Even in my weakened state, I couldn't help but get stuck on that phrase. It kept coming back to my mind. DeFido Motors, Where Fins Stand for Status.
Find the answers ... Where . . . fins ... stand ...
I slammed on the brakes so hard I fishtailed, and did a full one-eighty. I found myself facing the wrong way in the lane, with a truck bearing down on me.
I hit the accelerator and pulled off the road, landing in a ditch. The truck barely missed me, its blaring horn changing pitch as it swerved past.
Now my wheels spun in mud, and I knew there was no getting this car out of the ditch. Dizziness almost overtook me then. I clutched the steering wheel and closed my eyes until the feeling passed.
Then I got out of the car and headed back to the billboard on foot.
It was about a mile back. In the darkness, it looked completely black. Only in flashes of lightning could I see it now, and only for a second. My momma looked so happy in the picture, but that was a long time ago. Now the old billboard was falling victim to the elements. Another year or so, and a few more storms like this, and it would be down completely. One side leaned forward, the other side leaned back, the wood was pulling apart, and the paint had faded and peeled.
Find the answers . . . where fins stand . . .
Right behind the billboard was a narrow, weed-choked path leading through dense trees and up a hill into darkness. I took the path and headed off toward the mountains.
The rain turned to sleet, and although the cold numbed the pain of my wounds, it also stole what little body heat I had left. I couldn't feel my fingers, couldn't feel my toes, could barely feel pain when I tripped and smashed my knee against a stone. I wanted to sleep more than anything, but I knew if I did, I'd die. It would be years before they found my body out here, if they ever found it at all. Resting was out of the question. The only thing to do was push forward, following the path, following the gravity until I reached its center.
I stumbled up one hill and down another, over and over, each hill steeper than the one before.
I can't remember when I stopped walking. I don't remember falling down. But I do remember the feeling of cold mud against my back. I do remember the stinging feeling of sleet hitting my eyes as I lay on the ground, making it hard to see anything.
Now I can sleep, I thought. Now I can sleep, and I'll be fine.
And I do remember the angels looking down on me. Solemn faces and gray robes that must have been hiding their wings. They took me in their warm hands and lifted me up.
Finally, I closed my eyes, satisfied, because I knew they were taking me to my reward.
Part two
Eternessence
12
A feast of flowers
You can't wake up and still think you're dead.
No matter how strange your surroundings, there's something about being made of flesh and bone that tells you instinctively you haven't left it all behind. And so, when I opened my eyes to see a room with bright white walls and no windows, I knew I wasn't in heaven―but I wasn't anyplace on earth I knew, either. The light came from a large skylight above me, and through it I could see a clear blue sky. The rainstorm had passed.
"Good morning!"
I didn't know anyone was beside me until I heard the voice. I turned to see him sitting there next to the bed. A boy. He wasn't much older than me. He was clean-cut, had blond hair, a clear complexion, and pastel blue eyes. When he smiled I thought I recognized him, but knew I was wrong. His smile held no hint of deception; it was an honest smile, and I knew no one like that.
I sat up, expecting to feel weak, but I didn't. I felt completely rested.
"Hi, I'm Aaron," he said, and gently took my hand.
His clothes were white, and at first I figured this to be a hospital―but the style of his clothes was not hospital-like at all. He wore an eggshell-white shirt, and an eggshell white vest. Even his pants were that same soft shade of white. It was such an odd combination, and yet it seemed so perfect, you might wonder why everyone didn't dress like this.
Aaron was handsome. Truly so. Not in a Marshall Astor kind of way, but in a way that went beyond mere good looks. I was happy just to gaze at him, then I silently scolded myself for being so foolish. That's when I realized where I'd seen him before.
"I... I've been dreaming about you!"
He smiled gently, as if this were no surprise to him. "You probably have lots of questions," Aaron said.
I nodded.
"Well, come with me," he said. "Time to find the answers."
Like I said, I knew I was alive―no question about that, and yet when I stepped out of that little white room, I found myself in paradise. It wasn't just any paradise, either―it was my special one. "Nowhere Valley." This was the place I went when I closed my eyes. Oh, I didn't get it exactly right in my head; the mountains around this valley were higher than the ones in my mind. The houses I had always pictured in soft tones of blues and yellows were all eggshell white, and built in little clusters around the valley, not evenly spaced like I had imagined. But otherwise, it was every bit the same. The valley was the greenest I've ever seen, about a mile long. A stone path began at the small one-room cottage where I awoke and wound like a lazy river from this end of the valley to the other. If this was my new life, then everything I had been through had been worth it!
"Welcome to De León," said Aaron. Then he took my hand without any of the hesitation a boy usually has when taking the hand of a girl, and he led me down into the valley.
My body ached as I walked, but I was so focused on the sights it didn't matter. At the first house we passed, a couple in their twenties was sitting on a porch swing, sipping lemonade, and they waved to us. Their clothes were the same shade of white as Aaron's, which I now knew were soft as velvet, pure as satin. I looked down at what I was wearing. They had taken away my shredded gown and given me a white dress as well, but it wasn't made of the same material as their clothes. What I wore was cotton, but their clothes made the purest cotton look as ugly as a potato sack.
The couple came forward. "Good morning, Aaron," the man said. "Hello, Cara. It's good to have you here."
I looked at Aaron, gaping. "But... how does he know my name?"
"Shhh," Aaron said gently. "Just take it in. Enjoy it."
Then the couple clipped some flowers from their beautiful garden and threw them in the path in front of us. I tried to walk around them, but Aaron wouldn't let me. "No," he said. "Walk over them. Crush the petals beneath your feet so their fragrance fills the air."
And so I did.
At every house we passed, people stopped whatever they were doing to say hello, and to throw flowers in our path. One woman came running out of her house to give me a gentle hug. "I'm so glad you pulled through," she said. "My name is Harmony."
Harmony was beautiful―perhaps Momma's age, but without the world-weariness that weighed on my mother's face. In fact, everyone here was beautiful. It wasn't a plastic, fake beauty, like fashion models, or like Marisol. Nothing so skin-deep. Like my ugliness, their beauty went to the bone.
"I tended to your wounds, and Aaron and I took turns sitting with you," Harmony told me. I could still feel those wounds from the greenhouse glass, which had cut me in so many places. I looked at the long gash on my arm. There was no bandage, even though the wound was still red and a bit swollen. It had been stitched closed by sutures so fine I could barely see them. In fact, all my wounds had been sewed the same way.
"I did all the work," Harmony said proudly. "Ninety-five stitches in all."
"Harmony's our seamstress here," Aaron said.
The fact that I was sewn up by a seamstress didn't sit well with me. "No offense, but... aren't there any doctors here?"
Neither of them answered right away. Then Harmony said, "We get by without."
I wanted to ask how―or more importantly, why―but Aaron gently urged me forward along the path.
Along the way, more flowers were tossed
at my feet by smiling residents of the valley, and the perfume of the crushed petals filled the air around me. I began to realize that this was part of some ritual. It made me think of a punishment I heard about from the olden days. When a soldier was found guilty of some criminal act, the other men formed two lines and the offender had to pass between them, while the other men beat him with their fists, or with sticks, or with whatever they wanted to use. It was called a gauntlet, and "running the gauntlet" left a man broken in more ways than one. Well, this was an anti-gauntlet, and the men and women on either side of the road delivered pleasure rather than pain, offering me good wishes and flowers before my feet. I had never felt so accepted in my life.
You might think such a thing would feel good, but you have to understand I wasn't used to acceptance. It felt strange. It was, in its own way, terrifying, and by the time I had come to the far end of the path, my hands and legs were shaking as if the men and women had beaten me.
Aaron put his hand around my waist to give me support as we passed the last of the homes, as if he understood exactly how I felt.
At the end of the path loomed a mansion―the last structure before the walls of the valley closed in. The double doors were wide open and inviting. I hesitated. Experience told me that sometimes the most inviting places are just to lure you to something awful. I tried to sense deceit or hidden intentions in Aaron. Either there were none, or my intuition was broken.
"Come on," Aaron said, gently easing me forward. "He's waiting for you."
"Who's waiting for me?"
Aaron smiled. "We just call him Abuelo." Grandfather.
The mansion had dozens of rooms. Through the open doors I saw a library, a sunroom, and a huge kitchen. Music poured from the entrance of a grand salon, harpsichord and violin. There was joyous laughter everywhere, and then it occurred to me that with all the voices I heard, both in the valley and in here, I had not heard a single child. It seemed Aaron and I were the youngest ones here. With so many happy couples, shouldn't there be children? I thought to ask Aaron, but the thought was blasted out of my mind by the sight before me as we neared the center of the mansion.
There was a wide marble staircase, leading up to a closed mahogany door adorned in gold. This was the only door I had seen in the entire mansion that wasn't open.
Aaron stopped at the bottom of the stairs.
"Don't be afraid," Aaron said. "Go on. He's expecting you."
I could feel my heart pounding against my ribs, and I thought for sure it would burst halfway up, and I'd tumble back down the stairs. Still, I forced myself forward until I was at the top of the stairs, then I reached for the golden knob on the huge mahogany door and leaned against the door with all my weight.
The door slowly creaked open, and I slipped through the gap into a huge oval ballroom. There were no windows, only a skylight, just like in the tiny room where I had first woken up. The walls here, however, weren't white. They were painted black, and on every wall there were dozens of picture frames―rectangular, square, oval―and every single one of them was covered by the same soft white cloth everyone's clothes were made of. I wondered what artwork could be so precious that no one was allowed to see it.
"Finalmente!" said a voice both gentle and rough.
He sat on a soft padded settee at the far end of the room, in the shaft of light brought in by the skylight.
"Vengas aqui, mi hija." When I didn't move, he sighed, and resorted to English. "Come here, my child."
I approached across the black marble floor, cold beneath my bare feet.
The old man had a glow about him that had nothing to do with the light of the sun. It was an inner radiance. He was truly old―perhaps as old as poor Miss Leticia had been―but the vitality in his eyes was like that of a man in his twenties.
"Did you enjoy your pascua de florida? Your feast of flowers? I can still smell the blossoms on your feet."
"It was . . . uh . . . interesting."
"Forgive me," he said. "I am a man in love with ceremony."
Now that I was just a few feet away, I could see that his skin was marred by deep wrinkles, but that didn't lessen how handsome he was. Looking at his face was like looking at an ancient oak in the first days of summer―lined and wizened, and yet as gloriously green as a sapling.
But when he looked at me, clearly he saw something different. He saw my ugliness.
"Ah! That face, that face!" he said. "So many tears your face has drawn from you, verdad?"
"My face is my business," I told him.
"This is true. But you are here, so that makes it my business as well." Then he gestured all around him. "For you, I have covered all my mirrors."
So, it wasn't artwork on the walls around us.
He narrowed his keen eyes and took in the features of my face. "Hmm," he said. "Que feo. What Aaron says is true. You are very, very ugly―but do not think you are special in this. You are not the first, you are not the last. And I have seen uglier."
If anyone else had said that, I would have called them a liar, but there was such authority in the old man's voice, everything he said rang true. There was a certain light to Abuelo, too. Not something I could see, but something I could feel, as irresistible as the pull of gravity, yet somehow a bit dangerous, like radiation. I'd call it graviation. G-R-A-V-I-A-T-I-O-N. Good word.
He smiled at me as if he could read my thoughts. If he told me he could, I would have believed him. I almost wanted him to, because it was so hard to put into words all the thoughts and feelings I had had since opening my eyes to this wonderful place.
"Why did you bring me here?" I asked.
He waved his hand. "I did nothing. You brought yourself here. Like a salmon swimming upstream, there was an instinct in you to find this place. My letter merely reminded you."
I gasped. "You wrote the letter!"
The old man smiled, showing teeth as pearly white as his suit. "I wrote it, yes. But it was Aaron who convinced me you were worth the effort."
"Aaron convinced you? But... I never met Aaron before."
The old man raised his eyebrows. "Well, Aaron knows of you, even if you do not know of him. And when you came through the mountains, it was he who was waiting with the monks for you."
"The monks?"
"Not your concern. They found you, freezing to death in the rain, and they brought you here. That's all you need to know."
I thought back to that rainy night. Was it yesterday? A week ago? How long had I been unconscious? "My parents are probably looking for me!"
"Let them look," Abuelo said. "They will not find you here. The earth itself conspires to keep this place hidden." Then he added, "Besides . . . do you truly believe they will search for long?"
I wanted to be furious at the question. I wanted to think my parents would tear the world apart trying to find me ... but did I really believe that? My father, who secretly thought I was the curse that brought him a life of failure? My mother, to whom I'd been such a burden for all these years? How long would they try to find me? How much did they truly want to?
I turned my eyes down to the black marble floor. "I don't belong here," I told him. "I might not belong out there, but I definitely don't belong here."
"Perhaps this is true," the old man said, "but you are welcome to linger awhile. Who knows, in time, you may see things differently, verdad?"
I didn't think so, but whether I belonged here or not, I couldn't deny the sense of acceptance I felt. "Thank you," I said. I would stay, I decided. At least until the ugularity of my face sucked away their acceptance, and poisoned them against me, as I knew it eventually would.
13
It's a beautiful life
I stayed in that little one-room cottage at the opposite end of the valley from Abuelo's mansion. When I had arrived, there was nothing in it but a bed, but each day someone else brought a single gift. The daily gifts were another one of Abuelo's rituals, I suppose. No one seemed to keep a calendar, so I
marked the days by counting the things in my cottage. A table and chairs, a handblown glass oil lamp, a dresser.
Each morning I awoke to find Aaron sitting on my porch, waiting to take me to someone else's home for breakfast. I have to admit I liked that he was there, but all that attention from him made me self-conscious.
"Don't you have something better to do than babysit me?" I asked him on the third morning.
He shrugged. "There's plenty of time to do the things I've got to do," he said. "Besides, it's not babysitting."
I wondered whether it was his assigned chore to be my escort, or if he did it because he wanted to.
Time was spent differently here than in the outside world. Some people had generators to make electricity, but they rarely used them, which meant there were no televisions, or video games, or any of the usual things people use to occupy their time. You might think that would be horrible, but it wasn't. Or at least it wasn't in De León. People kept busy, each in their own way―and wherever I went, people invited me to be a part of whatever they were doing.
In Harmony's house, for instance, some of the women would get together and weave with her. She invited me in and taught me how to do it, creating that fine fabric for the clothes they wore. They sang while they wove, and taught me the songs so I could sing along. We worked the hand looms to the rhythm of the song. It wasn't exactly what you would call fun, but it was soothing, and satisfying in a way I can't explain. I sat there all day and hadn't realized that hours had passed until Harmony lit the lamps. I left that evening feeling like I'd accomplished something great.
I quickly learned that everyone had their place in De León―or I guess I should say everyone made their place. There were Claude and Willem―two craftsmen who carved furniture with so much love, you could just about feel their embrace when you sat in one of their rocking chairs. There was Haidy, who spent her days writing poetry, and her husband, Roland, who set it to music. Maxwell, the storyteller, would come to a different house each night and entertain better than the finest film, in return for being fed.
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