“Isn’t Marisita …” Judith began, “the rainy pilgrim who cooks?”
In a more dangerous note, Antonia said, “Why is he sending a message to a pilgrim?” But the tone in her voice told everyone there that she already knew why he would be doing such a thing.
“Love,” Eduardo said reverentially, and Antonia flinched. Joaquin made a note of the way he said it, in order to have Diablo Diablo try it later. It was the round and splendid way that he pronounced the o, the gentle landing on the v. He did not realize that his face was soundlessly pronouncing the word until he saw both his parents frowning at him. He corrected his face, and they corrected theirs, but he was still contemplating the part of him that was Diablo Diablo, and even though they didn’t know the name for it, so were they.
“What does it mean, Beatriz?” Judith asked. They all knew that Beatriz and Daniel were the closest of the cousins, and Judith assumed (correctly) that this also meant Beatriz knew what the message meant. Beatriz, however, said nothing. She said nothing for so long that most of them forgot Judith had asked Beatriz the question in the first place, including Judith. (People often forget the power of silence, but Beatriz rarely did.)
Francisco marked this absence of an answer, and put it away in his mind to think about later.
Nana said, “So he is still alive.”
To this point, you have not seen anything of Nana besides a few minutes of her picking tomatoes in her back garden. That was because Nana was old, and like many old people, she had arthritis. It was not bad enough to completely prevent her from moving, and in fact, she had precisely calculated the number of steps she could take each day without suffering for it that night or the following day (217). She had taken 15 steps to Eduardo’s stepside pickup, and then he had lifted her in and twirled his mustache. Then she had taken 47 steps from the pickup truck to this message. That left her with 155 for the rest of the day’s tasks. It was an expensive side trip, but one Nana felt she had to make.
“He could be close,” Judith said. “Who knows when this message was left?”
“Don’t get any ideas,” Antonia warned. “It is still not a good idea to go looking for him.”
But Judith had not said this as a message of hope. Rather, her old fear was beginning to creep up again, complicated by guilt. It was bad enough to be terrified that pilgrims might bring darkness on you; it was worse when the pilgrim was your own cousin whom you loved. She was torn in many directions. The easiest of these directions was away, and a huge part of her wanted to retreat to Colorado Springs with Eduardo. But that felt like giving up on Daniel. And even if she was willing to do that, a small part of her still thought that she might be able to convince her parents to reunite.
But it didn’t seem very likely, looking at them now. Francisco and Antonia were closer physically than they had been in a very long time, but they appeared farther apart than ever.
Eduardo placed his hand upon the small of Judith’s back, and she remembered the way he had said love. Her fear went back to sleep.
“I’m not an idiot,” Judith retorted.
If Antonia and Francisco and Michael and Rosa had been paying attention, they would have marked that neither Beatriz nor Joaquin, the two most vocal supporters of actively helping Daniel, had spoken in favor of helping him now. As it was, only Nana noticed their quiet acceptance, and she took it for despair rather than secret collusion.
“I never said this wasn’t terrible,” Antonia said, feeling the silence of the group was castigating her for upholding their rules. “I don’t know why you are always making me out to be the bad guy.”
“I am in agreement with you, Antonia,” Michael said.
“As am I,” Francisco said.
There was a pause, and they looked sharply to Rosa, but it turned out that the gap in her agreement was only because she was removing her hair from the baby’s mouth. “Yes, yes, we must be cautious.”
The adults were soon discussing logistics in Spanish, which meant they were no longer actively soliciting the younger Sorias’ thoughts. They could not leave water for him, because that was against the rules. But if he was this close, they mused, he could get water from any of the ranches if he was willing to drink with the cattle. And if he was sensible enough to leave this message, they reasoned, then he was sensible enough to be hunting down food for his body, perhaps. Which meant instead of the elements, maybe he was only having to fight the darkness.
They were desperately wrong about just one part, however, and that was the only in that phrase—only having to fight the darkness. Yes, Daniel was fighting the darkness, but there was nothing slight about it. They were not looking for the signs of how his darkness had manifested, nor could they have, but if they had, they might have noticed how uneven the letters were, how some of them were misshapen and only legible to the optimistic. They were words crafted by a young man with fast-failing vision.
But they needed this optimism to counteract their failure to act. Imagining that Daniel was still doing all right was the only way the adults could live with their abandonment of him.
“‘Marisita, I’m listening,’” Rosa repeated, bouncing Lidia in time with the words, waiting for them to make more sense. “‘Marisita, I’m listening.’”
Marisita, I’m listening.
Finally, Beatriz and Joaquin allowed their eyes to meet, and in that look, they saw that they were both thinking the same thing: If Daniel truly was listening, they needed to put on a show that felt like a miracle.
There used to be an enormous and fine barn at Bicho Raro, capable of housing two hundred bales of hay, twelve horses, a small tractor, and twenty-four barn swallows. The siding had been amber brown and the roof was gloriously red. It was, in fact, the very barn Pete was scavenging for the dance floor’s boards. Shortly after it had been built, the wind nudged it, as it nudged all things in the San Luis Valley. Nothing happened, because the barn was very securely built. The wind nudged it for all that week, and still nothing happened. The wind nudged it for ninety-nine weeks in a row, and still nothing happened; the barn did not budge. But on the one hundredth week, the wind nudged the barn and the barn fell onto itself. It was not that the one hundredth week of nudging was any stronger than the previous weeks. It was not even that the one hundredth week of nudging was what had actually knocked the barn over. The ninety-nine weeks of nudging were what had truly done the job, but the one hundredth was the one around to take the credit.
We almost always can point to that hundredth blow, but we don’t always mark the ninety-nine other things that happen before we change.
Things felt different in the box truck that night; things felt like change. Some of this was because their population had altered by one. Beatriz, Joaquin, and Pete were jammed together like crayons in a box as the truck lumbered slowly out into the dark. Beatriz wasn’t much of a talker, and Joaquin wasn’t feeling like being civil, and Pete wasn’t one to start a fire in a room that didn’t seem to be in the mood for smoke, so for quite a while the only sounds in the truck were the rumbling of the engine and the squeaking of the seats and the nearly inaudible thump of hearts when Beatriz’s and Pete’s fingers accidentally jostled together.
“Do you like music, Oklahoma?” Joaquin finally asked, more aggressively than one might have ordinarily, and more aggressively than one might have thought, considering the truck’s cramped cab was pressing their shoulders together hard in a familiar sort of way.
Pete missed the tone. “I like Patsy Cline an awful lot.”
“Patsy Cline,” Joaquin echoed.
“Who’s Patsy Cline?” Beatriz asked.
“Oh, you know who she is,” Joaquin said dismissively. He threw a significant twang into his voice but otherwise did not attempt to make it musical. “I’m always walkin’ after midnight, searchin’ for you.”
Beatriz shook her head, no closer to recognition.
“Craaaaaaazzy,” Pete sang.
Technically, he was not a very good singer, wavery and low, but he was pleasantly heavy on the syllables in the way that Johnny Cash was, and Beatriz was charmed by it. Moreover, the tune was recognizable. Beatriz said, “I know that one.”