Interviewing Senor Reyes in the gloomy chapel, I heard — literally heard — Nooshin thump to the ground outside. I don’t know how to describe the creepiness of that dull impact, echoing off the sad-eyed icons that hung in the murk. It was just like a keeling body in a movie or TV show, a sound I never expected to hear for real. Wondering what the hell happened, I bolted into the morning starkness. I raised my forearm against the angry sun, casting a bar of shade across my eyes — and that’s when I saw her, a crumpled unmoving figure, half-rolled onto her side with a thin arm flung across the gravel.

Now I stare at her beautiful face, unnaturally still and sheened with sweat. What I’m feeling, oh god — it’s emotional torture, the pain sharpening every memory that floats behind my eyelids. This is the girl who got under my skin, into my head, through my ribcage. The bravest person I know. My Nooshball. And I brought her here, to unconsciousness in a dying pueblo in bumfuck nowhere Mexico. Hanging above the bed is a solitary crucifix. I hope Christ doesn’t care if he’s watching over a girl who happens to be Muslim.

Chirbampo’s only doctor bustles around the room, changing the saline drip. He checks the tiny droplets of fluid leaking down the tube and into the bruised crook of Nooshin’s arm. His waxy face is immobile with focus. A graying ponytail spills out from underneath his straw cowboy hat. He’s wearing a Western-cut sportcoat with doublestitched trim and his jeans are too short, revealing more of his shit-stained cowboy boots than I care to see. The rancher garb isn’t an act. When Dr. Samesh isn’t busy saving lives, he runs a herd of 2,000 longhorns in a valley outside town.

I’ve never met an Asian Indian in Mexico who didn’t speak English, but I have to switch to Spanish to make him understand my frustration. “Well? Why isn’t she waking up? Do you think she’s in a coma or something?”

“Senor, please calm down,” Dr. Samesh says. His advice just ratchets my blood pressure even higher. He clasps Nooshin’s wrist gently, as if it might snap in half, and checks his watch. The minute hand creeps. “Hmmm.” He lays her wrist down again and stares off into space for a while. A forefinger taps his bloodless lips. “Hmmm,” he says again.

Jesus fucking Christ. I glance down at Don Fidel for support. This is a guest bedroom in his family’s 400-year-old casa, after all. But the diminutive figure seems even more diminutive, shrunken by the crisis, a sweaty horseshoe of gray hair fringing his scalp. All his bluster and guffawing have evaporated like spit on a hotplate. He feels the weight of my scrutiny and shifts uncomfortably.

“You say she was suffering from a stomach ailment?” Dr. Samesh asks. I’m about to mop the tile floor with his mask of cool professionalism, but then he tacks on an observation. “She appears to have lost a significant amount of weight recently, no?”

I smile faintly. “Nah. She’s always been like that. Super-skinny.” I Spanglishize the term — superflaca.

“I delivered some Bactrim and Lomotil to her the other day,” adds Maria, the teenage secretary from the mayor’s office. Her youthful curves are tucked into the wooden chair in the corner, where she flips idly through one of her glossy fashion magazines. She’s acting as the mayoral liaison, or so she claims. Any excuse to get away from the mayor-elect and his three unshaven chins.

“Did she take the medications?” Dr. Samesh asks me.

“Yeah. She was taking the recommended dosages of both.” I remember translating the labels for Nooshin, double-checking to make sure she read them correctly. Small print is even worse in Spanish.

He screws his waxy features into a musing look. “Hmmm.”

“What’s your diagnosis?” My impatience carries me closer to him. Menacingly close, even. “You can’t just stand there and go hmmm — ”

“She’s concussed, of course. But I suspect the fainting was caused by dehydration. She probably stopped drinking fluids because it made her vomit or worsened her diarrhea. Combine that with the heat stress of being outside on a hot day, and some orthostatic hypotension — ”

“Ortho what?”

“Orthostatic hypotension. That’s the medical term for faintness caused by changing position, such as when you stand up and feel lightheaded. You said she’d just gotten out of the car…” Dr. Samesh loses his train of thought. He tips back his hatbrim and considers Nooshin the same way he might consider a longhorn cow. “Like I said before, I’ll need to know some aspects of her medical history if — ”

Suddenly my cellphone plays a warning ringtone — the theme from Jaws. Everybody in the whitewashed room startles a little. Everybody except Nooshin, anyway. In my peripheral vision the willowy figure beneath the bedsheets doesn’t even twitch. She programmed that ringtone for a reason. The caller is Nasrin, Nooshin’s older and very controlling sister in San Diego. I only reached out to her because I had to.

“Nick” The word is frostbitten and lightly accented. “I got your voicemail, but I didn’t understand it. What happened to Nooshin?”

I already rehearsed this conversation — just the facts, and in reassuring language — but my mouth forgets the script. “Uh, she got sick…”

“Sick? What do you mean? Is she okay?”

“Well, not exactly.” My eyes flicker to Nooshin, so frail that she barely makes a dent in the bed. “She’s unconscious right now.”

“She’s — what?” Nasrin almost screams.

“Look, she passed out and hit her head. We’re at a friend’s place now. A doctor is taking care of her. She might need to be hospitalized in Los Mochis.”

“Los…Mochis? Is that a hospital?”

“It’s the nearest city, down on the coast. We’re in Sinaloa. A Mexican state. Where Mazatlan is.”

Strange words are pooling in my ear. Farsi, but spoken more harshly than Nooshin does. Her big sister is probably cursing me. Looking around I see everybody is eavesdropping on the conversation, reading the pained look on my face, sensing the hostility. I escape out of the bedroom and into the lush foliage of Don Fidel’s courtyard.

Nasrin is drifting back to English. “I hate you! I hate everything you’ve done to our family! I hate — ”

“Just shut the fuck up and listen, okay? The doctor needs to ask some questions about her medical history. You’re the only one with answers. Are you going to help Nooshin, or what?”

There’s a pause. A long lingering pause. A fuck-you-with-a-bargepole pause. “Let me talk to the doctor,” Nasrin finally says.

“He doesn’t speak English, so I’ll translate back and forth.” I return to the bedroom, ducking a little to fit through the Mexican-sized doorway. Every face tracks me expectantly. I flap a wrist at Dr. Samesh, motioning for him to get started.

The translation goes slower than I want, maybe because of the distracting inflections — Indian-accented Spanish in one ear, Iranian-accented English in the other. But eventually the questions and answers are strung together to make progress, and –

“Nick?” says an unmistakable voice.

I almost drop my cellphone in delighted shock. Nooshin is looking at me, the screen of her eyelashes raised, her mocha eyes dull but open. For a painfully elongated moment they’re twinned, staring in tandem — then the right orb begins wandering toward the potted Christmas cactus in the corner.

Dr. Samesh stiffens in concern, but I just slap him on the back. “Don’t worry. She’s always been like that. Evil-eyed. Evil-eyed and super-skinny.” I plop down on the bed next to her hip, smoothing her dusky tresses across the pillow, my fingers catching on a piece of gravel.

She squirms weakly on the bed. “That tickles!” The doctor is testing the sensation in her extremities, running a fingernail back and forth along the arch of her bare foot. Tendons in her neck stand out like piano wires as she cranes for a better view. Her eyebrows flare when she sees the IV dangling into her arm. “What’s going on?”

“Nasrin, good news — she’s conscious again,” I say into the cellphone, then lean down to plant a kiss on the tiny scars ghosting across Nooshin’s forehead, reminders of the awkward truce between a little girl and her crooked wandering eye, a little girl who grew up to be my valentine tomorrow.