At Chichen Itza three years ago, Elizabeth couldn't bear to watch her 10-year-old daughter race up the steps of the pyramid. At the top, Rosie raced from side to side to gape at the view of jungle and ruins and unending sky. Elizabeth, goaded by her husband James, climbed gamely all the way up the stairs and then had to hide inside the pyramid's dark little dirt room, gasping for air. She heard James and Rosie call her name, and she knew with what felt like certainty that one of them today would lose his or her footing and tumble like a parcel to death below.

"Elizabeth," James said upon finding her. "You made it. Going down is the easy part. Don't look up, don't look down. You just take it one stair at a time."

"I need to calm myself for a while. I'll start down in a while."

"Darling, we have to get back to the airport. Our plane leaves in less than an hour. They're pouring black coffee down the throat of the pilot right now, as we speak."

He beamed at her. She felt that she might throw up.

"Turn around, mommy. Go down backwards," said Rosie, moving laterally toward her like a mountain goat. "Just don't look down."

Elizabeth swallowed. She had the whirlies. She reached out one long spidery arm, felt about for the step below her, lowered one foot and then the other, shuffled her body down one stair. James and Rosie, from different positions unseen behind her, called out encouragement.

"Good, mommy," said Rosie.

"Swing your hips and smile on towards health," said James.

Sometimes she wanted to kill him.

Several minutes later in slow torturous arthritic time she found herself half-way down, and from then on turned to peer over her shoulder from time to time so that she could gauge the point at which she might survive if she fell all the way down to the ground.

She couldn't bear the thought that somehow, someday, something bad might happen to Rosie. She wished she were a monkey mother who could carry her child everywhere on her back; and she grieved there on the pyramid steps with the awareness that Rosie really was a miracle; and everyone, or at least Elizabeth, knew that miracles don't take.