I whirled on the house and met its gaze head-on.
If I died in San Isidro, so be it. Perhaps Paloma’s bleak, oracular words had a power that bound me to this land. To this house. Perhaps one day I would stop fighting the voices and give myself over to madness at last.
But it would not be today.
I was the daughter of a general, and I was not done fighting yet.
“Behave yourself,” I snapped, the words loaded with a threat.
The house did not reply.
I turned my back on it and walked down the easy slope of the path. Rodolfo stepped from the carriage and began to greet the villagers.
His hair was bright bronze in the sunlight, gleaming like a cathedral retablo. He was perfect. Of course he was. He was Rodolfo, and he was full of promise and light.
RODOLFO RODOLFO RODOLFO RODOL—
Or was he?
His face was smooth and calm; if he noticed Ana Luisa’s absence, he gave no sign of it. But how could he not, when she had lived and worked on this hacienda all of her life? All of his life?
He and his treat their dogs better than us.
Did they mean so little to him?
“Querida!” he cried, and strode toward me, arms outstretched. I took his hands and offered my cheek to kiss, keeping my face still and angelic to hide the revulsion that bubbled beneath my skin at the brush of his beard, at his dry lips.
“Welcome home.” I smiled my brightest as I looked up at him, blinking and shielding my eyes from the midmorning sun. “How was the road?”
“It felt longer than ever,” he said, taking me by the shoulders.
“As was the wait for you,” I said. “Were you able to deliver my letters to my mother?”
His smile faded.
“I’m sorry,” he said, putting a hand on my cheek. My spine stiffened, but I focused on the disappointment I felt to keep myself from flinching away from his touch. It was not hard. It pulled me down, its weight like wet wool. “She would not see me,” Rodolfo added. “I sent the letters through a messenger instead, and though I sent him back daily for a reply, none came.”
Mamá would not listen to my pleas to come to San Isidro. And what if she had? San Isidro was in no state for her to arrive.
Not yet.
“Don’t worry,” Rodolfo said softly. His voice crawled under my skin. “She will come around. Perhaps all she needs is time.”
I nodded, then lifted my eyes to meet his. He was searching my face, looking for something; a slight crease formed between his brows.
“You’re not wearing your hat,” he said, his voice pitched strangely.
I wasn’t. Nor had I been for days at a time, not in the garden, not as I slept on the terrace in full sunlight in the afternoons, desperate for rest and respite. I had barely spent any time in my bedchamber out of fear, and that was the only place where I had a mirror in the house. Without Rodolfo around to remind me, I had completely neglected my complexion.
And I knew what happened when I did. When I was careless. I fought to keep my face still, though panic rose like acid in my throat.
You’re one of us, now, Paloma said.
Rodolfo had not even noticed Ana Luisa’s death.
If he had it in him to kill his first wife, who was criollo pale, waxy as a doll, then what of me? What if he saw me as just as expendable as the villagers? As the maids?
I could not believe I had let myself slip. What would Mamá say?
I waved one hand, a delicate dismissal of his concern. “Oh, how my mother would harangue me for how careless I have been while preparing the gardens.” If my mother had any idea what was truly going on at Hacienda San Isidro, she might say many things. If she began with I told you I was right, you married a monster, I would not blame her in the least. “Come inside. I’ll get it and show you where I put the furniture.”
The house hummed at Rodolfo’s return. It shifted around me like a colt ready to bolt; if Rodolfo felt it at all, his face remained infuriatingly impassive.
After my brief tour of all the things I had accomplished in his absence—an underwhelming litany, if I were to be frank, since my primary concern had been staying alive—Rodolfo met with José Mendoza. To my relief, he spent most of the day with the foreman, breaking only to have lunch with me on the terrace. I made sure to wear my thickest hat, as if that could change anything now, and listened as he glowed about how well the pulque was selling. How the economy was beginning to settle at last. I weighed this, thinking of how my father said that at the end of the war, the insurgents didn’t even have guns and fought with stones. No one had money coming out of the war, yet somehow, my husband did.
I started when Rodolfo mentioned something about the hacendados of Haciendas Ocotepec and Ometusco coming for dinner. “What did you say, querido?”
“Didn’t you see my last letter?”
I pasted a smile on my face. I had not read it. The news that he was returning was enough to occupy my mind in the wake of the failed exorcism and Ana Luisa’s death.
“Ah yes,” I said. “It had slipped my mind in the excitement of your return. I look forward to welcoming them into our home.”
I did not, not in the least. After lunch, Rodolfo rejoined José Mendoza; the minute he was out of sight of the house, I ripped off my hat and rolled my dress’s sleeves up to my elbows. “Paloma!”
* * *
*
PALOMA AND I WORKED in hurried silence, each of us doing the jobs of two people as we prepared an elaborate meal for eight. Rodolfo insisted that if a priest was on the property, it was appropriate that he join us for dinner as well as Juana, the two hacendados, and their wives. My mouth soured at the idea of Do?a María José seeing me quite darker than I had been when she first met me, but I shoved this to the back of my mind.
“How is Padre Andrés?” I asked Paloma in a spare moment where I stoked the fire, relishing its warmth on my face. The winds had risen, and though the afternoon was as bright as the morning, the air had a bite of chill of the oncoming winter.
She made a noncommittal noise as she chopped onions. “His head still aches.”
“Did you say to him—”
“Yes, I told him you said he shouldn’t feel he has to come.” Paloma shrugged. My skin felt like it was too tight at the thought of him and Rodolfo facing each other across the dinner table. Would Rodolfo realize what I was trying to do with the house? Would he peel away my thinly affected adoration of him and see how the priest had as powerful a hold over me as he did the villagers?
For it was true: somewhere between sleeping and waking, suspended in pale, quiet dawns, Andrés had slipped into my heart.