The Temptation of Demetrio Vigil (8 page)

“Thanks,” I said politely.

“I’ve been thinking,” she began,
for no apparent reason, “that if you
believe
a thing matters, then it
will, and if you
don’t
believe a thing matters, then it won’t. What do you
think?”

“I don’t know,” I answered, truthfully. I wondered
if she’d overheard me and Kelsey talking about the coincidence.

“Well, maybe you’ll have some thoughts on that,
eventually, and when you do, I want you to come tell me what they
are. Come by whenever. Here, or at my studio downtown. Deal?”

Yazzie held her hand out for me to shake it. I did,
tepidly. Her hand was strong and dry, the skin thick from working
with clay.

“Have a great weekend,” she said, releasing my hand,
and busying herself with her slides again.

“You too.”

I returned to Kelsey in the hall, and we giggled in
spite of ourselves as we walked back down the hall, toward the
exit.

“Yazzie’s freakin’ weird, and
quite unhealthily obsessed with you, I might add,” said Kelsey. “I
daresay the unattainable MILF is in
love
with you.”

“You’re a disgusting perv,” I said, looping my arm
through hers as I wadded up the photocopied story and stuffed it in
my pocket, next to the neatly folded paper bearing Demetrio’s
contact information. “I think she means well.”

“Naive, like I said,” Kelsey told
me. “You think everyone means well, except for me and Demetrio, and
we’re the ones who actually
do
.”

♦

After classes ended for the day, I stood
outside the dance studio at school, with a dozen other girls, and
read the “dance troupe practice is canceled” note taped to the door
with disappointment. I needed the release of a workout, and nothing
calmed me or centered me better than dancing. I lived to dance. Oh
well. The anxiety headache I was nursing would have to be remedied
the old-fashioned way, with Tylenol. Prone to headaches since the
crash, I now carried painkillers in my backpack, like an old woman.
I felt overwhelmed, unlike myself, sleepy, and worried about the
anxiety that I simply couldn’t shake.

To clear my head, I walked across one of Coronado
Prep’s many landscaped quads, to the gym complex. My father, who
had gone to college back East, said the stately crimson brick
buildings and towering trees on the grounds of my school reminded
him of the way Ivy League schools looked in New England. It
certainly required a lot of water to make anything in the desert
look like a lush forest, and I figured a hefty chunk of our sizable
tuition went to grounds maintenance and the water company.

The storm from earlier had wrung itself dry, and the
afternoon sky blazed clear now, a bright cobalt blue. The angled
rays of the lowering sun struck the snow in such a way as to make
it twinkle like millions of diamonds had been sprinkled across the
world. I stood for a moment, breath caught in my throat, admiring
the work of nature. Snow, I thought, could be so many things. It
could be peacefully sparkling jewels, or slippery claws of
near-death. I’d heard that Eskimos had many words for snow, and now
understood why. Snow was multifaceted, both a playful bringer of
life-giving water and a dark messenger of slow and ruthless death.
Nothing was simple, when you took the time to really examine
it.

No wind blew now. I caught sight
of three small bunnies, huddled together, perfectly still beneath a
pine tree, watching me with their perfectly round, blinkless black
eyes. How did they survive such harsh weather? I wanted to gather
then into my arms and bring them inside. Perhaps humans had simply
become too soft, incapable of surviving the elements. We must
surely have been tougher in the past, when Native Americans lived
on this same land 10,000 years ago without benefit of heat and
electricity. How did they do it? Did they know something - or
some
things
-
that we’d forgotten now?

I crunched across the snow, opened a side door to
the West campus athletic complex, walked into the soothing blast of
heated air, and snuck into the basketball court where Logan was
jousting with the fencing team. I liked to watch him do this
because of the grace and skill involved; but I hated to watch him
do this because it involved swords and stabbing. In his white suit
and facemask, he was nimble and robust, a man who would protect me
from all harm. Like everything else he did - shooting, swimming,
skiing - he excelled at fencing, an obscure, testosterone-soaked
art of gentlemanly sword fighting. He looked up, saw me, and nodded
his acknowledgment. My presence seemed to galvanize him to perform
harder, the way girls always seem to inspire the best in
competitive boys. He went after his opponent with a vengeance now.
I cringed and tried to understand the appeal of thrusting a weapon
another human being. It was a guy thing for sure.

After a triumphant sparring match, Logan removed his
mesh mask, and strode over to me, beaming and glowing with
sweat.

“What’re you doing here, babe?” he asked me, out of
breath, his cheeks glowing pink from healthy exertion. He gave me a
humid hug and a peck on the cheek. One amazing thing about Logan
was that he never smelled bad, even after working out. He always
carried the scent of freshly squeezed limes. I told him dance
practice had been canceled, and that I was wasting a little time
before heading up to Santa Fe for a couple nights with my dad and
then back Sunday for my big dance competition.

“Wish I could come see you compete,” he said, “but
I’m heading up to Colorado with my dad. There’s whitetail coming
down near Buena Vista, tons of ‘em. Late December’s the best for
archery. We’re trying out some crossbows for a big company that
wants to endorse me.”

“Stay warm,” I said, not knowing
what else one might say under such circumstances. Don’t get too
much blood on you? I put the thought of hunting deer with a
crossbow out of my mind, because it sickened me just a little.
Okay, a
lot
. My
mom’s dad and brothers all hunted, as did my own dad, and mom once
told me it was a woman’s duty to ignore certain things men did for
the sake of getting along with them. I was doing my best, but did
wonder if I’d ever get the hang of ignoring what Kelsey called
Logan’s barbarism. I stared at his beautiful face, and wondered how
such a good-looking person could have it in him to kill
anything.

Logan’s coach whistled for him to come back to
practice, so he gave me another quick peck, on the lips this time,
and trotted over to his team. I quickly grew bored, and decided to
head out. I walked back across campus, admiring the glistening snow
again, and loaded myself into the Land Rover for the hour-long
drive to Santa Fe. Kelsey had promised to come up to go to the
movies with me tomorrow, meaning I wasn’t going to be bored out of
my mind babysitting my twin toddler half-sisters while my dad and
his new wife went out on the town, as was often the case on my
visits. My dad and his wife seemed to think of me as their resident
weekend babysitter.

As I left Coronado Prep’s student parking lot I
called my mother on the Bluetooth, to let her know I was fine and
on my way to my dad’s a little early. She answered in her usual
stressed-out voice full of sighing and deep inhales, telling me she
was in the middle of an important meeting with the city council and
couldn’t talk long.

“Are you taking Buddy to your dad’s?” she asked.

“No. He’s still limping a little from the
crash.”

My mom sighed, then complained. “So I have to feed
and walk him all weekend.”

“Not the whole weekend. I have my dance competition
Sunday, so I’m coming home early,” I said.

“Regardless. He’s your dog. When we got him you
agreed to take care of him. I expect you to live up to your
responsibilities.”

“Mom, he’s
injured
. I don’t want to stress him
out. Just this once.”

“Fine.” She sounded annoyed. “Call me when you get
to your dad’s.”

“Okay.”

“Take the Interstate. I don’t want
you on those back roads again. We saw how
that
ended up. And focus on the road
this time.”

“Fine.”

We said our goodbyes and hung up.
I felt an incredible sense of isolation, anger and sadness wash
over me - a new mix of feelings that left me wanting to punch
something, or someone. I didn’t
like
feeling this way; it didn’t
make me proud - but I couldn’t deny it, either. I had a dark,
untapped well of anger inside. Hurling a glass at a wall would have
felt wonderful just then. I wasn’t generally quick to anger. My
emotions seemed to be out of whack completely, ever since the
crash. Maybe I
had
damaged my brain somehow. I didn’t know anymore.

I did know I wouldn’t be following her orders. It
was a passive resistance, but one that was all my own. I steered
the car West on Academy Boulevard for a few blocks, past the
upscale mini-malls and the empty, frozen golf course, fully
intending to go to the South on Interstate rather than North. I
would take Highway 14 again, in spite of her - or to spite her.
Maybe a little of both.

When I got to San Mateo boulevard, Kelsey called me
to remind me to call Demetrio to apologize.

“You’re so obsessed with him,
maybe
you
should
call him.” I told her. “You want me to set you up or
something?”

“That’s not a bad idea,” she said.

“Yes it is.”

“Whatever. Call him. Why are you so snippy?”

“Sorry. My mom pissed me off, blaming me for the
accident.”

“I’m sorry. Just ignore her. With parents, that’s
often the best approach. Do not make eye contact. Do not feed them.
Etcetera.”

I laughed, grateful once more for my best friend’s
ability to set the world right whenever it went askew. We made
arrangements for her to visit me at my dad’s tomorrow morning, and
hung up.

Not quite sure why, I did as she asked, punching the
phone number from the scrap paper into my phone’s keypad at a red
light near the McDonald’s. The call connected through the
Bluetooth, and the ringing noise came through the car’s speakers.
My pulse sped up in anticipation of the awkward call, but not for
long. Soon, the telltale tones signaling a disconnected number
bleated out of the speakers, and I pressed the call off. Dead
end.

As I pulled into the Southbound
lanes of Interstate 25, a sort of denial came over me, where I knew
I was defying my mother’s instructions, but where I didn’t want to
think too hard about it. I just kept driving, and told myself it
was okay to prefer the East side of the Sandias, where the
mountains sloped gradually, and where rainfall allowed for the
growth of Ponderosa Pines and Aspens at the higher elevations. The
East side, the Albuquerque side, was dry and rugged, more cliffs
and cacti than forests. The evergreens of the East side lifted my
mood. I cranked my music up, and rolled on, toward the towering,
flat-topped purple Sandia Mountain range, until the city of
Albuquerque had slipped behind me, and I found myself driving
though the mountain cleavage known as Tijeras Canyon. Yep. I was
heading once more toward Highway 14. The place where I’d crashed
and thought, only one week ago, that I would die. I wasn’t going to
let a freak accident - or my mother - make me afraid of this drive.
If you weren’t vigilant in life, it could scare you into paralysis.
I thought of my mother, so bitter and lonely, scared away from love
because of her bad marriage to my dad. That was sort of an
accident, wasn’t it? I would
not
be like her. I wasn’t going to be scared away
from taking chances.

I suppose I knew at some level
that I intended to drive past the address on the slip of paper,
too, just out of curiosity. Kelsey had made me feel guilty enough
about how we’d treated Demetrio that I at least wanted to see for
myself just what kind of home he came from. Perhaps I’d misjudged
him. Somewhere near the town of Cañoncito, driving in the shadow of
the mountain but beneath an azure sky, I remembered something
Yazzie had said earlier, seemingly off-the-cuff, earlier that
day.
If you think a thing matters, then it
does.
Maybe it held true for people, too.
If we thought a person mattered, they did; if we thought they
didn’t matter, they didn’t. Demetrio had thought I mattered enough
to call for help on my behalf, and to find me at the coffee shop to
give me my necklace. The least I could do was think he mattered
enough for a proper thank-you.

I pulled the Land Rover off the highway, onto the
gravel at the San Pedro Overlook, with its cliff-top view of the
barren mesa scrubland below, covered in white snow, and I typed the
address into the navigation unit on the dashboard of the car. That
way, the car could be responsible for me going there, not me. It
was starting to get dark, and you just never knew what you might
find out here in the middle of nowhere.

I drove on along the twisting
narrow road, until I got to the town of Golden, at which point the
navigation unit took me off Highway 14 and onto a series of even
narrower, and more twisty dirt roads. Soon, I was directed just off
a road called Luz Del Cielo, onto a stark and narrow lane where the
houses were few and far between. The soothing woman’s voice of the
navigation system announced: “You have arrived at your
destination.”

♦

It was only now that I realized I didn’t
have anything to give him - in the event that I actually found him,
that was. I’d meant to maybe have a card, some way to thank him for
helping me. Maybe a handshake would have to do, I thought. That’s
when I remembered that I had a gift card for $50 worth of free
downloads on iTunes, somewhere at the bottom of my backpack. It was
a late birthday present from Missy, my dad’s new wife, and even
though I liked iTunes as much as the next girl, I didn’t
particularly like the home-wrecking usurper that was
Missy
, so I’d essentially ignored it rather than deal
with my emotions. I burrowed through my pack until I found it,
buried at the bottom and covered with lint and cracker crumbs. I
wiped it off, then slipped it into my jacket pocket.