What Tony had found was a message from Daniel.
He had been out walking that morning, eating his breakfast on the move so that no one could see him at it, and discovered the message. The letters were sized large enough for him to spot from his impressive height. One of the e’s was written backward. Tony, who liked large things, approved, even if he didn’t understand the meaning of it.
Now all of the Sorias stood three miles out from Bicho Raro, the various vehicles they’d used to arrive there scattered on the edge of the road some yards away. All work had halted for them to visit the site, as if any artifact of Daniel’s was now a Shrine, and they were the pilgrims. It was a rarity to see all of them together at one time, particularly the middle generation. Michael, his work paused. Antonia, without scissors in hand. Francisco, far from his greenhouse. Rosa—well, Rosa was pretty much always Rosa. They had not been all together in one place since Judith’s wedding, and before that, not for years.
“Why would he put it here?” asked Antonia. She looked accusingly at each of them, including Francisco, who stood on the opposite side of the circle. “No one would see it here.”
“Maybe he misjudged,” Michael said. “Meant to have it visible from the road.”
Rosa adjusted the baby Lidia on her hip. “Who is Marisita?”
Spelled out in stones and dried branches torn from the scrub were the words:
Marisita
I’m listening
Daniel
Because as you have already guessed, Daniel’s placement was no accident. His message was designed to be seen not by a vehicle on the road but rather by a vehicle that had left the road to secretly broadcast a radio station. And the message was deliberately cryptic as it was meant for no one but the cousins who spent time in that box truck each night, and for the young woman he loved.
Joaquin pressed one of his water bottles to his forehead as if the chill of it might steady him. Beatriz closed her eyes for one moment, and in that moment of darkness imagined Daniel returning to them safe and sound. When she opened her eyes, she and Joaquin found that they could not exchange looks as their secret hung between them and threatened to become visible if they both pointed their gaze directly at it.
But they both felt the same. It was one thing to be sending sounds out into the night with the hope that someone, anyone might be listening, and something else again to be sending sounds out into the night with the hope that someone in particular would be listening. And it is a third thing altogether to send sounds out into the night and know that you are being heard by the person you meant to reach.
“Isn’t Marisita …” Judith began, “the rainy pilgrim who cooks?”
In a more dangerous note, Antonia said, “Why is he sending a message to a pilgrim?” But the tone in her voice told everyone there that she already knew why he would be doing such a thing.
“Love,” Eduardo said reverentially, and Antonia flinched. Joaquin made a note of the way he said it, in order to have Diablo Diablo try it later. It was the round and splendid way that he pronounced the o, the gentle landing on the v. He did not realize that his face was soundlessly pronouncing the word until he saw both his parents frowning at him. He corrected his face, and they corrected theirs, but he was still contemplating the part of him that was Diablo Diablo, and even though they didn’t know the name for it, so were they.
“What does it mean, Beatriz?” Judith asked. They all knew that Beatriz and Daniel were the closest of the cousins, and Judith assumed (correctly) that this also meant Beatriz knew what the message meant. Beatriz, however, said nothing. She said nothing for so long that most of them forgot Judith had asked Beatriz the question in the first place, including Judith. (People often forget the power of silence, but Beatriz rarely did.)
Francisco marked this absence of an answer, and put it away in his mind to think about later.
Nana said, “So he is still alive.”
To this point, you have not seen anything of Nana besides a few minutes of her picking tomatoes in her back garden. That was because Nana was old, and like many old people, she had arthritis. It was not bad enough to completely prevent her from moving, and in fact, she had precisely calculated the number of steps she could take each day without suffering for it that night or the following day (217). She had taken 15 steps to Eduardo’s stepside pickup, and then he had lifted her in and twirled his mustache. Then she had taken 47 steps from the pickup truck to this message. That left her with 155 for the rest of the day’s tasks. It was an expensive side trip, but one Nana felt she had to make.
“He could be close,” Judith said. “Who knows when this message was left?”
“Don’t get any ideas,” Antonia warned. “It is still not a good idea to go looking for him.”
But Judith had not said this as a message of hope. Rather, her old fear was beginning to creep up again, complicated by guilt. It was bad enough to be terrified that pilgrims might bring darkness on you; it was worse when the pilgrim was your own cousin whom you loved. She was torn in many directions. The easiest of these directions was away, and a huge part of her wanted to retreat to Colorado Springs with Eduardo. But that felt like giving up on Daniel. And even if she was willing to do that, a small part of her still thought that she might be able to convince her parents to reunite.
But it didn’t seem very likely, looking at them now. Francisco and Antonia were closer physically than they had been in a very long time, but they appeared farther apart than ever.
Eduardo placed his hand upon the small of Judith’s back, and she remembered the way he had said love. Her fear went back to sleep.
“I’m not an idiot,” Judith retorted.
If Antonia and Francisco and Michael and Rosa had been paying attention, they would have marked that neither Beatriz nor Joaquin, the two most vocal supporters of actively helping Daniel, had spoken in favor of helping him now. As it was, only Nana noticed their quiet acceptance, and she took it for despair rather than secret collusion.
“I never said this wasn’t terrible,” Antonia said, feeling the silence of the group was castigating her for upholding their rules. “I don’t know why you are always making me out to be the bad guy.”
“I am in agreement with you, Antonia,” Michael said.
“As am I,” Francisco said.
There was a pause, and they looked sharply to Rosa, but it turned out that the gap in her agreement was only because she was removing her hair from the baby’s mouth. “Yes, yes, we must be cautious.”
The adults were soon discussing logistics in Spanish, which meant they were no longer actively soliciting the younger Sorias’ thoughts. They could not leave water for him, because that was against the rules. But if he was this close, they mused, he could get water from any of the ranches if he was willing to drink with the cattle. And if he was sensible enough to leave this message, they reasoned, then he was sensible enough to be hunting down food for his body, perhaps. Which meant instead of the elements, maybe he was only having to fight the darkness.
They were desperately wrong about just one part, however, and that was the only in that phrase—only having to fight the darkness. Yes, Daniel was fighting the darkness, but there was nothing slight about it. They were not looking for the signs of how his darkness had manifested, nor could they have, but if they had, they might have noticed how uneven the letters were, how some of them were misshapen and only legible to the optimistic. They were words crafted by a young man with fast-failing vision.
But they needed this optimism to counteract their failure to act. Imagining that Daniel was still doing all right was the only way the adults could live with their abandonment of him.
“‘Marisita, I’m listening,’” Rosa repeated, bouncing Lidia in time with the words, waiting for them to make more sense. “‘Marisita, I’m listening.’”
Marisita, I’m listening.
Finally, Beatriz and Joaquin allowed their eyes to meet, and in that look, they saw that they were both thinking the same thing: If Daniel truly was listening, they needed to put on a show that felt like a miracle.