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"Stop it!" I yelled My heart was thu that bird!"

The boy froze like a rabbit in headlights The other kids, down on their knees, stared too I’d arrested theht paper and candy that sparkled on the ground Theover their heads on a wire Its fractured body hung in clay shards the size of plate, held together by a crepe-paper skin

When I was ten I’d des and a long glossy tail of real feathers At a birthday party At some time or other every child in Grace had done the same

After an i for their prize Two older girls helped the smallest kids scoop candy into piles in their laps A cluster of boys elbowed and slapped each other behind the girls’ backs

I felt disoriented and disgraced, a trespasser on faroup of kids back toward the place in the center of the orchard where I must have left my suitcases I wondered in what dim part of Grace I’d left my childhood

Chapter 3

HOMERO

3 The Flood

The leaves shine like knife blades in the beaht The rain has slowed, but the arroyo is still a fierce river of mud and uprooted trees that won’t crest until dawn He is wet and chilled to his spine The girls are lost The sound of the flood ather prickly-pear fruits for jelly They knew a stor and they went anyhile he was in his workroom He follows the narrow ani the bank, shining his light along the edge of the rising water Acacias lean into the river with their branches waving wildly in the current, like nore his cautions because they are willful children who believe nothing can harm them Hallie is bad but Cosima is worse, pretty and stubborn as a wild horse but without an animal’s instincts for self-preservation-and she’s the older She should have soh the bank of oleanders near the house and turns back toward the riverbed to search the arroyo to the south He has no idea which way they would have gone; they roa in a desert is poisonous or thorned Good Lord, he has already lost a wife, and did not think his heart would live beyond her Wished it wouldn’t He slashes at the oleanders with the ht He’d meant to cut these dohen Cosi on cardiac arrest in a child He’d seen a case years ago, or was it later, after the girls left hoirl?

Doc Hoe pill bottles on the sill There is light at theIt’s a Sunday irl His own daughters are grown and living so after the hard His circulatory system believes they are still lost

He turns his pillow and rests his head on it carefully because his brain gets jostled and things move around inside his head like olives in a jar of brine Think about the flood He is going south on the near side of the arroyo He stops to look back upstreaht finds them, by pure luck, on the opposite bank Cosi blades of scissors They are screa but he only sees theirbirds Absolute expectation, Papa will save us The road is washed out, and he has to think how else he will get to them He realizes, stunned, that they have been huddled there for half a day The road has been washed out that long

How does he reach them? A boat? No, that wouldn’t have been possible He sits up again He has no clear i them, noover the telephone And then he understands painfully that he wasn’t able to go to them There is no memory because he wasn’t there He had to call Uda Dell on the other side of the arroyo Her husband was alive then, and went down the bank on his mule to find theirls wanted to save

"There were seven," she’d wailed over the telephone "I could carry four but Hallie could only get one in each hand and we didn’t want to leave the other one He would have gotten drowned" Cosi for half a day in the s for the mother coyote to come back and save her children, they had to leave theround They’re both crying as if they are drowning the pups