Viridiana looked out the window, which had no proper view. But the moon was out. She could look at the moon and think of the coyote in the sky.
“I had no idea who they were,” Viridiana said. This wasn’t a lie.
Because she’d thought Gregory was Montgomery Clift taking her in his arms and dancing with her, he in his tux, and she in a white dress which bared her shoulders.
It turned out she was wrong.
So, no, she hadn’t known who they were, she hadn’t known what movie she was in, hadn’t known the ending or the sort of music that would play over the credits.
Viridiana sat back on the bed and he put away the newspaper and wrapped an arm around her, so that she might better rest her head against his chest. She rubbed her foot against his leg.
“What day are you leaving?” she asked. She knew he had stretched his departure for a while now and she knew why. He was fond of her.
“Thursday,” he said. “I’m thinking of buying Reynier’s car.”
“You’re going to drive back?”
“I don’t like to drive, but the bus was a mess. Plus, the car is beautiful. You like it too, right?”
“Yes,” Viridiana said.
“I was thinking you might need one in Mexico City. I can’t handle the traffic, but you might not mind.”
She glanced up at him. He’d made no promises to her, which was fine with Viridiana. Gregory had promised her the stars and that turned out to be a crock of shit. It was better to avoid big pronouncements.
“You talked about going to Mexico City,” he said. “Why not go with me? I have a big place in a nice area. You wouldn’t have to worry about a thing.”
“Except you tiring of me,” she said simply.
“Could be the other way around.”
“Could be,” she conceded.
“The odds are in your favour. I’m bad with women.”
“That’s terribly romantic.”
She meant it as a joke, but he looked bashful and shook his head. “I’m saying it all wrong. I know it. But you… how about it? How about you give the capital a try with me?”
“They don’t need you in Boston?”
“No. I never did like it, anyway.”
To reply too quickly, too eagerly, might make him think she was desperate for this. Maybe she was, but she didn’t want him thinking she was a cheap souvenir he’d picked on the side of the road, like the shells of turtles and the shark jaws they sold to tourists. She decided to push back, rather than accept him with a smile.
She was silent and serious and he was forced to explain himself more.
“You said something to me one time: do I make you nervous? You do, if I have to be honest. But I like that feeling,” he said. “It feels unlike me.”
How odd. She felt unlike herself these days, and she wasn’t sure she’d ever go back to being herself at all. Which was fine, because there had been a girl who had arranged the murder of her lover, left him to bleed out in a house by the seaside, but she was ready to be an entirely different girl. One who lived not in Desengaño, but in Polanco. Who rested her hand on Mr. Landry’s arm and drove that sleek car he’d promised and who laughed a full laugh, with no regrets and no worries.
Viridiana sat on Lawrence’s lap and wrapped her arms around his neck, looking at him in the eye, but still she didn’t speak. He ran his hands down her back, pulling her even closer to him. She decided not to give him an answer now, to leave him waiting and tremulous. To drag all the desire and the tension, until early in the morning hours when she said a simple yes.
She had learned to put on a performance and realized it would serve her in the future.
Epilogue
The night before their departure she dreamt a man in a yellow jacket was tossing food to the sharks. He tossed them a human foot, an arm, a leg. This was not a nightmare because it didn’t unsettle her. She surveyed the scene calmly, and in the morning she decided to stop by the beach.
The sharks were gone, they would not return until the next summer. It was only the sea and the jaws of the great monsters, still dangling from a wooden rack.
She ran her fingers along one of the huge jaws. You’d think them tough as iron. They were so delicate. So is a lump of coal, before the titanic forces under the Earth transform it into a diamond which can be faceted.
The kid from the shack had dragged out a mounted turtle and was trying to sell it to Lawrence, who kept saying no. The kid kept saying, “bargain”. Two fishermen sat in plastic chairs by the shack and chuckled, looking at Lawrence, then at Viridiana.
It didn’t bother her. She was used to being a celebrity in town. One more reason to be leaving, even if her stepfather had made a weak argument about how she should remain with them.
You didn’t leave home unless you were married. You certainly didn’t leave home unmarried and on the arm of a foreigner.
She had to go somewhere, and Mexico City was fine with her.
“Don’t you come back,” her mother had told her, quietly, while they stood next to the birdcages on the patio. Viridiana realized that she wasn’t being cruel by saying this. That the way she said it, with tears in her eyes, it was almost like a prayer. Don’t you ever come back.
She wondered if someone had told her mother the same thing, and what it must have been to return, but it didn’t matter. Viridiana was no salmon who’d trace its course back to its birthplace. She had the money she had earned during the summer, and she had a ride out of town. She even had an apartment in Polanco, because Lawrence Landry was a crazy fool who was taking her to live with him.
And even if the Boy Scout reneged on that, Viridiana had no doubt she could find her way around the city, that she was born to ride its subway, cross its streets and sit at its restaurants, wearing a fashionable coat, with her nails done and her lipstick very red.
Lawrence was still talking to the boy, while she turned her head and looked toward the mound of dead sharks in the distance. You couldn’t tell what it was from where she was standing.
She remembered coming here with Gregory and looking at those carcasses. For a moment, her hands went to the camera dangling from her neck and she had the strong desire to dash it against the ground, as if to appease her guilt.
But that would have been silly. He was dead, and Daisy was likely dead, too.
If she wasn’t, Viridiana doubted she was anywhere nearby. The police wanted her for questioning. If she had half a brain, she had fled the country.
“Then this is the shark beach,” Lawrence said, finally extricating himself from the boy and standing next to her, sunglasses in hand. “It looks peaceful.”
“For now. A storm’s coming,” she said.
He looked up at the sky, surprised. It was pure and unblemished, but you could smell it, like the salt in the air.
“It doesn’t look like it,” he said.
“Trust me,” she said.
She took a picture of that sleepy seashore and watched it develop before her eyes. When the rains come, that’s when the waters are stirred and the dead haunt the shores, but they’d have to walk a long way to find Viridiana. How many kilometers? It would take them years to find her if they moved in the slow way ghosts always move.
Whatever happened, she’d endure the haunting.
Not that it was that difficult to endure. It seemed to her that the summer had been nothing but a cheap B-movie she’d watched late at night on the battered TV set. Had that been her? It had been a Viridiana before Viridiana.
“Let me see,” Lawrence said and she showed him the picture. “Would you look at that. As pretty as a postcard.”
She tucked the picture away and pulled his head down for a kiss. He complied happily.
The boy in the shack was making a bracelet and stared at them when they walked by, hand in hand. She’d never bought anything from the kid. She paused, because this was different. This time she was leaving and she was taking the pic
ture as a reminder. She might as well take something else as a trophy.
“How much?” she asked, pointing at a shark’s tooth dangling from a cord.
The boy smiled, a gap-toothed smile that showed he knew all along that she’d buy his wares.
She handed him the money and put on the necklace.
“Want me to take a picture of the two of you?” the kid asked.
Viridiana took off her hat. Lawrence placed his arm around her and they smiled. The kid pressed a button and the camera spit out a picture.
They went back to the car. It was Reynier’s fine old car. Lawrence had come to town with a single suitcase, riding the bus, but he was leaving with two suitcases and a girl.
They got into the car and Lawrence placed the camera on the dashboard. The tape recorder was at her side and the map was in the glove compartment, but she didn’t need it. Even with her eyes closed she could have directed him to La Paz, onto the ferry, and back to Mexico City.
“Not too shabby, I think,” Lawrence said holding up the picture of them together and handing it to her.
Viridiana examined it. She thought she looked different. That her hair was black and her eyes were as dark as they’d always been, but it was as if she had reassembled herself.
She had found herself that summer and peeled off that first skin she wore to become someone new. An ambia ago, a world before, she had met three strangers and they’d died. The desert swallowed them but it did not devour Viridiana.
She would not apologize for that, because here she was, at the beginning.
Her beginning, the beginning of everything.
“Wait,” Lawrence said, grabbing the tape recorder and holding up the microphone. “You’ve got to say something.”
“What am I supposed to say?”
“Anything. You’re always talking to this thing, and you were the one who told me you wanted to document the trip back.”
“It doesn’t mean I have anything to say,” she protested.
He smiled at her and Viridiana leaned forward, took a breath and spoke.
“Day one,” she said and then pressed the stop button.
That was enough for now.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to my husband for always reading my work. Thanks to my agent, Eddie, and to the publishing team at Polis, including my editor Chantelle. And thanks to Lavie, who read an early draft of this book and said it was good.
About the Author
Silvia Moreno-Garcia is the author of the critically acclaimed speculative novels Gods of Jade and Shadow (named one of the best books of the year by NPR, Tordotcom, The New York Public Library, BookRiot and LitHub), Signal to Noise, Certain Dark Things and The Beautiful Ones. She has edited several anthologies, including the World Fantasy Award–winning She Walks in Shadows (aka Cthulhu’s Daughters). She lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. Untamed Shore is her first thriller.
Untamed Shore Page 26