The Hacienda(28)

A second rap at the door. “Padre Andrés!”

Padre Guillermo’s voice.

I darted around the back of the altar and ducked beneath it, yanking my skirts around my legs and tucking my knees to my chest. Padre Andrés’s black trousers and shoes crossed the room in a step and a half; then a box scraped across the stone floor in front of the altar and he pivoted on his heel.

Daylight flooded the storeroom.

“Padre Andrés!” Padre Guillermo huffed. “Padre Vicente told me you were in the confessional with a parishioner.”

“I was looking for my prayer book, Padre Guillermo,” Padre Andrés said smoothly. “Of course it was an accident.”

But this was not. If anything about this conversation went awry, there was no explaining away why I was curled into a ball beneath a dusty altar with Padre Andrés concealing me.

A dusty, faded red cloth covered the middle of the altar, hiding me from sight, but beyond it I could see a dusty statue of la Virgen on a shelf. Her hands were spread wide, her painted face perfectly beatific.

Help, please. The thought flew from my mind before I could summon the shame to stop it. As if that prayer were worth listening to. Who would intercede on my behalf in a situation like this? Our Lady of Dust and Secrecy? Our Lady of Women Disobeying Their Husbands?

Padre Andrés smoothly diverted Padre Guillermo’s attention away from the confessional incident and drew him deep into some town affair involving the Sunday bell ringer and his incurable pulque habit. Soon he would usher the priest out and the danger would be gone.

Ducking beneath the altar had disturbed dust; it rose around me in a faint cloud. My nose itched with the beginning of a sneeze. Panic budded in my chest as I fought to suppress it, too afraid to move. If I failed, my hiding place would surely be revealed—

“What are you doing in here?” Padre Guillermo asked at last.

“Oh,” Padre Andrés drawled innocently, as if only then remembering his surroundings. “Penance, Padre.”

“You’re praying in here?”

“Dusting. Organizing. As you instructed me to do two weeks ago, and which I clearly haven’t done.”

Padre Guillermo’s sigh was deep. Long-suffering, but also affectionate. That was a sigh I had often directed at Mamá—the sound of someone who had long put up with the whims of a daydreamer. “Ay, Andrés. What will we ever do with you?”

“The Lord is in all things, Padre,” said Padre Andrés. “Buenas tardes.”

“Buenas tardes.”

A creak; the door shut. Footsteps retreated in the gravel, then faded entirely.

Padre Andrés turned and dropped to a crouch. He shoved the box to the side and lifted the altar covering that concealed me from sight. A thin veil of dust fell between us.

A moment passed. The dust settled. Reality settled: I was sitting on a dusty storeroom floor like a child, my knees pulled to my chest, looking up into the face of an unfairly handsome priest.

I sneezed.

“Salud,” Padre Andrés said solemnly.

His seriousness was so incongruous with our position that a sudden peal of laughter escaped my lips.

His finger flew to his lips. “Shh!”

I clapped a hand over my mouth to smother the sound but was unable to stop. I shook with silent laughter, tears leaking from my eyes.

Padre Andrés kept his expression carefully neutral, but I sensed he was mortified as I crawled out from under the altar. He held out a hand to help me to my feet. I accepted it, gasping for breath between stifled peals of laughter.

He released my hand as soon as I was upright, murmuring an apology, his gaze demurely downcast. “I was certain we would be undisturbed here. How Padre Guillermo knew . . .”

I waved a hand, finally catching my breath. “It’s all right,” I said, wiping tears from my cheeks and brushing dust from my skirts. When was the last time I had laughed like that? Sleeplessness was certainly stretching my sanity thinner than it had ever been. I inhaled deeply to compose myself and looked up at Padre Andrés, at the crease of concern that seemed permanently etched between his brows.

Papá distrusted the Church as a rule. Priests were conservative and corrupt, he said. I had never once told a priest anything aside from what was required from me in bland, unspecific confessions or society small talk. I knew I couldn’t trust them, not in my life before Papá’s death nor now, when I was alone in my torment in a cold, hostile house. Yet a curl of intuition drew me to Padre Andrés like moth to flame. You’ve never met a priest like him before, it whispered.

“We can speak freely here,” he said quietly.

And so I did.

He moved to my side, leaning against the altar as he listened. We had left the confessional behind, but I had never been so honest with a stranger. I laid everything bare, beginning when Rodolfo and I first arrived from the capital, with the red eyes I saw on that first night. I left out no detail. Not even Juana’s erratic behavior, believing me one day and dismissing me as mad the next. Nor did I forget Ana Luisa’s copal.

Padre Andrés listened, one hand rubbing his jaw thoughtfully, as I described the pounding on the doors and the cold that swept through the house and prevented me from sleeping. As I described the skeleton I had found in the wall that vanished.

When I finished, I glanced up at his face, bracing myself to see a look of horrified disbelief. Instead, Padre Andrés bit his lip, worrying it as he thought. He drummed the fingers of his left hand against the altar. “I think I can help,” he said at last.