It still feels strange not to start her day with the first milking. Unnatural, somehow. From where Helen stands, she has a good view through her kitchen window of the land she sold last month—five hundred hectares of open pasture, bordered by another three hundred of native forest. She pours herself a cup of strong tea and pictures her cows in their stalls, their udders heavy and swollen, as they stamp their hooves with impatience. She can hear the rhythmic, repetitive sound of the milking machine and smell the sharp, pungent odor of the parlor when the cows nose their way into the troughs and she attaches the cups to their teats. The new owner’s sons take care of it all now, and they do a fine job. Still, she is not accustomed to changing her habits. She puts her empty mug on the counter and observes her hand as if it belonged to someone else. It looks like a stranger’s hand. An old woman’s hand.

Helen hears Thiago’s truck in her driveway, and watches from the screen door as he ambles up her steps, making his familiar raspy, bronchial sound in greeting. He wears a T-shirt and a pair of Wranglers, his favorite, with an old checked shirt that once belonged to Helen’s brother, Paul, tied around his waist. More than three decades ago, when she arrived in Brazil to work with her brother as a missionary, Thiago was her first teacher, showing her how to place her tongue against the back of her teeth and pull sounds from her throat to speak the language of his people. Now that Paul is gone, Thiago likes to check on her. His concern makes her feel grateful, in the way that prayer used to. He pulls an envelope out of his pocket and offers it to her on the flat of his outstretched palm.

“I found this,” he says. “In your mailbox.”

Thiago brings her things. A macaw’s feather. A stone shaped like a dog’s ear. A cat in need of saving, its fur matted and paws bloody. Helen takes the envelope, squinting at it in the bright sun, and wonders for a moment what kind of bad news there is left to get from Nebraska. She and Paul heard about the deaths of their relatives in letters like this, about the slow peeling away of everyone they’d known as children. But the envelope isn’t addressed to her. It is addressed to Kim K. Siddiqi, c/o Paul Klassen. Whoever sent the letter to her address doesn’t know that her brother is dead. The thought of having to tell the story of his illness again, even to herself, exhausts her.

“It’s for the fellow with the ponytail,” Thiago says, pointing to the addressee’s name.

Helen nods. She remembers Kim. Strange name for a tall brown American. He spent six months in the area last year, on a fellowship funded by the U.S. government. She didn’t much care for him or his video camera. But then, she’s never much cared for anthropologists. Or graduate students. She particularly doesn’t care for the kind who have their mail sent to her without asking.

The next morning, Helen sits at the kitchen table, pinching one of the seed pods that Thiago gave her between her thumb and forefinger and spinning it like a top. She thinks of her brother sipping his tea in the chair across from hers, telling her about the new sprinkler system he was thinking of buying. His absence feels like something eating at her from the inside. She opens Kim’s envelope quickly, roughly. She pulls out the tissue-thin pages and reads them fast, running her fingers over the indentations of a ballpoint pen.

Dear Kim, I have not been able to stop thinking about the night before you left. Ammi has been asking every day what is wrong with me, because I am so different. I wish you could see me now. You joked that I should marry one of the boys that Ammi has in mind for me. But how can I, when I know what you and I could be to each other? I think about you all the time. I can barely sleep. . . .

Helen tucks the letter inside the front pocket of her apron. She washes her clothes and hangs them on the line, weeds her garden, sweeps the porch. She finds that the letter intrudes on her thoughts, crowding out her own words. She leans against the kitchen table and reads it again, her heart beating fast.

Three weeks later, in early October, Kim knocks on Helen’s door.

“Ms. Klassen, how nice to see you,” he says as she opens it. Kim’s teeth are sharp and white, like baby teeth, and his skin is a smooth, wheatish beige. His long black ponytail reminds Helen of the way that Thiago’s people wore their hair when they first came out of the forest, nearly forty years ago. This annoys her most of all. She dislikes a copycat.

“Morning,” Helen says. She turns, motioning to Kim to follow her into the kitchen. She has a sitting room with a low table, a couch, and a rug, but it doesn’t get much use. Paul’s reading chair is there, his footstool, and his lamp. She knows that she should put away his bifocals, which are lying face down on the table, but she likes the way they look there, as if he might still pick them up.

She offers Kim a seat at the kitchen table and pours him a cup of yerba mate. She slides the letter and a metal straw toward him and takes a seat.

“You might have mentioned that you were handing out our address,” she says, shifting her weight. Her knees hurt today. Bone spurs, the doctor in Campo Grande said. He told her she needed steroid injections to relieve the pressure on her joints, but she doesn’t like needles.

“It’s just the one person—sending me mail, I mean,” Kim says. “She kind of insisted on having an address to send stuff to.”

“My brother died four months ago,” she says. “Stomach cancer. I guess you didn’t know that.”

“I’m sorry for your loss, ma’am,” Kim says, rotating a leather cord on his right wrist. “He was a kind man.”

Helen looks down, chin to her chest. When people offer her condolences, there is never anything to say back. She wonders about the girl who wrote the letter. She points to the ragged edge of the envelope where she ripped it open.

“I didn’t know it wasn’t mine,” she says.

“No worries,” Kim says. He picks up the cup and sucks at the straw, drawing the warm liquid into his mouth. What an irritating phrase, Helen thinks. Who is it, exactly, that has no worries?

Helen asks Kim about his field work and what he plans to do while he is in Brazil. He says that this time he’s in the region for eighteen months. He plans to set up a tent in Thiago’s village, a mile outside of town, and spend most of his time accompanying the men on hunting trips farther into the forest. Once a month, he’ll walk back to town for supplies and to send and receive letters. With her permission, he’d like to come by her house on these trips, to pick up his mail. As for his dissertation research, he plans to record the elders’ songs and prayers, and interview them about their meanings. Helen points out that Thiago’s people go to the church that she and Paul helped plant three decades ago. Most don’t want to relive their past in the interior territory.

“Some don’t mind,” Kim says. “I already recorded a few songs on my last trip. I think I can do it again.”

The boy is arrogant, Helen thinks. What does that girl see in him?

“About the mail,” Kim says. “You’re the only person I know here with a bona-fide address.”

“That’s from a girl, then?” she asks, motioning to the envelope, trying to feign ignorance. She is not accustomed to lying.

“Yeah,” Kim says, taking another sip. He places the cup on the table and wipes his mouth with the back of his sleeve. Helen thinks for a moment, studying the boy’s shiny forehead. She hasn’t had anything to be curious about in a long time.

“Well, I suppose you can use my address,” she says, surprising herself.

Two weeks later, Helen finds Thiago on her porch with another letter for Kim.

“Morning,” she says, waiting for Thiago to speak. Because of her knee trouble, she relies on him for an account of what’s happening in the village and in town. “Any news?”

Thiago looks out at the cows grazing and adjusts the sweatband on his wrist. Recently, he told her about miners with bulldozers encroaching farther into the protected lands. There have been skirmishes with Thiago’s distant relatives, the ones still living in isolation deep in the territory. Today, Thiago reports that Kim has been filming the men of the village with his video camera and trying to learn how to hunt wild boars.

“Can he hunt?” Helen asks.

“He’s better with the video camera than with the boars,” Thiago says, and smiles his lopsided smile. “He spends too much time looking around. Sometimes he gets too far from the group, and then we have to find him and bring him back.”

Helen shakes her head. “As if anyone has time for this foolishness.”

Helen places Kim’s letter in an old shoebox and sets the box upon a high shelf in the kitchen, on top of a stack of books. In the course of the day, she pulls the box down from time to time and takes the letter out. She studies the return address: Maryam Rehman, Department of Chemistry, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Helen tries to stay busy, but the letter proves distracting. She holds it up to the light, trying to guess at its contents. Kim probably doesn’t even appreciate these letters, she thinks. People like him are used to things coming easily.

She begins to wonder if there is some way to read the letter without Kim knowing. Then she hits upon the idea of steaming it open. She puts a kettle on the stove, daring herself to stop, then daring herself to go through with it, as she watches the column of steam escape the spout. It is a sin to snoop like this. Or isn’t it? She can’t decide. That’s the thing about being alone—there’s no one to check your behavior against. She runs the envelope through the steam so that she can peel back the flap and slip the letter out. She takes a deep breath and begins reading.

Dear Kim, I know you said that we shouldn’t make any decisions and that you don’t want to rush into anything. But I’m sorry—I couldn’t help it, and I told Ammi that we spent the night together. I thought she would be furious, and it’s true that she was very surprised. But, once she understood that we are serious, she was so happy for us! Ammi says that the best marriages come from a place of mutual understanding and trust, and I know that we have that. I haven’t heard from you. Please write to me. As I walk to work every day, I think about you sleeping alone in your tent. . . .

When she’s finished reading, Helen paces the kitchen. Then she slides the letter back into the envelope and runs a thin, invisible layer of gum arabic along the edge. She smooths it shut with the side of her thumb and slides the envelope underneath a heavy book. When she removes it, an hour later, the letter looks as if it were never opened. She feels a flicker of pride at her handiwork, followed quickly by a flash of embarrassment. It was wrong of her to pry like that.

Helen walks into Paul’s bedroom and closes the door. She looks at his bed, neatly made, his prescription pills and his hairbrush on the nightstand, his address book on the chair. She gathers the pills, the brush, and the book in her arms and lies down on the bed. Why didn’t Paul prepare her better for a life without him? She closes her eyes. Maybe I just need to rest, she thinks. As she falls asleep, she sees Maryam walking to work, Paul chopping wood. She wakes up two hours later, disoriented, the hairbrush poking her thigh.

On the first, second, third, and fourth of November, Helen watches her porch for signs of Kim. The rainy season has begun, and the air feels heavy. When he arrives on the fifth, she feels strangely impatient, almost offended—as if he has kept her waiting. They sit at her kitchen table again. This time, she gives him black tea.

Helen sips from her cup, weighing her words. “Who named you Kim?” she asks. “Your mother or your father?”

“Oh, my real name is Kamil,” Kim says, smiling. “It’s a nickname. When I was a kid, my dad and I used to play something called Kim’s Game. Do you know it?”

Helen shakes her head.

“My father would arrange a handful of objects on a tray—an old coin, a ribbon, a rock, a thimble, that sort of thing—and ask me to memorize them. Then he’d cover the tray with a newspaper and ask me to describe what I remembered. Sometimes, he’d take something away to see if I noticed. In the Kipling novel, the game is part of Kim’s training to be a spy. I wanted to be just like him. ”

It makes sense that Kim’s boyhood dream was to be a spy, Helen thinks. To seep into the seams of a place and extract information.

“Your parents are from India?” she asks.

“Close,” Kim says. “They’re from Pakistan. They moved to a town outside of Boston before I was born. That’s where I grew up. When my dad died, two years back, my mom’s best friend and her daughter moved in with us. The daughter, Maryam—she’s the one who insists on writing to me.”

Ah, Helen thinks. The gears of Kim and Maryam’s story click into place.

Kim notices a row of objects lined up on one side of the kitchen table. Several stones. An old perfume bottle. Feathers. A dried leaf. He picks up a broken piece of pottery, turning it over in his hand.

“Let’s play with some of these,” he says. “It’s easy. I’ll teach you.”

Kim reaches for the tea tray, removing the cups and saucers and placing a dozen or more items in an irregular arrangement. “Take a look,” he says, holding the tray in front of Helen. “Examine it carefully.”

Kim tells Helen to memorize what she sees. He takes a bandanna from his back pocket and lays it over the tray, so that everything is obscured from view. He asks her to close her eyes and tell him how many objects she saw on the tray.

“Easy,” Helen says. “Fifteen.”

“Describe them,” Kim says, and Helen recites what she saw, imagining the pattern they made on the tray.

“Are you sure there were fifteen?” Kim asks, and tells her to open her eyes. He whips the bandanna away like an amateur magician. “What’s missing?” he asks, peering at her face.

“The gray rock,” Helen says. “And the feather.”

“You’re good!” Kim says, laughing, and Helen laughs also. Then Kim brings another rock from behind his back, a small, curved black stone. “You forgot this one.”

“Ah,” she says.

They play again. This time, Helen gets everything right. This pleases her more than she’d like to admit. She can’t remember the last time she played a game.

“This is how I find my way back to the village,” Kim says, replacing the objects on the table and smiling with satisfaction. “When we hunt far from the village, I check for differences in the vegetation, rocks, and leaves along the path, that sort of thing. I memorize the details.”

Helen looks at Kim and sees him bouncing in his seat as he talks, his confidence seeping out like wild honey.

“You need to be careful in the forest,” she says. “This isn’t some adventure story.”

She slides Maryam’s letter across the table and watches for Kim’s reaction. She observes him as he picks up the letter and casually stuffs it into his pocket, as if he were indifferent to its contents.

“This is none of my business,” she says. “But why does the girl write to you?”

Kim looks surprised by Helen’s question. “Maryam? It’s a childhood crush, I suppose. She has this idea that we’ll get married someday. Why?”

Helen fixes a stare at Kim, assessing him. “It seems to me that if you don’t care for her, you ought to tell her. It seems to me that it would be the right thing to do.”

Kim looks taken aback. Then he gives her a grin, as if he were a naughty child who had been given an empty threat. “Yes, ma’am,” he says, and offers her a mock salute.

The next letter for Kim arrives a week later. For an entire day, Helen resists the impulse to read it. On the second day, she finds it more difficult to ignore. On the third day, she can’t stand it any longer. She boils water and steams the envelope open to find a letter from Kim’s mother.

Beta, Maryam has told me that you two are engaged. I am surprised that you did not tell me this news yourself. However, Maryam is like a daughter to me already. May Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta’ala bless you and grant you peace, and may He join you together in joy. I am awaiting a letter from you to tell me when you plan to return home for the nikkah. Maryam is ordering the clothes now. Love, Amma

Helen puts the letter down and glances around her empty porch.

“Well, this is a fine mess,” she says aloud, as if Paul can hear her.

It is already the twelfth of December, later in the month than Kim usually comes for his mail. When he arrives, early in the morning, with a rapid knock, Helen pours two cups of tea. Kim looks a little the worse for wear. Thinner and dirtier than the last time. He probably hasn’t bathed in a week or more, Helen thinks. He keeps his hands around the teacup, as if the warmth of the drink is something he hasn’t felt in a while.

“How’s the research?” Helen asks.

Kim puts one hand, then the other, on the table. He seems to be noticing the caked mud underneath his fingernails for the first time. His smile is tight.

“Truthfully, it’s harder than I thought,” he says. “The men don’t always like to have me along when they hunt, which makes it tougher for me to do my recordings.”

Helen gets up and busies herself at the sink, glad to have her back to Kim so he can’t see the scowl on her face. “My brother used to say that we ought to remember that we are guests here,” she says. “You need something from these men. But they don’t need anything from you.”

She turns and sees Kim playing with a ring on his right hand. She wonders if he’s listening.

“I have a favor to ask,” Kim says, interrupting her thought. He pulls the ring free and holds it out to her. “Will you keep this for me while I go on this next hunt? It belonged to my dad. I’ve lost weight, and it’s gotten a little big. I’d hate to lose it.”

Helen takes a deep breath. She picks up the ring and turns it over, examining it. The band is silver, with a flat, dull-crimson stone embedded in the center. She lets the stone catch the light and sees some intricate lettering carved there that she can’t make out.

“It’s an āyah,” Kim explains. “A verse from the Quran. It says, ‘Indeed, with me is my Lord; He will guide me.’ ”

“Do you believe that?” Helen asks. “That God will guide you?”

She misses the comfort that her faith once gave her. The sureness and solidity. The routines that determined her days.

Kim pauses, considering her question. “I do, yeah. Most of the time, anyway. I like the ring because it reminds me of what I want to believe in.”

Helen sits back at the table, still holding the ring. She places it with the other objects, tucking it between a feather and two stones, and hands Kim the letter from his mother.

It’s January, and the rain comes and goes. On a dry morning, Thiago helps Helen repair the fence around her property. They work in silence, digging a trench and inserting logs in neat rows. Splitting and stacking the wood was her brother’s job, one of his favorite tasks. If she closes her eyes, she can see him raising the axe above his head and bringing it down on a stump, making a clean cut each time. It’s true what he used to say: it is satisfying work, giving new purpose to existing materials. Strange, Helen thinks, how you can live with a person your whole life and know him differently after he’s gone.

That afternoon, Helen finds herself restless. She tries doing housework, then some crocheting, but she can’t keep her mind on anything. She thinks about the trunk she prepared when she was new to Brazil and thought that marriage would be part of her ministry. She remembers the dresses she sewed from patterns, the set of enamel dishware her mother gave her, and the cotton sheets she starched and ironed. She thinks of John, her brother’s friend, and how, after he broke off their engagement and moved home to Missouri, Paul said that it would be best to take the trunk to the village and place it by the fire, so that the items of Helen’s trousseau could be divided equally among the households. For some years afterward, Helen saw the dresses she had made on other women. Once, she was offered a drink of water from one of the enamel cups and refused it. It was curious how these material objects had lived other lives that had nothing to do with her.

Before she can change her mind, Helen gets into Paul’s jeep and drives down the long dirt road toward town, past patches of knee-high grass and underbrush. She parks in front of the church and starts walking to the village. As she follows the path through the trees, she feels herself sweating, and her knees begin to ache. She wonders if she’s being foolish. Then she sees a little girl, perhaps eight or nine years old, running toward her. The girl’s eyes widen with recognition, and she turns around and dashes back in the direction she came from. Helen knows that the news of her visit will be shared and discussed. She keeps going, and, at the mile mark, as she gets closer to the settlement, she feels the hard stares of two women hanging wet clothes on a line. She hasn’t been here in more than a year, since before Paul got sick. The girl reappears, and Helen hands over a loaf of her homemade bread, which the girl cradles in the crook of her elbow like a doll. She runs to present the bread to a group of adults sitting around an unlit fire pit, and two other small children rush up to Helen, hanging on the straps of her shoulder bag as they search her pockets for candy.

Kim’s tent isn’t hard to find. The families here make their homes from local wood and dried palm leaves. Kim’s tent looks like something out of a mountaineering catalogue. Dark-green nylon, buckles, and clamps keep the frame in place, and it’s zipped up, as if he is sleeping. “Kim!” she says sharply. “Wake up!”

There is no sound, and Helen begins to get annoyed. Why is he asleep in the late afternoon? She unzips the flap and bends down to enter the tent, where she is hit with the odor of unwashed clothes. No sign of Kim. Somehow, this irritates Helen even more. She sits and looks through the detritus of his belongings—clothing, photographs, and a handful of books. She’s not sure what she’s searching for. Then, in a corner of the tent, she sees a small stack of the letters that Kim has received. Near them is a pen and a yellow legal pad, with a few lines scratched in an uneven, boyish hand.

Dear Maryam, I’ve been thinking about you and what you wrote to me about getting married. Before I go on my next hunting trip, I want to write this letter so that you have something from me, in my own words.

Helen hears an elder call her name outside the tent and replies that she’s coming. She stuffs the legal pad and the pen in her bag and walks toward the fire pit, where people make space for her to join the circle. She greets the eldest man first, a kind, wrinkled grandfather holding a giant green sippy cup. She nods at his wife, a tiny woman with long gray hair, weaving a basket. Then Helen greets everyone else, in order of her best guess at seniority. To explain to the elders that she doesn’t plan to stay long is useless. There are no short visits. And yet she is tired. After about thirty minutes, she gets up and walks to the older man, begging his forgiveness because she needs to take her leave before the sun sets. He lays his hand on her head, and they exchange goodbyes in his language. She passes Kim’s tent and begins the walk back to town, studying the path carefully in the fading light. Once she reaches the jeep, she starts the engine and drives fast, a cloud of dust puffing into her rearview and obscuring the road behind her.

When she gets home, she pulls out Paul’s box of stationery and his pen case and sits at the kitchen table to write a letter. “Dear Maryam,” she begins. “My name is Helen Klassen.”

She looks out the window, unsure of what to write. What does she want to tell Maryam, exactly? She wants to give her a warning—a signal. Then again, perhaps she should mind her own business. She gets up and paces the kitchen, considering the options. She walks into the sitting room and sits in Paul’s empty chair. If her brother were here, he might say that she should be wary of arrogance. Who is Helen to think that she has a better idea of what these young people should do with their lives than they do? She feels a wave of shame break over her. She goes back into the kitchen and puts the stationery and the pen case away.

Anticipating the arrival of letters has become part of the rhythm of Helen’s day, part of the light shifting across the kitchen floor and the cuckoo of her wooden clock announcing every hour. For the next week, nothing comes in the mail, and Kim doesn’t return to the house. Thiago brings Helen a Y-shaped stick. The year ahead stretches out in front of her, unbroken and untold.

Helen is making tea when she hears Thiago at her screen door. He looks concerned. Some of his relatives went hunting with Kim ten days ago, he says. Perhaps he should have told her before this, but he didn’t want her to worry. Early one morning, Kim disappeared. His pack with his video camera was gone, too. Now Thiago’s cousins are saying that he must have gone farther into the forest to try to locate their uncontacted relatives. “That stupid boy,” Helen says, shaking her head. Inside, she feels something stirring, an uneasy feeling she can’t put her finger on.

For the next week and a half, Thiago comes to her door with updates. His relatives have gone out in small groups on horseback, looking for Kim in different directions. Every couple of days, they go a little farther—to the edges of the protected lands on one side and to the river on the other. There’s no sign of Kim.

One night, Helen can’t sleep. She goes outside and sits on a rocking chair on the porch, alert to every rattle and wheeze of the land and the animals around her. She looks up at the sky and remembers Kim telling her that he believed that God was with him and would guide him. She thinks about the tray of rocks and sticks and feathers that he arranged in her kitchen. She thinks about how every life is a game, and how she might play her game differently if she had the chance to do it again.

A week later, when Kim’s body is found, face down at the base of a waterfall, his neck broken and his camera next to him, shattered from the fall, Thiago’s relatives say that he ventured too far into the forest. That his desire to see something that few outsiders ever do was what got him killed.

After Helen hears the news, she sits at her kitchen table for a long time, wishing she could change the end of the story. She wraps Kim’s ring carefully in an old cloth napkin, tucking it inside a small cardboard box with some of the other objects Kim played with. Then she picks up Kim’s legal pad, looking closely at the letter he started. “Dear Maryam,” he wrote. “I’ve been thinking about you and what you wrote to me about getting married. Before I go on my next hunting trip, I want to write this letter so that you have something from me, in my own words.” It won’t be hard to learn the boy’s slanted, shaky handwriting, Helen thinks. It won’t be hard to write how much he’s looking forward to getting married and how, when he’s alone in his tent, he imagines his wife-to-be. When the news of Kim’s death reaches Maryam Rehman, Helen thinks, his letter and the contents of the box will be small comfort, but they will be something. ♦