by Alisa Valdes
“I know. Yes, ma’am.”
“Your dad was a liar!” she shrieked, totally losing it now. This is when I saw the half-empty bottle of wine on the counter. No, more like two-thirds empty. Great. “I never thought you’d end up just like him, but look at you!”
I felt sick arguing with a drunk, but I couldn’t help it. “That’s not fair. I’m not like dad.”
“You are! You’re just like him. You’re a liar, and I can’t stand it. I am your mother!”
She was sobbing now, hysterical.
“Do not compare me to him,” I yelled back.
“How can I not? When you go around telling me lies and sneaking around.”
“I’m not ‘sneaking around’.”
“Sneaking around with a cholo. With scum. Where did I go wrong, dear Lord?”
My mother angrily yanked the lasagna out of the oven and set it to cool on the granite counter. She then began to rip open a bag of prepared green salad, dumping it into a large wooden bowl while laughing and crying, and otherwise generally looking more and more like a woman who’d completely lost her mind.
“You must think I’m pretty stupid, Maria.”
“I don’t. I think you’re very smart. You’re a lawyer. You went to Stanford. You’re successful. Everyone knows that.”
Mom dropped the empty bag of salad on the counter, and threw her hands up in the air.
“You know what?” she asked. “I’m done. I’m done with this. I’ve done the best I could to be a good mom to you, and I don’t even know who you are anymore. I can’t do this anymore. It’s too much. You’re trying to ruin my career, that’s what this is. You mock my accomplishments, and my office. How dare you. I’m a mother, yes, but I’m a professional, and I will still be a professional long after you’ve gone to college and moved out. You are not my priority.”
I stood mute, and watched my mother rush from the kitchen, toward her room. I heard her door slam. How was it possible, I wondered, that my own mother was less mature than I was?
I found my backpack, and pulled my books out to study for my finals tomorrow. I was not going to let her drunken abuses - or the craziness I encountered earlier - deter me from passing the eleventh grade.
Half an hour or so later my mother returned to the kitchen, somewhat calmer. She apologized for having lost her temper, and said that she was also sorry for projecting her anger for my father onto me.
“No worries,” I told her. “He’s a bastard. I understand.”
Together my mom and I set the table, and got the dinner served, somewhat cold but good nonetheless.
“You don’t have to tell me every little detail of where you’ve been, okay?” she said, finally, doing a 180 from her attitude earlier.
“Uhm, okay.”
“You’re a smart girl, and I know you’ll make good decisions.”
“Thank you.”
“But I don’t want you to lie to me, Maria.” She wore her politician’s smile.
“Okay. I’m sorry.”
“If you don’t want me to know something, just tell me it’s none of my business. I’ll ask you where you’re going, and you can say, ‘you know what, mom? I don’t want to tell you, but I’ll be okay.’ I’d be fine with that. I wouldn’t love it, but I’d be okay with it.”
“Okay.”
“And just promise to answer your cell if I call you, so I don’t start thinking you’re in trouble or going to die.”
“Okay,” I said, even though I apparently was in trouble and might very well die, according to the company I’d been keeping.
My mom looked at me with a ton of love now, switching gears entirely.
“You are so much like me,” she said.
“Thanks. I think.”
She laughed. “I know what it’s like to be sixteen, Maria. You think your mom is the dumbest creature who ever lived. You can’t stand being around her.”
“That’s not true. Except when you talk about yourself in the third-person.” At least it wasn’t true all the time.
“All I ask is that you level with me. And that you go to your therapy appointment so you don’t screw up in school on top of everything else.”
“I’m doing fine in school.”
“I know. But things - a lot can change at sixteen, Maria. You can start to think it’s all about boys, because hormones are terrible things.”
“I’ve heard they don’t really start raging until a woman hits her late thirties,” I told her with a grin. “We should probably be more concerned about you, honestly. I worry you’ll go full-on cougar on me one of these days.”
My mother laughed, and shook her head. “I don’t know about that.”
“Yeah, you say you’re working late all the time, but where are you really, hmm?”
My mother kept shaking her head, then began to cry into her lasagna again.
“Just remember, please,” she said. “We are a political family. We have an image to uphold. You think it’s easy to run for office as a single mother and a Latina? No. No, it’s not. They will judge me twice as hard. I have to be twice as good for half the credit. I can’t afford to have a crazy daughter. You have to understand this.”
“I get it.”
“I think we should go to Santa Fe over winter break, just me and you, for a mother-daughter ski trip, where we can reconnect and get to know each other again. I think I’ve neglected you, and I’m sorry.”
“Okay.”
She poured some more wine, with a mysterious smirk on her face, and switched gears again, no longer loving and saccharine, back to the rabid she-wolf.
“Logan is a good boy, Maria. He’ll make a great husband and father someday.”
“Maybe, but not for me.”
My mother looked at me, exasperated, and started to cry anew. “You don’t get it,” she sobbed, growing hysterical again. “He - if you were with him, Maria! His family is practically royalty around here. Think of what it could do for us. If you were to show up in the society pages with him at events. Just imagine.” Her eyes glowed with excitement just thinking of the possibilities. It made me sick.
“Mom.”
“You don’t get it,” she groaned.
“No,” I told her, as I stood up to clear my place and get started on the dishes. “You don’t.”
♦
My mother sat alone at the table for a while, then quietly went to her bedroom. The silence and peace that fell over the house, underscored with the eventual, soothing sound of her snoring, was divine. I puttered around the kitchen for a bit, found some cookie dough ice cream to help with the studying. I got myself ready for bed, and watched a little TV. Then I settled in to read some more. Finally, near midnight, the numb denial I’d been in since I awoke in my car wore off, and I realized what I’d learned.
Demetrio was dead.
Demetrio was dead.
Demetrio was dead, and he could resurrect animals from the dead. But, presumably, he could not resurrect himself from the dead.
Ridiculous.
I went to my desk at fired up my iMac. I opened the Internet browser, and went to Google. I typed in: “DEMETRIO ANTONIO DE LOS SANTOS VIGIL” along with “HIGHWAY 14” and “ACCIDENT”. I pressed “search,” and waited.
The search returned several entries, all from the local media. I clicked on the first one, a brief from last year, from the local newspaper. It required a login. I was annoyed by this, but knew that my mother had a login because she subscribed to the newspaper.
I ran to the kitchen and started to go through the files in the kitchen desk drawer. My mother was meticulous with record keeping, and I soon found the one labeled “Albuquerque Journal”. I flipped through old invoices, and found a piece of paper with the login and passcode written on it in my mother’s scratchy, messy doctor’s handwriting. I ran back upstairs with it, and sat at the desk to punch in the codes. It worked. The article came up quickly. It was short, and I intended to read through the whole thing, but only made it a couple
of lines before I was frozen in horror.
Two young men from Los Cerrillos lost their lives in a tragic alcohol-related fatal crash on NM Highway 14 over the Christmas weekend. They were Hilario Gallegos, 19, and his half-brother Demetrio Antonio de los Santos Vigil, 18. Both young men were reputed gang members...
I could not move, or breathe, or do anything but blink stupidly at the screen for a long moment. There was a photograph of the wreckage, a gnarled, mangled tangle of metal that no one, not even an ant, could have emerged alive from. My heart beat so fast I thought it would burst. My mouth hung open, and every nerve in my body seemed to go tingly and numb from disbelief and fear. I dragged my eyes up to the top of the paragraph once more as they filled with tears, and read it again, out loud this time, just to be sure I’d seen it correctly. I moved my finger along beneath the words as I went.
Two young men from Los Cerrillos lost their lives in a tragic fatal alcohol-related crash on NM Highway 14 over the Christmas weekend. They were Hilario Gallegos, 19, and his half-brother Demetrio Antonio de los Santos Vigil, 18. Both young men were reputed gang members...
“No,” I said, softly. I gulped for air, and felt dizzy. I read on.
Both young men lived in Los Cerrillos with relatives. Neighbors and friends expressed shock at the deaths, but at least one person who knew the young men said he was not surprised, as both young men had allegedly been involved with gang and drug activity.
The grandfather of Vigil said the younger brother was an outstanding singer and choreographer, and that he graduated with honors from Santa Fe High, though at press time the Journal could not confirm this. Friends say Vigil had expressed interest in leaving the gang, and was working as a veterinary assistant in Santa Fe to save money to attend St. John’s College in the spring, where he hoped to major in world religions and philosophy. He also gained entrance to Stanford and Princeton, where admissions officials say his essay about leaving gang life moved them to tears. Alcohol and drugs are believed to have been a factor in the accident, according to state police...
There were two photos of Hilario Gallegos with the article. He was every bit as good-looking as Demetrio, though without any of the warmth or intelligence in his eyes that his brother had. I punched Demetrio’s number into my phone, but he didn’t answer. I tried again, and again, and there was still no answer. I texted, and got nothing back.
I would not be ignored.
I called my dog over to me now, and held him tightly.
“Come on, Buddy,” I told him, adjusting the cone so as to be slightly more comfortable. I got up from my desk and went to my closet to find something suitably warm to wear in the middle of nowhere on the coldest night of winter thus far. I stuffed some pillows in my bed to make it look like I was sleeping there, in case my mother awoke from her drunken stupor and found her way to my room. Unlikely.
I knew I needed sleep to excel at final exams, but something in me told me that could wait.
“We’re taking a drive. There’s someone we need to talk to.”
♦
iPod and cell phone in pocket, with a flashlight I appropriated from the garage, I headed off into the night, in my jeans and recklessly applied layers of shirts and sweaters that either looked bohemian or ridiculous. There was a very real chance I had achieved both. Buddy tagged along at my heels, limping with his little cast, yet overjoyed to be going on a trip at last. I suspected he had felt abandoned by me over the weekend. I lifted him into the Land Rover, and closed us inside. It was about 12:30 a.m.
Shortly before 1 a.m., we arrived in Golden. I wasn’t sure of what to do or where to go at first, so I simply parked at the church, turned off the lights and the car, closed my eyes and hoped for a sign. I was afraid, but not as afraid as I’d been before I understood, at least partly, what was going on. Now, I felt some semblance of control over my life. He was dead, but he was nice.
After a while, I had the urge to go to the descansos. The crosses that someone had erected for Demetrio and his brother. I was filled with a crazed bravery that made little sense to me, fueled in part by anger and disbelief. Why hadn’t he told me? That was easy, I reasoned. Because I wouldn’t have believed it, just like I didn’t entirely believe it now.
I drove to the crosses, grabbed the flashlight and my dog, and jumped down into the cold dark of night. Somehow, knowing the cross on the right belonged to someone I knew and loved made it not nearly as creepy as it had been before.
I remembered the first time I’d met Demetrio, and the way I’d joked about the crosses, the strange look that had come over his face then. Of course. I’d been joking about death, and bragging about how I’d skirted it, when he himself had not been so lucky. But how? How was any of this possible? I knew that there was a scientific explanation. He’d even begun to tell me, and it had made sense, to a point. Something about the Golden Ratio.
I walked to the descansos, with Buddy shivering in my arms. The blackness of the frozen night was complete, but for the weak cone of illumination from the flashlight. I stood and stared at the crosses, and tried to feel something. Anything. I tried to conjure Demetrio up from the blackness, but nothing came.
“Where are you?” I called out into the night, softly at first and then repeated with more volume. “Where are you?”
Nothing.
“I get it,” I cried, loud, a desperate sort of courage coming to me. Overhead the stars twinkled coldly, by the millions, so very many stars. Dizzying billions. Smears of stars. We didn’t have stars like this in the city.
“So you’re dead, big deal,” I screamed. “I’m not scared, okay? You don’t have to hide from me anymore. I believe you. I want to understand you.”
I waited, and soon enough heard something rustling in the piñon trees nearby. My pulse jumped in my chest and began to bombilate against my sternum like the wings of a trapped bird. My mouth was heavy and dry; my nose numb from the cold. I realized that what I was doing could be incredibly stupid. What if he wasn’t good? What if he was a morboso, like the plumber had said? What if he wanted to eat my soul? But I also know what I felt for Demetrio, and how I felt around him. I trusted him.
“I’m here, Demetrio. Let me see you.”
It sounded absurd as it came from my lips, but it was what it was. The world as I’d understood it before was gone, something new and aberrant having taken its place. “Please don’t be afraid of me. I won’t fear you if you won’t fear me.”
The rustling grew louder, as though something were moving through the frozen scrub grass and crunchy snow toward me. I was excited and petrified both, with the possibility of seeing him again, and touching him. I wanted to ask him all sorts of questions about life and death. I needed to understand, as a scientist. I smiled to myself, and Buddy, responding as he often did to my own body language, panted and wagged his tail and twirled in circles in the snow.
Suddenly, the rustling grew louder, and was accompanied by a terrible, horrible low growl, followed by the wet, nasty sound of chops being licked. Big chops. I looked up and saw a pair of yellow eyes shining at me from the darkness.
Before I knew what was happening, an enormous, rabid-looking coyote - the one I had seen next to the Land Rover Friday night, I was certain of it - leapt out from the darkness, snarled menacingly at me. It snatched Buddy in its muscular jaws before leaping back into the blackness. It happened too quickly. I had no time to react.
Buddy was gone.
“No!” I screamed, devastated. I ran a short way into the darkness, but realized I was too slow. I saw a shadowy outline of the thing lope across the land, fast as a jaguar, and it was gone.
“Buddy!” I wailed. “No!”
He’d looked like a ragdoll in the beast’s jaws, just dangling there. Was the coyote Demetrio? Why would he take Buddy?
“Bring him back! Don’t take Buddy! We don’t want to hurt you! We come in peace!”
I listened, but heard nothing.
“Buddy!” I yelled, hot tears percolating in
my eyes. I was in an agitated panic now, unsure of what to do, punishing myself with guilt for having brought Buddy out here in the middle of the night. What was I thinking? He weighed nine pounds. He had injuries. He was no match for a predator. It was quite possible, I realized in horror, that the coyote was just that, a coyote, not a spirit or trickster, just a hungry carnivore who’d happened across a lucky domesticated meal.
“Oh, dear God,” I cried, tears flowing coldly down my cheeks. I had to do something. Anything. And fast. “Dear God, help me. Please help me.”
I ran back to the Land Rover, climbed in, and sped back to the church. I drove all the way to the top of the scrubby hill this time, crushing weeds and bouncing over small boulders, dispensing with the formality of the empty parking lot, putting the hearty Land Rover to some sort of practical use for once. I parked, and jumped down, leaving the headlights on high, shining down upon the desolate ruins of a house. Something in my gut told me I was in the right place. I’d get Buddy back by coming here. I knew it. I don’t know how I knew it. I just knew.
“Demetrio!” I cried, at the top of my lungs. “Demetrio! Come out! Let me see you! I need your help!”
I waited, starting to hyperventilate in my state of terror and important purpose. My voice rose to a powerful shout.
“I saw the newspaper stories about you! I saw the news videos. I know what happened to you, and I’m really, really sorry. I am so terribly sorry. I know who you were, and I know about your brother. I wouldn’t bother you now except something just grabbed Buddy and took him away, and I need your help to get him back. Buddy’s helpless.” I broke down sobbing.
I fell to my knees now, in the emptiness of the night. I was foolish, screaming alone into an empty house without a roof, a ruin whose walls crumbled in all around it. If my mother could have seen me then, she would have locked me away and shoved Lexapro down my throat. I was losing my mind. Maybe my mother had a point. I’d lost it, hadn’t I? I wasn’t the girl she knew anymore. I hardly even recognized myself. It was senseless, all of this. Nonscientific. Impossible. I beat my fists weakly against the frozen earth, and I wept - for Buddy, for myself, for mysteries, for the imperfect nature of religion and science, and all the myriad ways they failed to intersect.
