Miranda Kline’s daughter, Melora, wonders about her mother, who left her anthropology studies to have two children, Lana and Melora, with a complicated man. She reflects on her family’s history. Her father already had four children by two different ex-wives. He didn’t seem interested in his new daughters’ lives, and he and their mom separated after he had an affair with a high school student. After the divorce, her father tried harder to have them in his life, taking an interest in their ballet and having dinner with them some nights. He was a famous music manager and very wealthy. Though he created a relationship with his two younger daughters, he was careful to hide some of his life’s seedier truths, such as his drug consumption and his son Rolph’s depression, which led to his death by suicide.

Meanwhile, their mother returned to school to finish her PhD. One of her former professors, Nair Fortunata, had claimed he discovered an indigenous tribe in Brazil. Several of his students had gone to Brazil to find this tribe but couldn’t, and one didn’t make it back. Dr. Fortunata went to find this student but died of a terrible fever in an area far from the forest where this indigenous tribe supposedly lived.