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the words, various women in tones of concern and affection, but none of it made any sense. What would they do with him? The women around him grieved loudly, they wailed and sang dirges in an old language he couldn’t understand. No one explained a thing. No one had to. His favorite place in the village was an empty field at the edge of the jungle, a sometime park, sometime trash dump full of flowering wild plants and lizards with golden eyes, a field alive with the cawing of invisible birds—they can bury me there, Victor thought, they can bury me now because it’s all the same to me. He could feel his fingers tingling. He had the strangest sensation of sinking, a curtain falling, his life going black. The women coddled him, fed him, sang, and prepared his things.
    â€œCan I see her?” he asked.
    They took him to the river’s edge. It was swollen with the previous week’s rain, and the water spun and quaked like a living thing. Victor could hear the adults whispering about him: Adela’s boy is here, Adela’s boy. He tried to ignore it. The village was there, and the men who wouldn’t acknowledge Victor—the men who should have saved her—and his classmates, too, all eyes trained on a rock halfway between the shores, jutting above the water line, wrapped fiercely in white foam. His mother’s body cut the current too, slumped, clutching the stone as if it were a life raft when, more likely, it had killed her. The men were trying to string up a safety line from the other bank. They seemed helpless. Above, the skies were clear and deep blue, betraying no trace of the last week’s storms. Her body, Victor realized, wouldn’t stay there forever: the men might reach her before the current carried her away, but, just as likely, they would not. She’d been fishing, one of the women said. She lost her footing in the eddies where blind silver fish gather to eat and be eaten, the village’s staple food. She must have been distracted, because these things never happen. Then the river had carried her here.
    Now the women were telling him things that made his head hurt. She’s with your father now, they said, and Victor felt sick to his stomach imagining that dead and empty space. Victor had never known him. His mother told stories, but they were few and vague: your father was from the city; he was an educated man. Not much more, not even a name. But they were together now, the women said, and Victor blinkedand wondered what that could mean. The river churned, and his dead mother clung to a rock, the moiling currents poised to take her away, downstream, toward further indignities. A boy approached him and then another, until Victor was surrounded by his friends. Together they waited for the disaster to end, and nothing was said. It was in their faces, in the shifting weight of their bodies: the tension, the despair, the relief that it was not their mother, dead, astride a rock in the river. One of the boys touched him, took him by the shoulder or squeezed his arm. Only a few moments more, Victor thought, and the river would undress her, strip her bare, exposing her skin, the muscles of her back. The men were rushing, but not fast enough. Elijah Manau was among them, Victor’s teacher, his mother’s lover. Victor had watched them walking through the village together, nearly every night since his best friend Nico left, never touching hands until they stepped into the forest. Manau worked alongside the men now, more frantic than the rest, more flushed and helpless. They were the two men of her life. Victor tried to catch Manau’s eye, but couldn’t.
    She was dead anyway, he thought, why rush? For a moment, he hated these men, who moved as one to save her body but who had not saved her. They couldn’t feel what he felt. Nico had left 1797 a few months before. Now his mother was gone, too, and the town might as well implode and sink into the earth. She clung