“Let’s try this again. Did you see Daniel’s darkness?”
Daniel was as interested in this answer as his cousins were, as he had not yet seen whatever it was that he felt shadowing him. He was certain that Marisita had looked out the window after him as he left—he had been able to feel the familiar weight of her gaze wrapped around him. So it was possible she had seen whatever it was that watched him now.
“No, I did not,” Marisita said in her sweet, sad voice. “Nothing except for the owls. I’m sorry. I want to be able to help. But I didn’t see any change at all. It’s hard for me to imagine that he even had any darkness inside him, because he is—he was—you know how he is.”
Yes, they all knew how he was. But we all have darkness inside us. It is just a question of how much of us is light as well.
“Yes,” Diablo Diablo said bleakly. “He was a Saint.”
“I didn’t see him up close, though. He passed me a note through my door and told me not to come out,” Marisita continued. “It said he was dangerous and that I shouldn’t follow him.”
“Dangerous,” Diablo Diablo repeated, and the word thrilled over teeth. “Did you happen to see which way Daniel went when he left?”
“I looked out the window after him. I saw him going into the night. He stopped near the edge of Bicho Raro, but I don’t know why.”
This had been because Daniel had encountered Antonia Soria’s dogs. They had not yet become aware of his presence. Some were sleeping, some were dozing warily, and yet another was worrying at what was left of Tony’s white jacket. Some men might have tried to sneak past the dogs, or to trick or intimidate them. Daniel did none of these things. Instead, he prayed. He prayed to his mother that the dogs might know how he was feeling. The dogs at once began to weep. They tipped their heads back and instead of howling, they let big tears roll out of their eyes and into their fur. They wept as they understood that Daniel was afraid that he might be going into the desert to die alone. They wept as they understood that Daniel could not bear the thought that he might not see Bicho Raro or his family again. They wept as they understood that he was in love with Marisita Lopez and still, even after all of this, longed for there to be a way to spend his life with her.
As the dogs cried and whimpered, Daniel walked past them. He did not try to comfort them, because he knew there was no comfort. He could hear the strange sound of his darkness moving in the shadows on the other side of the house, but he did not flinch. He was the Saint of Bicho Raro, and he was determined to walk out of Bicho Raro without harming his home.
Diablo Diablo persisted. “You didn’t see where he went after that?”
“No.”
“Just now, you were wandering in the desert after him with no idea of where he went?”
“I had to start somewhere. I can’t imagine him out here alone. And his family can’t help him. I can do something, and so I will.”
“How long are you intending to wander?”
“As long as I need to,” Marisita said.
Daniel was overcome then, and allowed one tear to fall. He would spare one drop of his precious water for this feeling to escape him.
“As long as you need to? And what if you haven’t found him by tomorrow?”
“I will eat some of the food I packed for him and keep looking.”
“And the next day?”
“The same.”
“And the next? And the next?”
“I’m going to look for him until I find him,” Marisita insisted.
There was a long pause here, and Joaquin seemed to be struggling to find a way to put his next question into words. Finally, he merely asked it as it had first come into his head.
“Marisita, are you in love with him?”
“Yes.”
Daniel spared another drop of water. The tear fell to the dust. A pack rat raced out from the brush to grab it, certain it was a jewel because of its shine in the firelight. Daniel’s sorrow had made it tangible enough to carry, and so the pack rat bore it back to its nest, only to later find that offspring raised on a bed of sadness fail to thrive.
Diablo Diablo said, “Marisita, there is a problem with your quest. We have a source here in the station who is telling me that if you are in love with him, you can’t look for him. If you’re in love with him, the family darkness will come on you, too, if you help him.”
Marisita did not immediately answer.
“I think you better play another song,” she finally said. “I need to cry some more.”
Diablo Diablo did not immediately answer either. Daniel suspected (correctly) that this was because he was trying to find another thematic song in his prerecorded session. He put on Paul Anka’s “It’s Time to Cry.” When it was through, he said, “Last question, Marisita: The Saint’s darkness came to him because he helped you and interfered with your miracle. How did Daniel help you?”
Daniel curled on his side, the top of his head touching the radio so he could feel the vibration of the speaker against his skin. He closed his eyes, though his blind spiders’ eyes stayed open to the night as they always did.
In a small voice, Marisita said, “I don’t want to answer this one. I’m sorry— It just, it just makes me cry too much. I can’t tell the story to someone else yet.”
“That’s all right,” Diablo Diablo soothed. After a pause, he added, in a somewhat less Diablo Diablo voice, “Marisita, he’ll be okay. He’s too good not to fight it. Maybe we can have you on the show again?”
Marisita said, “I’d like that.”
Daniel opened his eyes. But it was not very much brighter than it had been with them closed.
Being a pilgrim was a hard row to hoe. Nearly every person who came to Bicho Raro believed that the first miracle was the end point of their journey. They had only to make it to the point of receiving it and then their soul would rest easy. Things went pear-shaped for many when they understood it was the first of a two-step process, and as time passed, pilgrims began to fall into two increasingly disparate groups: those who performed the second miracle almost immediately after their first and those who, with every unsuccessful day following the first miracle, became increasingly unlikely to ever perform the second miracle.