Now Francisco nodded as he sat in the church-like light Daniel had inadvertently created all those years ago, and he thought about how Daniel was somewhere in the wilderness with his darkness.
“There must be a way to communicate safely with him,” Beatriz said. Before Daniel had gone, she had been considering telling her father about the radio station, as she thought he would have found it an interesting thought exercise, too. But now that he had vehemently shared Antonia’s feelings about connecting with Daniel, she didn’t feel confident that he would allow them to keep doing it.
“If anyone can come up with a solution, I believe you can,” Francisco said. He had great faith in his daughter’s brain. “But I don’t want you putting yourself in unnecessary danger.”
“I don’t want to put myself in unnecessary danger either,” Beatriz reassured him. “But the doctor still treats the patient.”
This kind of talk would have infuriated Antonia if she had heard it. Francisco often mused about the scientific points of the miracle, but to Antonia, this was not only blasphemy but dangerous blasphemy. To treat it as something contained by logic was to get comfortable around it, which not only made such a thing more dangerous but also made it less holy and thus less important. Antonia’s kind of belief is not uncommon, but it has done both science and religion a disservice. By relegating the things we fear and don’t understand to religion, and the things we understand and control to science, we rob science of its artistry and religion of its mutability.
“Do you have any thoughts on that in your notebook?” she asked.
Francisco sat back down at his desk, hands crossed over each other, back straight. He was a comely and poised version of his daughter when he sat like this, the same eyes, the same nose, the same obsession with the handsomeness of thought.
“Only that there must have been a better way at some point,” he said. “Or the Sorias would have died out by now.” He turned his cunning eyes upon his daughter. “And is there something else troubling you?”
There was, but Beatriz was less comfortable with sharing this one, as she could not quite sort out its shape. Part of it had to do with Pete and herself. And the other part of it had to do with Francisco and Antonia, and if there had ever been a possible future for them that did not drive Francisco to live in the greenhouse and her mother to live alone. Beatriz wanted to know if people like herself and her father—people supposedly without feelings—could be in love, or if they were not capable of producing the correct quantity of emotion to fill an emotional partner’s glass for very long.
“Do you still love Mama?” she asked. This was a longer sentence in their language than it was in English or Spanish, as Francisco and Beatriz had developed several phrases to indicate all of the different forms of love they had identified in their study of humankind. The musical phrase that Beatriz used roughly translated to need of the sort that can only be fulfilled by one thing.
“Did Judith tell you to ask me?” Francisco inquired.
This was not an improbable question. In fact, through the window, Beatriz could see Pete at work on the stage that Judith had set him on. He was now creating upright pillars for hanging strings of decorations. While Beatriz appreciated Judith’s attempt at strategy, she did not think that either of her parents were so straightforward that they could be tricked into falling back into each other’s arms merely by re-creating the scene of their first moments together. “No. I’m not asking if you will move back in with Mama. I just want to understand why it doesn’t work.”
“Have you asked your mother this same question?”
“No.”
“Would you?”
She imagined this scenario. Antonia, angry, and Beatriz, merely puzzled, both of these expressions feeding the other. It was exactly the kind of conversation that Beatriz spent much time avoiding.
“No.”
“That is why it doesn’t work,” he said.
Beatriz took this information and put it into a projected future. In this projected future, she could not tell if she broke Pete Wyatt’s heart merely by being herself. She could not tell if they would be unable to have conversations because they would both want something from the other that was impossible. She could not tell if it was safer to stop a love story before it ever truly got under way.
When she thought this, she experienced a physical sensation as profound as the surges that had struck Pete’s weak heart. It felt like a blow, but it was actually a feeling. It was a feeling so sizable and so complicated that it would have been difficult even for someone with emotional practice to express, and for Beatriz, who was handicapped by her belief of not having them, it was impossible. The feeling was, in fact, a combination of relief that she might be able to use this conversation as an excuse to never speak to Pete again and thus protect herself from further complex emotions, and also the intense and heartrending disappointment that came from standing on the edge of something extraordinary and walking away from it. These seem like intractable opposites, but only if you are being logical about it.
Beatriz was being logical about it.
A tap came at the glass. This one made Francisco sigh heavily, as it was not someone who was a quiet soul. It was Joaquin, who did not wait for permission but pushed his way in instead.
“Beatriz,” he said urgently.
“Shut the door,” she said in her language, then, catching herself, again in English. “Don’t let the rooster out.”
Joaquin squeezed into the greenhouse. “Wyatt the Riot said Tony found something you need to see.”
With some difficulty, Beatriz sorted her thoughts back into their proper places. Love, especially new love, is gifted at disordering them. “I’m coming.”
“Beatriz,” Francisco whistled. “The answer to your question, though, is yes.”
What Tony had found was a message from Daniel.
He had been out walking that morning, eating his breakfast on the move so that no one could see him at it, and discovered the message. The letters were sized large enough for him to spot from his impressive height. One of the e’s was written backward. Tony, who liked large things, approved, even if he didn’t understand the meaning of it.
Now all of the Sorias stood three miles out from Bicho Raro, the various vehicles they’d used to arrive there scattered on the edge of the road some yards away. All work had halted for them to visit the site, as if any artifact of Daniel’s was now a Shrine, and they were the pilgrims. It was a rarity to see all of them together at one time, particularly the middle generation. Michael, his work paused. Antonia, without scissors in hand. Francisco, far from his greenhouse. Rosa—well, Rosa was pretty much always Rosa. They had not been all together in one place since Judith’s wedding, and before that, not for years.
“Why would he put it here?” asked Antonia. She looked accusingly at each of them, including Francisco, who stood on the opposite side of the circle. “No one would see it here.”
“Maybe he misjudged,” Michael said. “Meant to have it visible from the road.”
Rosa adjusted the baby Lidia on her hip. “Who is Marisita?”
Spelled out in stones and dried branches torn from the scrub were the words:
Marisita
I’m listening
Daniel
Because as you have already guessed, Daniel’s placement was no accident. His message was designed to be seen not by a vehicle on the road but rather by a vehicle that had left the road to secretly broadcast a radio station. And the message was deliberately cryptic as it was meant for no one but the cousins who spent time in that box truck each night, and for the young woman he loved.
Joaquin pressed one of his water bottles to his forehead as if the chill of it might steady him. Beatriz closed her eyes for one moment, and in that moment of darkness imagined Daniel returning to them safe and sound. When she opened her eyes, she and Joaquin found that they could not exchange looks as their secret hung between them and threatened to become visible if they both pointed their gaze directly at it.
But they both felt the same. It was one thing to be sending sounds out into the night with the hope that someone, anyone might be listening, and something else again to be sending sounds out into the night with the hope that someone in particular would be listening. And it is a third thing altogether to send sounds out into the night and know that you are being heard by the person you meant to reach.