Blue backs scaled fences, and she bent herself into the square darkness of the box before the migra men came into the parking lot. She shut the flaps against the light and prayed to la Virgen.

"I asked her to save me from la migra," she whispered to her mother. "And someone picked up the box and put it in a truck."

Larry knew she was inside. He said two words she didn't understand into the cardboard flaps. She remembered the smell of her tears and sweat, drying to silvery webs on the hot, thick paper beneath her face. She felt faint, like in the car trunk. She didn't want to go back to Mexico. She didn't even know her address yet. She had no idea where the truck was headed.

"You went with him?" her mother said, her cheeks etched with disbelief.

In his apartment, Larry had dabbed stinging orange medicine on her knees, pointing to his own scars and scabs. She was paralyzed with fear. She was fifteen. She had never touched a man, hardly brushed her father's or brothers' hands when she gave them food. In San Cristobal, no one held hands or kissed until they were to be married. Larry's ponytail draped like a corn tassel over her wrist as he painted her knees.

She remembered the green couch. "I didn't know where to go. Rigoberto was gone. I didn't know where Indio was. Only strange men were left at the garage. The woman in the front house was caught by la migra. I saw her on the floor." She remembered staring at Larry's TV, which glowed like a square veladora.

Larry brought food from Taco Bell. The cracking-hard tortillas pricked Serafina's gums. She sat awake on the green couch all night, after Larry fell asleep in the chair across the room. Sirens blared down the street, red lassos of light reached through the curtains to circle the walls, and the sound sent pain and fear to collect like a nest of bloody threads in her head. The tomatoes she had picked in Culiacan, the seedy red acid on her hands, the blood-smeared bundles of her dead baby sisters, the exploding rockets soldiers had fired in Oaxaca to make her uncle and the other old men leave, the torn hole like a dark rosebud in one old man's temple. The webbing of red at the corners of Larry's eyes when he applied the Mercurochrome. She was afraid to move, afraid to look at his long, pale feet sprawled near his boots.

In the morning, she kept her eyes closed. When his delivery truck pulled away, she looked down at the avenue with cars rushing past. If she left this room now, where would she go? How could she find the garage? What if a neighbor saw her and called la migra? What if someone saw her even now, in the window? She huddled on the green couch, staring at the television.

When Larry returned that night, bearing another bag from Taco Bell, he tried to speak a few words in Spanish. "La migra," he said, then swept his arm across the table. "No trabajo." She understood nothing else he'd said but that: No job. No place to go. She put her head down on the table, smelling the unfamiliar beans of the paper-wrapped burritos. Larry pulled his chair close to her, patted her hair awkwardly, and said, "Okay, okay." She understood that. Then he pulled her toward him and kissed her, hands on her back. All she could think of was the way La Virgen's hands felt against her lips, the plaster fingers glowing with the oil of everyone's entreaties, maybe her own mother's lips on her forehead and cheeks. She had no idea how to pull away, how to kiss back, and so she imagined herself a statue when he pulled at her shirt. But his hands were hot and callused.

"You let him touch you? An American?" Her mother clenched her fists. "They have disease! They hate Mixtecos!" She leaned forward and whispered, "You made the gods angry."

Her mother's braid was still black at the end, but the stripe of silver hair at her part was now wide as a panel of lace. When they'd moved to the migrant camp in Culiacan, Serafina had seen prostitutes gather in the fields on payday nights, lying down with men under the trucks. "We don't do that, like animals," her mother said. "You are promised to Rogelio Martinez. When you are married, and you lie down together, his white blood will mix with your red blood. Ten times, and then you will have enough to make a baby."

She understood nothing Larry said, nothing he did. She knew it then, in the dark kitchen. There was no San Cristobal now-her father, who would kill a cow and marry her to Rogelio, was dead. Rogelio was somewhere in the grapes. The things she knew-washing clothes in the river, boiling corn over a fire-were gone. Here was a stove with frighteningly beautiful blue fire, a street with sirens and white strangers, a man smiling, touching the buttons on her blouse. His teeth clicked against hers, his watch ticked against her fingernails, and Serafina understood that these were her only coins: her teeth, her nails, the bones of her spine rubbing the arm of the green couch.

How could she tell her mother about the way the shouts of la migra circled in her brain even now, how hundreds of people watched her from car windows and houses, inspecting her braid and cheeks?

These peeling walls hid her at this moment. Larry fell asleep in a few minutes after he finished lying on her. He was kind for a week, then drunk for two nights, and then he didn't come back at all.

For days, she walked around the two rooms, touching the stove, the TV. She couldn't imagine how to get back to the garage where Rigoberto had taken her, which was filled with strange men from Michoacan. The plywood room near the dump in Tijuana, black flies and white seagulls whirling around her head, a trash barrel flame for cooking ash-specked tortillas, her father and brother buried, her mother sitting stunned on a concrete block. Rigoberto in Indio. Men grabbing her breasts in the dump, saying they would break into the shack to feel virgin blood.

Her head ached in the welter of scars like pink yarn stitched on her temple. "I had a baby," was all she could whisper to her mother, whose face crumpled with pain and disgust before she looked away, staring at the flickering candles on the altar.

"I missed you," Serafina whispered. "That morning, I missed you.

She remembered how Elvia's breath had smelled when they woke up that day, soft and milky through the baby teeth, and how Serafina had touched one sharp pebble of backbone. A small stone, shifting underwater at the river's edge when she knelt there to rinse the clothes, her mother humming. She had suddenly missed her mother's smoke-scented neck, her braid thin as an eyelash at the end when it brushed Serafina's arm near the cooking fire. Serafina had slid one finger into Elvia's loosely curled palm, thinking, I want to go home, but instead of gripping reflexively, like a baby, Elvia opened up her hand like a flower and pulled it away.

Her mother's hands were on Serafina every day. She spread pastes of turpentine and cloves on her ribs and ankles and wrist, for warmth to heal her bones. But inside Serafina's belly, the pain was sharp-she wasn't touching her own daughter, braiding her hair and washing between her toes. "Sandoo," Elvia used to whisper at her feet. Serafina couldn't even see her own useless feet-her aching brain wouldn't work. It took months before she could walk properly, bend her wrist, look at the sky without seeing black sand. When she finally hobbled up the dirt path, holding her mother's arm, she said, "I have to go back and find her."

Her mother shook her head. "She is gone. They have found another place for her. She is an American now. She has a better life. You cannot leave again."

"I have to go back-" Serafina would begin, each day while she grew stronger, and her mother's voice would rise into a scream, her lips fierce and drawn back like a cat's.

"If you go back, you will die! All my children die! You are the last one." The desperation in her mother's voice edged over to hysteria, and she would scream, "You left me! In Tijuana! All of you. I was there alone with robbers, with floods, but you never came back!"

One of the old women would rush up the path and try to calm her. Dona Crescencia or Dona Elpidia would say, "You must stay, or you will kill her. Your mother has taken care of you. You must take care of her. Why do you want to return to California?"

Her mother's eyes would widen, and Serafina knew she had to be silent.

Her uncle spent days in his fields. There was no word or money from Rigoberto for months, and they ate tortillas with cheese or beans or salt. Her mother cried and said Rigoberto must be dead, too, her last son buried in California. Then he wired a hundred dollars from Fresno, but when she wrote back to him there was no answer.

For nearly a year, Serafina refused to look at la Virgen's face. How could she make me choose-my mother or my daughter? How could she be so cruel, to expect me to live with a cleaving of my breastbone? But one night, when her mother lay sleeping beside her, Serafina studied the soft blue robe, the hands clasped in prayer. She tried to imagine Elvia's face, grown thinner or chubbier, fed or not, smiling or sobbing. The tiny teeth. Please. Please. Apple.

She had been found. She couldn't be dead. I would feel that. Who is feeding her? Another woman is brushing her hair, braiding it. A nun? Do nuns take care of children, in the north?

What if Larry had come back, and someone had told him about the car? What if Elvia lived with Larry now, waiting for her mother to return? What would Larry have told her? What would he feed her? The nopales paddle had flown into the yard like a green moon of anger.

Larry had a beer glass. Colorado was etched into the side. Serafina knew this word, from the market in Nochixtlan, the vats of prepared mole sauces-negro, verde, Colorado. Black, green, red. A red place? A red beer?

But the glass was wrapped in paper she had never seen-clear plastic bubbles trapped together. She remembered touching the circles of air, rigid buttons of protection.

Now she prayed, for the first time. But in the fire-glow, she thought that even her prayers were too Mexican to reach California, to touch her American daughter. So she prayed that la Virgen would wrap an invisible blanket of bubbles around Elvia, each dimple of air full of exhaled love.

Today her mother wore a white huipil, a dress her mother's mother had woven. Her mother's mother had spun the cotton, threaded it onto the loom, and embroidered the birds and animals with silk. This huipil had been saved for years, to be worn only in death.

Twelve years, Serafina thought, smoothing the fine cloth. I never left you. Her mother used to whisper, "I never left you, when I brought you back so sick, in case your anima flew."

Her mother had lost her mind a long time before. When Serafina cried about Elvia, or when anyone who visited San Cristobal talked about America, her mother would shout about the devils and the spirits of the north, where even the air was full of evil magic. Then, five years earlier, her mother's left breast had dripped fluid, as if she needed to nurse a baby. Serafina wanted to take her to the doctor in Nochixtlan, but her mother shook her head, a strange blue light around her black irises. "The milk-it has come back," she said.

The breast pained her, but she smiled and said it was a hurt like a baby's lips. Then the pain traveled to her back and her hip, and, finally, when her body began to waste away and her breath smelled like metal, Serafina told her uncle they needed money for the doctor.

She wrote to Rigoberto in the cotton, in the lettuce, in the oranges-all the places from where he'd last wired money. "Please come home. She is very sick. She will leave us soon." Every month she walked the seven miles to the next village, Santa Maria Tiltepec, where she took the bus to Nochixtlan and the wire office that held money for the few people left in San Cristobal. All the men who were working in California and Arizona and Washington put their money on counters there, where dollars disappeared and turned into pesos in Nochixtlan. After almost a year, Rigoberto sent three hundred dollars and wrote back: Take her to the doctor in Oaxaca City. I cannot come home. Crossing is too hard. Do you want my face or my money?

"Cancer," the doctor said, after they'd taken the long bus ride to the city. Nothing helped, not teas or horchatas or medicinal rubs, not the prayers and offerings.

Her mother lay in the wooden casket Uncle Emiliano had just made. A small crucifix rested on her breastbone, her fingers wrapped around a tall white candle. Her anima had chosen last night to fly, lifting from the open doorway and blending into the mist of the mountains around San Cristobal Yucucui.

Her mother still couldn't be alone. When the sun rose, and Dona Crescencia came to sit, Serafina would make tortillas and take them to her uncle in the field, as always. Serafina knelt on the palm mat near the coffin. She heard Dona Crescencia's thin voice rising from the path. Serafina touched the melting wax so it wouldn't drip on her mother's fingers. Dona Crescencia was wrapped tightly in her rebozo, her brown face small and round like sweet bread.

Dona Crescencia sat down on the palm mat and said, "Five years of suffering. She chose last night to leave because your brother didn't come for fiesta. Eladio Reyes and his brothers came from Santa Monica. They took the bus. Amado Torres brought his sons from San Bernardino. He has a truck. And the Sanchez brothers spent all their money from Santa Barbara on the flowers and candles. They will carry San Cristobal this year."

The fiesta for the town's patron saint was the only time people came back, during the third week of August, when they ate the special moles that sent sweet and spicy steam through every window, when the church was full of flowers that added their scents to the air, when the men carried the statue of San Cristobal on a platform through the streets.

"I asked them all," Dona Crescencia said sternly. "They heard Rigoberto went to the coast, to the artichokes and strawberries. But no one knows. And he isn't here."

Serafina nodded. "He sends money."

"Money doesn't erase his tequio," the old woman said. Tequio-each person in the pueblo had a responsibility, for the water or the roads or the church, for the fiesta, for the old people. Money would pay someone else to do the work, but it wouldn't dissolve the insult of absence.

"Money isn't life," Dona Crescencia said, moving a pearl of wax from her friend's knuckle.

Serafina glanced at her, remembering the tiny apartments, the feeling of desperation when Larry didn't bring home money, when the only place for food was the corner store. "When you are up there, it is. Up there, it feels like the whole life."

She went into the cane-walled cooking shelter outside, starting the fire under the clay comal, mixing the masa she had ground. The firelight was the only glow yet in the dark. Serafina didn't need to see. She had done this since she was small; she had thought she would teach Elvia.

Her throat hot, as if an ember were lodged there, she kneaded the masa, waiting for the tears. For the first few years, she had wanted to die. Every morning, in the blackness before dawn, she had shaped tortillas, making sure the small maize-yellow suns appeared in her hands before light filtered through the cane-stalk walls, before any words or pictures drifted through her head. Sesame Street. Cap'n Crunch. Na. Crickets running along the baseboards in Rio Seco. The old woman next door, her bony, pale hands reaching for the jars of pomegranate jelly.

Serafina nudged the suns, laid them gently on the comal. Her mother had stripped dry corn with her in the storeroom, saying, "A San Cristobal man will come back, and you will marry. You will have children here."

Every year, families came from America for the fiesta, but not Rigoberto, not Rogelio Martinez nor his brothers. Every year, the pueblo was empty again except for the old, a few children, and a crazy-eyed girl whose mother ran the soft-drink concession.

Serafina would imagine Elvia's small, dimpled fingers on the glass of the Nova. The fingers growing longer, thinner. Holding someone else's hand. The nun. A policeman. A stranger. Growing in Elvia's blood would be hate. She will hate me when I go back to find her.

She washed her face with water from the barrel. Pulling the silver barrettes from her apron pocket, she rubbed them over her lips. She felt the weight of the Nova's lighter in her palm. All she had. What did Elvia have, by now? Had she taken anything from the car? Serafina looked at the adobe walls she had touched almost all her life. Had Elvia had a home? The only address Serafina could remember was Yukon Street. She couldn't be there now. What if she wasn't even in Rio Seco? She could be anywhere in California. Anywhere in America.

When I see her, I will tell her: "Don't hate me. Your backbone lay along my breastbone every night, that close, while we slept. My arm was over your belly, to protect you. To keep you."

She brought a cup of coffee for Dona Crescencia. "All those cities in California named for santos, full of people who never go to church," the old woman said, sewing beside the coffin.

Serafina nodded, carrying the dishtowel-wrapped tortillas and dented thermos into the road. Dona Crescencia's singing followed her on the path to the fields, her words like gauzy trails from a spider. Serafina breathed heavily, but she couldn't see her own air in the cold because the dawn's fog, the sierra's own exhalation, shimmered like thousands of pearly beads.

She paused to look back at her uncle's house, the tin roof disappearing in the fog, and suddenly she felt invisible, too, not watched by the saints of earth and sky, whom she might have ignored for too long. She squatted in the path, nearly panting with fear, holding the tortilla bundle like it was a baby. Her mother was gone. This was how she'd felt in the linen plant that first day, invisible in the steam, sure no one was watching over her.

She pressed the tortillas to her chest for warmth and walked again, up the steep path to the milpas, the corn fields of her uncle. His patch of green was high above, where the valley was very narrow and the flanks of the sierra nearly met. "Rigoberto and the others are collecting someone else's dirt under their fingernails," he always said. "In their mouths."

But Rigoberto had always been angry at the soil while he pulled the plow himself on the steep slope where oxen couldn't maneuver. After the rain stayed away for years, and then a flood washed the soil down around the scattered houses close to the river, he said to his uncle, "Your earth is almost gone." Serafina looked at the palm-frond shelter where her uncle sat sharpening his knife, near the shrine honoring the season's only cornstalk with three ears.

Back when she was eleven, carrying lunches in a basket on her back, her father had promised her to Rogelio Martinez, who was fourteen, and accepted the promise of Rogelio's sister for his oldest son, Luis. During their three years of school, they all played together, until the boys began to accompany their fathers to the milpas and the girls began to grind corn in the yard and wash clothes at the river. She remembered seeing Rogelio and his father plowing or resting under their own shelter, opposite theirs. She glanced at her uncle now, his thin puckered mouth chewing, his eyes far away on the hills. "n'un savi," he used to say to Rigoberto when they argued. "We are people of the rain clouds."

"n'un tu cuiti," Rigoberto used to mutter, so only Serafina would hear. He didn't want to be disrespectful. "People of nothing."

When Rogelio and his father left with a truckload of men, her father reaffirmed their promise. "Three years, four," the men said. "When we get the money to come back and build a house."

But a year later, after another dry season with no rain and ears of corn the size of thumbs, Serafina's father took them north to Culiacan, in Sinaloa state, to harvest tomatoes. They slept in a box of tin, in a row of twenty, where the sun was molten all day and the brown water came from one pipe. Her mother's belly was big again. One day in the field they tied tomato plants to metal stakes, their hands stinging-slick with green paste, and a plane flew low overhead. A burning mist dropped onto their hair, flew past their lips, and seeped into their chests.

A week later, Serafina's mother moaned in the tin corner, two other women blocking her from Serafina. In the night, men gathered down the line of doorways, kicking a soccer ball, but her father and brothers sat frozen on a truck bed. In the morning, two cloth-wrapped bundles lay tiny as loaves, faceless, covered blind.

"She sihi," her mother cried, and Serafina ran to her call. Daughter. But her mother saw nothing, murmuring, "She sihi, she sihi." and Serafina understood then. Two girls. Daughters.

They were buried in a row of graves near the edge of a tomato field, under a series of long stones chipped by a man from Puebla. A long row of gray doorways to the sky.

Rigoberto turned his book to the graves and trudged toward the field, where a crew boss screamed. "He doesn't care," Rigoberto said. "More from Oaxaca come every week. More ants. Ants carry so much. They're so strong. And then you step on them."

Their father only stared at him. Their mother didn't eat, didn't speak. Her black hair grew silver at the part between her braids, a stripe of emptiness, of hunger. The tomatoes were hot in Serafina's fingers, stacked in the crates. When the field was trampled and bare, her father took them north again, to Tijuana. Her mother rode silent in the bus, eyes blank until they reached a plywood shack painted yellow near the dump, where her mother's comadre Alba, long gone from San Cristobal, stared into her face. Alba's lips nearly touched her friend's, and then her mother's eyes shifted, glistened, and she began to sob into Alba's aproned chest.

Serafina knew then that only a woman who'd lost a child could receive those tears. She was not old enough yet to cry like that. Now, folding the dishcloth, she knew she was.

Her uncle finally said, "Nicuvui nuhundeyteta."

The deceased become the earth. Serafina whispered, "nu u cuhu," to herself. My two sisters. Her uncle had never seen them, had never left this plot of his earth.

"When are you leaving?" he said.

She looked at the green fields, bending with beaded mist. Her uncle had his corn and the liquor he distilled from the sugar cane he grew in the far corner. Ndixi kept him warm all winter, dissolved more and more of his words every year until now he spoke only of ritual. "Soil is the flesh," he used to tell her and her brothers. "Rocks are the bones, rivers are the veins, and water is the blood. If the santos are not satisfied, we will starve."

"You're worried about who will feed you," Serafina said finally, and he glared at her, hearing the bitterness in her voice. She had never spoken to him with heat and disrespect.

"Is that what you think?"

"Someone else will do that. Dona Crescencia will make your tortillas and wash your clothes."

He frowned. "What is it that you miss so much? The money?"

Serafina looked at the sun turning the mist gold. "Tonight we bury her, and I will cook for the raising of the cross in nine days. Then I will leave, whether Rigoberto comes back or not."

"Because you're young, you think you know everything."

"I'm old. I'm thirty-one."

"When people leave, they only go somewhere else and die. Your brother sends money but he doesn't come home. Mixtecos must die on their own land, or their souls wander forever." She turned for the path. "Don't forget the santos, even if you can't see them where you are going."

She bent over the metate in the yard, grinding five huge leaves of yerba santa into a bright green paste. Then she laid cilantro leaves under her stone mano, moving back and forth. To send her mother on her journey to the other world, she would make her favorite. The green mole sauce with pork. In the stone molcajete where her mother had guided her fingers so long ago, she ground cumin and green tomatillos, garlic, and several jalapenos, mixing in the yerba santa.

A new straw hat, like the ones men bought for the fiesta, floated up the path. She recognized the slumped shoulders and stubbled jaw. "Florencio," she said.

The lines around his mouth were deeper than when she had seen him last, three years ago at the fiesta, when he told her he worked with Rigoberto. He was her brother's closest friend. He turned to look at the cooking pot, and in the firelight she saw only the sides of his neck and his hard cheekbones. He looked so hungry.

"I'm sorry about your mother," he said. "I heard now, walking through town. We have only one letter from you. We've been moving from place to place for months. A bad, rainy season."

Serafina let out her breath. "So Rigoberto isn't coming."

Florencio shook his head. The marks around his mouth were curved, as though someone had cut him with a machete, and three grooves reached from each corner of his eyes. "There were floods all spring in Pajaro and Salinas. The lettuce and the strawberries. No work for weeks; no place to sleep but a barn. No money. Now the oranges are ready." Florencio paused. "I told Rigoberto I was coming back to see my cousin."

Serafina nodded. Florencio's young cousin had lived in Tijuana for a few years, but she had come home alone to have a baby. She stayed in a room at the small store, taking care of the empty soda bottles.

"She is the only family left," he said. Serafina knew his parents had died in a car accident years ago, with Gabriel, Alba's son. The one who had found her in the arroyo. Bandits had chased Gabriel's truck in Sinaloa, causing a crash, then robbed the bodies.

"Rigoberto stayed in the oranges because he borrowed money from the boss. For you." Florencio took out a roll of dollars wrapped tight as a cigarette. "Now he can't leave."

Serafina couldn't breathe. "He knew?"

Florencio shrugged. "He said your letter sounded like you would come soon. It's much harder to cross now, and coyotes charge more."

Serafina shivered, hearing a string of firecrackers from town. Her hands shook when she ladled a dish of mole verde and put it near him. He dipped the tortillas and ate slowly. His face was grave now. "He said you want to go back there. To where you were."

"Rio Seco," Serafina whispered. "I do."

"What happened to you?" he whispered, looking down at the ground.

She went to the adobe storeroom to hide her face. Stripping dried corn kernels into a bowl, she saw herself small, heard her mother telling her not to waste any part, not the husk or even a few kernels, or the n'un would look from the sky, see them lying on the ground, and assume her family had too much corn and didn't need such a large harvest next season.

She tried to remember what she'd been teaching Elvia. A. Apple. B. Balloon. C. Cat. She had chanted the letters to herself for years. But someone would have taught Elvia everything else. Another woman had taught her to tie her shoes, to button shirts, to comb her own hair.

Or Larry had combed her hair. He hated braids. Maybe he cut them off. "She ain't Mexican," he used to say. "Ellie ain't Mexican." He would have told Elvia a thousand times that her mother was someone to forget.

She was fifteen last week. Ocho Agosto. She will never recognize me. Serafina bit her lips until they stung. Then she slid sticks across the hearthstones to feed the cooking fire, careful to brush off splinters and dirt from the blackened rocks that held up the iron ring.

The n'un yuu nu'un-the santo of the hearthstone-was the fiercest of them all. Rocks are bones, her mother said, and the rocks burned daily in the hearth suffer the most pain. They are truly dead. Never step over them or place things on them, or you will become very ill. Serafina crossed herself, missing her mother's whisper across the steam.

She bent near her mother's small, dark face on the pale pillow. She had carefully braided the long gray hair, the woven tail wispy as a moth's antenna. She could see the small indentation left by her thumb, at the corner of the mouth, where she had held her mother's dry lips closed as gently as she could, until the body's stiffness settled in to keep them together.