The Hacienda(94)

No looking back. No looking forward.

“Then don’t.” I lowered my face to his. “Just be with me now,” I breathed against his lips. “Be.”





34





THE NEXT MORNING, PALOMA and José Mendoza helped me put my trunks in the carriage. Mendoza held his hat in his hands awkwardly as Paloma and I embraced and both burst into tears, promising to write.

I watched them walk back through the gates of San Isidro.

Using José Mendoza as an intermediary, I had sold the land that our neighbor Hacienda San Cristóbal so greatly coveted. I had made Mendoza and Paloma keepers of the property in my absence and drafted a plan with them for how the new income would be used and invested. Reopening the hacienda’s general store for the first time since the death of old Solórzano, with all the villagers’ generations-old debts wiped away. Building a school for the children. It was the talk of the village, passed from hand to hand with loaves of pan de muerto as families prepared for the first of November, as they gathered in the graveyard behind the capilla and exchanged news over the crackling of small bonfires.

I had spent the holiday evening indoors with Paloma. We scattered bright cempasúchil petals around a small ofrenda for her mother, but she did not want to go to the graveyard. And I had no desire to go into the graveyard bearing offerings for the Solórzanos. Some wounds were too fresh. Perhaps they would heal, when we were ready for them to. Instead, we sat by the fire and talked long into the night, our conversation marked by the rising and falling of laughter, by the blue of a single plume of copal at the door.

I would miss her. Her bluntness. How her sense of humor bent wicked more often than not. But I knew she and I would correspond regularly. I had officially made her Mendoza’s heir as foreman. She would see the house repaired and cleaned; cover its furniture with dust cloths and keep the gardens alive. If I or my descendants ever found ourselves in need of its use, Paloma would see to it that the house would be ready and waiting. If I ever healed enough to return.

If.

“Are you ready, Do?a Beatriz?” the driver asked.

“A few more minutes,” I said. There was one person I still had not yet said farewell to.

Andrés stood off to the side of the carriage, his shoulders stiff. He, too, watched the gates where Paloma and Mendoza had melted away, and did not look down at me until I walked the few steps between us and stood before him.

Finally, he met my eyes.

Neither of us said anything for a long moment.

“You could come with me,” I blurted out at last.

There was still time. The carriage could wait as we gathered his few belongings from the rooms adjoining the capilla. We could leave together, start a new life. Something unmarred and perfect and—

He dropped my gaze and turned his face to the side, looking away from me.

My heart sank.

“I can’t.” His voice cracked. “This is who I am. This is my home.”

Andrés the priest. Andrés the witch. He was a fractured creature, stretched between darkness and light. He belonged to this place in ways I could never comprehend, and he chose to keep belonging: the village. His family. The Church. His land.

“I know,” I breathed.

But I offered no apology for what I had said. It was what a deep, selfish part of me wanted: I wanted to steal him away and make him mine. I wanted to keep him always by my side; I wanted his hand clasped, warm and strong, over mine. I wanted him near with an ache that carved bone deep.

And I understood it was not possible.

As I took a step backward, he lifted his head. For a moment, I thought of his face last night, how its lines were softened by the dark. How his eyes had fluttered closed as our linked breathing drew us slowly toward sleep. How young he had looked. How at peace.

Now his eyes were bloodshot, his mouth set in a hard twist that betrayed how he fought to keep his composure.

If only I could speak. If only I could say something to alleviate his pain and mine, but I couldn’t. There was a tempest inside me, thoughts jostling one another back and forth, struggling to be set free: I could say how I would carry him with me always. How he had saved my life and I would be forever in his debt.

How I longed for him to choose me. How I was angry he would not leave everything behind for me.

How ardently I wished for him to never, ever change.

But for all that, I had no words.

In that moment, we were two people standing opposite each other on the road. We had walked it together, holding each other close in the dark, but now our paths forked. His led one way, back to the village, back to his family, back to San Isidro.

Mine led another way: to Cuernavaca. To Mamá. To a wealthy widow’s freedom, a freedom that was so frighteningly my own I barely knew how to hold its reins.

But I would learn how. I would learn to carve my future into whatever I wished it to be.

I had Andrés to thank for that. For believing me when I could not believe myself, for reaching into a nightmare and drawing me to a dawn.

But now the gray mists of dawn had burned away, and day was garish bright around us. He had given me a new chance at life. The only way to repay such an act was to live. I knew the only way for me to heal, to fully live again, was to leave San Isidro behind.

“I will always trust you,” I breathed. “Adios.”