Vivian Divine Is Dead (15 page)

As the fireworks grow brighter, I see women across the cemetery taking out picnic baskets and unwrapping food from plastic bags. I’m suddenly starving. Beside me, Isabel rummages in her bag and then hands me a tamale wrapped in a cloth napkin. “Best tamales in Rosales, sold right outside these gates,” she says.

I try to unwrap the tamale, but the tips of my fingers burn on the hot corn husk. “I love tamales,” I say. “But they’re just so fattening.”

“You’re tiny,” Isabel says. “You can afford to gain a pound or two.”

Now that’s one I’ve never heard before
. Between “the screen adds ten pounds” and “hello, fat; good-bye, career,” I’m pretty much versed in the “less is more” mentality.

“You don’t understand,” I say, shaking my head. “If I get fat, I lose my career.”

“Would that be so bad?”

I hesitate, my breath suspended in my throat and my fingers still burning on the steaming cornmeal. I imagine all the things I could do if I quit acting: eat ten tamales an hour. Go outside in my pajamas. Watch TV without cringing at my bad haircut. “I don’t know,” I whisper, “if anyone would love me without it.”

Isabel takes my tamale and unwraps it so the cornmeal pokes out of the top, like a banana. When she hands it back to me, it’s cool and sticky in my palm. “They would,” Isabel says slowly. “But would you?”

It scares me that I don’t know the answer.

All around me, children are poking fingers into their moms’ pockets and pulling out long sticks, their tops wrapped in bundles of cloth. They light their crude sparklers, passing them from hand to hand. I feel a sharp tug on my hand as Isabel pulls me to my feet. The woman at the next grave hands Isabel two sticks, and she gives one to me, the bitter smell of gasoline filling my nostrils. We touch our gasoline-soaked tips to the woman’s, and soon sparks are everywhere, bounding over graves, jumping the heads of tombstones.

I think about Marcos, and how he’s a hero to the town, but I saw him burn a hole in his guard’s hand for a simple mistake.
Who is he really? And why did he have my mom’s earring?

When the lights fade out of the sky, the women around us start gathering their bags. “Follow me,
mi hija
,” Isabel says. She brushes the flower petals off my white dress, throws her bags over her shoulder, and grabs Abuelita’s weaving. As she stands up, one end slips out of her hand, and the weaving unrolls, inch by inch, from her hands to the grave.

At first it looks like a mural of Mother Mary, like the one that’s painted in the back lot’s “Religious Italian Town” set. But something’s a little off, so I step closer to Mother Mary’s pale face. Beneath the blue headdress, and above her full lips, I see the hundred tiny weaves of my mother’s heart-shaped mole, and hanging from her ears, identical pink roses.

For a moment I can’t speak: my voice box has stopped working.
Other than the blue headdress, it could be a photograph of Mom.
The ground shakes beneath my feet, dropping my stomach and weakening my knees.

“What’s wrong?” Isabel asks.

I realize I’ve moved closer to the rug, until my nose almost touches the soft wool. “That’s my mother.”

Isabel beams at me like I said the right answer to a long-unanswered question. “She’s everyone’s mother.”

“No, it’s not Mother Mary,” I insist, shaking my head. “It’s my mom. Pearl Divine.”

“The movie star?” Isabel asks, looking at it closely. “Are you sure?”

I nod. “Those are her earrings,” I say, “and her mole.” Both years Mom was voted Sexiest Woman in Hollywood, the press focused on her heart-shaped mole, which Dad swore was an imprint of the first kiss he ever gave her. “How did Abuelita know what my mom looked like?” I demand.

“Abuelita just weaves whatever she’s asked to,” Isabel says. “This must have been the picture Marcos brought over.”

“But—”

“I know how much it hurts,” Isabel says gently. “But your mother’s gone, Vivian. And even finding out what happened to her won’t bring her back.”

I grate my teeth into my skull and clench my fists by my side. “Maybe not. But I need to know why Marcos had Mom’s earring, and why he paid Abuelita to weave her portrait,” I say, pressing my finger into the weaving. “I have to know the truth.”

“And what if the truth is that he killed her?”

“Then I’ll kill him,” I growl. “And that’ll make the pain stop.”

Isabel puts her hand on my shoulder. I want to shake it off, tell her I don’t need any pity, but I let it rest there instead, like a weight holding me in this world. “The pain does stop,
mi hija
, but not through hurting someone else. And not all at once. Over time, it just slowly fades away.”

I want to believe that, but every morning, I wake up hoping to see Mom’s face, and every morning, her absence hurts more than it did the day before. “For me,” I say, “the pain just gets worse.”

“That’s because it’s different for everyone,” Isabel says. “I mourned for different amounts of time for my mom, my dad, my sister. Some losses are easier to live with, and some stay around longer.”

“What do you mean?”

Isabel studies me for a second. “Did you ever get hurt, get cut or something?”

Like being thrown from a horse?
I nod.

“Grief is like that. It starts off as a painful, bloody wound, then it crusts into a scab, and eventually, it fades into a scar,” Isabel says. “The scar’s always there, but it doesn’t hurt anymore.”

“So one day,” I say, taking a deep breath. “The pain ends?”

“It ends. And then you know you can live through anything, so you stop being so afraid.”

“Of what?”

“Of everything,” Isabel says. “We fear what we think we can’t handle. If you can handle this, you can handle anything.”

Isabel’s words make me feel calm inside for the first time since Mom died.
I can handle this. I can go on, be less afraid.
I feel my muscles relax, my jaw unclench, my heartbeat slow. Someday, I won’t feel like every day is crushing me into little bits.

There’s something comforting about knowing that one day the pain ends, and you get stronger, until you can handle whatever comes your way.
Maybe Mom was right.
I watch the last of the fireworks sizzle to the ground, spiraling blue, green, and red lights across the white tombstones.
Maybe I am stronger than I think.

I nod at Isabel. “Let’s go,” I say, grabbing the weaving off the ground.
Maybe I do have the courage to keep going, to find out what happened to Mom.

Chapter Twenty-Two

T
HE SUN IS JUST TIPPING
its head over the lake when we reach the church at the end of the cemetery. A ghostly fog hangs over the building, obscuring the procession of mourners winding through the thick stone doorway.

The church looks like it’s straight out of
The
Hunchback of Notre-Dame
, with its spindly spires and stone dark enough to have been roasted in a fire. On the steeple, a small boy is hanging from the heavy iron bell, posed as if about to ring it.
Or jump off the building.

“Does anybody ever—”

“Jump?” Isabel answers. “Just last year. A man betrayed la Familia de Muerta, so he took a nose-dive into the center of the square. But I wouldn’t say
jumped
is the right word. More like
pushed
.”

I remember the cut on the little girl’s face, and how she said it was la Familia de Muerta that did it, and how I held my hand over my heart to translate the word
Nick
to her, before I even knew I loved him. I try to shake him out of my mind. I don’t want to think about Nick, where he is, if someone found him under that bench. I remember him taking off his shirt, the muscles in his arms as he held me in the lake, his mischievous smile, that wound on his forehead . . .

Stop thinking!
I try to focus on the men and women now filtering through the giant gold doors into the church, skeleton masks hiding their eyes, but I can’t. I’m too distracted by thoughts of Nick.
But the farther Nick is from me, the better off he is. I can give him that much, for now.
I watch people taking skeleton masks from a man standing near the door, and strapping them on as they enter the church. I take one too and strap it over my eyes.

My stomach is violently twisting and turning as we get closer to the entrance.
What if Marcos just bought the earring, and he doesn’t know anything about Mom’s disappearance? If so, then why does he have a weaving of her face?
I pause in front of the church doors, wondering if it’s too late to bolt down the stairs and catch the nearest boat home.
And if he didn’t buy the earring, could Marcos have been involved in Mom’s murder?
I force myself to take a deep breath and straighten my shoulders.
If Mom were this close to finding out what happened to me, she wouldn’t back out
, I say to myself as I push through the thick gold doors behind Isabel.

Compared to the small cemetery, the church is enormous. Above me, a glass dome scatters light across the rows of red velvet pews, and the sunrise peeks through the stained glass window above the altar.

It looks like a normal church overall, except for the altar, which has been transformed into a stage set, complete with a fifteenth-century plastic graveyard. It’s not as fancy as the studio’s graveyard set, but the story’s the same: Don Juan, a cheating scumbag, kidnaps his fiancée, Ines, and kills her father. Ines dies of sorrow, but then she forgives Don Juan for his sins and pulls him up to heaven.
What fool would forgive him for that?

In front of the altar, people are flocking to Marcos, who is standing royally by the first pew with an indulgent smile. Women approach him shyly and kiss his hands, and men in grubby white clothes openly admire his red silk suit. Little kids dash around his feet, and he picks them up and tickles them, their laughter filling the church.

“What’s going on?” I ask Isabel as a boy clip-clops up to Marcos on shiny steel crutches. Marcos kneels down and ruffles the kid’s hair.

“Marcos paid for that boy’s crutches,” Isabel says. “The people ask him for favors, and he never refuses: he buys the cemetery to save our ancestors, gets crutches for injured kids, delivers sacks of apples for Los Muertos . . .” She rolls her eyes. “People love him around here.”

“What about you?”

Isabel shrugs. “He always shows up smiling at the charity events he gives. But when Aurora worked for him, he would make her do horrible things to people.” She shudders. “Things no good person would do.”

“But he seems so—”

“I know,” she says. “Just wait here. I’ll go find out what Marcos knows, before I lose my nerve.”

With the weaving tucked under one arm, Isabel hurries through the crowd, passing the red velvet pews, which are filling up with people wearing skeleton masks.

When Marcos sees Isabel, he kisses her politely on the cheek and takes the weaving. He immediately unrolls it, and I wince as I get a flash of Mom’s heart-shaped mole. Marcos nods, looking pleased, and then Isabel leans in and whispers something to him. Angry lines harden on Marcos’s face as he answers back, and I suddenly notice how his red silk suit, the same color as the pews, glimmers like a wet bloodstain.

After he finishes talking, Isabel heads back up the aisle, joining me beside the last pew. “I asked Marcos if he was pleased with the weaving of Mother Mary, and if not, he could have a new one
gratis
,” Isabel says. “Marcos said it wasn’t Mother Mary, but he accepted the free weaving anyway.”

“Then who is it?” I hold my breath, waiting to hear the two words I’ve been praying for: Pearl Divine.

“I don’t know.” The bell booms through the church, shaking the floor beneath me. “But there’s nothing more I can do. I’m sorry.”

I can tell she means it, and I’m sorry too—for putting her through all of this.
Maybe I’m making this all up, and Mom’s earring really was stolen, and Marcos bought the weaving of Mom because he’s just one of the million Pearl Divine fans.
I watch the crowd, in their creepy skeleton masks, as everyone finds a place to stand or sit, while the bell rings once, twice, three times.

When the last bell rings with a resounding clang, Marcos stands up in the front pew. He walks toward the stage, his foot dragging slightly behind him, and the tapping of his cane seems almost as loud as the last clanging of the bell.

As Marcos climbs onto the stage, people drop into silence, all at once, like a lid closing on a coffin. Standing alone onstage, he looks like one of those televangelists, too good-looking to be holy, too slick to be honest.

“
Bienvenidos, amigos. Tengo una mala noticia
,” he says.
“El primer actor sufrió un accidente
.
”

“What’s he saying?” I whisper in Isabel’s ear.

“He says the lead actor had an accident,” she translates, but by the way she says
accident
, I can tell there was nothing accidental about it.

I turn my attention back to Marcos, but the only word I can understand out of his speech is
amo
: I love. I remember when someone spray painted that word on the studio gate, with the letter
I
above it, and even after the janitors painted over it, I could still see the words: “I love.” If I were to write that now, I’d put the word
Nick
after it.

“Marcos says the person standing in for the lead actor is someone very dear to him; his
ahijado
,” Isabel says. “His godson.”

A man stands up in the second pew and walks up to Marcos, his back to the crowd. Marcos put his arm around the actor’s shoulders, and then turns him to face the audience. “
Mi ahijado
, Nicolas.”