The Hacienda(61)

Nor why.

Rodolfo returned in the morning.

The closing of the circle was but a slap of plaster on a crack in a swollen dam. Water surged behind it, ready to burst forth; the crack grew wider and wider with each passing hour.

And we still stood directly in the path it would flood.





20





ANDRéS TOLD ME THAT while Paloma and Mendoza were fixing the door in the green parlor, Mendoza had invited her to stay with him and his daughter. His eldest daughter had married away to Hacienda Alcantarilla in the spring, and there was ample room in their home for Paloma to stay as long as she needed. When they left, it was to move her belongings across the village to Mendoza’s house.

Which meant that without Paloma present, spending another night in the safety of the capilla’s rooms was no longer appropriate.

I would have to sleep alone.

Heavy rain opened over the valley midafternoon and continued with silent flashes of lightning. As the gloomy skies darkened further still at twilight, Andrés arranged censers in a particular pattern around my bedchamber, especially near the door and window, and lit them. The darkness followed his movements closely, drawing back with a soft hiss when he began to murmur a prayer. He lifted his chin, squared off with the darkness, and closed the prayer with a territorial stamp of the heel.

The darkness shrank away.

He turned back to me, victory glinting in his face as it had earlier. He was recovering from his injury. Perhaps I would be safe tonight after all.

“Have you heard any voices since this morning?” he asked.

Tightness gathered in my throat, thinking of the red eyes appearing behind him in the green parlor, of Andrés’s intensity when he told me to cast out the voice.

I shook my head.

He must have watched all of this cross my face, for he said, “I fear for you. Your dream . . . it is evidence that your guard was down, left open to that. It is dangerous.”

I did not have to ask why. “How dangerous?” I breathed instead. If I were in danger of losing my mind, what could I do?

You’ll die here like the rest of us.

Andrés worried his bottom lip, an echo of Paloma’s expression when she weighed how much to tell me. How much of the truth I could stomach as I faced the inevitability of night. And with that inevitability, the threat of fear so profound it could drive me to madness.

“My grandmother once brought me to a house that she determined was making its inhabitants irritable. It brought the marriage of the couple who lived there to the edge of ruin. They loathed each other by the time she arrived. These forces have the power to pry your mind open and enter it. Shift what you see, how you feel. Shift your reality. I am afraid . . . I am afraid to leave you alone.” He rubbed a hand over his face, his palm scraping over the shadow of stubble. “Do you want me to stay?”

The meaning underscoring his tone was clear: he asked because he wanted to stay. Something in the determined placement of his feet, or the way his attention curled around me, calm, sentry-like, and watchful, made it clear that he had no intention of leaving me alone.

My God, there was nothing more I wanted. “Yes,” I breathed. But . . .

The room around me was bathed in flickering candlelight. The boudoir, my vanity, the plush bed that was so absurdly different from Andrés’s hard cot. The very air was imbued with an intimacy that spending the night next to each other in the green parlor did not have. Nor even Andrés’s austere rooms after the disastrous exorcism. We had fled there in desperation and collapsed defeated.

This felt intentional.

He met my eyes. Though his face was carefully impassive, there was something there that told me he saw what I saw. He, too, felt how close to a cliff’s edge our sudden, desperate friendship danced.

He still chose to stay.

I took some linens out of the dresser and placed them in his arms, then changed out of sight on the far side of the dresser. When I finished, I found him sitting on my vanity’s stool, which he had taken and positioned next to the door. The blankets and pillow I had supplied lay in a neat pile, ignored. Didn’t he intend to use them?

I glanced up at him: a rosary in hand, his attention fixed straight ahead, deliberately diverted away from me.

Perhaps not yet.

I sat on the edge of my bed, then loosened my hair from its knot and braided it. I, too, kept my attention shyly averted from the other person in the room. If I thought I felt his gaze dance over to me, linger, then dart away, I ignored it out of propriety.

Instead, I let the quiet of the room sink into my tired, aching bones. I imagined myself plaiting copal smoke into my hair, weaving in Andrés’s protective powers, the sound of his low voice beginning the rosary. When I curled beneath the blankets, I was asleep within minutes.

For a time, I slept dreamless and deep. Then, red eyes appeared in the dark; I dreamed of being pushed from a high place, and falling, falling, falling . . .

I woke with a start, heart pounding. Sunlight poured over the bed from the window. A chorus of birds sang outside, lilting up from somewhere in the garden. Everything had a crystal, clean sheen, as if I had blinked water from my eyes and were seeing clearly for the first time.

“Buenos días,” a low, musical voice said.

I looked to the doorway.

Andrés was gone.

The woman with the corn silk hair sat where he had been, her chin resting in her palm as she watched me. A golden necklace glinted coyly beneath her lace collar.