Paola Santiago and the River of Tears

by Tehlor Kay Mejia

  “What do you mean?” Dante asked, his voice higher than normal. “What is all this?”

  “You have to go,” his abuela said. “Now. Today. Before it’s too late. The candles won’t hold the boundaries of this space for long. And once they fail…” A dark look crossed her features. “You have to go.”

  “Go where?” Pao asked, finally finding her voice. “To the police? Do you know something?”

  “Pah,” Señora Mata said, waving a hand dismissively. “Maldito Policía. They wouldn’t know what to do with what I know.”

  “What do you know, señora?” Pao asked. “Is it about Emma? Can you save her?”

  “Quiet,” she said. “There’s no time. Just listen. The third quarter is almost here, and the boundary will be crossable again. The solstice approaches, and if she comes…”

  “Who?” Dante and Pao asked together, but Señora Mata’s eyes were unfocused. She didn’t seem to hear them.

  “Go toward the river,” she said. “Take these.” She shoved the lumpy crocheted bag into Pao’s hands and snapped at her when she tried to open it. “There’s no time. You only have five days to try to do the impossible. Go.” She took off one old slipper and held it out to Dante, who flinched, though he had the good grace to look embarrassed afterward.

  “What do I need your chancla for?” he asked, not reaching out for it, and Pao couldn’t blame him. The thing looked about a thousand years old.

  “¿Me estás escuchando?” she asked him, her voice rising, and she thwacked him on the arm with the house shoe before letting it fall to the ground at his feet. “There’s no time! You have to go now!”

  “Go where? Abuela, this is crazy. You can’t just tell us to go to the river and not tell us why.”

  “Créeme, mijito, I would tell you more, but…” Señora Mata shuddered, her eyes closing, the room growing a little darker as she did. Pao watched as two of the candles behind the old woman went out.

  The candles won’t hold the boundaries of this space for long, she had said.

  “What’s happening, señora?” Pao asked, clutching at the bag, something icy cold settling in the pit of her stomach. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Dante reach down to pick up the chancla. He yelped, and Pao whirled around to face him.

  In his hands, the slipper was changing. The worn sole was stretching and widening, the once-pale-yellow terry cloth turning a deep blue, ridges forming in it like corduroy. Within a few seconds, the transformation was complete. Instead of an old lady’s tiny and worn slipper/weapon, Dante held a brand-new blue house shoe that looked to be the perfect size for his foot.

  Everything Pao had thought she knew about the fixed properties of material objects was slowly unraveling. She felt upended and dizzy, as though she had lost her gravitational connection to Earth.

  But that was nothing compared to what was happening to Señora Mata.

  Her mouth moved rapidly as she muttered under her breath, not seeming to hear Dante as he asked over and over what was going on. English, Spanish—nothing was getting through.

  Was she praying? Pao wondered. “¿Señora?” she said again, glancing at Dante, who was backing away, finally going silent as three more candles extinguished themselves.

  “She…seeks…the Dreamer…” Señora Mata said in a hollow voice. “She is coming….”

  “Who’s coming?” Pao asked, and as if in answer, the light in the room changed. “No!” she exclaimed as the candlewicks caught fire again. This time, the flames burned bright green.

  “Pao?” Dante asked, his back pressed against the wall.

  “¡Señora!” Pao said, stepping forward. “What do we do?”

  “She seeks the Dreamer,” Señora Mata said again, coming back to herself a little. “You must bathe. And then go.”

  “Bathe?!” Pao asked, frustrated and afraid.

  “The water…” she said, sagging as another candlewick caught green. “My water…”

  “I don’t understand!”

  But Dante was coming up behind her, a large glass jar in his hands. “It’s okay, Abuela,” he said, unscrewing the lid. The smell hit Pao all at once—familiar, almost stinging her nostrils. Florida Water. Dante flicked some on his grandma, but she snapped at him, her eyes still closed.

  “Not me!” she said. “You! Hurry!”

  Pao didn’t understand, but she dipped her fingers in the jar anyway and smeared the cologne across her forehead like her mom sometimes did. Dante did the same, but when their eyes met, they were wary. Almost all the candle flames were now green, and from what they could see through the cracks in the blinds, the sky outside was turning dark and ominous.

  “Go,” the old woman mumbled, still squeezing her eyes shut. “Go while she cannot see you. She seeks the Dreamer. The third quarter is almost here. Go.”

  “Abuela…”

  “GO!” she yelled, and this time her eyes flew open, revealing two glowing green orbs that looked nothing like Señora Mata’s kind (if slightly judgmental) brown eyes.

  Pao nearly screamed, and beside her the jar of Florida Water slipped from Dante’s fingers and shattered, soaking their shoes.

  “¡Abuela!” he said, stepping forward, but she pushed him away with surprising strength.

  “¡NO MIRES ATRÁS!” she shouted in a grating voice.

  Pao’s Spanish was basically nonexistent, but she knew this phrase: Don’t look back.

  “Dante,” Pao said as the light from the candles and Señora Mata’s eyes started to pull at her like Emma’s hand in her dream. “Dante, we have to go.”

  “Are you crazy?” he shouted. “I’m not leaving her like this!”

  But something was tugging at Pao. An instinct. A voice. A memory…

  When the time comes, don’t hesitate. It won’t save them.

  “We have to go,” she said, the restless feeling building to a crescendo in her blood. “We have to go now.”

  Something was becoming horribly clear to Pao as the room was stained a venomous green and the walls between her dreams and reality came tumbling down. Whatever was happening couldn’t be explained logically. All she knew, without hypothesizing or testing or gathering data, was that she was the Dreamer. And it was up to her to stop this before it got any worse.

  Señora Mata slumped to the floor, green light spilling from her eyes. Dante went over to check her pulse, and she moaned softly at his touch. As tears streamed down his face, Dante lifted her gently onto the couch. He sat down next to her and started to sob.

  Pao pulled at his arm. “Whatever’s happening, it’s about me,” she told him. “If I go to the river, it’ll stop.”

  “No!” Dante screamed. He wiped his runny nose on the sleeve of his T-shirt.

  “I’m the Dreamer, Dante,” she said. “I have to go, even if—”

  “No! You’re not going anywhere! We have to—”

  But Pao was already leaving, the restlessness driving her down the hallway to Dante’s bedroom. She was convinced that if she didn’t, that green light would swallow Dante and his abuela, Pao’s mother, the entire Riverside Palace, and maybe even more.

  This is insane, said a part of her brain. The same part that had won the sixth-grade science fair with solid research and testable hypotheses. The part that had executed countless eye rolls when her mother told stories about moments just like this.

  When Pao reached Dante’s room, she was knocked down by what felt like a wave. And yet, lying flat on her belly in the doorway, she found herself and the floor completely dry. From the living room came a hissing, raspy sound—an unfamiliar voice saying something in Spanish.

  Don’t hesitate, said Ondina in Pao’s memory. It won’t save them.

  Pao managed to get up and make it to the window before a second wave hit, and this time she saw it coming—a green mist that rippled the shag carpet and pushed her against the screen with a force she couldn’t hope to fight.

  And it brought Dante with it, dumping him next to her before forming a trans
lucent green barrier between them and the rest of the room.

  This didn’t make sense. Mist was just tiny droplets of water hanging in the air. Liquid, not solid. Even in its solid form, it would just be tiny ice crystals, not nearly dense enough to—

  “No!” Dante screamed, cutting into Pao’s attempt to reason as they struggled against the supernatural force. He still clutched the blue slipper. But even if both his hands were free, he wouldn’t have been able to break through the mist. Whatever it was.

  “See? Like your abuela said, we have to go. We have no choice now,” Pao said, checking around her feet for the crocheted bag she’d never had a chance to look inside of. “Please, Dante.”

  “We…can’t…just…leave her!” Dante said, struggling to breathe as he pushed against the barrier with every ounce of his strength. “We…don’t…know…what’s…It could—” His words cut off with a sob, and he slumped down to the floor.

  “We will fix this,” Pao said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “We will save her. But we have to go now if we want to have a chance.”

  She barely knew where these words or her certainty were coming from, but when she turned to the window, the force didn’t stop her. The only way through this was forward. There was no going back.

  The rasping Spanish in the other room had stopped, but the green light in the mist continued to intensify, and as it did, a keening sound began to build, raising the hairs on Pao’s arms, grating against her eardrums.

  “Pao?” Dante asked as the air pressure in the room increased.

  “Dante!”

  “PAO!”

  The top part of the window shattered, and at first, Pao thought shards of glass were hitting her face. But then she realized the window had been blown outward. The stinging she felt, like a thousand biting ants, was coming from her forehead, where she had dabbed the Florida Water.

  Forward, forward. There was no other way.

  The green light was almost blinding. Unable to see Dante, Pao flung out her hand and called upon the weird boy-girl magnetism that had sprung up between them recently, causing them to keep bumping into each other with their shoulders, knees, or elbows.

  Please… she asked the inconvenient phenomenon. Just this once, let it happen when I mean it to….

  Whether Dante could see better than she could, or her wordless plea had actually worked, she didn’t know. But his hand zapped to hers like a staticky sock to a sweater fresh out of the dryer. Before she could ask him one more time to come with her, the pressure sucked both of them out the open window.

  They landed on their butts more gently than Pao would have hypothesized, given the speed of their ejection and the distance of their fall to the ground. Amazingly, their hands remained connected, the chancla in Dante’s other fist, the shopping bag twisted around Pao’s arm.

  She spat out one of her braids. Her forehead and fingertips still stung, along with spots on her feet where spilled Florida Water had soaked through her sneakers. In Dante’s apartment, green light glowed from every window. Seeing that, Pao was up in a second and, despite Ondina’s dream warning, hurried back to the fire escape. Dante followed close behind.

  But they’d only run a few feet when they hit another barrier, this one completely invisible. They bounced off the solid material, then explored it with their hands. It felt like Plexiglas and blocked their access to the apartment in every direction. As Dante pushed and pounded on it, tears streaming down his cheeks, Pao had the feeling that this part of their journey—the one that took place at Riverside Palace, where there were adults to tell them what to do—was over.

  This time, she didn’t ask Dante. She didn’t beg or plead or explain. None of this made any sense, but it was happening, and they had to try to make things right again.

  As Dante pummeled the barrier, Pao slid her arm under his and turned him around. When they were facing the same direction, she started to run, pulling him toward the river of her nightmares.

  The river loomed in front of them, and Pao was surprised to see it looking perfectly ordinary. There was no bioluminescence, no hand breaking the surface, no unearthly wailing. Just an innocent dawn mist that hovered over the water and chilled the air.

  Though Pao now had a new take on mist: It was a little more complicated than just water vapor.

  So much of what had occurred this morning seemed to have come straight out of a dream, but being in their usual spot made Pao feel grounded in the real world. And yet she knew Señora Mata’s world was here, too, lingering in the mist.

  Dante hadn’t spoken since they left the apartment complex, and she hadn’t expected him to. His sobbing had stopped, but he still sniffled every now and then, and Pao couldn’t help but feel guilty for literally dragging him along.

  She seeks the Dreamer. Pao felt certain she herself was the Dreamer, but the rest was so unclear. Who was seeking her? And why? Was all this connected to Emma’s disappearance?

  Lost in thought, she didn’t realize she’d walked all the way to the water’s edge until Dante cleared his throat.

  “So, where are we going?”

  A hollowness in his voice made Pao look up. His eyes were narrowed and his jaw was clenched.

  “Well?” he prompted when she didn’t answer immediately. “Abuela said you would know where to go. So, where do we go? You said we’d fix everything. You promised me, and there’s creepy stuff going on, and my abuela might be in danger, and you’re just standing here, so what’s the plan, Pao?”

  “Why are you yelling at me?” Pao asked, hating how small her voice sounded.

  “Because this was all your idea! You’re the one who didn’t want to trust any adults, you’re the one who had this big plan to track down the kidnapper, and now apparently you know something about the totally messed-up thing that just happened to my grandma, even though all you’ve ever said is that you don’t believe in ghosts. Or dreams. Or anything that can’t be explained by your precious, perfect science. So I’m a little confused, Pao. And yeah, I’m mad! Tell me what the heck is going on!”

  Pao felt like her limbs were filling with cement. She wanted to yell back at him, to say she hadn’t asked for any of this. But was that true? Hadn’t she resolved just last night to do whatever it took to find Emma?

  “I don’t…I don’t know why your abuela said I would know where to go,” Pao admitted, a humiliating tremble beginning in her lower lip. “I don’t know. I don’t believe in any of this, and I wanted to help, but I can’t, and I just…wish I could go home.”

  The world seemed suddenly too big and too small all at once. They were just two kids with a shape-shifting house shoe and a useless crocheted shopping bag, and the world was full of kidnappers, and police who didn’t believe you, and, apparently, sinister magical forces.

  Everything Pao had thought she knew was dissolving in acid, or being burned away by the heat of an open flame, or exploding with such force that it shattered its test tube.

  And right now, her brain felt a lot like the test tube.

  “Look, it’s okay,” Dante said, moving closer to her. “I’m sorry. I’m just freaked out about Abuela…and I’m…”

  “I know,” Pao said. “This is all…”

  The silence they lapsed into wasn’t awkward—it just meant they had no strategies for talking about the situation. Pao scanned the river, thinking back on her dreams and everything that had come apart. She hadn’t even been able to say good-bye to her mom.

  Pao had yelled at her. Rejected her beliefs. Told her she was responsible for all the prejudice directed toward people like them.

  The memory sat in her stomach like a cold cheese enchilada. What had she done?

  Pao had always been hot-tempered. She wasn’t the kind of girl anyone would hire as a babysitter; she’d never gotten one of those certificates teachers give out to reward helpfulness or a good attitude. She’d told herself it wasn’t her fault—the world was full of things to be angry about. Pao had simply assumed she was more realistic
than most people.

  But what if her anger was part of something worse? She let herself wonder. The señora’s ominous words rang in her ears.

  Dante was looking at her like she should have answers, but all she had were dreams in which she drowned or got lost over and over again….

  Dreams that somehow showed her things before they happened.

  Was there something wrong with her? What if all this was her fault?

  “She called you the Dreamer,” Dante said, breaking into her panicky thought spiral. “And you dreamed…about the kidnapper, and Emma’s ring….”

  Pao nodded miserably.

  “Did you dream about any…places?” Dante asked, rubbing the back of his neck. “Anywhere we could go? I know it sounds stupid, but—”

  “It’s not like we have much else to go on,” Pao finished for him.

  Dante nodded, looking at her intently.

  She wished he would stop doing that.

  But instead of saying so, she imagined the dream landscape: the glowing green river, the utterly black sky, the white sand. She shook her head, frustrated. Putting aside the weird colors, it looked like a stretch of the Gila. Any of the countless ones in this area.

  “I just dream about the river,” she said at last, feeling totally useless as she gestured at it. “And her hand…pulling me into it.”

  She shuddered, and Dante stepped closer again, but he didn’t put his arm around her. Forced to admit she didn’t know what to do, Pao felt her heart sinking like a stone into the murky water.

  Before it could reach the bottom, an earsplitting scream echoed along the bank.

  “Emma!” Pao said, and then she took off running.

  “What the—” Dante began, but Pao barely heard him, because her pulse was pounding in her ears. He chased after her.

  Can it really be this easy to find her? Pao wondered.

  “Pao, stop!” Dante called.

  The scream sounded again—all too familiar. She didn’t stop, and to his credit, he didn’t, either.