“Padre, for the last time. Keep your peace or leave.” The old man hovering over me harrumphed, but not unkindly. “Meddling know-it-all,” he added under his breath as he dabbed more poultice on the wound across my ribs.
I turned my head to the side. Paloma sat next to me, biting her lip as she scribbled furiously on a piece of paper—instructions from the doctor.
Andrés stood before the hearth, staring into the fire. His hands were bandaged in thick white strips, clasped as if in prayer with his fingertips pressed to his lips. Was he all right? What had happened?
Did Juana survive?
Andrés glanced over his shoulder, as if he heard my building distress, and met my gaze.
Rest. He did not speak, but I heard him as clearly as if he had. Whatever had happened, it was over. I could sleep.
I let myself melt away into soft, gray unconsciousness.
* * *
*
WHEN I WOKE SOMETIME later, it was to the sound of someone chopping vegetables.
Sunlight streamed over the blankets covering me. I turned my head to the side. There was a chair next to the cot I lay on. It was empty but for a stack of letters. Beyond was an open door; Paloma was outside, working in what looked like an open-air kitchen. The smell of frying onions brought me fully awake. I was famished.
I tossed off the blankets, wincing as I sat upright and brought my feet to the floor. The bandages around my torso were white and fresh, and the pain along my ribs had lessened to a dull throb.
I glanced at the chair. A single letter lay open atop a handful of envelopes; it was signed by the hand of Victoriano Román and absolved me of Rodolfo’s murder. I lifted it; my breath caught.
The envelopes. They were addressed to Do?a Beatriz Solórzano, of course, but in Mamá’s handwriting.
I didn’t notice the pain in my side as I reached for them. There were six, perhaps eight. My vision blurred as I tore the first open.
Mamá was back in Cuernavaca. The matriarch of Papá’s extended family had died and left Mamá the little stone house in the garden where I had grown up. I saw her clearly as I read, as if I were in the room myself: Mamá sitting in its small kitchen, writing to me, surrounded by vases of flowers, the smell of her perfume mixing with chocolate warming on the stove. Her soil-stained gardening apron hanging on its hook on the door. Morning light curling into the room through the thick vines that hung rebelliously over the window.
Mamá invited me to visit, Mamá wanted to make amends, Mamá wanted . . . she wanted me. It was evident from Mamá’s letters that she was concerned by the lack of reply, but that she understood my stubbornness, and prayed I would forgive her.
Later, after I had read them all and forced myself to stop sobbing for the pain it caused in my side, I limped to the doorway.
The wind shifted; smoke from the cooking fire carried over to me, and I shuddered. Paloma looked up from stirring a vat of pozole over the fire.
I lifted the letter I held in my hand, too shaken to speak.
Paloma’s face transformed with pity. She set her ladle aside and wiped her hands on her apron. “I found them among the patrón’s belongings,” she said softly.
I shook the letter once, still speechless. He lied.
“My mother . . .” I fumbled for words. “She wants me to come to her.”
“Will you go?”
I nodded. My voice was hoarse from disuse; could I trust it to carry me through a sentence? “I have to,” I said. “I can’t stay.”
Paloma held out her arms to me. I cried in her embrace like a child.
“Now that’s enough,” she said after a minute or two, pulling me away by the shoulders. “If you cry any more you’ll reopen your side, and it’s me Andrés will be angry with.”
I sniffed and looked around us. We were somewhere in the village. Small houses nestled up against one another like sparrows against a winter wind; a few curious onlookers peered at us but quickly turned away or vanished into their houses when they saw me looking.
“Where is he?”
Paloma shrugged, turning back to the pozole. “Back at the house, trying to get it to listen to him,” she said. “He’ll wear himself out eventually. And when he does, he knows where to find us.”
32
ANDRéS
AFTER A DAY AND night of hovering at Beatriz’s bedside, using my grandmother’s gifts to ensure that her recovery was seamless and quick, Paloma unceremoniously ushered me out of her house.
“She can’t rest properly if you keep meddling. Go be useful elsewhere,” she said. With a meaningful tilt of her head, she gestured out the doorway at the main house of the hacienda. “You know what I mean.”
I did.
The morning was gray and misty as I walked across the courtyard to the house, my aunt Inés’s pamphlet in hand. Its pages had been damaged by rain, but its glyphs survived without a smudge. I suspected something a bit stronger than ink bound them to the page.
The house watched my approach, silent and apprehensive. Its stucco was stained with soot from the smoke, but the fire had primarily damaged the far side of the house. From the front, it was the same it had always been: a few tiles missing from the roof, wilting bougainvillea. Flower beds weeded, then abandoned.
I could almost feel it narrowing its invisible eyes as it sized me up: like it, I looked the same as I had before the night of the fire. But a different man opened the front door and stepped into its cavernous quiet. It smelled of rain, wet wood. The aftertaste of smoke lingered heavy on the mist that seeped into the ruins of the dining room and, above it, Beatriz’s study and bedchamber.
The night of the fire, the roof had collapsed on Juana. Mendoza and I searched for her body there the next day and found it in the formal dining room, shattered and scorched. The floor of the burning room had collapsed into the room below before rain could extinguish the flames.
We buried Juana in the Solórzano plot with even less fanfare than her brother . . . and as far from her brother as we could manage. The caudillo Victoriano Román abandoned his investigation against Beatriz when Paloma brought forth a blood-blackened knife and dress from Juana’s rooms; her evidence was compounded by Juana’s arson and the blatantly clear attempt she had made to kill Beatriz.
I shook away the memory of finding Beatriz ringed by flames. It haunted me like my own shadow. In my brief, stolen hours of sleep since that night, I saw nothing but her silhouette against Perdition’s rage. In dreams, I could not move. I cried out to her but was voiceless. My feet were too heavy, my arms feeble and unable to move as fire devoured her, as her screams for help whipped the flames higher, still higher.
I woke drenched in cold sweat, her name knotted in my throat.
Never again would I allow her to be so threatened. I swore no more harm would come to anyone under this roof. I was there that morning to ensure that.
But would it be enough?
Paloma told me that she and Mendoza had found a stack of letters addressed to Beatriz among Rodolfo’s papers, that she suspected they came from Beatriz’s mother.