The Temptation of Demetrio Vigil (12 page)

He moved his face closer to mine, so close that I
could feel the breath coming from his nose and mouth. He stopped,
and just looked at me, from close range. I was hypnotized by his
eyes, completely lost in them, and covered head to toe with goose
bumps. He smelled of sunshine again, not like a normal boy with
normal teeth and the habit of eating food with them.

“I wasn’t good enough,” I whined, softly. “You
didn’t want me earlier.”

Fury flared behind his eyes for a brief moment, and
disappeared again. It was terrifying to see his potential for
anger, given how passive he’d been the other times I’d seen him,
but I couldn’t move. I was still paralyzed.

“Be quiet, Maria. I have wanted
you since before I met you,” he growled, his voice impatient, ripe
with need and want, and a little wild. I was a little scared by
this, but not as scared as I was strangely excited.

He moved closer, and I closed my eyes, my body
flushing with warmth, waiting for the kiss. But it never came.

What
did
come was a horrible, insistent
banging sound, like a hammer on wood. It jolted me, and Demetrio
quickly disappeared, just as he had before, in a twinkling flash of
lights. The room vanished, too, and I floated in a black
ether.

“No!” I looked down and there was no floor beneath
my feet. The cold had returned, and I floated for a moment in an
inky darkness, then fell with the weight of a stone in an empty
well. I screamed. Again, the banging. A hammer on wood? No. I fell
and fell to the sound, and finally struck the bottom of something,
jolted out of the dream, violently.

I opened my eyes, panting, and
looked around, expecting monsters and dripping water, stones and
darkness. But I wasn’t in a chamber with Demetrio, or falling
through space, and no one was hammering anything. Rather, I was on
the queen bed in the crafting/Maria room at my father’s house. The
morning sun was slipping in through the slats in the blinds, and
someone was banging on the large wooden door, which I’d locked the
night before.

“Maria! Good morning!”

“Hold on,” I groaned, shivering. I was on top of the
blanket and comforter, having managed to wriggle out of them
sometime in the night.

A dream. It had only been a dream.
Of course it had. It was part of the whole Maria-is-going-bonkers
thing.

“Egg white omelet is ready!”
called Missy’s voice - Missy’s horribly
cheerful
, horribly
childish
,
horribly
clueless
voice. My stepmother was a fitness instructor and
cheerleading coach, and very into egg whites, makeup and designer
jeans that showed off the flat belly my dad once said he’d married
her for.

“I’d like the yolks please. Whatever yolks you have,
they’re mine,” I said, just to bug her. “Mix them up with some
butter.”

I hope this would flummox her, and it worked. I was
met with confused silence for a moment as Missy gathered together
what few functioning neurons she had in that pretty little head of
hers.

“Uhm. Well, I only buy the whites, in a carton. A
jar. And we don’t do butter in this house. Missy doesn’t eat
butter.”

“Got donuts?” I asked.

Another long, confused silence. “Of course not.
Missy doesn’t eat donuts.”

Missy tended to talk about herself in the third
person for some reason when she was discussing her diet or exercise
habits. She had her own fitness company, Fit Missy, with videos and
a web site and a couple of D-list celebrity clients who summered in
Santa Fe.

“Well,
Maria
does. Maria eats donuts and
egg yolks and butter.”

I heard Missy cough. “Your heart attack, Miss
Sunshine. Breakfast is ready and your dad told me to get you up so
that we could leave the girls with you while we go to he gym and
the spa. Your dad and I need some quality alone time anyway.”

I stuck my finger down my throat at this
information. I didn’t want to imagine what that might mean. I also
didn’t know why my dad and Missy always seemed to think of my
weekend visits as little more than the chance to have a free
babysitter for their twin toddlers, Moet and Chandon, both four
years old and named for a brand of French champagne that I imagine
Missy must need in order to be around my father. The twins were
sort of tragic - coiffed and puffy as little French poodles, and
dressed up for showing off like show ponies with ribbons in their
tails.

Every weekend I ended up trying to
get my younger half-sisters to play in mud, to jump on beds, to eat
candy. Basically, I did all I could to help them realize that life
was about more than tiny Coach handbags (yes, they already had
three each), dieting (yes, they were four and on a diet!) and
acting cute for male approval - the three areas in which their
mother had tremendous experience and expertise. And while I tried
to introduce the tiny clones of Missy to things like, oh, you
know,
books
, my
dad and stepmom went off in dad’s Porsche, to soak in a hot springs
somewhere in the mountains or get their couple’s mud massages or
have their chakras balanced by a scam artist pretending to be a
yogi from India, or whatever other garbage they did that made me
and my mom sick.

“Your dad called a plumber. He’ll be here in an
hour. We need you up.”

“Fine. Give me a few minutes to get dressed,” I
griped.

It was probably better that Missy and my dad left me
alone. At least I could relax a little. I also remembered that
Kelsey would be driving up to hang out with me (and, apparently,
the twins) today, and to spend the night.

“Yay!” cried Missy. I could almost see her jumping
up and down for joy. “Missy will be downstairs with the egg whites
and the wheat grass juice. You’re a doll, even if you poison
yourself with donuts and too much sleep, and could stand to lose
five pounds - and I say this because I love you.”

“Wonderful,” I groused with quiet sarcasm. To
myself, I added softly, “Perhaps Missy can jump off a bridge and
die.”

I rolled out of bed, and stumbled
across the hardwood floor toward the bathroom attached to the guest
room. As I got closer, I heard the sound of water dripping, drop by
drop, into the sink drain.
Right
. The faucet leaked here. Thus,
the plumber. I remembered it all now. The drops of water in the
dungeon, Demetrio’s paralyzing stare - it hadn’t been real, any of
it.

I’d dreamed it all.

I brushed my teeth absently, looking in the mirror
through my grogginess. I wore pink and white striped pajama pants
with a pink camisole top, which meant my shoulders were exposed.
Something on the left shoulder caught my eye. It was faint, a
smudge. I looked down directly at the shoulder now, and stopped
brushing.

What I saw made me gasp with dizzy fear.

There, on my left shoulder, I saw the faint but very
real outline of a triangle, red, as though I’d been burned or maybe
scratched, inverted 180 degrees. Yep, that’s right. It was
upside-down. An empty bucket, or cup.

My knees buckled and nearly gave
out. Toothpaste foam dribbled down my chin. I began to
hyperventilate in a woozy panic. I caught my balance with my hands,
against the cold granite counter, spit in the sink, rinsed my
mouth, splashed cold water across my face to snap myself out of it.
But when I looked again, the triangle was still there. I found
myself making a strange sound that was a cross between a laugh, and
a stifled scream. It couldn’t be. Yet it was. Wasn’t it? Yes, it
was true.

He’d been here.

Either that, or I was crazier than I thought.

♦

An hour later, I’d calmed down. I’d
convinced myself I’d scratched the triangle with my own fingernail,
in my sleep. I was attempting to ground myself in reality by caring
for my younger sisters in my dad’s and Missy’s absence. I had
already grown tired of trying to get them to learn to play air
guitar. I’d given up interesting them in Frisbee or football,
kickball or climbing trees. I didn’t have the energy for both freak
occurrences and annoying unwanted siblings, so I gave up.

At risk of losing my temper or crying with
frustration at their constant requests for me to make sure they
were “hydrated” with spring water, or to put makeup on them, I’d
handed them over them to a sickly sweet princess DVD of some kind
in the great room, and left them sitting prettily on the big
leather sofa.

Moet and Chandon were both wearing little princess
outfits from the toy store, both of them with blonde hair extension
things pinned to their dark brown locks with barrettes, and tiny
high-heeled shoes with pink sparkles all over them. The hair thing
made me unspeakably sad. What, the toy companies couldn’t sell
princess outfits with brunette extensions? Oh, the lessons we
learned, as girls, early in life. It peeved me, especially given
the fact that I’d studied cultural appropriation and racial
self-loathing in my applied psychology class - but I also realized
there was only so much I could do to help, and by “so much” I
essentially mean “nothing”. Sometimes, a girl just felt helpless -
and not in a good way. I suspected there were times that a girl
might feel helpless in a naughty way, but I wasn’t there yet. Had
never been there. Didn’t know when I’d get there, but hoped that
when I did it might be with someone who looked a little bit like
Demetrio Vigil.

When the doorbell rang, I was messing around on the
Internet at the kitchen computer, Googling “Golden, New Mexico,”
“Highway 14,” “healers,” “evil coyotes,” and “triangles and
Buddhism,” to see if anything came up. There were some strange
things, including the fact that everything Demetrio had told me in
the dream, about the symbolic significance of triangles in various
cultures, was true. Maybe, I reasoned, I’d learned all of it
somewhere along the way and simply forgotten.

It was also strange to learn that Golden, New
Mexico, was for many years a literal ghost town, essentially
abandoned. It had been a boomtown during the gold rush at the end
of the 1800s, but by 1928 was officially declared a ghost town.
Since then, a few people had moved back, but not many. Artists,
bandits hiding out, that kind of person. The most famous building
in town, the piece on the Internet said, was the church. Apparently
it, too, had been abandoned for a long time, but was restored in
1960 by a priest and historian named Fray Angelico Chavez.

I left the article up on the screen, and went to
answer the front door of my dad’s sprawling new adobe house. On the
front porch stood Kelsey, in jeans and a black fleece sweatshirt
with a ski parka and hiking boots. Her light blue RAV-4 was parked
at the curb. The sky blazed bright cobalt, without a cloud in
sight, and the air was bitingly cold. It was the sort of winter day
that made you feel sorry for wild birds, whose feet were surely
frozen solid to the branches upon which they perched. I always
wanted to invite those birds inside. They never wanted to come in,
though.

The sight of my best friend in such sensible,
comfortable clothes made me unfathomably happy; I lunged toward her
and gave her a massive hug.

“Uhm, hello?” she said with a
laugh, giving me the Maria-is-a-dork look, which I completely
deserved. “What’s going on with you?”

“Princesses
,” I hissed with a shudder. “Tiny
princesses
all in pink and sparkles,
with fake blonde hair and spray-on tans. Little tiny clones of
Missy.”

Kelsey rolled her eyes knowingly,
and patted me on the back. “Ah,” she said. We walked into the
house. “You know, it’s their destiny to be stars of a future
‘housewives of Santa Fe’ reality show. Leave them to it, my friend.
They might be happy as they are. You should probably release your
need for control, Maria. We should probably talk about why you
always want everyone to be just like you.”

“I know,” I said miserably as I closed the door
behind us. I smiled, because Kelsey always had a way of pointing
out my flaws that simultaneously made me laugh. It was a rare gift,
that ability to poke fun at people without making them
defensive.

Kelsey and I settled into the kitchen, and began
looking through the refrigerator and pantry for something halfway
decent to eat. The closest thing we could find to palatable food
was a nice Italian coffee blend, which Kelsey set to work making in
the fancy coffeemaker, and some bagels with organic marmalade. We
talked for a bit about various things, and then Kelsey noticed the
article on Golden.

“Reading up on the state’s best spots to total your
car?” she asked.

I laughed. “Nah. Just, trying to understand a few
things.”

I averted my gaze from her eyes and tried to look
innocent. Kelsey instantly picked up on my nervous tone. Honestly,
I was dying to tell her about Demetrio, and the dream, and the
triangle on my shoulder - everything.

“You want to talk about it?” she asked as she popped
a bit of toasted bagel into her mouth.

“Yes,” I answered truthfully. “Very much. But I
can’t. I’d feel like an idiot.”

Most people would be surprised or
annoyed by an answer like this. But Kelsey was the daughter of not
one but
two
psychotherapists. She had a long, calm reaction time to most
things people said, even the weird things (of which I am most
certain my comments at the time were).

I glanced over at the twins. They still sat,
slack-jawed, watching a princess wait for prince charming to kiss
her. It hit me that I was sort of acting that same thing out in my
dream from that morning - except that it wasn’t a dream. Or was
it?