PEDRO PICKED UP ANGELINA’S RIGHT HAND AND GENTLY CLEANED it with the sea sponge full of sweet-scented soap. He’d tried lots of things over the years looking for the softest possible material, before he happened upon a sea sponge. Who would have thought something as rough and scratchy when it was dry could be so incredibly soft wet? He squeezed the soapy sponge in the basin of water and smiled. When he and Ty had gone fishing, the boy had commented, “Imagine how deep the ocean would be if it wasn’t full of sponges.” Had to be one of Theo’s lines.
Ty’s humor was only surface, though. Underneath the smile was a lonely little boy who needed a father, someone to—
Whoa, there, hold your horses. That position may be vacant, but nobody’s asked you to apply for the job.
Pedro needed to tread lightly here. He was definitely in a mine field and any wrong step could set off an emotional explosion. He had not felt anything for a woman in … okay, way too long. Just like Angelina’s fingers had drawn up into something like fists because she never moved them, his emotions had atrophied from disuse. Until Gabriella walked into the Mercantile trying to act calm and self-assured when he could see the pain beneath the façade as clear as trout in a mountain stream. He had discovered that day that his emotions had a lot more life in them than he’d imagined. But Gabriella had been so traumatized, how could she ever trust a man again, how …?
Just let it go. Back off and let it go.
He picked up a fluffy towel to dry Angelina’s hand. As he did, he tried hard not to imagine her hand holding a fishing pole, sunshine sparkling in her black hair. She probably would not have wanted to go fishing, though. Anza had been a girly-girl even as a toddler, liked pretty dresses and dolls, turned up her nose when Joaquin came in from outside dirty and sweaty.
But maybe not. Maybe Angelina would have been—
Don’t! Would-have-beens were dangerous waters. Swim out far in them and a riptide picks you up and carries you out to sea.
The ventilator puffed and sighed, puffed and sighed and the chest of the china doll lying perfectly still on the bed rose and fell each time it did. That was the only sign of life in her. Every couple of days, he’d disconnect the breathing tube and watch her chest rise and fall on its own for a while. Five minutes. Ten, sometimes. But she tired quickly, grew weak. As soon as she began to have trouble breathing, he hooked her back up to the machine. The doctors said it might be possible to wean her off the ventilator, let her gradually build up strength breathing on her own. They also said her heart might stop from the effort.
The bell on the door of the post office/laundromat side of the Mercantile jingled when someone stepped inside.
“I’m in here,” he called out to the customer. Whoever it was would have to wait until he was finished getting Angelina ready for the day. He had to take care of the child and run the cash register in the store at the same time because Anza had gone to a dentist’s appointment.
If Anza leaves, this will be the new normal.
He had wallowed the whole thing around in his head over and over until all the arguments had worn so thin he could not even donate them to Goodwill. Once he had calmed down, he had been forced to admit that his screwy ex-wife had been right about one thing—Anza had no future in St. Elmo. But she was so devoted to Angelina it would break her heart to leave. Should he … force her to broaden her horizons, experience more of the world than a little town on a mountainside? Better question: Could he force her to go? Could he make her leave … and could he make himself demand it?
Reality check: How on earth could he do life without Anza to help him care for her little sister? Oh, his mother lived down the street and she always helped when she could. But she was seventy years old and had her own medical issues. The neighbors always pitched in whenever there was an emergency. But on a day-in, day-out basis, Pedro and Anza were the ones who kept the wheels on the bus. Without Anza, how—?
The saloon doors that separated his home from the store swung inward and Gabriella took an uncertain step through them. His heart ramped into a gallop at the sight of her and a wide smile spread across his face. So much for back off and let it go.
He could tell she was instantly ill-at-ease at the sight of Angelina. He had forgotten about that part, how seeing the little girl so helpless made some people feel awkward at first. No one in St. Elmo was uncomfortable with Angelina anymore; almost all outsiders were.
“I don’t need anything right now,” Gabriella said. “You can go ahead with … I can get my laundry started before I get supplies.”
“I will not be long. Come back when you get the machines loaded and running. The coffee ees not out of a fancy rocket engine but it ees fresh.”
“Okay, thanks,” she said and hurried out.
That woman was as twisted up inside as last year’s Christmas lights, had so much hurt down in the depths of her hazel eyes, so much sadness. Pedro supposed it was what drew him to her—the pain. He had been down that road. And if what he suspected about her was true, her pain had driven her to the place where the Wild Things are.
She came back a few minutes later with a smile on her face that never reached her eyes. He knew she had screwed up her courage to come through the door chatty and cheerful, pretending Angelina was not there.
Pedro was not okay with that.
“Tell me where the cups are and I’ll pour us both some coffee,” she said.
“I already have a cup.” He gestured toward the hospital bed tray that stretched across the end of Angelina’s bed. “You can warm it up though. Get a cup for yourself in that cabinet beside the fireplace.
She poured coffee for herself then brought the pot over to pour him some. She did not look at Angelina.
“It ees all right,” he said. She looked a question at him that he answered before she wrapped it in words. “It ees hard to know how to act.” He nodded toward Angelina. “Hard to know what to say. I understand.”
He could feel it coming then, the way you can feel something hurling at you in the dark. The question. He knew he had left himself open for it, practically invited it. But it had been a long time since he had had to answer it and he had forgotten how hard it was.
She didn’t ask. She did look at Angelina, though, almost caressed the child’s face with her eyes.
Pedro put the towel down on the tray and crossed to the table and stood with his back to Gabriella. He felt the words leave his mouth without consciously willing them to go.
“I left her in the car, strapped into her car seat when she was six months old. Forgot about her.” A heartbeat pause. “Eet was July, a hot day.”
He turned around. Gabriella’s face was white. She lifted her hands to cover her mouth as tears welled in her eyes. Slowly shaking her head back and forth, she whispered, “Oh, Pedro, no …”
He could explain what happened.
How his only two employees had both called in sick, left him busier than a one-armed paperhanger.
How Adriana always dropped Anza and Joaquin off at their aunt’s house in Buena Vista on the days she worked as a part time nurse in the infirmary at the prison.
How she always took the baby to day care.
How that morning Adriana had gone in early so he had to make the kid run.
Adriana had strapped Angelina into her car seat. Anza and Joaquin had argued and bickered nonstop all the way to their aunt’s house and the car was blessedly quiet after they got out. Angelina had fallen asleep.
He could explain how … but he didn’t. It was hard to breathe. It still hurt so bad to go there it literally took his breath away. His mouth went dry, his heart thudded with a pedantic clumping sound in his chest. Sweat popped out on his brow. He sank down on the bench beside the table, facing Gabriella. He stared at the floor, couldn’t look at her.
Finish it!
The words were made of daggers and razor blades and broken glass.
“I parked in front of the store. I deed not find her until … about noon.”
A line has stretched out in front of the cash register five deep all morning, even before the tour bus arrived. Now a herd of large women wearing uniformly ugly flowered dresses crowds the narrow aisles of the Mercantile babbling about everything and nothing in unpleasant, nasal voices he is trying hard to ignore. But one voice rises above the others. It belongs to a frazzled woman, her face a bad-sunburn red, fanning herself with an ugly pink sun visor.
“… and I said to Edna, ‘Edna, I just think it’s awful to leave that little baby out there in a car like that with the windows rolled up. It’s too hot—’”
Realization slams into Pedro’s chest with the force of a hundred-ton wrecking ball. He drops the gallon of milk he is placing in a customer’s sack and it bounces twice before the plastic container splits open and splashes milk all over the wooden floor. He shrieks an inarticulate, yearning wail of denial and terror and slogs through air as thick as quicksand.
Everything has cranked down into slow motion.
He is at the door, shoves a camera-laden tourist out of the way.
He races down the porch steps at a crawl.
The car is locked; the keys are in the cash register drawer.
He slams his elbow into the driver’s door window. Hits it again and again until it shatters, and all the time he hears someone screaming and the someone is Pedro. The blood on his fingers makes it hard to pull up the button on the back door.
Angelina is limp, not sweating.
He whispers her name.
Calls her name.
Shrieks her name.
But she doesn’t open her eyes.
After that, reality breaks into shards of jagged glass that shift like the colors in a kaleidoscope to form the images and moments he remembers. The space in between those moments is blank.
At times, Pedro seems to be on a dark stage in front of a large audience and he wanders around the stage until he happens to step into the beam of a spotlight and is momentarily illuminated before he steps out again. Other times, he is standing on some tall white cliff somewhere overlooking the sea and at regular intervals the beam of a distant lighthouse shines on him for a moment and then passes on.
When Pedro is in the light, he is aware of and can relate to people, events and life. When he is in the darkness, he is as cold and dead as he prays to be with every breath he takes.
At some point in the telling of the story, Gabriella had left Angelina’s bedside and now sat next to Pedro on the bench. He couldn’t look up, couldn’t meet her eyes.
Go ahead. Tell her the rest, all of it.
“I served a year in prison for first degree assault and endangering the welfare of a minor. The remainder of the sentence was probated.” He was surprised that his voice was steady, marveled at the body’s ability to level the ship in the midst of a storm. “And St. Elmo, the whole town … they took it hard. Some of them walked by the car that morning, came into the store, bought their groceries, mailed their letters, did their laundry and walked back by the car when they left. But everybody was caught up in their own lives, doing their own thing. Nobody noticed her. That is why they all feel so … protective now.” He let out a long breath. “Communal guilt.”
He had not meant to say that last part.
Gabriella reached out and touched his arm.
“I … know about guilt,” she said.
She wanted to say more. He watched her wrestle with it, then spared her from having to ask.
“You want to know how I do it,” he said. “How I live with what I did.”
“I’ve seen you, watched you. How did you get there, on the other side of it?”
“The God-forgiveness is the easy part. You only have to ask. But forgiving yourself … that is a get-up-every-morning-and-do-it-again thing. Some days I manage, other days … not so much.”
“I can’t.” The defeat in her voice was heartbreaking.
“Your older brother’s death, that was not your—”
“Yes, it was. And so was Garrett’s.”
GABRIELLA WONDERED IF the look she’d seen on Pedro’s face as he told his story was what other people saw on hers sometimes but didn’t know why. Didn’t know a movie was playing in her head and she was the star. A horror movie.
Pedro had spent every speck of emotional energy he had to lift up that horrible weight out of his heart and lay it before her, steaming and stinking in the sun. She understood that he believed what he’d done was an act so heinous nobody could possibly empathize with it. But he was wrong.
“I talk to him even now sometimes,” she said. “Garrett. He’s the other half of me that’s always missing. He left a huge hole in my world and I still stumble into it if I don’t look where I’m going. It’s hard to crawl out.” She took a deep breath. “In the beginning, I didn’t. Crawl out. I stayed there, down in the dark pit. Lived there. Died there, but kept breathing.”
She suspected she was babbling. She didn’t know for sure except that Pedro wasn’t saying anything. But he probably had no air or words left to speak even if she weren’t rattling on and on.
“When we were little, I’d have a fever when Garrett got sick and he’d throw up when I had the flu. After Grant died, we had no one, only each other. Nobody else. Being that close you just know … One day on my way home from the studio, I got this sudden scared, sick feeling in my stomach. I knew it was what Garrett was feeling, too.”
She told Pedro how she’d called Garrett on her cell phone as she drove to his house, about the deadness of his voice, how it was like he was reading the instructions for assembling a barbeque grill instead of explaining why he was going to kill himself.
Pedro flinched.
“I have been where your brother was. I was planning to … if it had not been for Jim Benninger, I … he stopped me.”
“I tried to stop Garrett. He was drunk and high. But it wasn’t the booze and the drugs talking. It was Garrett’s soul. I told you how neither of us remembered everything about the day Grant was killed. Only pieces. That day when we were twelve and found the picture of Grant, Garrett told me what our mother had said about wishing she’d gotten an abortion and never had us. But that wasn’t all she’d said.”
Gabriella’s hands are shaking so violently she can barely hold the cell phone to her ear and the car on the road. It’s rush hour; she is only inching forward. At one point she screams, just screams—so loud that the driver in the next car turns and looks at her.
“You don’t know what Mother said to me that day—”
“Yes, I do. You told—”
“I told you what she said to us. Not what she said to me. She screamed at me that it was all my fault. She dragged me over to Grant’s body, and the smell … I gagged and she grabbed my neck and pushed my face down until it was just inches from Grant’s, the skin was … black.” Gabriella hears him make a grunting, guttural sound deep in his throat, the dying cry of an antelope being ripped apart by jackals. “And she said, ‘Look what you did! You killed him!”
Then their mother yanked Garrett upright and spit words into his face, told him she knew it had been his idea to leave the chalet when they weren’t supposed to because he was always the instigator, the rebellious one, the evil one and Gabriella was a pathetic little mouse with no mind of her own.
“She said I might as well have put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.” Garrett paused then and continued in a monotone, a dead voice. “She said, ‘You killed your only brother. You killed my only son. You’re a murderer. That’s what you are—a murderer!”
And in a sudden flash, Gabriella sees down a tunnel of memory. She and Garrett in the chalet. He’s shaking his head, doesn’t want to go with her. He has a stomachache.
“No, Garrett!” she cries into the phone. “You’re wrong. Listen to me. You didn’t do it; I did.”
She has pulled off the highway onto the street where they’d lived as children—before the end of the world. She can see the house halfway down the block. But it seems to be moving away from her. Like in a nightmare, she drives faster and faster toward it, but can’t seem to get any closer.
And time snaps back into place and she is in his driveway, wailing into the phone as she lurches out of the car.
“Garrett, no. You were sick that day! Don’t you remember? You wanted to stay in the chalet. I was the one. I wanted to—”
“Drumma du, Gabriella.”
“Garrett—!”
She is on the front porch, reaching for the doorknob when she hears the stereo sound—in her phone and in the house—of a gun going off inside.
She didn’t cry when she told Pedro that she opened the door and saw what was left of her brother after he put a shotgun into his mouth and pulled the trigger.
And some part of her understood that telling a story like that without tears was like dumping a motorcycle and sliding across the pavement without protective leathers. Your soul’s contact with the surface of that kind of horror would rip the skin off all the way down to the bone.
“Both my brothers died because of me. I killed them.”
Pedro reached out and took her chin and turned her face toward him. “You know that ees not true.”
“No, actually, I don’t.”
“Gabriella, it was an accident! You were only seven years old!” His Spanish accent hijacked his speech and his words ran together. “If Ty had accidentally hurt somebody when he was seven, would you hold that against him? Would you want him to suffer for it for the rest of his life?”
“How do you forgive yourself? It doesn’t help to know you should. It isn’t about what you know in your head. It’s bigger than that. Uglier. Meaner.”
“Ees that what you meant when you said you had created a monster?”
The mention of Yesheb was like running into a brick wall at a dead run. She staggered back from it, dazed.
“No … I didn’t … the monster’s real. He’s flesh and blood. And he’s out there right now searching for me.” She heard her next words drop out of her mouth but had no memory of forming them in her head. “I’m Rebecca Nightshade. I wrote …” She realized all at once what she’d said.
“The Bride of the Beast,” Pedro finished for her. “I know. At least, I suspected.”
Her head snapped up. “You do? But how …?” Then it hit her. “Does everybody know?”
“No. Well, I cannot swear to that, but nobody has mentioned it to me. And if anybody had figured it out, everybody would know it. Small town—hundredth monkey.”
She had no idea what he meant and her confusion showed on her face.
“You know, the theory that if ninety-nine monkeys know something the hundredth will know, too, just because the others do. These people live in each other’s pockets. There are no secrets in St. Elmo.”
“How did you figure it out?”
“From your picture on the back jacket of the book.” Before she could react, he continued. “But I am good at that, at faces, at recognizing people from pictures even when details—hair, beards, things like that—are different. I missed a real career opportunity in airport security.”
He didn’t say anything about the scar, how it was a dead giveaway. She appreciated that.
“And you won’t …?”
“Tell anybody? Of course not.” He paused. “But I do not get it. The monster in the book is made up. How could he be plotting to kill you?”
She sighed. In for a penny, in for a pound.
“Not kill me, kidnap me. A fan has been stalking me. He believes he has opened up a door in night itself, crossed over from the Endless Black Beyond for a purpose and I’m the purpose.”
“That does not make sense.”
“Crazy people don’t make sense. He’s … evil.”
“And he is stalking you because—what? He thinks you are Zara?”
Her eyes grew wide in surprise.
“Sí, I have read the book. I found it on top of a dryer after some tourists were here doing laundry. I have … trouble sleeping at night sometimes. The writing’s excellent. God gave you an incredible gift.”
Gabriella was suddenly deadly cold.
“Is that it? Is that why all this is happening? I used a … gift from God to create evil and now—”
“Do you honestly think God sent some lunatic gunning for you because he did not like the book you wrote?”
“If you read the book, you know the stalker only has two days. This is the third full moon. If he can’t find me in two days …”
“I do not believe you are at St. Elmo’s Fire by accident. Unless you left a trail of bread crumbs behind you, The Beast of Babylon will not find you there. Hang on.” He paused, struggled to smile and actually managed it. “In the words of that great theologian Dory the Fish, ‘just keep swimming, just keep swimming, just keep swimming ...’”
She looked down and realized she was still clutching her coffee cup in her hand. She hadn’t taken a single drink. It was cold now.
“Let me warm that up for you,” Pedro said. She caught herself before she blurted out, “You warm up everything for me, Pedro.”
A little over an hour later, Gabriella carried a laundry basket full of clean clothes down the steps of the Mercantile and loaded it into the back of her jeep. Pedro brought out a box of supplies and she was ready to head back up the mountain. As she got in behind the wheel, she noticed a gawking tourist across the street snapping pictures with his phone—of everything he saw—the buildings, the trees, the mountains, the flowers. The sight made her smile. She’d only been here a little less than two months, but St. Elmo had come to feel like home.
She pulled out of her parking space and before she drove away she called out to the tourist what the bag lady had said to her a lifetime ago, “I hope you enjoy our mountains.”
THE TOURIST SMILED and nodded, then stood in the street and watched the blonde woman in the jeep drive out of town. As soon as she was gone, he emailed the photographs he’d taken of her to his boss. He’d used a phone to look less conspicuous, but his was an iPhone 4, the latest model, with a five-megapixel camera. Even had a zoom. Four clear, close-up shots of her face—in good light. Paid special attention to her right cheek. You could see a scar there even with heavy makeup covering it. Got two really good shots of that. His boss wanted verification of the woman’s identity and the pictures he’d sent would leave no doubt. They’d either confirm that she was, or make it clear that she wasn’t who his boss was looking for, some woman named Zara.
* * * *
Oblivious to the storm, Yesheb crosses the empty street slowly. Partly because without his cane he still has a slight limp. But mostly because he is savoring this moment, his moment. He wants to remember every detail of the day he and Zara become one.
The storm sprang up shortly after midnight. Just as he knew it would! He had stood out in the parking lot of the motel in Buena Vista with his arms spread wide, his face lifted to the torrential rain, welcoming it, feeling the wind lash its approval and blessing on his quest. Then he returned to his room and went over with his team the timing of their two-pronged assault one final time. Rainwater ran out of his white hair and dripped off his face onto the pile of aerial photos of Chaffee County, Colorado, two of them with locations circled in bright red. One of those locations was a small hanging valley 2, 600 feet below the 14,269-foot summit of Mount Antero.
The chopper pilot pointed out, as if it were new information to Yesheb, that the “extraction” would be dangerous if it was still storming when Yesheb activated his call signal—and the forecast called for scattered thunderstorms all day.
“Even if the storm’s on the back side of the mountain, wind gusts on the mountaintop could reach 80 miles per hour, with wind shears that—”
“The storm will not be a problem. I’ll take care of it.”
And he would! He had been infused with such power since his time of seclusion that there was nothing he couldn’t do. The wind and rain would obey his commands. The dog, the growling beast at the airport, would yelp at his merest glance, tuck his tail between his legs and slink away. The old man would be struck dumb in awe. And Zara, his beloved Zara, would swoon into his arms, willingly offering her son’s life to seal their union. Yesheb’s time was so near his two worlds almost overlapped. He could sense the presence of legions of demons awaiting his command. His blue eyes sparkled with the reflected flames from the other realm.
He feels strength pulse through his veins with every heartbeat as he reaches the wooden sidewalk that runs the length of the pathetic cluster of buildings, deserted now as rain pelts them and puddles in potholes in the street. Yesheb has glided through the torrent between the raindrops and now stands perfectly dry before the door of the St. Elmo’s Mercantile.