Grave of Hummingbirds

by Jennifer Skutelsky

  Sophie tried to read her book, but the novel’s letters wouldn’t let her rest. They floated and wrestled with one another, creating jumbled words and sentences that separated and regrouped, unraveled and stretched.

  Lifting her gaze, she was besieged by ghosts. A young woman with deep smudges below her dark eyes, dressed in a stained slip, sat at a nearby table. She bore the marks of a beating. The color and shape of her bruises changed as Sophie stared, blood tides swelling and receding under her skin. In front of her, where a server would have placed a plate, a skull partly covered with blackened skin glared at Sophie.

  She gathered her things and fled to the room she shared with Finn on the second floor of the school, where she could still hear the monotonous leather drums, flutes, and dented trumpets of the small street band that meandered past. Even the instruments sounded drunk. The thump, moan, and high-pitched whistle mingled with cheers and shrieks of laughter from crowds that seemed to grow by the hour. People descended on the village as though it were the only place in the world to be.

  A headache thumped, and white spots drifted in front of her eyes. With shaking hands, Sophie emptied her handbag on the narrow mattress and fumbled for some ibuprofen. Afraid the pain would turn into a migraine, she washed down four tablets with some bottled water and lay down. She pulled the covers over her head and somehow managed to block out the racket.

  At last, she fell asleep.

  When she woke, the room had darkened and her headache had gone. She checked her phone. Four p.m., and still people partied in the streets. There were no messages from Finn. Sophie got up and crossed unsteadily to the window.

  Below, a man looked up at her as he weaved past. He yelled something she couldn’t understand, threw her a kiss, and held her eyes as a group of people jostled him backward.

  There was no way Sophie would stay here alone and wait for Finn. She’d made a mistake, letting him go off like that with Alberto. She tried to call him, but his phone went straight to voice mail.

  Sophie put on a clean shirt and thrust her arms into the sleeves of a thick alpaca sweater. She brushed her hair and drew it back into a ponytail, then pulled on her boots and restored the contents of her bag. She shrugged into a padded jacket and left the room.

  As she stepped outside, a swirling group of women, skirts swinging, insisted she join them in a circle dance. They grabbed her hands and swept her along, twirling and swaying until Sophie, smiling, disengaged and watched them move on down the cobblestones.

  She left the village and followed the path Gregory had taken earlier that morning. At first, the climb promised to be easy. She was fit. But soon its upward slant tested her, and her lungs began to struggle. She sweated in spite of the cold that stung her face and hands. Gradually the mountains lost their benevolence and loomed ahead like hooded Inquisition monks.

  She lost sight of the village. The din had given way to a quiet, now and again torn by a cry that reached out of the sky, a sound of such loneliness that Sophie shuddered. Her breath rasped. It wasn’t yet twilight; no more than half an hour had passed since she’d left Colibrí, but the sense of darkness lurked, less a promise of dusk than a threat of night, black and watchful and sinister.

  Gregory had turned away when he’d seen her on the path. He clearly wanted nothing to do with her. She should turn back. Finn wouldn’t be happy if she showed up unannounced, fussing like a mother hen. He’d said that he and Alberto would return to the village after dinner, and here she was, uninvited, all set to join them.

  Sophie stopped and straightened, arching her back and rolling her shoulders to ease her tension. A biting wind nipped at the lake water she could see through stirring trees, sending glistening discs rippling across the surface. Her ponytail whipped across her face, into her eyes.

  As she crested the slope, the ground leveled out. Spread before her was a house that seemed so integral a part of the landscape it might have been scar tissue grown over an old wound. Impossible climbing roses bloomed, and here the cold seemed less punishing. Perhaps the home rested in a thermal pocket, but Sophie, growing accustomed to strangeness, thought the house itself the source of heat.

  She stood alone before a cobbled driveway, beckoned by a synthesis of stone, slate, and muted earth tones to come in out of the chill.

  Sophie stepped forward. She heard a rustle of leaves and saw movement in the undergrowth but was too slow to understand that she needed to run, to scream, to lash out.

  She felt a biting pain in her neck, a flare of alarm that in a flash became terror, a sense of implosion, and then, nothing.

  SIXTEEN

  News spread quickly that a condor had been caught in the highlands. As the men made their way through the streets with their prize bundled in a blanket, people fell into step behind them, hoping to catch a glimpse of the captive bird.

  Rufo left Manco in charge at Los Colibríes and set out to make sure the condor was safely ensconced in a stall next to the school’s soccer field. In the excitement, a few customers had conveniently forgotten to pay for their food and drinks, abandoning their tables to join the surging crowd that followed the procession. The German news crew flung money onto the table, leaving a huge, probably unintentional tip before pushing through to the front of the group and heading toward the stalls.

  Rufo wasn’t concerned. There was nowhere else to sit for hours over a good meal and conversation, and he’d noted who’d left their tables without paying.

  It was a short walk from the café along the main road, but he wanted to avoid the crowd. He went the back way, cutting across a narrow alley to jog down a flight of craggy steps to the street below. The moon sat full in the cloudless night—he had no need to use the flashlight he’d tucked into his belt. He didn’t bother to check the batteries. Even tipsy and blindfolded, he could find his way around Colibrí. He’d tramped every path and knew every stone and crevice as well as anyone who’d been born and raised there and stayed no matter what.

  Rufo had never married. He’d wanted Nita since she was eight years old and he’d seen her mincing across the bridge in a secondhand tutu she’d worn to a school party. He was thirteen at the time and believed if he waited long enough, she’d give in to his incessant longing. But year after year she never did, and gradually his devotion had become a torment. She never acknowledged what it had taken to become governor, how much and how often his mettle was tested.

  He was a woman’s man, too—no slouch in the sack, or so he was told by the women he visited on the Calle de Comerciantes during his weekly trips to Búho. Luisa, not her real name, was his favorite. She had tried to tell him who she really was only once, and he’d shut her up. Better he didn’t know, for when he squeezed his eyes shut in the throes of release, he could call her anything he wanted, could even shout her name, “Nita,” and she would hold him with her comfortable thighs and murmur, “Yes, my love, it’s you, it’s always been you, only you.” And he’d forget the world beyond their tumbled sheets and secrets, fortified, for the briefest time, by the spurting hope that Nita dreamed of him this way, too.

  He hated Gregory for being the one, and somehow their fight that morning had given him an explosive opportunity to show him how much. For years he’d submerged his envy for her sake, and now, two years after her death, the tourniquet had been released. The blood rushed back into the petrified, implacable parts of him, and he’d been given another chance.

  It might have something to do with the woman, Sophie.

  Rufo’s body ached. He’d given Gregory a pounding, but he’d taken one, too. Within an hour of their fight, as regret, if not remorse, crept up on him, he started to drink more heavily than usual. He’d behaved badly in front of the woman and her son. Neither had returned to Los Colibríes in the late afternoon, and they hadn’t shown up for dinner.

  He stumbled over a breach in the stonework where tree roots cracked and elevated the rocks. He caught himself and continued to walk at a slower pace, blinking to clear his vision.


  He heard footsteps behind him and looked around, but all he could see were shadows, and he’d never been afraid of a shadow in his life. Now he sweated despite the cold. A drop trickled down from behind his earlobe onto his neck, and a rivulet snaked toward the small of his back.

  He sensed eyes on him.

  Slowly, he took a few more steps, matched by someone in the dark.

  He whirled and stumbled. The sleeve of his Windbreaker snagged on his watch, and as he shook it free, the clasp released, sending it skimming over the stones.

  Rufo cursed, fumbled for his flashlight, and switched it on. Seconds later the beam of light stuttered as the batteries ran out.

  Unhurried footsteps approached. Straining to see beyond the moonlit street, he scanned the shallow curb and caught a glimpse of a figure ducking into a doorway.

  “Gregory?” he called. “Is that you?”

  The sensation that he was being watched came from all around him now, and he felt ambushed by a collaborative stare, tightening like a noose.

  “Eh, who’s there? Don’t fuck with me, I warn you.”

  “Run, Rufo, run.” The words were murmured, but the voice came from everywhere, as though it had traveled a great distance and lodged behind the doors and windows that surrounded him. Pain flared as pressure built at the base of his skull, more sobering than ice water. White-hot light stabbed his eyes, and he grunted as he staggered backward. A slight, shimmering form caught him as he fell, and soft lips against his ear whispered again, “Run, Rufo, run.”

  Nita materialized at the same time that the figure stepped out of the shadows. In wonder, gratitude, and incredulity, Rufo reveled in the sight of her, believed her to be real, and as he stretched out his hand to touch her, his fingers clutched at the air.

  He didn’t feel the blades that struck his shoulders, but all the same, he fell to his knees. He clung to his vision of Nita as a third and then a fourth sliced through the dark and lodged in the thick muscles beside his spine.

  “I’m sorry,” Nita said, and he coughed a moist, unintelligible response. He couldn’t tell what she meant. Their lives had passed in a series of instants, gone the moment they arrived, and there, with four blades embedded in the top of his back, he wondered if she apologized for not choosing him.

  He fell forward toward her lap but braced himself with his hands on the cold stone so as not to dirty her dress, a floating white wisp of fluttering cloth that he would ruin with his blood.

  He wanted to tell her that he was not a man to run. He tried to put his secrets into words as a fist tightened on his hair and pulled his head up. Where had she been all this time, he wondered, as a rope was slipped over his head. Had they all been mistaken? Had she not died? Had she somehow been hiding for two years and now returned? The rope tightened, and he imagined her stroking his hair. Her touch was light, scarcely there, but his tired red locks accepted it and were lifted out of his eyes, away from his forehead. Rufo choked and coughed and cried and called, in his lost, sandpapery voice, for absolution, and he heard, through the pounding of his blood and pulse, the hiss of a familiar voice at his ear.

  “But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee. Or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee; and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee. Into whose hand is the soul of every living thing delivered, Rufo? Can you tell me?”

  “Forgive, forgive.” The words bubbled out of Rufo’s mouth and settled on his lips, and it might have appeared as though he sought absolution for all his transgressions. It might have seemed that his last moments were about contrition, a desperate need to feel an olive-oil cross bestowed on his forehead or a plea, perhaps, for a chance to do things over, a last-second reprieve from whichever hell turned out to be true.

  But it was to Nita that he spoke and to her that he apologized. She looked so pretty in her ghostly dress, and he had gone and ruined it.

  SEVENTEEN

  She’s a condor?” Finn asked, as he and Gregory walked away from the barn. “What happened to her?”

  Gregory hesitated before he said, “She fell and broke her wing.”

  “She fell? She’s a bird, and she fell?”

  “It was a shooting accident. But she’s healing well. She may even fly again.”

  “Who would do something like that?”

  “That’s not important now. Come, I’ll show you the horses, and then we’ll have something to drink, some hot chocolate perhaps. Sound good?”

  Tomás and Coco trotted over as soon as they spotted Gregory, and Coco nuzzled Finn’s head with her nose, playfully nibbling on his hair.

  “She was my wife’s horse,” Gregory said, running his hand down her neck. “She has a naughty streak. Can you tell?” Coco pushed her head against his shoulder, and he laughed softly. “No offense.” He winked at Finn. “She’s after apples.”

  Finn tangled his fingers in her mane, and she turned an ear toward him as he murmured her name.

  “I think she likes you,” Gregory said. “Do you want to ride her?”

  “What? Now?”

  “Why not? Now is always a perfect time, isn’t it?”

  “I’d like to. I can’t really ride.”

  “You know, Finn, from what I’ve seen, I imagine you’d get onto a horse and she’d think you were part of her. That’s how it should be, no? But come; tomorrow is another day. We must get back to Colibrí. Your mother is alone there.”

  “She’s at the café, reading, or maybe she’s taking a nap—we hardly slept last night. She should be fine; she knows where I am.” Noting Gregory’s hesitation, he quickly added, “I don’t want to be a nuisance. I’m sure I can find my own way.” He backed away from the horses and turned to go, adding over his shoulder, “Thanks . . . for your help.”

  “Wait, Finn, come on. Your mother won’t think much of me if I don’t at least feed you. I’ll make us something to eat, and we’ll go down together.”

  Finn hadn’t eaten for hours, and he wasn’t ready to spend the rest of the afternoon cooped up at the school with his mother. Food sounded like a plan.

  As they headed back to the house, Gregory said, “Why don’t I whip us up some eggs? You eat eggs?”

  “Eggs are good. I’m vegetarian, not vegan.”

  “Ah. That makes sense. How about I make us an omelet with sweet peppers and onions and whatever I can come up with? Mushrooms, cilantro, maybe some chiles . . . You’ll have to trust me.”

  In the kitchen, Gregory put water on the stove to boil, placed a knife and chopping board on the table in front of Finn, scooped up a few vegetables from a rack by the window, and rinsed them off before handing them over. “Go ahead,” he said. “Give it your best shot.”

  Finn washed his hands at the sink. “I shouldn’t really stay too long,” he said, carefully beginning to slice the red pepper.

  “Yes, I know. I’ll go with you, see that you get back safely.” Gregory took some eggs out of their plastic depressions in the door of the refrigerator and cracked four into a bowl. “We used to keep chickens, but I’m no farmer, I’m afraid. Isabella brings me these from the village.”

  “I don’t understand,” Finn said, “why they had to kill the horse.” He was afraid to say her name, Esmeralda, in case she chose to clip-clop into the kitchen, called back from somewhere far away.

  Gregory stirred a few tablespoons of finely powdered dark chocolate into the boiling water and added a dash of sugar. The sweetness, he told Finn, would fortify them for the descent to the village. He explained, as he beat the eggs, that each year the people of Colibrí used an old horse to draw a condor down into the canyon. “The condor is a vulture,” he said, the whisk moving faster and faster, tapping the sides of the bowl, “and he feeds on the carcasses of animals he spots from the air. When he’s on the ground, the men are able to capture him for the fiesta, to celebrate Independence Day.”

  “Doesn’t he try to get away?”

  “He can’t. He needs an
updraft to support that wingspan. Once he’s in the canyon, he’s trapped.”

  Gregory placed the mug in front of Finn, who picked it up and blew on the drink before taking a sip. The chocolate was creamy and sweet, and he drew a deep breath, inhaling the aroma and warming his hands on the thick ceramic.

  “It’s good?” Gregory said. “My wife used to drink it before bed. Or whenever she was upset.” He watched Finn for a moment before taking the board and scraping the choppings into a hot pan, where butter had begun to sizzle.

  He sat down and they ate in silence, each of them lost in thought, sharing a few moments of perfect peace and companionship, a stillness and calm, both aftermath and prelude.

  “She’s gone now,” Gregory said. “But you know, it’s a very strange thing. I feel her around me sometimes, as though she’s right here. I find myself talking to her like she’s still with me, and I expect to see her sitting there, across the table like she used to before she got too sick to hold her head up.” He smiled, a self-deprecating twitch at the corners of his mouth. “You must think I’m a crazy man, to talk like this.”

  “No, I don’t think you’re crazy,” Finn said. “Maybe she is here.”

  “You think so?” Gregory took the teaspoon out of his mug and set it on the table. “You think I live with a ghost? Well, maybe you’re right. I suppose you could say I really am a haunted man. Perhaps all of this is an illusion.” He rapped his knuckles on the table. “Energy and atoms, right?”