Francisco Soria had begun work on his marvelous greenhouse directly after an early fight with Antonia. She had been shouting at him as she had shouted at him each day for months, and he had realized all at once that he had nothing to say to her in response. Not only for this current argument, but for all of them. Rather than wait for her to finish so he could explain this truth to her, he had merely walked out of their house into the bright day and begun construction. Antonia had found this impossibly cruel, but Francisco had not left to hurt her. He had left to ease his own mind. Too much noise and too much anger acted like a flue on his thoughts, and as Antonia’s grief overtook her, his ideas had been choked down to only a tiny flame—and what was he, if not made purely of ideas? In those early months, he had worked on the greenhouse’s construction entirely after dark, when every other Soria was asleep, because he found that, having lived with so much noise for so long, he hungered for absolute silence. It was only after many days of quiet that his prized fluidity of thought had slowly built back up again. Once he had finished the greenhouse and begun work on his roses, he finally returned his schedule to a diurnal one.
In this way, he lived a small and solitary life in a small and controlled world. It was not his best life. But it was an acceptable one.
In the ruins left behind after the truck had burned down, Beatriz found that her small and controlled world was denied her. The radio dish was still smoking hot, and the truck had burned to ashes. There was no private place she could climb on or under. Beatriz’s mind refused to settle, though, and eventually, she went to the only sanctuary she could think of: the little house Pete had built.
There she sat inside the dark. There was only a little porch light coming through the windows, the glass still filtering the handsomeness of thought from her father’s greenhouse. She curled her arms around her knees and struggled to piece together a solution to reach Daniel, but her thoughts would not order. She tried to cast them up above her, outside of her head and into the sky, so that she could study them from all directions, but they refused to leave her body. She kept testing her thoughts on branches of logic and finding the logic would not hold.
She had been sitting there for countless moments when she heard a whistle.
“Beatriz?” whistled her father gently.
She did not respond, but he ducked his head and entered anyway. He had already, through process of elimination, decided that she must be in the house. He drew close enough that she came into view, still and owl-like in the corner. Father and daughter did not embrace or touch, but he sat close to her, facing her, mirroring her posture.
“What are you doing?” he whistled to her.
“Thinking of how to reach Daniel before it is too late.” It was not so much a whistle as it could have been, but he understood her.
“There was no way to save the truck,” he said.
“I know.”
“Pete has gone,” he said.
“I know.”
There was a long moment of quiet. Because they were both good about being quiet, it is difficult to say just how long this moment actually lasted. It was shorter than the night, but not by a lot.
Finally, Francisco said very softly, in words, not whistles, “I believe that we have been wrong about many things.” When Beatriz didn’t answer, he said, “I’m moving back into our house.”
Then he patted her knee and stood up and left her there.
Beatriz began to cry.
She had not known that she could cry, and she did not know why she was crying, and she did not realize that this in many cases is just how crying goes. She cried for a very long time and then she thought about how she had told Pete she was not upset when she had been the most upset she had ever been in her life. And then she thought about the vultures and Marisita and she cried even more. Finally, she thought of how they had been wrong about the taboo for so long and it was probably going to cost Daniel’s life.
When she was done crying, she wiped her cheeks—the dry air took away all the tears she had missed—and the girl with strange feelings saddled up Salto and rode into the desert to find her cousin.
Riding astride Salto, Beatriz followed the buzzards, and soon she caught up with the owl she had seen hatch from the egg in the fire. It coasted overhead with unshakable certainty, and Beatriz felt positive no owl would travel with such surety unless it was headed toward a miracle or a disaster. And what other miracle or disaster could be taking place in this valley tonight but something having to do with the former Saint of Bicho Raro?
As she rode, she wondered what she would do when she found Daniel. She had water, and a little bit of food, but she did not know what to expect.
The stars stopped their laughing to watch her gallop beneath them, and the moon covered its face with a cloud, and then, as she grew close, the stars scrambled down below the horizon so that they would not have to watch. The sun delayed its rising, too, so as to not bear witness, hesitating just at the edge of the earth, so the early morning hung in an eerie half-light.
The buzzards and pale-faced owl all gathered in the same place, a low flat area of scrub with a dune pressed up against an overgrown barbed wire fence. In this place, Beatriz caught sight of a figure and pulled Salto up sharply, meaning to be cautious. But then she recognized Marisita’s familiar dress, crumpled into a lopsided monument as she kneeled. She had Daniel’s head and shoulders in her lap. Her arms circled him.
“Do you have his darkness?” Beatriz called.
“No,” Marisita said.
This seemed impossible, as Daniel had broken the taboo by holding Marisita in her distress, and now Marisita was doing the same for him. And there was no doubt that she loved him—she was there, after all, and so she should have been an heir to his darkness. Beatriz began to wonder if they had been wrong about the savagery of the Soria darkness along with everything else, and dangerously, hope trembled in her. “How is that possible?”
“I cannot interfere with his miracle,” Marisita said with a little sob in her voice, “because it’s too late. He’s dead.”
Now Beatriz scrambled down from Salto so quickly that she terrified even Salto. The animal leaped back from her as she hurried to Marisita’s side and crouched in the scrubby grass beside her. Here was Daniel Lupe Soria, the Saint of Bicho Raro, worn to a frayed thread in Marisita’s arms. He looked like all of the icons Beatriz had ever seen. The martyred Saint, gaunt and frail, long hair hanging. Marisita was the Madonna, holding him close.
Beatriz thought she knew then what Pete felt like with the hole in his heart.
Movement to her right startled her.
“What’s that?” she demanded.