Come As You Are

by Steven Ramirez

  “‘But I love you,’ he said.

  “Taking one of the pebbles as a souvenir, she left him.”

  As the video ended, Brooke stared at her assailant, who was barely alive now, and put down the phone.

  “Why did you tell me that story?” she said. “Are you that man?”

  His voice was a harsh whisper punctuated by the stutter of short gasps. “Jeffrey…won’t be coming back,” he said, barely conscious now.

  “What?”

  “Because I can’t…give him the signal. That it’s safe…to return.”

  The intruder was silent now as Brooke stared at him in dawning horror. They’d been married five years—a long time in Coto de Caza. How could Jeffrey want her dead? Memories flashed across her mind. Their storybook wedding at the Ritz Carlton. The honeymoon in Europe. Jeffrey had planned for them to be away six weeks.

  They had started in London, then made their way to the continent. First Paris, then Rome, then Venice. But something happened. Jeffrey had been called back to the states on important business. He never explained why. Something about accounting irregularities just prior to the company’s quarterly earnings call. By the time they’d moved into their new home, things at work had sorted themselves out, and Brooke didn’t think any more about it.

  Though she hadn’t wanted to admit it at the time, Jeffrey was different. And it seemed it happened after that phone call while they were staying at the Hotel Excelsior in Venice. During their engagement, Jeffrey had spoken often about wanting a family. But now, whenever Brooke brought up having children, her husband either changed the subject or became sullen. Finally, she stopped asking and contented herself with being the wife of a wealthy businessman. And it seemed to work, although there were times when she was terribly sad and eventually sought help from a therapist. He encouraged her to share her feelings with Jeffrey, but she didn’t. Had she been afraid?

  Then last month, her father called her, wondering why out of the blue Jeffrey would be contacting him, asking for a loan. She had been shocked to hear it and tried convincing her father she knew nothing about it. Later, when she asked Jeffrey, he told her he had meant to keep that “between the men.” He hadn’t wanted to worry her. She decided not to pursue it any further.

  Now the realization that her husband wanted her dead hit her full on, and Brooke stared at the dying man, her eyes blind with tears of rage.

  “Is there an insurance policy? Is that what this is about?”

  He stared at her in silence. She wanted to hurt him further to get him to talk. But it was hopeless. Then his phone buzzed. She held it up to her face and wanted to vomit. It was Jeffrey’s number. Trembling, she answered it.

  “Hello?”

  Brooke heard a gasp, then the phone went silent. She turned to the intruder, who smiled at her contentedly and closed his eyes.

  He was dead.

  As she dialed 911, the garage door opened suddenly, almost causing her to drop the phone. Instead of pulling into the garage, Jeffrey turned off the engine and got out, forgetting to switch off the headlights. Nervously, he stood in front of the car, looking first at the dead man, then at his wife, who was holding the phone in one hand and the gun in the other.

  Brooke wanted to say something but couldn’t even imagine what words she could possibly use to confront the man she thought she knew—the man she still loved. The voice of the 911 dispatcher came on.

  “A man is dead.” She gave the address. “I’m okay. Yes, send an ambulance. Yes, he’s still here in the garage. I don’t know his name. No, I don’t think he was high. No, no children. I’m the victim.”

  As Brooke answered the dispatcher’s endless questions, she kept staring at her husband, who made no move to come inside. After a few moments, she disconnected and laid the phone down. But she didn’t let go of the gun. She kept it close—very close.

  Because, after everything that happened tonight, she needed something to hold.

  The Widow and Her Magician

  The dissonant bells of the church of San Ignacio de Loyola would not be rung for Ignacio Muñoz, or “Ignacio the Mystifier” as he was known to everyone in the village and had been known to three generations of children whom he delighted with his peasant magic. There were the shy metallic balls that seemed to appear from nowhere, float perilously close to pinched, eager faces, then vanish. Multi-colored scarves extracted from a startled woman’s ear like stolen dreams. Mourning doves that cooed from the depths of a troubled soul then raced to the sun from smooth, bare palms that held no secrets. He had been named after the saint for whom the seventeenth-century mission church was built. Still, no bells would be rung for him in these his last hours.

  The reticent old man in Roman robes with bursitis who presided over the ancient, dwindling congregation soberly recalled the story of how his predecessor, who had baptized Ignacio, cut his thumb on an invisible sliver of mirrored glass as he made the Sign of the Cross with chrism on the child’s forehead. Obliged to hear his confession hours before the magician was to be led to the gallows, Fr. Altmann could not silence the incessant wailing of the women or his throbbing conscience.

  “Damn these infernal widows!” the priest said as he tried hopelessly to sleep in his cramped, cold room with a single mothy woolen blanket to keep him warm.

  Though he was only sixty, he felt eighty and still boiled when he read Voltaire. His father had been a retired bierbrauer who had come to this country and married a local girl. Fr. Altmann detested beer but dutifully drank a toast to his father’s good health once a year on his birthday until his uneventful death only two years earlier. The priest had lost his mother two years before that and fully expected that he or someone close would die very soon since he knew the two-year interval had passed and that Death comes in threes.

  The voices seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere like the Mystifier’s doves. They trilled in the darkness, defying the sun to show its first cowardly rays and mocking it bitterly as blackness carpeted the rugged foothills like a slow, creeping algae. As the wind carried the distraught voices of the demented hags, some of them toothless but their eyes still bright in the harsh yellow light of a fallen moon, Ignacio slept alone on a simple straw mat in a damp cell in a drafty storage room in the church that served as the village’s only jail. Despite the inconvenience, he slept deeply, serenaded by the mournful wailing, dreaming of coffee and crickets.

  Lourdes Navarro de Leon’s voice grew hoarse as the night turned bitter cold. Everyone still referred to her as the mayor’s daughter, though her father had died some twenty years earlier. She had been the first and never forgot the wonder of those rude, searching conjurer’s hands that had never known physical labor.

  It had been barely ten months since her husband died. She recalled that endless road of sleepless nights, imagining her husband still next to her breathing like the dead. She recalled, too, the stinging loneliness of widowhood gilded with the good intentions of concerned friends and neighbors. All color had been removed from her life. The black clothing Lourdes wore constantly reminded her of the eternal night she shared with the other widows of the wayworn village. She went to Mass every morning and prayed every night. Nothing helped.

  After a time, she stopped going to confession because the only thing she had to confess was that she had not sinned. Fr. Altmann had insisted she examine her deepest thoughts and feelings, but the only thing she could think to admit was that her legs were throbbing from so much kneeling.

  Coming out of Mass one morning, Lourdes saw Ignacio and smiled as she suddenly remembered that he had been known as “Nacho” when they were children. He was entertaining a baby. The young mother, who couldn’t have been more than seventeen, thanked him and gave him a coin as she made her way into the church for a blessing. He thanked her with the humility of an altar boy, then smiled wickedly at Lourdes as he pocketed the cash.

  It was the look that did it. Lourdes remembered Ignacio had smiled just that way when they were both nine and a
lone in the park. Then, he kissed her. She hit him with a rock and ran home, scandalized, tears streaming from her burning cheeks. But now, his smile was crooked and the teeth yellow. Instinctively, she looked for rock, but the scar where she had hit him mocked her, and she laughed at her own foolishness.

  Some time later, the laughing became caresses, and the caresses lost hours in the misty sweetness of honeyed nights. He never asked, only gave. Never spoke, only listened. And Lourdes freed herself from herself with the Mystifier as her dark witness.

  “I refuse to love you,” she said to him.

  The other widows of the village learned through intuition what was going on right under their noses, and they were scandalized and fascinated. How they, too, longed for an intimacy that had been denied them for so long. How they wanted strange hands—those dove’s hands—to tear away the suffocating blackness and reveal a fire that still burned madly, inextinguishable.

  When Lourdes’ neighbor Luz Olveida Sanchez found her way to Ignacio’s house at the edge of the village, Lourdes said nothing. In truth, she was relieved and thankful that another had joined the lonely pilgrimage. But what started as a trickle became a torrent as more widows availed themselves of that sly sorcerer’s charms. Like school girls, women in black would greet each other on the road coming and going, one flushed and sated, the other tingling with anticipation as she carried the food she would later cook for him.

  Eventually, things became so complicated that Lourdes was compelled to act as secretary and kept a strict schedule so as to avoid a bochorno. She wrote in a plain diary with a sturdy black cover and kept it hidden in a foxhole beneath a shrine to the Blessed Virgin hewn from rock. Passing travelers never imagined their proximity to that chronicle of indulgence as they stopped on the road to offer prayers and beg for intercessions.

  Weeks passed, and the pilgrimage went on, even during the rains. Often, Fr. Altmann would notice these women on the mountain road as he tended the modest graveyard behind the church. He observed them one after another bent in fervent prayer at the shrine, their heads bowed, clutching a black prayer book. The scene filled him with elation.

  “God has come into these women’s lives again,” he said with satisfaction as he lovingly worked the soil in the little flower bed surrounding the sainted former pastor’s grave.

  The words had barely left his lips when he heard a disturbing thudding noise coming from somewhere in the cemetery. Frightened, he gathered up his gardening tools and hurried away, hoping it was his imagination.

  One morning at Mass, Fr. Altmann became inspired, and in one of his rarely eloquent homilies, he spoke of singular women devoting themselves to a life of prayer and self-sacrifice, trudging through wind and rain like postmen, enduring untold hardships to honor the Virgin Mary. Listening to that confused old man, it was all the widows could do not to laugh. They had to hold themselves tightly, and some shivered with guffaws that fought to escape their burning lungs like enraged circus animals.

  It started on one side of the church. At first, little gasps of air could be heard, followed by what sounded like someone clearing her throat abruptly. Now more unsettling noises—actual chortles that resembled rabid weasels drowning in syrup. Stuttering, sputtering, and labored sighs of frustration erupted as the priest’s words took on a comic relevance he never intended.

  Soon, the fever spread to the other side of the church. It was all the poor women could do to keep from wetting themselves. The more the priest spoke of longing and suffering, the more they wanted to scream their sin to the congregation. Fr. Altmann took note of this momentous development and sermonized further, believing with all his heart he was witnessing the Holy Spirit filling these women with flaming devotion and charging them to speak in tongues.

  Unfortunately, it was all too much for Luz Olveida Sanchez. She had tried mightily not to laugh. In fact, she had succeeded in calming herself into a state of controlled paralysis. Then, weak and exhausted, her heart pounding, she exhaled loudly, her breath like the sigh of Eurydice as she was dragged back to Hades. Finally, she keeled over into the aisle, pressing her heart, and greeted her dead husband, who was floating in front of her in a milky cloud of fireflies, holding a trowel in one hand and a brick in the other, his familiar overalls stained with mortar. Instantly, the other chastened widows went to her.

  Fr. Altmann brushed the mortar dust from the floor, knelt, and said with the utmost reverence, “My children, we have witnessed a miracle today.”

  An acolyte ran to him with the holy chrism. Taking it, the priest administered Extreme Unction and forgave Luz her sins.

  Every widow in the village attended the funeral. Lourdes wept uncontrollably, her stinging tears flushing away any of her former joy and reminding her that Luz had shown them all the new path they must follow now. She vowed in that instant never again to see Ignacio. But it was Elvira Altmann Lopez, the coarse, desiccated elder sister of Fr. Altmann, who would lead the widows down a different treacherous road like frightened goats, herding them with a cruel rustic staff from which dangled the head of Ignacio Muñoz.

  Elvira was an embittered woman who had never married. She hated the magician—loathed him even. Because when they were children he never so much as looked at her. Because he refused to attend her parties even though she pleaded with her father to make him come. Because all the widows in the village were giving themselves to him while she guarded her virginity like a windy, frigid cave that had never seen the sun—a forgotten grotto which no one had ever asked permission to enter.

  The old woman had suffered a debilitating stroke several years earlier, and through sheer force of will made herself walk again, even surprising the high-priced specialist from the capital city, whom she referred to thereafter as “that buffoon.” When the widows offered to look after Elvira during her convalescence, she refused their help with that sharp serpent’s tongue that had served her all her life.

  Only Magda, a poor barefoot girl from a neighboring village, was permitted to attend the old woman. She bathed Elvira, washed and combed her hair, prepared her meals, and cleaned her house. Everyone thought the girl was a mute. Only Elvira and her brother knew the truth—that she had taken a vow of silence after being raped by a drunken relative when she was eleven.

  During Luz’s funeral Mass, Elvira’s mind wandered, and she recalled a day when she had been walking to church. Her left leg trailing almost imperceptibly and her raven’s claw of a hand clutching her black rosary, she remembered seeing in the distance one of the widows making her way toward the shrine. She had recognized Luz kneeling and thumbing through a prayer book. For a time, she watched the widow and, as Luz rose slowly and continued on, Elvira shrewdly noticed the widow was no longer carrying the book. So, she decided to investigate.

  The shrine was simple and unadorned. Wilting wildflowers surrounded Mary’s feet. Everything seemed in order. Elvira prayed, but couldn’t stop thinking about the prayer book. When she was finished, she got to her feet and happened to look at the ground, where she noticed a foxhole—and something inside it. Unable to resist, she reached timidly inside, praying to the angels and saints in heaven that she wouldn’t be bitten by some rabid animal.

  “And that’s when I found the diary wrapped in oilcloth,” she said to her brother the priest as they drank chocolate in the dank, drafty study of the church after the burial.

  “Where is it now?”

  “I had to leave it. Otherwise, those widows would have surely become suspicious.”

  “Yes, of course,” he said. “But I don’t understand what it’s for.”

  Elvira rolled her eyes impatiently, secretly cursing God for giving her such a blockhead for a sibling. “It’s an accounting of their daily sin, what do you think?”

  He blinked but didn’t say anything.

  “¡Ay!” she said. “They’re all giving themselves to the Mystifier!”

  Fr. Altmann choked on his biscuit. “Surely not Lourdes!”

  “She’s the instigator!�
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  “Dear Lord, the mayor would be spinning in his grave!”

  Now the priest could hear the thudding sound again, coming from the cemetery. Thinking he was going mad, he turned to his sister, whose face had gone white.

  “What in heaven’s name was that?” she said.

  Fr. Altmann hurried outside to investigate. A terrible wind had kicked up, and he had to fight his way to the gardener’s shed, where he found the groundskeeper sleeping one off. He farted loudly, and the priest cuffed him in the head.

  “¡Imbecile!”

  Together, the two men determined to find the source of that unholy noise as Elvira cowered behind them, her face hidden in her rebozo. It was loudest at the grave of the mayor. The groundskeeper, whose head still throbbed, knelt and put his ear to the ground.

  “¡Chinga’o! It’s coming from down there.”

  The priest smacked the gutter-mouthed groundskeeper’s nose with the handle of the shovel and pointed a shaking, bony finger at the grave.

  “We’d better dig him up,” he said.

  When the groundskeeper had completely exposed the top of the simple pine coffin, he used his shovel to pry it open despite the squealing protests of the squirming, oxidized nails. As he raised the lid, he gasped at the sight of the mayor’s mummified body lurching painfully, first onto its side, then its stomach, then its other side, then its back. He was about to let go with another oath when Elvira spoke coldly.

  “I told you it was Lourdes. The mayor never could control that sin verguenza.”

  Then, as the priest and gardener continued looking on in horror, she limped away woodenly in the rising wind, a dead branch clinging to her shoulder like a skeletal hand.

  “But what am I to do?” the priest said as his sister made him comfortable in his old chair.