Once they were outside the bar, Pilar breathed a profound sigh of relief. “Thanks, baby.” She squeezed Loup’s hand. “I know that wasn’t the first thing either of us wanted to do here, but I just didn’t want it hanging over my head, you know?”
“I know.” Loup returned her squeeze. “Feeling better?”
“Tons.”
“Let’s go see our people.”
By the time they reached the church, there were four familiar figures playing a short-handed game of stickball in the street outside the gates.
“Hey!” Dondi shouted, pointing.
“Loup?” T.Y. swung wildly at a pitch, letting go of the broom handle as he spun around, looking for her.
She laughed. “You guys are playing stickball?”
“We were going crazy waiting!” He raced over and gave her an impetuous hug with only the slightest hint of flinch. “Jesus, it’s good to see you!”
Loup hugged him back carefully and ruffled his brown curls. “I’ve missed you.”
“Hey, baby doll,” C.C. said to Pilar, grinning. “Couldn’t stay away from me, huh?”
She smiled fondly at him. “You wish, loverboy.”
“Holy crap!” Dondi eyed Pilar’s stacked wedge heels. “Could those be any higher?”
“They’re in style, okay?” She tugged him down to plant a kiss on his cheek. “When did you get so tall, little man?”
“Umm… way before you left, remember?”
In the background, Mack was gathering up stray tennis balls and the discarded broomstick. Loup caught his eye and smiled. He smiled back at her. “So where’s everyone else?” she asked T.Y.
“Oh, hell!” He grinned. “It’s like old times. Kotch and Jane are helping Anna in the kitchen, bitching about how the women always get stuck with the nurturing roles—”
“I offered to help cook!” Dondi said, aggrieved.
“He did,” C.C. confirmed.
“—and Jaime couldn’t wait. We unloaded the van and he’s already got his hands on one of those fancy computers you brought,” T.Y. finished.
“Diego and Maria? Are they okay?”
“Yeah, yeah!” He nodded vigorously. “Trying to find a babysitter, I think.”
It was like old times, and it wasn’t. All the Santitos were a year older, their lives following divergent paths within the narrow confines that Outpost allowed. They trouped through the wrought-iron gates, chattering, young adults returning to their childhood.
Inside the church, Loup halted.
“Whoa.” She reached unthinking for Pilar’s hand.
“Whoa,” Pilar agreed.
The effigy of Santa Olivia sat in her niche; the child-saint in the pretty blue dress and white kerchief with her dark, unblinking gaze, her basket over one arm. Her basket overflowed with the handwritten petitions that had once been proscribed. Hundreds of votive candles flickered around her, and a sea of handmade paper flowers spilled over her feet. In her own niche, Our Lady of the Sorrows looked on with gentle approval.
“Did you guys do this?” Loup asked, bewildered.
“No, Loup.” Mack’s hands rested on her shoulders. “You did.”
“I didn’t—”
“Yeah, you did, baby.” Pilar kissed her softly on the lips. “I told you, you have no idea what it was like here after the fight.”
She felt dazed. “Guess not.”
T.Y. tugged her arm. “C’mon!”
And almost everyone was there; Father Ramon in his cassock, his handsome face lined with age and his hair more silver than black; Sister Martha with her intent gaze and generous heart; Anna, still lovely and kind; tall, blond Katya, her imperious youth given way to a warmer maturity; sharp-tongued, quick-witted Jane; clever Jaime, tearing himself away from the new computer. Everyone hugged and wept and exclaimed all at once, and Diego and Maria arrived in the midst, baby in tow, to start the process all over again.
At last they sat down to eat, crowded around the long table. The food was simple, chicken in adobo sauce, rice and beans, but there was plenty of it. After the platters had been passed around, Sister Martha cleared her throat.
“All right,” she said. “What in God’s fucking name have the two of you been up to?” She gestured broadly, looking at a rare loss for words. “What did you do out there to turn the whole fucking world upside down?”
Loup and Pilar exchanged grins.
“You eat,” Pilar said, pointing at Loup’s heaped plate. “I’ll talk. So it started with this guy, Magnus Lindberg, who wanted to hire Loup to be the world’s only GMO bodyguard…”
She began telling the story, charting its unlikely twists and turns from Huatulco to Aberdeen, London and Sicily and Switzerland, training, the first Kate concert, Vincenzo Picco, the wedding, the birthday party, the fire and the pirate terrorist.
“You shot a guy?” T.Y. interrupted in disbelief. “You? With a gun?” He pointed his finger. “Bang, bang?”
“Why does everyone have so much trouble with that part?” Pilar asked with some asperity.
“Because the Pilar Ecchevarria we knew would have shrieked and hidden behind the nearest available male,” Jane said calmly. “Preferably an attractive, wealthy one.” Jaime elbowed her discreetly in the ribs, and she raised her eyebrows at him. “What? She would have.”
“Maybe we didn’t know her as well as we thought,” Mack murmured.
“No, I guess it’s pretty true,” Pilar admitted. “But people do change, you know. Anyway, we went back to Huatulco to spend time with Loup’s family…”
She continued the story—touring with Kate through Australia and Japan, the stage rushing, the rising Mystery Girl phenomenon. The hearings, the disappearance and abduction of Miguel Garza and the decision to rescue him.
“That’s why you came back, Loup?” Jaime asked. “To rescue Miguel fucking Garza?”
“Pretty much,” she agreed. “Then other stuff happened.”
“Jesus! He’s a cretinous thug who ran roughshod over this town for years!”
“He’s really not that bad once you get to know him,” Pilar offered. “I mean, he’s crude and he’s a bully, but he’s sort of decent underneath it all. Smarter than you’d think, too. Well, except for getting himself in trouble in Vegas. That was dumb.”
“I take it you succeeded in rescuing him?” Father Ramon interjected. “We’ve seen footage of his testimony, but there was nothing about an abduction.”
“Oh, yeah!” She smiled and described the Vegas caper.
“Excuse me,” Anna inquired delicately. “Are you… are you having fun with us?”
Loup blinked, a forkful of rice and beans in hand. “No, of course not.”
“It’s just—”
“Look, I know it sounds pretty crazy, especially when you string it all together. But we’re not making any of this up, honest.” She ate her forkful of food. “Pilar, you haven’t even eaten. Go ahead and I’ll tell my part.”
“Okay.”
Loup finished her end of the story—the cross-country drive, her detention. The Outpost hearings and the happy result. “After that, I guess you know what happened. They overturned the Human Rights Amendment and I was released.”
“Yeah,” C.C. said in awe. “We saw it on the news. We saw you on the news. Real live news!”
Sister Martha dabbed her lips with a napkin. “Which is a true goddamn miracle.” She glanced around the table. “I’m not joking, children. As much as I’ve railed against God in my lifetime, I can recognize a goddamn fucking miracle when I see one.”
“Amen,” Maria whispered with heartfelt fervor, and blushed.
Father Ramon smiled. “Amen, indeed.”
FIFTY-FOUR
They spent the night in the church’s empty girls’ dormitory room. Pilar watched Loup push a pair of cots together, making them up with threadbare sheets Anna had given them.
“Jesus, this is weird,” she said. “Do you remember—?”
Loup sat on the improvised double
bed. “That first night we were alone here?”
“Uh-huh.” Pilar straddled her lap.
“Mm-hmm.” She slid her arms around Pilar’s waist. “It was the first time we got to spend the whole night together.”
Pilar kissed her at length, exploring her mouth in a delicious, leisurely fashion. “We stayed up all night fooling around.”
“Until dawn,” Loup whispered. “That’s when you told me you loved me for the first time, and I told you I loved you too.”
“Want to relive history?”
She laughed. “Are you kidding?”
When the pale gray dawn broke through the narrow, arched windows, they were tired and languorous, replete with pleasure and happiness. Loup ran a lock of Pilar’s hair through her fingers, watching the early sunlight pick out the glinting blond streaks in its brown, silken fineness.
“I love you,” she said softly. “I wanted to say it first this time. I love you an awful, awful lot.”
Pilar sighed. “Oh, God! Me too.”
Later in the morning, they met with Father Ramon and Sister Martha to talk seriously about topics overlooked in the joy of the previous day’s reunion—the disposition of the gifts they’d brought, Santa Olivia’s most pressing needs, and their desire to set up a scholarship fund for the Santitos and other deserving Outposters.
It was the latter that engaged them the most.
“Are you quite serious?” Father Ramon asked, dumbstruck.
“Well, yeah,” Loup said. “Why?”
“It’s just…” He looked apologetic. “You never struck me as much of a scholar, Loup. Neither of you did.”
“No, I know.” She smiled sidelong at Pilar. “Although it turns out Pilar’s really good at research and all kinds of stuff.”
Pilar smiled happily. “Thanks, baby!”
“Well, you are. And people should be able to do what they’re good at, right?” Loup shrugged. “In Huatulco, I got to run outside for the first time in my life, as far and as fast as I wanted. It felt so good, like setting a part of me free. I used to think about it a lot in my jail cell. I think for someone like Jaime or Jane not being able to use their minds, not being able to study and learn, must be like a kind of prison.”
“And it might make Jane less crabby,” Pilar added. “Which would be a good thing, right?”
Sister Martha shook her head. “Children, you are a wonderment.”
They learned it would be a while before they could implement the plan. The Red Cross had set up a temporary medical clinic, relieving Sister Martha of some of her burden, but for now she was busy coordinating with the government to provide a census and establish birth records for everyone born in Outpost after the occupation in order to complete the paperwork that would render them American citizens.
“Guess they cut a few corners for us, huh?” Loup said.
“Sweetheart, I don’t think anyone’s going to begrudge you,” Sister Martha said wryly.
Father Ramon made his recommendations for the disposition of their gifts—the majority of the computers for the school, a few items for the church, phones for the Santitos, a big flat-screen television for the improvised theater of the legion hall—and agreed that a free raffle for the rest was a fine idea.
“Everyone gets a ticket,” he said in approval. “It will be the most democratic thing to happen here in decades.”
“Plus, it will drive Rosa Salamanca crazy to see stuff given away for free with no way for her to make a profit on it,” Pilar said with a certain glee. “The greedy old witch.”
He smiled. “It will at that. When—?”
“Santa Olivia’s Feast Day,” Sister Martha interrupted him. “When else? We’ll set up a table in the square where everyone can claim a ticket and use the census list to keep track.”
“Perfect.”
With two days yet to go before Santa Olivia’s Day, with the help of the Santitos, they made flyers announcing the free raffle and posted them around town, finding in the process that the town had changed. There were barely half as many soldiers around, and the boxing ring in the center of the town square was gone.
“Wow.” Loup stared. “When did that happen?”
“A while ago,” T.Y. said. “General Argyle was replaced about a month after you disappeared. As soon as the new guy took over, they tore down the ring.”
“No more fights?”
“Nah.” He shook his head. “Yours was the last.” He brightened. “Hey, you know what they are gonna have this year? Fireworks! The ban’s been repealed.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.” T.Y. made a face. “Though I suppose that’s no big deal to you, huh? You and Pilar probably saw fireworks tons of times, traveling all over the world and everything.”
“Nope.” Loup smiled at him. “Not a one.”
“Only in the movies,” Pilar agreed. She nudged Loup with her hip. “Though I can think of something that’s a lot like fireworks.”
“Mm-hmm.”
T.Y. covered his ears. “I don’t need to hear this!”
They went past the gym where Loup had spent so many hours sparring in secret with Miguel Garza. The UNIQUE FITNESS sign had faded further and dusty blinds covered the windows, untouched for almost a year. Loup touched the windows lightly with her fingertips.
“Thinking about your coach?” Pilar asked sympathetically.
“Yeah.”
“We’ll look him up one day. Florida, right?”
“Yeah.” She gave her a grateful look. “Thanks, Pilar.”
It made them pensive. On the eve of Santa Olivia’s Day, they visited the extensive, rambling graveyard behind the church filled with largely unmarked graves. Even knowing what they were looking for, it was hard to find. Mack, who tended the grounds, consulted the charts and showed Pilar the plots where her parents were buried, and Loup the plot where her mother rested.
“We bought her a comb for her hair not long before she died,” she murmured, remembering. “Tommy and I. The first time he won money betting on a fight because I told him what would happen. I wanted her to have something pretty. She was buried wearing it.”
Mack touched her shoulder. “Want me to show you Tommy’s?”
“No.” Loup shook her head. “That one, I can find.”
A pair of cracked and faded boxing gloves still dangled from the makeshift cross. Loup sat cross-legged on the hard earth, remembering the big brother who’d always taken care of her and taught her to be careful. Tommy, with his sunny disposition and his ready smile; tall, strapping, blond Tommy, looking nothing like her, but her brother nonetheless. Tommy, who was meant to be Outpost’s hero.
“Hey, baby.”
“Hey.” She looked up at Pilar, seeing the marks of tears on her cheeks. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” Pilar sank down beside her. “You?”
“Mostly.”
They sat side by side.
“He’d have been so goddamn proud of you he’d burst,” Pilar said after a while.
“You think?”
“I know.” She stood and held out her hand. “C’mon, Santa Olivia. We’ve given the dead their due. Time to celebrate the living.”
“Okay.”
Santa Olivia’s Feast Day dawned hard and bright and clear. In the empty girls’ dormitory on their makeshift bed, Pilar smiled at Loup, her head pillowed, her face still soft and sweet and lovely with sleep.
“Happy birthday, baby. No shadows today?”
“No shadows,” Loup promised.
The Santitos assembled, yawning, to help carry the effigy of Santa Olivia to the town square, where she was enshrined on a pedestal. There was already a handful of people around to cheer, waiting to garland the effigy with fresh strands of bright paper flowers. Many of them smiled and touched Loup’s hands, thanking her. It made her feel warm inside.
Banners of paper lacework adorned the square, and there were strings of colored lights that would be turned on when the sun went down. As the sun rose hig
her in the sky, the first band of the day began to set up onstage. More and more Outposters trickled into the square, staking out picnic spots before lining up at the table where Sister Martha sat with numbered tickets they’d printed, checking names off her census roll.
It was a good day.
An expectant buzz hung over the festivities. There was music, and dancing in the space where the boxing ring had once stood. People picnicked and gossiped and compared ticket numbers, speculating on the nature of the prizes. Children laughed and shrieked and raced around the square like crazy, pelting one another with hollow eggs filled with confetti.
It wasn’t freedom—not quite. No one from Outpost but Loup and Pilar had been issued a passport, and there were still MPs patrolling the event. But the taste of freedom was in the air, and even the MPs were smiling.
By two o’clock, the last raffle ticket had been given away.
At three o’clock, the Santitos went to fetch the reloaded van and bring the prizes to the square. The most recent band vacated the stage. The Santitos unloaded the van, stacking valuable prizes on the stage. An awed murmur ran through the crowd.
“You’re fucking crazy,” T.Y. grunted, hauling a heavy box. “Remind me why’d you do this again?”
“I dunno.” Pilar smiled. “Because we could?”
He set down his box. “Some lousy excuse for a gold digger you turned out to be.”
She laughed.
“No kidding.” Jane, rearranging the prizes into a more aesthetically pleasing pile, glanced up with a tentative expression. “Are you guys serious about this scholarship thing?”
“Yeah, of course.” Loup set down a boxed television. “You and Jaime are first in line. Why?”
Jane scowled. “I don’t know if you noticed, but I haven’t exactly been nice to you.”
“Yeah, but you’re still our people,” Loup said. “And you worked really hard at the dispensary with Sister Martha. You’d have taken over from her one day if all this hadn’t happened, wouldn’t you? Taken care of people?”
She nodded reluctantly. “Someone has to.”
“That’s nice enough for me.” Loup headed back toward the cargo van for another load.
[Santa Olivia 02] - Saints Astray Page 38