Who was the old man who came to the hospital, I wondered. And Roberto, the guy mom had the argument with before the accident. I'd never heard that name before. Did someone actually try to kill her? Was it Roberto?
I was halfway to the parking lot before I realized I didn't have a car anymore. Pools of light glinted off silent cars in their neat rows, an empty slot where I usually parked. When I closed my eyes for a moment I remembered being on Highway 46 over a week ago, reaching down for my phone right before the truck hit. It was a good thing that I didn't see it coming.
I blinked away my tears and looked up into the sky. The night was cool, the street quiet, the light breeze encouraging. I walked toward the Mexican place that had tortillas that nearly rivaled Abuela's although their refried beans—the true test, she always said—were only passable.
When I walked in, I was starving, but once the food arrived, it smelled so familiar I could hardly pick up the fork. A ghost of Abuela's gentle hand seemed to be rubbing my back, urging me to eat. Panic rose at the memory and sealed my throat. Where were they? Why hadn't they called?
I had started to pick at my food when the first fire truck roared by the restaurant's front window, the shrieking sirens shaking the glass with muffled fury. Three more followed, each screeching siren louder than the last as if a sound barrier had been cracked open and their desperate cries slipped in and around everyone and everything.
I asked for a to-go box to take my still warm food with me, a nagging dread pulsing in my stomach in time with the wailing sirens.
I knew before I turned the corner that the flames were coming from my apartment. My head seemed incredibly light and I felt myself beginning to sway.
Do not pass out, Kat. Do not.
The gathered crowd was surprisingly large as if a tour bus had just dropped off a group of tourists. I lingered at the edge of the group, watching the flames shoot out of my bedroom and living room windows with fierce determination.
Everything would be gone. My gear, my clothes, my posters of Big Bend and Hueco Tanks. A deep weight pressed down on my shoulders, driving me into the ground. I weighed 300 pounds, heavy and frozen in place.
I became inexplicably philosophical. At least I was safe. At least I hadn't been home, hadn't taken the sleeping medication Eliah had brought me to help calm the pounding in my head.
I scanned the crowd for my neighbors, for the three guys that lived behind my apartment, for Alyse the balcony gardener on the other side, and David the accountant and acid rock fiend just below. I was about to move in toward one of the firefighters, to let them know that I was all right, when I spotted a very tall man in the crowd. Some would call him freakishly tall.
It was Eliah, but he was almost unrecognizable. In fact, if he hadn't been so tall, I wouldn't have believed it was him. Gone was his awkwardness, the goofy smile, the wide, eager eyes.
His face was transformed into a series of hard edges, a wry smile on lips tightly closed. He narrowed his eyes as a firefighter aimed the hose into my bedroom window, as if disapproving of the effort.
Slowly he began to turn away from the fire, scanning the crowd himself.
I stepped back behind a woman who was holding up a squirming toddler for a better look, hoping the kid's head kept me hidden from view. I stepped backward, bumping a young girl who was cracking her gum in time with the fire.
Taking a deep breath, I calmed the overwhelming need to run, forced my legs into a slow walk of a disinterested stranger. When I glanced back over my shoulder, Eliah was heading over to the firefighter at the nearest truck, his face transforming again, concern slipping into place over his features like a wax falling into a mold.
I tossed my dinner into a trashcan, shoved my hands into my pocket and felt the plastic cassette tape in my pants pocket. My mother's voice rose in my head.
Trust no one, Katarina.
Chapter 10
I'd left San Antonio at noon the next day, having spent the night in Pilar's hospital room. At that point I didn't know where to go, still couldn't reach Abuela when I called from the hospital, and didn't dare call anyone else. Shock was settling in, with its close cousin, panic. Pilar and I talked in hushed voices for hours about the fire, the accident, Antonia, all of it, my head pounding, eyes burning.
"You know, they stopped by after you left that day," Pilar said, adjusting herself on the bed. She was the kind of person that was hard to imagine sleeping for more than an hour at a time.
"They did?" I was confused. "They were gone when I went back to my room."
"It was a couple hours later. They came to warn me about some guy."
"The lawyer from the ropes course?" I could see Calderon, uncomfortable in the leather chair. I hadn't heard from him since the accident.
"No, not him. Some older man—same age as your grandmother. She said he wasn't to be trusted. She refused to give me any details. She said to not let him know where you were or that they had been here."
A few weeks ago I would have said Abuela was being overly dramatic. Sometimes she seemed to see danger everywhere. I had always blamed the telenovelas. Now I didn't know what to think. "She didn't say his name or anything?"
"No. I asked, but she said that wasn't important. That he was just some rancher, then they rushed out of here." She shook her head. "I figured they were going to see you."
We talked for a little while longer, but before long exhaustion smothered my brain. Somewhere in the conversation I'd drifted off, slipping quickly into a dream. I was walking in a dim night, walking toward movement a few yards away. There I saw a couple dancing in flickering candlelight, the sound of a crooning Texas border ballad filling the air. As I approached, I could make out the man. Eliah.
His face was strangely animated, changing over and over as he danced. One moment it was the kind, if over-eager, face of the man I meet a year ago, then it shifted to the hard angles and dead eyes lit by fire, the face I saw last night. Eliah spun his partner and I saw he was dancing with Antonia. Her face was going through the same changes, soft and gentle, relaxed in a moment, then shifting like quicksilver to reveal a harshness, her intelligence burning through every pore. They danced atop of the desert mountain, winds rippling their clothes, their feet lightly sidestepping rocks and cactus as if they'd done this for years, had memorized the exact spot of every stone and thorn. As he twirled her, a sudden gust came from behind me and, without a sound, they tumbled down the mountain side, slipping into a valley filled with smoke. Gone.
I woke as a nurse came in, the lingering sound of music in my ears, my throat filling with smoke from the dream. The nurse, a compact woman, her badge bouncing on the pocket of her lab coat, crossed the room dragging a blood pressure cart. She gave me a friendly nod and moved in to set down her chart. As she took Pilar's vitals, I washed up in the bathroom, only coming out when I heard her soft sole shoes pass the door.
"Bottom line. You have to get back there," Pilar said. Dark circles rimmed her eyes, but that did little to diminish their intensity.
"I know."
She gestured to the room's cabinet and I brought her the scarred leather messenger bag she carried everywhere. She reached into a side pocket, then tossed me her keys.
"Take the truck."
I shook my head. "Pilar, I can't do that. What if something happens?"
Her lips curled into a wry grin. "I'm not going to be driving a stick shift anymore, Kati. I've got no use for that truck." She waved me off. "Go. Call me when you get there."
I reached for her bag to put the keys back. "It's too much, Pilar. I can't..."
"Don't argue with the gimp," she said, grabbing my arm. She hadn't lost an ounce of strength in her arms, arms that could scale a wall better than most climbers in the state. "Take it and find out what the hell's going on."
I'd taken a bus over to Pilar's place and picked up her metallic green Nissan. It had a matching camper shell and was easily 10 years old. It ran like a tank, partially because she'd rebuilt the engine h
erself. The dusty smell of climbing ropes lingered along with the debris of a dozen recent climbs: rocks, leaves, bits of mud knocked off hiking boots. A mini fuschia carabiner hung from the rearview mirror on a length of thin nylon rope with a bendable stick figure climber at one end, posed so it looked like she had just made it to the top of the mirror.
She'd had that hanging from her rearview mirror when I first met her four years ago. She was the only woman on the crew teaching rock climbing that weekend and was by far the best climber. More than once all of us wannabees would watch her gracefully dance up the rock, making it look so easy that we were instilled with a load of false confidence. Every ounce of which would be dashed when we got our feet off level ground.
We were on a break and I had just gotten off my borrowed climbing shoes. Pilar had a ridiculously long stretch of webbing which she was pulling into a series of interconnected loops called a daisy chain. "Do you want to learn how to do this?" she asked me. At her feet were more piles of brightly colored webbing, nylon strips that were set in place to hold the climbing rope to the wall.
"Absolutely," I said, picking up a length of red.
No one in my family knew I was there that weekend. Rock climbing class was my secret, by necessity. When your mother has a traumatic brain injury, nobody is too crazy about the idea of you increasing your chances to get one too.
We were climbing in an area east of town, Hueco Tanks. The desert had the scent of clarity and tenderness seeping out of the ground, set free by the delicate hammer of rainfall that had fallen the day before.
It was a big group, about 30 students, clustered in groups. The fit older guys who were adding to their adventure portfolios. Students who considered this a step up in maturity from skateboarding. A handful of older women who were bonding. Two couples with well-worn packs and hiking shoes that looked like they'd been re-soled. Twice. And the meager collection of singles, both men and women, inserting risk in a life that had been, up to that day, as safe as airbags and over protective mothers could make it.
I fit firmly in the last category, taking my first steps in risk and rebellion as tentatively as possible. I'd taken some self-defense classes, even one semester of karate, but kicking and punching was never my thing. Taking on a boulder sounded more interesting. My feet were crushed into tiny black soled shoes, ballet shoes of the rock, the rubber treated to grip surfaces generally left to the toes of geckos and daddy long-legs. I had spent the morning moving up the tiny protrusions in the surface of the boulder, amazed with each step that I was rising above the ground through the power of my arms, balance of my hips and the magic ballet shoes.
When I reached the top of my first boulder on the first day of climbing, I sat there, watching as the sun sliced through the soggy cloud cover, shining golden beams down on the ground. The land glowed in the slices of light, dust traveling up into the moist air. The rope fell flat against the trail I had just climbed, a very vertical trail of crevices and huecos, holes carved by rainwater, a route that as visible to veteran climbers as an asphalt road, but was still nearly invisible to my beginner's eyes.
If I can do this, I thought, I can do anything. If I can climb up here, reach the top of a rock I swore was impossible to climb just an hour before, I can do anything in the entire world. Including leaving home.
After that, I hooked up with a group of beginning climbers, running into Pilar every now and then. She'd be making her way up much harder climbs with much cooler people. Then two years later, after I finished my training to be a ropes course facilitator, I ran into her again. I'd landed the job at Hill Country Retreat (known as HCR in town) and the group had set up a short trip to Reimer's Ranch, the local crag for climbers.
We came around a curve on the trail and saw a group of climbers, seven or so, all looking up at the woman on the rock wall, up about thirty feet. It was Pilar. She was lead climbing a tough route, climbing from point to point with the rope trailing her. She had three contacts on the wall—one hand was holding onto a thin slice of rock, her feet precisely placed to give her the maximum stretch for clipping into the next bolt. The muscles in her legs were taut, cords of veins crossing the surface as she pulled up a length of black and red rope, secured it in her teeth and reached down for another length.
Her belay partner on the ground, an older, dark-haired guy with deep brown skin stained from sun and sweat and muscles like a linebacker, quickly played out enough rope for her to work with, never taking his eyes off of her. She was more than fifteen feet above her last bolt, a bolt with a carabiner holding the rope that would normally keep her safe from hitting the ground if she slipped or missed the next move. Typically sport climbers, once they get past the first bolt, are relatively secure. If they fall, they'll swing from the pivot point of the carabiner hooked into the first bolt that had been drilled and glued into the wall years ago.
But on some climbs, particularly the more difficult ones, bolts can be much further apart. That means if you fall while climbing between bolts, or worse, right before you manage to clip into the next one, your fall is longer. She now had enough rope out that if she were to miss this move, she'd hit the ground.
Everyone lounging below was silent, leaning forward, leaning toward her, mentally pushing to keep her against the rock wall through the force of their own attention. Pilar showed no signs of strain, seeming casual as if she was standing on an escalator instead of mere millimeters of limestone. There was no wasted movement as she lifted the long loop, the "bite" of rope, and clipped it into the carabiner hanging from the bolt over her head. A collective sigh rippled through the gathered crowd.
"Shit, Pilar," her belay partner said, shaking his head as he began pulling in the slack of the rope.
"What?"
"You had us freaking out." A few members of the group laughed in agreement.
She made a few moves, a smile on her face. "Y'all needed the drama."
"Tell that to my cardiologist."
That day Pilar set up top ropes for our group, lead-climbing routes none of us would dare try on our own. Top roping is the safest way to climb because you are always secured from the top. The rope goes from the belay person to the top of the climb, through two bolts at the top, then back down to the climber. You simply can't fall more than a foot. But someone has to go up the wall first to set the ropes in place, and if you don't have a good enough climber in your group, you're stuck.
Three weeks after I saw Pilar, one of the assistants at HCR got caught with the owner's daughter in the equipment barn. I'd convinced my boss to hire Pilar as the replacement on the facilitating team. Which is why every week I was "catching" on belay one of the best climbers in the state who was falling from platforms on purpose, knowing I would always keep her safe.
She trusted me. Now she didn't have a leg.
I stuffed a duffle with clothes I'd bought from the thrift store with the little money I could pull from an ATM around the corner from the hospital. I barely registered the drive until around midnight.
I pulled into a truck stop in Fort Stockton as my eyes began to shift in their sockets, desperate to close. I crawled into the rear camper bed and woke to the strafing of semi truck headlights pouring through the narrow opening in the curtained windows hours later. I cleaned up, heated up a burrito in the truck stop's micro and hit the road.
The terrain had changed completely from the plains I'd driven through early in the evening. Desert valleys stretched between small mountains, distant brothers to the Franklin Mountains of El Paso. I began to relax, feeling at home in the place I was born, where cactus and granite shared space and solitude. On the passenger seat next to me was a cassette tape recorder from the thrift store, and an unopened pack of batteries. I should listen to it again. Later, I thought.
Streaks of purple were slicing across the sky, sunrise reaching into the night to unlock the darkness ahead of me. When you drive west in the morning, time elongates. Sunrises last twice as long as when you drive away from them, but you can neve
r get going fast enough to really escape. The light will come soon enough, ripping off the comforting darkness that had reduced the size of your world to the glow of your dashboard lights. Then you have to face what the universe has thrown at you, there are no more safe shadows, no warm spots under the covers. The next day arrives, refusing to be ignored or avoided.
I'd be in El Paso in a matter of hours, but I had no idea what to do when I got there. Was it safe to see Abuela and Antonia? Would I be putting them in danger? Did they know what happened? Who was the man they warned Pilar about?
Eliah's face flashed across my mind. Not the face he wore for months while I attempted to avoid him in social settings. The face at the fire. The one that made the pit of my stomach get cold and hard and my courage shrink into a tight little ball. I checked the review mirror, wondering if he was back there, somewhere, figuring out that I wasn't dead.
Getting home made so much more sense hours ago, but with miles under me it started to seem dangerously idiotic. If Eliah was looking for me, it would be the first place he'd go. He knew I was from El Paso, although I'd never gone into much detail, I didn't imagine it would be hard for him to find my family there. Who the hell was he? He obviously wasn't the glad-handing geeky insurance guy I thought he was when he came to the ropes course.
There were dozens of times I'd seen him over the last few months, but I couldn't remember anything that came close to the face I saw at the fire. I never saw that coming. What else was I missing?
Fabens was the next place with a decent size gas station. I had to try to call home, maybe pick up one of those prepaid cell phones. But first, church. Antonia said to go to the church, to see Father Henry.
Chapter 11
The church in San Elizario was the less popular sister of the missions in El Paso, resting in the historical shadow of Ysleta and Socorro, but no less beautiful. The plaza in front of the church still had the pecan trees, their trunks circled with a dirty white skirt of paint to discourage ants who, as the story went, disliked the feeling of the paint on their feet. Ants never seemed that picky to me.
When I Knew You Page 5