All the Crooked Saints

by Maggie Stiefvater

  “That crazy fool!” Joaquin said.

  “That crazy fool,” Marisita agreed. “And we broke that rule, too, eventually. We spoke. Just a few words here and there, more every time that nothing terrible happened when we did. I know we were fools. I know how it sounds. I’m so sorry.”

  This apology meant nothing to Diablo Diablo and everything to Joaquin and the rest of the Sorias—but not for the reason Marisita thought. Contrary to what Marisita feared, none of them were angry with her, and none of them hated her. They did not need this apology to make her actions right. But it still meant something to them that she cared enough about them to offer it.

  Generously, Joaquin said, “It was him as well as you, Marisita. Always take blame for your own actions but never take blame for someone else’s. Was this when his darkness fell?”

  “No,” Marisita said.

  “Well, I don’t understand why not.”

  “Because he hadn’t helped me yet,” Marisita said. “He hadn’t interfered. I wasn’t any closer to the second miracle just because I fell in love with him. In fact, I only felt worse. Daniel is so good, and he loved his family so much, it only made me think about how I hadn’t heard from my own family—how could I have? I assume they have been thrown in the streets. They—they must hate me. I’ve put them through so much humiliation. I failed them. I didn’t even save myself, and so all I have is this guilt.”

  “But this is an outrage,” Joaquin said. Beatriz and Pete furiously wrote messages to Joaquin and held them up for him to read them. “What about this brother of yours—Max! He should be carrying the guilt! Yes, all of us in the studio agree that he’s the villain.”

  “He was just so angry,” Marisita said.

  “So am I!” Joaquin said. “At Max!”

  “If you’d met him—”

  “I’d be angrier! Tell us what happened that night, the night Daniel came to you.”

  On that night, Marisita had decided to walk into the desert until she could no longer walk. She had been contemplating it for weeks, and it was not an easy decision to make. It was the ultimate in failure. The ultimate imperfection. But it was made—or it had been, until Tony and Pete arrived, interrupting her. Now she could not go until the dogs had settled and Bicho Raro had fallen back to sleep. Even this small delay destroyed her, and she curled on the floor of her home and sobbed. Deep down, she knew that walking out into the desert still did nothing for her family; it was merely another selfish act. In the end, she still thought only of herself. If she wanted to truly cure her family’s woes, she would return to them and beg for Homer’s forgiveness. Even in this moment of despair, she could not make herself do that. Self-hatred and rain poured around her. She had not been dry or warm in months.

  Slowly, the commotion outside died down. The dogs’ barking vanished into the night. Engines were silenced. Voices rose and fell. Owls screamed and called and finally fell silent.

  The night was quiet.

  A knock came on Marisita’s door. She did not get off the floor, nor did she answer. A moment later, the door cracked open and footsteps came to her. They stopped beside her, and the owner of the feet stood there for a very long time. This was because it was Daniel, and he was still wrestling with himself over what he wanted to do and what he was supposed to do.

  With a heavy sigh, he curled himself around her.

  This was not allowed, to embrace her like this, but he did it anyway. The rain fell on her, and the rain fell on him, and they were both soaked to the skin. In this moment the scent of rain mingled sweetly with the scent of the Shrine’s incense, and Marisita remembered what it was to be warm and safe.

  Then Daniel did what he would do for her if she had not been a pilgrim, as if he was not afraid. Still holding her tightly, he spoke into her ear. He told her that she could not hold herself responsible for all of her family’s financial woes, and that it was not her place to be the sacrificial lamb. There were other solutions, but her family had settled on the easiest and ignored the signs of her unhappiness. Moreover, she was honorable for not giving herself to a man who she couldn’t love; Homer didn’t deserve to live a lie.

  “But they didn’t make me,” Marisita had told Daniel. “They were not cruel. I was at fault for not going through with it, or not telling them sooner that I couldn’t.”

  “You can forgive yourself,” Daniel had insisted.

  “I don’t think I can,” she’d replied.

  He continued to hold her. “I know everything feels wrong, but you can be right again, Marisita, if you try as hard at it as you try with everything else.”

  This was when the black rose of his darkness had bloomed. Neither Daniel nor Marisita knew what part of that visit triggered it, but the truth was that it was not Daniel coming to comfort her, nor the sensible council he gave. It was not his arms around her or the warmth of his words in her ear. It was, in fact, the way that he said Marisita to her in this last sentence. The way he said her name conveyed all of his sympathy, and it confirmed all of the truth of his advice, and it promised her that she was worthwhile and redeemable, and it indicated that he treasured the way he had seen her selflessly interact with the other pilgrims, and it hinted that if any single thing was different about their circumstances, he would marry her immediately and live with her for decades until they died on the same day just as in love as they were in that moment. This may seem like a lot to be contained in the single word that is a given name, but this is why in more conservative times, cultures took great care to refer to each other by Mr. and Mrs.

  “And then he left,” Marisita said.

  Joaquin was too overcome by his cousin’s bravery to immediately answer. Right then, he was so ferociously proud and scared for Daniel that love and hope and fear choked his Diablo Diablo voice from him. With great effort, he managed to say only, “We’re going to take a brief musical break. Here’s Elvis with ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love.’ ”

  While Elvis crooned, Joaquin held himself and wiped away a tear, and Pete and Beatriz looked steadily at each other because stories about lovers always hit other lovers hard.

  Joaquin pulled himself together as the song drew to a close. “Now we’re back. Thank you, Elvis, for singing the words we were all thinking. And the darkness?”

  “I don’t know when it came upon him. It must have been soon after he left, because he returned only a few minutes later with the letter for Beatriz. He slid it under the door and gave me the instructions for the letter. Then he was gone, and I never got to tell him myself that I love him.”

  There was silence.

  Joaquin said, “If he is listening tonight, you just did.”

  Marisita said nothing.

  Joaquin said, “Marisita?”

  “It’s just—” Marisita started.

  “Yes?”

  Marisita held out her hands to the sky and examined them again. “It’s just that the rain has stopped.”

  Of all the Sorias there, only Luis the one-handed had ever been in Michoacán at the time of the great monarch butterfly migration. Millions of butterflies travel to Mexico each fall, sheltering in the forests there as winter punishes the land farther north. It was a sight he would not soon forget, the air shimmering with drifting color, the butterflies floating on wings that looked like Antonia Soria had cut them at her kitchen table. Some people said that these butterflies were the souls of the dead returning to earth in time for Día de Los Muertos, but Luis had thought he had never seen anything so alive.

  He hadn’t believed he would see anything like it again, but on that charged night, the Sorias found themselves gazing at a sky that rivaled that enchanted one. Once the storm had ceased over Marisita, it took only a few moments for the butterflies on Marisita’s dress to dry. Now they took off all around her, hundreds of them, swirling up and around into the sky. They mingled with the miracle-crazed owls who circled and dove, driven to excitement by Marisita’s miracle.

  It was an awesome sight, but a charged one. Mira
cles are a strange thing in that sometimes a miracle will trigger another one, or sometimes trigger a disaster, and sometimes both of these are the same thing. So when the butterflies swelled upward, dots of orange and yellow, they flew right into that atmosphere that had begun the night so charged with anticipation and fear and hope. Those molecules vibrated and agitated as hundreds of wings brushed against them again and again, and in the black sky, an electrical charge mounted. The Sorias could hear it down below—their ears momentarily went dull and dead in anticipation—and then there was a mighty crack, as though the sky itself was ripping open.

  A massive lightning bolt flew from the dark.

  Lightning hunts the largest prey, which in this case was the antenna on top of the radio telescope, with Tony as its human base.

  There was an explosion of light.

  The antenna and the dish and Tony were all obscured by it. Everyone down below was forced to avert their eyes lest they be blinded. In less than a second, the electric pulse raced white-hot down the wires that ran from the antenna to the truck, and every ground wire exploded from the soil with a sizzle and pop. A thunderous crash shook the ground they stood on.

  When the air cleared, there was no sign of the antenna. The telescope dish was blackened. Tony was stretched out in the dust at the base of the dish, the remains of the antenna blasted in copper bits around him.

  He was no longer a giant.

  He was not currently breathing.

  Before the lightning strike, as Tony had listened to Marisita’s confession, he had been looking down from this very great height onto Bicho Raro and he had been thinking about the enormity of what they were doing tonight and how this entire family had come together to do it. He was thinking about Joaquin’s incredible promise. And finally he was thinking that it wasn’t all bad being a radio giant, as long as you looked for the things you could do as a giant that you couldn’t do as anything else, like hold up someone else’s voice so it was just a little louder.

  The second miracle had come easily.

  “Tony, gosh, Tony!” Pete said. “What do I do?”

  Joaquin, who had torn off his headset to jump from the truck, put his ear on Tony’s chest, trying to hear his heart or check for breathing. This is a terrible way to check for evidence of life. Beatriz, who had leaped out with Pete and Joaquin, did it in a less terrible way. She lifted Tony’s hand, noticing the branched and peculiar lightning flowers that covered his arm, ending at his fingers.

  “There’s a pulse,” she said. “He’s alive.”

  It’s a difficult thing to be struck by lightning. It’s also a difficult thing to fall dozens of feet from the top of a radio telescope. Tony’s breath had been knocked all the way out to the highway, and it took a full minute for it to make its panting way back to him.

  “He’s breathing!” Joaquin announced for the benefit of the other Sorias.

  But they were not paying attention to him. They were shouting and pointing at something completely different: the box truck. Because Pete, Beatriz, and Joaquin had jumped out of the box truck so swiftly to attend to Tony, they had not realized that the truck had become extremely warm immediately following the strike. The lightning had raced down the wires so hot and ferocious that it had lit everything it touched on fire.

  The box truck had been quietly and furiously burning to the ground in the minutes they were distracted by Tony.

  Beatriz said, “Save the transmitter!”

  “I’ll get buckets from the barn,” Pete said.

  “I’ll help,” said Antonia.

  “Yes,” agreed Michael.

  Anyone who has fought a fire of any size knows that there are some fires you can kill and some fires that will die only on their own. This was the latter. The interior of the truck was an inferno. The smell of melting electronics filled the night as clouds of dark smoke blocked out the stars. As buckets were passed from hand to hand and precious water poured out on the sand, the fire popped and groaned and hissed like the living thing it was. The egg Beatriz had hung in a hairnet nest began to agitate and scream. It had never grown warm enough to incubate and hatch but now, finally, in this miraculous, destructive fire, it cracked open. A strange dark owl of a breed none of them had ever seen burst from the fire. It circled around their heads once, and when it looked down, for a moment, its paler face looked like a woman’s—a little like Loyola Soria, and a little like the face of the sculpture in the Shrine.

  Then the owl was gone, and the truck was, too, singed to smoldering ashes.

  It is difficult to give up hope, particularly when you have just been filled with a lot of it, particularly when you have gone without for so long. Humans are as drawn to hope as owls are to miracles. It only takes the suggestion of it to stir them up, and the eagerness lingers for a while even when all traces of it are gone. And the Sorias were riled up over more than just a suggestion. Marisita’s second miracle had happened right before their eyes, and then Tony’s had, too. They finally truly believed what Beatriz and Joaquin had posited: For years they had been doing it wrong. The danger had been real, but the taboo had not. Now they imagined a generation of pilgrims coming and learning from previous pilgrims and from Sorias and from the indefinable wisdom that comes from music, even if the words don’t always sink in.

  So when the box truck burned to the ground, they did not immediately realize that something had died with it.

  It occurred to Beatriz first.

  “No,” she said, just one word.

  To communicate with Daniel, they would need another radio, and she could build one, but it would require new parts. New parts would require a trip to Alamosa at best, ordering them from elsewhere at worst. It would mean she had to build a new antenna. Even with all the help of everyone here in Bicho Raro, it could not be done in a day, or even two days.

  She had seen Marisita return home that day with Daniel’s bag. He didn’t have two days. He didn’t have one day. He might not even have had this day. Now that the owls and butterflies had dispersed, there was only one species left soaring overhead: vultures.

  “Where is Marisita?” asked Judith.

  Marisita was gone. Now that she was healed, her shame and guilt gone with the rain, she found that her desire to find Daniel remained. She was determined to find him and offer the same comfort that he had given her.

  This struck Beatriz as the ultimate folly. It seemed obvious to her that if Marisita had not found Daniel before now, there was no reason why she could hope to find him in the midst of an ashy black night.

  And so, in this moment of terrible loss and hardship, Pete and Beatriz did what lovers often do when things are the worst for the other: They fought. It was made worse by neither of them realizing that they were fighting. Instead, they thought they were being quite reasonable.

  “I can’t believe it’s gone,” Pete said.

  Beatriz said, “It will take me weeks to rebuild it.”

  “Oh. I just meant the truck.”

  Pete felt blindsided by the sudden loss of his future, a loss that Beatriz pointed out was only a loss in his mind, as he did not need a moving truck to be a whole person, and in fact only required a sense of worth, which was something that came separate from a job title or being shipped off to another country to shoot at people like your father or father’s father had been before. This did not, as you might imagine, make Pete feel any better, as very few people are ever healed by being told a truth instead of feeling the truth for themselves.

  “You don’t have to be cruel about it,” Pete said. “I know you’re upset.”

  “I’m not upset. Please stop saying that I am!”

  She sounded so certain that Pete regarded her fresh, trying to understand if he was reading her wrong. Her expression was complicated by the ash on it, and she did not wear her feelings like anyone else he had met, but he felt strongly enough about it to press on, with sympathy. “Look, you’re allowed to be upset. All this—the fire, Daniel—you’re allowed.”

&nbs
p; “I don’t have feelings like that.”

  “Don’t have feelings like that?” Pete echoed. “You’re not a doll. You’re not a robot.”

  “I’m trying to tell you something about myself,” Beatriz said. “You’re wrong.”

  But Pete was not wrong. He had not been wrong before when he’d said it, and he wasn’t wrong now. If only Beatriz believed her strangely shaped feelings existed, she would have seen it, too. Instead, she found herself impatient with him, thinking about how Francisco and Antonia’s relationship had fallen apart because they were too dissimilar. Pete, she thought, was merely proving how he was an emotional being and unable to see her for how she truly was, unable to understand what she was unable to give him. She believed that this conversation was exactly why people like her father and Beatriz ended up alone in greenhouses with their work.

  She didn’t realize that she was being torn to shreds inside.

  “I don’t need to be made into something that I’m not,” she said, “something easier, with feelings, something more like you. I am trying to think of what to do next and it’s taking all of my mind and I don’t need you to imagine me as something softer to make you feel better about who I am!”

  Pete stared at her, but she didn’t soften these words, because she fully believed them. And because she fully believed them, he thought that he must have been wrong. She knew herself better than he did.

  As her eyes glittered coldly at him, he waited just a moment longer to see if there was any feeling or kindness in them, but she believed herself the girl without feelings too much for that. Behind him, the box truck he had wanted so badly smoldered. His heart lurched dangerously, a pit inside him, the hole enormous and irreparable.