Francisco said nothing, growing ever quieter in his distress, and Antonia said nothing, growing ever angrier in her own. They were both destroyed imagining the young man who had occupied this Shrine only a few days before.
Antonia, too, began to recall Daniel as a child. As a baby, Daniel had been as much a hellion as he had been in his teen years. He would chomp on Antonia’s breast and feed dirt to himself and tip over his cradle with himself in it and eat the hair off the barn cats if they got into the house. In many ways, though, Daniel’s terribleness had been a blessing. If he had been a sweet baby, Antonia’s grief would have never allowed her to look at him, imagining only what it would have been like for her sister-in-law to raise him for herself. But since he was awful, Antonia would say, “It was lucky Loyola died so that she never had to suckle a demon at her breast,” and spend all her moments with him and love him ferociously.
Now these memories of Daniel choked Antonia, and she began to rage in the Shrine. Ordinarily, Francisco would have said nothing or would have removed himself, which only would have increased her anger. For years he had been saying nothing or removing himself. But now, he recalled General MacArthur and Daniel and, in the same way, put his arms firmly around his wife. He turned her to the mirror that was opposite the sculpture of Mary and held her there. She looked at herself, at her twisted face, and at Francisco’s tear-lined face, and at Mary and her owls behind them both, reminding her what the Sorias were really meant to do. Minutes passed like this, with Francisco still and Antonia rigid.
Antonia’s anger died inside her. She collapsed against Francisco and for several minutes they wept together.
“Look at us, Francisco,” Antonia said. “Look what we’ve become.”
Francisco pressed his lips together. “I don’t want to. I’m too ashamed.”
Daniel’s presence in the Shrine was so potent that they found themselves speaking English, as they would have if he’d really been there with them. They realized it at the same moment and shed more tears.
“What can we do?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
They clung to each other still. Judith had thought that if she convinced them to dance on the stage as they had when they first met, her mother and her father would fall back into each other’s arms, and she was not quite wrong. But it was not the hundredth blow of wind to knock the barn over, merely the ninety-ninth. This place, the Shrine, reminded them of who the Sorias really were. To turn away from this calling was to ruin themselves. Francisco and Antonia were both so choked up with unperformed miracles and their own darkness that they had nearly destroyed themselves.
In this way, losing Daniel’s parents had begun to tear them apart, and in this way, losing Daniel brought them back together.
Outside the Shrine, they could hear owls shuffling and calling, sensing the presence of a looming miracle—in this case, the untended darkness inside both Francisco and Antonia resonating against the unused saintliness inside Francisco. But they were not pilgrims, they were Sorias, and they had both seen for themselves that Soria darkness was a harder thing. Both thought of the wooden Soria family housed in another shed nearby. Of Daniel, lost in the wilderness.
“We cannot orphan our daughters,” Antonia said wildly.
The door to the Shrine flew open.
Both Antonia and Francisco jumped in guilt and shame.
“Rosa,” Antonia said. “Rosa, I can explain.”
But Rosa Soria, her round and beautiful form lit by headlights behind her, was there neither about the owls on the roof nor Daniel in the desert.
“Come to Eduardo’s truck and listen to the radio,” Rosa said. “Tell me who it sounds like to you.”
It was inevitable that the other Sorias would hear the radio station eventually. In past years, when the family had stayed up late enjoying one another’s company, it would have taken no time at all, because the assembled members would have noticed the cousins’ absence. But because the Sorias had slowly parted, falling into their individual sadness, it took a late-night trip to uncover the secret.
Eduardo and Luis had gone to Alamosa to play cards and on returning had seen the pilgrims gathered close together. It looked like a witch’s gathering, with Tony the giant at their center, a fire pit at his feet. Although he was married to Judith Soria, Eduardo Costa had an outsiders’ understanding of the pilgrims. This meant he usually did not think of them at all, and when he did, he thought about how they were uncanny, he thought about his wife’s family’s legendary history in Mexico, and he thought probably this proved that God was real, and if not God, at least the devil. Up close, they made him uneasy, and so it was with suspicion that he drew his beloved stepside truck close to them.
When he exited, he realized the pilgrims weren’t truly gathered around Tony or the fire—the real focal point was a radio.
“Hola hola hola, it is Diablo Diablo again, tiptoeing through the night with just fifteen volts and a dream. We’ve got a great show for you tonight. Our theme is gonna be love. I know what you’re saying—‘The theme for every night on this show is love, Diablo Diablo!’—but I don’t mean love like that. Not a-kissing and a-hugging, my friends. We’re talking love like for your mother, for your brother, for your sister, for your auntie. So what have we got, what have we got coming up? I’ve got some love letters—not love like that! Not love like that! You wait—that listeners have written for me to read on air. I’ve got another entry from my cousin’s journal. And I’ve got some fresh new music shipped in from a friend back east who’s got an ear for what’s hot. I know it’s late, but stay tuned and stay awake, because here we go. Let’s get under way with a classic from Trío Los Panchos.”
Eduardo instantly recognized Diablo Diablo’s voice. Joaquin! he thought. His fancy and useless sixteen-year-old cousin by marriage, a disc jockey! Eduardo was no fool, and he had heard some pirate radio in this time, and he knew at once that that was what he was listening to. Because Eduardo was a proper macho of the kind who was much prized at the time and because a pirate radio carried an element of risk to it, this raised Joaquin’s esteem in Eduardo’s eyes by several degrees. Before Joaquin had been merely ridiculous to him, but now Eduardo revised all of the memories he had of him to include his role as a pirate DJ. Now his strange sense of fashion seemed like a coy nod to Joaquin’s secret life. His hair was a wink. Eduardo was an old-fashioned cowboy; Joaquin was a radio cowboy. This was to change their relationship for the rest of their lives.
“Where is Joaquin broadcasting from?” Judith asked.