by Alisa Valdes
“They took Buddy,” I lamented. My voice faded to a normal volume, then grew weaker. “All because of me. I was hoping you could help me. I don’t know. I want him back. I love that dog.”
I heard more rustling, and braced myself, scared. I didn’t want more coyotes - though if one came and carried me off now, it was what I thought I deserved for sacrificing my beloved dog, and disrespecting my poor mother.
I lifted my eyes, and looked around. Still nothing. No one. Just an endless black, ceilinged with stars.
“Demetrio Vigil,” I warbled, tears seeping from my eyes, my nose starting to drip. “I don’t know how it is that I see you, and feel you, or how it is that you smell so good to me, and make me laugh so hard, but I know one thing, one crazy thing.”
I stood up now, sniffling and delirious, and stumbled back to the car, with an inexplicable urge to turn the lights off. Let the coyotes take me, I thought. Let them get me.
I cut the lights, and closed the door, standing next to the car in the night with my arms stretched out at my sides. I listened for a moment, to the near complete silence all around me. For a moment, I felt Demetrio’s presence. I cannot explain precisely what the sensation was, because it was sensed with something beyond the five senses humans normally engage. I knew he was there, as surely as I knew my feet were cold.
“I don’t know much,” I said, softly now, to the darkness. “But I do know that I think I love you.”
The rustling returned, and this time, as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I could make out the silhouette of a dog, too fat and puffy to be a coyote, just at the edge of the ruined house. A Chow-Chow?
“Bring him back,” I said to the shadow. “Buddy never hurt anyone.” I reconsidered my statement, and smiled to myself. “Well, you know. Except a few stuffed animals and ankles, but he thought it was for love. You get a dog snipped, you think that sort of thing is going to stop, but it didn’t. I don’t know. I guess some urges are just too strong for most boys.”
I heard a faint and faraway tinkling of bells at this, like a wind chime crossed with a human voice, coming from very nearby and yet sounding as though make from a very great distance - the way an old radio broadcast might have sounded, crackling from a speaker near your ear. It seemed to come from a tree just a few feet away. I turned my head to look at it, and to my astonishment, saw those same sparkler-like lights I’d seen Friday night, moving faintly though the branches. They flared quickly, and died out, leaving me with nothing but the disquieting possibility that I had not seen them at all.
Meanwhile, down by the ruined house, the shadow of the animal began to move toward me with alarming speed.
“Oh, God.” I wanted to get into the car, but there was no time. The thing was upon me in seconds - but thankfully, it wasn’t a puffy beast set upon my demise. It was Nutmeg, the cheery rescued road kill from earlier that day.
“Nutmeg!” I cried out, kneeling to pet her. She seemed happy to see me, and wagged her whole body. She leaned into my caress and whined. Her fur was warm and soft, and oddly smelled of cookies baking, butter and vanilla.
“What a good girl,” I told her. “Who’s a good girl? Nutmeg is! That’s right. Where’s Demetrio, girl? Where is he? Huh?”
The dog looked me in the eye with an alarming expression, one of complete understanding - an almost human look. She pawed the ground, and nuzzled me, and began to walk, turning back every few paces to whine at me. She wanted me to follow her.
“Okay, okay. I’m coming. Tell me something,” I said to the dog as I walked behind her, still delirious with adrenaline and trying to keep myself sane. “If Demetrio has been dead for two years, why does he smell so good? Hmm? You’d think he’d smell like a pile of rotten eggs.”
Again, the bell-like tinkling, still nearby, only this time in a different tree. I stopped walking and looked, and saw the sparkles, flaming out as quickly as they appeared, only now that my eyes had adjusted even more to the darkness, I saw that as they faded, their lines made the shape of a human being. A specific and recognizable human being.
Demetrio.
“It’s you!” I screamed, a smile washing over my face as I stared off into the darkness once more. “I saw you! You’re here, aren’t you?”
Nutmeg whimpered again, and pawed the earth. When I didn’t come promptly, she returned to me and gave me that imploring look again, as if to say this way, this way!
“You know where Demetrio is, don’t you, girl?” I asked her. She nodded. Yes, she did. She looked at me, and in the darkness that was lit up now by a full moon overhead, she nodded.
I followed her, and tried to think of another joke. I couldn’t. It seemed like the sparkles were a sort of laughter, and that they were the best way to see Demetrio, if that’s what it was in the bushes.
Ahead of me, Nutmeg arrived at the fence to the graveyard for the small church, and leapt over it. On the other side, she stood on her hind paws, placed her front paws on the fence, and peered over the top at me as if to invite me in.
“Uhm, is this where he is?” I asked. I shuddered at the thought of trespassing into a cemetery in the middle of the night.
“Yes,” said a disembodied voice.
I snapped my head around, looking for his face, for those amazing lips. Nothing – only darkness.
I scrambled over the fence, heart thundering, and followed Nutmeg across the small churchyard, to a grave in the Southwest corner. It had a gray stone marker that looked newer than the others, engraved with a kneeling cherub, and adorned with a collection of plastic flowers. A large, white stuffed bear leaned against the stone, smiling with ridiculous optimism, holding a red heart in its hands; it was the kind of toy you might find at a drug store around Valentine’s Day.
“Ah, now you,” I said, pointing to the stuffed animal. “You, Buddy would like. You’re just the right height for maximum pleasure.”
Again, the tinkling of chimes and a soft sort of singing laugh, echoing as though from far off, but made quite close to my ears. Again, the faint, quick quiver of sparkles, this time in the air just above the tombstone, the lines leaving a brief impression of his smiling face there.
“You have a sick sense of humor, Demetrio,” I said, and again came the tinkling, and the small spray of light, this time smaller than before, as though it were losing force - or maybe the joke just wasn’t that funny.
Nutmeg stood next to the headstone and wagged her tail enthusiastically. I clicked the flashlight on, and shone it now on the tombstone. The name was clear.
Demetrio Antonio de los Santos Vigil
I turned the light off, because it felt intrusive here, and knelt at the side of the grave, next to the dog. I’d never been so unafraid in my life, oddly. I was suddenly at peace here. Calm.
“You see him, too, don’t you girl?”
Pant, pant, pant.
I scratched her behind her ears, and tried to understand.
“How is this possible?” I asked the tombstone, as though it might answer me. “I know you’re there.”
A small, very faint breeze kicked up then, and circled around me, warm. It was well below freezing out, but I was enveloped in a warm little gentle tornado that smelled of sun on sand.
“I don’t understand,” I whispered.
The lights were back now, circling in the moving air, and softly flaming in and out. In them, I saw his outline, and his eyes, briefly, but they were there.
“But how, Demetrio?” I asked, tears coming to my eyes.
I heard his voice again now, right next to my ear, smooth as always, and filled with confidence, though sounding now as though it traveled to me from a great distance, crackling and amid a cacophony of static.
“If you love me, as I love you, tell no one, mamita. Tell no one. Not even Kelsey. You are part of my world now, and you have to keep my secrets. If you want Buddy back, tell no one. I’m just the guy called 911. That’s it.”
“Do you have Buddy? Did you take him?”
“
No,” came the hissed, elongated reply, from far away. There was a brief pause, and then the voice returned, stronger. “It is important that you do as I ask this time. Promise me. If you let me down, it could mean the end of Buddy, and the end of my chances. And yours. I need your word.”
I watched as the light died out one last time, as though exhausted from the effort. I wrapped my arms around myself as the cold air came flooding back over me and the warmth and peace I craved and adored seeped away into the night. Fear returned. I didn’t know what chances he referred to, but I knew I loved him, and he needed my help.
“I promise,” I said, as I ran my fingers across his name on the gravestone, my shivering beginning anew.
♦
I got home late, happily undetected by my snoring mother, slept, and drove myself to school the next day feeling blank and moving on automatic pilot. It might seem strange, to someone who didn’t experience the surreal things I had, that I reacted with numbness to such extraordinary circumstances, but I’m positive in retrospect that this reaction from my mind and heart was a protective one. Denial. There are some things that human beings simply are not equipped to process all at once, some things we need to take in piece by piece - if at all. Denial was given to us through evolution, so that we could survive. The old Maria never had thoughts of this nature; for the new Maria, the post-accident Maria, they were somehow second nature.
I arrived in Art History class before Kelsey did, and sat in my usual spot. It didn’t take me long to notice that our classmates were whispering about me, and trying to seem like they weren’t. I was clearly the center of attention, and not in a good way.
“They’re talking about me,” I told Kelsey.
“I know.” She looked at me with great pity. “It’s all over Twitter and Facebook. Logan’s started a ‘save Maria’ campaign to let everyone know you’ve lost it. Apparently someone has a video of your argument with your mom at Dion’s, and he got ahold of it. It’s everywhere. I guess Logan thinks any chick who dumps his lousy ass is certifiably insane.”
“Oh, God.” I slid down in my chair, wishing myself invisible.
“You can get him for cyber-bullying,” Kelsey said. “I looked into it. He’s such a pig.”
“This is really bad.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll get through it,” she said. “I started a ‘Screw Logan’ page, and we’re getting almost as many hits as the ‘save Maria’ page. Thomas had a photo of Logan in his underwear with a rainbow afro wig on, from the school camping trip last year. I used it.”
“Thanks,” I said, smiling a little, but still feeling pretty glum. “Nice to know we can sink to his level when we need to.”
Yazzie appeared in the room then, rushing in from somewhere with her hair half sticking up all over her head. She looked like she’d been electrocuted by a clown, and inexplicably wore what appeared to be a red rubber pair of overalls. She apologized for being late, and instantly set out to feel and read the energy in the room, drifting about. When she got to me, horrifyingly, she stopped, and stared as she was wont to do.
“A revenant,” she said.
I balked. Kelsey snorted, because she didn’t know what I knew - otherwise, I was sure she, too, would have balked.
“I beg your pardon, ma’am?” I said.
“I feel the blue 4th aura of a goodly ghost here. It has touched you.”
I gulped, and tried to hide the fact that my heart thundered like the hooves of a team of Clydesdales at a trot. I hadn’t allowed myself to so much as think about my night yet.
“Have you read the story I gave you?” she asked.
“No, not yet. I’m sorry.”
“Soon,” she said, thoughtfully. “You should. Imperative.”
Then, as quickly as she’d honed in on me, Yazzie moved on, handing out the final exams as though she were a flower girl at a wedding, laying rose petals upon the floor. I was grateful for the silence that fell over the room, because it meant I didn’t have to notice my former friends gossiping about me. Unfortunately, the test was a Yazzie creation, and as such it was very easy, with no right or wrong answers. Too easy. We all finished in about fifteen minutes, leaving us with nearly two hours to kill. Yazzie informed us that we’d be spending class in the Lucero Library on the other side of campus, researching photorealism.
“I want you to think about the controversy this style ignited. People began to paint from photographs, with technical prowess, and their paintings looked like photographs, but weren’t photographs,” she said, pacing back and forth at the front of the room. “Ask yourself, is this art? The people in the high art world in Europe and the States did not think so at the time. They felt that art had to be purely imaginational, spiritual, that it had to come from within and be expressed in a highly stylized and original way. The question is one of great significance to a world steeped in science and technology, though, isn’t it? If a thing looks like a photograph, and serves the same purpose as a photograph, but came into being through the attention and love of an artist who saw something in it that might not have been seen before, is it a photograph? Is it a painting? What is it? And does it matter? And aren’t both photographs and paintings both just approximations of life? Who is to say one is art and the other is not? Who is to say one is real and the other is not? Who, but the creator, can make such determinations?”
I thought about this, and was struck by the parallel with Demetrio. He looked like a human. He felt like a human. And yet he wasn’t a human. Or was he? Was he a spiritual work of art, somehow, or something? Were things always a matter of perspective? As Yazzie spoke, she watched me, and only me. I knew she meant this lecture for me, for this reason. I didn’t know how I knew this, but I knew it - just as I knew that she knew things the way I did now. With a start, I realized Yazzie wasn’t actually as crazy as everyone thought.
We gathered our things, and began to walk across the cold campus toward the spectacular structure that was Coronado Prep’s Lucero Library. It was better endowed, as libraries go, than many college facilities. Coronado Prep had ridiculous amounts of money floating around. I braced against the cold wind, and tried to get Kelsey onto a new topic.
“Have you picked a dress for the dance yet?” I asked her, ignoring the group of girls who laughed at me from across a courtyard, and the other group of girls who gave me a fist-pump and shouted “team Maria all the way!” Great. I was a team now, all on my own.
“Nah,” she said. “I was hoping maybe we could hit the mall next weekend, or sometime over break. If you’re still going.”
Right. I’d forgotten that when I broke up with Logan I forfeited my rights to the dance.
“How about we go stag?” she asked. “We can go as a group, me, you, Victoria and Thomas.”
“Sure. That’s a good idea. I’m assuming you’ll go for black?” I tried to smile as though I hadn’t a care in the world.
“Dunno.”
“You should try blue,” I told her, as a flock of crows alighted from a branch in a tree above us, one of them swooping so close we ducked. “Or turquoise. It would really set off your eyes.”
Kelsey looked at me now, hard, at the door to the library. “What’s wrong with you today?” she asked me. “I mean, besides all this crap with Logan on the Internet.”
“What? Nothing. Why?” I grabbed the handle to the door, and held it open for her to pass. She didn’t budge.
“You don’t seem like yourself. You are so not the girl who says ‘wear blue to set off your azure eyes.’”
“That’s not what I said, exactly.”
“Close enough. Out with it. What’s eating you?”
“C’mon. It’s freezing out here. Continue your inquiry inside.”
“Fine.” Kelsey stomped past me, unsatisfied with my answer.
Members of the class paired and grouped up, or went off alone, to find information. To my dismay, I saw Logan here, too, with his calculus class. He sat with a group of kids and they all looked at me when I
walked in, and burst out laughing.
“Morons,” said Kelsey, putting a protective arm around me.
“What are they saying, you think?”
“It’s all about Demetrio. Logan put up photos of prisoners and thugs and various other creepy men with metal teeth that he randomly found, and said you’re dating them. His team is saying you’re slumming it with a hoodlum and that you’re under his spell because you like drugs.”
“What?”
“Logan’s pretending he wants to help you, but it’s all about how mentally unstable you are and how you’re a danger to the school now that you’re bringing gang members on campus.”
I felt my eyes fill with tears. I tried to avoid everyone’s gaze as Kelsey and I settled in at a table on the north side of the building, near the windows that faced out to the expansive playing fields. The fields were covered in snow at the moment, flanked by stark, hibernating deciduous trees, and their perkier - and to my eyes at this moment, arrogant - evergreen cousins.
“Me, I like photorealism,” I said dismally as I plopped down in my chair across the table from her. My eyes strayed across the field, in hopes of enticing Kelsey to follow my gaze. It did not work. She continued to stare at me, interrogation-style.
“Did you kiss him?”
“No.”
“Lame,” she said.
“He never wants to.”
“Gay?”
“Negative. I asked.”
“Maria.” Still staring.
“What are you hiding? You won’t even look at me.”
I finally met her eyes with mine, and sighed, hoping she’d notice how weary and unhappy she was making me.
“He told me a lot,” I said, sincerely, in a half-whisper. “I’m dying to tell you. But he also told me he’d kill me if I told anybody.”
