Esperanza

by Trish J. MacGregor

  He walked fast, the chants and shouts rising and falling around him, each wave louder, angrier, more hostile. Then the mob surged toward the cops, pelting them with eggs and rocks and screaming, Death to the pigs!

  The cops retaliated, a crushing tsunami of swinging batons that cracked heads, faces, arms, and drove protestors to the ground. Tear gas thickened in the air. Ian tore up the sidewalk, but hordes of people suddenly scrambled for safety and shoved their way toward the shops, diving for cover under the tables and benches, hurling chairs at the cops. The injured stumbled through the throngs, sobbing for help, blood streaming down their faces. Two women got knocked to the ground and were trampled by the mob behind them. Ian helped one man to his feet and jerked him toward the door of a coffee shop where a woman gestured frantically for people to take refuge inside. They lurched inside the building, the woman slammed the door, and urged them all to the back, where people were streaming out the rear exit, into an alley.

  Ian hurried toward the promise of sunlight and escape and stumbled into the alley with several dozen frantic, terrified people. He tore right, racing along with the crowd, and abruptly stopped at the end of the alley. He knew what he was seeing, and his brain kept yelling, Run, run, but he couldn’t run. The fog hadn’t just rolled inland. It now climbed the hills, moving toward them with shocking swiftness, thick, dark, at least half a mile wide. Already, he could hear an eerie chant rising from the fog, Find the body, fuel the body, fill the body, be the body, and he was suddenly back in Esperanza, the chant crashing over him.

  He tore in the opposite direction, pounding the pavement, arms tucked in tightly at his sides. The fog tumbled through the alley behind him, chants rising and falling. Find the body, fuel the body . . . Tear gas now mixed with the fog and people ran with their arms covering their mouths and noses. Some of them now twitched, bodies jerking this way and that, as brujos seized them. Ian had no idea how this nightmare had found him, but he wasn’t about to be seized. He ran faster, faster, breath exploding from his mouth, and burst out of the alley.

  Sirens sundered the air. Police wearing gas masks seemed to be everywhere, leaping out of patrol cars, swinging batons, galloping into the crowd on horses, herding curious spectators to stay back, move aside. He tore up the hill with crowds fleeing the pandemonium on Presidio. His lungs strained, sweat poured down his face.

  The fog moved uphill, but at a slower pace, as if the brujos were so busy feeding off the bedlam around them they didn’t wanted to stray too far from the mob. Fill the body, be the body . . . He didn’t slow, didn’t look back again. At the top of the hill, Ian nearly doubled over from pain, gasped for breath. The hotel doorman trotted down the steps and helped him into the lobby, to a chair.

  “Sir, sit tight. I’ll get you something cold to drink.”

  Ian couldn’t speak, his chest heaved. The doorman returned with a tall glass of ice-cold water. Ian raised it to his mouth, hands shaking violently. He sipped, eyes darting toward the door, terrified he would see the fog pressing up against it, tendrils clawing at the glass like some rabid dog that wanted in. Instead, people ran past, cop cars raced down Pacific.

  “What’s happening down there?” the doorman asked. “We heard the cops moved in on the protestors and it’s a bloodbath. And the fog . . . never seen nothing like it.”

  “Thank you for the water. I’d like to settle my bill, get to the airport. I’ll need a cab.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll take care of it.”

  He didn’t know how many minutes passed. He finished the water and glanced anxiously toward the door again. Then the doorman brought over the bill and his puny bag. His clothes buying would have to wait until he got to Ecuador. Ian dug out his wallet and gave the doorman cash for the room and a generous tip.

  “Your cab’s on the way, sir. There’s some weird stuff going on down there, that’s what we’re hearing now,” the doorman said in a soft, confidential tone. “Like, people acting really strangely, having seizures or something. Fires have been set. Ambulances and fire trucks are on the way. Some of the roads are blocked off.”

  “Will I be able to get to the airport?”

  “For now, the road to the airport is clear.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Ian stood at the hotel door, watching fire trucks and ambulances roar past, sirens shrieking. Crowds continued to pour across the sidewalks, desperate to put distance between themselves and the mayhem at the bottom of the hill. Several times, people tried to enter the hotel, but the doors were locked.

  The fog’s advance appeared to have slowed or maybe even stopped somewhere below. When a taxi parked at the curb, Ian swept up his bag, the doorman opened the door, and he hastened out. As the cab pulled away from the curb, the driver, a slightly built Asian man, said, “War protesters are setting buildings on fire down there, people are having convulsions, dozens injured and killed.”

  “Can we get to the airport?”

  “Don’t worry.” He shook his head. “This is about the war. People know it’s wrong, they want it to end. The war’s to blame.”

  The war for souls. Ian leaned forward, vigilant, alert for any sign of fog. As they reached the top of a hill, fog climbed toward them from a hill to his left, and people were racing away from it, hollering, terrified. The cabbie hit the left blinker. “Go right,” Ian said urgently. “Do whatever you have to do to stay away from the fog.”

  “But the airport is to the left and—”

  “Go right,” Ian shouted. “Fast.”

  The cabbie hung a right, stepped on it, and the cab sped forward, careened onto another street, tore down another hill, screeched into yet another turn, weaving back and forth on one-way streets until they seemed to have broken free of the area the fog covered. Minutes later, signs for the airport appeared.

  Would the fog turn toward the airport, socking it in so that flights were delayed or canceled? He didn’t know. But he hoped the brujos were like ticks bloated with blood, rendered useless once their appetites were sated.

  The cab drew up in front of the airport and Ian handed the cabbie a huge tip. “For your own safety, avoid the fog on your way back.”

  Ian scrambled out of the cab with his pack and sprinted into the terminal.

  Tess Livingston 2008

  We will first understand how simple the universe is when we recognize how strange it is.

  —John Wheeler

  Fifteen

  KEY LARGO, FLORIDA JUNE 2008

  The wind chimes that hung in the trees outside her mother’s kitchen were made of pipes and seashells, aluminum, copper, glass. They sang and gonged in the sunrise breeze like high mass rituals in the Sistine Chapel, calling birds to the feeders. Flocks of crows and blue jays, wrens, blackbirds and doves, even wild green parrots fluttered and squawked and jockeyed for spots at the feeders. They brushed the wind chimes, changing the tempo until the yard sounded like an amateur band tuning up. Tess didn’t see a single hummingbird among them and felt immeasurably depressed by their absence.

  Ridiculous. Tess couldn’t recall ever seeing a hummingbird in the Florida Keys or anywhere in South Florida.

  Her own reflection in the window stared back at her. I’m still me. Eyes a smoky blue. Hair long, blond, wavy. A mouth that could yet smile. When she had died five months ago today, her inner landscape had changed dramatically, but she didn’t see it yet in the way she looked. This seemed important.

  Pipes clattered somewhere. Her mother or niece were up and she wished she could have an hour more alone. She immediately felt guilty about thinking that way. Her mother had been at the hospital constantly since Tess had been shot back in January. While she’d been in a coma, her mother had moved her to the hospital here in Key Largo where she was director of nursing. The move probably had saved Tess’s life. When she’d awakened from the coma, the faces of her mother and eighteen-year-old niece, Madison, were the first she saw.

  In the six weeks since Tess’s release from the hospital, her mother and Maddie had been
her most intimate support group. They had cared for her, driven her to physical therapy, cooked and shopped for her, been there when no one else was. Since the house sat on concrete pilings that elevated it twenty feet off the ground, they had had a wooden ramp built that had enabled her to navigate her wheelchair into and out of the house. Her mom and Maddie even sorted the mounting tally of medical bills, now into seven figures. If Tess’s health insurance covered sixty percent of that, she would still owe enough to make her an indentured servant to the FBI for the next twenty years.

  She slid the window open and the June humidity, thick with the scent of ocean and earth, enveloped her. On either side of the window, the edges of the aluminum hurricane shutters were visible. The entire house could be shuttered in about ten minutes, but there were two skylights—one here in the kitchen and another in the living room—without protection. Tess shut the window and turned, staring up at the kitchen skylight, suddenly worried that something would get into the house through there.

  Absurd. Even though hurricane season had started June 1, the National Hurricane Center had declared that the Atlantic basin was quiet. Besides, the skylights were built to Hurricane Andrew standards, able to withstand category five winds. But could they withstand—what? She felt the weight of the word at the tip of her tongue, then it slipped away. This kind of thing had been happening to her often since she’d regained consciousness. She wouldn’t be sharing that detail with the Bureau shrink she was supposed to meet with today, who would determine whether she was mentally healthy enough to return to work.

  The bullet that had turned her life inside out had pierced an artery in her right thigh and she nearly had bled to death before she made it to ER. During emergency surgery, she had flatlined. She still didn’t know how long she’d been dead. Not that it mattered. Nothing had happened—no tunnel of light, no celestial choirs, no reunions with the departed.

  The femur bone in her right thigh had required steel pins and rods to restore. She now had so much metal in her leg that in an airport screening she probably would trigger alarms. Her limp remained noticeable, but improved daily. In fact, she felt better today than she had in weeks, and was sure that daily yoga helped, her compensation for physical therapy since her insurance coverage had run out. All she needed to return to work was a clean bill of mental health.

  She wasn’t entirely sure that she wanted to return to the Bureau, but her leave was nearly used up and she needed the income. Her boss had assured her she was first in line for any Bureau position that opened in the Keys, but such openings were rare. The Keys were a coveted location, more laid-back, less bureaucratic bullshit. But until or if it happened, she would commute to Miami, two hours round trip if she didn’t drive at peak hours. Even though the prospect didn’t thrill her, what with the price of gas as high as it was, she had no great desire to move back to Miami. Couldn’t afford it, given all her bills. The town house she’d rented for seven years was now occupied by someone else and her mother had moved most of her belongings to storage.

  “Hey, Tesso. What’s up?” Maddie strode into the kitchen dressed in her tank top and running shorts, carrying her shoes in her hand.

  “Too early for much to be up. Where’re you running?”

  “The beach. Two miles round trip. Want to come?”

  Maddie reminded Tess of a frisky colt, all legs, with a lovely mane of thick red hair that came from her father’s side of the family. The rest of her was pure Livingston—dancing blue eyes, a mouth that perfectly reflected her moods, high cheekbones. Her pale complexion wasn’t genetic, she worked at it. No sunbathing. Many creams and sunblocks. A Nicole Kidman in the making. She was a fussy eater, too, a true vegan who ate only raw fruits, vegetables, tofu. A ruby stud flashed from her left nostril.

  “You’d lose me after three yards,” Tess said.

  “You’re underestimating yourself.” Maddie dropped her shoes, popped open the fridge, poured herself a tall glass of OJ. “You know how I was a year ago. I could barely walk thirty yards without getting winded. I was just your local fat girl, headed toward diabetes, reviled by fellow students, a laughingstock. If I can do it, so can you.”

  A year ago, Madison wasn’t just the local fat girl. She had been living in North Carolina with her mother, Tess’s older sister, and her new husband, a man Maddie detested. She was nearly flunking out of school, had been arrested twice, was on a fast track to nowhere. So when Tess’s sister had called and asked their mother if she would take Madison for a few months, as though she were a stray desperately in need of a home, Lauren Livingston had driven to North Carolina and picked her up.

  Madison took to the Keys the way a frog took to insects. Hungry for change, she had turned her life around and graduated from high school in December, six months earlier than her peers. She recently finished her first semester at the junior college and had been accepted to the University of Florida for the fall. The software company she and a friend had developed would be paying her bills. She wanted to be a vet.

  “Okay, get Lauren and I’ll give it a shot.”

  “I appreciate the fact that no one referred to me as ‘Nana,’ a word I’ve always detested.” Tess’s mother stood in the doorway, already decked out in her running clothes, her short, thick hair brushed back dramatically, a salt-and-pepper lion’s mane. Her sinewy body, as slender and compact as a shoot of bamboo, looked like that of a woman of forty. Daily runs, yoga, a moderate diet. She probably would outlive them all. She threw her arms out dramatically. “Now, I ask you, does Lauren Livingston look sixty-three?”

  The chorus was unanimous. “No way!”

  “You both will live to see another day. Now let’s get on with this run, ladies.”

  The beach on which Tess’s mother lived was not really a beach in the way most people thought of Florida beaches. No endless white sands, just endless mounds of rocks, shells, seaweed. They ran at the water’s edge and every quarter of a mile crossed a dock that thrust out into the water, a boat of some kind tethered to it. After crossing one too many docks, Tess slowed to a walk and her mother fell into step beside her.

  “You want company today, Slim?”

  Slim. How odd that her mother would refer to her by the nickname her dad always had used. Slim, from one of her favorite Bogie and Bacall movies, Dark Passage. The nickname made her uncomfortable, as though it carried an association that Tess couldn’t recall.

  The question was a tactful way for her mother to ask if Tess needed emotional support for her appointment with the shrink. Oddly, it hadn’t occurred to her. Most of the time, she felt emotionally absent, as though her heart had been carved up and tossed to wolves. She didn’t say that to her mother, though. Lauren Livingston, ex-hippie, connoisseur of the best of the mind-altering drugs of the sixties, acid-tripping companion of Terrence McKenna in the summer of love, was now a mainstream nurse and might read something into those words. Emotionally absent. It sounded dangerous, like the description for a serial killer. But Tess knew something was missing inside. It was as if huge chunks of herself had gotten lost when she had flatlined.

  “I’m fine, Mom. I’ve been driving for two weeks.”

  “To and from yoga and the grocery store is a little different than a drive to Miami.”

  “My leg took a hit, not my head.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I’m good, Mom. Really. Everyone treats me like I suffered brain trauma.”

  “Well, you did flatline. I was talking to Doc about the kinds of questions the shrink might ask, and he felt pretty certain the flatline would come up.”

  Tess disliked the idea of her mother discussing her with Doc Brian, her mother’s intermittent lover. “How would he know?”

  “His background is psychiatric ER, that’s how. Possible brain trauma enters the equation. Do you remember anything from when you were in a coma or dead?”

  Tess had lost count of how many times her mother had asked this question. Her answer never changed. “Nope. There isn
’t anything, Mom. I died, that’s it. Then I started breathing again and my molecules swam back together and here I am.” Tess stooped down and swept up a piece of driftwood. She ran her fingers over the smooth bark, studying the swirls of patterns, spirals within spirals. The driftwood was more interesting than death, she thought.

  “That sounds cynical, hon.”

  “Yeah, I guess it is. But death isn’t an acid trip, Mom.”

  “I’ll be sure to include that in my book about McKenna and Kesey and the gang.”

  Her mother’s wild youth in the sixties.

  Ahead of them, Madison stopped, hands on her hips. “Cheaters,” she shouted. “No walking allowed.”

  “I can’t believe my own granddaughter is calling me a cheater,” Lauren said.

  Tess smiled as her mother jogged on.

  Tess’s Mazda 3 purred north on U.S. 1, headed toward the campus where Maddie and her software partner would be testing their newest product on a student focus group. Maddie fiddled with her hair, put on peace symbol earrings. “Lauren’s convinced something happened to you when you died, Tesso.”

  “Why?”

  “Probably because she’s been reading all these books about near-death experiences, Buddhism, reincarnation. Why does Lauren ask any of these questions? It’s just how she is.”

  “Nothing happened to me. Or if it did, I can’t remember it.”

  “You’re different now. You know that, right?”

  “I am? How?”

  “You really listen.”

  “I didn’t before?”

  “Not like now. When I say something to you now, I know you’re really hearing me. And there’re other things, like what you eat. You used to eat red meat, a lot of junk food, and drank tons of soda. You haven’t touched any of that since you woke up. You never took vitamins or practiced yoga. Then there’s Dan. Before you got shot, you were talking about moving in with him. Now you avoid his calls. You’re not the same person. And I think I like this Tess better.”