CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
What I did after my loneliest, most unsettling drive in Oregon yet:
Write down everything Penn told me at the beach
Feed Anne Shirley
Cuban-mother-level first aid to help my latest wound close, including an ancient remedy of packing a layer of freshly cut onion skin over the cut
What I did not do:
Visit any urgent care for stitches
Consider the thought of stitches
Visit the library computer alcove
Keeping my no-research promise to Penn stung a thousand times more than the wound across my palm.
With the blood controlled, I sat cross-legged on my bed wearing yoga pants flecked with cat hair.
Rough machinery sounds poured out from Tía Viv’s workshop—oddly grounding at a time when my thoughts kept drifting.
The Oregon Coast had left me with more loose pieces than the ones jutting from the float on my nightstand.
There were no Fourth of July fireworks at Skinner Butte this year.
How did you know, Penn?
Don’t look for me.
Why not?
And above everything was the crushing realization that he couldn’t explain because there hadn’t been enough time.
When did we ever have enough time?
I wrote these thoughts in my brown leather notebook, needing a place to put them other than some overworked section of my brain.
Beyond the cabin, nature became louder than Tía Vivian’s work. I tested the quietness for a bit. I folded laundry, wincing when my left palm blotched a shirt with deep red, seeping through all my protective coverings.
I hated everything about this. The sting when I removed the bloody bandage and thin slice of onion skin. The mad, seismic fissure across my palm. The everywhere cringe of replacing my dressings and mummifying my entire hand again with the roll of gauze.
The silence outdoors had held up through my self-doctoring.
Viv was likely taking a break. I hadn’t spent more than five minutes with her in the last two days.
Maybe it was time to channel my tía and see what a little nature could do with the restlessness, and that anxious, undone feeling that had come home with me from Lincoln City.
Ahora, Sylvie. Just go. This time it was my own voice that led me out of the cabin.
Tía Viv was probably resting on the creek bridge, or maybe a lounge chair. As I pointed my feet, they stopped. A flash of cobalt blue winked from the forest.
Tía must’ve heard me. She took a few steps in my direction, appearing in the wedge between two peeling trunks. She held one finger to her lips, signaling she wasn’t alone.
I crept slowly, trying not to Godzilla-stomp through whatever was there.
No hollow knocking, so it wasn’t another woodpecker.
When I got close enough, I didn’t have more than seconds to note the gossamer shine radiating from my tía’s eyes.
The calm stance of her frame against the overwhelming wildness of the forest. Rest. Health. Contentment.
“Look up. Tell me when you see it,” Vivian whispered.
I scanned the leafy canopy that stretched for miles in every direction. Too soon, my vision was dazed with branches and needles, berries and cones. I almost gave up with a testy Just tell me already! before I was cut short.
Who-who-who-WHOOO, who-who-who-WHOOO.
I gasped. An owl. My searching had been off-center. I pivoted as the staccato call sounded again, and there, nestled high in a cozy V-shaped cleft, was one of the most beautiful creatures I’d ever seen.
“That’s a barred owl,” Tía Viv said.
The fluffy owl was covered in the palest gray feathers and painted with reddish brown streaks. Black eyes, a curved yellow beak. Who-who-who-WHOOO, who-who-who-WHOOO. I could only smile back.
Vivian tipped her chin. “She’s beautiful, no?”
Everything but no. “How do you know it’s a she?”
My tía giggled. “Wishful thinking maybe. Females are generally larger.” She nudged her chin. “This one’s pretty big.”
I’d still missed her.
“Ay, look at how graceful and elegant she is,” Viv continued. “I could never make anything so magnificent.” She gave a loose shrug. “Entonces, at least I’m able to say that I’ve spent my life trying.”
Her words stuck inside my throat like something foreign. “More like that’s just you being you, Tía.” Hands shaping wood, wielding the edge of a blade, commanding glass to do impossible things. Working in her element.
Across the world, my dad was living large in his element. My mother was right there too, thriving with purpose, more at ease in their watery summer home than she ever was in LA. Del’s home was on a horse—so obvious—and I’d seen it firsthand. What that fit looked like.
My conscience pinged softly. What was my element? I realized then that I didn’t have one. I didn’t have a clue.
“Mijita.” Vivian gave a gentle poke beneath my shoulder bone.
“Sorry,” I said. “Not sure where I went.”
“Hmm. I told you these woods were good for getting lost. I was just saying that there is a lot of lore tied to the barred owl.”
“Does it have anything to do with the cascara tree legend?”
“No, it’s more like folklore. These owls signify protection, for one,” Vivian said.
“When they visit, either someone close to you needs protection, or you’re the one feeling unsafe.
And they’re also known to be a symbol of peace, so seeing one could mean a pressing need to find common ground or work through some sort of conflict. ”
I looked up. Did you come here for me? Are you trying to tell me something? I had lived through too much this summer to dismiss these odd little happenings as coincidences. I stared hard into the owl’s globelike eyes as they drifted closed.
My thoughts strayed to the idea of protection and feeling unsafe. Then flickered to Penn remembering his dad on the beach, revealing the invisible string weaving through our childhoods. We were both left behind as kids, lost to parents looking for something better.
The moment flipped on its edge, as if I’d switched the view on my camera and it pointed right at me.
But it wasn’t just my face in the frame.
Tía Vivian was right beside me, just as she’d been for thirteen years.
I snapped through an album of all the ways my tía had sheltered me from the sting of all those goodbyes.
How she’d welcomed me into the center of her element—so opposite to the way my parents housed me separately, an atlas away from theirs.
“I need to say something,” I blurted.
My tía’s expression shifted from surprise to shock and horror. “Sí, pero, your hand. What happened?”
I glanced down. My sweatshirt had hidden the gauze wrap when I’d gotten out here. I must’ve pushed up the sleeves on instinct. “It’s fine.” I’d swear it, over and over. “A little accident in Lincoln City.”
Vivian’s face blanched a different shade. “Oh! Your beach trip. You were gone all morning, but I was caught up in the shop. And then I saw the owl . . .”
“Maybe she’s actually a sign of forgetfulness.”
“Okay, chica.” Viv shook her head, eyes rolling with extra drama. “I’m sorry you didn’t find a float.”
“No, I did.” I held up my hand as unsaid words were pushing their way in. “It’s broken, though, which is how this happened. I still brought it back.”
“Sylvie,” she warned, “let me see that cut.”
I had just enough time to jerk my arm away when she reached out. I turned my palm. Blood was seeping through again. I’d just changed this bandage. “Listen, it’s not that bad. And I promise to do every Cuban remedy trick.”
“Mijita—”
“Why did you always let them leave?” My voice cut into the space like one of her tools. Gone was the peace and tranquility of the owl and the careful way I’d crept into the woods only moments before. My blood was humming.
I’d braced myself for a scowl, or something hurt and wounded. But Vivian was unreadable. After a brisk nod, she waved me back to the cabin and tossed one last glance at the sleeping owl.
We sat on the picnic bench facing the creek. Vivian’s flower-vine railing looked elegant and dreamy, and she’d given the whole bridge a fresh coat of honey-colored varnish. She made so many things beautiful, but as hard as she tried, parts of my life were still knotted and scarred.
“You never failed me,” I said. “I mean, whether it was a concussion or a friend issue or me not getting picked for cheer captain, you took care of me, and not just during the summer. But you did it too well.”
My tía picked a sliver of wood from underneath her nail. “You wish I had told tu mamá no sometimes. You wish I had put my foot down and been too busy, maybe for a few of those summers.”
“See, you’re even doing it now.”
“Paying attention?”
“Seeing me and knowing me better than my own parents. You’ve always been there.
But that’s the reason my mom or dad could leave so easily.
I know you made sacrifices for me, but it felt like you were also just enabling them!
” I clenched my good hand. “I love you and resent you for the same reason. And I don’t know what to do with that. ”
“I think you are doing just fine with it now. Admitting it,” she said. “We can figure out how to get through the confusing parts. Sylvie, this is real, and that’s good.”
Real talk. That part of me who was always a whisper away from Penn gave a little jolt. “But how?” I asked. “I don’t want you to be mad at me.”
Her strong hand rested on my shoulder. “I am not mad. If anything, I regret not doing more to help, to make your parents try harder to see how they may be hurting you. I am sorry, and I promise I’m glad that you told me.
But you need to tell these things to them too.
For all their faults, I know my sister and her husband.
They love you, and you owe them the same honesty you have given me. ”
I rolled my eyes. “Sure. I’ll just call them up . . . Oops, that won’t work. Thanks, Sacred. Or I’ll just wait until they come home and find time between their bickering and silent treatments to spill my guts.”
I tracked the moving creek water for a few beats.
“I’m leaving the house as soon as I can. I’m done being ‘Cuban eighteen.’ I’m going to find my own place. I’m gonna sell this watch to help make it happen.” Because soon, this watch would just be a reminder of another impossible goodbye.
“Or you could stay and save all that money until you’re done with school.”
“This idea is actually your doing, so you can’t talk me out of it.
” When her brows sank into a deep furrow, I went on.
“You left home and did things the way you wanted even though Abuela tried to stop you. You told me that yourself. And now you have this big, amazing life that you get to control. I want that too.”
“I see. And I take it your mami and papi do not know of this plan?”
I shook my head.
I didn’t expect the crisp, wry laugh that spurted from her mouth.
“It’s true that I did leave against my parents’ wishes, but I was moving toward an opportunity.
I was actively working on my skills and building a career out of a dream.
You need to add a few points to your plan before you can compare it to mine.
” Vivian bent her hands into a flourish as if she could wield magic from more than wood and glass.
Nothing appeared but the blurred afterglow of her words.
“I think you have to ask yourself: Are you leaving because you’re moving toward something? Or are you simply running away from everything?”