by Alisa Valdes
I was out, over the top of Rancho la Curación, now, and then higher, higher into the sky about Pojoaque. The world moved beneath me, or us, and I watched as it blurred, day and night, day and night, backwards.
I have something to show you, so you can understand me better, mamita.
Slowly the spinning stopped, and I floated down again, toward the earth. The light and energy that had surrounded me dissolved, and reformed now, into a recognizable human body. His human body. Demetrio was at my side, his hand in mine, as our feet gently alighted upon the ground. We were no longer over my the mental institution. We were landing, noiselessly, in front of a small, decrepit adobe house in the middle of rural New Mexico, the typical kind of place you saw but never stopped at when you were driving on any of the back roads of the state. A blanket with a cartoon character on it hung over the front window, covering it instead of a curtain. Trash and broken toys littered the small front yard. Nothing grew here. Everything was dirt and neglect.
“Listen,” he said.
From inside came the sounds of loud rap music, and screaming. Plates breaking. Fighting. A woman crying, a man shouting.
“What is this place?” I asked him.
“My home.” He flinched as he said it, and this was by far the most vulnerable he had ever appeared to me yet.
I looked at him with sorrow, and he met my gaze with a sort of pained peace of his own.
“It’s okay,” he told me, though I could tell he still smarted from whatever this place meant to him. “It’s over now. Easier for me to show you than tell you, though. Come.”
He walked toward the house, and I followed. Then, astoundingly, he walked through the wall, and I hesitated.
You can do it too.
I stepped forward, and reached for the wall, but felt nothing there. It was like a hologram. I stepped forward, and instantly found myself inside of a filthy living room, with mismatched, stained furniture and piles of dirty clothes and rotten food everywhere. He stood to one side, watching as a man beat a woman in front of two filthy-faced young boys. The boys appeared to be about the same age, both wearing stained SpongeBob pajamas, holding onto a chair and looking about himself with deep, sorrowful eyes that had extremely long lashes. The slightly bigger child, who had shocking green eyes, huddled in a corner, watching with fear as the man pounded the woman’s face with his fist, and bloodied the woman’s nose.
“You can’t do that to my mom!” the green-eyed boy screamed, finally, as he charged the man, grabbing him around the knees. “I hate you!”
The man stumbled, and fell, nearly crushing the boy. The other child began to cry.
The woman appeared to be unconscious.
The man’s fist reared back, his face in a passionate rage, and he struck the green-eyed child, so hard I could not watch. The child did not cry, however. His beautiful eyes, so full of fear and a desire to help his mother in the moments before, took in the situation with what appeared to be a cool detachment - and seemed to change, before me. They became cold, hateful, nearly ruined. It became obvious to me that this brutality was all this poor child had ever known.
“Come on,” the green-eyed boy said to the other child, taking him in his arms as well as he could, and running with him, past the man and woman, who, now that she was conscious again. were back at each other’s throats, and out the front door.
Demetrio turned toward me, and indicated that we were to follow the children outside. We walked through the wall, and watched as the green-eyed boy stumbled under the weight of his brother, across the yard in his bare feet, over broken beer bottles and bits of tumbleweeds. He made no sound, but tears flowed from his eyes, sadness, yes, but also hatred and indignation. I’d never seen such feelings played across the face of one so young before, and it frightened me.
My heart broke.
The green-eyed boy walked around the side yard of the hovel, to where a large splintery wooden doghouse sat abandoned in the dark, against a broken chain-link fence, illuminated in an orange glow from a streetlight on the block.
“You’ll be safe here,” he said to the other child. He put the brown-eyed boy in the doghouse, and, after finding a large, sharp stick, sat down outside of it, like a sentry. “I’ll protect you, Demetrio. If he comes back, I will kill him.”
I gasped, horrified. Demetrio, the adult Demetrio, put an arm around me.
“This is my earliest clear memory of your dimension,” he told me. “That’s my brother, Hilario.”
“Is that man your father?” I asked, horrified.
“No. My father died the year I was born.”
“Is it your brother’s father?”
“No. We have the same father, different mothers. We were born two months apart.”
“So the woman there is not your mother, but his?”
“No. She is my mother. It’s complicated. She raised us both. Hilario’s mother abandoned him with us. My dad had an affair, and Hilario’s mom showed up after he died to tell my mom. She said she’d been protecting him while he was alive, but now that he was gone she wanted the truth to be known. She was a drug addict, and left him for my mom to raise. My mom caved under the stress and depression from knowing that my father, her one true love, had cheated on her. She turned to alcohol.”
“I’m so sorry,” I told him, collapsing into his arms.
“It’s why I can’t just write Hilario off, even though he’s still in the gang and doesn’t want to leave,” he said, his eyes focused on the furious, brave child sitting on the ground and facing the night alone. “He always stuck up for me, and my mom.”
“I understand,” I said.
“The mayordomos, Lupe and Diego - especially Diego - they agree with your art teacher that my brother might mean me harm now. But I don’t believe it. It’s just how he comes across. There’s still hope for his soul. I’m trying to save him. They want me to challenge him to a duel at the Grand Coliseum, to find out if he’s good for me or bad.”
“A duel?”
“A test of skill and talent, probably dance and soccer combined.”
“Why don’t you?” I asked, though I was unsure what a final duel was, or the coliseum. I’d ask him later.
“Because he saved my life that night. I’m in debt to him.”
I began to sob for the child Hilario had been. I ran to him, wanting to scoop the little boy with the quivering lower lip, bruised face, and false bravery up into my arms, to kiss him, to tell him it was all going to be okay, but the child had no awareness of me.
“It has already happened,” Demetrio reminded me. “There’s nothing to be done from here. We should go.”
“But we can’t just leave him there!” I wailed. “Both of them. What if the man comes out?”
“He did come out. My mom’s boyfriend broke Hilario’s leg that night. The neighbors found me wandering in the road the next morning. My mother was unconscious, beaten nearly to death.”
“Oh, God! No!”
“Mamita,” he said, patiently. “The man went to prison for a while. It’s over. There’s nothing we can do.”
I collapsed to the earth, and Demetrio lifted me easily into his arms. I wrapped my arms around his neck, and buried my head in his shoulder.
“I am so sorry,” I cried. “I had no idea.”
“There are millions just like me,” he said. “We can’t help the boys we see here now, but you can go back to your world and help the ones living this human hell right now. That’s what I do all day long, Maria, when I can’t see you. We should leave here.”
I knew the child in the doghouse was him, that he was also here now, solid, grown, and holding me, that somehow he had survived this horror and gone on to graduate from high school, to have learned to sing and dance in spite of all this, and to have been accepted to college. But I also knew that Hilario had escaped into drugs and alcohol, and that, in the end, both of them had died for the sins of their parents. If this scene I’d just witnessed had never happened, what might have c
hanged? What might have been different for those children? Might they still have been alive?
“I’m so sorry,” I cried, heavy and weak with misery.
“Don’t be,” he said. “Just love me now, as I am, accept me.”
I clung harder to him now. “I do. I do! I love you. I accept you.”
His chin turned up, toward the moon.
“I need you to trust me, Maria,” he said.
“I will. I do.”
“I can’t visit you anymore. Not in human form.”
“What?” I asked, shocked and horrified. “But why?”
“Look what’s happening. It’s too risky. Your life, your mom. It’s going to ruin you.”
“No, it won’t!”
“Maria, I’ve seen what Logan did to you online, and how the kids at school turned against you. And now this, with your mom. Our time will come, but it cannot be now.”
“It can!” I insisted. “I can’t lose you! I’ll die without you.”
“Delectation, mamita.”
“What does that even mean?”
“The pleasure that comes from surviving something, or from getting what you want after a noble and necessary wait. It’s why the pain of unrequited love is different from all other pain.”
“I don’t want to wait. I don’t want pain of any kind.”
“And I won’t do this to you anymore, not without a protection ceremony for you. We’ll do that in the spring. Three months. When the time comes, I’ll find you.”
He kissed the top of my head, ever so gently; I marveled that anyone who had witnessed such brutality could be so gentle. Revenant, yes, but I also began to believe him more than that. I began to believe him to be a sort of angel.
“I love you,” he said as his feet lifted off the ground, and we floated back through time and space, to Rancho la Curación. He became light and warmth once more, and released me with a promise, unspoken but known to me as much as a breath is known to the lungs, deep down in my gut, that he would be by my side every free moment, even if I couldn’t see him.
Then I was on the ceiling again, looking down at myself where I snored and drooled, and falling back into my own sleeping body, older than I’d ever felt, disgusted with what horrors the world unleashed on some children, and determined, with a ferocious conviction unlike anything I’d ever felt, to do something about it.
♦
The next day after I’d worked out at the luxurious gym and had lunch in my room (grilled salmon Cesar salad and a Diet Coke), I had a two-hour session with Dr. Bergant in my suite. As before, the fire burned brightly as a light snow fell outside. As before, she wore jeans and a sweater, with the same jewelry, and seemed very fashionably casual and fun. As before, she listened, and asked a lot of questions. This time, she got me to talk about my parents and my early life. I told her about the divorce, too, and it felt incredibly good to get al of my anger out in the open.
“My parents never divorced,” she told me as she munched on some of the peanut brittle she’d brought for us, along with hot chocolate, “but they should have. Sometimes it’s for the best.”
“I guess you’re right.” I remembered my mom and dad fighting, and supposed it was a relief not to have to endure that anymore.
Eventually, the conversation turned back to Demetrio. I was still a bit shaken from the dream the night before, but reluctant to tell her about it.
“You know,” she said, out of the blue. “Some of the girls who come here believe this place is haunted. How do you feel about that?”
I shrugged. “I dunno. Why?”
“Because, I think they’re right,” she said matter-of-fact. “I’ve seen them.”
“Who?”
“The ghosts here. In fact, I’ve seen one in this very room.”
“Really?” I felt goose bumps coming, and folded my arms over my chest.
“Before this was a hospital, it used to be an artist colony. A woman lived here, a painter. She was married to a man who was unfaithful to her, and used to flaunt it in her face.”
“That’s sad,” I said.
“He used to bring his different girlfriends home for dinner, and expect her to cook for them.”
“What?”
“It’s amazing what some men will do.” Dr. Bergant shook her head. “But, yes, that’s what her life was like. She put it with it for many years, but they say that one day, when he brought home her very own niece, she’d had enough, and went upstairs, to this very room, and hanged herself from that viga right there.” She pointed to the third viga from the outside wall; the one directly over my bed.
“Tragic,” I said.
“Does it scare you when I talk about ghosts?” she asked.
“Why are you asking me this?” I replied, suddenly suspicious of her.
She smiled. “I’ll be honest, Maria. Your mother mentioned that you had told your friends that you were seeing ghosts. You haven’t mentioned that, so I was trying to let you know it’s okay to talk about that sort of thing here.”
I sat with this information, unsure what to do with it.
“So, do you?” she asked.
“Do I what?”
“Do you see ghosts, like I do?”
I remembered what Demetrio had told me, about telling no one, and I shook my head. “Sorry, but no.”
“You do understand that whatever we discuss here will remain strictly confidential,” she replied, as though she had read my mind.
“I know.”
“So let me ask you again. Do you see ghosts, Maria?”
I met her gaze, and felt its sincerity. She was a kind woman. She was trying to help me. Plus, everything else I’d told her, she had sympathized with.
“Yes,” I said, finally. “Sometimes, I see ghosts.”
Dr. Bergant smiled. “That’s fine, Maria. I don’t think you’re unstable because of that. I believe there’s a scientific explanation for the reasons some of us see these things sometimes. I’m glad you opened up about it.”
“Can I tell you something?” I asked her now, feeling a complete sense of relief at having told someone about the ghost thing.
“That’s why I’m here.”
“I don’t want you to think I’m out of my mind,” I said. “Because I’m not.”
“I have already figured that part out, don’t worry,” she said.
“The boy I told you about? Demetrio? He’s - he’s not exactly alive anymore.”
Dr. Bergant smiled. “I figured as much.”
“How?” I asked.
“Well, after you told me his name, I thought to Google it. What an unusual name, I told myself. I was actually just hoping to do a background check on him, to make sure I wasn’t encouraging you to become involved with an actual criminal, which is what your mother thinks. Anyway, sure enough, the name came up in a few news stories, but they were all about a boy who’d died in a car crash exactly where you had your crash. I put two and two together.”
“You don’t think I’m insane?”
“Sweetie, no. If I hadn’t had some of the same experiences, I probably would have, though. Which is why I want to spend the next part of our session talking about things you should and shouldn’t say to people who might harm you. Ghosts, for instance. That’s not something you should go around telling people. Especially not people like your mother.”
“I know.”
“It’s not that you’re denying Demetrio exists, okay? It’s that you’re protecting yourself.”
I used this opportunity to tell her about the disturbing dream I’d had the night before, and about how Demetrio said he couldn’t see me anymore. She looked heartbroken, and shaken.
“Maria, do you believe in coincidences?” she asked me.
“No.” I shivered at the coincidental mention, once again, of coincidences.
“Me neither. I mean, I believe they happen, but I believe that they are a sort of divine intersection of things that were meant to meet.”
“Yes.”
>
“Like us. Because, and I’ve never told anyone this before, but my husband, his grandfather came to me as a ghost, just as you’ve described with Demetrio, and it was he who helped me to meet my husband in the first place.”
“Are you serious?”
“Dead,” she said. “It happens.”
“I’m surprised you haven’t been disbarred,” I told her.
Dr. Bergant laughed. “I would probably be expelled from the profession if anyone knew I believed this stuff. That’s why we are keeping everything said in this room in this room, right?”
Dr. Bergant’s speech was interrupted now by a knock on the door. It was four o’clock. Dr. Bergant opened the door to my room and we found Debbie standing outside next to Yazzie.
“There’s a visitor here for Miss Ochoa,” she said.
“Hello,” said Dr. Bergant to my art history teacher, reaching out to shake her hand. Yazzie shook, but there was a curious look upon her face as she did.
“I think we lost track of time,” said Dr. Bergant. To me, she said “We’ll pick up where we left off, tomorrow.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Now, I’ll leave you two to visit,” she said. “Enjoy the rest of your evening. Oh, and Debbie, can you give Maria a couple more tranquilizers?”
“I don’t need them,” I insisted. I’d thrown the ones from the day before down the toilet, and flushed it.
“Just in case,” said Dr. Bergant.
Yazzie came in, and closed the door behind her. After hugging me, greeting me, and giving me a wrapped gift that felt like a small-framed painting, she got right to the point.
“I don’t like this place for you,” she said, pacing up and down the floor of my suite. “And I don’t like your doctor.”
“The place sucks, but Dr. Bergant is really nice,” I said.
“You have a tail, Maria,” she said, stopping to stare at the third viga from the outside wall.
“What?”
“A bad thing happened here, in this spot,” she said, pointing to the viga.
