Vice(48)

“Beautiful, no?” Natalia asks.

“Yeah. Yeah, it really is.”

“Come. I’ll show you the place.” She takes me by the hand, then. It’s a small, simple gesture, but the connection between us feels all the more strong for it. Every time we touch, no matter how brief the contact, it seems as though we’re cementing ourselves together in yet another way. She leads me toward the furthest cross, at the lowest point of the burial ground; as we pass by the other crosses, it doesn’t escape my notice that none of them are marked. Not even with an initial, or something to indicate who lies there. I ask Natalia why this is, and she looks uncomfortable.

“The name Villalobos is not a popular one around here. Thanks to my father, people are scared of us. My grandfather and my mother are buried here. My aunt, who was killed when she was just a child. If any of the villagers suspected these graves belong to someone from the Villalobos cartel, they would dig them up and desecrate them.”

“Jesus.”

“I don’t really blame them. My grandfather was a sweet man. He farmed in order to make money, but he also sold cocaine, too. He wasn’t a violent man. He never killed anyone in the name of competition or business. Whatever profit he made from the drugs, he used to send my father away to be educated. He wanted him to be a doctor, or a lawyer. Something legal. When my father came back from school, he chose to use his business degree to expand my grandfather’s cocaine production. He became very…cutthroat. Unforgiving. If someone crossed him, they were never heard from again. So now, we are feared.”

Natalia comes to a stop in front of a cross with a red streamer. She dips down, resting on her heels as she runs the streamer through her fingers. “Laura’s favorite color was red,” she says.

It feels like I’ve been sucker punched in the gut. I can hardly breathe. “I know. She wore this red dress to her prom. My father nearly had a fit. Said she looked like a prostitute, but she refused to get changed.” I lose myself in the memories for a moment. God, they fought so hard that night. Dad didn’t want her leaving the house “looking like a street walker” and she refused to “give in to his capitalist, archaic, patriarchal bullshit.” They were always butting heads, but it was because they were so alike. Later, at some point while she was away at college, they mellowed towards each other. She was his favorite, and I was okay with that, because she was my favorite, too. She was everybody’s favorite. Full of piss and vinegar, always ready to call you out on your shit. She called a spade a spade, which was a breath of fresh air in our household.

“She always felt so alive to me, even when she was sad,” Natalia says. She looks like she’s about to burst into tears. “I want you to know…if I could have helped her escape, I would have. Things were bad back then, though. My father goes through phases. He was so watchful of me then. He was paranoid that I was going to try and leave myself. I was under constant surveillance.”

I stroke my hand over her hair, sucking in a deep breath through my nose. “I know,” I tell her. “I know you would have. This isn’t your fault.” It’s mine. I should have been watching out for her. I should have been paying attention, not throwing back champagne the night she disappeared. And I should have looked harder for her. I should have stayed down here. I should have figured out where she was sooner.

There are so many reasons to blame myself for this. It’s madness that Natalia would feel even an ounce of guilt herself. I crouch down beside her, taking the red streamer from her hands. I wind it around my own fingers, hating myself more and more by the second.

“I’ll give you a moment,” Natalia tells me. She gets to her feet and heads off, stopping in front of one of the other crosses, placing her hand lightly on the ground in front of it.

“I bet you’re loving how complicated this thing’s become,” I say softly under my breath. “You always did love drama. Remember when we were teenagers, and Dad caught me sneaking out one night to see that girl…god, what was her name? Sarah Goldman. Fuck, Sarah Goldman.” I shake my head, trying not to laugh. “He caught me shimmying down a drainpipe at the back of the house, and he was screaming and shouting, yelling at me, calling me a little punk, and you showed up and just sat there, eating a sandwich, watching us argue, volleying back and forth like it was a goddamn tennis match.”

I almost expect to hear her voice, laughing, telling me I deserved the hiding I got that night, but there’s nothing. No laughter. No elbow in my side. Just the wind teasing the red piece of fabric in my hands, and the mountains stretching on forever in every direction.

Did she ever come up here? Did she ever get to see this while she was alive? I find myself hoping so. She would have really, really loved it.





CHAPTER ELEVEN





MASS





A sour, terrible smell hits the back of my nose as we head back down the mountain. It’s ripe and pungent, and makes my gag reflex work overtime. Natalia takes me by the hand again and tells me we need to hurry back, and I can see that she’s edgy. The smell grows thicker, burning my nostrils as we hike down. At the back of my mind, I already know what the smell is, I recognize it on some level, but I don’t want to acknowledge it.

After a while, the smell disappears. Natalia seems to relax, and I forget about it until we pass through a stand of trees and suddenly we’re faced with a yawning hole in the ground, which is filled almost to the brim with bones. Bones f*cking everywhere. And not animal bones. Not the remains of game that has been hunted and killed. No. These are human skeletons.