The lights of Laredo rise up and grow brighter. They drive quietly and after a while, Glory scrounges around in her backpack for her cassette player and a tape. She slides the tape into the player and hits play. Lydia Mendoza, the Lark of the Border, Victor cries out, and she is surprised to hear a tremor in his voice. Una vez nada más en mi huerto brilló la esperanza . . .

Glory rolls down her window and chews her lip. The recording is grainy and the words are hard to make out, but she understands a few words, nada más and esperanza—there was always at least one Esperanza in every classroom at Gonzalez Elementary—and now Glory is holding her arm out the window, spreading her fingers apart so the wind streams through them. She is glad she’s not dead, but she would give a lot to be able to haunt Strickland for the rest of his life. Hope shines, she thinks the singer may have said, but Glory can’t be sure and she doesn’t want to ask her uncle, whose eyes have begun to glisten in the dark, and maybe it doesn’t matter on this starry night. Maybe the woman’s voice, and the gentle scratching of her fingers on the guitar strings, is enough.

They arrive in Laredo after midnight, where they grab a bite at the truck stop and take turns napping in the parking lot. But only for an hour, Victor says. He wants to be at the crossing before sunrise, and they are still nearly two hundred miles away.

Once they leave town, they drive so close to the border they are not always sure whether they are in Texas or Mexico. The sky is black as hematite, and the names on the road signs are no help—San Ygnacio, Zapata, and Ciudad Miguel Aleman—each marking a wide spot in the road named for stolen rivers or local war heroes or ranchers who died young.

Are we still in Texas? Glory asks every few minutes.

Yes, he tells her.

How about now?

Pues, who knows? Texas, Mexico, it’s all the same dirt.

She tells him about the rattlesnake, how large it was, how it moved like a river. She does not tell him that she had only been that afraid on one other occasion in her life. That snake must have been six feet long, she says, and as thick as my leg.

No shit? Victor says. You’re going to be a legend. Glory Ramírez, the girl who stared down a fifteen-foot rattlesnake.

It wasn’t fifteen feet long, she says. There’s no such thing as a snake that big.

Who cares? That’s how a tall tale works, mi vida.

Most of the stars are gone when they turn off the highway and drive past half a dozen little wooden houses in the still sleeping village of Los Ebanos. At the ferry, five men sit on folding chairs outside a small, festive shack adorned with beer signs and Christmas lights. Another man leans against a two-hundred-year-old ebony tree, the red cherry of his cigarette beating back the dark. A steel cable thick as a man’s fist is wrapped around the tree. It stretches across the Río Bravo and encircles its twin on the other side, where a dozen men and women are already standing on the ferry. It is a border crossing that has been unmanned for as long as anyone can remember. In dry years, in the places where the river becomes barely more than a stream, cattle wander back and forth in search of the sweet blue grama grass. Men and women work on one side and live on the other, and kids sometimes reach their tenth birthdays before they figure out which side of the river they belong to.

Tonight, most of these women and men will cross the river again, heading home to the sounds of water birds and wrens and starlings, cattle and coyotes, ocelots and bobcats. They will listen to music drifting back and forth across the water, Tejano and country, ranchera and norte?o, and from the living-room window of one old woman who puts on a record every night just before sunset, pours herself a glass of whiskey and sits out on her front porch to watch the sun go down, jazz—Billie Holiday and John Coltrane, and the doomed boy from the dead center of Oklahoma who could make a horn sing.

No one asks any questions when Victor and Glory drive onto the ferry at Los Ebanos. No one asks to see any papers. Boxes of produce are stacked in the middle of the wooden platform, along with several steel pipes and a pile of lumber. A skinny yellow mutt stands atop the wood and looks across the river. There is so little space between the two sides, Glory sees now. Even after the recent rains, the river is not much wider than a four-lane highway, not much farther than the distance from her door at the Jeronimo Motel to the swimming pool. And sure enough, when a man on the other side calls across the river to say they are ready, and the men standing on the ferry grab the cable and begin to pull, one hand over the other, the journey is hardly longer than the time it takes Glory to braid her mother’s hair before she leaves for work in the evening, or for Alma to look through her purse in the morning for a handful of change to give to her daughter. Crossing the river is enough time to sort through a stack of bills in search of a letter from home, to walk down the hall and check on the kids, to flood the engine on a car bought with military pay. It is enough time to stare down an old snake in the desert, to start wondering what comes next. When they reach the other side and one of the men sets down two thick wooden planks for their wheels to pass over, Victor and Glory look straight ahead. Neither of them looks back at Texas.

They drive south with the windows rolled down and the sun in their eyes. Glory sits with her legs crossed. At the Río Bravo Delta, also known as the Laguna Madre, they will turn west and start driving into the heart of her mother’s country. If they move steadily forward, they can be in Alma’s hometown for the Feast of St. Michael at the end of September. Imagine, Victor tells her, you and me and your mom standing at the water’s edge with our feet in the sand, lanterns burning on the deck of every fishing boat in the harbor, a thousand candles floating among them. Can you see it, phoebe?

No, she tells him. She rubs her thumb against one palm and then reaches down to touch her feet and ankles. Victor calls them battle scars. Something to be proud of. It means you fought hard, means you came home from the war. Can you see that?

Not yet.

Try.

She rolls her eyes and looks out the window, but she is trying to imagine her scarred feet moving steadily forward, carrying her where she needs to go. Away from a pickup truck parked in the middle of the oil patch. Across the desert and up a road to someone’s front door. Down a flight of metal stairs where she pressed her hands against rough concrete and lowered her body into the water, where she pushed away from the side and learned that if she moved her arms in gentle circles, she could drift until she touched something solid.

Glory looks at the two small scars on her hands, one in the center of each palm, the body doing its work. In a year, they will have flattened and grown softer. In two, they will be gone. But the scars on her ankles and feet will thicken and grow longer, dark red cords that tether her to a single morning. The girl who stood up and fell back down, who grabbed onto a barbed-wire fence and stopped herself from falling again. The girl who walked barefoot across the desert and saved her own life. She can’t imagine any other way to tell the story.