“Rosalie!” Ramon called.
She turned away. “But Jay—”
She wanted to drag him out, but she had the uneasy feeling that maybe it was true. Maybe he was all that was keeping the building up. She knew Ramon wouldn’t leave without her, so finally she ran down the stairs.
The air was cleaner outside, away from the falling dust and grit. People were milling around everywhere and she could hear sirens in the distance.
Come on, Jay, she thought. Everybody else is out. You don’t need to stay any longer.
She put the trumpets down on the ground and was about to start back for the building, when Ramon stopped her.
The building collapsed.
It fell in on itself with a thunderous roar, sending up plumes of dust and dirt. All that was left in the silence that followed was a heap of rubble inside of what remained of the walls.
Rosalie stared in horror.
Oh, Jay . . .
In The Dragon Garden restaurant in Chicago’s Chinatown, Katharine Xú looked up from the newspaper on the table in front of her. The restaurant wasn’t busy, but what had caught her attention had nothing to do with the handful of remaining customers. She gazed into some far distance that only she could see. Emotions flitted across her usually stoic features. Worry. Disappointment. Anger. Sorrow.
She stood abruptly from her table and headed for the front door.
“Paupau?” her daughter called from behind the counter where she was working on the day’s receipts. “Is everything all right?”
Paupau’s only response was to give Susan a distracted wave, then she was out the door.
She had no time for conversation. She had somewhere else she needed to be.
In the alley behind a soup kitchen in New York City, a small white woman with dark brown hair and violet eyes was sharing a cigarette with an old black man. They were sitting on the back stoop of the building, talking about nothing in particular—the strange weather this summer, a blues riff that sounded like the clatter of a subway car—when the woman broke off in midsentence and stood up.
“Sorry, Jake,” she said, “but I have to go.”
She strode off down the alleyway and was around the corner and lost from sight before her companion even had a chance to ask what was the matter.
In a dojo in San Francisco, a Japanese man was running his kendo class through a series of exercises when he suddenly stopped, wooden sword held high in the air above his head. He seemed far away in his mind for a long moment before he finally lowered the sword and looked at his class.
“My apologies,” he said. “But I must leave.”
He walked across the dojo, laid his sword on a table by the door, and then went out the door.
In a garage on North Lamar Boulevard in Austin, Texas, a tall black man stood up from the Harley he was working on. He pushed his dreads back over his shoulders.
“Crap,” he said. “I was really looking forward to a burrito when I was done with this.”
A dark-haired woman lifted her head from under the hood of a vintage T-Bird to look at him.
“What’s up?” she asked.
“Business,” he said. He cleaned the grease from his hands on a rag. “Bad business.”
“You need a hand with it?”
She’ d known him long enough to know not to ask what kind of business.
He shook his head. “But thanks for the offer. I’ll see you in a couple of days.”
And just like that he was out the door, walking into the bright sunlight that beat down on the pavement of the garage’s parking lot. A moment later his long legs had taken him out of her sight.
Jay hadn’t thought he could hold out as long as he already had. It seemed impossible that he could even be doing it—some kid supporting this whole freaking building all on his own—but even as it was dropping back into its slumber, the dragon lent him strength, and to keep the beast under control he’d found reserves of willpower he didn’t think he had. He supposed he could thank Paupau now for the years of intense training designed to keep him strong and focus his will. Things like standing on one leg for hours, or hanging from the chin-up bar until he thought his arms would fall off. “It’s good to build up stamina,” she’d say when he complained, “for a human as well as a dragon.”
But nothing could have prepared him for this, because the dragon was almost asleep again, the building was taking forever to clear, and it was all he could do to stop the roof from crashing down.
He was trembling from head to foot by the time everybody was out, but finally they were all safe and he didn’t have to bear the enormous weight anymore. Except then the realization suddenly hit him. He was so screwed.
How was he supposed to get out?
Who was going to hold up the building until he made it to safety?
No, scratch that. Never mind getting out. Who was going to hold the building up right now? Because he was losing his grip on it.
He tried to wake the dragon again, but the rage that had come from seeing Margarita die was gone. There was only fear left, and that didn’t seem to be enough. His brain was blank. Anything that might have helped—from what he’d learned having the dragon waken, to his studies with Paupau—was gone. There was only the crack of the rafters overhead. The thunder of the building collapsing.
He stared up, stunned, until he remembered the other thing he’d learned today.
Just before the roof crashed into the floor, he shifted to Lupita’s in-between place.
The silence was absolute after the roar of the collapsing building. He stared up and drank in a dark desert sky, rich with stars. And free of falling debris.
He let out a breath he hadn’t been aware of holding and slowly walked in the direction of where the parking lot would be in the world he’d just left behind. When he judged he’d gone far enough, he shifted back. The quiet of the desert was immediately swallowed by pandemonium. People shouting and talking. Sirens approaching.
Jay stared at the wreckage of what had once been a music hall. Part of him was numb. Part was horrified. He’d just killed one of the gangbangers, fried him to a crisp with hardly a thought. He’d just pulled down this enormous building, almost killing everyone inside. But another part of him thought that making the gangbanger pay for killing Margarita was the coolest thing ever. And he’d come through in the end, hadn’t he? He’d saved everyone. He really was some kind of kick-ass superhero.
He heard someone behind him, footsteps crunching in the dirt, and turned to see Anna, her face streaked with grime and tears. He thought she’d be freaked by what had happened, but she only looked angry.
“You did this,” she said.
It was a statement, not a question.
“I guess I did.”
She slammed her palms against his chest and he staggered back.
“You did this,” she repeated. “But you couldn’t do it before Margarita got killed?”
“It’s not like that. Before tonight, I didn’t know I could really—”
She cut him off. “Bullshit. You told us all about the dragons and crap.”
“But I had no idea how to—”
“You could have gone and shut them down—all those goddamn posing bandas—but no, you had to wait to make some big statement with it, didn’t you?”
“What are you talking ab—”
She slammed her palms into his chest again, hard enough to make him stagger back.
“Margarita’s dead! Don’t you get it? She didn’t have some magic power to protect her. She was just our friend, a kid who played in our band, and now she’s dead!”
Over her shoulder, Jay saw Rosalie approaching with Ramon and the other band members. They walked like zombies, dejected and stunned, carrying the few instruments they’d been able to grab before they’d fled the building. Behind them, Hector knelt beside a blanket-draped body.
Here he was thinking he was so cool, that Anna was going to be impressed. But their friend was dead. Murdered.
“I . . . I . . .” he tried, but he couldn’t find the words.
“You could have stopped it before.”
Jay shook his head. “I didn’t know that guy was going to—”
“Not now. Back when you went to see El Tigre. Instead you just made some kind of deal with him and now Margarita’s dead.”
“That deal was supposed to—”
“You make me sick. I hope I never have to see you again.”
“Anna,” he tried again, but she was already gone.
He could see Rosalie a step or two ahead of the others. He couldn’t read her expression, but still he didn’t know how he could face her. It was going to be the same as with Anna. All of them were going to feel the same.
Maybe he should have done something before. Instead of making the deal, maybe he should have tried to wake the dragon instead, smashed the crap out of the bandas’ pool hall with all of them in it. Then Margarita wouldn’t be dead.
“Jay,” Rosalie began.
But he shook his head. He couldn’t stay to hear it. There was no place for him here.
Before Rosalie could reach him, before Anna could shove him again, he stepped away to the in-between place, its calming desert. He sank to his knees, too weak to stand.
He’d wrecked everything. He’d messed up and people had died because of it. Not as many as might have, but he was no hero for saving them. Not when he’d created the danger in the first place.
The image of Anna’s face—the tears streaming down her cheeks, the anger in her eyes—wouldn’t go away. He sat up and hugged his knees, rocking back and forth.
What was he going to do?
Rosalie stood with her mouth agape, staring at the place where Jay had been. She’d thought she’d seen the gangbanger turn to ash and vanish before the building came down, but even with everybody talking about it, she hadn’t really believed it. He had to have just disappeared into the crowd while everybody was looking at Margarita and Hector. But even if it had happened, how could Jay be responsible? Even if he could turn into a dragon, there’d been no dragon. Just Jay standing there with his arms spread wide.
But this . . .
“Mother of God,” Gilbert said, and crossed himself.
“What . . . how did . . . ?” Rosalie couldn’t seem to make her mouth work properly.
“It was magic,” Ramon said.
Rosalie glanced at him. She heard in his voice the shock and wonder that she and Gilbert were feeling, but there was also the satisfaction of finally having something confirmed. The only one of them who didn’t seem surprised was Anna. She just looked pissed.
“Did you see?” she said. “He’s like some kind of freaking superhero, but he still couldn’t take the time to save Margarita.”
“What are you talking about?” Gilbert said. “What happened to Jay?”
“He took off on us,” Anna said. “What else would you expect from a guy like him?”
Rosalie wanted to protest, but just then someone came over to say that the police wanted to speak to them.
“Wait up,” Ramon said. “Nobody saw anything, okay? Not unless you want to spend the rest of the night talking to some cop who could give a shit about a couple more dead Mexican kids.”
“Why should we protect Jay?” Anna demanded.
Rosalie could see that she still wanted to hit something.
“I’m not saying you should,” Ramon told her. “But tell me. What did you see him do in there?”
“He—well, the gangbanger—oh crap, I don’t know. But you all saw him just disappear in front of us, right? So he must’ve had something to do with what happened in the hall.”
“We don’t know that.”
“How about this,” Anna said. “He let Margarita die. Why should we cover for him?”
Ramon shook his head. “We’re not doing that. I want to protect us—all of us that are still here. If we tell them what some of us saw, or thought we saw, they’re going to think we’re high and be all over us for drugs and who knows what kind of crap. We could even get locked up for psychiatric evaluation. Do you want that?”
“No, it’s just—”
“We wouldn’t even be able to go to Margarita’s funeral.”
Anna thought it over. “Fine, I get the picture.”
Ramon looked at the others. “Everybody else okay with this?” Silence. “Okay, let’s go talk to the cops.”
It was easier and harder than Rosalie had expected. Easier because the police simply took their statements at face value, but harder because this was Margarita they were talking about. Their Margarita. Not some stranger, but their drummer and friend.
When they were finally done, Ramon, Rosalie, and Anna found themselves still standing in the parking lot, staring at the ruined music hall. Everyone else had gone home except for the police and the fire department, and a handful of rubberneckers, hanging on in case something else happened. Ramon draped an arm over each of their shoulders.
“Let me take you guys home,” he said.
Anna shook her head. “I want to go to the hospital or the morgue . . . or wherever they took Margarita.”
“You know we can’t do that.”
“Then what can we do?”
“We can go home.”
“You can stay with me,” Rosalie said.
“What if Jay’s there?”
Rosalie sighed. “I know it’s easier to believe that this was his fault—that he knew all about what he could do—but I really don’t believe that he did.”
“Margarita’s still dead.”
“I know. It’s horrible but—”
“The bandas killed her. Like they killed my brother . . .” Rosalie nodded. “I know. My mother’s dead because of them, too.”
“God, I hate living like this.”
Ramon drew them both in close. Anna wept into his shoulder while Rosalie stroked her hair.
“I’ll go talk to Margarita’s parents,” Ramon said when Anna finally pulled away and stepped back. She rubbed at her eyes with the sleeve of her hoodie. “Better they hear it from one of us than from the policía.”
He drove the girls back home and walked them to the door. Tío was waiting up so, once Ramon left, the two girls camped out in his living room. Over the cocoa Tío made them, they told him what had happened.
It was late before Tío finally let Rosalie chase him off to bed with her argument that he had a restaurant to open in the morning, and later still before Anna eventually fell asleep on the sofa. It was only then that Rosalie was able to deal with her own grief. Somehow, she’d managed to keep the flood of numbed shock and sorrow at bay while dealing with the police, taking care of Anna, talking to Tío. Now it washed over her like storm waters rushing through a dry riverbed. She cried for Margarita, for Margarita’s parents, for all of them. For the gifted life cut too short. For the friend she’d lost. For a world in which such things not only happened, but were all too common.
But while her tears exhausted her, she wasn’t able to fall asleep the way Anna had. She lay on her half of the big sofa and closed her eyes, trying not to think, but that just made her think more. After a while she got up and stood in the door of Jay’s room.
Enough time had passed that she had begun to question what she’d seen in the parking lot: Jay standing there, present one moment, gone the next. People didn’t just disappear—well, not into thin air the way it had seemed that he had. People disappeared all the time, but they either walked away from their lives, or someone took them.
So which was it with Jay?
When she looked around the room, there wasn’t much of his personality visible. The furnishings were all Tío’s, as were the posters on the wall, most advertising local galleries. But she saw his backpack lying in the corner by the dresser. His MP3 player was plugged into the wall socket, charging. Crossing the room, she opened the top drawer of the dresser. Jay’s few clothes were all still there, all neatly folded. She was about to close the drawer again when
she saw the corner of the notebook she’d given him peeking out from under his T-shirts.
She hesitated a moment, then pulled it out. Sitting on the bed, she looked around again. It was hard to tell that anyone lived here, which also made it hard to tell if Jay had simply abandoned his few things or was planning to come back. The flimsy notebook felt heavy in her hand. She wasn’t sure she was actually planning to read it. Then she glimpsed her own name in the first paragraph and the next thing she knew, she was deep into what he’d written.
It was strange, reading about things she had experienced herself only to see them now from a different point of view. The change in Jay as the journal continued was disconcerting, too. He went from the kid she’d met a few weeks ago—not really sure what he wanted out of life, easy and fun to be around, crushing on Anna—to someone so full of—
Anna would say bullshit.
But Rosalie thought it was maybe more like potential. Big, weird, mysterious potential.
She tried to convince herself it had to be a story he was writing. But she knew it wasn’t. She’d probably always known that it wasn’t, that it was all real—the dragon, the magic, everything.
“But how can it be?” she said aloud, the words startled out of her mouth.
She looked to the doorway. She half expected someone to be standing there, shocked that she’d be invading Jay’s privacy. Truth was, she was shocked herself; guilty, too. But these things she’d been reading . . .
She fell back on the bed and let the journal drop as she stared up at the ceiling. She was so tired. Too tired to get up and go to her own bed.
In the end, she fell asleep where she lay.
The destruction of the dance hall brought out half the neighborhood. Whether or not they’d actually seen anything, they were all happy to talk to the various news reporters who vied to get reactions from people on the street.
Five-fingered beings weren’t the only ones drawn to the wreckage. Cousins stood around the parking lot in human form, exchanging their own stories.
The Painted Boy Page 11