She had done it. Relief rushed through her shoulders like a cool breeze. She made the sign of the cross and sent a prayer to whomever was listening—God, la Virgen, whichever saint had lent her the energy to call Ignacio back.
“?Querido!” Elena cried, her voice cracking. “Dios mío, I thought you were dead.” A softness drew at the corners of Ignacio’s mouth as Elena fussed over him, as he looked up at her and, in a creaky voice half mired in sleep, asked what on earth the matter was.
Nena turned her face away. To grant them a moment of privacy, she told herself. It was not because something in her heart twisted at the sight of such open affection. She was stronger than that. She cleared her throat and put the rosemary back in her bag.
Ignacio reached his right hand up to caress Elena’s face. The motion caught Nena’s eye, but what drew her attention was the glint of a wound beneath the man’s underarm.
She turned sharply to examine it.
It oozed with blood.
“When did that happen? How?”
Elena and Ignacio turned to Nena in surprise, as if only just then remembering that she was there.
“What?” Confusion clouded Ignacio’s face. Exhaustion hung over him like a soaked rebozo.
“You’re bleeding.” She immediately turned her bag out, searching for the strips of fabric she always kept there for bandages. She was an idiot. She had been so afraid of failing to cure Ignacio’s susto that she had completely overlooked this. What if she had gone back to la casa mayor and left his wound to fester?
How could she ever tell Papá that she needed to stay on the rancho as Abuela’s replacement if she was this careless? She was arrogant, she was stupid. She needed to be more diligent. She needed to work harder.
She pored over Ignacio’s wound as she cleaned it. There could be no infection. It was a strange wound—it looked as if a snake had bitten the man’s arm, if a snake had six fangs. If those fangs were several times the width of a snake’s.
Very odd. She would tell Abuela about it as soon as she could. Ignacio was too exhausted to be asked questions about the wound—whether Nena liked it or not, it would have to remain a mystery for now.
When Ignacio’s wound was clean and bandaged, Nena gave herbs to Elena with instructions on how to brew a strengthening tea for Ignacio. It was possible his recovery would be long—the vaqueros who were felled by similar bouts of susto still suffered from weakness, sensitivity to bright sunlight, and exhaustion. Abuela could not yet track a precise amount of time to their full recovery.
“Thank you so much,” Elena said as they stepped onto the patio. “I should have never doubted you.”
Nena kept her false smile firmly affixed as she stood on Elena’s patio and said goodbye.
There was something that kept the people of the rancho from trusting her like they trusted Abuela. It didn’t seem to matter how hard she studied Abuela’s practices, never mind how early she rose to help young mothers with colicky babies or how many broken bones she successfully set.
Abuela had her theories. She had poked a gentle finger in Nena’s upper arm as they hung laundry to dry one recent afternoon.
“It’s your aura,” she said. “It’s wounded.”
Nena looked up at her in surprise, her pride stinging.
“People can’t see it as I do,” Abuela continued. Her voice was tender, almost pitying. “I know where this wound comes from. You do too. You must find a way to heal yourself from it, or you will never be able to live your full self. Can’t you sense how it confines you? The sick can. That’s why they hesitate.”
This, Nena knew, was nonsense. The reason people did not yet fully trust her was because she was young. The only thing that gave them pause was her lack of white braids and the gravitas that came with Abuela’s age.
She was untested. That was all. Every morning she woke before dawn to cross the rancho and demonstrate her skills was a step closer to proving she could be trusted. Even mornings like this one, where she stepped from Elena and Ignacio’s patio feeling a familiar, bruising loneliness well beneath her heart.
The mist had thinned. Soon, it would burn away entirely. The eastern edges of the rancho, over the roofs of the jacales and la casa mayor, brightened with the promise of dawn. Crickets hummed a steady melody. The trill of birds waking filled the air; from the chicken coop came the bright, bold crow of a rooster.
Then why did the hairs on her forearms stand on end as she reached for the latch of the gate? What drew her eye over her shoulder toward the line of trees?
It was nothing. It had to be nothing.
Nena gave her shoulders a brusque shake and slipped through the gate.
But she was still grateful for the click of the latch behind her.
5
NENA
LATE MORNING FOUND Nena sewing on the patio of la casa mayor. Stitches blurred before her eyes as she counted them, replaced in her mind’s eye by the wound in Ignacio’s arm. It was unlike any other animal bite she had seen. What would it look like when it healed? Would it scar?
She reached absentmindedly for her neck. The necklines of her dresses were unfashionably high. Every time she inherited a dress from Mamá or one of the tías, Mamá ensured that it was altered so as to cover the scar that puckered the skin of her lower neck, above her collarbone.
Part of her insisted that it was not the same kind of wound as Ignacio’s. It couldn’t be.
But it was.
The night she received the scar, she had stepped into the dark, yearning for the comfort of Néstor’s company, intent on finding Spanish silver to protect the rancho from Anglos, and then . . . she lay in bed, the sun that streamed through the window midmorning yellow, her throat parched. Abuela was at her side, holding her hand, whispering her full name like an incantation. Mamá hovered just behind her, face drawn, her fingers tripping over the coral beads of her rosary.
Everything in between was a sinkhole of darkness.
Mamá never spoke of that night. Yes, she watched Nena hawkishly in the weeks that followed, as she regained her strength. Yes, she fussed over altering necklines, claiming that such modesty was becoming, that it would certainly endear Nena to suitors in the future.
Neither did Abuela. She monitored Nena’s recovery closely and asked a few questions about what had happened, but did not pry. Months passed. Years covered the night, burying it firmly.
Of the many unspoken dicta that ruled life on the rancho, one of the most important was this: if tragedy struck and you escaped unscathed, it was unlucky to call attention to your fortune by talking about it. Even if you emerged with scrapes and bruises, it was simply not prudent to talk about it. You survived, and that was what mattered. Nothing could be gained from lingering on the past.
But now Nena wondered.
There was one person who had been there. One person who knew what had happened.
But he was long gone.
She swept this thought away with twice the force she normally would.
Her stitches had gone askance, loosened by her distraction. Wonderful. Now she had to painstakingly undo them.
“Then the witch removed her skin and left it in a heap on the patio.” Abuela’s voice drifted over to her from the far side of the patio, where she sat in a spacious rocking chair next to the bushes of jasmine and oreja de ratón that grew on the shady side of the house. While she had said that her hands still ached, she was still able to keep watch over the rancho’s many children. A circle of them—young cousins of Nena’s and vaqueros’ offspring alike—fanned around Abuela’s feet like supplicants at a saint’s shrine. Their eyes were all fixed on Abuela, wide and greedy as moons, as she spoke.