her. Elvia could say "Mama." She would tell the kindly old sister, "Mama come back." It might not be too late. But her tongue didn't work; it squirmed heavy in her mouth, like a trapped creature.

"Don't move. Don't talk." Her mother frowned. "She sihi. Daughter. You nearly died. Your anima tried to leave. Your soul had already flown. You have been gone from this world nearly a month. It is October now. Only la Virgen's gaze brought you back."

October? Serafina looked down at her arm, trying to remember. She saw the scar, a spatter of silver like shooting stars. Elvia's atole.

"Atole," her mother said, pointing to the altar beside the bed, the row of veladoras trembling, watching, the bouquets and incense perfuming the air. A clay bowl of sweet thick milk steamed nearby. "I made this every morning, to send your favorite smell past your face, to help you become hungry again," her mother whispered, picking up the bowl.

The cinnamon scent floated to her. She couldn't lift the casted arm to touch the scars. Elvia was gone, carried away from the church, waiting, waiting. Giving up. Serafina cried out, not even words, just a spiral of hoarse barking that made her ribs hurt, her breastbone, her marrow.

For days she tried to form words her mother could understand. They swirled in her head-Cap'n Crunch. Apple. Atole. Sandoo. Elvia. Please. Money. Please. Her mouth could not form them. Her vision was full of black-lace veils, as if the man's blows had loosened something in her skull. She kept her head turned away from la Virgen de Guadalupe, hanging over the altar. The tilted face made her cry again until the pain shot through her head like agave thorns. I was looking for you, she thought. I was praying to you, and they took me away. My baby was sleeping in the car. How could you be so cruel? I wanted to come home, but not without her.

She listened to her mother's grateful prayers to la Virgen: "Thank you for bringing my daughter back to me. Make her stay. There is only evil in the north. Make her stay forever."

Uncle Emiliano studied her briefly before he left for his corn fields. He was over sixty now, her mother whispered. The old women of the pueblo filed in to look at her, to shake their heads at the evil in Tijuana, in the north. Her mother counted the dead: twin babies in the tomato fields of Culiacan, her husband and eldest son in the Tijuana dump. Even their spirits were not here, in the mountains of San Cristobal. No one was left. Everyone was working in America, disappeared like Rigoberto and Serafina, four years ago.

Serafina stared at the whitewashed adobe walls. She chewed tortillas. She felt the cotton huipil blouse on her chest. Her jeans were gone. She had nothing now, just like when she'd left. The barrettes?

"She sihi," she finally murmured. "Elvia."

Her mother was incredulous as she spooned broth into Serafina's mouth. "Elvia? A daughter? You were fifteen when you left me in Tijuana. I sent you to your brother. You were promised to marry Rogelio Martinez. He was in the strawberries. Rigoberto was supposed to find him." She leaned close. "You were not married. A daughter?"

It took Serafina a long time to tell her everything. How the car trunk felt, how she couldn't breathe, how the sickening thuds and jerks made her dizzy. Then she was standing on a sidewalk, nearly fainting, and her brother, Rigoberto, took her inside a garage where ten men lived. He said Rogelio Martinez had left months ago for the vineyards past San Francisco. Rigoberto said nothing was the same here in California, nothing was like San Cristobal; he gave her store-bought tortillas and cheese and a blanket for his mattress. He said she had to put away her skirt and wear jeans. He would find a job for her. He said, in a bitter voice, that jobs were better for women.

The next morning, the woman in the front house took Serafina to the Angeles Linen plant, where she folded towels and sheets, her heart beating wildly in fear until the fourth day, when she was comforted by imagining that the steam swirling around her was the mist of San Cristobal. That night, Rigoberto told her he was leaving for the grapes in the desert, in Indio, that he would be back in three months, that she should be careful. She looked at him uncomprehendingly; he was her only brother still alive, and he was supposed to take care of her. But Rigoberto said there was no work in Rio Seco for him, and he needed to make money to send to their mother.

"He left?" her mother said, disbelieving.

"He said he needed to make money. He said grapes were quick. Thirty-five dollars a day. He said Uncle Emiliano needed a new roof." She stared up at the corrugated tin Rigoberto's money had bought. She whispered to her mother, "He left in a truck with the other men. I was afraid in the garage, but I went to my work with the woman. I didn't know the street. I only knew the hands on the wall."

Angeles Linen was a pale blue building with hands folded-as if in prayer-painted on the side. Serafina stood with the other women pulling sheets and towels and uniforms scalding hot from the huge dryers, folding and stacking. All around Spanish words flew too fast. Her hair was tucked into a blue mushroom cap.

A young man waited outside for his truck to be filled with clean laundry. He smiled at her a few times, his eyes green as faded leaves, his mustache yellow and thick. She lowered her eyes, a trickle of fear falling with the sweat down her back. That afternoon, the day Rigoberto left, she folded in the hot fog, and through the wreaths of steam, green-shirted men poured through the narrow doors like wasps bursting from a crack. From her corner, Serafina saw them float against blue chests and brown elbows, she heard screams rise, and she was swept by other women outside. Then she saw the box.