Her arms lay limp at her sides as she sat, slumped in the corner, something sharp and metal digging into her back. But she couldn’t feel it, she couldn’t feel anything. Except the heat. A small trickle of light slid in, illuminating a thin line across her skin and she sank into it, her eyes searching every translucent particle as it floated passed her. She held a hand out, letting the light dance across it as she tried to see if Diego’s blood was still there. The faint metallic smell was gone, replaced by the sweet sulfur smell of her body as it baked within the back of the truck.
She had no idea how long they had been moving but finally darkness fell. A car passed by, the first one in hours and it threw light against the truck, sliding it between the steel hinges and the door. In that second, before it swelled into nothing, it highlighted Liliana’s crouching frame and she pulled her knees to her chest, cupping her palms around the arches of her feet.
Holding tight to herself, she began to rock along with each lurch and jostle of the truck, imagining the worn rubber tires carrying her over hard sand flecked with displaced gravel and copper weeds. She counted each revolution like the long hand on a clock as she sat there, trapped in a constant state of motion. She tried to flex her toes, the numbness evaporating in sharp pricks that traveled to her knees. She tried to move her legs, but they were so rigid that unbending them was like trying to untwist the head of a coat hanger.
The temperature finally dropped and Liliana could feel the breath thickening at the edges of her lips as rain began to beat against the roof and sides of the truck. In the dark, blind and deaf to everything, the harsh battle of rain against steel began to lull her to sleep. But a restless burning was beginning to swell inside her, a fever making camp deep within her skull. She pressed her flaming forehead to the door of the truck, imagining burning a hole right through the metal.
Her mouth hung open slightly as the insides of her cheeks began to feel as if they were splitting open, small drops of blood settling between the corners of her mouth. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had something to drink.
She came to with a start, hands fumbling for her ears as the sound of a shotgun unloading trembled just on the other side of the thin metal screen separating the driver’s seat and the back. She opened her eyes, examining the darkness as her heart began knocking with the fierceness of a bird in flight against the inside of her chest.
There was yelling just outside the truck and Liliana tried to pull herself onto her knees but she slipped onto her right shoulder, her cheek grating across the floor. Suddenly the metal mouth of the truck fell off its hinges and sand the color of gold flickered against the violet sky. Her eyelids flinched at the light and they shuddered closed as she felt hands wedge themselves under her arms.
She made her body stiff, her limbs heavy, as she clawed at the floor of the truck. She wasn’t aware of when she stopped fighting but suddenly she felt the cool buttons of someone’s shirt against her face. She felt the breeze, cool and sliding over her skin. And then she felt her father’s square chin resting on her forehead, the moon floating behind his left cheek brighter than the sun.
Chapter 45
Liliana
Her stiff fingers climbed to the rough cotton ties of the hospital gown and peeled them from the indentions they had made in her skin. The IV in her wrist went taught as she moved and she winced behind gritted teeth. When she opened her eyes, she saw her father, elbows on his knees, his eyes frantic as they searched her face.
Her eyes drew closed again and she felt as he placed one of his large hands on the curve of her skull, gently squeezing her. The sensation seemed to subdue the ache that had settled within her bones, readying her body for sleep but she pushed down the weariness and blinked. She watched her father through heavy lashes, noticing the reflection of her face pulsating in his large, dark eyes and felt his other hand, dry and calloused reach for her thumb.
“It was hard enough on you losing one parent. I didn’t want you to know you had really lost them both.”
Liliana’s heart swelled into her throat and she could feel it sharp and throbbing there.
He curled her fingers into both hands and brought them to his face.
“You are my daughter Liliana. My daughter.”
And the words crept in through Liliana’s eyes and ears, settling into her heart, into her very core and she trembled at the design of it all. Because it was fate and not blood that was the divine vine that strung them together and as she lay there, every inch of her aching, she could feel it, deep and fervent in her veins. He was right. She was his daughter.
Epilogue
Liliana found the lip of Diego's boot and helped him pull them off, resting them in the sand beside him. He'd been recovering indoors and away from the sun for almost two weeks and they chose a spot free from shade, where the lapping water carved a crisp white line along the beach. As the water rushed toward them, he kept his knees bent and drawn into his chest, his legs unwilling to move save for the guidance of Liliana’s touch. She gently tugged on his ankle, pulling his feet toward the ocean as she pulled herself into his chest.
She finally settled there between his outstretched legs, her back pressed against him the way she had when straddling the branch of the Ombu tree as a wave ran up the smooth sand and fell apart against their knees. Diego shivered, his arms growing tense and Liliana reached her hand around his neck, pulling his ear to her mouth.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
“Better,” he said, though that same grating weariness still trembled in his voice.
The bullet had sliced through Diego’s lower hip and burst through his appendix. Another had lodged itself into his right arm, while the left had lost a good bit of flesh where another stray bullet had grazed him and he'd had to have emergency surgery. When she saw him, an IV in his wrist, and the strings on his hospital gown digging into the skin around his neck, she had climbed into his bed with him, resolved to sleeping there every night until he was released.
The owner of the motel had been in pursuit of his van when he saw Diego’s truck overturned in the ditch. When the paramedics arrived Diego was unconscious on the ground, blood staining the soil from his shoulder to the edge of his knees. A couple of stitches, a fever, and severe dehydration were the extent of Liliana’s injuries. Though a stiffness still lingered in her bones, riled by the darkness of night as she was still trying to learn how to sleep again.
Liliana grew quiet, absorbing the rapid thrum in Diego's chest as he eyed the water over her shoulder. She could feel the way his lungs shuddered, the way his arms grew tight around her waist and she knew it wasn't just the water, that it wasn't just her uncle or the war. She knew it was her—his pain a physical manifestation of her relentlessness and as if he could feel it in her fingertips, limp against his palm or in the arch if her back as she drew toward the tide, he rested his chin on her shoulder, lips poised next to her ear.
“I’m ok," he said, the familiarity of their cadence flat and hollow.
“I know.” Liliana barely breathed the words, letting the wind take them before they could reach her own ears. “But I…”
“Please. Don’t say it again."
But it wasn't another apology perched on Liliana's lips. In fact there was nothing coherent at all. What she wanted to say, what she needed him to know was that she was still afraid. Afraid of how the truth would reconstruct their lives, afraid of how it would ruin Nita, afraid of how it had ruined her father, and afraid that if it did the same to Diego that he would hate her for it.
Liliana could see her father, the way his face had changed when she told him what Raul had said, what he had done—the brother who'd been his shield, his everything when they were boys, and how there was not an ounce of recognition floating there in his gaze. She thought of her mother’s journal, of the night Raul and his friend attacked her just yards from Manuel’s bedroom and she imagined that must have been the face Isabella had seen when she told him what his brother had don
e. He didn’t want to believe it then, but now he had no choice. Liliana had watched him, her father, their silent core, as he hadn't just wept but as all six and a half feet of him spilled onto the floor in an unrecognizable heap, as if he knew he could have done something, as if he could see so clearly now the role he had played in Isabella’s death.
Ana had sent Liliana and her sister to Andrés’ and Diego’s until she could get Manuel off the floor and into bed. They waited there for four hours while Diego’s father made them coffee and Diego fiddled with the TV antennae, trying to find a channel Nita would like. But it was as though they had just traded one darkness for another, every word Diego said stifled beneath a grief all his own. She could feel it in the way he stiffened next to her on the couch, every inch of him recoiling, and in the way his skin grew taught, muscles rippled along his back when he was trying again and again and again to move, to flex his fingers, to be in command of his body again. And all she could do was watch.
When they finally returned home Isabella’s death clung to everything with a new fervency and just like he had when his wife first disappeared, Manuel surrendered to the solitude of his bedroom. Liliana still remembered those days when all their father did was stay in their room, getting drunk off of her smell, her old clothes—the things she had left behind. But her things were gone now and so his method of torture behind that closed door was a silent mystery.
Raul had still been a prisoner in his own body, held against his will in that hospital bed, the cancer burning through him while his brother, trying to reconstruct his past from the new truth that had destroyed everything, contemplated what to do with him. A week went by, then two, and though indignation had burned in Liliana those first few days, strangling her with a confusion and impatience that only delayed her father’s decision that much more, the flames had finally begun to settle into a numb indifference that finally allowed her to breathe again. But in the interim, fate, which Liliana had come to learn wasn’t just an intangible contract but a living, winding, burning thing made the decision Manuel was too broken to make. And so, despite his indecision, the dead took Raul anyway. Though who collected his soul—mercy or contrition just became one of the many things they would never know for sure.
Still, it was something and in a war where so few had been persecuted for their crimes, where so many were still living and breathing and walking the very streets they’d once dressed in blood, something was so much, something was everything. But while Liliana was able to cling to that ease, regardless of how ephemeral, Diego still lingered in that dark place between fear and healing.
The doctors had recommended a rehab program to help him relieve the stiffness in his right arm; he could barely lift it without pain and he still didn’t have the complete use of his fingers. He’d stayed in the hospital, recovering for about a week, and during the past four he’d travelled to the city twelve times for rehab. Liliana had gone with him, learning from the nurse so that she could help Diego do his exercises at home, sitting with him when frustration drained his body of all of its energy, and always watching over her shoulder as she quickly led them through that familiar dimly lit parking lot. It was hard on him, but it was hard on her too, seeing the anger flicker in his eyes, noticing it lingering there, even when he was looking at her.
He’d tried to hide it, but it seemed to radiate from his entire body, every cell trembling with the hunger to brush his fingers across those strings, to strum and feel the vibrations against his skin, tingling into his forearm. Without it he felt like he was dead and no matter how hard he tried to hide it, Liliana was starting to sense the ghost in him. She could feel him sinking and it rising to the surface, crawling over the parts of him that were still alive and burying them beneath its shadow. And it made Liliana hate herself.
She felt the tears, wavering there at the edge of her lashes as Diego leaned forward to rest his head on her shoulder and give his ribs some relief. She heard the air cutting through his teeth and she reached for his hand even though she knew nothing, not even her touch would be enough to rile his senses. She let go, fingers crawling instead to the water’s edge where the tide was disappearing into the sand as the sun coaxed her eyes closed.
She thought about Diego, about how he was now the one thing that she had wanted to be more than anything that night on the dock—completely and irrevocably numb. But the truth was she wasn’t. Not then, not now. She could still feel everything—the ink rising off the pages of Isabella’s journal, the steel door of the truck falling closed, the coarse hospital gown her uncle wore the night he told her how he killed her mother. And Diego’s lips hot on her skin, his fingers curled into the hair at the nape of her neck, his arms hooked around her waist.
She looked out over the ocean, to the invisible horizon line where it spilled into nothing, to the place where so many people had abandoned their bodies, to the place where they had been buried, where her mother had been buried. For Diego, the ocean was a mass grave from which he recoiled, but Liliana didn’t recoil, she didn’t move an inch. She turned to Diego who shaded them with the palm of his hand and he searched her face, his dark eyes so still Liliana could see the flux of her own staring back. And then she took his face in her hands, and he did the same, and she pressed her mouth to his until he was all she could feel, all she could taste, and she was drowning in him, in all of the things they would never, could never take from her, in all of the things they didn’t bury.
The tide surged, spilling over their legs but Diego didn’t move. He sat there, still and consenting as she devoured him, her fingers curling around his limp wrist and for the briefest of moments, for just a fraction of a second, he thought he could feel her. But then she slipped from his arms and Diego turned, watching as she strode up the beach before stopping at the dilapidated shed and slipping inside. She emerged with the strap of his guitar strung over her shoulder and the sight of it flushed against her, the face worn and cracking spurred his lungs.
She stopped, her shadow spilling over him as she said, “Do you want to try?”
“I can’t,” he said.
She knelt down in front of him, the wood knocking against her knee, wrapping them in a primordial hum.
“Here.”
She settled between his legs again and then reached for him, leading the fingers of his left hand to the frets, placing them there gently the way he had done the afternoon he’d tried to teach her how to play. She reached for his right hand and she could feel his breath, stifled against the back of her neck, waiting. But instead of draping it over the guitar, she drew it around her waist, resting his fingers against the inside of her thigh. And then she started strumming, a low melody vibrating against Diego’s knee that set his bones buzzing. He drew closer, meeting her skin and then he pressed his fingers to the metal strings, feeling that familiar cold bite as the ridges drove into his fingers, no longer calloused. And then together, with his chin resting on Liliana’s shoulder, his lips trembling by her ear, they began to play.
The Things They Didn't Bury Page 22