Juan thought for a long time. Then he smiled—the same crooked, mango-juice smile from the Atacama.
They hitchhiked south. A fisherman took them to Chiloé. A nun driving a tractor took them to the lake district. In a small town called Futaleufú, they found an abandoned schoolhouse with a red door and a garden overgrown with fuchsia. Juan said, "We could stay." Agnessa felt her chest crack open like a geode. agnessa and juan
"For how long?" she asked.
"Don't what?"
Agnessa, born in Minsk to a climatologist and a ghost, had spent the last eleven years moving in straight lines. Efficiency was her religion. She could name three hundred species of lichen, rebuild a transmission in the dark, and predict a flash flood by the way sand shifted under her boots. What she could not do was sit still. So when Juan offered her a slice of mango and a place in his passenger seat, she said no. Then the storm swallowed her tent, and she said yes. Juan thought for a long time