Soroche

Selling the house was remarkably easy. Zaga didn’t tell her stepchildren what she was doing, and she didn’t consult Joel’s lawyer or his accountant. A few months after Joel’s funeral, she sold the house for much less than her real-estate agent advised. Once she had a closing date she sold most of the furniture as well. She’d chosen every piece of it herself, except for the family heirlooms; she’d decorated each of the rooms and designed the kitchen in which she’d cooked the meals that had stunned Joel’s friends but never truly made them like her. Joel had built the house for her, and she knew he’d assumed she would stay there. But in his absence the silent rooms seemed intolerable.

At night her dreams wound through blizzards and mountains she couldn’t recognize. During the day she cleared out the house alone. Her stepchildren were nearby—Alicia lived in Meadowbrook and Rob in downtown Philadelphia—but they had hardly spoken to her since their father’s death and she knew they wouldn’t have offered to help even if they’d known about the sale. Vans came for the large pieces and men from the art museum crated the paintings Joel had bequeathed to them; room by room Zaga cleaned and wrapped and boxed. On the Wednesday evening before her forty-fourth birthday, she tackled Joel’s walk-in closet. In the back, behind the overcoats, she found a carton of souvenirs from their trip to Chile in 1971.

A vicuna shawl, soft and light, bought in Santiago; two knitted ski caps Rob and Alicia had worn; a brochure showing the yellow hotel dwarfed by the mountains behind it. There were snapshots, which she vaguely remembered taking, of Joel and the children posed on the ski slopes in gaily colored outfits. And there was one picture of herself, which she’d never seen before, looking very young and miserable in the hotel lounge.

“For your baby,” Dr. Sepulveda had said, on the snowy day when he’d captured her. A lifetime ago, and yet she remembered this perfectly clearly. “Someday you can show this to your child and tell him—or her, maybe you will have a little daughter?—how he was with you even here.”

The envelope folded around the picture was addressed to Zaga in a spiky, European hand that could only have been Dr. Sepulveda’s. She had never seen it; Joel must have intercepted it and then hidden the photo to spare her. If a letter had come with the photo it was lost.

On her first day in the Andes, the liquid and brilliant sky had made Zaga wildly euphoric. The peaks surrounding the Hotel Portillo were clean and white. The frozen lake gleamed like an eye below her room, and the top of Mt. Aconcagua rose in the distance like a moon. The slopes were dotted with skiers dressed in pink and green and blue, and although she couldn’t ski and was afraid of heights and had never been athletic, the thin air made her feel at first that she could do anything.

The headache, the stiff neck, the burning cheeks and icy fingers came on the second day. When she tried to rise from her bed she threw up, and by mid-morning, when the children came in, she was as sick as she’d ever been.

They stood in the doorway, Rob and Alicia: Joel’s children, not hers, red-cheeked and insubordinate and already dressed in their ski clothes. Joel had told them that they were not to go out alone until he’d had time to show them around. He was forty-two and panted each time he moved quickly. His children breathed easily and looked at Zaga with interest but no sympathy.

“Zaga’s sick,” Joel said, and Alicia said, “No kidding,” and moved closer to the bed. Although she was only fourteen, she was three inches taller than Zaga and weighed thirty pounds more. There were long streaks bleached into her hair, from the hours she’d spent beside the pool, and her figure was so flamboyant that she made Zaga feel like a twig.

“You can’t come skiing?” Rob asked Joel. He was twelve, Alicia’s height already, and so strong that Joel had given up wrestling with him.

“Your stepmother’s sick,” Joel repeated. “No one’s going anywhere until we get her fixed up.”

Rob and Alicia exchanged a look. “We’ll just go downstairs then,” Alicia said. “Have some breakfast. Okay?”

Zaga leaned over and threw up again, diverting Joel’s attention. The children moved out of the doorway but not, Zaga learned later, out of earshot. And so when Joel, holding Zaga’s head over the wastebasket, said “Do you think it’s morning sickness?” Alicia apparently heard every syllable.

All day Zaga lay in bed, dizzy and nauseated and only—vaguely aware of Joel’s comings and goings and of the scene Rob and Alicia made when Joel found them. They’d stormed off to the slopes without Joel and returned unrepentant, hours later. In the lounge, where Joel finally caught up with them, they had said the idea of a baby disgusted them.

“It’s so gross,” Alicia had said. Rob, ever practical, had apparently said only, “Where’s it going to sleep?”

Joel imitated Alicia’s disgusted squeal and Rob’s nervous rumble as he described the scene to Zaga. “They’ll come around,” he said. “It’s natural for them to feel this way—now they have proof that we sleep together.”

Zaga had trouble smiling back at him, and by the time the hotel doctor arrived she was very weak.

“Dr. Sepulveda,” he said. His face was lean and tanned and his hair fell back in a smooth black wave. He leaned over and rested his hand on her forehead. “You are feeling poorly?”

His short white jacket buttoned to one side and was starched and crisp. “Can you tell me your symptoms?” Lightly accented English, perfectly correct. Because Zaga couldn’t speak, Joel told the doctor about the dizziness, the vomiting, the headache that spiked down the back of Zaga’s neck and pierced her eyes.

“Yes?” Dr. Sepulveda said. He took her pulse and her temperature, looked in her throat and listened to her chest. Joel told him that Zaga was three months pregnant, and Dr. Sepulveda nodded and ran his fingers gently over her belly.

“You have soroche,” he told her. Then he looked up at Joel and repeated the word. “Soroche. Altitude sickness. That’s all.”

“That’s it?” Joel said. “No virus? There’s nothing wrong with the baby?”

“The baby has nothing to do with this. She has all the classic symptoms.”

He gave her two injections and then he left. An hour later she stopped throwing up; he returned the next morning and gave her two more shots and by nightfall she was almost well. The next day she dressed herself, after Joel and Alicia and Rob had gone out for the day. Then she began waiting for her time in Portillo to end.

Zaga knew she hadn’t gotten what the house was worth, but at the closing, even the amount left after the broker’s commission still took her breath away. She moved into a furnished apartment while she decided what to do. For nineteen years Joel had fussed about his health, but he’d never really been sick and she’d made no plans for a life without him.

He meant to retire young, he’d told her, during a quiet moment stolen from his sixtieth birthday party. They could travel again. Not the sort of family vacations they’d had for years, to Florida, Mexico, Maine—but a real trip, just the two of them. He didn’t say, “We could go back to Portillo,” but she knew it was on his mind. She’d thought about that: Portillo again, the way it was meant to be. Six days later a weak spot on the wall of his aorta had opened like a window.

Afterwards, when she’d woken each morning and found the undisturbed blankets beside her, his absence had seemed impossible. At dusk she’d strained her ears for the sound of his car pulling into the crescent driveway, and sometimes she’d called out his name in the empty rooms. But her first move eased her grief unexpectedly, and her second relieved her even more. Downtown, near the art museum, she found a lovely old building that had just been converted to condominiums. She bought a two-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor, overlooking the Schuylkill River: high ceilings, beautiful moldings, smooth oak floors. It cost so much less than the Merion house that she felt virtuous and thrifty.

Morning coffee in the sunny kitchen; a quiet browse through the papers and then a shower and some shopping or a walk. No meals to make, no garden to weed or guest room to rearrange. No guests. For nineteen years she had entertained Joel’s friends and business associates; she had been famous for her parties and Joel had been proud of her success. Their closest moments had been spent on the sofa, going over menus and guest lists or rehashing the high points of a party just past, and she had never told him she knew that his friends still compared her unfavorably with his first wife.

Now she spent days alone in her new place and felt no desire to call anyone. She walked to Rittenhouse Square. She haunted the antique shops on Spruce and Lombard and then spent hours moving knicknacks here and pillows there. Silence, idleness, solitude. Where was Joel in all of this? Sometimes she walked the few blocks to the art museum and gazed at the statues or strolled through the hall in which the collection of Joel’s grandfather’s paintings hung.

Joel had taken her here on their fourth or fifth date, but he hadn’t said a word about his family. He had let her admire the paintings and read the polished plaque in the front of the room. “Any relation?” she remembered asking, when she saw the identical last names—thinking of course not, or at most someone distant; laughing, joking. “My grandfather,” he said, and only then had she realized how surely she was in over her head. She thought how her grandmothers might have done laundry for his family, and she dreaded what Joel might think of her father, who shed his clothes after work in the basement and then showered in a grimy stall, washing off layers of dust and mortar before entering the scrubbed and parsimonious upper floors.

But Joel had already told her he loved her by then. She was gentle, he said. And so flexible—she was as happy lying around in his old pajamas, eating muffins and reading the papers, as she was when he took her out to fancy nightclubs. She sang while she cooked. The rich, complicated meals she fixed, based on her grandmothers’ recipes, made his eyes moist with pleasure.

In a bar off Rittenhouse Square, he courted her with recollections of his first visit to Portillo. He told her how, during the summer after he finished college, he’d found a spot on a freighter headed for Chile. He’d made his way to Santiago; then up the Andes and to the hotel, where he’d joined some old acquaintances. Just a handful of skiers, he said, back in those good old days. She could recall doing a quick calculation in her head as he spoke, and realizing that she’d been five at the time.

Endless white snowfields, he’d said, his hands moving in the smoky air. Daring stunts; condors soaring over the rocks. And although he was middle-aged and filled with the hectic despair of the newly divorced, his stories made him seem young. He was young, he said. He had married right after his trip to Portillo and had two children quickly. His wife had dumped him so she could discover herself.

“She wants to paint,” he’d said bitterly, over a meal that Zaga made him: roast veal with fennel and garlic? Pork braised with prunes? “Watercolors,” he’d said. “So she’s got the house in Meadowbrook, which I’m still paying the mortgage on, and the kids are with her, and I’m stuck here.”

‘Here’ was an airy two-bedroom apartment with an enormous kitchen, nicer than anything Zaga could afford. She was nothing like his first wife, Joel said, and she took this as a compliment. She was drawn by his stability, his solidity, the radiant success with which he managed his outward life. She was touched by his inability to cook or clean and by his obvious need for her. He reached across his sofa after their first visit with her family, and he lifted a strand of her hair and said, “Did you get this from some beautiful Lithuanian grandmother?”

She took this to mean that he accepted her background, and her. He bought her new clothes and then, in the galleries where he purchased paintings, introduced her as if he were proud. Two years later, when the huge house in Merion was almost done, she was thrilled when he proposed a delayed honeymoon in Portillo. Joel had been shaped by the Andes, she thought; perhaps the mountain air could transform her into someone from his world.

Then Rob and Alicia, unexpectedly abandoned by Joel’s ex-wife, sailed into their lives like a three-masted ship from a foreign country. Their arrival changed the focus of the trip but made it seem even more important. By the time Zaga discovered she was pregnant, the plans were too far along to change without disappointing everyone.

Those early days came back to her one afternoon, over a lunch of salmon and asparagus salad in the museum café. She realized that she had not seen any of Joel’s paintings anywhere. She went back to the hall where his grandfather’s collection hung, thinking Joel’s bequests might have been mingled in. Then she walked more carefully from room to to room. Nothing. The next day she called the museum and made an appointment to meet the woman in charge of new acquisitions. The woman had an office so softly blue and gray that Zaga felt as if she’d been set inside a cloud.

There were some small financial difficulties, the woman murmured. She crossed her long, narrow legs and regarded her excellent shoes. Of course the museum was enormously grateful for the bequest. But so few people, outside the art world, understood the expenses involved with such a gift: cataloging, cleaning, reframing, lighting—her voice drifted off and so did her gaze, leaving Zaga to fill the empty space.

“You have an endowment, surely?” Zaga said. Joel had taught her a good deal and his friends had taught her more.

“Of course,” the woman said. Her voice hovered between the purr she would have used with Joel and the bite she would have used on Zaga, had Zaga not been married to Joel. “But these are difficult times, and our budget is constantly being trimmed…”

“Would a donation be useful?” Zaga asked. She felt a thrill as she said that. Joel had always made the big donations; of course he had, the money was his. But now Joel was gone and the money was hers.

When the woman smiled her teeth were perfectly white and straight. “Coffee?” she said. Zaga nodded and the woman summoned her assistant.

Three days before they were due to leave the Andes, a blizzard cut them off from the outside world. No traffic arrived or departed and there was nothing to do but wait. Joel and the children still skied, masked in goggles and wrapped in extra clothes, delighted at their extended vacation. Zaga sat, more and more frantic, at a table by the window in the lounge of the Hotel Portillo. Dr. Sepulveda, also trapped by the blizzard and unable to return to his home in Santiago, sometimes joined her. The first time he appeared at her table, he talked about the weather for a while and then fell silent and studied her face.

“You must be Slavic,” he said. “With those cheekbones and that name.” He lit a cigarette and turned from her face to the mountain. “Let me guess,” he said. “Slovenian royalty. Ukrainian landowners. White Russian aristocrats fleeing the Bolsheviks.”

“Lithuanian potato-and-cabbage peasants,” she admitted. Was he teasing her? She had seen faces like his in the paintings of Spanish nobility that hung in the museum at home. “My parents were born in Philadelphia, but only just. I have a brother who’s a bricklayer, like my father; another who’s a cop. The big success is Timothy—he’s an optometrist. My sister works part-time in a bakery, and I was working as a secretary in an art gallery when I met Joel.”

“Really,” the doctor said. “Among the modern languages, Lithuanian is the one most closely related to Sanskrit.”

“I’ll have to take your word for that,” she said. “I hardly remember any of it.”

“But your grandparents…?”

“They never learned English well.”

Outside, beyond the windows, the snow fell and fell and fell. The afternoon had only just started and there were hours to kill before Joel and the children returned from the slopes. There was nothing to do but talk, and so when Dr. Sepulveda said, “And what about your husband?” she answered him more fully than she might otherwise have done.

“Joel’s grandfather was a chemist,” she said. “He synthesized a drug used to treat ulcers, and then he started a pharmaceutical company to manufacture it. The family still owns most of the stock.” When she mentioned the name of the company Dr. Sepulveda raised an eyebrow in recognition.

“Your husband runs it?”

“One of his cousins. But Joel’s on the board of directors, of course, and he works there—all the cousins do. Joel’s the vice-president for community relations.”

“What does that mean?”

“He’s the do-gooder,” Zaga said. She would have given anything for a bottle of wine, green and slim on the table between them, but her doctor at home had forbidden alcohol. “He oversees all the nonbusiness stuff,” she said. “The sports programs they sponsor, and the scholarships and grants and the corporate art program. Joel buys contemporary art for the offices, and he collects some privately.”

“Very enlightened,” the doctor murmured. “He must have a discriminating eye.”

“And you?” Zaga said. “Are you married?”

He ordered more coffee for himself and, without consulting her, removed her cup and replaced it with a glass of fresh juice. “You shouldn’t be having so much caffeine,” he said. “Not in your condition.” Then he turned to the window, where the bright figures of the skiers flashed against the snow. “Charles Darwin came by here,” he said—the first time he mentioned that name, the first hint she had of the stories that were to come. “A century and a half ago, when these mountains were wilderness. He walked through the pass in the Cordillera near here, past Aconcagua and into Mendoza. Did you know that? If it wasn’t snowing so hard, you could see the tip of Aconcagua from your chair.”

Aconcagua; that chain of gentle, open-mouthed vowels could not be more different than what she remembered of her grandparents’ speech. She rolled the word around in her mouth, and only when Dr. Sepulveda said, “Zaga?” did she hear the link to her own name.

The woman at the museum was very persuasive and Zaga, after an argument with her broker and a long phone call from her lawyer, wrote a substantial check. It was thrilling, inking that row of figures onto the smooth green paper. And she felt sure that Joel would have been pleased—he would have left the museum the funds to maintain the paintings had he not been overscrupulous about providing for her. But she had everything she needed. When her sister Marianna came to see the condominium, Zaga blithely told her about her gift.

“How much money?” Marianna said. “You gave that much to strangers?”

Zaga explained the situation: how there was money left from the sale of the house, how the museum needed it. “I’m fine,” she told her sister. “Joel left me in good shape.”

But Marianna wasn’t worried about Zaga’s financial stability. “You might have thought of us,” she said, aggrieved and pinkfaced, and then all the resentment she’d felt since Zaga’s marriage came pouring out. Zaga, she said, had not been sufficiently generous.

“Look at your clothes,” she said. Zaga could not see much difference between her blouse and jacket and Marianna’s pretty sweater. “Look at your cars.”

“I only kept one,” Zaga protested. “Remember when I gave Dad the Oldsmobile?”

“Oh, please,” Marianna said. “Big deal.” And when Zaga reminded her that she and Joel had paid the hospital bills for her father’s final illness, and also the live-in housekeeper who had made possible her mother’s last days at home, Marianna only made a face. “What did that cost you?” she said. “What did you have to give up? Nothing.”

“I had to ask Joel every time—you think that was easy?”

Marianna flicked her hand in front of her face, as if she were waving away a gnat. “Joel was a weenie,” she said impatiently. “If you’ll pardon me for saying so. We all knew he’d do whatever you asked. But things are different now. My kids are headed for college in just a few years, and Teddy and I don’t have any idea where we’re going to scrape the tuition from—how do you think it makes us feel, watching you give that kind of money to a museum?”

“I didn’t know you felt like that,” Zaga said, unwilling to admit how impulsive her gift had been. “The museum was very important to Joel.”

“What’s important is family,” Marianna said. “If you ever came home, you might have some idea what was going on.”

“I visited as much as I could,” Zaga said. But she knew that this was not precisely true. Within a few years of her marriage to Joel, the row houses and narrow streets of her family’s neighborhood in northeast Philadelphia had come to seem unpleasant. Christmas days they had spent with Joel’s family, but on Christmas Eves they went to her parents’ house, where all her relatives gathered. Each year she’d been more uncomfortable turning off Roosevelt Boulevard and heading into the blocks where she’d grown up. Reindeer and sleds on the shabby roofs, shrubs wound with colored bulbs and children everywhere. The contrast with Merion, where her neighbors hung small wreaths on their front doors and framed trees between half-drawn curtains in front of picture windows, had made her queasy. Joel had never mentioned the garish decorations or been less than courteous to her family, but she had always imagined that he suppressed his distaste only out of kindness. Rob and Alicia had sometimes giggled out loud.

Abashed, Zaga promised her sister that the next time she felt like giving money away she would keep her family in mind.

Zaga would not have said she knew Dr. Sepulveda well: during their afternoons in the hotel lounge she learned only the barest facts of his life. He was a widower, he had three grown sons. He had an apartment in Santiago and, during the ski season, a suite of rooms at the Hotel Portillo, which he received in exchange for his services as hotel doctor. He didn’t ski but he loved the mountains, and he said he enjoyed the hotel’s cosmopolitan clientele.

He didn’t ask Zaga any more questions about her life and he seldom talked about himself, but he was a pleasant companion, full of interesting tales. In 1835, he told her, his great-great-grandfather had shown Darwin around what existed of Santiago and had helped with arrangements for Darwin’s journey over the Portillo pass. “They were friends,” he said. “These stories have come down through my family. I still have first editions of the journals Darwin published.” The last Darwin story he told her, on the day before the blizzard ended, was the most unusual.

“I’ve never been able to get this story out of my mind,” he said. As he spoke he took a small black camera from his leather bag. On the Beagle, he said, the ship that had carried Darwin and his companions around South America, “—on that ship were three Fuegians, natives of Tierra del Fuego who’d been away from their home for years.”

FitzRoy, the Beagle’s commander, had made an earlier visit to Tierra del Fuego, during which some Fuegians had stolen a whaleboat from him. In retaliation, FitzRoy had taken two men and a young girl hostage. Later he added a little boy, whom he bought from his family for the price of a pearl button. The Fuegians seemed happy aboard the ship, and FitzRoy took the four of them back to England with him.

Dr. Sepulveda cradled the camera in his left hand as he explained how one of the men had died of smallpox while the other, whom FitzRoy had named York Minster, survived. The girl, named Fuegia Basket, thrived, and so did the boy, called Jemmy Button after his purchase price. “They learned a good deal of English,” the doctor said. “They adopted English dress and were quite the wonder of London for a while. The queen met them and gave Fuegia Basket a ring.”

But the Fuegians weren’t happy, the doctor said, and FitzRoy was no longer sure that he’d done the right thing in taking them from their native land. And so when he set off on his second voyage—the one on which Darwin was present—he carried the Fuegians with him, along with a missionary and a huge store of goods donated by a missionary society. He had hopes that Jemmy and Fuegia and York might teach their tribes to welcome Englishmen. Then a shipwrecked sailor or a passing stranger might not have to fear for his life.

“Darwin was quite a young man then,” the doctor said. “Your age, maybe a little younger—twenty-three, twenty-four. He found the Fuegians very interesting and was particularly fond of Jemmy Button, whom he describes as sweet-tempered and amusing. He expected a great reunion when they finally came on Jemmy’s tribe, but the tribe was hostile and unwelcoming. Jemmy, who had forgotten how to speak his own language, had changed so much that his family hardly recognized him.

“FitzRoy’s crew unloaded the gifts of the missionary society and showed the members of Jemmy’s tribe how to use a shovel and a hoe,” Dr. Sepulveda said. “Then they packed up and went off to do some botanizing. They left Jemmy behind, along with the missionary and York and Fuegia. A few weeks later they returned to find the gifts demolished and scattered among the tribe. York and Fuegia were all right, but Jemmy was miserable and the missionary, who was terrified, gave up his plans and sailed off with the Beagle when it left again.”

The story made Zaga restless, as did the camera glinting darkly in Dr. Sepulveda’s hand, but he seemed compelled to go on talking. In his journal, the doctor said, Darwin recorded his suspicions that Jemmy would have been glad to rejoin the ship along with the missionary. He’d been civilized, he noted; perhaps he would have liked to retain his new habits.

A year later, when the Beagle returned to the area, a canoe headed out to greet the ship. A long-haired man wearing nothing but a scrap of sealskin was washing the paint from his face while a woman paddled. No one recognized the man until he hailed FitzRoy and Darwin, and then they saw that this ragged stranger was the Jemmy they’d left, plump and clean and clothed, all those months ago.

He still remembered the English he’d learned and he told FitzRoy and Darwin that he was very happy now. He had plenty to eat, he had found a wife, he liked his family. And although York and Fuegia had run away with the few belongings his tribe hadn’t already taken, he claimed to be content.

Jemmy gave FitzRoy an otter skin and Darwin a pair of spearheads. Then he returned to his canoe and paddled away. When he reached the shore he lit a bonfire. The last sign Darwin saw of him was the long and wistful column of smoke outlined against the horizon.

Dr. Sepulveda paused and sipped his coffee. In the Andes, he explained, Darwin had mused on the story of Jemmy Button, and so had he. Before Zaga could smile, he held the camera in front of his face and clicked the shutter: “For your baby,” he said. He gestured toward her waist and spoke a few words in Spanish; perhaps he addressed her child. Then he said, “Think of that. Jemmy Button: captured, exiled, re-educated; then returned, abused by his family, finally re-accepted. Was he happy? Or was he saying that as a way to spite his captors? Darwin never knew.”

Zaga imagined how she might look through his lens, surrounded by wealthy skiers from France and Spain, California and Brazil. Small, slight, insignificant. Ill-bred and poorly educated. “Are you happy?” she asked the doctor. He replied, “Are you?”

Despite her promise to Marianna, Zaga continued to give money away. It was a fever that came over her. It was a burning in her fingertips, which could only be relieved by writing checks. She gave money to the Girl Scouts, the Boy Scouts, the Shriners, Kiwanis. Her money seemed like a dead skin, and the more she shed the better she felt. “Visit lawyer,” she wrote on her list of things to do. “Set up college funds for the kids.” But meanwhile she gave to political candidates, medical research foundations, slim girls in jeans begging funds to save the whales. Her list was still by the phone when Rob called. It was the first time she’d heard from either him or Alicia since her move.

“How are you doing?” he asked her. “How do you like your new place?” As if her efforts to mother him had worked, as if they were actually close. He told her how his job was going and then said he had a friend who very much wanted to meet her. His name was Nicholas Bennett; Joel had known him and had thought the world of him. Nicholas had something he wanted to discuss with Zaga. Would she see him? She said she would.

A week later she met Nicholas for lunch in the museum cafe. He was tall, as he’d said over the phone, and lean and dark-haired; he was younger than Zaga, with interesting planes between his cheekbones and the crisp line of his jaw. When she spotted him at his table in the corner he rose to greet her.

Over a salad of ripe pears and Roquefurt he offered his condolences and told her how much he’d admired Joel. For an hour she waited to learn why he’d wanted to speak to her, but instead the conversation eddied pleasantly around Joel and common acquaintances and the situation at the museum. “You were right,” Nicholas told her. “To give them the funds. Joel would have wanted those paintings hung properly.” Zaga had two glasses of Chardonnay and when Nicholas asked her about her family she told him more or less the story she’d told Dr. Sepulveda years ago.

Nicholas said, “Really?” and smiled at her. His teeth were white and charmingly uneven. By the time he finally, casually, mentioned what must have been his real purpose in seeing her, she had entirely lost sight of the fact that he wanted something. The light coming in through the high, arched windows was gentle and everyone else had left the café. Nicholas was absurdly young, he was barely thirty. She was not so much attracted to him as she was warmed and flattered by the image of her younger self she saw in his eyes. He explained how he’d recently purchased the rights to an excellent new drug.

He was starting up a company to market it, he said. A few people, some savvy investors, would be helping him get started; once the drug hit the market and the stock went public the profits would be staggering. As she listened to him, she thought how she still had too much money sitting in dead investments instead of building something new and vital. By the time the first tired museum-goers had wandered in for afternoon tea, she had convinced Nicholas to let her invest with him.

“I couldn’t let you do that,” he said at first. “There’s some risk involved, I’m not sure Joel would have approved.” He was bashful, reluctant; he dragged his feet and nearly blushed.

“Joel’s dead,” she said. “It’s my decision.” Even then, she may have understood what was bound to happen.

He brushed her hand and said, “I wouldn’t feel right.”

“Please,” she said. “I insist.”

That night, alone in her clean bed, she dreamed of Dr. Sepulveda. In his white shirt and silk scarf and elegant pleated pants he led her outside the hotel and around the lake, where they met three mules loaded with blankets and food and cooking utensils and hardware. There was a mare with a bell around her neck, but she was not for riding: she was the madrina, Dr. Sepulveda explained, the steady mother who led the mules. Dr. Sepulveda wrapped Zaga’s feet in enormous boots and then led her to a pass between the peaks.

The two of them stepped quietly in the wake of the surefooted mules, the mules followed the horse with the bell, the horse followed a silent man whom Dr. Sepulveda did not introduce. Up they went, and up and up, moving effortlessly through the lightly falling snow. They crossed a snowfield interrupted by columns of ice, and they passed a horse frozen head down in one of those columns with its hind legs stretched stiffly skyward. From behind the column, dressed in the hide of an animal, Jemmy Button appeared. Three condors dotted the sky between him and Aconcagua.

The horse represented her inheritance, Zaga decided when she woke. Frozen, useless; she had done the right thing in freeing it up. Dr. Sepulveda had told her a story of how Darwin had seen such a horse and described it in his journal, but she could no longer remember how the horse had come to its fate.

Six months later, when Nicholas’s company went under, Zaga was left with so little that she could no longer afford the maintenance fees for her lovely condominium. “I was investing the money for the children,” she told her siblings. “I wanted them to have more for college.” If they knew she was lying, they didn’t call her on it. By then they were treating her as carefully as if she were sick.

She rented her condominium to a pair of brokers she could hardly tell apart, and she moved into the first floor of a three-story row house within walking distance of two of her brothers and not far from the house where she’d grown up. Marianna, after her initial rage, found the apartment for Zaga; she also found Zaga a job as a receptionist for a pediatric dental practice.

The waiting room there was always full and Zaga learned that she was good with children—much better than she would have thought after her experiences with Rob and Alicia. The children called her by her first name and drew stars on her hands with felt-tipped pens. She hung the drawings they made for her on the wall above her desk.

At night, when the office emptied and the dentists drove off in their new cars toward the area she’d abandoned after nineteen years, she walked home through the crowded neighborhood. Her family began, slowly and tentatively, to invite her to Sunday dinners and birthday parties and confirmations and school plays. When they took her aside, one by one, they all asked the same questions.

“How did you lose Joel’s money?” they asked. “What could you have been thinking?”

She could not explain that it had nothing to do with thought. It was the buzz, the rush, the antic joy of flinging her old life to the winds. She was abashed by her final loss, adrift and upset—and yet there was also the fact that she had not felt so content in years. Every trace of the life Joel had given her was gone, and she had nothing left to live on but her wits. She knew that what her family really longed to know was why she couldn’t have given the money to them. I would have, she wanted to say. If I’d known what I was doing. But even their resentment could not shatter her sense of relief. Even her stepchildren couldn’t make her regret what she had done.

Rob and Alicia came to visit her four months after she’d moved into her new apartment. It took them that long to agree on a day when they could both find the time, and when they arrived they were hot and exasperated and two hours late.

“We got so lost,” Alicia said as she flounced in the door. “Unbelievable, these streets—how does anyone find their way around here?”

She was thirty-four, still flamboyant, now completely blond. She set down her purse and walked through Zaga’s rooms, which ran in a row from front to back: the kitchen just inside the door, then the living room, then the bedroom. The bathroom was off the kitchen and had no shower, only an old, deep tub with a rubber nozzle that Zaga used for rinsing her hair. Alicia stared at everything in the three small rooms—weighing, Zaga thought. Judging, as she always had—and said, “Do you really have to live like this?”

“Alicia,” Rob said, but Alicia would not be stopped. She wandered across the linoleum, from the old gas stove to the window propped open by a book, and when she looked at Zaga her puzzlement seemed genuine. “What happened to all the good furniture?” she said. “What happened to everything?”

Zaga explained that she’d sold much of it and left the rest in the condominium for her tenants, but she could tell that Alicia did not believe her.

“Are you living like this just to make us feel guilty?” Alicia said.

“Alicia,” Rob said again. But then he looked around glumly and added, “You ought to sue that bastard.”

Zaga refrained from reminding him that he had sent Nicholas her way, and that, after she’d given Nicholas the first check, Rob had called her and had seemed pleased and horrified in approximately equal parts. Now he said, “I wish you hadn’t trusted him so much.”

He had, Zaga knew, lost a fair amount with Nicholas himself. But in his eyes she read his conviction that she had lost everything. In his townhouse he hid his TV and VCR in a nineteenth-century French armoire that had passed to him through more generations of family than she could bear to remember. He was searching the room for some trace of his father and failing to find the smallest thing, and she couldn’t explain to him that the objects she’d shed were no more meaningful than the donations the British missionary society had sent to Tierra del Fuego with Jemmy Button and his companions. Still, occasionally, she thought about the equation Dr. Sepulveda had seemed to suggest between Jemmy’s life and her own.

Beaver hats and white tablecloths and soup tureens and pants; a complete set of dishes painted with flowers and little trays for tea. How FitzRoy’s crew had laughed when they’d opened those crates on Tierra del Fuego! And how strange it had been, Dr. Sepulveda said, when the boat’s crew returned to visit Jemmy the first time. The dishes were smashed, the vegetable garden trodden into the mud. The fancy clothes had been torn into strips that waved gaily from heads and wrists.

“I heard you’re working,” Alicia said.

“For some dentists,” Zaga replied. She offered nothing more. She had planned to bring them with her to a family barbecue, but after a few more minutes of awkward conversation they exchanged a glance and then made excuses and left. She changed her clothes and went to Marianna’s by herself.

“They got to my place late,” she explained to Marianna. “Then they had to leave early.”

Marianna was holding Timothy’s youngest daughter in her lap, watching the rest of the children spread mustard on sausages and potato salad on paper plates. “Why’d they bother coming at all?” she asked.

Zaga remembered how miserable she had been in Portillo, caught in the hot beam of Rob’s and Alicia’s eyes. What had she expected to find in that place? Ease and elegance, manners and wisdom, a past she could share with her husband. She had never considered how isolated she would be. But Joel had been out on the slopes with his children, and when he returned he alternated between describing their thrilling runs and pressing Zaga to come outside. She didn’t feel well enough, she’d said. Whenever she’d alluded to her pregnancy, Rob and Alicia had looked at the walls, the floor, the snow.

“It’s good that you’re pregnant,” Dr. Sepulveda had said. Was that the afternoon he took the picture, or another, earlier one when she asked about his wife and he said quietly that she was dead? In the lounge, when she’d been driven to ask him her last question and he’d responded with one of his own, she’d refused to answer him. She’d risen and said goodbye and left the hotel without seeing him again. But before that, he had said, “A baby with Joel’s money and your looks and character, born into Joel’s world—a child like that might do anything.”

But she had lost the baby. Afterwards, she had wanted to move; her grief had been outrageous, excessive, and she’d told Joel that the sight of the house where she’d lost their child was unbearable to her. She had been hysterical. She had blamed the long flights, the altitude of Portillo, the injections with which Dr. Sepulveda had cured her of soroche. She had blamed Joel for the pleasure he’d taken in skiing and Rob and Alicia for the way they’d stared at her barely thickened waist.

She had written to Dr. Sepulveda, remembering his pointed tales but forgetting the image of her he held captive in his camera. What did you mean by those stories? she’d scrawled. What am I supposed to do?

He never answered, or she believed that he’d never answered. For years she’d imagined him baffled by her failure to understand that the link between her and Jemmy Button was specious, only a surface resemblance: Jemmy had had no choice. But she had always seen that, as clearly as she could see her lost child in the toddler Marianna held in her lap. She had simply not known what to do with the knowledge.

Marianna, still annoyed about Rob and Alicia’s absence, said, “Why do you even bother with them when they treat you like this?”

Zaga watched her youngest brother put together a kite for his son and then struggle to launch it. “I don’t know,” she answered. “Joel would have wanted me to.” It seemed impossible to admit that all the years she’d spent with them had not forged a connection strong enough to survive Joel’s death.

Joel had led her through their house after she lost their baby, pointing out the peach curtains she’d hung in Alicia’s room, the built-in desk she’d had made for Rob. The children’s mother was staying in France, he said. She wasn’t coming back. Then he asked her if she couldn’t be happy raising Rob and Alicia as their own. “It’s too late,” he said. “I’m too old to go through this again.” Tired and heartsore she’d bent to his wish, the way one of her grandmothers might have bent to life in her new country. No one had consulted Alicia or Rob.

The kite had a body of lightweight blue nylon and a red tail that spun like a pinwheel. “Bird,” said the baby in Marianna’s lap, pointing at the kite as it rose. A string of children trailed Zaga’s brother, his two grade-schoolers mingled with the toddlers produced by her oldest brother’s son. It seemed impossible that she should have a brother who was a grandfather. Impossible that everyone in this family had children but her and that all of them could grow up without her help.