by Alisa Valdes
Realizing how foolish I was being, driving like a maniac, I stepped on the brakes, and slowed back down to 45 miles per hour. I picked the prayer card up again - and, again, nothing chased me. I set the card down once more, and again the lone coyote cantered alongside me in shadow, its posture suggestive of patient disappointment. I refused to look at it, though I felt it wanted me to. Within moments, the thing gave up trotting alongside me, and began to smash its body into the side of the Land Rover. Thump after sickening thump. I felt it, and I heard it.
“Omigod, omigod, omigod,” I chanted. I could understand visual hallucinations, but physical and audible ones?
I looked at it, and this time the coyote did not disappear. The act of hurling its body against a moving Land Rover had no obvious physical repercussions on the coyote. In fact, it seemed to grow larger with each furious leap against my car. Before I knew it, the coyote had leapt onto the hood of the Land Rover, and was standing in my line of vision, blocking the road.
I scrambled to find the card on the seat with my hand again, and held it up between myself and the animal. The coyote seemed to lose strength instantly, as soon as its eyes made out what was on the card, but did not leave the hood. Rather, it crouched there, unsteady, almost pitifully holding on to the metal as well as it could with its paws and claws, and shaking its head the way dogs do when they’ve bumped them on something. I was astonished. I turned the card toward me now, and began to read the words out, in as loud a voice as I could manage. I would read a few, then flash the card back at the animal, read some more, on and on - all the while trying to concentrate on the road before me. Cars passed, and the coyote disappeared, only to reappear in the exact same spot as soon as we were alone on the road once more. I read the card again. Louder this time, though in a quivering, terrified voice. The animal seemed provoked by this, but also crippled by it. The anger apparent in its eyes no longer served to strengthen it.
By the time I finished reciting the prayer, which, it turned out, was for protection from evil - surprise, surprise - the coyote was small, tiny, the size of a dog not much bigger than Buddy. I stared at it in astonishment. It seemed so pitiful now, I almost felt sorry for it. I had to force myself to remember that moments before, it had been trying to run me off the road. I had to fight the impulse to rescue and cuddle it. It shivered on the hood, against the wind, and seemed to be slipping every few seconds. Its eyes entreated me to help it. I had to remind myself that this was all just my mind, playing tricks on me. The coyote represented insanity, and I refused to sink into that abyss.
Looking into the eyes of a tiny, helpless animal that was now somehow smaller than my beloved Chihuahua back home, I felt a meanness come over me. I would not be made crazy by a car accident. I would not relinquish who I’d been.
“To hell with you,” I said, looking directly at the creature. I said the prayer again, and pressed the pedal to the metal, speeding along a straight stretch of road with all my might. When the speedometer hit 75, the coyote seemed to dry up like a scrap of road kill or mangy wolf jerky. Unable to hold on to the hood any longer, it flew away into the night, like a bat. I was almost to Santa Fe by then, with only 12 miles to go to the upscale enclave known as El Dorado.
I had never been so happy to be that close to my father’s house. I couldn’t wait to get home. All I wanted was to crawl into bed, and sleep.
When I finally pulled into my father’s driveway, I called my mother as she’d requested I do. I was trembling, my voice quaking with fear and worry.
“Are you okay?” my mother asked me.
“I don’t think so.” My voice broke, and I began to sob. “I think I need to see that doctor after all, mom. I think I’m losing it.”
My mother didn’t ask me why; rather, she sighed at the inconvenience of having an imperfect daughter to contend with. Ever the expert on everything under the sun, she assured me, without conviction, that “this kind of thing is normal after a traumatic event,” and promised to make an appointment for me with a child psychologist she knew. She told me she loved me, that I was going to be fine, and said she’d come get me if I needed her to. But I didn’t need her to. What I needed, I decided, was sleep. I went inside, asked to be excused from dinner because I wasn’t feeling well, and locked myself in the bedroom that during the week was Missy’s crafting room and on weekends was reserved for me. I got into my pajamas, crawled beneath the goose down comforter, and hardly able to remember the way life felt before my crash - before I’d begun this slide into insanity - I fell into a deep slumber.
♦
Demetrio stood across the room with his chin up and his eyes blazing through me. I didn’t know where we were, only that it was a large, dim chamber that smelled of damp earth; cold, with thick adobe walls and a high ceiling girded by crooked vigas that looked like the roots of a massive tree. It could have been an ancient church, maybe, or a medieval dungeon, except that it appeared to be perfectly circular. It was hard to tell where I was, or what it was. It was something old and echoing, cold, damp and mysterious, and if not for the flickering yellow light of a few dozen lit candles, absolutely dark.
In the flickering shadows behind Demetrio were vague people in outfits I recognized as belonging to Aztec Dancers (my mother took me to the Mariachi and Mexican Folkloric Christmas Fiesta at Popejoy Hall every December, I was down with the history of my dad’s peeps) - meaning feathered headdresses, no shirts, rattles lashed to their ankles, golden chest plates, and little fringed skirts. Music played somewhere, and they moved. I stood mesmerized and watched, until the music faded and the dancers, one by one, disappeared. I was alone in the chamber now with Demetrio.
He wore a strange outfit, a thick gown of some sort, brown with a wide, knotted rope about the waist, the kind of thing a monk might wear, with a long hood worn hanging down his back. He was planted next to a huge wooden table, crooked and rooty as the vigas; it was covered with burning white candles. There was very little sound here, just the soft trickle of something unwholesome dripping, dripping, dripping, somewhere in the distance. I was freezing cold. My feet and the tip of my nose were numb with cold. I shivered. I crossed my arms over my chest, and realized, to my horror, that I wore only a thin white nightgown, almost transparent, one I’d had when I was younger, only it fit me now. I might as well have been wearing nothing. I was afraid to be seen, naked beneath it, and I whirled around, looking for somewhere to hide from Demetrio’s smoldering gaze. But there was nothing else in the part of the cavernous room where I stood. Just me and the frigid hard dirt of the floor, the lumpy earthen walls, and the clear, almost metallic tones of water dropping slowly into a pool somewhere out of view.
“Come here, mamita. Ven.” Demetrio motioned for me with his hands, as though directing a symphony. The motion stirred up a mild breeze in the entire room. “Don’t be afraid. I won’t hurt you.”
“But my nightgown. I’m embarrassed.”
He smiled gently, and stepped forward with his head tilted to one side and one corner of his mouth held playfully in his teeth. As he did so, the brown robe he was wearing dissolved around him, melted into dark nothingness. He stood before me in just a pair of white cotton pants, the kind you might wear for a karate lesson, with a dark red sash belted at his trim waist. I gasped as something caught in my throat, and a thrill went up my spine. His body was exquisitely sculpted, formed perfectly; his skin looked smooth as a new bar of soap, and in the candlelight was the color of a soft caramel candy. I wanted to touch him so badly.
“Now you ain’t alone with your shame,” he said with a wink. “Come.”
I hesitated. Shivered. Trembled like a stinking human Chihuahua. I liked him, I wanted to be with him, but I didn’t like this place. This cold, humid, strange, suffocating place. I felt like I couldn’t get enough air. This wasn’t where I wanted to be when we kissed for the first time, I realized. This wasn’t where I ever wanted to be at all, frankly.
“I can’t,” I said.
“Sure yo
u can,” he told me, as he stepped forward again. “All you gotta do is trust me. You do trust me, don’t you mami?”
Shivering, I stepped toward him, brought my other foot next to the first, and stepped again, walking the way people do in weddings. Step-together. Step-together. He did likewise, until we met halfway. The dripping sound grew louder, and I felt a cold drop fall from the ceiling onto the top of my head.
I wanted to scream, but Demetrio stopped me by putting a finger to my lips and saying, “Shh, you don’t want them to know you’re here. You shouldn’t be here. I snuck you in.”
“I know! I knew that. I don’t want to be here,” I gabbled, frantically.
“Shh,” he repeated. “Silence. Please. For me. It’s okay. You’re cool as long as you’re with me. I’m pretty sure of that.”
“Pretty sure?” I stared at him, dumbfounded. “That’s not good enough!”
“It’s the best we got,” he told me. “No more talking. Hush.”
For a split second, I heard a crinkling noise, and saw a very tall, very skinny figure of a man with very thick eyebrows slink past us in the distance, glowering.
“Hey,” I called out, but the figure was gone.
Demetrio seemed not to notice or not to care, as he unfolded my hands from across my chest, and held them in his own. As had been the case before, I was filled with a deep, profound warmth. The water droplet on my head spread, and was warm. The chill and fear in me simply disappeared, as he looked into my eyes. He pulled me in closer to him, and embraced me. I relaxed in his arms, and wrapped my own around his firm, solid body.
“I’m so confused.”
“Shh.”
He unwrapped one arm from around me, and used the tips of his fingers to pull he nightgown down over my left shoulder, exposing it to the cold air. With the other arm he reached out across the enormous distance to the table, his arm stretching unnaturally. He snatched a candle from the table and brought it back to us, his arm contracting now.
“How...?”
“Don’t ask, mamita. Not now.”
He wet his thumb and finger in his mouth, and used them to squelch the flame. Then he ground the wick between them, to make a fine ash. He used this substance and his fingertips to draw a small triangle on my skin, charging my skin with electricity as he did so.
“What are you doing?” My voice was a scrap of a whisper.
He answered calmly, confidently, in a low, dark voice. “In Ancient Egypt the triangle symbolized intelligence and love. That’s why I like it for you, Maria. You’re my smart mamita. I can talk correct English in front of you and you won’t front. That’s cool, girl. The Cheyenne Indians use the triangle tip of an arrow to symbolize male power. That’s me. I also like the triangle because in Buddhism it’s a way to invoke love energy and promote union with all good things. And there’s the Christian holy trinity, of course. In ancient Greece, Pythagoras believed numbers, math and all things mystical were connected, and he thought this because of the structure of the perfect right triangle, which we still call the Pythagorean triangle, where, I’m sure they taught you in your fancy school, mamita, the sum of the areas of the two sides equals the square on the hypotenuse. The universe is pretty simple, ultimately, but it is also infinitely complex. Dope, right?”
“How - how do you know all this?” I asked him. “You said you’re just a simple country boy. You’re a gang member. Why are you speaking so well? Your grammar - and I mean this respectfully - but it usually sort of sucks.”
His mouth turned up in a delicious, almost wicked grin, and he laughed at me softly.
“Turn that triangle upside down, and it might be a country boy’s bucket, or sacred cup to carry me in when I’m not with you. Nothing is ever as simple as it seems.”
Next, he took the same finger and used it to tilt my chin up so that my mouth was inches, then centimeters, from his.
“You said we can’t kiss,” I told his lips as they moved toward me. “You didn’t want me. I tried to kiss you and you didn’t want me. I was so embarrassed.”
“Shh. That wasn’t it. That was never my reason. I always wanted it. From the first time I saw you, even as messed-up-looking and bloody as you were.”
He moved his face closer to mine, so close that I could feel the breath coming from his nose and mouth. He stopped, and just looked at me, from close range. I was hypnotized by his eyes, completely lost in them, and covered head to toe with goose bumps. He smelled of sunshine again, not like a normal boy with normal teeth and the habit of eating food with them.
“I wasn’t good enough,” I whined, softly. “You didn’t want me earlier.”
Fury flared behind his eyes for a brief moment, and disappeared again. It was terrifying to see his potential for anger, given how passive he’d been the other times I’d seen him, but I couldn’t move. I was still paralyzed.
“Be quiet, Maria. I have wanted you since before I met you,” he growled, his voice impatient, ripe with need and want, and a little wild. I was a little scared by this, but not as scared as I was strangely excited.
He moved closer, and I closed my eyes, my body flushing with warmth, waiting for the kiss. But it never came.
What did come was a horrible, insistent banging sound, like a hammer on wood. It jolted me, and Demetrio quickly disappeared, just as he had before, in a twinkling flash of lights. The room vanished, too, and I floated in a black ether.
“No!” I looked down and there was no floor beneath my feet. The cold had returned, and I floated for a moment in an inky darkness, then fell with the weight of a stone in an empty well. I screamed. Again, the banging. A hammer on wood? No. I fell and fell to the sound, and finally struck the bottom of something, jolted out of the dream, violently.
I opened my eyes, panting, and looked around, expecting monsters and dripping water, stones and darkness. But I wasn’t in a chamber with Demetrio, or falling through space, and no one was hammering anything. Rather, I was on the queen bed in the crafting/Maria room at my father’s house. The morning sun was slipping in through the slats in the blinds, and someone was banging on the large wooden door, which I’d locked the night before.
“Maria! Good morning!”
“Hold on,” I groaned, shivering. I was on top of the blanket and comforter, having managed to wriggle out of them sometime in the night.
A dream. It had only been a dream. Of course it had. It was part of the whole Maria-is-going-bonkers thing.
“Egg white omelet is ready!” called Missy’s voice - Missy’s horribly cheerful, horribly childish, horribly clueless voice. My stepmother was a fitness instructor and cheerleading coach, and very into egg whites, makeup and designer jeans that showed off the flat belly my dad once said he’d married her for.
“I’d like the yolks please. Whatever yolks you have, they’re mine,” I said, just to bug her. “Mix them up with some butter.”
I hope this would flummox her, and it worked. I was met with confused silence for a moment as Missy gathered together what few functioning neurons she had in that pretty little head of hers.
“Uhm. Well, I only buy the whites, in a carton. A jar. And we don’t do butter in this house. Missy doesn’t eat butter.”
“Got donuts?” I asked.
Another long, confused silence. “Of course not. Missy doesn’t eat donuts.”
Missy tended to talk about herself in the third person for some reason when she was discussing her diet or exercise habits. She had her own fitness company, Fit Missy, with videos and a web site and a couple of D-list celebrity clients who summered in Santa Fe.
“Well, Maria does. Maria eats donuts and egg yolks and butter.”
I heard Missy cough. “Your heart attack, Miss Sunshine. Breakfast is ready and your dad told me to get you up so that we could leave the girls with you while we go to he gym and the spa. Your dad and I need some quality alone time anyway.”
I stuck my finger down my throat at this information. I didn’t want to imagine what that mig
ht mean. I also didn’t know why my dad and Missy always seemed to think of my weekend visits as little more than the chance to have a free babysitter for their twin toddlers, Moet and Chandon, both four years old and named for a brand of French champagne that I imagine Missy must need in order to be around my father. The twins were sort of tragic - coiffed and puffy as little French poodles, and dressed up for showing off like show ponies with ribbons in their tails.
Every weekend I ended up trying to get my younger half-sisters to play in mud, to jump on beds, to eat candy. Basically, I did all I could to help them realize that life was about more than tiny Coach handbags (yes, they already had three each), dieting (yes, they were four and on a diet!) and acting cute for male approval - the three areas in which their mother had tremendous experience and expertise. And while I tried to introduce the tiny clones of Missy to things like, oh, you know, books, my dad and stepmom went off in dad’s Porsche, to soak in a hot springs somewhere in the mountains or get their couple’s mud massages or have their chakras balanced by a scam artist pretending to be a yogi from India, or whatever other garbage they did that made me and my mom sick.
“Your dad called a plumber. He’ll be here in an hour. We need you up.”
“Fine. Give me a few minutes to get dressed,” I griped.
It was probably better that Missy and my dad left me alone. At least I could relax a little. I also remembered that Kelsey would be driving up to hang out with me (and, apparently, the twins) today, and to spend the night.
“Yay!” cried Missy. I could almost see her jumping up and down for joy. “Missy will be downstairs with the egg whites and the wheat grass juice. You’re a doll, even if you poison yourself with donuts and too much sleep, and could stand to lose five pounds - and I say this because I love you.”