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But we’d laughed together as it dribbled down like some science-fiction ooze.

We’d laughed a lot, and stretched our horizons, quite literally. I could still feel the heart-pounding thrill of the first time I’d piloted the Citabria. And there was the perfect three-point landing I’d accidentally made, surprising a seasoned flyer like Hy. Only a week ago we’d flown high into the White Mountains. I could still see the golden eagles, the wild mustangs, the bristlecone pines.…

Bristlecone pines are the oldest living things on earth—some over four thousand years. Hy had been forty-one.

I was crying now, lying on my back with tears washing across my temples and into my hair. Crying when I didn’t want to and couldn’t afford to because I had to do something about this terrible wrong that had been done both to Hy and to me. Crying, and I couldn’t stop. I … just … couldn’t … stop.…

In the course of the past three days, everything that counted for anything in my life had changed. My past was remote, no longer accessible. My present lay shattered. The future was unimaginable.

Nothing would ever be the same again.

Sixteen

Thursday, June 10

The mesa was the most desolate place I’d ever seen.

I climbed out of the Scout and followed my guide across rock-strewn ground where nothing but mesquite and spiny cholla cactus grew. The morning was overcast, the air saturated with salt-laden moisture—spitty weather, we used to call it. The wind blew sharp and icy off the flat gray sea.

Ahead of us where the ground dropped off to distant ranch-land stood the tumbledown adobe hut. My guide, Andrés, stopped several yards from it and waited for me to join him. “There is where it happened,” he said in a hushed voice.

I looked at the hut, felt nothing. It was simply a relic of a bygone time, crumbling now into the earth that had formed it. I started toward it, then glanced back at my companion. He stood, arms folded, staring resolutely at the Pacific. Superstitious, I thought, and kept going.

The hut had no roof, and two of the walls leaned in on each other at abnormal angles. I stepped through an opening where a door once had been onto a packed dirt floor. Loose bricks were scattered underfoot, and trash drifted into the corners; fire had blackened the pale clay.

I still didn’t feel anything. No more loss or grief, no sense of horror—none of the emotional shock waves that surge through me at the scene of a violent death, even though the death that had happened here should have touched me more deeply than any.

What’s wrong with you? I asked myself. You can’t have used up all your tears in one night.

For a few minutes I stood still, looking for something—anything—and willing my emotions to come alive. But there was nothing here, so I turned and went back outside. I felt a tug at the leg of my jeans and glanced down: a little tree, dead now. Poor thing hadn’t stood a chance in this inhospitable ground. A few crumpled papers were caught in its brittle branches; I brushed them away. Rest in peace.

One of the scraps caught my eye, and I picked it up and smoothed it out: U.S. Department of Justice, Immigration and Naturalization Service, Notice and Request for Deposition. The form the border patrol issues to illegal aliens when they pick them up, carelessly discarded here because it didn’t matter anyway. One trip over the border fence and through the wild canyons—infested with rattlers, scorpions, and bandits—had been aborted, but that made no difference. Soon the illegal—in this case, the form showed, one Maria Torres—would be back, and others would follow in a never-ending stream. I let the paper drift from my fingers.

Then I walked away from the hut where so much had come to an end and stood at the very edge of the headland. To my right lay the distant towers of San Diego and, closer in, the vast Tijuana riverbed. The river itself had long ago been diverted from its original course; it meandered westward, its waters made