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teeth were chattering. She put on layers of clothes and made tea. She cradled the cup in her hands and took it to bed.
    Warm again, she told herself that she was only now reacting to what had happened to her. To be sick in a foreign city, not just sick, but stripped, emptied, swollen, marked? She had been foolish not to see how hard it would be to convalesce. But when had she ever looked ahead at anything? When she tried to do that, it was like her dream, she was on that train, and everything outside was speeding by. She could never see anything until it was past. If she tried to look, the past became sharp. She saw the sun like a white ball of heat over the sandhills. Shabby trailers circled like a wagon train. Her brother with rabbits he’d shot, one in each hand, dripping blood.
    She got back up and turned on all the lights and sat at the table to write letters. The cold goaded her. First she wrote her sister-in-law in Austin.
    It was great to hear from you and get the picture of the new baby. I suppose you get teased now about having the perfect family, a boy and a girl, but I’m glad about the girl because maybe she’ll be someone you can feel really close to. And Kermit finished school! Now he’s a pharmacist! I hope that means you can stay home with the baby. Is your mother there? Has my mother come? She hasn’t written me in a long time. I don’t worry. I know you’d tell me if anything was wrong. I’m sorry I took so long to answer.
    She hated what she had written. She wondered if Sherry ever thought of that day they raced around Lubbock, looking for her father’s girlfriend. Had Sherry felt like Abilene did about it, like they’d been friends that day? They had been on the edge of discovering something nobody else knew.
    She sat for a long time, and smoked a little of the grass Isabel had brought, and tried to think of what to write to Sage. The corners of the room were moving toward her, into the light; she realized it was almost dawn.
    I told you I would write you when I had thought about what you said at the tienta. I’ve thought about it every day since. But I was sick and I’ve been in Mexico almost a month. Can you understand how hard it is to think of there when I am here? To think of you at all? I mean, in any real way. I know what you say. You did say that. That we both love the Huasteca. You’re right about that, but why is it we never have talked about it? Do we love the same things? Is it the beauty of the land, where it is beautiful, or the dry hard spaces where it isn’t? Is it the isolation? Or the cat in the brush? Is it that neither of us could get along someplace else? A long time after Tonio came back from Europe that spring, I realized that you and I had never gone the quarter mile from your house to the beautiful grotto where the river is born. I went there with tourists from the hotel, but never with you. Where did you take me? To a cave filled with vampire bats!
    Do we have enough to give one another? I don’t know if there’s very much inside me. Maybe Tonio suits me because he wants so little from me. And which of us would tell him? What would he say? What would he do? He could hurt you!
    Maybe Tonio will marry the diplomat’s daughter and I will come to you because I have no other place to go except the real world. Would you settle for that? Would it be enough? For how long?
    I don’t know what to do. I feel like I’m outside a cave in the heart of the city. A city built on an ancient lake-bed. Who knows? Maybe the cave will fall in around me. Maybe the city will fall in. All the rich people and the bureaucrats, right along with the desperate peasants from the country, and me.
    Something might happen to all of us, and it wouldn’t matter who I loved.
    She read the letter carefully. The next day she mailed it to Sage, in care of the Arcadia Hotel.
    A few days later she received a letter from Claude, the Arcadia