Lopez obeyed and the spots left his vision. He and Joe took turns trying to feed the baby and changing her diapers. Joe insisted the baby wasn’t going back to her heaven. When Lopez asked how he knew, the old Polinesio only shrugged. Lopez fell asleep briefly but woke in a sweat. Stepping onto the porch, he discovered morning fog so thick he couldn’t see the barn.
It made him think of his old life in Bodega Bay. For a year he had had a lover, a younger man named Alejandro who spoke mostly Spanish but sometimes murmured in Chinese in his sleep. Lopez remembered his cottage amid eucalyptus. He remembered the day he had decided to leave, Alejandro’s angry words, the relief to be going.
In the growing morning light, Lopez felt darkness being draped around him. The old feeling he had fought before. He was going to die, perhaps not in that hour or even in that year, but he was going to die far too soon. No one could go with him. All his memories of eucalyptus groves and ruined cities and old lovers would vanish. He grabbed the porch railings and tried to breathe more slowly.
The cabin door creaked. He turned to see Lani, nightgowned and barefoot. He stood up straight and tried to slow his heart. She paused, as if she might go back inside. But when he gestured for her to come closer, she eased the door shut and went to the railing.
“I’m sorry if we made it hard to sleep,” he said.
“I would have helped with the baby, but Daddy told me not to.”
Lopez looked out into the fog.
She said, “He said it’d be hard on you, raising a girl.”
“He did it for you.”
“I often wish he had been reincarnated—” she said, then seemed to interrupt herself. “Not for my sake. I just never realized what he went through by picking me up.”
“He’s glad he did so.”
“This is hard on you.”
He tried to smile. “It’s embarrassing.”
She laid her hand on his but didn’t say anything.
The warmth of her palm sent goose bumps running up his arm. He wanted to say something but didn’t know what. The moment stretched on, and he felt as if he were not really himself, as if it were someone else’s hand she was touching.
At last he said, “You should go to the baby.”
She turned to him. Her eyes, searching his, seemed to be asking a question.
He nodded.
She left.
Dr. Lo diagnosed the baby with a viral infection. Nothing to worry about. And, indeed, the baby improved over the next few days. But still Lopez suffered bouts of a racing pulse, ragged breathing, a sensation of darkness closing in.
Then, on a cold evening, Lani hung a curtain at one end of the cabin to separate Lopez’s bed from the rest. She lay beside him, smiled in the half light, slipped out of her blouse. She joined him the next night and all the nights after.
The next Sunday, Luis came back from town with a black eye. He had picked a fight with an older boy. When Lani asked if she could help, Luis yelled at her. In the following days, Lopez left the baby with Lani and took Luis to work in the fields. Joe was happy to join. Luis was sullen and didn’t talk much, but he stopped picking fights and was polite to Lani.
Time passed. The morning fog burned off earlier and earlier until one night it failed to roll in at all. There followed crisp end-of-winter days that filled the forests with slanting light. Lani made peace with Luis when she bribed him with a bit of honeycomb. For Lopez, life regained a bearable rhythm. Each day’s work exhausted his worry, set him to anticipating the night with Lani. In the mornings, he watched Lani sit with the baby in sunlight, their two expressions of contentment.
The cadence of days broke when large flat-bottomed clouds drifted in from the south. For a week, the outfit worked under cathedrals of air, billowing higher. Then came long, rolling sheets of rain.
Confined indoors, the outfit became relaxed, talkative. At first they filled the hours by mending clothes, filling a chink in the roof, that sort of thing. But when the rain persisted, they lapsed into long conversations or card games played with an ancient, shabby deck.
Lopez, Luis, and Collin were in a competitive game when a voice sounded from outside. Robert led the men onto the porch to discover a lone figure on horseback. A rifle, wrapped in leather, was tucked into the saddle. The rain was so loud that Robert had to yell to be heard. When the newcomer answered, Lopez realized she was a woman. Her hair was cut short. She wore a man’s riding coat.
When Robert invited her in, she dismounted and stepped onto the porch. Her black hair had whitened around her temples. She called herself Melisa and came from a ranching outfit in the Central Valley. Her English was fluent but her cadence suggested she’d be more comfortable speaking Spanish.