BY DENISE HAMILTON
Encino
Talina pulls in at the trailhead and turns her wheels dutifully against the hillside. Night has fallen and cars already line both sides of the road. She applies the emergency brake, kills the engine, and flips down the mirror. Taking a small earthen pot from her purse, she daubs on lip gloss, careful not to touch the inside of her mouth. She rarely wears makeup, and it feels wrong, greasy and thick as pork fat. Plus there’s that residual bitterness from the herbs she’s pounded in.
From the mirror, a painted, nervous stranger stares back. Talina frowns and hardens her eyes. Then she scrubs her red-stained finger with a wipe until no trace of color remains.
Can she really do this? Should she? What will it accomplish? The skeleton of the past has been picked clean, bones cracked, marrow sucked, leaving only shards buried in time.
And yet.
A word in a dead language, the smell of raw spirits, the toll of a bell—any of these things can send a dagger through her heart.
And just like that, memory swamps her. Her lower belly contracts. Rough wool chafes her skin. A weight pins her to the ground like a splayed insect. Talina grips the steering wheel, hands slick with moisture. She starts to dry them on her skirt, thinks better of it. She can’t do this. It was stupid to come. She will start the car and drive home.
Outside, a shadow streaks across the windshield, a tree branch snapped by the warm winds that Santa Ana has sent blustering down her canyons tonight. Then Talina sees the outstretched wings, the dense tips of bristling feathers.
Intent on prey, it hurtles past with a blood-curdling cry before silence descends once more.
The owl is a portent, infusing her with strength.
Enough to see this through.
It’s time. It is her time. She has felt the quickening all around her, the rustling of nameless voiceless multitudes urging her on, buoying her, leading her here, tonight, to this.
Talina presses a hand to her cleavage, feels the reassuring bump of the tiny cobalt bottle nestled there. She climbs out, locks the car, and follows the fire road until it branches onto a narrow footpath. The night is dark, the stars just beginning to glow, but she’s always liked the dark, has no problem navigating. Her eyes adjust and soon she sees in a different way. Another half mile and she’ll be there.
Talina hears the music first, a faint hum floating on the night air. Then she sees it in the distance, an adobe structure so old and weathered it almost blends into the hillside.
It disappears as the trail descends, only to wink back into sight as she peels off the main path onto an animal trail that leads through the scrub and around a bend. No one knows who built the Old Bar. It may have always been there, squat and brooding, an earthen clay adobe tucked into the eastern spur of the Santa Monica Mountains.
Talina has reconnoitered the entrance and exit, outhouse and cellar, the river rock fireplace whose iron tools could double as weapons. She has sat at the long bar of burnished wood, sipped red wine from forgotten Pueblo vineyards, chatted up bartenders. She knows the hidden room in the back, wallpaper stained brown from cigar smoke, where secret treaties with Spain and Mexico were signed; where Mickey Cohen played poker with the Brothers Warner; where police chiefs and bootleggers hammered out clandestine deals and cash-strapped moguls auctioned off nights with their leading ladies.
Now a new generation has discovered the Old Bar. Undeterred by the long hike, they come—drawn by something indescribable and haunting about this spot where time seems to eddy and pool in strange ways.
Upon arriving, they leash their ratty rescue dogs to ancient hitching posts, the animals’ coats dusty from the trail, their brindled necks draped in faded bandannas. Near the stone water trough stand the horses of patrons who ride in.
Talina makes her way to the horses, lets their tawny animal heat wash over her. She strokes velvet muzzles, whispers equine blandishments, feels soft nickers and warm exhaled breath on her neck. They greet her as a friend and she draws strength from their patience, a skill she’s worked so hard to cultivate.
As she musters her courage, raucous laughter and shouting leak from the Old Bar. Then Los Lobos comes on the jukebox. It’s a song that always stirs the melancholy in her—those strumming guitars and hitched beats set against David Hidalgo’s mournful croon.
The man in the song is torn between the outlaw world and his love for a girl, and it’s killing him. Suddenly the front door blows open and a couple staggers out, arms wrapped around each other. A horse paws the ground. A dog lifts her head, looks at Talina, then sets it back down on her outstretched paws.
Go now.
She weaves like a shadow along the horses’ flanks, moving closer to the entrance. Then she runs across the dirt lot and slips past the iron-strapped wood door before it creaks shut.
Inside, the noise and music and perfume and mingled sweat clobber her senses and she blinks to adjust her eyes, though the lights in the Old Bar can in no way be considered bright.
Orange-and-black bunting decorates the bar. Chili-pepper lights line the eaves. Giant shellacked tumbleweeds sit atop acrylic plinths. Many patrons still wear their Halloween finery, as if they’d partied all night and never gone home. Or maybe they dress like that all the time, not just on All Saints’ Day. At the Old Bar, such things are strictly your own business.
The crowd splinters into jagged prisms—a glass raised high, a mouth cranked open, a jeweled hand carving the air. Some patrons wear wigs, masks, hats, crowns; carry canes, scepters, whips, lassos. Talina, too, has cloaked her identity. Under the snorting approval of the horses, she’d veiled herself in the black lace mantilla of a high-born Spanish doña.
Now she makes her way to a pillar, where, partially obscured, she scans the crowd until she finds him.
There.
An old monk with a creased leathery face wearing a threadbare brown robe sits at the bar, bald except for white wisps encircling his skull. His mouth droops as he considers his drained highball glass, staring into the melting ice as if it might foretell his future. Or provide a portal into days past, when Russian fur traders plied the California coast for otters and Native Americans moved silently through the land. As Los Lobos sings about a man torn between two passions, Talina can almost read his thoughts. In the early days of orange groves and missions, this monk, too, had dangled between worlds, forced to choose what kind of man he’d become.
As Talina watches, a thump to his back almost knocks the elderly monk off his stool. He grabs the bar to steady himself.
“Nando! Qué tal, compa!”
The monk named Nando turns and beholds the smiling face of another monk.
They beam at each other, their teeth too white, square, and mail-order perfect. Pretending to study her phone, Talina inches closer. The monks are halfway across the crowded room, but her senses have grown acute. She sees each detail. She smells oiled leather, musty wool, and the fragrant sagebrush they wear called “cowboy cologne.” She hears their conversation, shouted over the din of the crowd.
“Gabe! You came,” Nando says, as his friend slides onto a stool and adjusts his cassock.
“Haven’t missed one yet.” Gabe looks around. “Are we the first?”
Nando nods. “Maybe the only.”
“Do you think the others will make it?”
Nando shrugs. “There’s been a mudslide along the coast, so Santa Barbara sends her regrets. San Diego fell and broke his hip. San Juan Cap says surf’s up, gnarly southwest swell, so he’s out. San Charles Borromeo’s trying to get his script to Clint Eastwood in Carmel. The others haven’t responded.”
That’s because their time is over.
The thought fills Talina with satisfaction. She knows that Nando spends his days slinking around the dusty barrios of Arleta, San Fernando, and Pacoima, hauling bags of aluminum cans to the recycling center for a few coins, and not gold reales either. At sunset, after the schoolchildren have clambered back onto their buses and the echo of their high, clear voices fades, he creeps back to his mission to patch cracks in the old plaster. Later, in his unheated bedroom cell, he keeps a solitary vigil, his only companions the Good Book and a dirty futon he dragged in from the alley.
None of this displeases Talina.
“How was traffic this year?” asks Gabe.
“Can’t complain,” Nando says. “I took the bus from the mission. Hopped out at the Narrows and followed the river to Santos Stables in Burbank. They had my horse saddled and ready to go in no time.”
“Bus to the Gold Line to the stables for me,” says Gabe.
“I heard it’s been bad in your dominion.”
Gabe grimaces. “I spend my days visiting the sick, sabotaging new housing developments, and urging the bears and pumas to stay in the mountains. But the drought is terrible and the swimming pools draw them. Your dominion isn’t exactly thriving, Nando. What about those brush fires? Foreclosures. That guy who killed his family?”
Nando tosses back the last of his melted ice. “Each day a new test of faith. But tonight, we set the year’s troubles aside and celebrate.”
Gabe nods, then waves the bartender over. As Talina listens, he grills the man about grand crus from long-gone vineyards that gather dust in the cellar below. The bartender goes off to retrieve a bottle.
Gabe winks at his compadre.
“Sommelier, that’s me. Know a thing or two.” He taps the side of his head. “Tried for a job at that downtown winery by the freeway, gave them my bona fides. They shooed me away. Said I could get a hot meal at the mission down the street. My good man, I told him, I AM the mission. One of them, anyway. Things got a little heated after that, and they called security to escort me out.”
“No respect anymore,” Nando shakes his head.
Cry me a river.
Now that she’s finally here, at the culmination of her plans, a strange prickly lethargy washes over Talina. She’s both keyed up and unable to move, to shatter the spell of their old-fashioned, petulant voices.
As the bartender sets drinks before them, they sigh and reminisce.
“Those were the glory days, eh? Tending the trellises of our missions, testing for sweetness and must, teaching the neophytes to prune, fertilize, and irrigate. Shame they rejected their lessons and fell asleep in the fields.”
“Too exhausted from sneaking out at night for their own harvest rituals.”
“Wayward children, they were.”
“Needed a firm hand.”
“Didn’t we give it to them.”
At this, red spots dance in Talina’s eyes and she steps forward. Suddenly, a girl with bobbed hair wearing a cocktail dress lunges toward the padres and Talina freezes.
“Great costumes,” the cocktail-dress girl slurs, grabbing the carved cherrywood rosary that dangles from Nando’s neck as she nearly tumbles into his lap.
Nando reddens. Placing his large, work-roughened hands around the girl’s cinched waist, he deposits her back onto tottering heels.
The girl giggles, swipes Nando’s drink, and staggers off to rejoin her friends.
Gabe elbows his compadre. “Enough to make a man forego his vows, eh, San Fernando?”
Nando looks annoyed. “Speaking of vows, my dear San Gabriel, what’s this I hear about your Chinese Girl Friday in Monterey Park?”
“We must be ever vigilant in stamping out gossip, San Fernando. Like that scurrilous rumor about you and the Indian maiden back at Los Encinos with Father Serra.”
At this, Talina startles.
“At least she was a maiden. What about that Native warrior? Teaching him catechism, were you?”
Gabe winces. “Monkish vices in a moment’s weakness that I soon put behind me.”
“Five years later when he died of smallpox,” says Nando. “Still, we’ve all got our skeletons.”
“Skeletons,” drones the bartender. “Here ya go, friars, one for each of you. Press this button and the eyes light up. Tequila company’s giving ’em away, swag for their fancy new agave. We’ll have it in stock all week. Bottles made of artisanal glass, set you back $160 a pop. And at those prices you damn well better see visions. You fellas with that studio wrap party?”
Not waiting for an answer, he continues down the bar, handing out little light-up skeleton pins that say, Happy Dia de Los Muertos 2020.
Sheepishly, Gabe and Nando affix the pins to their robes. The front door blows open again. It’s just the wind, but as gusts of canyon air billow into the bar, Talina makes her move.
In preparing for this moment, she chose each item of her costume very carefully—the skirt of cormorant feathers and sandals of soft deerskin. The ropes of cowrie shells that hang from her neck. Instead of the usual ponytail, her long hair hangs loose. She watched in the bedroom mirror how it rippled down her back, black as the bubbling brea from the tar pits. Behind the lace mantilla, she knows her large eyes shine luminous against her skin.
As Talina walks toward the monks, a girl sings on the jukebox, a sad piano canción about doomed love, missions, and prison towers. Sensing something unusual afoot, the patrons clear a path. She feels their eyes on her, trying to decide if she’s a young girl or a mature woman, knows it’s hard to tell, knows that there’s something ageless about her.
Aware of some disturbance, Nando and Gabe crane their ancient tortoise heads.
Talina pulls off the mantilla and drops it to the floor. She steps on it, trampling it with sawdust, leaving it sticky and filthy from spilled drinks. The exquisite lace tears.
“Over here, Pocahantas,” a voice calls out.
An embarrassed murmur starts up, but Talina doesn’t seem to notice.
“Now there’s a gal who knows how to make an entrance,” a man calls out. “Somebody oughta get her a screen test.”
Everybody laughs, except for the cocktail-frock girl, who climbs unsteadily onto a table, cheeks flushed, eyes flashing. “Shut it, you sexist, racist pigs!” she yells. “Do you live under a rock? You can’t talk to people like that. I’m calling you all out!”
“Amen, sister,” a woman says.
Talina has reached the monks. She stops and stands silently before them.
Nando clutches his chest. His mouth moves but no words come out. Lunging for Gabe’s wine, he guzzles it. “You,” he says at last. “After all this time. I never thought …”
Talina tilts her head, as if she can’t quite believe it either. “Yet here I am, Fernando.”
“How’d you find me?”
“I’ve been following you.”
His voice quails. “You have?”
“I know your habits, the places you go, I know when you get up in the morning, the taco truck where you buy lunch, what time you turn out the light at night.”
Nando shreds the edge of his cocktail napkin. “That sounds m-more like st-stalking. Of course, your people were always good trackers.”
In the long ages since they last met, Talina has learned to roll her eyes.
“I’m just messing with you, Fernando.” She pauses. “Or maybe not. Still, everyone knows you and your com-padres”— she stretches the syllables like poison taffy—“gather here every year on this night.”
He fixes her with a guilty, worried look. “I suppose you’ll want money.” Reaching into the folds of his cassock, he pulls out a battered leather purse. He fumbles for coins, but she stops him.
“I don’t need money. The casino revenues have left us well off.”
Nando rubs his chin. “Casinos, yes. I’ve heard something … We’re a little cut off, you know, at the mission.” He glances sideways at her, drawn to her painted lips. Slowly, he licks his own.
She sees him struggle to tamp down his secret thoughts, bring himself back to the present. If only he’d shown such resolve when …
“You’re still beautiful,” Nando says. “My Little Teresa of the Flowers.”
Talina’s nostrils flare. “That was never my name.”
“It was the name I gave you.” Nando’s voice drops to a whisper. “At your baptism.” His right hand rises trembling in midair and traces a palsied cross.
Talina makes a dismissive motion. “Say my name, Fernando.”
“But I have. Teresa. Mi Teresita. And it fit you. So small you were, and delicate as a flower.”
A spasm moves through her.
“My name is Talina.”
“That’s not the name I called you when—”
“Say it.” Her voice, usually so lilting, is rough and pitted as a millstone. “Say my name. My real name.”
Conflicting emotions play over the old padre’s face. Talina sees a shadow brush ashen wings of doubt across his mind. Watches him banish it.
“If you wish,” he says, “though I like Teresita better. Tere … Tele … Tale …” He grimaces with effort. “Tah-leena. There,” his voice rises in triumph.
Talina crosses her arms and considers something in the middle distance. She feels, more than sees, Nando’s eyes devouring her.
“I see you’ve gone back to the old ways,” he says.
She can almost hear what he’s left unsaid: Except for that tawdry lipstick.
Talina shakes her head, and the cormorant feathers whisper against her thighs. “I never abandoned them. You only saw what you wanted.”
“But it’s the right thing. I see that now. Those high-necked dresses never suited you.”
“This?” Talina touches a feather on her skirt. “This is regalia for ceremonial occasions. Also a cultural signifier.”
“I don’t—”
“Most days it’s jeans or yoga pants. We live in a split-level in the Encino Hills. I made sure it overlooks the sacred spring and we built a sweat lodge in back. But there’s a Prius in the garage. I shop at Macy’s. Bend like the willow, you know?”
“Why, then, after all this time … have you come?” He swallows. “Is it the … is something wrong with,” his voice breaks, “the babe?”
An explosion goes off in Talina’s head. She no longer stands in the crowded bar. The world telescopes down to a panting, sweating girl squatting by the riverbank, grunting and biting down on a stick of green wood while the women pull something from inside her that begins to mewl.
The midwife holds up the newborn.
Hoping against hope, Talina looks.
Relief floods her. All her prayers, the offerings, have worked.
The midwife wipes off the blood, the slick birth layer. Carefully, she compares the color of the infant’s skin to hers.
“A healthy boy,” she says, her voice drooping with resignation. “But not ours.”
You fool. How could it be otherwise?
“I’ll snap the neck,” another woman says.
“No.” Talina struggles up. “Give him to me.”
The midwife places a hand on her arm. “Sister, all of us here have felt your pain.”
They stand around her, the truth of it visible in their eyes. A girl who was led off by Spanish soldiers at night and returned two days later, mute and bleeding, bangs her head against a tree.
“The People must survive,” the midwife says, as the others murmur assent.
“He’s mine. I’m keeping him.”
“He is not of our blood.”
“He is of my blood.”
My blood my blood my blood.
Her empty arms ache.
Her spirit rises and she floats, unmoored in time, lost between worlds.
She thinks of how much blood has been shed down the generations. More will be shed tonight. And for what? Her mind is dizzy with jumbled memory and sensation.
“Get your skeletons,” intones the bartender.
Talina flips.
There are wooden planks beneath her feet, not earth.
The air no longer smells of green willows and metallic blood, but of chemical perfumes and spilled hops.
The circle of women has retreated back into the multitudes that live inside her head. Only the padres hunch beside her, raggedy brown crows who watch with weak, fearful eyes.
Talina trembles with rage and hurt and love for the child who arrived when she was but a child herself.
My blood my blood my blood.
It’s time to finish the business that lies between them.
“Our son is dead, Fernando,” she says. Nando covers his face with his hands. Strangled birdlike cries rise from his throat.
“Our daughter, who came the following year, survived.”
Nando lifts his head.
“I hid her from the world until it was safe,” Talina says.
“How is the … this … this girl child?”
“She is long grown,” Talina says, exasperated. “She lives up in San Jose’s dominion, where she restores the old sites and builds virtual new ones. She’s smart and kind and funny and deeply moral.” Talina lets the contrast sink in. “Too bad you never met her. But that would have meant confronting a truth you’d rather forget.”
“I am a father twice over.” Nando’s voice is hushed with wonder.
“Not in any sense of the word, Fernando. But our daughter had an excellent father. Jorie Webweaver adopted her when we got together, and then we had two more. Jorie’s a good man.”
“Webweaver?” A disparaging tone creeps into Nando’s voice. “Since when do your people name children after spiders?”
Talina sighs at such ignorance. “Jorie’s a tech guy. He built the Nativenet, used by all the sovereign nations. The concept of a shamanistic interface was revolutionary, even Zuck was interested.”
“I’m not familiar with the Nativenet,” Nando says, stroking his rosary beads.
“That’s because you live in a crumbling mission with only mice and lizards for company, Fernando.”
“You’re happy with this Webweaver, Tere … Talina? Do you ever think back to the time when we … ?”
“I was fourteen years old. You bewitched me with your white skin and your gunpowder, your mirrors and sugar and fine cloth. I thought you were a god.”
She has pictured screaming these words, spraying him with spittle, her nails gouging bloody furrows down his cheeks. But now she’s curiously inert, as if recounting the story of a stranger.
“We loved each other, didn’t we?” Nando is almost pleading. “I never mistreated you. I wasn’t like the soldiers, drunk and vile as beasts …”
Talina struggles to make sense of the sounds that emerge from his mouth, but it’s like he’s speaking some incomprehensible language and she must first translate the words, then assemble them into a sentence she can understand.
When at last she does, it still defies comprehension. “For that I should thank you?” She snorts, then explodes in bitter laughter that trails into sobs. How can such black absurdity exist? Clasping her sides, she convulses helplessly like she’s having a fit as Nando looks on in bewilderment and dismay.
Slowly she composes herself. Straightens. “You tore me from my family and brought me to the mission to serve you. Then you called me Jezebel and sent me away. But you crept back at night, begging me to forgive you, your shoulders oozing blood from your flagellations, resigned to burning in hell if it meant holding me again. At dawn you’d be back in the chapel, asking your god’s forgiveness. I wanted to kill myself. Instead, I ran away with our daughter and made sure you couldn’t find me. And yes, I’m happy with Jorie. He completes me, as you never could.”
Nando looks stricken. “Then why—”
“It was so long ago, but it was also yesterday You stole part of me before I could even put a name to it. But the world has changed, and I’ve come to reclaim what’s mine. And to hear you apologize.”
“I’ve spent years atoning.”
“Not to your god. To me.”
“Yes. You’re right. Tonight I’ll pray for you. I’ll kneel until dawn.”
“Mortifications of the flesh. Bread and water. Suffering and abasement and nights of sleepless feverish prayer. You’ll do it all, won’t you, Fernando?”
“Yes,” he says. “I will.”
A small cold pleasure runs through her at the thought of his suffering. She is astonished to discover this chamber of cruelty hidden in her heart. Was it always there, just waiting to be kindled? Or had he twisted and perverted something inside her all that time ago?
It doesn’t matter anymore. But Nando’s god is a bloodthirsty one, and the monk will perform his penance too eagerly.
It is not enough.
“I don’t want your prayers, Fernando, I want your apology. Right here, right now. You wronged me. Look at me. Say my name and tell me you’re sorry.”
She wants to hate this decrepit old man who once held such power over her. Who now lives like a haunted ghost amid his derelict mission that reminds him daily of how far he’s fallen. But hate is too facile, too pure a word for the rich loamy churn of emotions she feels.
The old monk’s hands twist and writhe like snakes. “I am sorry, Talina. I never meant to hurt you.” Stoned on memory, he sways. His voice drops. “But you see, I thought we wanted the same thing.”
Talina’s head jerks, and she stares at him, disbelieving. She’d been wavering, but now she makes her decision. With great deliberation, she steps closer to the old padre.
Filled with joy, Nando throws his arms around her and covers her cheeks in clumsy kisses. Talina struggles to break free, then feels her body go limp as the muscle memory of nightmare floods her, of making herself small and remote and perfectly still so that it happened to someone else.
With difficulty, she claws her way back from the edge of madness. She must focus. She has come here with a purpose.
And with that, resolve fills her and she presses her thickly painted lips against his. Again the faint waft of bitter herbs hits her. Working its way in. And with that, the thing is done.
All around them, the bar patrons applaud.
“Get it, Granddad!” yells a barfly.
“San Fernando, your vows,” cries Gabe, scandalized. “Release her at once.”
Talina steps back, breathing heavily, and wipes her mouth on her sleeve. Then she places her open palms on Nando’s chest. Eagerly, the old friar leans in, and Talina shoves him hard. He staggers and falls backward.
“Too much for you, pops?” someone yells.
“Gonna give the old buzzard a heart attack.”
“At least he’ll die happy.”
Talina watches the padre convulsing on the ground and gasping for breath.
With one foot, she prods the coarse wool cassock, shiny from wear, patchy from clumsy darnings.
Gazing up at her, his face turning purple, his mouth smeared red like a clown from her lip gloss, Nando glows like he’s experienced a miracle. “You trembled in my arms just now,” he rasps. “Your heart b-b-beat wildly, like a little bird, just as it used to, mi Teresita de las Flores … and then I knew that you … you still loved me just a little.”
The triumph in his eyes makes her sick. He will go to his death unrepentant, believing his web of lies. An empty defeated taste fills her mouth. She presses her hand against her heart, feels the tiny cobalt bottle.
In the surge of emotions, she’d almost forgotten.
But there it waits. Silent and ready.
And she understands that it doesn’t have to end this way.
That today she is the one who holds the power.
“Should I call 911?” asks the cocktail-frock girl, who has followed every move from her perch atop the table and now stands, thumbs poised over her phone.
“He’ll be fine,” Talina says.
She drops to one knee, and her hair ripples like a stage curtain to block the crowd’s view.
Using his cassock, she wipes his mouth clean of the garish gloss. Then she pulls the tiny cobalt bottle from her bodice, unstoppers it, and brings it to his mouth, cradling his head.
Nando’s distended lips part. The grizzled throat moves up and down.
Talina lays his head back against the wood floorboards and takes a long swig from the bottle herself before putting it away. Their eyes meet in strange communion. Something wordless passes between them, and the fervor in Nando’s eyes dulls as he finally understands.
“Goodbye, Fernando,” Talina says.
Nando shuts his eyes. A deep shudder moves through him. When he opens them, she is gone and Gabe is pulling him to his feet.
“Are you okay?” Gabe asks.
“I’ll live,” he says, and the despair in his voice is palpable to all.
Stalks of lavender and rosemary lash Talina’s legs as she walks to her front door in Los Encinos. The night has drained her. Even the voices in her head have stilled to the murmur of drowsy bees. But as the fragrant oils rise in the air, a wave of memory crashes down and pulls her out to the drowning sea.
“What is the meaning of this?” says Doña Luisa, her voice clipped and angry. She dangles the hand-sewn doll between them like a soiled handkerchief.
The doll has long black hair snipped from Talina’s own head and and carved-acorn eyes. Talina has sewn a tiny dress from bits of rags and stuffed the body with dried lavender petals for the child she has hidden away.
“I … I just wanted to make something pretty.”
All day, Talina moves silently through the cool hushed adobe, cooking and cleaning for the household. She tends Doña Luisa’s garden and sews sachets of sweet-smelling herbs to tuck into the linen closets. That’s what gave her the idea.
“This is a heathen idol, is it not?”
Eyes downcast, Talina shakes her head. Her wool dress is too tight, and its coarse fiber scrapes her skin raw with each step. The muslin doll would be soft against her daughter’s cheek, a fragrant pillow to clutch at night when her mother has to work late. But Talina cannot reveal this child to Doña Luisa any more than she can name its father. To the family she is a young, innocent girl. The truth would spark disbelief, dismissal, and worse.
Doña Luisa crosses herself and recites a prayer. Her mouth sets in a grim line as she tears the doll apart. Dried lavender petals fall like purple snow and cover Talina’s bare feet.
“Sweep this up immediately. And let there be no more abominations.”
Doña Luisa’s long skirts swish angrily away.
But Talina is determined, stealthy. She collects more lavender, thread, muslin, and a needle. When Doña Luisa discovers these things in her pockets, along with bread she’s hidden to take home for the child, she tells her husband. That night, Don Felix assembles the entire rancho. He delivers an impassioned sermon against thievery and graven idols, then administers a whipping. Talina leaves the rancho in disgrace, her wages withheld to pay for the clothing that she strips off, bloody and shredded, and burns when she gets home.
The voices swirl and echo around her.
We’re sorry We’re sorry We’re sorry.
It is a fall evening in Los Encinos. The sunbaked flagstones release the day’s heat and warm Talina as she comes to. Pushing up onto her elbows, she grabs handfuls of lavender and crushes them violently against her neck, her bare arms, her cheeks.
“I’ll make a hundred dolls from these petals, do you hear?” she roars at the night sky. “I’ll eat an entire loaf of bread with my daughter, washed down with good wine and Spanish cheese and tiny olives, and by the gods, just you try and stop me.”
No one does. The suburban streets are empty as usual.
Talina struggles to her feet, brushing plant debris from her skin and clothes, and makes her way inside.
“Hi, hon,” Jorie calls from the kitchen, plugging in the rice cooker. “How was your day?”
“I settled a very old debt,” Talina says.
“Don’t tell me you paid off the car.”
“Nothing like that.” Talina opens the fridge and pours herself a glass of sun tea. She takes a sip, considers. “Actually, it was way bigger than that.”
“Oh?” says Jorie, getting out the cutting board.
“I thought it would free me. That my heart would soar like a hawk. Nope. Not at all.” Talina can hear how strange and shaky her voice sounds. She plucks a miniature candy bar from the plastic orange pumpkin they offered to the trick-or-treaters the night before, rips it open, and crams it into her mouth.
Jorie regards her with concern. He comes over. With soft moth fingers, he flicks bits of lavender off her cheek. She gulps down the half-chewed chocolate but it catches in her throat and she almost chokes.
“What’s going on?” Jorie says. “Your eyes are red and there’s lip gloss all over your face and—”
“Since when do you have allergies?”
She shrugs and won’t meet his gaze.
“Soak in the springs?” he says after a moment.
“Maybe later.”
He leans in to kiss her, but she pulls away and runs to the bathroom to gargle and scrub her mouth until it hurts.
The cold water revives her. Slowly she eases back into her skin.
“It’s probably overkill,” she calls from the sink. “But I have to get it all off. I don’t want to take any chances.”
Jorie stands in the doorway, his broad shoulders filling the frame. He frowns. “So that’s the kind of debt it was. I was wondering … You’re not a lip gloss kind of girl.”
Talina takes the tiny pot from her purse and hurls it into the trash. Then she goes to Jorie, lips chapped and swollen. She wraps her arms around his waist and buries her head in his chest.
He strokes her hair. “Did you say the prayers for the dying?” he asks.
“No,” she responds, her voice muffled against his chest.
Alarmed, Jorie pulls back. “Hey now. We always …”
Talina’s cheeks are wet and streaked. She reaches into her blouse and pulls out the cobalt bottle, holding it up and turning it until it catches the light.
“Whoa,” Jorie says. “Getting pretty low.”
“I brought him back.”
“You changed your mind?”
Talina shrugs. “For so long, I wanted vengeance. It ate away at me until I was so brittle and hollow that sometimes I thought I’d shatter when you touched me. When I finally confronted him tonight, I was terrified, but then …”
She pauses. “I don’t know. It was nothing like I thought. He was pathetic. So old and shrunken. He’d lost his lands, his power, his titles. Then I destroyed his last illusion.”
“It’s wrong to destroy a person’s faith.”
“Oh, I’m pretty sure that still hangs by a thread.” She exhales heavily. “I mean me.”
Jorie’s mouth twitches, but he says nothing.
Talina reaches for the memory. Again and again, she replays it, just as she knows Fernando will, for eternity, as he haunts the halls and walls of his ruined mission. She recalls the anguish in his voice, the desolation in his eyes, the despair as his last, most intricately constructed illusion shattered and slipped away forever.
Her heart surges, and she isn’t sure if it is hardening or softening.
“I want him to live.”