Chapter 14

Abigail, 1936

It wasn’t always easy being the weakest one in the family, or more exactly, being thought of as weak only because you were sick as a child. How much longer did she have to pay for having a bad kidney? How many more of these torturous baths?

The place that had once seemed magical to Abigail for its natural beauty and warmth had now become her prison. Now that she’d turned fifteen, it was no longer fantastic to have a waterfall directly across from the pool where she sat for hours so the minerals in the water would restore her health. Neither did it seem extraordinary that said waterfall would be named after the Virgin’s mane—Cabellera de la Virgen—for the water that cascaded like women’s tresses along the mountain. As a child, she’d tried to visualize the Virgin’s features somewhere in the mountain’s green vegetation. She’d imagined the largest rocks to be her eyes, watching her, protecting her, and a row of bushes to be her nose. The mouth always changed; sometimes it was the shadow of a tree or a dent, and sometimes, despite how hard she tried, she couldn’t visualize it at all. With the years, the Virgin’s features became harder to find, and then one day, Abigail couldn’t see her altogether.

She looked away from the cascade and focused, instead, on the warm green water wetting her calves as she sat by the edge of the pool. Tightening her fingers around the slippery rim, she kicked the water, the People Soup, as she called it, splashing all the heads around her. They glared at her. But Abigail didn’t care. She was done with these miraculous thermal waters her mother forced her into three times a week; done with the wrinkled toes and the tight white cap pressing uncomfortably against her forehead; done with the stiff balsa floater imprisoning her chest and the textured polyester of Amanda’s old bathing suit rubbing against her growing breasts. She couldn’t stand any more sick people around her, or more kids splashing about. She longed to be normal, like her sisters, and go to dance contests, like Ana and Amanda were doing this very moment. And, why not, have her own set of admirers.

Abigail removed her floater and discarded it behind her.

“Are you going to sit there all day?”

Abigail’s gaze followed a pair of wet legs to the childish shape of a prepubescent girl with a nose full of freckles and a yellow cap. Oh, great. It was the little brat. She’d seen her before; she was always the loudest and most obnoxious of all the kids in the pool.

Squinting against the sun’s rays, Abigail shielded her eyes with her hand. “That’s none of your business.”

“How come you always sit by the edge with that stupid floater? How come you never swim?”

Abigail stared at her own pale legs—they were never exposed to the sun long enough to get a tan. It was humiliating that this girl, younger than she was by at least four years, could swim. That was perhaps the worst of all her problems with this place—this irrational fear she had of the water.

“You’re a chicken,” the girl said.

“That’s enough,” Abigail said. “Get out of my sight, niñita majadera!”

She turned her back on the girl and glanced at the people in the pool. But before she realized it, she was among them—in the water; face down, wet, light against the thick water; her body loose, unsafe without her floater. She kicked randomly with legs and arms, realizing—perhaps too late—that the insufferable girl had pushed her and she couldn’t reach the pool wall with her hand. She tried to yell, but a gush of water broke violently into her mouth and down her throat. She coughed, but instead of sounds, she produced an assortment of bubbles, which now blinded her view of the pool’s surface. Her body sped downward, toward the bottom, until she could only hear the noises inside her own head, the painful pressure in her sinuses, her ears ready to explode. She couldn’t breathe, she’d lost all control of her body; she’d lost her long battle with death, the battle that had started as a little girl with painful injections and hospital rooms. She shut her eyes, now certain this was the end of her life, thinking how unfair this all seemed. But then a force that she recognized as a hand, or maybe two, gripped her arm, her waist, her now loose hair. She felt a bare shoulder, an Adam’s apple, an arm, and she held on to a neck with one hand as her body ascended as quickly as it had descended.

Her emergence to the surface was an attack to the senses: a bright light shone in her eyes, yells hurt her ears, the tastes of salt and sulfur scorched her tongue. A pair of hands—the hands that saved her—pulled her slippery arms onto the hard edge of the pool; fresh air filtered through her nose. Oxygen. She was breathing again. She shut her burning eyes, lightheaded from the heat of the water, from the movement around her. She was still alive. Or was she not? Someone lifted her up. She was floating. But bodies didn’t float; only souls did. She tried to open her eyes, to assess whether or not she was truly being elevated from the pool, but she didn’t have any strength left, not even in her eyelids.

In a matter of seconds—or had it been hours?—she was lying on a rough but warm surface. She opened her eyes to see a blurry face leaning toward hers. It was an angel, an apparition of some sort. Only an angel would have eyes that blue, skin so light, a voice so soothing. As her vision sharpened she discerned that it was a man, a young one, perhaps sixteen or seventeen, and he was saying something, except that she couldn’t understand him. There were too many other voices mingling with his. He leaned over. Was he going to kiss her? Of course, it was the only way. It had happened to Sleeping Beauty and Snow White. Their princes brought them back to life with a kiss. She shut her eyes, for there was nothing else to do but receive that imminent first kiss of love.

She stiffened as his lips touched hers, but instead of a gentle encounter like the ones Amanda had talked about, he blew air inside her mouth and squeezed her nose with his fingers. No, this kiss, or whatever it was, couldn’t be considered a kiss of love by any stretch of the imagination. She brought her hands to his bare chest and pushed him away.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought you couldn’t breathe.”

Oh, but he was an angel, for sure. Never before had she seen such a perfect creature. He was lean and his straight nose was sunburned. His mouth was bright red and still moist. Running his hand across his dripping hair, he asked if she was fine, and the sound of his voice was music.

She focused on his Adam’s apple, the one she’d felt under the water, and nodded. Resting her hands on the concrete floor, she attempted to push herself up, but her arms were still weak. Gently, he placed his hand behind her back and pushed her to a sitting position. This close, she could get lost in the brightness of his blue eyes. She wanted to thank him, to ask his name, but Pepe, the pool supervisor, pushed him aside and leaned toward her.

“What happened to you? I told you not to remove your floater!”

It was an unpleasant change of scenery to have this man’s sweaty face and his foul breath in front of her. His loud voice hurt her ears.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Pepe yanked her up by the arm and asked if she needed help getting home. Abigail searched for her savior among dozens of wet heads, but he’d disappeared through the crowd as quickly and as unexpectedly as he’d appeared under the water.

Abigail asked the curious bystanders if they knew him, but nobody had seen him before, or had any idea of where he went.

She returned the next day, and the day after, and continued going for the next three months, but there was no sign of him. She could no longer follow conversations or do simple school work. Not even the prospect of Ana’s wedding or her new dress excited her. Her mind was occupied with a single goal: to find him.

At the pool, she asked about the young man, talking to anyone who would listen, describing every detail, every nuance of his serene face until the point where she couldn’t be certain anymore if her mind had fabricated his features. Did he really have that deep shade of blue in his eyes? Had his wet torso really brushed again her chest? Had his mouth been on hers for a split second? She questioned if he’d been real. Had she even fallen in the pool? Pepe never mentioned the unfortunate event again. No one else did. Not even the little brat who pushed her into the pool and never spoke to her again.

No, he had been real. And she would find him. Eventually. It was not a choice; she had to see him again.