Then the shock faded. The dust settled.
Now, as she sewed in la sala, Nena could see that nothing about her life had changed. Yanquis still threatened her home. She would be riding to a battlefield and had much to prepare: herbs for limpias and poultices, bandages and needles and thread for wounds.
It did not matter that Néstor was back.
There was nothing that would distract her from her task of convincing Papá that she was worth more to this rancho on it than sent away from it. That she was Abuela’s successor and was valuable in ways that could not be quantified like salt to be bartered or horses to be sold.
It did not matter that Néstor was back.
She wound these thoughts tighter and tighter around her spine as the parlor game continued around her. As a set of footsteps approached the house, as a figure stepped onto the patio and went to the door. If she had lifted her head and looked out the window, perhaps she would have seen him. Perhaps she would have not been surprised at the knock at the door.
Félix stood, taking a candle for light. The door opened inward; she could not see whom Félix greeted, but she should have recognized something in the way her cousins’ faces changed, swift as the turning of pages, from disinterest to rapt curiosity.
She froze, needle suspended, as Néstor Duarte asked Félix if he could have a word with Se?orita Magdalena.
Like a herd of deer lifting their heads at the appearance of a rider, every face in the room turned to Nena. Didi’s and Alejandra’s eyes were wide with delight; Javiera watched her intensely, brow creased. Félix looked at her from the held-open door, expectant. Waiting.
She lowered her gaze to her embroidery. Her needle was still suspended, gleaming silver in the candlelight.
She stabbed it into the next stitch.
“Tell him I’ve gone to bed already,” she said archly.
A long-suffering look, eerily reminiscent of one of Mamá’s, crossed Félix’s face. “Nena, he can hear you.”
A soft titter escaped Didi, though she clamped a hand over her mouth.
Heat flushed up Nena’s neck to her cheeks.
Everyone was still looking at her. Every expression was an echo of another from the past: Félix looking down on her when she begged to know if he had picked up the mail at the comisaria; Didi creeping to her bedside in the dark to find her crying into her pillow; Javiera watching her, hawk-sharp, as her mind wandered while she chopped vegetables.
She was not weak, not anymore. She had not been for a long time.
She set her embroidery down. Stood. Smoothed her skirt with hands that shook. Her feet carried her across la sala to Félix as if they were someone else’s, her heels crisp on the flagstones.
Félix handed her the candle and stepped back. Nena rested her hand on the open door and stepped into the spot where Félix had been.
She looked up at Néstor.
For a long moment, nothing but a soft chorus of crickets disturbed the silence. No one inside spoke. Neither did Nena.
Néstor’s hands were folded before him respectfully, his black hair pushed back from his face and looking messier than it had been before. He was serious, perhaps even determined, but candlelight softened some of his sharp edges. This close, she could see a small white scar beneath his lower lip. She had forgotten that scar.
When they were eleven, he was thrown from a half-broken mustang. She was at the corral that day, watching as the colt bucked and flung Néstor into the air like a slingshot. She remembered screaming as he struck dirt; she slung herself through the rungs of the fence only to be seized by the arm and yanked back by his cousin Casimiro.
“He’s fine,” Casimiro said when she struggled to be let go and run to see if Néstor was hurt. “See?”
Even before another vaquero had reached him, Néstor had sprung to his feet. His face was bloodied, but he was grinning.
That day was the first her heart had beat so hard in fear for him that it physically hurt.
It was not the last.
But years passed; she grew tired of hurting. She built up calluses to it. She had bled and had her own scars now.
He was looking directly into her eyes. It was too familiar. Too intimate.
“Buenas,” he said softly.
Without breaking eye contact, she shut the door in his face.
9
N?STOR
N?STOR PACED BACK and forth before the patio of his family’s jacal. Voices old and recent waged a duel in his skull.
My daughter is dead.
Magdalena, come here.
Nena lived. He saw her. She met his eyes and stood. At that moment, time shuddered and slowed beneath his feet, hooves skidding on uneven ground.
But it couldn’t be. He had held her cold body. He had carried her for God knew how long through the dark, willing her to breathe, willing her heart to beat. In vain.
From where he paced, he saw figures in skirts returning to la casa mayor from the assembly: Do?a Mercedes and a tall, lean girl who might be Javiera. A few of Nena’s aunts; her cousins Didi and Alejandra.
He kept pacing.
Don Félix and another figure approached la casa mayor. A figure with full skirts and hair braided around her head like a crown. A figure whose gait he recognized even after not having seen her for nine years.
They disappeared into la casa mayor.
My daughter is dead.
Yet now she lived.
These two truths faced each other, pistols drawn and trembling. One had to win over the other. One had to be the victor. But neither would draw the trigger.
He had to speak to her. He had to.
Night settled around the rancho with all its sounds. Don Feliciano was still in the courtyard. There was no reason to be afraid to walk up to the patio. To retrace the path he had once carried Nena down.
Perhaps it took an hour. It felt like no time. It felt like three hours. He inhaled sharply, bracing himself, and let his feet carry him through the grass.
He went to the door of la casa mayor. Lifted his hand. Knocked. The sound rattled the breath between his ribs. He was thirteen, he was falling to his knees on rough tipichil floor, Nena’s weight impossibly heavy against him. He shook his head to clear it. He cleared his throat.
Don Félix opened the door.
Then, before he knew what he would say, she was in the doorway.
Nena stood before him. So close that if he lifted his hand, he could have touched her cheek. Felt its living warmth.
For nine years, she was dead.
She was a ghost haunting his nights and his days; her mist thickened and faded with the setting and rising of the sun, but it never left. No matter how hard or far he rode, she clung to his skin like the smell of sleep. His soul bore her brand, the wound deep and blackened and scarred over. From the day he left Los Ojuelos, a part of him knew that his life was now a game of second bests. Of good-enoughs. A meager harvest grown in the long shadow of her absence.
None of that was true anymore.
For now here she was, candlestick in hand. Looking at him.
He should have sensed she was not happy to see him. He should have done or said something to begin on the right foot, but he was struck dumb. To him, the crickets fell silent. The noise of the assembly in the courtyard faded; the moon ceased to glow. The night had no mistress but her.
Silent, reverent, he watched the glimmer of the flame reflected in her dark, liquid eyes. Candlelight gilded the tips of her eyelashes and danced along her hairline, caressing the brown hair swept elegantly away from her face. She was a woman now, and more beautiful than he ever could have dreamed.
Nothing mattered but this: a bolt of yearning as wide as the sky. A certainty so brilliant it shattered every vision he once had of the future.
This was what he wanted.
His mind was on another patio, one he had dreamed of for years, one that he built with his own hands on his own land. In dreams he had turned and found no one next to him; now, he saw.