“What are you asking?”

“I’m asking you to let me not put him on the plane. Let me nurse him back. Give me a few weeks. A month. Maybe two. I’m asking you to trust me with your son.”

I heard the quick inhale. The breath he caught before it escaped. The long pause. The shuffle. The sniffle. “You think he’ll stick around?”

“I don’t know. But my guess is that he’ll stick around here longer than he will anywhere close to home.”

As much as it hurt, he knew I was right. “Whatever you think best.”

“You want me to talk with Marguerite?”

“No. I’ll tell her.”

*  *  *

The following morning, I woke early. It was still dark. I checked my watch: 4:27 a.m. I rose, checked on Zaul, and then walked next door to where Paulo lay sleeping. I shook him gently. He woke and stared at me as I made signs mimicking a man digging. “Dig? We dig?”

He swung his feet over. “Sí. Sí. We dig. Dig deep.”

*  *  *

Paulo and I spent the morning at the well. Me on one end of the rope, he on the other. I surfaced for lunch and he and I ate a sandwich, and I played with the kids who had appeared to watch us dig. Then I descended again. When my arms were noodles, I pulled twice on the rope, and Paulo once again lifted me up as I scaled the inside of the well like Spider-Man.

This continued all week.

While Leena and Isabella cared for Zaul, Paulo and I dug. Standing at the bottom of a deep, deep hole in the earth, with thinning air and only the dim light of a headlamp, gave me a lot of time to think. Sometimes I thought about the rope—my sole tether to the surface world of light as I rummaged around below in a world of darkness. Several times, as I squatted in the hole or leaned against the side, waiting on Paulo to return the dirt bucket, I cut the headlamp and stood in the darkness, waiting for my eyes to adjust. But they never did. No matter how long I stood there, and no matter how many times I blinked or tried to adjust, my eyes never made sense of that black world until I turned that lamp back on or climbed up toward the pinhole of circular light above me. Until then I was just groping about in the dark. Credit the thin air, credit tired muscles, credit exhaustion, I stood down in that muddy hole amazed at the absolute absence of light. Call me simple, but it was tough to miss the lesson: If it’s dark and you want light, you either need a source outside yourself or you need to get to one—because nothing resident in me lit that hole. And as quiet as it was, I was not able to silence the voice that questioned when I was going to tell Leena about my role in Cinco Padres’ collapse. Every time I climbed down into that hole, that voice was waiting on me. The more I dug, the louder it got. And I had no answer for it.

*  *  *

By Friday night, I climbed out having spent the better part of the week down in the earth. Paulo pointed me to the rope coiled neatly at his feet and kicked it with his toe. With a satisfied smile, he patted me on the shoulder. “Trescientos.”

I knew he was speaking of a measurement, but he said it so fast that I couldn’t make it out.

I shook my head. “No comprehende.”

He smiled and said, “Three hundred.”

I understood that. In the last week, I’d dug almost a hundred feet.

*  *  *

In the evenings, I took walks with Zaul. First, we just walked from the backyard to the front. Then a few houses down the street. Then around the block. The sight of two gringos in a village where few seldom ventured off the hard road was akin to the circus being in town, so we were often followed by an audience. One of the things that amazed me was how the kids gravitated to Zaul. They tried to hang on him like a jungle gym until Isabella shooed them off. If they had a ball, they kicked it to him. If they had a Popsicle, they offered him part. If they had a toy, they shared it. I’d never seen someone attract children with such a magnetic draw. One afternoon, I came back from digging, covered in mud, and when I walked out of the shower, Zaul was sitting on top of a five-gallon bucket with another upside down in front of him holding two homemade drumsticks. The kids around him were sitting on the ground, with sticks in their hands and buckets or bowls or anything that worked or sounded like a drum, and he was giving them drum lessons. I didn’t even know he played the drums. And as I stood there listening with Leena, I watched as a kid began to shed a dark blanket that he’d wrapped himself in a long time ago. The more he played that bucket like a drum, the more those kids smiled. And the more they smiled, the brighter Zaul became. With the kids joining in as a chorus, he busted loose. His arms waving, his hands spinning the sticks, his face smiling. We were watching a kid bloom. Walking in a circle around him and his class, I took a short twenty-second video on my phone, which I sent to Colin. Moments later, he responded with a single word: “Tears.”

I wrote him back. “Me, too.”

*  *  *

Sunday afternoon, I found Paulo shoving wood into an outdoor oven that rose up out of the ground behind the chicken coop. It looked like one of those large brick ovens that pizza places use to cook their pizzas at a thousand degrees. In a few moments, he stoked a raging fire, and after shoving in more hardwood, we stepped back as the heat grew intense. The oven had two large holes about the size of a window, which he covered with pieces of tin roofing just slightly larger in size. He left a small “intake” opening that fed the fire with air while the chimney poured white smoke. While he prepared the fire, Leena and Isabella, both wearing aprons, appeared with several bowls and trays and oil and smiles. Leena waved me closer. “Come on. You need to get your hands dirty.”

I washed my hands and stepped up to the table, where Leena tied an apron around my waist, which prompted a quick giggle out of Isabella. She looked up at me with a smile and one upturned shoulder. “I’m laughing with you. Not at you.”

Leena walked me through the process of making and then kneading dough. Making it was easy, kneading it broke me out in a sweat. Evidently, the kind of bread we were making cannot have any bubbles in the dough, so I had to roll it and beat it and slam it until the bubbles had been worked out. By then, my forearms were cramping.

Then we sliced the dough into small doughnut-sized pieces, which we then flattened like tortillas and spread with a coarse, brownish-looking sugar; raw cinnamon chunks; and some sort of smelly, crumbling cheese, which curled my nose and convinced me I had no desire to taste it. Then we “folded” all of that inside the bread, leaving essentially a triangle pastry.

We lined the trays with about forty triangles, and then Paulo, using a long stick, removed the glowing red pieces of tin roof and pushed all of the fire out the main window onto the ground, where he rolled buckets of water underneath it. Having cleared out the fireplace, he then used a broom of sorts to “brush” out all the ash. When finished, he was left with a clean oven where the inside was hovering around between eight hundred and a thousand degrees—which it would do for the next hour.

Leena handed the four trays to Paulo who—using a different stick—slid them into the fire much like a man cooking pizzas. He leaned the tin against the windows again, covering the holes, and then stood there, tapping his foot. After ninety seconds, he threw off the pieces of tin and, using the reverse end of his stick, hooked the corners of the trays, removing them from the heat, and Leena, donning hot pads, set them on the table to cool. When finished, Leena placed a napkin in her hand, set a browned, puffy tart in the middle, and handed it to me with a raised eyebrow. I viewed it with suspicion and sat hesitantly until the smell wafted up, convincing me to sink my teeth into it.