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They called her the priest's daughter, but her name was Esther. She lived with her mother in a two-room house on the highway, a fifteen-minute walk from the nearest town, Santa Cruz. The house was made of wood and when it rained, which it did frequently, the wood bled water. Esther noticed that people were afraid of the rain, to one degree or another. When it rained, the farmers in the nearby fields left their corn and huddled under trees, the women waiting for the bus gathered close and their daughters slipped under their skirts and the bike riders on the highway parked under the tin roof of Doña Maria's tienda and ate jalapeño chips.

Esther wasn't afraid of the rain. When it rained, she stopped whatever she was doing and stepped into it. One morning Esther left two tortillas cooking on the comal and raced into the rain. By the time the rain stopped, the tortillas were blacker than the richest soil. Her mother scolded her, but then could not help herself and laughed. "You're crazy," her mother said.

Esther liked how the rain felt when it was light and warm and caressed the roots of her long black hair. She didn't like it as much when clouds rumbled into each other like heavy trucks and released a rain that came with relentless fury. But she joined this rain, too, staying in it until it ended. She felt she had a purpose in the rain, although she did not know what it was. She was a priest's daughter, and she had known this ever since she had understood words. Her mother had been a cook at the parish in Santa Cruz. By the time Esther was born, however, the priest was gone, off to repent at the feet of some higher priest, and her mother had to look for other work. Her mother became a maid at a house in Cobán, the city north of Santa Cruz, and when the woman in the house grew jealous of her and dismissed her, she worked picking coffee and then sorting asparagus.

When she was young, Esther thought her mother might be angry or sad or lonely. But when she was older, Esther knew that because people always called her mother "pobrecita amante del padre," she had mimicked their pity. Her mother was not angry or sad or lonely. Her mother walked barefoot on the dirt floor of their house as if it were warm sand on a gold beach, and she celebrated the rain with Esther by smiling and clapping.

Esther and her mother were poor, undeniably, but there were only two of them. Other families with larger incomes lived harder lives because they had more children to feed and send to school. Nevertheless, in elementary school Esther was treated like an outcast by most of her classmates, many of whom wore more ragged clothes than hers. Their scorn, however, did not bother her as it did others who suffered the same treatment. Their teasing seemed to her like so many weeds trying futilely to destroy a tall, strong corn plant.

Esther was friends with other girls who, for reasons of birth or ill-fortune, were shunned. There was Josefina Chinchilla, whose father killed a man in a machete fight in a whore house and walked home naked with the man's right arm slung over his shoulder. Josefina was known, of course, as the "murderer's daughter." There was Alicia De Leon, who had been born with her nose embedded below the surface of her face and whom everyone called "No Nose." There was Sandra Gonzales, who as a baby was thrown from the back of a pick-up truck and fell into a three-month coma. She grew to be barely four feet tall and her speech was slurred almost beyond comprehension. Her classmates nicknamed her "Dwarf Drawl."

Over time, Esther watched them all be destroyed. Josefina Chinchilla had her first boyfriend at age twelve and was no longer a virgin by age thirteen. At fourteen, she got pregnant, but miscarried. She miscarried at fifteen and sixteen. When she was seventeen, she led a troop of boys away from Ana Fernandez's fifteenth birthday party and let them have her on the grass above the river. She became pregnant from this encounter too. When she miscarried again, she rose from her bed and carried the slick, bloody sack around town as possessively as a dog would a bone until a policeman, summoned by an outraged cantina owner, threw her and her dead child in jail. She remained in the outdoor cell all night, sniffing the urine that clung to the walls like paint and watching the puddles from the ferocious rain grow under the bars. She caught a fever and almost died. When she recovered, her mother sent her to live with relatives in a mountain village.

Alicia De Leon, Esther's other friend, suffered cruel jests about how she should join the circus. "Come see the girl with no nose," her tormentors teased. "She smells through her ears, breathes through her eyes, sneezes through her toes." One day, Alicia arrived at school with a mask that covered everything but her eyes and mouth. Her elementary school classmates, on unusually good behavior, said nothing until Erwin Ponce, a stocky boy with a thousand well-groomed curls, drew his own mask on notebook paper, taped it to his face and danced on the top of his desk, shouting, "I'm the mask monster and I need a wife." The laughter made Alicia run from the room as if hunted. Long after her classmates had repented of their earlier wickedness, when, in fact, many of them had confronted their own tragedies, Alicia did exactly what they had said she should do. When the Frog Brothers, Marcos the Monkey Man and the other members of the Tall and Tiny Circus came to town, she joined them.

Sandra Gonzales was Esther's best friend, the only one who made it with Esther to high school at Colegio Verapaz, on the outskirts of Cobán. Despite her speech problem, Sandra was an excellent student, consistently one of the best in her class. And although she walked with a duck's waddle, she passed physical education because whereas she failed all the physical exams, like making a lay-up or dribbling a soccer ball, she wrote book-length reports on the history of volleyball and ping-pong, complete with illustrations.

Sandra Gonzales was like Esther in another respect. She liked boys. Worshipped them, feared them, desired them, scorned them, dreamed of them. In her final year of high school, she picked as her object of love the boy every girl had picked. César Juarez was tall and light-skinned with a mustache as dark as shoe polish.

Esther loved César Juarez too, but realized she had no chance to win him. She was a priest's daughter, the tainted product of her mother's seduction of a holy man, and she bore her nickname with serenity. Esther had learned to accept as impossible what most girls considered at least conceivable. She saw potential romance with nobles such as César Juarez in a mystical way. To win his love, she knew, the world would have to behave uncharacteristically, the elements that composed normal life meshing in a strange constellation. But Esther was not unhappy, not at all, and she did not pine even a minute for any unrealized romance. She had had two boyfriends, the most recent of whom was Hector Briones, whose mother had been run over by a tour bus.

Sandra Gonzales did not share Esther's sense of the impossible. She believed not only in the likelihood of miracle, but of its certainty. She was sure she would be César Juarez's girlfriend. Esther did nothing to discourage her. Hope, she decided, might be the chief ingredient needed to shake up the elements of normal life, and if Sandra had enough hope, anything might be possible. Esther also liked the role she assumed after her friend's inevitable disappointments. She was ready, with open arms and light words, to comfort, console and hear her confessions of lucid dreams unfulfilled.

Near the end of the school year, after Sandra Gonzales and Esther had both turned twenty and were about to graduate from Colegio Verapaz, the class took a trip to the lake in San Cristóbal, a town west of Santa Cruz. It was early May, a time when it rained periodically and one could not wake up to a sunny morning with the confidence that it would be sunny at noon. It was, however, sunny when the class arrived on the shores of the lake, carting lunches and soccer balls.

After lunch was eaten and soccer played, a group of boys drifted down the hill to the lake's edge to watch the fish and throw stones in the water. Sandra Gonzales and Esther trailed them like altar boys. They stopped a few feet short and perched on the last grassy hump before the hill became shore, their light dresses flapping in the breeze. The boys' conversation turned to the lake itself and its deceptive distances. While the opposite shore looked close, César Juarez said, it was actually a kilometer away, and the only people known to have swum it were the three men who participated in the first and last San Crist—bal Triathlon, and two of the participants had dropped out after completing the swim. "No one here could do it," he said. "Not even me." Seconds later, Sandra Gonzales announced what Esther knew was: "I can swim it," but the boys must not have understood, or if they did, they must have thought that what she said was not directed at them. Indeed, by the time Sandra made her bold pronouncement, the boys were talking about who had the class's longest index finger. When Sandra kicked off her sandals and rumbled past them, the boys drew back as if a wild animal had burst by. Sandra fell into the lake and began an awkward swim toward the far shore. The boys watched for a minute, then turned their attention to the ranks of clouds coming like an army over the mountains to the south. "Rain," César Juarez said, and even as he said this, the first drop fell. "Rain," another boy said, and the rain came hard now, and the boys abandoned the shore, running up the hill toward the thatched-roofed comedor at the top.

The rain pushed Esther's hair in front of her face, and she had to hold it up to see Sandra, who was not even a third of the way across the lake. "Come back!" she yelled at her, but the rain was loud and must have been even louder to Sandra in the water. Esther thought about water beating water, and the futility of it. She yelled Sandra's name again, but now, because of the ferocity of the rain, she could not see her at all.

The night before Sandra Gonzales' funeral, Esther's mother told Esther about her father, the priest, a story Esther had heard as soon as she could hear. Over the years, her mother had repeated the story, but in different forms, depending on Esther's age. Now Esther was a woman, and her mother spoke to her as a woman.

Her mother used to cook for the priest in the dark kitchen of the rectory. The wood snapped on top of the stove, the big pots rested directly on the fire. The priest often came to sit with her, on a stool just out of the smoke's way, and he would talk about his childhood. As a boy, he was a good soccer player, and he still dreamed of elegant passes and evasive dribbles down the sidelines and the rough admiration of drunk men and the shy devotion of pretty girls. She told him she had always liked soccer, particularly as it was played in the late afternoon. The day cools, but the heat of the game, a heat the players feel, intensifies, and those watching, if they are watching closely, feel the heat as well. "Yes," the priest said. "That's it, exactly." He stood, approached her, but a burst from the fire that sent sparks skipping everywhere stopped him, and he left the kitchen.

Her mother had loved the priest. He was a good priest, and he cared for the words he spoke. He was not like the former priest, whom Esther's mother had also cooked for, who read the Bible as if it were a government report. Her priest spoke each word as a patient child eats chocolate, with nibbles of devotion. He was a good priest, and he cared for the people in the parish. He counseled the sick and troubled in his living room, and at night he left the front room of the rectory open for those who, for whatever reason, could not sleep at home. He visited the villages, and although he was from the capital and had been taught a strict Catholicism by the conservative bishops, he dropped chicken blood around a pile of corn seed and prayed all night with the indígena farmers, in their language, for a blessed harvest. She loved the priest, and could not help it if because of her love, she wanted him to love her, and not only in the way he loved God, his words like caresses but still only words.

He was sitting behind the smoke when he told her about how nice it was, as a boy, to take off his shirt and feel the sweat at first creep and then race out of his skin as he ran up and down the field. I know, Esther's mother told him, I used to watch the boys play soccer shirtless after school and their skin would become wet and when the sunlight hit them right, their bare backs would be brighter than sky. The priest approached her, braving the smoke, and they made love standing in front of the fire.

The priest repented more severely than she could ever have expected. When their love-making was over, he placed his hand in the fire and it remained there until she pushed him away.

"People feel sorry for me now," Esther's mother told her, "but for a moment he loved me more than he loved God."

Before Sandra Gonzales's coffin was cemented into the crypt, the rain fell. It fell hard from the first, and the sudden force scared the people at the funeral, even Sandra's mother, and they sprinted for tombs with overhanging roofs.

Esther stayed in the rain with the two men who were smoothing concrete over Sandra's grave. Spreading her fingers to catch the ferocious drops, she felt how sensuous the rain was, even in its quick and furious fall. But Esther knew the sensation of water on her skin alone wasn't why she stood in the rain; it wasn't why Sandra had tried to swim the lake.

The rain flattened Esther's hair, soaked her dress, filled her shoes. The two men finished their work, then raced to join the others. Esther alone remained, drenched, satisfied: she knew everyone was watching her.