After a long pause in their conversation, she’d brought out a small black box and opened it, taking out two rods of wood about four inches long. She looked up at Jin.

“So, your daughter.”

“I just need to know what you can tell me about where she is. Please.”

She placed the rods of wood on the floor and set the empty box aside. Returning to her spot, she sighed.

“Hold out your hands,” she said.

Jin complied.

“No, with the palms up.”

She lowered his hands toward the floor, where the lighting was better, and closely examined his palms. Like a person unraveling a riddle, her face was all concentration. Then she picked up the two rods of wood and clapped them against each other. From their hollow cores, the rods rang musically. She placed them in Jin’s open palms.

“I can only tell you what is in your spirit,” she said.

Jin nodded.

Leaving the wooden rods in Jin’s open palms, the fortuneteller adjusted herself until she was sitting cross-legged, her back straight and her hands folded into her lap. She hummed. The sound came from deep inside her throat. To Jin it appeared she was humming some sort of chant, but she kept her mouth closed, so there was no way to make out the shape of the sounds.

There were no details, no useful information, just the stuff of baseless dreams, tricks for the broken heart.

After a minute the fortuneteller began to speak, but not in her own voice. For a moment her eyes opened, showing only their whites, then closed again. She was in a trance, speaking in a low voice, the words coming out harsh and deliberate; a voice wholly unsuited, Jin thought, to a person like her. She told him of the many grandchildren his daughter would bring into the world, the large house they would all live in together, the beautiful garden they would walk through, and other things Jin did not fix in his memory, since the crazed edge of the fortuneteller’s voice distracted and frightened him. Then it was over.

Afterward, Jin decided that the fortuneteller’s vague predictions were based on cold readings of his situation. There were no details, no useful information, just the stuff of baseless dreams, tricks for the broken heart. He told Margaret about it, laughing at himself sadly; she laughed, too, mockingly, and then also sadly. But something about the woman’s voice followed Jin throughout the next few days. It seemed to come from somewhere timeless and formless, ensconced in possibilities. No matter how frightening the voice was to him, he needed to hear it again.

After a few visits, they skipped the small talk and went directly into the palm-reading and fortune-telling. Jin scarcely listened to the voice’s words any longer, focusing instead on the tones that issued forth like ocean swells. Each session, he tried to dive deeper into those tones, yet each session ended in frustration, not with the fortuneteller but with himself. If only he could listen more closely, more deeply…

Jin quickly surveys the bus. Save for an infant in a stroller at the front, there is not one small child aboard. He takes a seat in the very back.

Recalling the little white hand waving to him from the back of the school bus, he realizes that most children are at school by now. He knows that Amara would be — is — six-and-a-half, so would be in the first grade. He still holds to the likely motive for the abduction: that she was sold to a human trafficking network that eventually placed her with an adoption agency, which in turn placed her with a nice family, since Asian children, especially girls, are so popular in that market. He holds to the idea that the people now raising his daughter believe her parents are dead. So when Amara cries for her mommy, for her daddy, it is because the very young have yet to make death’s acquaintance and so demand that those they love be returned to them.