He continued to hold her. “I know everything feels wrong, but you can be right again, Marisita, if you try as hard at it as you try with everything else.”
This was when the black rose of his darkness had bloomed. Neither Daniel nor Marisita knew what part of that visit triggered it, but the truth was that it was not Daniel coming to comfort her, nor the sensible council he gave. It was not his arms around her or the warmth of his words in her ear. It was, in fact, the way that he said Marisita to her in this last sentence. The way he said her name conveyed all of his sympathy, and it confirmed all of the truth of his advice, and it promised her that she was worthwhile and redeemable, and it indicated that he treasured the way he had seen her selflessly interact with the other pilgrims, and it hinted that if any single thing was different about their circumstances, he would marry her immediately and live with her for decades until they died on the same day just as in love as they were in that moment. This may seem like a lot to be contained in the single word that is a given name, but this is why in more conservative times, cultures took great care to refer to each other by Mr. and Mrs.
“And then he left,” Marisita said.
Joaquin was too overcome by his cousin’s bravery to immediately answer. Right then, he was so ferociously proud and scared for Daniel that love and hope and fear choked his Diablo Diablo voice from him. With great effort, he managed to say only, “We’re going to take a brief musical break. Here’s Elvis with ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love.’?”
While Elvis crooned, Joaquin held himself and wiped away a tear, and Pete and Beatriz looked steadily at each other because stories about lovers always hit other lovers hard.
Joaquin pulled himself together as the song drew to a close. “Now we’re back. Thank you, Elvis, for singing the words we were all thinking. And the darkness?”
“I don’t know when it came upon him. It must have been soon after he left, because he returned only a few minutes later with the letter for Beatriz. He slid it under the door and gave me the instructions for the letter. Then he was gone, and I never got to tell him myself that I love him.”
There was silence.
Joaquin said, “If he is listening tonight, you just did.”
Marisita said nothing.
Joaquin said, “Marisita?”
“It’s just—” Marisita started.
“Yes?”
Marisita held out her hands to the sky and examined them again. “It’s just that the rain has stopped.”
Of all the Sorias there, only Luis the one-handed had ever been in Michoacán at the time of the great monarch butterfly migration. Millions of butterflies travel to Mexico each fall, sheltering in the forests there as winter punishes the land farther north. It was a sight he would not soon forget, the air shimmering with drifting color, the butterflies floating on wings that looked like Antonia Soria had cut them at her kitchen table. Some people said that these butterflies were the souls of the dead returning to earth in time for Día de Los Muertos, but Luis had thought he had never seen anything so alive.
He hadn’t believed he would see anything like it again, but on that charged night, the Sorias found themselves gazing at a sky that rivaled that enchanted one. Once the storm had ceased over Marisita, it took only a few moments for the butterflies on Marisita’s dress to dry. Now they took off all around her, hundreds of them, swirling up and around into the sky. They mingled with the miracle-crazed owls who circled and dove, driven to excitement by Marisita’s miracle.
It was an awesome sight, but a charged one. Miracles are a strange thing in that sometimes a miracle will trigger another one, or sometimes trigger a disaster, and sometimes both of these are the same thing. So when the butterflies swelled upward, dots of orange and yellow, they flew right into that atmosphere that had begun the night so charged with anticipation and fear and hope. Those molecules vibrated and agitated as hundreds of wings brushed against them again and again, and in the black sky, an electrical charge mounted. The Sorias could hear it down below—their ears momentarily went dull and dead in anticipation—and then there was a mighty crack, as though the sky itself was ripping open.
A massive lightning bolt flew from the dark.
Lightning hunts the largest prey, which in this case was the antenna on top of the radio telescope, with Tony as its human base.
There was an explosion of light.
The antenna and the dish and Tony were all obscured by it. Everyone down below was forced to avert their eyes lest they be blinded. In less than a second, the electric pulse raced white-hot down the wires that ran from the antenna to the truck, and every ground wire exploded from the soil with a sizzle and pop. A thunderous crash shook the ground they stood on.
When the air cleared, there was no sign of the antenna. The telescope dish was blackened. Tony was stretched out in the dust at the base of the dish, the remains of the antenna blasted in copper bits around him.
He was no longer a giant.
He was not currently breathing.
Before the lightning strike, as Tony had listened to Marisita’s confession, he had been looking down from this very great height onto Bicho Raro and he had been thinking about the enormity of what they were doing tonight and how this entire family had come together to do it. He was thinking about Joaquin’s incredible promise. And finally he was thinking that it wasn’t all bad being a radio giant, as long as you looked for the things you could do as a giant that you couldn’t do as anything else, like hold up someone else’s voice so it was just a little louder.
The second miracle had come easily.
“Tony, gosh, Tony!” Pete said. “What do I do?”
Joaquin, who had torn off his headset to jump from the truck, put his ear on Tony’s chest, trying to hear his heart or check for breathing. This is a terrible way to check for evidence of life. Beatriz, who had leaped out with Pete and Joaquin, did it in a less terrible way. She lifted Tony’s hand, noticing the branched and peculiar lightning flowers that covered his arm, ending at his fingers.
“There’s a pulse,” she said. “He’s alive.”
It’s a difficult thing to be struck by lightning. It’s also a difficult thing to fall dozens of feet from the top of a radio telescope. Tony’s breath had been knocked all the way out to the highway, and it took a full minute for it to make its panting way back to him.
“He’s breathing!” Joaquin announced for the benefit of the other Sorias.
But they were not paying attention to him. They were shouting and pointing at something completely different: the box truck. Because Pete, Beatriz, and Joaquin had jumped out of the box truck so swiftly to attend to Tony, they had not realized that the truck had become extremely warm immediately following the strike. The lightning had raced down the wires so hot and ferocious that it had lit everything it touched on fire.
The box truck had been quietly and furiously burning to the ground in the minutes they were distracted by Tony.