It wasn’t that his heart stopped beating, no—it hurt too much to have simply stopped. It buckled in surprise. It collapsed in on itself. It pinned him to where he stood, for he was certain—deliriously certain—that he looked into the face of a ghost.
Her brown hair was braided and coiled around her head like a crown; a delicate white scarf wound around her shoulders and the high neck of her dress, though the night was not yet cold. Her lips were pink, bare of rouge; they parted slightly, as if in surprise.
She rose like the first coil of smoke from kindling: slowly at first, then all at once.
If he looked away, would she vanish? He could not look away. He could not move, not even as she took a hesitant step forward.
Do?a Mercedes’s sharp voice shattered the spell.
“Magdalena,” she said.
The woman turned her head toward her. Quickly, smoothly. A reflex.
“Magdalena, it’s time for us to leave.”
The young woman turned her back on Néstor as Do?a Mercedes took her by the elbow.
Magdalena.
It thrummed in step with the pulse in his head.
Magdalena.
An eerie orange light filled his vision, winking over the spring. From the darkness a monster thundered forth, pinning Nena to the ground and sinking its fangs into her neck.
Now here she was.
She was standing there, her back to him, not ten strides away. Alive, grown, beautiful. Carrying on a conversation with Do?a Mercedes and Don Félix, her head bobbing affirmatively at something Félix said. A gesture so familiar it sent a shard of bone through Néstor’s ribs.
This could not be real.
He saw her on the floor of la casa mayor in the candlelight, pale and bleeding. So small beneath the concerned shapes of her family curled over her like mournful trees. So fragile. Dead.
Because of him.
Néstor turned on his heel and strode back through the courtyard entrance.
“Hey!” Beto was right behind him. “Where are you going?”
He didn’t know. His feet were carrying him; all he could process was the realization, with chill certainty, that he was going to be sick. A ringing rose in his ears, drowning out Beto asking what was wrong with him, drowning out the noise of the assembly as it faded behind him, as he walked as quickly away from la casa mayor as he could.
He focused on the thump of his boots on dirt. He walked until he came to the patio of his childhood home. He walked two steps farther. Put his hand on the side of the wall, fell to his knees, and vomited.
He felt as if he were throwing up his lungs. Though his eyes were shut, there were shadows rippling through the black; Nena’s screaming drummed against the back of his skull.
Beto seized him by the arm and yanked him, coughing, to his feet.
“What the fuck,” Beto hissed. “You aren’t drunk, are you?”
He wasn’t. Not even remotely. He leaned away from Beto, spat, and straightened.
“You go back,” he said hoarsely. “I’m fine.”
“What, you’re not coming?” Beto said. Néstor did not reply. “I don’t know anyone there without you. You should come.”
Before he could stop himself, Néstor spoke the truth. “It’s too much.” Shame flushed his neck with heat when he realized what he had said. It was all too much. He was weak to feel that way, weak to admit it. “Find Casimiro.”
Beto hesitated. Néstor could almost hear the calculations whirring through his head: Néstor was obviously in distress, but the smell of the food the Serranos had prepared for those attending the assembly was rich on the night.
Shame turned to embarrassment, burning hot in Néstor’s face. He was a man; he could handle himself without Beto fussing over him like a mother hen. He gave his friend a half-hearted shove.
“Go on,” he said. “I need to be alone.”
Beto gave him one last long look. “All right,” he said. “Just don’t do anything crazy, like run off or something.”
“I’m not going to run off,” Néstor snapped. There was more venom in those words than he intended. He couldn’t see Beto’s expression in the dark, but could sense his friend was taken aback.
“Fine, fine,” Beto said. “See you.”
He returned to the assembly.
Néstor stood, hand against the wall of the house, for a long moment. Echoes of voices traveled through the night to him. His heartbeat had not slowed.
Nena was alive.
She was alive.
Which meant that for the last nine years, nine goddamned years, every step he had taken since he left Los Ojuelos, every day spent driving cattle under the burning sun, running farther and farther from home, every night he had stared at the sky, begging for sleep to bring the one dream that eased the ache in his chest . . .
The fundamental truth on which he had built every one of those years was wrong.
8
NENA
LATER THAT NIGHT, Nena sewed in la sala while Javiera, her cousins Didi and Alejandra, and Félix played a parlor game. The familiar sounds of her family needled her as she mended: Didi’s occasional squeals of delight grated; Javiera’s insistence that someone was cheating pitched too close to whining. Félix hushing the others because Mamá had gone to bed already brought no relief.
She thrust the needle through the skirt she was mending and pulled the thread through so sharply that it snapped.
“Madre Santa,” she hissed under her breath, rethreading the needle.
It was impossible to focus. Against her wishes, her mind kept looping back to the assembly, like a moth obsessed with a flame. To the moment a group of Los Ojuelos vaqueros had stepped into the warm light of the party, scrubbed and decked in their Sunday best, their mood restless as a group of stallions.
The purpose of bringing them all together in the same courtyard, to listen to the rancheros all at once, was of a logistical as well as a more political nature. They would be discussing the number of wagons and cattle to bring, as well as the best route to join with the Mexican army at Matamoros. But of the ten or so rancheros who had agreed to join the squadron, many had rivalries with one another. They were neighbors with long histories that were not always harmonious. Even now, as the final ranchero arrived with his vaqueros and the group shifted and settled with anticipation, Papá’s voice pitched in agitation as he spoke with Don Antonio Canales. Papá and Don Antonio were not arguing outright; perhaps the other rancheros kept the conversation at a civil keel. But they were close to it, and continued speaking heatedly even as the conversation beyond Nena and Mamá shifted in surprise. Out of curiosity, her eye followed the attention of the assembly as it swooped like swallows to the courtyard entrance.
The Los Ojuelos vaqueros were among the final arrivals to the assembly. As de facto leaders of the rancho’s vaqueros, Bernabé and Casimiro arrived first, a matched set with dark hair and nearly identical features, polished and gleaming like bright coins.
Behind them was a third.
Nena’s eye passed over the figure for a moment, caught by the presence of a man who looked like an Anglo among the vaqueros, then her attention tripped over itself in belated surprise. Wait, it cried. There. She looked back.
She knew him.
Over the years, on the rare occasions that she let her guard down and allowed thoughts of him to slip under her skin and bruise, she wondered how he had grown. If he would resemble Casimiro, or if he would be so changed that he was a stranger to her. If he ever walked into her life again, would she recognize him?
Néstor Duarte walked slowly into the courtyard and paused, a beat behind his family, sweeping the room with dark eyes.
The answer was yes.
Undoubtedly, undeniably yes.