The Temptation of Demetrio Vigil (34 page)

“Oh no,” I cried, covering my face with my hands.
“That’s terrible.”

“It is self-defense, Maria. That
was what she intended to do to you,” Yazzie told me, as the tree
regained its original shape and stillness.

“Thank you, uncle,” said Yazzie, embracing the
tree.

“But why did she want to hurt me?” I asked.

“To tempt Demetrio into a trap of some sort, I
suppose. He’s what they want. Not you. You’re the way they get to
him. You, I sense, are the bait.”

“But why?”

“I do not know. This is what he warned you of. This
is why he cannot see you.”

“But I saw him, tonight! He sent me to you!”

She put her arm around me, and guided me back
through the woodland, to where her Jeep awaited us on the mesa.

“So he came, then,” she said, sadly. “His love for
you is greater than his love for himself.”

“That’s beautiful,” I said. “Right?”

“Perhaps,” she said, turning the key in the
ignition. “But the blindness of young love often leads, too, to
great tragedy. We’ve only just begun this journey. Fasten your
seatbelt.”

FINAL THIRD

tercio de muleta

{
whereby
the matador prepares to kill the bull
}

T
he
following week, after Rancho la Curación’s administration announced
that my doctor was mysteriously missing, I was assigned a new
doctor, a harsh, cold, cruel man with a pinched nose, to whom I
spoke only the words I knew I needed to speak to convince him of
what he needed to be convinced in order to release me to my mother.
In short, I falsely confessed to having been temporarily rendered
crazy by the stress of my auto accident, and I said I missed my old
life and would do anything, and take any pill, in order to regain
it. The pills went beneath my tongue then down the sink drain. The
lies went to the center of this man’s tiny brain, where they
worked, as lies often do, to appease the wicked, and I was given
back to my mother fully rehabilitated and, they claimed
“cured”.

My mother drove me home with a
smug satisfaction dancing like a twitch upon her lips, believing
the hospital had broken my spirit and brought me to my senses. She
had even planned a reconciliation dinner at the country club, for
me and Logan, and even though I hated every minute of that steak
and caviar nonsense, I allowed him and my mother to believe I cared
for him and wouldn’t mind dating him again if he could forgive me
my trespasses. He was delighted, of course, and expressed this by
posting a new “Welcome Back Maria” page on Facebook. We were going
to Winter Ball together after all. Oh, joy.

Only Kelsey and Yazzie knew the truth, that I was
going along with all of this in order to avoid being imprisoned by
my mother in a mental hospital again - and only Yazzie knew that
Demetrio was my Kindred Other and a revenant. Kelsey still thought
of him as my gangster hottie I was seeing on the side; it was less
than a year until I turned 18, and she believed me when I told her
I was biding my time with the old status quo until I was able to
legally make my own decisions about things such as being
institutionalized.

My mother gave my phone back.
Logan’s father gave her a pile of money for her mayoral run. Buddy
was overjoyed to have me home. I resumed studies at Coronado Prep,
a new year began, and I began the long process of waiting for the
arrival of spring, which was the time, Yazzie told me, that
Demetrio could perform the protection ceremony for me that would
allow me back into his life - or whatever it was that he had.
Important ceremonies for revenants could apparently only happen
once a solstice. I tried to push him out of my mind, and he began
to visit me in my dreams, nearly every night. I began going to bed
earlier, waking up later, until it was my waking world that felt
like a dream. Demetrio was the reality I wanted.

♦

I went to Kelsey’s house to get ready for
Winter Ball that Friday. She lived in the university area, in a
neighborhood known as Ridgecrest. Her house was a lot older than
mine, but it had a charm and warmth that my house - both my houses,
really, if you counted my dad’s - lacked. It was located on a
tree-lined street with a grassy median, was white stucco with a red
tile roof, and turquoise trim on the shutters, doors and windows.
Whereas in our High Desert neighborhood it was against the rules to
have grass or anything that required a lot of water to grow, there
were no such regulations here, and even though it was yellow and
dry with winter, the front yard of the house was a lush green lawn
in the summer.

Kelsey’s parents were home, but they were busy with
an intellectual dinner party of the type my mother would never have
or be invited to. I envied Kelsey her parents. They were artsy, and
calm, relaxed people. They had lots of books about esoteric
subjects, and seemed genuinely grounded, balanced and interested in
anything you had to say. They also didn’t get in the way. I know
that if we had gotten ready at my house, my mom would have wanted
to stop in every few minutes to check on us. Kelsey’s parents,
luckily enough for her, had lives of their own, and those lives
seemed rich, rewarding, and full of interesting people.

Kelsey had a couple of younger brothers, but her
parents had the nanny over to watch them in the nursery wing of the
sprawling one-story house. Kelsey had her own wing, adjacent to it,
separated from the younger boys by a large laundry room and a music
room that housed a baby grand piano, a drum set, guitars and all
sorts of other cool stuff. Kelsey’s room itself wasn’t nearly as
large as mine, but it was more interesting in some ways because it
had a loft for her bed, accessible by a ladder and descendible by a
circular slide. This had been somewhat more fun, of course, when we
were a little younger, but we still managed to make good use of it.
The room was decorated in muted earth tones, and had real art on
the walls. It was elegant, but still a teenager’s room, and at the
moment we had music blasting.

Victoria was there, too. We’d brought our dresses
and collective makeup, shoes and accessories, and had everything
laid out on Kelsey’s queen-sized futon bed on the floor. We were
all in our jeans and t-shirts, sort of standing there analyzing it
all. The guys would be here in about an hour to pick us up. A tray
of snacks, brought in by the guest chef Kelsey’s parents had hired
to do the party tonight, sat basically untouched at Kelsey’s desk.
We were all supposed to go out for dinner before the Winter Ball,
and we didn’t want to spoil our appetites.

Somewhere in the past week I’d managed to get myself
to a mall with Kelsey and we’d both purchased dresses. It felt
exciting and strange to try them on, because they were terribly
fancy and unlike anything either of us had ever worn before. We,
unlike my stepsisters, weren’t exactly the princess type, and we’d
never put all that much thought into looking particularly girlish.
I, for one, had felt a combination of shame, excitement, and
general stupidity as I tried them on. In the end, I’d settled on a
classic, elegant black sleeveless dress, taffeta, with a fitted
bodice and a flared skirt that ended at the knee, with a playful
pink sash around the waist, twisted into a bow in the back. It was
flirty, silly, and fun. I felt like a gift when I wore it, and
that, Kelsey and Victoria reminded me, was how I was supposed to
feel.

“Forget about him, whoever he was,” Victoria told
me. As much as Kelsey and I liked her, we didn’t think she was a
kindred, and we didn’t feel safe telling her the whole truth. We
had concocted a lie about how I’d been dating a guy from St. Pious
High School but that he dumped me for a girl from La Cueva
High.

We all changed into our dresses together, and adjust
each other’s snaps and buttons, zippers and seams. Then we took
turns doing our makeup at the mirror over Kelsey’s dresser, helping
each other. I went light on the eyes, but Victoria set me straight.
Her mother was an actress in the theater in town, and so she knew
about stage makeup.

“Tonight,” she told us, “is a performance. The
lights will be low, and you deserve to have eyes that pop.”

She lined my eyes in black all the way around, and
stuck fake lashes to my top lid. It felt awkward and uncomfortable,
but looked fantastic. My eyes looked twice as big as they’d ever
looked. I wore my hair mostly down, with a few front layers pinned
up, and my friends helped me set it with hot rollers so that it
cascaded in pretty waves. I’m not sure exactly what Victoria did to
my face and cheeks, but when she was finished with me I looked like
a model with sculpted cheekbones. I wasn’t complaining.

Kelsey wore a sky-blue silk dress that set off her
eyes beautifully, and Victoria helped her pile her hair up in an
elegant twist. Victoria wore a hot orange dress that set off her
skin tone, and she put sparkly flower barrettes in her kinky hair.
In the end, we all looked fabulous, and we knew it. When we went to
the dining room to show the grownups, Kelsey’s parents looked
completely surprised and overjoyed.

“You kids look like you just stepped off an episode
of The Real World,” said Kelsey’s mom. We tried not to be too
annoyed at the dated reference. Instead, we just said thanks.

Soon enough, the doorbell rang, and there they were,
our dates, fresh out of the limo Thomas’s parents had rented for
the occasion. Joel, Kelsey’s date, got him a discount from his
cousin’s car service company. Because the event was formal, they’d
all worn the tuxedos that males tended to wear for such things.
They looked cool, excited, cute, and happy. Logan looked good. I
couldn’t deny it. He always did. He’d worn a pink cummerbund and
bow tie to match my sash, and had a single white rose for me. We
stood on the front porch and tolerated a round of photographs at
the hands of Victoria’s mother, all the while feeling the bumping
bass coming from the heart of the limo as the driver blasted a
heavy, throbbing hip-hop rap song and waited for us. There was
something sort of tragic to me now about the scene, a bunch of rich
prep school kids, headed to the limo daddy rented, listening to
thug music, the guys trying to pimp-walk. It was all such a sorry
approximation of everything that was real, sincere, and even
painful about Demetrio.

Demetrio.

I tried desperately to push the idea of him from my
mind. I missed him with a purple pain the sliced through the very
center of me, but there was nothing I could do about it. I didn’t
want to see him, not like it had been, and he knew this, and he was
staying away. I knew that he just wanted me to get on with my life.
I was trying.

The back of the limo was lit up
with blue neon, and there was a TV on, with music videos playing.
They didn’t match the songs that blared, but it didn’t matter. The
whole scene was surreal, and, to the girl I had been one short
month before, probably somewhat fun. I was the walking wounded, but
I had enough self-control to be able to pull myself out of the
self-pitying missing of Demetrio in order to appreciate the
situation. There were two Marias inside of me now, the one I had
been, and the one I’d become when he touched me. I hadn’t lost my
former self completely, and I still enjoyed the moment - if not for
my own sake then for the sake of the friends I loved.

I sat next to Logan on the long seat. He put his arm
around me, territorially, and tried to kiss me. I didn’t move. I
didn’t want to.

“Don’t start this again,” he warned me, whispering
in my ear and biting my neck. “You know what your mom will
think.”

I kissed him, and tried to enjoy it. I was so
confused, and lost.

The limo stopped at a fancy trendy restaurant near
downtown, called the Slate Street Grill, and we went inside.
Thomas’s dad, a successful trial attorney, had already paid in
advance for our dinner, and we were escorted like prized guests of
honor to a reserved table. All of the adults in the place watched
us walk across the room. At the time I thought they admired how
adult and sophisticated we looked, but as I’ve gotten older I have
decided that they probably watched us more in a nostalgic and
sweetly patronizing way that, had we realized it, would have only
served to make us feel even more like kids. They remembered what it
had been like - except that none of them, or few of them, probably
remembered what it was like to be me, torn between two worlds, that
of the living and that of the dead. I tried not to think about
Demetrio, but everything reminded me of him. The candles. The mood
lighting. The way the waiter walked. A few times, I saw sparkles of
light in corners, in my peripheral vision, and thought it was him.
I’d gasp to myself in those moments, and my heart raced.