“I did.”
He’d tried to, anyway. He had walked out to the main road and he had even convinced a trucker to pick him up so that he could hitchhike back to Oklahoma. But as he thought about leaving the desert, he realized he didn’t think he could actually survive it. He’d already broken his heart once that night, and he thought that if it happened again, it really would kill him. In fact, it was only love that had kept him dying from the first heartbreak. It has a way of plugging holes in the heart even as it punches new ones. But he knew there wasn’t enough love in the world to help him survive leaving the desert so soon after leaving Beatriz, and so he asked the trucker to let him out. The desert was so moved by this act of love for it that it cast a wind that rose the sand and dust, and this amorous breeze rolled Pete head over heels over scrub and fence and through dry riverbed, tumbling him through the night like one of its weeds, until it brought him here to Beatriz.
Once he saw her, he knew what he needed to do.
“You can’t be here,” Beatriz said. “You’ll get my darkness.”
“I know,” Pete whispered. “It’s already here.”
“What?”
Dread seeped through her, and he held her fingers more tightly.
“Don’t let go of my hands,” he said. “I can’t see anything.”
Faith is a funny thing, and Beatriz, as only a reluctant Saint, had never truly accepted it. But now Pete was relying on her to be able to cure herself so that she could cure him.
“How do you know I can do this?” she asked.
“I reckon I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t know much of anything about what’s gonna happen. I don’t know what I’m going to do now that the truck’s gone. I don’t know if I’m ever going to see again. But I guess I do know this: I want to be with you.”
In her head, Beatriz heard all of the arguments she had mounted against the possibility of a relationship with him, a young man so kind and so soft, and her, the girl without feelings.
And then, of course, just like that, she had it.
“I was upset,” she told him.
“I know,” he replied.
“I was upset every time you said it,” she said.
“I know.”
“I don’t show feelings like other people.”
“I know that, too.”
She hesitated. It felt very peculiar to express this out loud, but she suspected that meant she was supposed to. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t have them. I think—I think I have a lot of them.”
Pete wrapped his arms around her. He was covered in all the dust the desert had rolled him through, but she didn’t mind.
“I know I have a lot of them,” she said.
The sun rose, and they both saw it.
Miracles and happiness are a lot like each other in many ways. It is difficult to predict what will trigger a miracle. Some people go their entire lives full of persistent darkness and never feel the need to seek out a miracle. Others find they can exist with darkness only for a single night before they go hunting for a miracle to remove it. Some need only one miracle; others might have two or three or four or five over the course of their lives. Happiness is the same way. One can never tell what will make one person happy and leave another untouched. Often even the person involved will be surprised by what makes them happy.
And it turns out that owls find both miracles and happiness irresistible.
There was plenty of happiness to be found the night the Sorias finally celebrated Antonia’s and Francisco’s birthdays the following year. Marisita and Daniel danced on the stage that Pete had built, lights twinkling over their heads and rose petals swirling under their feet. Marisita wore a blue dress she had never worn before. After having to wear a wedding dress every day for over a year, she had vowed that she would never again wear the same clothing two days in a row. That night after the dancing was done, she would sit at the kitchen table with Antonia as she had every night before, tear the seams out of the blue dress, and sew herself a new one. Daniel held her fondly as they danced, and his hands bore eight more tattoos: eight closed half-moon eyes just below his open spiders’ eyes, to remind him of what he had learned during the hours that he could not see.
Antonia and Francisco had just finished dancing, and now they exchanged gifts while Judith looked on with joy. Antonia presented Francisco with a small box. When he opened it, he discovered a shapely, night-black rose. It was not quite as perfect as the one he had been hoping to breed, but that was because she had fashioned it out of the ashes of the box truck. Francisco kissed his wife in delight, and then he retrieved a large box from the table behind him. When Antonia opened it, she discovered a black-and-white collie puppy. It was not exactly the same as the one he had owned when he met her all those years ago, but this one had a bigger smile. Antonia said, “I love dogs.”
Pete and Beatriz had yet to dance. Currently, they both sat on the blackened wire mesh platform of the radio telescope, looking down at the festivities from above. From here they could see Marisita’s family joyfully chattering near the stage (Max had remained in Texas with his anger for company), and they could also see Joaquin demonstrating the use of the turntable and speakers to one of Marisita’s younger sisters. His bag was already packed beside him; he was headed to Philadelphia that summer, but he’d promised to stay for the party. He was on his way to becoming Diablo Diablo even during the daytime, and the Sorias couldn’t have been more proud.
“I’m happy,” Beatriz told Pete. It was a sentence she wouldn’t have thought to say out loud only a few months before.
“Me, too,” Pete whistled back.
Above them and below them, owls began to cry out. They lifted from the rooftops and soared off the edge of the radio telescope, and Beatriz and Pete hurriedly descended to discover the source of the commotion. All of the Sorias watched as a pair of headlights slowly pulled up beside Eduardo Costa’s beloved stepside truck. Owls careened toward the newcomer, some of them landing on the vehicle itself. Owl talon on metal is not a fortunate combination, and the sound is equally unpleasant.
The lights turned off. It was a large farm truck with the words double d ranch painted on the side of it.
This was Darlene Purdey, the owner of the rooster Pete had repurposed the previous summer. Deprived of her prize fighter, she had shifted her focus from hosting cockfights to searching for the two young people who had taken him from her. After all this time, she had finally tracked them to Bicho Raro by means of a classified ad—the Sorias had listed Salto for sale in the newspaper, and Darlene had recognized him from his description alone.