The Temptation Of Demetrio Vigil Part 15

"Yeah. I shoulda had more self-control, but seriously, I've never felt the way I feel with you when I have been around a girl. Ever. It's like, I don't know, like you were meant for me."

I felt sick, and cold, overcome with nausea at the realization that I was not in the world as I'd known it before. There was more than I'd ever known. At a visceral level, I understood this now. There was much more.

"So, what are you, exactly? An angel?" I asked him, flinching a bit afterward, because I wasn't sure I wanted to know the answer.

"Nah."

"Magical healer, like in those churches on TV?"

"Nope."

"Then...what?"

"I'm dead, mamita," he said, plainly.

"Dead," I repeated, in a breathy whisper, feeling faint.

"Right. Just like my descanso said. I'm a person, like you, but I'm dead. I'm sorry, Maria."

"Dead," I said again, trying to wrap my mind about it. "But I can see you and feel you, you're warm, you're right here."

"I - I wanted to tell you. I'm a revenant, a ghost in human form. Sometimes I'm in human form, I should say. In this dimension. It's like in d.i.c.kens, when Dr. Manette is returned to life, except he only died symbolically, and I actually did."

"d.i.c.kens. Tale of Two Cities, you mentioned it the first day."

"I dropped you a few hints. You didn't pick 'em up though."

"Dead."

"Hey. You heard of La Llorona? She's a revenant. I am too, but not all the time. I didn't know how to say it, without scaring you away. There's science involved, it's not what you think, it's actually beautiful, it has to do with the Golden Ratio and Fibonacci numbers, if you've heard of them, and the Maker, he believed I deserved -"

The world spun, and I placed my hands on the ground to steady myself, but it didn't work. The Golden Ratio? The thing Thomas was prattling about the other day? Impossible coincidences, too many of them. Everything began to fade, and disappear. Sounds grew distant and fuzzy. I felt a buzzing in the center of my brain, a churning sickness in the center of my soul.

And I knew I was pa.s.sing out. And I knew I couldn't breathe right. And then I knew nothing but darkness.

When I came to, I was in the driver's seat of my Land Rover, in the rear Starbucks parking lot, near the dumpster, with the doors locked and the Saint Anthony of the Desert card on the dashboard. It was dark out, and I was alone. My purse was on the floor of the pa.s.senger seat. There was no note, nothing from Demetrio. Just me, safe in my car, with no memory of how I'd gotten there.

Shaken, I drove the three minutes to my house. I made it home just in time for dinner, and found my worried mother in her yoga pants, fuzzy yellow slippers and an oversized National Hispana Leadership Inst.i.tute t-shirt, busily checking a frozen lasagna in the oven while the evening news blasted tragedies on the under-cabinet flat screen TV.

"Hi," I said. I tried to sound normal, and failed.

My mother crossed her arms sternly over her chest, angry. "Maria." She then proved that she had a singular penchant for holding a grudge by balling up a dishtowel and hurling it to the floor. "What is going on with you? Where were you?"

"It doesn't matter."

"I don't like this, Maria," she said as her voice began to crack with tears.

"You don't like what?" I was growing irritated with her.

"This! You! What's happening to you."

"Nothing's happening to me."

"Oh, please! I don't even know who you are anymore, Maria! You're lying and secretive, taking off and being careless, breaking up with Logan -"

"If you like him so much, you date him, mom!"

"Do not speak to me that way, young lady. Show some respect."

I knew this was a losing battle. "Yes, ma'am. Sorry."

"You're getting into car accidents and disappearing," she continued, not quite done with her harangue.

"Mom, stop. I'm fine. I made it home for dinner on time."

"But what if you hadn't? Where would I have looked for you?"

"But I did. Here I am. Jeez, I wonder how you'd handle it if you actually had a bad kid, mom."

She kept listing my faults for me. "You don't answer your cell phone when I call you, and you lie to me. Maria! You know how I feel about lying!"

"I know. Yes, ma'am."

"Your dad was a liar!" she shrieked, totally losing it now. This is when I saw the half-empty bottle of wine on the counter. No, more like two-thirds empty. Great. "I never thought you'd end up just like him, but look at you!"

I felt sick arguing with a drunk, but I couldn't help it. "That's not fair. I'm not like dad."

"You are! You're just like him. You're a liar, and I can't stand it. I am your mother!"

She was sobbing now, hysterical.

"Do not compare me to him," I yelled back.

"How can I not? When you go around telling me lies and sneaking around."

"I'm not 'sneaking around'."

"Sneaking around with a cholo. With sc.u.m. Where did I go wrong, dear Lord?"

My mother angrily yanked the lasagna out of the oven and set it to cool on the granite counter. She then began to rip open a bag of prepared green salad, dumping it into a large wooden bowl while laughing and crying, and otherwise generally looking more and more like a woman who'd completely lost her mind.

"You must think I'm pretty stupid, Maria."

"I don't. I think you're very smart. You're a lawyer. You went to Stanford. You're successful. Everyone knows that."

Mom dropped the empty bag of salad on the counter, and threw her hands up in the air.

"You know what?" she asked. "I'm done. I'm done with this. I've done the best I could to be a good mom to you, and I don't even know who you are anymore. I can't do this anymore. It's too much. You're trying to ruin my career, that's what this is. You mock my accomplishments, and my office. How dare you. I'm a mother, yes, but I'm a professional, and I will still be a professional long after you've gone to college and moved out. You are not my priority."

I stood mute, and watched my mother rush from the kitchen, toward her room. I heard her door slam. How was it possible, I wondered, that my own mother was less mature than I was?

I found my backpack, and pulled my books out to study for my finals tomorrow. I was not going to let her drunken abuses - or the craziness I encountered earlier - deter me from pa.s.sing the eleventh grade.

Half an hour or so later my mother returned to the kitchen, somewhat calmer. She apologized for having lost her temper, and said that she was also sorry for projecting her anger for my father onto me.

"No worries," I told her. "He's a b.a.s.t.a.r.d. I understand."

Together my mom and I set the table, and got the dinner served, somewhat cold but good nonetheless.

"You don't have to tell me every little detail of where you've been, okay?" she said, finally, doing a 180 from her att.i.tude earlier.

"Uhm, okay."

"You're a smart girl, and I know you'll make good decisions."

"Thank you."

"But I don't want you to lie to me, Maria." She wore her politician's smile.

"Okay. I'm sorry."

"If you don't want me to know something, just tell me it's none of my business. I'll ask you where you're going, and you can say, 'you know what, mom? I don't want to tell you, but I'll be okay.' I'd be fine with that. I wouldn't love it, but I'd be okay with it."

"Okay."

"And just promise to answer your cell if I call you, so I don't start thinking you're in trouble or going to die."

"Okay," I said, even though I apparently was in trouble and might very well die, according to the company I'd been keeping.

My mom looked at me with a ton of love now, switching gears entirely.

"You are so much like me," she said.

"Thanks. I think."

She laughed. "I know what it's like to be sixteen, Maria. You think your mom is the dumbest creature who ever lived. You can't stand being around her."

"That's not true. Except when you talk about yourself in the third-person." At least it wasn't true all the time.

"All I ask is that you level with me. And that you go to your therapy appointment so you don't screw up in school on top of everything else."

"I'm doing fine in school."

"I know. But things - a lot can change at sixteen, Maria. You can start to think it's all about boys, because hormones are terrible things."

"I've heard they don't really start raging until a woman hits her late thirties," I told her with a grin. "We should probably be more concerned about you, honestly. I worry you'll go full-on cougar on me one of these days."

My mother laughed, and shook her head. "I don't know about that."

"Yeah, you say you're working late all the time, but where are you really, hmm?"

My mother kept shaking her head, then began to cry into her lasagna again.

"Just remember, please," she said. "We are a political family. We have an image to uphold. You think it's easy to run for office as a single mother and a Latina? No. No, it's not. They will judge me twice as hard. I have to be twice as good for half the credit. I can't afford to have a crazy daughter. You have to understand this."

"I get it."

"I think we should go to Santa Fe over winter break, just me and you, for a mother-daughter ski trip, where we can reconnect and get to know each other again. I think I've neglected you, and I'm sorry."

"Okay."

She poured some more wine, with a mysterious smirk on her face, and switched gears again, no longer loving and saccharine, back to the rabid she-wolf.

"Logan is a good boy, Maria. He'll make a great husband and father someday."

"Maybe, but not for me."

My mother looked at me, exasperated, and started to cry anew. "You don't get it," she sobbed, growing hysterical again. "He - if you were with him, Maria! His family is practically royalty around here. Think of what it could do for us. If you were to show up in the society pages with him at events. Just imagine." Her eyes glowed with excitement just thinking of the possibilities. It made me sick.

"Mom."

"You don't get it," she groaned.

"No," I told her, as I stood up to clear my place and get started on the dishes. "You don't."

My mother sat alone at the table for a while, then quietly went to her bedroom. The silence and peace that fell over the house, underscored with the eventual, soothing sound of her snoring, was divine. I puttered around the kitchen for a bit, found some cookie dough ice cream to help with the studying. I got myself ready for bed, and watched a little TV. Then I settled in to read some more. Finally, near midnight, the numb denial I'd been in since I awoke in my car wore off, and I realized what I'd learned.

Demetrio was dead.

Demetrio was dead.

Demetrio was dead, and he could resurrect animals from the dead. But, presumably, he could not resurrect himself from the dead.

Ridiculous.

I went to my desk at fired up my iMac. I opened the Internet browser, and went to Google. I typed in: "DEMETRIO ANTONIO DE LOS SANTOS VIGIL" along with "HIGHWAY 14" and "ACCIDENT". I pressed "search," and waited.

The search returned several entries, all from the local media. I clicked on the first one, a brief from last year, from the local newspaper. It required a login. I was annoyed by this, but knew that my mother had a login because she subscribed to the newspaper.

I ran to the kitchen and started to go through the files in the kitchen desk drawer. My mother was meticulous with record keeping, and I soon found the one labeled "Albuquerque Journal". I flipped through old invoices, and found a piece of paper with the login and pa.s.scode written on it in my mother's scratchy, messy doctor's handwriting. I ran back upstairs with it, and sat at the desk to punch in the codes. It worked. The article came up quickly. It was short, and I intended to read through the whole thing, but only made it a couple of lines before I was frozen in horror.

Two young men from Los Cerrillos lost their lives in a tragic alcohol-related fatal crash on NM Highway 14 over the Christmas weekend. They were Hilario Gallegos, 19, and his half-brother Demetrio Antonio de los Santos Vigil, 18. Both young men were reputed gang members...

I could not move, or breathe, or do anything but blink stupidly at the screen for a long moment. There was a photograph of the wreckage, a gnarled, mangled tangle of metal that no one, not even an ant, could have emerged alive from. My heart beat so fast I thought it would burst. My mouth hung open, and every nerve in my body seemed to go tingly and numb from disbelief and fear. I dragged my eyes up to the top of the paragraph once more as they filled with tears, and read it again, out loud this time, just to be sure I'd seen it correctly. I moved my finger along beneath the words as I went.