by Alisa Valdes
“How about a movie?” I asked. “I feel like sitting in the dark, in someone else’s world for a while, far from my mother.”
“Sounds good.”
I guided the car toward out favorite theaters, not knowing exactly what was showing, but willing to see just about anything at that moment.
“So you think all these coincidences mean something?” I asked her, even though I sort of knew they did, in my gut.
“Seems like it, but who knows?” she asked. “Anything could be a coincidence, kind of like horoscopes, if you think about it hard enough. People can pretty much justify just about anything, don’t you think?”
“Here,” I said. “Turn on the radio. Let’s see what’s on. We’ll try to make it a coincidence. Maybe you’re right.”
“Just to a random station?”
“Yeah, FM. Just turn it on.”
She did, and to our amusement - and a bit creepily, I might add - Usher’s “You Make Me Wanna” was on. You make me wanna leave the one I’m with, start a new relationship with you, this is what you do....
“Okay, fine,” I said, with a little thrill. “Maybe it’s all what we make of it, but you have to admit, that song is totally fitting for me right now.”
“Then that would mean that all the coincidences on earth are about you,” complained Kelsey.
“True. But maybe they are right now.”
“Or maybe millions of people get together and break up each and every day,” she huffed, “which is why that’s what every pop song in the world is about.”
“True.”
“Let’s change it to a random station and see if it’s still something we can justify,” she said.
Kelsey spun the dial randomly, and the song came back as “Gangsta Love,” by Snoop Dogg.
We both laughed at this one.
“Too weird,” she said. “Then again, it could just be sad that the so-called gangsta culture is something big corporations glamorize for a profit as a conspiracy to keep people down. Maybe it’s nothing more than that.”
“Do it again,” I cried.
This time, the song was “Lean Like a Cholo.”
“See?” said Kelsey. “You can find personal meaning in everything, once you start looking for it. Or corporate appropriation of barrio culture.”
“So you’re saying the coincidences don’t really mean anything?” I asked her.
“Yeah. I think so.”
“Do it one more time, and the next song will be the answer from the universe to the question, ‘do your coincidences mean anything,’ I said.”
Kelsey did as I asked, and the song, shockingly, came up as the same one the dance team from South Valley High had used.
We looked at each other, stunned.
“Okay, that’s maybe a little creepy,” she said.
“Or not,” I told her. “Depending on how you look at it. Maybe it’s comforting. Maybe someone’s looking out for me.”
“Yeah,” she said with a snort. “Me. I’m looking out for you.”
I smiled at her, grateful. “Yeah. And I love you for it.”
“Dork,” she said, and my shaking, like my rage, disappeared in a laugh.
♦
Demetrio texted me during the movie. I was so happy to hear from him that I walked out of the darkened theater to call him from the hallway. I told him all about the lunch, and the coincidences, and the movie, and asked him what he was up to. He said he had some time off work and would love to meet us for “coffee or whatever you fancy people do on Sunday afternoons.” I agreed we’d meet him at a cafe near the theater, after the movie was out. When I told Kelsey, however, she said she needed to get home to do some studying, and asked that I take her to her car instead. I did just that, and called Demetrio to ask if he could meet me at the Starbucks near Academy and Tramway instead, as it was closer to my house. He agreed, but emphasized he’d have to keep it short because of his curfew.
I arrived after he did, and found him waiting in one of the velvet armchairs just inside the door. He bounded up when I came in, and seemed a little goofy and overly happy. I guess the news about Logan had cheered him.
“Hi,” I said, suddenly awkward.
He stepped toward me with a grin, and held his arms open for me. “I won’t bite,” he said. The look on his face was supremely confident, and just a tiny bit cocky, and turned me to jelly. “Just a friendly hello. That’s it.”
For the first time since the crash, I found myself in his arms. This time, he didn’t touch me in the clinical way he’d originally done. He touched me passionately, romantically. He was solid, and comfortingly warm, and he smelled like sunshine on freshly turned earth. We didn’t do much for a long moment, other than hold each other. I didn’t care who was watching. I just wanted to feel him. I let my hands move along his back a little. It was like a big, strong Valentine.
“Coffee, madam?” he asked, at last releasing me from the embrace and opening one arm toward the counter. I realized now that people were staring at us. This was my neighborhood, after all, and not the sort of place where you’d usually find a guy like Demetrio. Except that he was here, and he had every right to be here, and I didn’t give a flying rat’s ass what they thought about it anymore. I really didn’t. I smiled at him, and touched him gently on the arm.
“Let’s do it,” I said, in answer to his question. “Decaf for me, though. I’ve got finals in the morning, and I can’t afford to be up all night.”
We ordered. He paid. Then we decided to take a little walk on the bike path along Tramway Boulevard. Demetrio wanted to hear all about the conversation with my mom and Logan. As I told him about what happened, he listened attentively, stopping to ask me how I felt about the whole thing a couple of times. Logan never asked me how I felt about things. It was really nice to have a guy do that.
“I’m cool with it,” I told him. “My mom will get over it once she gets to know you.”
We kept talking, and even held hands a bit, as we walked along the bike path. Just south of Academy, the path crossed over a canyon - Ardilla Canyon, actually, owned by my school - with a gorgeous unobstructed view all the way to the foothills. The sun was low in the sky in the West, and we stood for a moment, facing East, admiring the beautiful view and the way the Sandias turned pink and red at dusk. We talked about how the color of the mountains were the reason the Spaniards who colonized this land originally had called them the Sandias, because sandia means watermelon in Spanish. We were near my house, but I didn’t mention it.
Suddenly, as we stood on the overpass, a large orange Chow dog, mangy and apparently stray, ran up from the canyon, scaling an embankment and landing on the path about ten yards from us. It ran as though being chased, right out into the busy traffic, looking behind it rather than ahead. Almost before I realized what was happening, the dog was struck by an oncoming Hummer, so hard and so fast that it’s body was thrown clear past the bike path and back down the embankment it had come from. I saw an arc of blood, like a twisted rainbow from hell, smear the sky as the animal flew. The sound was horrible, a wet thud, and a noise like cloth tearing. I screamed. The Hummer kept going, as did all the other cars.
“Come on,” said Demetrio, already scaling the railing, on his way toward the animal down below.
“No. It looked bad,” I called out, shaken. “I don’t think I want to see what’s left of that dog.”
“I have to help it,” he told me. “Come if you want, or wait here.”
“Oh, God,” I whispered, making the sign of the cross on myself. Not to be outdone in my love for animals, I cautiously followed him, scrambling past cactus on the loose sand of the embankment. The dog lay just beneath the path, in two pieces. I fought the urge to wretch, and looked at its terribly vacant eyes, the bloodied fur, the back legs that hung to the top part of the torso by just a few strips of tendon. Guts spilled out across the dirty snow and sandy frozen earth.
“Oh, no, no,” I said. “So sad. This is horrible. We just saw
it! It was just alive, and now. Oh, no. How is this possible? So unfair.”
Demetrio kneeled at the creature’s side, his eyes fixed on the body, trancelike, his hands floating over it much the way he’d done with Buddy the first day I met him.
“Demetrio,” I said. “Let’s go. It’s dead. There’s nothing we can do for it now.”
He ignored me, closing his eyes and chanting some words I couldn’t understand, in a language I didn’t know, beneath his breath. I was so disgusted with the sight of the disemboweled animal that I was about to turn away, when I caught sight of sparks, like flaming, icy blue snowflakes, from the corner of my eye.
I looked back at Demetrio, and saw that the sparks fell from his fingertips onto the dog. I blinked, hard, to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating. The sparkling lights were still there, raining down from his fingers like the spray from the tip of a sparkler on the 4th of July, onto the body of the animal below. All around Demetrio’s head I saw a golden orange glow, almost as though someone held a flashlight behind it.
In total disbelief, I watched as the dead dog began to glow a sort of blue-white hot color. To my astonishment, bits of it began to move back together, on their own, inching like worms, the skin and organs falling into place, kneading one another into place, and knitting themselves shut. Demetrio’s breath was haggard, labored, and sweat dripped from his face. He was straining, exhausted by this, whatever it was he was doing.
I stumbled closer, unable to fathom what I was seeing. Bit by bit, the animal fastened itself back together again, and the blood seeped backwards from the earth, back into the dog. Moments after he’d begun, the dog that had previously been cut nearly clear in two was whole again, and breathing, and opening its eyes to look at us in a sort of grateful confusion. Demetrio put his hand upon the animal’s fur now, and pet it gently while speaking in a calm voice to it. He pulled a water bottle from his pocket, and dribbled some of it into the animal’s mouth. The dog lapped it up, and sat up, and wagged its tail appreciatively.
I felt lightheaded, dizzy, faint.
“Mami,” said Demetrio, as though he were about to deliver some very bad news, the way police did in shows when they said someone had died. “Sit down. Come here. I have something to tell you.”
“No,” I said, staggering away, then back, around in a little circle, stunned. “What was that? What just happened?”
“I didn’t want you to have to see it, but it is my duty to do this. I couldn’t wait, or she wouldn’t have made it. Would you girl?” He scratched the now-healthy dog behind her ears, and she wagged her tail in reply. “I think I’ll call her Nutmeg, after the color of her fur. You like that? Nutmeg? Kind of cute, no?” He was trying to put me at ease, but I didn’t think anything could do that now.
“Demetrio.” My teeth chattered together.
The dog looked at me, and wagged its tail.
“Go get her, Nutmeg,” he said to the dog. “Go on.”
It cocked its head to one side at me, and walked over to me, nudging me toward Demetrio - as though it had understood his words.
“This - hold on - no, this can’t be happening,” I said, numbly, as I tripped over my own feet and ended up sitting next to him with the dog lying at our feet as though we owned her.
I met his eyes, and blinked, again and again, trying to compose myself.
“You just brought that thing back from the dead,” I told him.
“Yep.” He smiled with a shy shrug, as though he were a little boy who’d been caught stealing candy and couldn’t find a way to deny it.
“But that’s not possible.”
“You think?” he asked. “Then I’d say you got mad skills at denial, mamita. Unless you weren’t here just now.”
“But how? It’s impossible.”
Demetrio let out a long sigh. “Well, I guess I was a fool for thinking I’d be able to hide it from you.”
“Hide what?”
“My work.”
“This is your work?”
“Search and rescue. Only today I wasn’t searching, but I found one anyway. This is what I do.”
“Okay.” I took a deep breath and tried to rationalize what I was seeing and hearing. “I knew that. You told me that. I’ve known this fixation you have for road-kill. But I didn’t realize you could do that. I figured you just found injured animals and nursed them back to health.”
“That’s about right.”
“No, that is not what I just saw. It was way more than that. No one can do what you just did.”
“I can. But never twice for the same creature.”
In the west, the sun was getting lower, and Demetrio was watching it closely. Seeing him eyeball the sky with anxiety, preparing to run as soon as the sun set once more - the realization hit me like an errant golf ball upside the head.
Doink.
“You heal things. You can’t be out after dark. Coincidences follow you like mice after the Pied Piper. You’re not exactly a regular person, are you?” I asked him. Even as it came out, the words sounded exactly right; absurd, but right. I’d known this, somewhere, at some level, in my gut, from the moment he first touched me. Demetrio wasn’t human.
Demetrio’s face fell into a frown. He seemed torn and reluctant to answer. “I want to be,” he said softly. “Ever since I met you, that’s all I want, mamita. It led me to do some reckless, stupid things, too.”
“Like letting me see this,” I said of the dog, who wagged her approval.
“Yeah. I shoulda had more self-control, but seriously, I’ve never felt the way I feel with you when I have been around a girl. Ever. It’s like, I don’t know, like you were meant for me.”
I felt sick, and cold, overcome with nausea at the realization that I was not in the world as I’d known it before. There was more than I’d ever known. At a visceral level, I understood this now. There was much more.
“So, what are you, exactly? An angel?” I asked him, flinching a bit afterward, because I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer.
“Nah.”
“Magical healer, like in those churches on TV?”
“Nope.”
“Then...what?”
“I’m dead, mamita,” he said, plainly.
“Dead,” I repeated, in a breathy whisper, feeling faint.
“Right. Just like my descanso said. I’m a person, like you, but I’m dead. I’m sorry, Maria.”
“Dead,” I said again, trying to wrap my mind about it. “But I can see you and feel you, you’re warm, you’re right here.”
“I - I wanted to tell you. I’m a revenant, a ghost in human form. Sometimes I’m in human form, I should say. In this dimension. It’s like in Dickens, when Dr. Manette is returned to life, except he only died symbolically, and I actually did.”
“Dickens. Tale of Two Cities, you mentioned it the first day.”
“I dropped you a few hints. You didn’t pick ‘em up though.”
“Dead.”
“Hey. You heard of La Llorona? She’s a revenant. I am too, but not all the time. I didn’t know how to say it, without scaring you away. There’s science involved, it’s not what you think, it’s actually beautiful, it has to do with the Golden Ratio and Fibonacci numbers, if you’ve heard of them, and the Maker, he believed I deserved -”
The world spun, and I placed my hands on the ground to steady myself, but it didn’t work. The Golden Ratio? The thing Thomas was prattling about the other day? Impossible coincidences, too many of them. Everything began to fade, and disappear. Sounds grew distant and fuzzy. I felt a buzzing in the center of my brain, a churning sickness in the center of my soul.
And I knew I was passing out. And I knew I couldn’t breathe right. And then I knew nothing but darkness.
♦
When I came to, I was in the driver’s seat of my Land Rover, in the rear Starbucks parking lot, near the dumpster, with the doors locked and the Saint Anthony of the Desert card on the dashboard. It was dark out, and I was alone. My purse
was on the floor of the passenger seat. There was no note, nothing from Demetrio. Just me, safe in my car, with no memory of how I’d gotten there.
Shaken, I drove the three minutes to my house. I made it home just in time for dinner, and found my worried mother in her yoga pants, fuzzy yellow slippers and an oversized National Hispana Leadership Institute t-shirt, busily checking a frozen lasagna in the oven while the evening news blasted tragedies on the under-cabinet flat screen TV.
“Hi,” I said. I tried to sound normal, and failed.
My mother crossed her arms sternly over her chest, angry. “Maria.” She then proved that she had a singular penchant for holding a grudge by balling up a dishtowel and hurling it to the floor. “What is going on with you? Where were you?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I don’t like this, Maria,” she said as her voice began to crack with tears.
“You don’t like what?” I was growing irritated with her.
“This! You! What’s happening to you.”
“Nothing’s happening to me.”
“Oh, please! I don’t even know who you are anymore, Maria! You’re lying and secretive, taking off and being careless, breaking up with Logan -”
“If you like him so much, you date him, mom!”
“Do not speak to me that way, young lady. Show some respect.”
I knew this was a losing battle. “Yes, ma’am. Sorry.”
“You’re getting into car accidents and disappearing,” she continued, not quite done with her harangue.
“Mom, stop. I’m fine. I made it home for dinner on time.”
“But what if you hadn’t? Where would I have looked for you?”
“But I did. Here I am. Jeez, I wonder how you’d handle it if you actually had a bad kid, mom.”
She kept listing my faults for me. “You don’t answer your cell phone when I call you, and you lie to me. Maria! You know how I feel about lying!”
