Waiting for the Night Song

by Julie Carrick Dalton

  The colors in her carefully curated memory shifted, the sepia images turned sharp and bright, and, for the first time, Cadie could see the fear that had been in Clyde’s eyes that day. Fear of going to jail, fear of losing custody of Garrett, fear of failing his dead sister. And a deep fear that his actions would expose the Garcias if Cadie told anyone what had happened. The memory sharpened as she turned it over and over in her mind.

  “Juan was my friend,” Clyde said.

  “I know.”

  “You’re going to take a hit too, you know. I mean, you were just a kid, you’ll be okay. But still. People will know.”

  “I’ll be fine.” Her stomach turned. She hoped she would be fine.

  “You were out on the lake and heard the shot. That’s all. But you and Dolores were never in the woods. It was me and Garrett who buried the body. No one else.”

  “I thought we were done lying.”

  “It’s one thing to not report hearing a gunshot. It’s another to admit to burying a body. And putting you in the woods might stir questions about Daniela. It’s easier this way. And safer. I started this. I’m prepared to face the consequences. I don’t want to derail your life any more than I already have. And I don’t want to get in the way of your work. It’s important.”

  “You know what I do?”

  “I don’t live under a rock.” Clyde tried to force a smile. “I follow #CadenceUnderFire.”

  “Wait. How do you know about that?” It had never occurred to her that all these years she had been avoiding Clyde, Clyde might have been keeping tabs on her.

  “The Internet?” Clyde shook his head. “I’m not a stalker. I just try to stay informed, you know, about climate change. I think it’s bullshit, by the way, what they’re doing. They can’t lock scientists out of public lands like that.”

  “I have one suggestion before we go inside,” Cadie said. “Do not call Dolores an old lady on the record. She will destroy you.”

  “Good advice.” Clyde drew in a deep breath and held it for a few seconds before releasing it in a forceful stream.

  “Okay then?” Cadie took a few steps toward the station door, but Clyde did not follow.

  “Garrett was so proud of being a police officer, even if it was just in this small town. He made a difference here.”

  “I know.” Cadie took another step toward the door. Clyde did not follow.

  Cadie searched Clyde’s watery eyes for the monster she loathed, but he had dissipated, evaporated in the hot August air.

  “He lived his whole life trying to make up for that one day. You believe that, don’t you?” Clyde said.

  Cadie nodded.

  The boy on the pier in the ratty lawn chair. The kid who cherished her books as much as she did. The author of her first love letters. Cadie pushed down the ache swelling in her chest as they walked up the stairs to the police station side by side.

  This is where it ends, Cadie told herself as a blast of cold air hit her face.

  39

  PRESENT DAY

  “I knew you’d be here.” Daniela sat down next to Cadie on the blackened remains of Cadie’s fireplace after she had left the police station.

  Scaly soot lifted off the stone like barnacles, crunching under Cadie’s thighs as she scooted over to make room for Daniela. The defiant chimney rose out of the charred remains of her childhood home. A few erect wooden beams marked where the walls used to keep the woods from creeping into the house. Those creaky walls her parents had filled, over and over, with caulk and insulation.

  It was that golden hour when the sky bends forward and breathes the honey glow of evening across the treetops on the other side of the lake. The trees absorbed the warmth and shot the light back from the surface of every amber-washed leaf.

  On Cadie’s side of the lake, a whistling breeze searched the naked trees for leaves to rustle. A branch crashed to the ground in the distance. Straggler honeybees should have been making their final trek back to the hive, their haunches loaded with pollen. But there was no pollen here. No hive to go home to.

  “Are your parents going to rebuild?” Daniela rested her head on Cadie’s shoulder.

  The soot kicked up a smell like the hickory bacon on Cadie’s father’s breath as they read together on Sundays after breakfast. Fleeting images of sleepovers with Daniela on her bedroom floor bumped up against flashes of bony shadows dancing on the walls, pointing at her accusingly.

  “They want me to rebuild here. They’re giving it to me.” She imagined the stones from her cairn rooting into this piece of land, the roughly hewn floorboards marred with beetle etchings under her feet as she looked out over the lake every morning.

  “Is that what you want?” Daniela asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You could put up a yurt instead, and cook over an open fire.” Daniela reached out to rub her hands over an imaginary flame in the hearth, revealing an ink drawing on her upper arm. “You can finally live out all your survivalist fantasies.”

  “Is that a tattoo?”

  Daniela ran her hand over a colorful bird with a green back and blue head. “Sal drew it last night. She wants to be a tattoo artist. It’s her new thing. Resistance art.”

  “Why the bird?”

  “It’s the Torogoz, the national symbol of El Salvador. I kind of wish it was real ink.” Daniela traced the outline of the bird’s tail with her finger and flexed her bicep. “Are we too old to be badass?”

  “Never.” Cadie laughed and thought of Dolores standing next to her in the creek, yanking at the vines and the barbed-wire fence. “Your mom’s still a badass.”

  Daniela blew out a long stream of air that disrupted the ash swirling in front of them.

  The mountains on the other side of the lake looked the same as they always had. Bald granite jutting above the tree line, forever oblivious to fires, gunshots, and the movement of time. The Earth would not record this fire in its geologic memory. The ash of this moment would be compressed so tightly it would disappear in time.

  “I’m glad everyone will know what happened to Juan,” Daniela said.

  Cadie’s stomach tightened.

  “We left him to rot in the woods as if it never mattered that he existed,” Daniela said. “My whole life, it made me feel like I never mattered either. If Juan was disposable, unwanted, then so was I. So was my family.”

  How had Cadie run through the woods with Daniela, day after day, picked buckets of berries right next to her, and not understood the weight of her constant fear?

  “I’ve spent so much of my life desperate for people to see me—yet not wanting to be seen. I don’t want Sal to feel that way,” Daniela said. “Hiding is exhausting.”

  Cadie had been hiding from Clyde all these years. Looking for him in grocery stores and airports. Misplaced anger and fear had etched lines into her forehead and robbed her of sleep. But Daniela’s fear had carved lines on the inside of her. Permanent lines no one could see.

  “I remember him now,” Daniela said.

  “Who?”

  “Juan. I remember riding on his shoulders when we left El Salvador. It’s fuzzy. But I even remember a song he used to sing to me. I’ve always remembered it. I just didn’t know where the memory came from.” Daniela whistled a few bars. Cadie recognized it as the melody Daniela used to play on her wooden flute when they were kids.

  “Now I’ll remember, too,” Cadie said.

  “I brought you something.” Daniela pulled a small tambourine out of her purse, the partner to the one she’d given Cadie the night before she moved to Boston. “If you insist on traipsing through the woods alone, chasing those goddamn bugs, you’re going to need this.”

  The varnish on the lightweight wooden hoop felt slippery. She had long ago worn the gloss off the old tambourine, the water-warped instrument that had bounced against her backpack up and down so many mountains.

  Cadie shook the hoop over her head for several seconds. The gentle clatter filled the empty spaces b
etween the blackened timbers, between Cadie’s bones. The woods, the fire, the earth had reclaimed the tambourine’s sister, now a crumble somewhere in the ash pile. The shiny discs sparkled, catching the sun and tossing shimmers of light against the ground, the blackened tree trunks, and the sooty hearth.

  “Your dad gave this to you.” Cadie extended the instrument back toward Daniela. The familiar weight felt satisfying in her hand. “Sal should have it.”

  “Sal’s not afraid of bears.” Daniela raised one eyebrow and half smiled.

  Cadie thought of the wet nose of the bear she had watched die on the highway. The heave of its chest under her hand, the humidity of its last sigh. She felt the bear’s breath inside her now.

  “I’m not afraid anymore.” She didn’t realize that she meant the words until after they had passed through her lips. She worried for Raúl and Dolores, for Sal and Daniela, for herself. But concern occupied a different space than fear had. Worry prodded at her, but it left room for something else. For breath, for hope, maybe.

  “I want you to have it.” Daniela pushed the tambourine back toward Cadie.

  Charcoal-tinged air tickled Cadie’s sinuses with microscopic bits of her books, her father’s art, and the sister to the tambourine she now held in her hands. “I’ll take good care of it.”

  “I know.”

  “A team from Vermont found evidence of the beetles near the Canadian border after reading my research. This is just the beginning. With changing temps there’ll be more. Not just here. Not just beetles. And a few more research institutions have stepped forward to openly defy the research ban.”

  “Then why are you sitting here?” Daniela pushed her hair behind her ears. “Don’t you have some research to get on? Fires to stop?”

  “I missed you, you know. So much.” Cadie closed her eyes and imagined floating head to head in the lake, her fingers curled around Daniela’s. Drifting as the sun poured down on their faces.

  Daniela appeared somehow at ease as she ground the char to dust under her foot. The woods creaked like an old rocking chair.

  The warm stones of the fireplace radiated a sense of calm that penetrated Cadie’s jeans and her skin, through to her bones until the stillness saturated her marrow. Cadie hoped Daniela could feel it too. Cadie rubbed greasy soot between her fingers and thumb and smeared a thick black stripe under each eye. She did the same on Daniela’s cheeks. The residual char filled in the scar on her thumb where years ago she had carved a promise out of her own flesh. And Daniela’s. The black etching looked like the silhouette of a burnt tree.

  “My parents hired a lawyer.”

  “Why? They aren’t implicated in anything, are they?”

  “No, it was Sal. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but she has a lot of opinions.”

  “Sal? No way.”

  “Now that she knows my parents and I are technically undocumented, she’s obsessed with immigration laws. She’s been talking about it nonstop. We were at dinner and Sal gets all mad and says, ‘So if you, who have a business, jobs, friends, pay taxes, volunteer, can’t even come forward, then who can? If we can’t fight for our rights—for their rights—then who will do it?’”

  “Geez. What did your father say?”

  “He cried,” Daniela said. “He actually cried. Then he got mad. I mean, he went from tears rolling down his cheeks, to steam-coming-out-of-his-ears mad in seconds.

  “Enough!” Daniela shouted and slapped her knees, breaking the silence in the chalky forest. “He bangs the table and yells ‘Enough!’ At first, I thought he was mad at Sal, but Sal looks at him and grins. ‘Enough!’ she yells, and slams down on the table. And Dad smiles.

  “And that was it. They hired a lawyer. We’re going to move slowly, but she thinks we have a strong case. She already located the arrest warrant for my father for disobeying orders, shooting an officer, and abandoning his unit. She even found a record of their house being burnt down days later. They had a perfect case for asylum status when we first got here, but it was too risky because the US was in bed with the Salvadoran government.”

  “This isn’t exactly a great moment in US history to be undocumented either.”

  “Even more reason to stand up and fight.”

  “You sound like Sal.”

  “Why, thank you.”

  “If they hadn’t been so afraid of being exposed, none of this would have happened. I wouldn’t have been afraid to tell the truth about what we heard that day. My mom wouldn’t have been scared enough to cover up Juan’s murder. And Clyde wouldn’t have been able to scare you by threatening my family. All because we were so damned afraid.”

  “I wish I’d understood all that back then.”

  “We can’t look backward. Just forward.” Daniela shrugged.

  “Why are you so calm? Aren’t you scared?”

  “I’m terrified, actually,” she said. “But my parents are so optimistic. It’s kind of contagious. It turns out there weren’t many witnesses to the attack in the village my father told us about. Not many first-person accounts about what actually happened. My father’s never been able to tell his story, and now that they are looking back at history differently, his story is important. If things go well, my parents might actually go home to El Salvador for the first time.”

  “I thought that’s what they were trying to avoid?”

  “If they can get papers, they might be able to go visit. Sal could go with them. It would mean the world to her. The lawyer thinks it’s possible. But nothing’s for sure, especially in this anti-immigration climate. It could be a long time, or it might never happen.”

  “What about you? Do you have a case?”

  “The lawyer’s going to take on all of our cases. She’s optimistic,” Daniela said. “But there’s a lot of risk. I wanted to believe marrying a US citizen made me safe. But even then, I was still using false papers. They might go easier on me because I was only three. It’s not like I bought the papers myself. It’s all I’ve ever known. The lawyer says we have a lot of reasons to hope.”

  “But no guarantees?”

  “No guarantees.”

  “I don’t get why you’re doing this.” Cadie didn’t want to ask what would happen to Sal if their petition failed.

  “We’re tired of hiding.” Daniela straightened her back and clapped her hands to change the subject. “I’ve been following your hashtag. There’s, like, thirty universities signed on your petition.”

  “It’s not my petition. This woman, Piper, she studies endangered birds. She started it. Somehow my name became the hashtag. But, yeah, it’s kind of incredible.”

  “I always knew you’d change the world,” Daniela said. “But couldn’t you get arrested? Maybe try a more low-profile, no-hashtag approach?”

  “Nope. I’m going to fight. Just like you.”

  “Will you come back for Juan’s memorial service?”

  “Yeah.” Cadie thought back to the silent prayer she’d attempted while clinging to Dolores’s hand after they buried Juan, and about the desperate eulogy Daniela had offered at his graveside so many years ago. He deserved so much more than words scraped together in secret.

  As the truth about Juan’s murder and the cover-up emerged, Cadie’s guilt had not subsided, but intensified. The secrets about Garrett, the Garcias, and Clyde, about the gun, the boat, and the beech tree, all those secrets had linked arms to create a shield protecting Cadie from her deepest shame, the one that gutted her now as she forced herself to confront it.

  Cadie had been complicit in erasing Juan Hernández. His name, his body, his history. She stared into the black gash that had been ripped into this small community, the wound she had been averting her eyes from for decades, and she allowed it to hurt. She didn’t dig her fingernails into her thighs to distract her thoughts. She didn’t mentally recite the periodic table as she had trained herself to do in college as a diversion. She needed it to hurt.

  “It sounds like there’s going to be a big crowd. My par
ents volunteered to pay for the service, and Chester Talbot, of all people, offered to host a reception at the sugarhouse,” Daniela said.

  “Chester Talbot?”

  “People can surprise you, I guess.” Daniela brushed the ash from her scrubs and stood up. “I have to get to the hospital.”

  A small mound of loose dirt at the base of the fireplace indicated that ants were already back, turning the soil, resuscitating the land with tiny breaths.

  Daniela extended both hands to Cadie, dragging her up off the hearth and into a tight embrace. Daniela rocked from foot to foot, swaying Cadie’s body with hers.

  “I’m sorry about Garrett.”

  “He wasn’t the person I wanted him to be.” Cadie stepped back from Daniela and wrapped her arms around her own waist, squeezing her elbows tight to her ribs. She didn’t want to acknowledge the hopes she had hung on Garrett. “But I guess I understand him now. He was scared, just like we were. One moment doesn’t define a person’s life.”

  “I don’t know. He saved Sal’s life. I’m going to let that define how I remember him,” Daniela said. “It’s okay to be angry and sad at the same time, you know.”

  “I thought for a minute maybe we had a chance together.” Cadie’s breath stuttered as if she had already cried the tears she refused to release. “I thought maybe he really was the storybook character I imagined him to be when we were kids. We believed in a lot of things that weren’t real, didn’t we?”

  “I guess it’s time we grew up.” Daniela raised her eyebrows high.

  “I wouldn’t go that far.”

  Daniela laughed. A real laugh, the way she did when they were kids. “I missed you, too.”

  They walked to Daniela’s car, charred earth shattering with every step.

  “I’ll be here when you come back, Cadie Braidy. We don’t need to do this alone anymore.” Daniela waved out the window as her car crept down the blackened path of the driveway.

  Cadie didn’t like the loneliness Garrett’s presence—and his absence—had carved out inside her. Without the tightly bound secrets filling her up, she felt hollow. But lighter. She inhaled deeply. Primordial particles that had been her forest hit the back of her throat and filled her lungs.