One Grave Less

out at the unexpected jarring. Maria bit the edge of her tongue.
    “Sorry,” said Maria, “I didn’t see that.” It wasn’t the first hole they’d run over, but coming just as it had, it startled the two of them.
    “The next day—I think—I was playing outside. I saw Father Joe in the garden. He was crying. It scared me.”
    “Was he hurt?” prompted Maria.
    “No, he was sad. I asked him if I could bring him a drink of water. He just cried. I asked him what was wrong. He said he did an unforgivable sin. But he had told us that no sin is unforgivable if we confess and repent. I told him that.”
    “What did he say?” asked Maria.
    “He said he’d thought that was true, but it wasn’t. He said he couldn’t be forgiven. When I asked him what he did, he just cried and told me to go inside. Two days later it happened. I know, because Mama gave me a calendar to mark off the days she was gone. I was scared when I saw Father Joe crying so I went to my room to see how many days before she would be back. It was three more days.”
    Rosetta was quiet for a long while.
    It was darker than Maria meant it to be before she stopped. Just a little farther, she thought. She realized she couldn’t see the road ahead more than a few feet. The headlights had become weak . . . and then dimmed to nothing. She stopped as blackness surrounded them.

Chapter 25
    “What happened?” asked Rosetta.
    “I’m not sure,” said Maria. “For some reason we lost our headlights.”
    She tried turning them off and back on. They illuminated briefly and dimmed out again. Maria hadn’t wanted to stop for the night under the trees. She was hoping for any kind of clearing. She reached for a flashlight, rolled down the window and let the narrow beam of the light guide her. She drove at a slow pace, looking for a place to stop for the night, shining the light to the side and back in front of them.
    After a while she lost any semblance of a trail and simply drove through the brush until her light vanished into what looked like a break in the flora ahead. She drove toward it. Through a copse of trees the jungle opened up into a clearing. Maria drove the truck into it and stopped.
    “Stay here. I’m going to look around,” she said.
    She put the truck in park, leaving it idling. She shined the light on the ground beside the door to make sure she was not stepping into something she would regret. The surface of the ground was blackened and covered in a dark stubble of twigs, stumps, and twisted remnants of vegetation.
    “It looks like there’s been a big fire,” she said as she got out.
    She shined the light into the darkness. It was a poor flashlight. The beam didn’t extend far. But it did shine far enough into the burned area to show a large mound of dirt and piled-up twigs and limbs ahead of them. Maria looked for a path to drive around or over the rubble. She fixed a route in her mind and got back in the truck. Proceeding cautiously in the pitch black, she managed to get the lurching truck to a spot on the other side of the mound. Here they would be hidden from anyone coming from the direction they had come. She parked and reluctantly turned off the engine, wondering if it would restart in the morning or if the battery would be gone. She knew so little about cars. She hoped that, like her, all it needed was rest.
    Maria turned off the flashlight and was shocked at how dark it was without even a glow from the dash lights.
    “Okay,” she said as brightly as she could, “we’re camping here for the night.”
    “It’s really dark,” said Rosetta.
    “It is. Are you afraid of the dark?” asked Maria.
    “No . . . it’s just that it’s really dark ,” the little girl repeated.
    “It’s good to see the stars,” Maria said, looking through the windshield at the star field.
    Rosetta followed her gaze. “I wish they could be brighter,” she said.
    “Do you need to use the bathroom before we turn in?” asked Maria, grabbing the flashlight on the seat.
    “I don’t want to go out there in the dark,” Rosetta said.
    “No need to go far. We’ll both go.”
    Maria opened her door and got out. With the motor off, the jungle sounds were loud. She hadn’t really heard it so much when they stopped earlier. With the truck noise always rumbling, not much of the jungle sound had penetrated her consciousness. But now she could hear cries of night birds and the shrieks and growls of other animals she couldn’t identify. Some of