Buildings are not very good at remembering the people who once occupied them.
The high alpine desert around Bicho Raro had more than its fair share of abandoned buildings, and Marisita was slowly working her way through them. Every time she thought she had searched all of the buildings within easy distance of Bicho Raro, she found another one. They came in all shapes. There were collapsed barns, of course, like the one the Sorias scavenged wood from, and old mining towns like the ones Pete and Beatriz had chased Salto through. There were equipment sheds and well houses. But there were also real houses, scattered homesteads, substantial cabins with porches and forgotten histories. Marisita was always shocked by how little she could learn about the people who had lived in them, even though some of them had been neglected only for a few years. Fabrics and rugs faded to colorlessness, glassware and knickknacks got smashed, and scents disappeared. She had heard that houses like these used to be lived in by families who were bought off by logging companies or terrorized into leaving by white ranchers, but she had no way of knowing for sure. She found it depressing, how fast memories were replaced by rumors. Tragedy left behind such subtle artifacts.
Marisita climbed through yet another empty house the day after the radio station had stopped being secret. This one had a front door (sometimes they didn’t), but it was missing the knob. Scavengers, both human and animal, had already had their way with the interior, so only a few featureless chairs remained, knocked on their sides. There was no bed, but it would have been a good place to seek shelter from the cold overnight.
“Daniel?” Marisita called.
There was no reply. There was never a reply. Marisita checked all four of the rooms anyway, in case Daniel couldn’t speak or was dead. When she returned to the dim entry room, she carefully righted all of the chairs, attempting to return the room to as close to perfection as it was capable of. She looked at them for a long moment, trying to imagine what kind of family would have sat in them, and then she sank into one of the chairs and cried. Water pooled around her feet and slipped between the gapped old floorboards.
“Please be alive,” Marisita said, but only in her head.
After a few minutes, she rose and took up her bag from beside the front door and left the house behind. She wanted to be back in time for the radio program. Tonight was different than all the other nights, because now that the Sorias knew Beatriz and Joaquin were running a station, they insisted that the cousins broadcast live from Bicho Raro. The single-minded goal was to reach Daniel, and the whole family wanted to be there to watch.
Marisita had a letter in her pocket from Beatriz. It was probably soaked through, but she remembered what it said, as it was so brief: Marisita, I hope you will consider completing your interview tonight. Beatriz.
But Marisita’s heart had not changed. She still did not want to tell her story. The thought of saying it out loud made her feel as ill as the days when her past had unfolded, and every time she relived the memories, her tears came fresh, and the rain fell harder on her and her butterflies. She thought the Sorias already probably despised her for luring their Saint into darkness. How much more would they despise her, she thought, if they knew what kind of person she was?
She thought about the last thing Daniel Soria had told her, and remembering it reddened her eyes again, as it always did. She loved him and missed him, and she scanned the bright horizon for signs of him.
There was no sign of Daniel, only another small house, a twin to the one she had just searched. There was a story that linked those two houses together, but it had disintegrated with the curtains. The front door fell off as Marisita opened it, startling a thread snake, also known as the blind snake, from beneath it. The dust that rose in the air reacted with the storm over Marisita so that electricity crackled. Marisita waited for it to calm, then she stepped inside. There was no furniture in the main room. There was only a shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe in the corner. Marisita crouched before the statue. Mary, her eyes softly downcast, as gentle as Daniel’s, stood upon a crudely sculpted pile of yellow roses. The words ¿No estoy yo aquí que soy tu madre? were painted among the blossoms. The rain from Marisita’s miracle speckled the ceramic, giving the appearance that the Virgin wept.
Marisita closed her eyes and meant to pray, but instead of a prayer, she thought about the lost stories of these abandoned houses, and about Daniel, and about the struggling Soria family. She thought about how a careless or foolhardy Saint could all too easily reduce Bicho Raro to yet another one of these abandoned homesteads, a badly placed conversation sending deadly darkness through an entire family. Daniel had put them all in danger despite his best efforts to separate himself, because he had somehow forgotten how tenacious love was, even in the face of fear. She had seen it before she left that morning. His family was still afraid, and yet they rallied around hope.
She removed Beatriz’s letter from her pocket. It was soaked, but the ink had not bled. Beatriz’s request remained intently bold.
Marisita knew that her fear of sharing her story was selfish. She had seen how music had helped Jennie, and she’d seen how Diablo Diablo’s subtle exploration of the truth had helped Robbie and Betsy defeat their darkness. It was entirely possible that telling her story could help Daniel. They didn’t know what he needed to hear to defeat his darkness, but they knew what he wanted to hear: Marisita. And yet she was here, because it was easier for her—she had been fleeing her past for months and she knew in her heart that this had become just another way of fleeing.
The sculpture of the Virgin had ceased praying and was instead holding her ceramic hands out toward Marisita. With a sigh, Marisita folded Beatriz’s damp letter before draping it over the Virgin’s hands.
Marisita made a vow: If she did not find Daniel that afternoon, she would return to Bicho Raro, and she would tell her story on the radio.
Only a few minutes later, she discovered Daniel’s lost pack of supplies. It was hung up on a strand of barbed wire, just a few threads tangled around one of the barbs. Marisita ran to it as if it might run away, and she caught it up in her arms. It still smelled like him, like the candles of the Shrine, and she held it to her face until she could feel the fabric growing saturated by the rain over her. Then she opened it and searched its contents. To her distress, she found it was full. She guessed, correctly, that this meant that he had not meant to leave it behind.
“Daniel!” she called out. “Daniel, can you hear me?”
Marisita found a hand-sized stone, which she set on the top of the fence post closest to her so that she would have a marker of where she had found it. Slinging the pack across her shoulders in addition to her own bag, she began to walk the fence line, looking for evidence that a young man had squeezed through. Back and forth she went, in ever-widening circles. Her mouth had not been overly dry before she found his supplies, but now, all she could think about was lowering her bag from her shoulder and taking a drink. She refused to, however, imagining how dry he must be, feeling selfish for knowing that she could take a drink at any time.
She knew he might already be dead. She knew he might have sent out that message to her in vain.
She called his name again.
She did not know that he could hear her.
Daniel was perhaps one hundred feet away from her, still curled by the brush that he had sheltered under before. When he heard her voice, his heart leaped and then fell. He longed to let her find him, to hold him, to drive away the creature that still accompanied him. He imagined her pressing her fingers to his eyelids, as if his blindness was a pain that she could ease through touch. He could hear the rain falling around her still and the sound of that water nearly drove him to weakness. But instead, he mustered his strength. Slowly, he crawled around the opposite side of the plant in order to remain hidden.
Marisita came closer, calling. Although Daniel did not want to be found, his heart cried for her so strongly and her heart cried for him so strongly that she was pulled inexorably in his direction.
Only feet from him, her pulse pounded so strongly that it was as if she had already found him.
“Daniel,” she said, “I’m not afraid.”
This was not true, but she wanted it to be true badly enough that the difference did not matter.
There are many kinds of bravery. The one Marisita displayed right then was one of them, and the kind that Daniel displayed was another. Everything in him wanted to call to her, but nothing in him gave in to the impulse. He had risked everything in order that she might live without her darkness, and he would not give that up just because he did not want to die alone.
Marisita hesitated. She believed that her desire to find him had invented the feeling of certainty inside her.
“Daniel?”
The Saint remained hidden.
Marisita returned to Bicho Raro to tell her story.