Beatriz said, “Save the transmitter!”
“I’ll get buckets from the barn,” Pete said.
“I’ll help,” said Antonia.
“Yes,” agreed Michael.
Anyone who has fought a fire of any size knows that there are some fires you can kill and some fires that will die only on their own. This was the latter. The interior of the truck was an inferno. The smell of melting electronics filled the night as clouds of dark smoke blocked out the stars. As buckets were passed from hand to hand and precious water poured out on the sand, the fire popped and groaned and hissed like the living thing it was. The egg Beatriz had hung in a hairnet nest began to agitate and scream. It had never grown warm enough to incubate and hatch but now, finally, in this miraculous, destructive fire, it cracked open. A strange dark owl of a breed none of them had ever seen burst from the fire. It circled around their heads once, and when it looked down, for a moment, its paler face looked like a woman’s—a little like Loyola Soria, and a little like the face of the sculpture in the Shrine.
Then the owl was gone, and the truck was, too, singed to smoldering ashes.
It is difficult to give up hope, particularly when you have just been filled with a lot of it, particularly when you have gone without for so long. Humans are as drawn to hope as owls are to miracles. It only takes the suggestion of it to stir them up, and the eagerness lingers for a while even when all traces of it are gone. And the Sorias were riled up over more than just a suggestion. Marisita’s second miracle had happened right before their eyes, and then Tony’s had, too. They finally truly believed what Beatriz and Joaquin had posited: For years they had been doing it wrong. The danger had been real, but the taboo had not. Now they imagined a generation of pilgrims coming and learning from previous pilgrims and from Sorias and from the indefinable wisdom that comes from music, even if the words don’t always sink in.
So when the box truck burned to the ground, they did not immediately realize that something had died with it.
It occurred to Beatriz first.
“No,” she said, just one word.
To communicate with Daniel, they would need another radio, and she could build one, but it would require new parts. New parts would require a trip to Alamosa at best, ordering them from elsewhere at worst. It would mean she had to build a new antenna. Even with all the help of everyone here in Bicho Raro, it could not be done in a day, or even two days.
She had seen Marisita return home that day with Daniel’s bag. He didn’t have two days. He didn’t have one day. He might not even have had this day. Now that the owls and butterflies had dispersed, there was only one species left soaring overhead: vultures.
“Where is Marisita?” asked Judith.
Marisita was gone. Now that she was healed, her shame and guilt gone with the rain, she found that her desire to find Daniel remained. She was determined to find him and offer the same comfort that he had given her.
This struck Beatriz as the ultimate folly. It seemed obvious to her that if Marisita had not found Daniel before now, there was no reason why she could hope to find him in the midst of an ashy black night.
And so, in this moment of terrible loss and hardship, Pete and Beatriz did what lovers often do when things are the worst for the other: They fought. It was made worse by neither of them realizing that they were fighting. Instead, they thought they were being quite reasonable.
“I can’t believe it’s gone,” Pete said.
Beatriz said, “It will take me weeks to rebuild it.”
“Oh. I just meant the truck.”
Pete felt blindsided by the sudden loss of his future, a loss that Beatriz pointed out was only a loss in his mind, as he did not need a moving truck to be a whole person, and in fact only required a sense of worth, which was something that came separate from a job title or being shipped off to another country to shoot at people like your father or father’s father had been before. This did not, as you might imagine, make Pete feel any better, as very few people are ever healed by being told a truth instead of feeling the truth for themselves.
“You don’t have to be cruel about it,” Pete said. “I know you’re upset.”
“I’m not upset. Please stop saying that I am!”
She sounded so certain that Pete regarded her fresh, trying to understand if he was reading her wrong. Her expression was complicated by the ash on it, and she did not wear her feelings like anyone else he had met, but he felt strongly enough about it to press on, with sympathy. “Look, you’re allowed to be upset. All this—the fire, Daniel—you’re allowed.”
“I don’t have feelings like that.”
“Don’t have feelings like that?” Pete echoed. “You’re not a doll. You’re not a robot.”
“I’m trying to tell you something about myself,” Beatriz said. “You’re wrong.”
But Pete was not wrong. He had not been wrong before when he’d said it, and he wasn’t wrong now. If only Beatriz believed her strangely shaped feelings existed, she would have seen it, too. Instead, she found herself impatient with him, thinking about how Francisco and Antonia’s relationship had fallen apart because they were too dissimilar. Pete, she thought, was merely proving how he was an emotional being and unable to see her for how she truly was, unable to understand what she was unable to give him. She believed that this conversation was exactly why people like her father and Beatriz ended up alone in greenhouses with their work.
She didn’t realize that she was being torn to shreds inside.
“I don’t need to be made into something that I’m not,” she said, “something easier, with feelings, something more like you. I am trying to think of what to do next and it’s taking all of my mind and I don’t need you to imagine me as something softer to make you feel better about who I am!”
Pete stared at her, but she didn’t soften these words, because she fully believed them. And because she fully believed them, he thought that he must have been wrong. She knew herself better than he did.
As her eyes glittered coldly at him, he waited just a moment longer to see if there was any feeling or kindness in them, but she believed herself the girl without feelings too much for that. Behind him, the box truck he had wanted so badly smoldered. His heart lurched dangerously, a pit inside him, the hole enormous and irreparable.
He turned without another word and he left Bicho Raro.