Earth Thirst (The Arcadian Conflict) - By Mark Teppo Page 0,93
and the interior door is open. Through the wire mesh, I spot Mere standing in the kitchen. She's standing at the counter, preparing a plate of fruit, and she's wearing tan cotton pants and a cerulean-colored top. Her hair is pulled back but left unrestrained. She glances up as I enter, and then goes back to finishing the task at hand. “Well,” she says, “there you are.” As calmly as if I was just returning from a walk.
“Here I am,” I reply somewhat hoarsely. My throat is dry. “And where is here?”
A ghost of a smile crosses her lips. “About an hour outside of La Serena, up the Valle de Elqui.”
I nod, though I'm not sure of where that is.
“About a day's travel north of Santiago,” she says. “It's a bit of a tourist spot, what with the observatories and all the pisco distillers, but Phoebe said the soil was good.”
“It is,” I say. “How long have you been waiting for me?” I ask. There are several dozen other questions queuing up behind that one. Observatories? Pisco distilleries? La Serena? And, farther back: Montoya; Belfast and Secutores; Jacinta and the garden on Rapa Nui; my role in what happened on the island. And Phoebe. Where had she come from? How long had she been watching us?
“Five days,” she says. She looks at me again out of the corner of her eye and she can't quite suppress the shudder that runs up her arms.
“My face is healed,” I give voice to what she doesn't want to acknowledge.
“I can see that,” she says, visibly tensing. “I couldn't handle it,” she continues. “I had Phoebe pull over before we had even left the city. It was either you or I in the trunk. The back seat wasn't good enough. I could still hear you trying to breathe through…” She raises her hand toward her face. “And I let Phoebe dig the hole out back. I couldn't look at you. It was awful, Silas. It was really awful.”
“I'm sorry, Mere. I didn't do it on purpose.”
She chokes out a laugh. “Did you kill him?”
Him being Alberto Montoya. “Yes.”
“And is the rest true too?”
“That I killed Escobar's wife? Yes.”
She finishes preparing the fruit and brings the plate over to the table. She sits down, and when she doesn't say otherwise, I join her, figuring that there will be time enough to talk about everything.
There are bananas of differing sizes and colors on the plate, along with slices of oranges, papayas, passion fruit, lemons, as well as a couple of other fruits I don't immediately recognize. I try to savor them, to not grab the plate and immediately shovel all of it in my mouth, but the fresh fruit is a cup of water to a man dying of thirst. We eat in silence for a few minutes, as if we can put off plunging back into a strange reality we both set aside for a few days.
The round fruit with the shadowed green skin is dark inside—it isn't a date or a plum or a persimmon, though it tastes like the mixture of all three. I scrape the skin with my teeth, getting every last bit, and then I chew on pieces of the rind. “What is this?”
“Sapote,” Mere says. There's half of one left, which she shoves toward me as she goes for a long slice of papaya.
I don't give her a chance to change her mind, and my fingers are stained black when I'm done, like I've been dipping them in ink or as if I've been burned.
“If I close my eyes and wish really hard, I can imagine that it is just the two of us,” Mere says, lightly sucking at the tips of her fingers. “Look at you. Sleeping in until nearly sunset. A plate of fresh fruit prepared for you by a beautiful woman. An entire valley filled with vineyards. The quintessential romantic vacation.”
“That would be nice,” I tell her.
She raises her head and takes a long, hard look at me. The corner of her mouth turns up, and there's a glimmer of something in her eyes that I can't quite capture, and then she looks down at her hands again. “I've had some time to think,” she says. “Lots of time. And Phoebe… well, she's not the best conversationalist, but once I figured out how to interpret her silences, it got easier.”
“She tell you what happened? How she got to Santiago?”