22
sickly pink
WARA WAS EXHAUSED. SHE WAS SUFFERING, and Alejo had done this to her.
He watched her, sitting there on the horrible bed in this place he’d brought her to, playing with a silver ring on her finger. Her eyes were ringed in dark circles, glazed over and in another world She shivered and absently scrubbed at her bare arms, trying to get warm.
Alejo’s heart hurt.
He got up and walked over to her backpack by the door and found a black sweater his mom’s friend had brought for Wara. “Its cold in here,” he offered it to her. It was dark outside now, chilly and menacing in the shadow of the darkened Andes. She looked into his eyes as he handed her the sweater and her face was bathed in red from gaudy chandelier. Her nose was a sickly violet and yellow, puffy under her reddened eyes. It had to hurt. A lot. Alejo closed his eyes slowly, then opened them. “I think we should try to rest.” He dragged his feet over to the couch. The ugly thing was three cushions wide, good enough for a decent night’s sleep. He curled up facing the wall and stuffed a small, hard red pillow under his head.
“Whenever you’re ready, you can turn out the lights,” he told Wara. “I can sleep anywhere, with lights or without, so don’t worry about me.”
As if she would. Alejo grimaced at the back of the couch. He had no idea what else to say. Wara switched off the light and covers rustled behind him, then everything fell silent.
Way too silent.
Suddenly, the horror of the day pressed into him with a vengeance and it hurt.
Franco Salazar was dead, and he couldn’t say he was sorry.
He believed what he’d told Wara, that he couldn’t just sit by and watch while thieves attacked the man in the story of the Good Samaritan…or while Franco Salazar abused kids. But he’d never really thought about other people who could be hurt in the middle of delivering justice to the bad guys.
He’d never laid eyes on Noah, but Alejo had seen his sister’s tears, heard how the guy played with his little brothers and sisters and made sure Nazaret got home safe late at night. For all Alejo knew, that silver ring Wara was always playing with was a gift from Noah. It was obvious she cared about him, a lot.
Always before, when Alejo killed, he had been sure the man who died was scum and deserved whatever he had coming to him. Now, for the first time, someone innocent had been taken out along with the bad.
Alejo knew the reason Wara’s presence was undoing him: she was the incarnation of a person simply caught in the crossfire. He felt guilty for the other innocent people on the bus, but he had never seen them. When he looked into Wara’s eyes and realized what he had done, there had been no going back.
The combination of leaving Islam, leaving the Prism, and trying to figure out why, if he had done God’s will, he could still feel so wrong, spun Alejo’s world upside down.
A half-hour or so went by, and Wara’s even breathing seemed to indicate that she was asleep. A slightly hellish glow filtered into the dark room through the sheer red curtains from a street lamp in the courtyard outside. Alejo closed his eyes but he just couldn’t sleep.
And then there’s my family.
Who he had avoided in anger for years, then dragged into the very path of death.
He kept thinking about his father, and the few words they had had just before the Martirs went to Sacaba to take the bus away from Bolivia. Pablo Martir told Alejo he wanted to speak with him up on the roof again, alone, and Alejo had steeled himself for the conversation. He really hoped his father would understand that there wasn’t much that could be added to what had already been said.
There was nothing Alejo could say that would make it right.
There was nothing his father could say that would make Alejo feel more acutely how badly he had messed up, getting his entire family into this situation.
There was no other solution that Alejo could see to the problem; even if he would walk right back into Coroico and show up at the doorstep of his old house so the Prism could shoot him, the 964 would still be angry, and they could still go after his family. And Wara was still a witness.
Alejo had trudged up the concrete steps to the roof, following the broader form of his father. All these years, he had imagined that his father was still occupied as a pastor, preaching that Jesus saves while letting the world go to hell. Somehow, finding out that he had been directing the only center for children with AIDS in the country, which would now be left without leadership because of Alejo, made Alejo feel even more depressed.
The faded sheets were still drifting lazily on the line in the afternoon breeze on the hostel rooftop. Alejo’s father turned to face his son squarely. “Son, I can’t tell you how sorry I am we can’t have more time together. There is so much more I’d like to talk about, but as you said, now is not the time…” His voice cracked a little, and Alejo felt his shoulders tense. “So much time lost,” Pablo continued, “and now I don’t even know what will happen, what you…” He stopped and sighed, obviously thinking something along the lines of, “…if you are going to continue being a criminal, because that really complicates our relationship.”
“The one thing I want to ask you before we leave, though,” Alejo’s father said after the scowl had faded, “is about what you said before, about Jesus. You said that you have been a Muslim?”
“Yep, I’ve been a Muslim since I was eighteen,” Alejo confirmed dryly, wondering where his father was going with this.
“But you told me that you are no longer a Muslim, that you are a Christian.”
Alejo hesitated, the term Christian still racking him with unpleasant sensations of long sermons with too many amens. People pretending to praise God while peeking to see whose hands were raised the highest. Little boys dead in the grass so that no one would disrupt the worship of God in the church building every Sunday.
Alejo exhaled loudly. “I guess so...Dad. I don’t want to be a Christian like I was taught. I’m sorry. When I read the Bible and saw what Jesus said…it was like I had never heard most of it before. And I wanted that. I want that. It’s him I want, not a religion.”
Pablo sighed deeply, eyes boring into his son’s. Then he actually stepped forward to clasp Alejo’s shoulder, tears in his eyes. “We all need a lot of grace right now,” he said hoarsely.
Pablo Martir let go of his son and turned as if to go, then paused. Without looking back he said, “Noah had Jesus living in him. He would have forgiven you, Alejandro.”
Alejo had shivered, staring at the back of his father’s head as he walked towards the metal door that led back downstairs and disappeared.
Then Noah was a better man that I am, he thought.
Alejo, who usually could sleep like a baby even with a rock for a pillow, finally drifted into a fitful sleep on the soft red couch. He jerked upright at a foreign sound filling the room. A cell phone! Slapping around in the darkness, he got a hold on the metal chain of a pink floral lamp next to the couch and yanked it, flooding the motel room with sickly-sweet light. Wara had already flown across the room towards her bag and was throwing out clothes, looking for the phone that kept drilling its tinny tune into the night. Realizing it wasn’t there, she dove back for the bed, crawled over it, and grabbed the phone vibrating across the nightstand.
Her hands were shaking so hard she could hardly flip the thing open to gasp a breathless, “Hello?”
Alejo sank back into the couch, hoping the call was his sister in need of a midnight conversation. The odds were against that, however; there really wasn’t a good chance a call in the middle of the night would bring good news.
“Yeah, it’s me.” Wara’s voice quivered. She waited, then waited some more. Alejo exhaled as her entire body crumpled and sank back into the sheets, seemingly buried in the mass of fluffy pillows and thick satin bedspread.
“When?” Silence, and then she choked out, “Th-thank you.” The cell phone shut with a near-silent click, and then Alejo saw Wara pull the covers up over her head.
“You can go back to sleep,” she finally said in a voice that did not sound like herself. “The Bennesons just wanted to let me know that the funeral will be tomorrow at ten.”
They found him.
Alejo’s blood chilled, and he pulled the lamp off quickly, as if afraid to sit any longer in the light when he just found out he had caused a funeral. Rubbing his temples, Alejo rolled back onto the couch, slowly, staring up at the ceiling.
His brain told him he should say something. What kind of man just sat there without saying anything when a woman finds out the guy she loved has died? Alejo didn’t even need to run through the possible options in his mind, however, to know that finding something adequate to say to her would be impossible.
Taking a deep breath, he shivered, eyes fixed on nothing in the darkness until it was nearly morning.
A morning in which Alejo would go to a funeral.