Fables & Other Lies - Claire Contreras Page 0,72
me then, deeply, with an ardor and longing I knew I’d have for him as long as I lived, and when we found ecstasy, he smiled down at me.
“Your love sustained me and made up for a lifetime of loneliness,” he said. “I’ll love you for eternity.”
And then, he was gone. I gasped, sitting up in bed, sweating, and when I looked down, I wasn’t wearing any clothes.
“River?” I scrambled out of bed. “River?”
No one answered.
Chapter Thirty-Two
A few days later
“It’s a miracle,” the priest said. “Gia Guzman has made a full recovery.”
The church cheered. I clapped, but I wasn’t really there. I looked out the window I was sitting beside and saw someone out in the cemetery. I blinked. Mayra? I stood quickly and walked to the back of the church, not worrying about the people looking at me as I went. They all thought I was crazy anyway. Half of them had told me to leave the island. That I was a devil worshipper. Never mind that I was the reason they were still alive and thriving. Never mind that they depended on the very leaves I brought back for that. I rushed to where I’d seen Mayra, but there was no one there. I looked around, left to right, right to left, and found nothing. With a sigh, I walked back toward the church. As I walked, I looked down at the unpaved road beneath my feet and saw track marks. Bare feet. They were all facing one way. La Ciguapa. I looked up in the opposite direction of which they came and saw a woman standing at the edge, where the tombstones met the forest. A young woman, dark, much younger than Mayra could ever be. Fabiola. She smiled at me, a bright smile, and bowed deeply. I didn’t begin to cry, but the sob stayed in my chest, heavy, making it difficult to breathe.
Divers had been surrounding the area where Dolos once stood, but it was gone. The Calibans, the Devil’s Chair, the seedy town, and its people. Just gone. I’d done a ton of Google searches on it and found very little being reported. It seemed that news of Dolos and Pan Island only made it as far as the surrounding islands and even then it wasn’t top news. The people in Puerto Rico, Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic had bigger things to worry about, taking care of the aftermath of their own natural disasters.
“Is everything okay?” That was my mother.
I turned and nodded at her. She was wearing a black dress that hit her just beneath her knee, black heels, and her black hair up in a nice bun. She held out a hand for me, which I took, and walked back to the church.
“I hate that you’re leaving,” she said.
“I can’t stay. Too many things have happened.”
“I wish you’d talk about them.”
I smiled, squeezing her hand. She and everyone else. I hadn’t given Dee or Martín any details. I simply said I was grateful to be home. I smiled and offered both of them some of my grandmother’s famous tea when they came over. I’d set the intention. They’d forget where I’d been. They’d forget who I’d been with. Intention mattered. River said people had to want certain things in order for the tea to work, but he didn’t see it the way I did because he didn’t have Wela as a grandmother. She served it with the intention already made. I never wanted to forget that night all those years ago, but I did. I didn’t want to forget anything in my life, but I had, and now I remembered all of it clearly. I remembered the screaming matches in my house. I remembered the anger and the pain caused. I remembered how volatile they’d been behind closed doors and how I smiled through all of it the following day because I was forced to forget it.
I sat through the rest of the Mass with my mother, because despite everything, she was my mother and I loved her. When she went to her sister’s house with my grandmother, I kissed her goodbye, knowing it would be the last time I saw her. When I parked my Vespa in front of the house, I walked inside like a woman on a mission, packing bags of clothes and throwing them outside, far enough away from the house, before taking my own bag outside and setting it beside my Vespa.
I walked into the