The Hacienda(70)

“Beatriz. Shh,” I said, my voice low. I crossed the last few steps to her, my hands held out as if I were calming a spooked horse. “Shh.”

Her arms gave out. I sprang forward to catch her before she fell against the pew. She was soaked to the bone and shook forcefully. Her face was pale with fear. I tightened my grip on her upper arms to steady her. “Shh.”

She lifted her chin. A red graze cut across one cheekbone; her eyes were glassy with unshed tears as they tracked over me, searching me hungrily, perhaps trying to see if I were real or phantom. Then she looked around me, her chest rising and falling staccato. “It’s so quiet.” Her breath hitched. “So quiet.”

My heart tightened. How many times had I fled from the roar of the darkness as a child? How often had I been tormented by voices after sunset, and sought solace in the peace of the church?

“You’re safe here,” I said.

Her face crumpled.

The world slowed: a yearning like a tide swept through me, an unbearable need to protect the woman before me. At the same moment I drew Beatriz to me, she threw her arms around my body. One movement, perfect as dancers. One tight embrace. Her arms wound around my rib cage; her fingers dug into my back. Damp seeped from her dress onto my shirt, warmed by the heat of our bodies. I pulled her head into my chest, resting my cheek against her wet hair. She smelled of rain. She smelled of fear.

“You’re safe,” I murmured. She shook against me as she sobbed. “Shh. Breathe. You’re safe.”

I stroked her hair, my other hand pressed against her lower back. Slowly, her hitching breaths calmed; her hands relaxed. Her weeping softened and stopped altogether.

Neither of us loosened our arms. I do not know how long we stood there, twined tightly as lovers in the soft glow of the candles on the altar. Rain beat the roof of the capilla; deep in the night, an owl’s soft call echoed across the valley. She was safe. She was safe. I did not know why she had fled, but I knew this: as long as my feet felt the earth beneath me and my heart the heavens above, I would not let any harm come to her.

I felt the muscles of her back stiffen, ever so slightly, beneath my palm.

Reality fell into place around me. I should not hold her so tightly, no—I should not be holding her at all.

She loosened her arms, and I took a quick step back. Something akin to grief tightened in my throat.

Holding her felt right. The feeling swelled in me with the inevitability of rain, my certainty an ache that cut to marrow. An ache that knew no language. It was right.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said, a flat determination in her voice.

My heart stopped.

“I am not going back. I can’t.” Her voice cracked.

I cleared my throat. I had not been thinking that at all. Was that what she thought of me? That I was foolish enough to send her back to the husband from whom she had fled in the middle of the night? To that house?

No. I wanted to beg her to stay here, to slip into my arms, to dig her fingers into my back—

“I’m going to sleep on a pew,” she said. She inhaled deeply. “And you can’t stop me.”

Different thoughts tumbled through me, tangled, half articulated: her husband would wonder where she had gone. No, her husband would be angry if he woke and found her with me. The house was awake, alive, and she could not go back alone. Not until dawn broke. But she could not spend the night here.

Could she?

Hadn’t I sought refuge by doing the same, so many times in my life? Titi knew I fled my father’s house in the night because of the voices. When I grew old enough to begin learning from her, she lectured me about the powers that sought to slip under one’s skin, to seize their hosts like bats gorging themselves on a weakened bull.

You must cast them out, she would say. You are your mind’s sole master. Banish them. Tell them to mind their own business and leave you be.

Even when she walked into the most sickened of houses to purify their energy with copal and smudging of burnt herbs on the walls and hearths, houses so diseased she ordered me to stand outside with the inhabitants, the voices rippled off her like water off silver, her aura as impenetrable as a warrior’s gleaming shield. She was a prophet in a land that had been stripped of its gods: a healer of the sick, a beacon in the night. She reached into steel-dark clouds to control the storms of the rainy season, seizing lightning as her reins and bending them to her will to turn harvests into gold. She called the voices to heel and banished them.

I was not her.

I had failed, and Beatriz suffered because of it.

Perhaps I was weaker than Titi. No matter how hard I tried to walk her path, how hard I fought to be good, to do good, I failed. No matter how hard I thrust the darkest parts of myself into their box and worked only with Titi’s gifts, they endured. Worse, they had tasted freedom and hummed with life. They mocked my failure. They strained at their chains, demanded my attention. Reminded me that I was damned.

Damnation was not something Titi concerned herself with. She believed in an underworld for all, a smoky, dark peace into which all souls folded. But she had not spent years studying scripture as I had, nor praying for her sins in dark seminary cells, convinced the very soul she was born into marked her for burning. Because of what I was, I feared Judgment Day. Aside from Titi, anyone who knew what I truly was—not just her heir, as the pueblo did, but something darker—feared me. This was a pillar of my life, as fixed as the pattern of seasons.